Recently in Media Matters Category

Alan Mutter at Reflections of a Newsosaur analyzes seriously depressing data about the newspaper industry recently released by the Newspaper Association of America. As Mutter explains:

With three months to go in the worst year ever for newspapers, the drop in sales in the first three quarters of 2009 is roughly equal to the combined revenues for the last 12 months of Gannett and McClatchy Co. In other words, it's as though two of the largest publicly owned publishers in the land just fell off the face of the earth.

Ouch.

Our Republic needs a strong group of reporters gathering news and providing oversight over our government and institutions. Whether or not newspapers survive, we need to figure out how the reporting and editing can survive this carnage.

At the beginning of his 1,938,378,366th* column demanding bipartisanship during a time when Democrats have majorities in Congress, David Broder illustrates how to achieve this nirvana by calling Senator-Elect Al Franken a "loud-mouthed former comedian."

Yeah, that's the way to get people to work together. Use tired old insulting cliches. Guaranteed to work.

Besides, as Paul Krugman notes, anyone who has truly watched Franken's career this decade -- from the books to the Air America radio show, knows that Franken is a serious policy wonk. As Krugman explains:

So what will Franken do to the level of Senate discourse? He'll raise it.

Unlike Broder's influence on the political discourse.

* Number may be an estimate.

Wow. Dan Kennedy's Media Nation has the details.

Why do big-time newspapers have such problems giving credit to reporters from other papers? Is it really so difficult to give credit to people for the work they've done?

As BayNewser reports, the latest Times' victims are the San Francisco Chronicle's Matier and Ross, who will forever be known as "reporters in California."

Andrew Sullivan asks a vital question of the main-stream media:

A simple question: now that the chief Gitmo prosecutor has said that Qahtani was tortured, will the New York Times, the AP, Newsweek and the Washington Post stop using words and euphemisms that are not true? Or do we have to endure more linguistic cowardice from the MSM?

Alas, I'm going to bet on cowardice.

TVBarn's Aaron Barnhart informs us that AMC has published full-episode video of the entire 1967-68 series The Prisoner on the internet as a promotion for its reinterpretation mini-series scheduled to air later this year.

Watch the premiere episode of the original series, starring Patrick McGoohan.

Robert in Monterey is correct: this Los Angeles Times editorial is an embarrassment. The paper has lost all credibility on state budget matters.

Here's a hint: agreeing with a radical crack-pot idea is not likely to make an editorial seem like a voice of reason.

I am sure no one was editing the text messages being shown on Fox News Channel on New Years Eve.

This is an outrage -- will our broadcast networks really have no full-time correspondents in Iraq while our nation continues to have troops engaged in active combat?

Salon's Glenn Greenwald does an excellent job of explaining how awful a year it was in political journalism by taking a Politico story about the "Top Ten Political Scoops of 2008" and using it as an example of what is wrong with political coverage in this country. Greenwald writes:

Most notably, the only story on Politico's list that actually mattered in any meaningful way and to which one can apply the term "scoop" with a straight face -- namely: David Barstow's superb exposé on the Pentagon's domestic propaganda program -- was the only story of the 10 that didn't receive endless attention from our nation's television journalists. To the contrary, it was blackballed entirely. There's the central axiom driving coverage by our American media: the more significant a matter it is, the less attention it receives (if one wants to be generous, one could also include the Couric-Palin interview as a marginally meaningful story).

That's right. the political scoops of the year were stories about personalities and gotcha moments -- not policies during this difficult time in our nation's history. As Greenwald notes:

By contrast, a country that was plagued by actual political problems might focus on such dreary, boring revelations as the choerographing and approving of torture techniques at White House Principals Meetings; or the creation of a massive, likely illegal domestic surveillance system of sprawling data bases built and maintained with no Congressional approval or oversight by the NSA; or the issuance of a memo by the Bush DOJ endlessly expanding the definition of "torture" and declaring the Fourth Amendment inoperative to "domestic military operations" inside the U.S.; or the massive contributions received from the telecom industry by Sen. Jay Rockefeller immediately before he became the key advocate of immunity for that lawbreaking industry; or the flagrant abuse of unchecked NSA eavesdropping powers for purely prurient and invasive ends; or the patently false denials by the U.S. military -- bolstered by an ostensibly first-hand report from Oliver North on Brit Hume's "news" broadcast -- of massive civilian deaths in Afghanistan; or the endless holes in the attempts by the FBI to blame the anthrax attacks on a dead scientist; or so many other similar boring disclosures.

But not our media.

Perhaps the most annoying and sad part of this story lies with the fact that our media pundits pretend like there is nothing they can do about this. They pretend that they have no control over the narrative they put into their newspapers, web sites, and television networks.

They are just powerless victims. It's not like they write the scripts or figure out what stories to tell.

Andrew Sullivan offers a grave look at the economics of the newspaper business in his latest column.

I am quite worried that the current recession is going to spell the end of numerous newspapers in the coming year. Today's news about the Tribune Company (owners of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and others) teetering on the edge of bankruptcy solidifies this concern.

Worse, as Sullivan notes, blogs cannot fill the void.

The terrifying problem is that a one-man blog cannot begin to do the necessary labour-intensive, skilled reporting that a good newspaper sponsors and pioneers. A world in which reporting becomes even more minimal and opinion gets even more vacuous and unending is not a healthy one for a democracy. Perhaps private philanthropists will step in and finance not-for-profit journalistic centres, where investigative and foreign reporting can be invested in and disseminated by blogs and online sites. Maybe reporter-bloggers will start rivalling opinion-mongers such as me and give the whole enterprise some substance. Maybe papers can slim down sufficiently to produce a luxury print issue and a viable online product. There's always a hunger for news, after all.

Losing the oversight and investigatory role newspapers play in relationship to our government will be a major blow. Not just at the national level -- but also in local and state coverage.

Many governmental decisions are made in cities, counties, and states that receive far too little coverage or analysis. Who will be there as newspapers shut down government bureaus -- or shut down altogether?

What is next for news gathering? Because a free nation requires some entity to do this vital and expensive work.

Could he, or any of the other people on the right side of the political spectrum who have been whining about this recently, show me the leader of this effort to revive the fairness doctrine? Because I missed that meeting.

As Matthew Yglesias puts it:

Meanwhile, how dominant can liberals really be in the mainstream media if we can't even stop George Will from just making stuff up about us in his widely syndicated Washington Post column?

I'm sure the Post's inept ombudsperson will find some other made-up horror to address.

Josh Marshall has some excellent thoughts about the state of the newspaper industry here.

The New York Times' Christina Capecchi offers this epic fail attempt to describe the state of the Minnesota U.S. Senate race.

Media Matters' County Fair blog describes the journalistic atrocities:

We noted earlier the several blotches that appeared in the Friday Times article about the Al Franken/Norm Coleman recount. We didn't' like the way the article was heavily favored in terms of quoting and referencing Coleman supporters, and how the Times gave a platform to the GOP claim (completely unsubstantiated) that the race was being "stolen." And how the newspaper even quoted Sean Hannity, as if his propaganda had any relevance in the recount.

Now we find out that a person quoted in the Times piece and presented as sort of an Everyman Minnesota voter (who, by the way, came down on the side of Coleman), actually has close ties to the GOP. Worse, the Everyman voter says he explained his GOP connection to the Times reporter and that even the Everyman voter was surprised when his GOP ties were not mentioned in the Times article.

Fair and balanced.

He tries to say this was a "joke." Politico's Mike Allen and Andy Barr have the details:

A roomful of academics erupted in angry boos Tuesday morning after political analyst Michael Barone said journalists trashed Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republicans' vice presidential nominee, because "she did not abort her Down syndrome baby."

Barone said in an e-mail that he "was attempting to be humorous and ... went over the line."

Barone was speaking at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago, to the 121st annual meeting of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges, which calls itself the nation’s oldest higher-education association.

“The liberal media attacked Sarah Palin because she did not abort her Down syndrome baby," Barone said, according to accounts by attendees. "They wanted her to kill that child. ... I'm talking about my media colleagues with whom I've worked for 35 years.”

Barone, a popular speaker on the paid lecture circuit, is a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report and principal coauthor of “The Almanac of American Politics."

About 500 people were in the room, and some walked out.

Only some?

In a world that includes Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter, there is little a right-wing pundit can say or do to disqualify them from respectable political discourse.

Here is a man who slandered many of his colleagues and then tries to excuse himself by claiming he was telling a joke involving abortion. In a decent world, Barone would be shunned.

Update: And Atrios is right to name him "Wanker of the Day."