I have three stuffed animals at home that I hide when I expect visitors. (Guys don’t do stuffed animals.) But my fuzzy critters serve a purpose. Four years ago, I destroyed my living room TV set by throwing a beer bottle at it in anger and frustration. I had been watching Lou Dobbs.

So, for years, I have been throwing stuffed animals at Lou instead of beer bottles. But now I need throw them no more. Lou no longer haunts my 7 p.m. viewing. He quit his CNN program in a multi-syllabic huff this week. CNN’s venerable, respected chief national political correspondent, John King, will take over in January. I’m sure I won’t have to throw stuffed animals at Mr. King.

But I once considered Lou venerable and respected. He’s a Harvard grad, y’know, a self-touted intellectual giant in matters of finance and economics. That’s why I began watching him years ago. I learned from him things I did not know. But for the past few years, Lou has only taught me the face of intellectual arrogance, bigotry, and unexceptional reporting masquerading as “advocacy.”
Full Story »

My latest in Raw Story’s investigative series:

The Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General is conducting a new investigation into a covert Bush administration Defense Department program that used retired military analysts to produce positive wartime news coverage.

Last May, the Inspector General’s office rescinded and repudiated a prior internal investigation’s report on the retired military analyst program, which had been issued by the Bush administration, because it “did not meet accepted quality standards for an Inspector General work product.” Yet in recent interviews with Raw Story, Pentagon officials who took part in the program were still defending it by referencing this invalidated report.

READ THE REST…

(In case you missed any prior articles, here are Part I, Part II and Part III)

If you were a newspaper subscriber last year, there’s a 10 percent chance you aren’t this year.

That’s because paid circulation of daily newspapers nationally fell more than 10 percent from a year ago. Some papers suffered truly horrendous daily circulation losses: the San Francisco Chronicle (down 25.8 percent), The Boston Globe (down 18.5 percent) and The (Newark, N.J.) Star-Ledger (down 22.2 percent), reports Rick Edmonds on his Poynter Biz Blog. USA Today, hit by a slump in travel, fell nearly 18 percent. The circulation of 400 daily newspapers has fallen to only 30 million readers.

This hemorrhaging of circulation — the worst ever — will have serious consequences. Expect newspaper staffs, already slashed below the minimum necessary to adequately cover their turf, to be cut further. Expect more shallow, one-source stories. Expect more stories laden with anonymous sources because the poorly paid, younger, inexperienced reporters left on staff won’t have the skill to persuade sources to speak on the record. Expect more wire-service content because local stories won’t get done. Expect corporate newspaper management to continue to stall on finding a business model that enhances the public-service mission of journalism. Expect more style than substance.

Just expect less of what good newspapers used to be. Full Story »

CNN’s prime-time ratings — those hours between 7 and 11 p.m. that command premium advertising rates — have fallen sharply. CNN, reports The New York Times and MSNBC, now trails three of its principal competitors, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, and its in-house competitor, HLN (formerly Headline News).

CNN’s ratings in the prime 25-54 demographic fell 77 percent in the last 12 months. Finger-pointers and blame-gamers abound. The Times‘ Bill Carter calls the last-place performance of CNN’s “signature host” Anderson Cooper “alarming” at the 10 p.m. slot. Charles Warner of mediacurmudgeon.com writes at HuffPo that Fox and MSNBC may have outbid CNN for favorable channel positions. Others, like Bill Gorman of tvbythenumbers.com, thinks CNN lost its substantial advantage gained from its political coverage from 2006 to 2008.

But seasoned TV pundits are missing a significant point lost in the blizzard of analyses of the cable news rating wars.
Full Story »

My latest for Raw Story:

Figure in Bush propaganda operation remains Pentagon spokesman

A months-long review of documents and interviews with Pentagon personnel has revealed that the Bush Administration’s military analyst program — aimed at selling the Iraq war to the American people — operated through a secretive collaboration between the Defense Department’s press and community relations offices.

Raw Story has also uncovered evidence that directly ties the activities undertaken in the military analyst program to an official US military document’s definition of psychological operations — propaganda that is only supposed to be directed toward foreign audiences.

READ THE REST…

On the same day that The New York Times said (buried in its Media Decoder blog) that it would cut 100 newsroom jobs (again), Columbia University said it would not accept applications next year for its dual-degree graduate program in environmental journalism. The former is no surprise; the latter is a sad sign of the impact of newsroom job cuts on what news gets reported — or not.

In a letter to faculty, the directors of the program wrote:

As you know, media organizations across the county are in dire financial straits and thousands of journalists’ jobs have been eliminated. Science and environment beats have been particularly vulnerable. Although our graduates have done well in their careers, even those still employed are finding few opportunities to do the kind of substantive reporting for which the dual degree program has trained them, as they scramble to do their own work plus that of laid-off colleagues. [emphasis added]

The ability of newspapers to report credibly and capably on news other than sports, entertainment, business and politics has been severely undercut by the loss of several thousand journalists over the past three years. In the case of environmental issues, such as climate change, the loss is incalculable.
Full Story »

SEJ member Tom Yulsman
asks a question of Vice
President Gore in Madison.
Photo: Anne Minard.

The fate of the earth could end up determined by which tipping point is reached first: a physical shift that ushers in abrupt climate change with catastrophic consequences, or a social one, in which public attitudes rapidly coalesce around a mandate to address climate change. Or, neither could materialize, at least not imminently.

Al Gore believes the U.S. is on the brink of a political tipping point on the climate issue. Speaking to the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference in Madison, Wisc., last Friday, the former vice president said, “The potential for change can build up without noticeable effect until it reaches a critical mass. I think that we are very close to that tipping point.” Full Story »

On September 22, Politico ran an article by Glenn Thrush that egregiously misrepresented the words of  Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA). The subject was town hall meetings and racist comments that he had witnessed. In due course Thrush’s “error” was “pointed out” and Perriello’s actual words were substituted. (The original post, corrected, appears here.) Thrush then issued an explanation and apology.

So far, no crisis. Mistakes happen, are fixed, retractions and apologies are run, the world is right again, right? Full Story »

A recent edition of Forbes magazine explores the ROI — return on investment — of the cost of attending the nation’s more prestigious schools of business. Generally speaking, graduates of these top 75 schools need 4 to 4 1/2 years to recoup tuition, fees and foregone compensation.

Part of my job as a journalism professor is to recruit students. Because I was a journalist, I’m interested in finding bright, hard-working young men and women who’d like to follow the calling of the public service mission of journalism. (I remain optimistic, perhaps foolishly.)

Parents of prospective students, of course, routinely ask: “What’s your record on job placement?” That I can tell them, based on surveys of our grads six months after matriculation. (And it’s an excellent record, too.)

But here’s the question I dread:
Full Story »

The word carries a sense of enforced separation — walls, as in pay walls. Keep out those who don’t belong — meaning those who don’t, won’t, or can’t pay.

Managers of content-provision corporations — there’s no point any more in calling them “newspaper companies” — are desperate for revenue after enduring print ad losses. So, after 15 years of giving away the milk for free online, they’ve finally mustered up the cojones to at least talk about charging for content on their websites. They speak of this in a language the reporters they’ve fired would never use — the content provision managers talk of monetizing their sites, of incorporating paid-content strategies, of generating additional digital revenue.

And if you believe pay-content impresario Steven Brill of Journalism Online, about 1,000 publishers — er, content-provision specialists — expect to make $900 million at $8.33 a month from the 10 percent of online website visitors Mr. Brill thinks would be willing to cough of up the cash. But an American Press Institute study says only 51 percent of publishers (who voluntarily completed a survey) think they can charge successfully for online content.

But what does “successfully” mean? And who gets to define it? Easy: Cui bono?
Full Story »

It’s one of those days of American history that lives in infamy: April 20, 1999, the day Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris went on a shooting rampage at Columbine High School in suburban Denver, killing twelve students and a teacher, and inuring twenty-four others, before turning their guns on themselves.

Say “Columbine” today, and nearly anyone can tell you what it means. But as journalist Dave Cullen says in his new book on the tragedy, the real story of Columbine is only now starting to become clear. Media sensationalism, police cover-ups, scapegoating, and mythmaking have all distorted the story. Cullen’s Columbine, then, represents an important historical and journalistic effort to shed light on what really happened. Full Story »

by Tom Farmer

Life in the Wrong Lane: Why Journalists Go in When Everyone Else Wants Out by Greg Dobbs is a vivid time-travel dispatch from the heyday of big-iron network TV news.
iUniverse, 205pp

“Sadat has been shot. If you can get to Cairo, do it.”

Breathes there a real reporter who would not thrill to this flash, sent June 6, 1981 by ABC News to its forces across Europe? Got to ice that dinner date, honey. Here’s another chance to narrate history… and spend a fresh bucket of money.

Full Story »

“The culture wars are over,” says journalist Charles Pierce, “and the idiots have won.”

Woe be to the rest of America.

To a rational, thinking person, the rise of idiocy in America seems like a baffling phenomenon. People laugh in the face of logic and willfully ignore facts, preferring to listen to the gut instead of the brain. Intellectuals, experts, and scientists get vilified or dismissed for having expertise. Discussion gets shouted down by anyone able to shout nonsense loud enough.

Pierce plunges into the maddening crowd to explore this phenomenon in his new book, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.

Full Story »

The newspaper industry promises it will begin charging for news online. But it shares a similar problem with the music industry. It has allowed consumers of news for well more than a decade to treat news as a free good.

Further, during that decade, the newspaper industry has purposely deteriorated its product in a vain attempt to chase the last dram of declining advertising revenue. To do this, it has cut costs in the two principal areas it can — paper and people. Physically, newspapers have shrunk in height, width and number of pages, reducing the amount of newsprint required. In 1990 America’s daily newspapers had 56,900 staffers; 5,900 journalists lost their jobs in 2008; and thousands more have been whacked this year. And it’s the expensive high end of the experience spectrum that the industry has callously discarded. So profit levels remained tolerable to shareholders, but only because of decreased costs — not increased revenue.

And the titans of the industry now say they’re going to charge for a product produced by fewer people with less experience that’s led to far more editing errors and one-source stories that reveal much in their shallowness about the quality of the product being sold? Good luck with leading the paid content charge, Rupert.
Full Story »

I’m not a Republican, but I know many people who are. I have GOP friends, co-workers and family members, and for that matter I used to be a Republican myself. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, to be sure. But it’s true.

It’s no secret that I don’t agree with the GOP on much of anything these days, but there’s kind of an odd element to my conversations with Republican acquaintances lately: a lot of them profess significant disagreement with the platform and policies of their party, too.

Taken in a vacuum, this is hardly surprising. Full Story »

The phrase “spoke on condition of anonymity” has appeared in about 160 Washington Post stories this year, says Post ombud Andy Alexander. Since Jan. 1, The New York Times has used the phrase 240 times, says its public editor.

The Post knows better, Mr. Alexander writes:

The Post has strict rules on the use of anonymous sources. They’re spelled out in detail — more than 3,000 words — in its internal stylebook. But some of those lofty standards are routinely ignored. Others are unevenly applied.

Anonymous sources have their place in news gathering. Whistleblowers who make charges of malfeasance against governments or corporations need protection against reprisal. Victims of sexual assault similarly have been granted anonymity to protect against reprisal or demonizing. Sources in crucial national security stories may need protection. Sometimes, the grant of anonymity is the only way to obtain information that will serve the public interest.

“Anonymous sources are critical to newsgathering — and to informing readers,” writes Mr. Anderson. “Without a guarantee of confidentiality, many sources wouldn’t share sensitive information on corruption or misconduct.”

But far too many journalists and their editors use anonymous sources routinely without more critical assessment of the consequences. So should such journalists be surprised at the erosion of their credibility?
Full Story »

Part 2 of a series; Previously: What Bell Labs and French Intellectuals Can Tell Us About Cronkite and Couric

The Signal-to-Noise Journey of American Media

The 20th Century represented a Golden Age of Institutional Journalism. The Yellow Journalism wars of the late 19th Century gave way to a more responsible mode of reporting built on ethical and professional codes that encouraged fairness and “objectivity.” (Granted, these concepts, like their bastard cousin “balance,” are not wholly unproblematic. Still, they represented a far better way of conducting journalism than we had seen before.) It’s probably not idealizing too much to assert that reporting in the Cronkite Era, for instance, was characterized by a commitment to rise above partisanship and manipulation. The journalist was expected to hold him/herself to a higher standard and to serve the public interest. These professionals – and I have met a few who are more than worthy of the title – believed they had a duty to search for the facts and to present them in a fashion that was as free of bias as possible.

In other words, their careers, like that of Claude Shannon, were devoted to maximizing the signal in the system – the system here being the “marketplace of ideas.” Full Story »

Part one of a two-part series.

From Cronkite to Couric: the Kingdom of Signal is swallowed by the Empire of Noise

The recent death of Walter Cronkite spurred the predictable outpouring of tributes, each reverencing in its own way a man who was the face and voice of journalism in America for a generation or more. The irony of all these accolades is that we live in an age where “broadcast journalist” is such a cruel oxymoron, and we seem to speeding headlong into an era where the word “journalist” itself threatens to become a freestanding joke. Why, against this backdrop, would so many people who are so involved in the daily repudiation of everything that Cronkite stood for make such a show memorializing the standard by which they so abjectly fail?

As I read what people had to say about Cronkite, I realized that something I studied and wrote about over a decade ago helps explain why our contemporary media has gone so deeply, tragically wrong. Full Story »

Cronkite Called War “Illegal from the Start,” Slammed Network Silence and Would’ve Spoken Out Again from Anchor Desk

Walter Cronkite believed his “proudest” moment as a journalist occurred when he told the nation that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, despite rosy rhetoric from the Johnson White House and Defense Department. Following his death last week, various network news tributes replayed footage of Cronkite’s influential ‘68 on-air editorial. Yet scrubbed from the memorializing were similar instances of Cronkite’s journalistic candor regarding Iraq, such as his 2006 call for withdrawal from a war he went on to describe as “illegal from the start,” initiated on “false pretenses” and a “terrible disaster” serving “no purpose” that has “probably made us less safe.”

But the most revealing omission from these tributes — especially in context to the pageant of eulogies extolling Cronkite’s journalistic integrity — may be his response to a reporter’s question during a 2006 news conference. Full Story »

Once upon a time, he was the most trusted man in America.

Today, at the age of 92, he passed away, one of the last icons of the early days of TV news.

Walter Cronkite defined “anchorman”—literally. He worked for years as a newspaperman and a radio newsman, but it was his jump to TV in 1950 that put him on the path to becoming a household name. His big break came in 1952, when he served as the “anchor” for CBS News’ coverage of the 1952 political conventions.

In 1962, Cronkite made the jump to the studio, replacing Douglas Edwards as the network’s frontman. By the later part of the decade, he’d wrested first place in the ratings from the equally iconic Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, his competitors at NBC.

Looking back at the news of that era—from 1962 until Cronkite retired in 1981—it’s impossible not to associate Cronkite with the top stories of the day. Full Story »