Tag: media criticism

Gitlin responds

I don’t like it when other people try to summarize my position, so I’ll try to be careful in summarizing his: It’s OK for an opinion journalist to comment on matters involving a politician he supports even when readers are not informed of that fact. He calls my position “incoherent.” And he throws in a “metadiscussion” for good measure.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’d call this incoherent:

Anyway, I’m not writing a column on Obama, I’m writing a column on Tim Russert. I’ve been writing about Russert for a decade or so. I was writing about him — critically, in the main — when I’d never heard of Barack Obama.

Yes. Me too. Since then, though, you and I have heard of Obama, and you’ve publicly endorsed him. Thus you’ve forfeited the right to evaluate Russert’s coverage of the presidential campaign without disclosing that fact. And if you do disclose it, fewer people will take you seriously. This is basic journalism ethics. Do you not get it?

Now read the whole thing.

Russert, Gitlin and Obama

This week the Columbia Journalism Review unveiled a new weekly feature called “Russert Watch,” to keep an eye on everyone’s favorite Beltway bloviator.

It’s not a bad idea. Tim Russert can be quite skilled at the art of the prosecutorial interview, but all too often his inquisitions devolve into “You said X in 1987. Why are you saying Y now?” Plus it ought to be a federal offense to have hacks like James Carville, Mary Matalin, Bob Shrum and Mike Murphy all on during the same week, as Russert does as frequently as he can.

But shouldn’t CJR have chosen someone other than Todd Gitlin to write the feature? Gitlin’s debut isn’t bad. But look at this: Gitlin publicly announced his support for Barack Obama back in February.

Gitlin is an academic moonlighting as a journalist. Yes, he’s a liberal opinion journalist. But even we opinion-mongers owe readers our independence.

I sometimes hear it said that journalists should say whom they’re voting for in the name of transparency. I disagree. Voting, and even stating your position on issues, is not the same as publicly supporting a candidate.

It’s not that you’re keeping your true beliefs a secret. It’s that it becomes much harder to evaluate someone honestly once you’ve identified yourself as a backer. Either you can’t bring yourself to criticize him, or you go overboard the other way so that you won’t be accused of being in the tank. Far better to keep it to yourself, even if your readers think they know how you voted — and even if they’re probably right.

Gitlin thought some of Russert’s questions to Obama strategist David Axelrod were unfair. So did I, given that one of them, as Gitlin notes, was based on the false claim that Obama had once refused to hold his hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance.

But Gitlin should not be doing this for the CJR, of all publications. Media Matters for America, maybe.

Cavalcade of responses. Gitlin responds. I respond to his response.

Gitlin photo by David Shankbone, and republished here under a GNU Free Documentation License.

The military-industrial complex

Retired generals and other high-ranking military officers get hired as defense contractors. Television networks pay them to offer analysis on the war in Iraq, both during the run-up and in the long aftermath. The Pentagon, which holds the power of life or death over said contractors, tells the generals what to say. And they do, despite secretly harboring doubts about the truth of what they’re being told about the success of the war. Eisenhower was more right than he ever knew.

This, folks, is as sickening a media scandal as we have seen in our lifetime. At least Judith Miller believed the lies Ahmed Chalabi was telling her about weapons and terrorism. At least Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher were harming nothing but their own reputations when they took money to promote administration policy in their columns or, as Gallagher has tried to argue, on the side.

The New York Times’ David Barstow lays it all out today in horrifying detail. Nor was the Times itself immune, having run nine op-ed pieces by these bought-and-paid-for opinion-mongers.

Take a look at this excerpt about Robert Bevelacqua, a retired Green Berets and former analyst for Fox News:

Mr. Bevelacqua, then a Fox analyst, was among those invited to a briefing in early 2003 about Iraq’s purported stockpiles of illicit weapons. He recalled asking the briefer whether the United States had “smoking gun” proof.

” ‘We don’t have any hard evidence,’ ” Mr. Bevelacqua recalled the briefer replying. He said he and other analysts were alarmed by this concession. “We are looking at ourselves saying, ‘What are we doing?’ “

Another analyst, Robert L. Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who works in the Pentagon for a military contractor, attended the same briefing and recalled feeling “very disappointed” after being shown satellite photographs purporting to show bunkers associated with a hidden weapons program. Mr. Maginnis said he concluded that the analysts were being “manipulated” to convey a false sense of certainty about the evidence of the weapons. Yet he and Mr. Bevelacqua and the other analysts who attended the briefing did not share any misgivings with the American public.

Mr. Bevelacqua and another Fox analyst, Mr. [William] Cowan [another Fox analyst and a retired Marine colonel], had formed the wvc3 Group, and hoped to win military and national security contracts.

“There’s no way I was going to go down that road and get completely torn apart,” Mr. Bevelacqua said. “You’re talking about fighting a huge machine.”

What can you possibly say about the moral sensibility that informs Bevelacqua’s remarks?

The first major media figure who’ll be popping up today is Tim Russert, who’s pictured in the Times piece (above) surrounded by retired military officers on the set of “Meet the Press.” He ought to open by apologizing and promising a thorough investigation of NBC News’ use of this corrupt punditry. Next week’s show should be devoted to an hour-long self-examination. And every other network should do the same.

What’s so repellant about this is that it robs us of our ability to govern ourselves. Longtime Media Nation readers know that I’ve always been conflicted about the war — against it ahead of time, but, once we were in, hoping for a decent outcome.

I still haven’t abandoned that hope. But this morning I find myself wondering how much of that hope is based on paid-for lies that I mistook for honest analysis.

More about the flag-pin lady

Nash McCabe, the Latrobe, Pa., woman who’s so disturbed about Barack Obama’s decision not to make flag pins part of his everyday wardrobe, turns out to be a known Obama-hater whom ABC News tracked down with malice aforethought.

Josh Marshall: “[I]t does reinforce my sense that the disgraceful nature of the debate wasn’t just something that came together wrong, some iffy ideas taken to[o] far, but was basically engineered to be crap from the ground up.”

Stephanopoulos doesn’t get it

George Stephanopoulos, fresh from his Stephen Colbert shtick (right), tells the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz that Barack Obama deserved to get tougher questions than Hillary Clinton at Wednesday’s debate because he’s the front-runner. Kurtz writes:

“Senator Obama is the front-runner,” said Stephanopoulos, the network’s chief Washington correspondent and a former Clinton White House aide. “Our thinking was, electability was the number one issue,” and questions about “relationships and character go to the heart of it.”

Besides, he added, “you can’t do a tougher question for Senator Clinton than ‘six out of 10 Americans don’t think you’re honest.’ “

But the problem wasn’t that the questions were unfairly tilted against Obama; it’s that they were stupid and demeaning. Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson debased the process by mouthing Colbert-like parodies of Republican talking points as though they were actual questions.

“Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?” is not a question. “I want to know if you believe in the American flag” (from a Pennsylvania woman) is not a question. For that matter, “Six out of 10 Americans don’t think you’re honest” is not a question.

Does Stephanopoulos not understand this? Perhaps he does. Perhaps he realizes that he, Gibson and the debate producers screwed up big-time Wednesday night, and he’s just talking trash to Kurtz but will nevertheless learn from his mistakes.

If not — well, please, as Media Nation reader Peter Porcupine says, bring back the League of Women Voters.

More: Jim Romenesko rounds up the critics.

Illustration by Chris Arkwright, and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Shales nails it

Tom Shales gets it exactly right in today’s Washington Post:

When Barack Obama met Hillary Clinton for another televised Democratic candidates’ debate last night, it was more than a step forward in the 2008 presidential election. It was another step downward for network news — in particular ABC News, which hosted the debate from Philadelphia and whose usually dependable anchors, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable performances.

Indeed, it seemed like at least half the debate consisted of stupid hot-button questions that are of interest mainly to people who’ve already decided to vote Republican this fall. The bottom was reached when a voter named Nash McCabe, of Latrobe, Pa., asked by video: “Senator Obama, I have a question, and I want to know if you believe in the American flag.”

That’s a question? Who would choose to air such idiocy?

More: “This was a travesty,” Michael Tomasky writes in the Guardian. But I’m puzzled by Tomasky’s and Shales’ both saying that Stephanopoulos was off his game. I try to watch as little of Stephanopoulos as possible, so I’m not a good judge. But his performance struck me as entirely in keeping with why I generally change the channel as soon as his smug face appears.

McCain and his media admirers

Neal Gabler has a first-rate analysis in today’s New York Times on the media’s love affair with John McCain. He writes:

Seeming to view himself and the whole political process with a mix of amusement and bemusement, Mr. McCain is an ironist wooing a group of individuals who regard ironic detachment more highly than sincerity or seriousness. He may be the first real postmodernist candidate for the presidency — the first to turn his press relations into the basis of his candidacy.

Though McCain is hardly what you would call a staunch, steady conservative, he is, in fact, deeply conservative about most issues, including reproductive choice, same-sex marriage and, most notably, foreign policy and the war in Iraq. Yet reporters, and even liberal commentators, Gabler notes, choose not to believe him, because his view of how the world works is essentially in line with that of culturally liberal journalists.

My own sense about McCain is that though he cares deeply about foreign policy, everything else to him is just politics. I do get the feeling that, if he’s elected president, his domestic agenda will essentially be defined by expediency.

The media’s relationship with the candidates will be crucial this fall, especially if Hillary Clinton — detested by many journalists — somehow wins the Democratic nomination. Can the press fairly cover a race when it loves one candidate and loathes the other? If past performance is any indication, you would have to say “no.”

Life imitates art

Medill School of Journalism professor David Protess, on suspicions that Medill dean John Lavine may have piped a few quotes from anonymous students in an in-house magazine article: “I am not alleging that the dean fabricated quotes. I am alleging that it is inaccurate to say there is no evidence that he did not fabricate quotes.” (Via Romenesko.)

Slate columnist Michael Kinsley, lampooning the New York Times’ hair-splitting defense of its “anonymous former aides think John McCain might have had sex” story: “What I wrote was that some people had expressed concern that the Times article might have created the appearance of charging that McCain had had an affair. My critics have charged that I was charging the Times with charging McCain with having had an affair.”