Category: The Media

Bias in Journalism?

This is really wanky. Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times has a pearl-clutching piece about the fear that the Obama administration’s hiring of two journalists will lead to bias in favor of Obama across the entire media. Despite pointing out that the Bush administration brought journalists into the house (see: Tony Snow) and that the McCain administration would have been “a job destination for mainstream journalists in 2000,” it’s Obama that is producing a fear of bias. Rutenberg even goes to the absurd length of getting Jay Carney to defend joining the administration as Biden’s communications director with claims of non-partisanship. Because it would be so unethical for someone to work for a politician they wanted to succeed, or something.

Rutenberg never explains how having journalists in the Obama administration will actually lead to bias in coverage by the media still reporting. I don’t know if it is Rutenberg’s fear that Time will give Obama a pass because Carney is on Biden’s staff or if the magical presence of one Beltway journalist on the administration payroll will mean Fox News, Washington Times, and the Wall Street Journal will feel compelled to pull their punches. Most likely the presence of Carney and Linda Douglass in the administration will not mean a single thing regarding the tone and depth of coverage Obama receives in the press. To the extent that there is any bias in journalism favoring the administration, I’d think it more likely that tough-minded journalists at Time and CNN will feel obligated to give Carney and Douglass a harder-than-usual go in order to avoid any accusations of bias. But I doubt Rutenberg and the Times would see much news value in that story, as it fails to further the narrative that the media is biased towards Democrats.

Bipartisanship, Writ Halperin

Steve Benen’s take down of Mark Halperin’s logical twister regarding the stimulus and bipartisanship is a must-read example of how the fetishization of bipartisanship is illogical and leads to anti-Democratic narratives. It’s absurd to argue that it was Obama’s responsibility to please the right wing of the House GOP caucus by throwing Democratic ideas — ideas Obama campaigned on — out the window in order to win Republican votes. But that’s what the pleas for bipartisanship are. Moreover, it’s clear that Halperin and the Conventional Wisdom creating crowd around him care more about the makeup of a vote than the outcome of a vote. A compromise bill was passed with a strong majority yesterday; it’s incidental that no Republicans voted for it, as it did in fact contain concessions that they had asked for. Halperin’s analysis makes no sense. Democrats listening to Halperin’s analysis would make even less sense, but I have no doubt that it will be an area of deep concern for people on the Hill and anyone in the Whitehouse who thinks the opinions of a hack like Halperin or the votes of regressives in the House caucus should have any bearing on the Obama administration’s stewardship of this country.

A Failure of Equivalence

In an otherwise somewhat troubling piece about the Obama administration’s possible plans to “rein in” Social Security and Medicare, New York Times reporters Jeff Zeleny and John Harwood write this series of paragraphs.

The bad fiscal news underscored how, on his first week in Washington since the election, Mr. Obama is being challenged by a broad array of problems, some inherited and some a result of his own missteps, a departure from a transition that until now had been praised as orderly and swift.

The fighting between Israelis and Palestinians will present him with a complex foreign policy challenge immediately upon taking office.

The week opened with the first casualty among Mr. Obama’s cabinet appointments, as Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico withdrew as his choice for commerce secretary amid questions about whether he had been adequately vetted. Then Mr. Obama had to apologize to Senate leaders for not informing them of his choice to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta.

Yes you read that right, apologizing to Dianne Feinstein and having a nominee act to avoid distracting from the administration’s agenda are challenges in the same way war in Israel is a challenge. Equivalence

Local Media, State Blogs & State Legislatures

One of the issues that regular takes up untold millions of pixels in the realm of meta blogging is the extent to which statewide local blogs are replacing local news coverage. Local papers have had shrinking staffs for a long time, but it’s become dramatic in recent years. More and more papers are removing their reporters from the pool at state legislatures. As a result, with fewer reporters covering more things, the quality of coverage of state governance drops precipitously. It’s not surprising that local blogs have sought to fill that role, though I don’t know of anyone who would claim that there’s a one to one exchange between a blogger and a journalist in this circumstances, if only for the fact that so few bloggers get to blog full time.

Governing Magazine has a great article this month by Rob Gurwitt about the decline of traditional journalism covering state legislatures, the growth of blogs, and how these changes influence what elected officials are doing to get the word out about their work. Gurwitt’s piece is one of the best I can recall reading in the last five years on the dynamics that have contributed to the rise of local blogs. The article focuses a great deal on Connecticut, so it’s naturally of interest to me. He cites Christine Stewart of CT News Junkie as an example of what happens when an intrepid person seeks to do the work that is no longer being done by the traditional press.

CT. Rep Mike Lawlor is quoted in Gurwitt’s piece. His comments show a great deal of understanding of the changing footing he operates in as an elected official.

Mike Lawlor, a Democrat who chairs the Connecticut House Judiciary Committee, notes that while some legislators mostly complain about not getting their names in the newspaper anymore, “there are also curious, thoughtful, sophisticated people who are trying to accomplish things, and they’re frustrated that their constituents don’t know what’s happening at the Capitol anymore, and they can’t get them to care.” He sees in the rise of the Internet and the loosening grip of newspapers a twin challenge for legislators, because it’s created two distinct groups of constituents: those comfortable online, and those comfortable only with newspapers, radio and television.

“It’s changed how I do advocacy,” he says. “Twenty years ago, if I couldn’t get reporters to write about it, no one knew it had happened. Well, not so much anymore. Now everything is available. So if you want the relatively well-educated, tech-savvy people to know something, you know which blog to send a link to, and you can generate public opinion starting from that.” But he represents a district in East Haven, which is part of the New Haven Register’s circulation area and therefore no longer served by a print capitol reporter, and he sees the direct cost. “People who don’t go online and just read the newspaper, they’re out of the loop,” Lawlor says. “They don’t know what’s going on.”

The irony in all this, as Lawlor suggests, is that for a small coterie of interested parties, now actually is a boom time for state government news. Spurred by the inattention and over-stretched resources of traditional news providers, information about legislatures is bursting online. There are straight-ahead national news efforts such as Stateline.org; the Politicker sites; and the more ideologically slanted sites in Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and New Mexico run by the left-leaning Center for Independent Media.

It’s worth pointing out again how strong the analysis by Gurwitt and his sources are in his piece. It’s not blogging triumphalist bunk. It’s not a column filled with pearl-clutching journalists who bemoan that bloggers will never, ever be able to rise to the hallowed levels of them and their editors. It’s a sober, serious look at the landscape at a time when newspapers are shrinking, blogs are growing, and elected officials are trying to change the way they work so their constituents can remain informed of what’s happening in their government. I highly recommend you read the full piece at Governing.com.

LA Times: Disclosure Failure

In today’s Los Angeles Times a man named Bret Jacobson writes a virulently anti-union screed attacking Labor Secretary nominee, Congresswoman Hilda Solis.  Here’s how the LA Times describes Jacobson at the bottom of his op-ed:

Bret Jacobson is founder and president of Maverick Strategies LLC, a research and communications firm serving business and free-market think tanks.

We’ve seen a lot of anti-union, anti-Obama, anti-worker, and anti-Free Choice op-eds penned by business consultants and “free-market think tank” types of late, so this isn’t a terribly shocking biography for drivel like this. Of course, this isn’t all Jacobson is. Here’s what the highly-informative BretJacobson.com has to say:

Prior to founding Maverick Strategies, Bret co-founded the Center for Union Facts, overseeing that organization’s research activities, guiding its communications, launching its new-media capabilities, and helping plan its strategic national advertising and earned-media campaigns.

And just for those not paying attention at home, here’s Sourcewatch:

The Center for Union Facts is a secretive front group for individuals and industries opposed to union activities. It is part of lobbyist Rick Berman‘s family of front groups including the Employment Policies Institute. The domain name http://www.unionfacts.com was registered to Berman & Co. in May 2005.

American Rights At Work is a bit more hard hitting in their assessment of the Center for Union Facts:

The Center is the latest public relations campaign and front group devised by “notorious D.C. lobbyist”1 and veteran spin doctor Richard “Rick” Berman with his firm, Berman and Company.

The Center for Union Facts is a front group focused on damaging the public image of unions, depressing workers’ rights, pushing legislation that would make it more difficult for workers to join unions, and furthering an anti-union business climate.

Berman earned his status as one of The Hill’s top lobbyists, along with Jack Abramoff,2 by working on behalf of unpopular clients like the tobacco, alcohol, and fast food industries.  Berman’s campaigns have attempted to relax drunk driving laws, argue obesity is not a public health issue, prevent increases in the federal or state minimum wage, and attack advocacy groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD).

…

  • The Center for Union Facts’ legislative agenda is strikingly similar to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s.   The big business lobbying group both adamantly opposes the Employee Free Choice Act, and is in strong support of the Secret Ballot Protection Act.  Berman formerly devised union avoidance strategies for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,18 and he still has strong ties to the Chamber through Randel Johnson, Vice President for Labor at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.19  Berman told The New York Times that he asked Chamber of Commerce officials at a state conference to recommend that businesses in their states donate to his anti-union campaign.20  Randel Johnson has repeatedly denied any Chamber funding of the Center, yet admitted “he had served as an adviser to the Center.”21
  • On its website, the Center claims it is “supported by foundations, businesses, union members, and the general public.”22  Berman will only divulge that several companies and a foundation fund the Center, but will not release the names of his donors.23
  • No individuals, foundations, or corporations have come forward to admit any sponsorship of the Center.  Why wouldn’t they want to distance themselves from Berman’s hyperbolic and unsupported rhetoric?  Berman gets paid to say what responsible business leaders don’t want attributed to them.  The Washington Post reported that food industry officials, who would only be interviewed about Berman, “on the condition that they not be identified by name or by where they work, said that by keeping the sponsors anonymous, Berman’s group can be more vociferous, provocative and irreverent in its criticisms.24

In short, the Center for Union Facts is the key organization in Big Business efforts to stop the progress of labor in America, most notably through fighting against the Employee Free Choice Act. One of their co-founders, Bret Jacobson, was given license to push the Center’s anti-union, anti-worker agenda in an op-ed against the nominee for Labor Secretary, while the Times failed to disclose the only informative part of his biography. He’s the founder of a research firm? What is that supposed to tell the Times’ readers? Pretty much every person I know who works in politics does some level of consulting. The most important piece of Jacobson’s biography – his professional connection to one of the biggest anti-union groups in America – is left out of a column that specifically pushes the Center’s agenda. In an AP article three days ago, a spokesman for the Center attacked President-elect Obama’s pick of Solis for Labor Secretary (though, amazingly, the AP cited the Center as “a group critical of organized labor”).

There has been a heavy, persistent trend in the mainstream press of anti-union articles and op-eds. The business lobby has been very good about getting their surrogates’ op-eds placed in big papers like the LA Times, NY Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. There is a major fight going on between big business and America’s workers about the future of organizing to increase worker rights in America. The fight is centered around the Employee Free Choice Act, but clearly the Secretary of Labor is now another front in this fight.

As frustrating as it is to repeatedly read columns, like Jacobson’s, which include outright lies about what the Employee Free Choice Act is and does, I am 100% willing to take part in a national debate about how our country relates to working families. There are obviously different sides in this debate and there is nothing wrong with the debate being played out in the press. But in this atmosphere of daily volleys back and forth between big business front groups like the Center for Union Facts and the Obama administration and the American labor movement, it behooves the press to be honest about who is taking part in the debate. The LA Times was brutally negligent to not disclose Bret Jacobson’s employment at the Center for Union Facts, the only piece of his biography that had any bearing on his column. By not disclosing Jacobson’s ties to this anti-worker group, the LA Times succeeded in giving their pages over to a press release from a big business front group, with no means for their reader to discern it from a non-partisan piece on President-elect Obama’s pick to chair the Department of Labor.

So editors of the Los Angeles Times, let me show you how this is done:

Disclosure: I’m proud to work for the Service Employees International Union…so proud that I disclose it when I write about issues that relate to my employer. That said, this post was not approved by nor written with the knowledge of SEIU. It is representative of my views alone.

Now that wasn’t hard, was it?

Stanley Follow-Up

After getting great linkage from Atrios, Steve Benen, and The Daily Howler for my post on Alessandra Stanley’s wank-tastic analysis of imaginary political themes in the Obama national security team press conference, I thought I’d follow up with another on Stanley’s history of bad political commentary. A couple of my commenters tried to dismiss her bad column to varying degrees from Stanley because  she writes for the Times Arts & Leisure section and isn’t a political reporter. But yesterday wasn’t the first time that Stanley had problems writing accurately about political events.

Stanley has been awarded the Wanker of the Day by Atrios two times since 2006.  The previous citation was naturally for her endeavors into political writing, something we’ve already seen she has little acumen for. Now I’m not going to be charitable and count her god-awful review of ABC’s fictional Path to 9/11 movie as excusable because it was of an actual movie on broadcast television. Her review came at the end of a major political fight between liberal bloggers and executives at ABC and Disney. Roger Ailes demolished her review, earning Stanley a WOTD link in the process:

Consider this passage from Stanley’s review of ABC’s “Pathological Lies About 9/11”:

“‘The Path to 9/11’ is not a documentary, or even a docu-drama; it is a fictionalized account of what took place.

But if it’s a fictionalized account, it’s not about “what took place.” It’s an account of what didn’t take place.

Stanley seeks confused about the difference between reality and fantasy:

“The outside pressure was intense enough to persuade ABC to re-edit one of the more contested made-up scenes in the film. In the version sent to critics, it depicted C.I.A. operatives and their Afghan allies armed with guns and night-vision goggles creeping in the dark to snatch Mr. bin Laden from his compound in 1998. The men are told to stand by, in harm’s way, as the C.I.A. director, George J. Tenet and the national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, cavil by videoconference. Rather than take a firm decision, Mr. Berger flips off his videophone, and Mr. Tenet aborts the mission. (Among other things, ABC agreed to excise Mr. Berger’s hissy fit.)

“In reality the C.I.A. got close, but never that close….”

So if the program’s version is indisputably fiction, there’s no “contest.” The show is indisputably a lie. And since there was no conversation, there was no Berger “hissy fit.” Yet Stanley treats it as fact (“Mr. Berger’s hissy fit”) while acknowledging it’s a fraud.

Tristero piled on as well:

[Stanley]’s saying don’t worry, be happy, every little thing will balance out in the end, that if the 9/11 series is harsh and unfair towards Clinton, Bush will get his just as harshly and unfairly. That’s because the Disney propaganda will be counterbalanced by a future, hypothetical mini-series on the Bush administration’s marketing of the New Product in 2002 – the Iraq war – which will be equally inaccurate.

The similarity between Stanley’s review of the fictional 9/11 movie and the press conference that she (but no one else in America) viewed on Monday is that in both cases Stanley demonstrates a remarkable inability to distinguish between what is real and what is not real. Stanley’s Path to 9/11 review went beyond the common “Democrats say x, Republicans say y” brand of stenography and actually reported fictional accounts of an historic event as fact, then suggested the factual challenges to the movie were equivalent to the fictional assertions contained therein. It’s hard to find a reporter who has strayed further from the principles of reporting than Stanley in her 9/11 review, but the concoction we saw this week surely pushes the envelope even more.

Yesterday I wrote:

Alessandra Stanley and her editors need to stop projecting their desired story lines onto the Obama administration (viz. making things up) and start reporting the news like professionals.

But in going back to her Path to 9/11 review, I’m finding it impossible to be hopeful about the chances of Stanley’s reporting taking a turn for the better. In that review Stanley was careless with how she handled facts and took fictional events in the final as meritorious of treatment as fact. In the review of the Clinton press conference, she simply created her own set of events and wrote about them. Clearly the latter is worse.

There is one place where we regularly see facts created out of whole-cloth in the pages of the New York Times: Maureen Dowd’s twice-weekly columns. The difference worth noting is that Dowd is an opinion columnist, free to set whatever analytical framework she chooses. Yes, she should stay to the facts, but she isn’t reviewing pieces of news qua news, while Stanley is.

At this point I think the best remedy to Stanley’s reviews of fictional events is to contact the Times’ Public Editor Clark Hoyt. His email address is public@nytimes.com; in my experience the Times Public Editor or someone from his staff will respond to reader emails. Enough of an outpouring of anger will force Hoyt to address Stanley’s drivel in the paper itself. Maybe then her editors will endeavor to keep her reviews and analysis to things that actually happened and not fantasies of her own creation.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

One of the things that was most frustrating working for and with Chris Dodd during the course of the FISA fight is that while the blogosphere and a few rare liberal pundits (Keith Olbermann comes to mind) gave Dodd credit for standing up to the Bush administration and defending the rule of law, the mainstream press basically ignored his role in delaying retroactive immunity for telecom companies that illegally spied on Americans. Most big outlets focused their coverage of the Democratic Senate’s actions on FISA focused on Harry Reid, Patrick Leahy (as Judiciary chair), Jay Rockefeller, and Intelligence and Judiciary committee members like Ron Wyden, Russ Feingold, and Sheldon Whitehouse. While these were all key players in the legislative process, none of them did what Dodd did (while some actively fought against Dodd’s principled and lawful stand). I attribute the refusal of organizations like the New York Times and Washington Post to give Dodd his due were based on the fact that he wasn’t on either of the relevant committees and was running a presidential campaign. They just didn’t want to give him coverage, so instead of practicing good journalism, they largely ignored Chris Dodd’s role in trying to single-handedly stop bad FISA legislation.

I write all of this as preface to a piece by Ryan Singel of Wired’s Threat Level blog that came out yesterday. In writing about the current legal fight going on over the validity of the legislation passed last summer over Dodd’s objections, Singel ends up giving Dodd the greatest degree of credit for his work I have seen coming from any mainstream media outlet. Here is the first portion of Singel’s post:

The constitutionality of retroactive immunity for telecoms that helped Bush spy on Americans got its day in court Tuesday, a little less than a year after senator Christopher Dodd all but shuttered Congress with an ultimately futile one-man stand against the idea.

Tuesday’s courtroom showdown in San Francisco lacked the fireworks of Dodd’s fiery oration, but the judge handling the case gave some indication that he may take over as the one-man anti-immunity crusader.

“In essence that gives the attorney general carte blanche to immunize anyone.” Walker said, wondering what odd creature Congress had fashioned. “What other statute is like this statute?”

Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Walker that Congress had no right to give the attorney general a magic wand to make cases against the telecoms go away just by telling the judge a little bit about what happened. The group is suing AT&T for helping the government spy on Americans’ internet and phone usage.

“We have a right to an injunction against the telecoms,” EFF’s legal director Cindy Cohn said. “They are the gatekeepers … They have an independent duty to protect Americans’ privacy.”

A Democratically-controlled Congress bowed to election-year political pressures in the summer, legalizing much of the formerly lawless spying and creating a get-out-jail-card for the telecoms being sued for helping with the spying. [Emphasis added]

Dodd never got the credit he deserved outside the liberal blogosphere. It’s great to see that some journalists haven’t forgotten Chris Dodd’s role in the FISA fight. I’m glad Ryan Singel took the time to write Dodd into this post; he didn’t have to, but it was the right thing to do. Credit where credit is due to both Dodd and Singel.