journalism

October 29, 2013April 18, 2020

Bad Journalism About The Affordable Care Act Trickling Down To My Local Station

The problems with the national Healthcare.gov website have been reported quite a bit by a national media that loves to parrot Republican talking points. I really hoped that the bias in the reporting would stay with the national media and my local media would do a better job. I was wrong. The one station I watch most often, WBNS 10TV, in Columbus, breathlessly reported the problems signing up for the insurance exchange but has failed to offer any context or any success stories.

Ever since the insurance exchange opened at the beginning of October, WBNS 10TV has been doing stories like the following:

October 20, 2013April 18, 2020

Facts Don’t Have A Political Slant – Journalists Need To Do More Fact Checking And Less Stenography

‘Journalist’ Chuck Todd

Toledo Blade columnist Marilou Johanek wrote a post about journalists letting their opinion into the stories they do. While I agree with the general idea of her article, there is something missing: Facts don’t have a political slant. What I feel is worse for people today is the failure of journalists to give the facts and the context in a story. That should be their primary job.

June 19, 2012April 18, 2020

Tiger Woods Who?

Tiger Woods

Maybe I’m missing something but the amount of time the sports media spends on talking about golfer Tiger Woods doesn’t match his recent work on the links. Maybe it’s just my local station but when reporting on the recent US Open the sports anchor mentioned the guy who won but also spent the same amount of time mentioning where Woods ended up on the leader board. Make no mistake, Tiger will be on the list of great golfers of history but he seems to be past his prime and doesn’t deserve the amount of coverage he gets in the press today.

There is no doubt that Woods was one of the great golfers of our time. He was the top money winner for nine years and is still the top money winner overall. He has won 14 major tournaments (US Open, The Masters, etc…) but since 2010 he has only won two tournaments and no majors.

November 15, 2010April 18, 2020

In political discourse, cable maybe minuscule but broadcast news not helping

Beck Dick Cable news punditry may reach a small hardcore section of voters but their broadcast news brethren seem to follow their lead which doesn’t contribute to accurate information for the average voter.

Cable news is like fantasy football leagues for the political wonks. The audience for the pundits on cable never rises above 3 million total viewers. But viewership is never close to the average number of voters in the US (in 2008 there were 133 million total votes cast). The broadcast news channels have more viewers (ABC, NBC, CBS) with an average of 14 million a day. Even radio has more of an audience than cable TV news channels.

Of all those shows, only O’Reilly gets significantly above two million total viewers. By contrast, NBC’s nightly news program doubles O’Reilly’s ratings in both total viewers and in the coveted 25-54 bracket. Even CBS, the lowest rated of the three, easily outdraws cable, and both broadcast and cable news face the same aging demographics: the median Fox News viewer is 65, two to three years older than the median broadcast news viewer, and CNN and MSNBC aren’t far behind.
But outpacing all of TV news is radio, and that’s where Koppel and other media observers should be focusing their attention. At first glance, radio may look like a conservative-dominated field. Rush Limbaugh’s weekly audience of 15 million dwarfs any television news program, and even Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck’s radio audiences are several times their TV audiences.
In fact, though, NPR provides a counterweight both to conservative talk radio, and to the charge that both sides have equally partisan media. Twenty-seven million people listen to NPR each week, and its morning and evening news programs get fourteen and thirteen million weekly listeners respectively, just behind Limbaugh.
The Tiny Cable News Universe

But the conclusion of the article quoted above – that the audience is small – is beside the point. It seems the drivers of broadcast news follow cable’s lead in deciding what is news and the coverage of the issues and often either give misleading information or don’t squash outright lies quickly enough.

* Polling data during and after last week’s midterm elections suggested that many Americans genuinely believe President Obama has raised their taxes — even though the reality is that our president actually lowered them for most of us. This means that people trust pundits like Rush Limbaugh, a major force behind spreading that lie, over the numbers on their own tax returns.
* Another recent phenomenon? Half of new Congressmen don’t believe in the reality of global warming. It’s not that they don’t just disagree on the source or the severity of the problem. They flat out don’t think the world is getting warmer–despite the evidence outside their windows.
* The new Congress will probably try to restore millions of dollars of funding for scientifically inaccurate, largely disastrous abstinence-only curriculum in schools, many of which have been shown to spread lies like “condoms don’t work” and “abortion causes cancer.”
* News outlets picked up a wildly inflated and completely outlandish claim from an Indian blog that Obama’s trip abroad cost $200 million a day–and listeners have swallowed it. (In this case, the White House flat-out denied it.)
The scary thing is, these kinds of rumors have a way of taking root in the popular consciousness. Just as the election season began heating up earlier this year, Newsweek published a list of “Dumb Things Americans Believe.” While some of them are garden-variety lunacy, a surprising number are lies that were fed to Americans by our leaders on the far-Right. This demonstrates that media-fed lies can easily become ingrained in the collective memory if they’re not countered quickly and surely.
16 of the Dumbest Things Americans Believe — And the Right-Wing Lies Behind Them

Another example is the media blow job NBC gave to former President Bush who is trying to sell a book. Matt Lauer, looking for his Frost-Nixon moment, never pushed Bush hard enough to actually answer questions about his presidential screw ups like Katrina and the Iraq war. I mean when the biggest nugget from the interview was Bush being hurt by the statement of a rapper just made me sad for journalism.

Broadcast media does a disservice to the citizens of this country by letting cable news pundits lead them by the nose and giving up their needed advocacy for the truth. Just ask a follow up question – please!

June 27, 2010April 18, 2020

George, when did Journalism die?

I am not a fan of mainstream news. Not just because they can make things up but because many national reporters don’t do their jobs any more. A perfect example is the fall out of the recent resignation of Dave Weigel, a reporter for the Washington Post, after private e-mails were published on a conservative website. Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic made a comment about Weigel not being a real reporter. That released the hounds.

Goldberg really has no room to talk about who a real reporter is as Glenn Greenwald noted:

Despite all of those war-cheerleading deceits — or, again, because of them — Goldberg continues to be held out by America’s most establishment outlets as a preeminent expert in the region. As Jonathan Schwarz documents, Goldberg is indeed very well-“trained” in the sense that establishment journalists mean that term: i.e., as an obedient dog who spouts establishment-serving falsehoods. That’s why Goldberg is worth examining: he’s so representative of the American media because the more discredited his journalism becomes, the more blatant propaganda he spews, the more he thrives in our media culture. That’s why it’s not hyperbole to observe that we are plagued by a Jeffrey Goldberg Media; he’s not an aberration but one of its most typical and illustrative members.
The Jeffrey Goldberg Media

Ian Welsh at Crooks and Liars writes:

This is exactly what is wrong with US journalism. The responsibility of reporters is not to be “impartial”, their responsibility is to tell the truth. Should reporters have been unmoved by the fact that that Bush was torturing people? Should that not bother them as people? Should they be unmoved by the fact that Obama is still torturing people? Should they be unmoved by the fact that Bush sold a war based on lies, and millions of people were displaced, killed and injured as a result?
Is that we want? Sociopaths who have no personal opinions?
The Court Eunuch Standard of Blogging Exposed by Dave Weigel’s Resignation

This was the same dust up after the Rolling Stone article brought down General McChrystal. the main discussion in the mainstream media was how the reporter “burned his bridges” by reporting how the General and his staff really felt. The story wasn’t about the reporter, the story was about McChrystal and his views and how that relates to the current war policy in Afghanistan. No one really gives a shit about how the story effected the reporter.

To paraphrase Sam Axe from the TV show “Burn Notice”: You know DC media… bunch of bitchy little girls.

The reporters and pundits trapped in the Beltway bubble of DC are too full of their self-importance and their need to protect their celebrity perks and that hurts America because they don’t do their actual jobs – reporting the truth.