The Boston Globe today reports that Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown last week played up his conservative bona fides in an interview with “Sean Hannity, cohost of Fox News Network’s ‘Hannity and Colmes.'”
Was there no one handling this story who was aware that Alan Colmes announced he was leaving more than a year ago? Hannity went solo on Jan. 12, 2009.
The Cambridge Chronicle, like other GateHouse papers, often runs sticky-note ads on the front page. This one didn’t work out so well. Here’s the Chronicle’s story on the alcohol-fueled imprisonment and resignation of former state senator Anthony Galluccio.
Update: Statement from GateHouse group publisher Greg Reibman.
I’ve got an essay in the current issue of Nieman Reports on the evolution of media criticism, from its roots in the work of A.J. Liebling and the alternative press to its current status as an Internet-fueled growth industry.
The essay is, in part, a review of a new book by the media scholar Arthur Hayes called “Press Critics Are the Fifth Estate: Media Watchdogs in America.” Hayes deliberately eschews journalistic practitioners of media criticism such as Jack Shafer, Howard Kurtz, David Carr, Eric Alterman and Liebling himself in favor of political activists. (The cover aside, Stephen Colbert and even Jon Stewart receive surprisingly little mention.)
Hayes’ argument is that activists from ideological organizations such as Accuracy in Media on the right and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting on the left are more likely to bring about change than those whose mission it is to report on media institutions and write about their findings. As you might imagine, I disagree. I write:
At its best, media criticism — like all good journalism — is about digging out uncomfortable facts and telling them fearlessly. It is difficult to do well and, it shouldn’t be the critic’s job to bring about change. Truth is a rare enough commodity that it ought to be valued for its own sake.
Hope you’ll take a look.
A number of critics, including Sarah Palin herself, are going after Newsweek for running a cover shot of her in a sexy running outfit. Palin calls it “sexist.”
I can’t get too worked up about it. Palin, after all, posed for the shot, which was originally intended for Runner’s World. (At Beat the Press, Ralph Ranalli writes that Newsweek may have violated Runner’s World’s exclusivity deal with the freelance photographer.)
But Palin and other critics have a legitimate complaint about Newsweek’s inside photos. I haven’t picked up a Newsweek in many months, but Media Matters has the pictures — a back-to image of Palin’s shapely legs, something she most definitely did not pose for; and a photo of what Media Matters accurately describes as a “Sarah Palin-as-a-slutty-schoolgirl doll.” The latter was used to illustrate a piece by Christopher Hitchens, who is almost as overexposed as Palin herself.
The treatment is further evidence of Newsweek’s plunge into irrelevance. The New York Times this week described the magazine as repositioning itself for a smaller, more intelligent news audience.
But with garbage like this, and with recent cover headlines like “Is Your Baby Racist?”, the only thing editor Jon Meacham seems to be repositioning his magazine for is rack space next to People and Us.
I like it when politicians have direct, unfiltered access to the public. The media have plenty of opportunities to posit themselves between candidates and voters. If a pol lies, twists or omits relevant facts and there’s no one from the Fourth Estate to call him or her on it, well, so be it. There will always be another opportunity.
That said, I don’t think the Boston Globe did enough to make sure that the four Democratic candidates for U.S. senator actually wrote their own op-eds in Sunday’s paper. If words are appearing under the bylines of (in fair-and-balanced alphabetical order) Mike Capuano, Martha Coakley, Alan Khazei and Steve Pagliuca, I’d like some assurance that they were written by the candidates, not those of some paid spinner.
But when I asked editorial-page editor Peter Canellos what precautions the Globe had taken, he replied by e-mail that he had checked with op-ed editor Marjorie Pritchard and, essentially, none had been taken. “I spoke to Marjorie, and the answer is that we simply requested that they write pieces for the op-ed page,” Canellos told me. “There were no further restrictions imposed on them.”
Granted, short of some sort of forensic investigation, it would be impossible for a newspaper to make sure candidate op-eds were actually written by the candidates. But I think the candidates should have been asked directly to write their own statements, with no assistance from staffers other than editing. That way, they’d have been put on notice that if they didn’t, then they were cheating.
I realize that I’m holding a candidate’s written words to a higher standard than I am spoken words. But the role of speechwriters is well-established, and the very fact that a candidate has to speak the words changes the equation. A ghostwritten op-ed, in contrast, might never even be seen by the candidate — we simply have no way of knowing.
Besides, when a newspaper such as the Globe solicits op-eds, it is taking responsibility for what it publishes in a way that’s entirely different from running a story about a candidate’s speech.
It’s time to banish the ghosts from the op-ed page. Who you gonna call?
An additional thought: Several of the commenters make the point that ghostwritten op-eds are a long-established practice throughout the newspaper business. So let me clarify. Yes, I know that. Not reading obviously ghostwritten op-eds is an equally established practice. It’s time for a change, don’t you think?
Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli emerged from the salon debacle unscathed. But now that he’s admitted he knew all along that the salons were intended as off-the-record fundraisers, it’s time to demand that he and publisher Katharine Weymouth come clean on what they knew and when they knew it.
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