Sinclair Broadcast Group nearing bankruptcy

Clear Channel is in a bit of financial trouble, and apparently so are their cohorts in “Republican-slanted news is the only news people want” category, Sinclair Broadcasting. Good, I hope they both become nothing more than a footnote to future histories of the George Bush administration.

Lonely Zenith

you’ll remember Sinclair Broadcast Group as the TV group that carried the anti-Kerry smear documentary in prime time, just before the November 2004 election. You may also remember them for the infamous “The Point” editorial segments during their stations’ newscasts — featuring the right wing rantings of corporate management.

Perhaps you even recall their experiment in “central casting” — firing most of the news departments at their local stations, and instead running “local” newscasts from all over the country out of a central studio in Baltimore.

Well, it now appears that Sinclair is on the verge of bankruptcy

Five years ago, Sinclair was also the darling of the right for running that anti-Kerry documentary on all 58 of their stations, and for conservative editorials on all of those stations as well. Those who saw ever greater consolidation as the road to maximizing corporate profits were enamored of Sinclair’s experiment with producing “local” newscasts for their stations from a central studio at corporate headquarters in Baltimore.

Unfortunately for Sinclair, viewers were unimpressed by “local” newscasts that were produced hundreds or even thousands of miles from home — and tuned out in droves. And the right wing editorials created negative publicity for Sinclair’s stations. Ultimately. the central studio for producing newscasts was shut down, and the right wing editorials were cancelled. And the group has, by and large, floundered in mediocrity ever since. So far as I’m aware, none of Sinclair’s 58 stations is a market leader, and few are even in the top three — when you run a group on the cheap and attempt to push a national agenda onto your local stations, the result is predictable: poor ratings and a weak identity in your local markets.

As a result, Sinclair was poorly positioned for dealing with the advertising downturn of the past 18 months.

[Click to continue reading Daily Kos: Sinclair Broadcast Group nearing bankruptcy]

Bwa-ha-ha! Couldn’t happen to nicer corporations1

Footnotes:
  1. and by nicer I mean of course the opposite. Sinclair Broadcasting is just scum, plain and simple. []

Minions of Rupert Murdoch illegally hacked 3000 cellphone accounts

Either Rupert Murdoch is too close a friend of most US media conglomerate CEOs, or else they are scared of incurring Murdoch’s wrath. What other explanation for the lack of coverage of the juicy Guardian UK scoop regarding Murdoch illegality?

But so far the Guardian, which last Wednesday broke the news of how two newspapers belonging to Rupert Murdoch illegally hacked into the mobile phone accounts of “two or three thousand” people, as well as “gaining unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemized phone bills [belonging to] Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars” has the story pretty much to itself.

On the surface this is surprising. Here, after all, is a story that combines boldface names like Gwyneth Paltrow, Elle MacPherson, Nigella Lawson and George Michael with the official spokesman of the Conservative Party (Andy Coulson, media strategist for Tory leader David Cameron, was editor of the News of the World when the paper allegedly paid private investigators for access to the celebrities’ accounts) and Rupert Murdoch, the world’s most powerful media baron. The BBC put the story at the top of its world news lineup, and followed up the next day with a story about how some of famous targets were contemplating lawsuits. So why has the Guardian’s incredible scoop turned out to be a 2 day wonder?

[Click to continue reading  The Dog That Didn’t Bark]

Quite curious, no?

Rupert Murdoch’s News Group News papers has paid out more than £1m to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists’ repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.

The payments secured secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public figures as well as gaining unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills. Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators.

Today, the Guardian reveals details of the suppressed evidence, which may open the door to hundreds more legal actions by victims of News Group, the Murdoch company that publishes the News of the World and the Sun, as well as provoking police inquiries into reporters who were involved and the senior executives responsible for them.

[Click to continue reading Murdoch papers paid out £1m to gag phone-hacking victims | Media |The Guardian]

such as

When the high court last summer ordered the News of the World to pay damages to Max Mosley for secretly filming him with prostitutes, the paper was furious. In an angry leader column, it insisted that public figures must maintain standards. “It is not for the powerful and the influential to run to the courts to gag newspapers from publishing stories that are TRUE,” it said. “This is all about the public’s right to know.”

Even as those words were being published, lawyers and senior executives from News International’s subsidiary News Group were preparing to run to court to gag Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, who was suing the News of the World for its undisclosed involvement in the illegal interception of messages left on his mobile phone.

By persuading the high court to seal the file and by paying Taylor more than £400,000 damages in exchange for his silence, News Group prevented the public from knowing anything about the hundreds of pages of evidence which had been disclosed in Taylor’s case, revealing potentially criminal behaviour by journalists on its payroll. It also protected some powerful and influential people from the implications of that evidence.

[Click to continue reading  Trail of hacking and deceit under nose of Tory PR chief guardian.co.uk ]

Red Light Night

names like:

Scotland Yard disclosed only a limited amount of its evidence to Taylor. The Guardian understands that the full police file shows that several thousand public figures were targeted by investigators, including, during one month in 2006: John Prescott, then deputy prime minister; Tessa Jowell, then responsible for the media as secretary of state for culture; Boris Johnson, then the Conservative spokesman on higher education; Gwyneth Paltrow, after she had given birth to her son; George Michael, who had been seen looking tired at the wheel of his car; and Jade Goody.

When Goodman, the News of the World’s royal editor, was jailed for hacking into the mobile phones of Palace staff, News International said he had been acting without their knowledge. One of the investigators working for the paper, Glenn Mulcaire, was also charged with hacking the phones of the Lib Dem MP Simon Hughes, celebrity PR Max Clifford, model Elle MacPherson and football agent Sky Andrew as well as Taylor. At the time, the News of the World claimed to know nothing about the hacking of these targets, but Taylor has now proved that to be untrue in his case. Others who are believed to have been possible targets include the Scottish politician Tommy Sheridan, who has previously accused the News of the World of bugging his car; Jeffrey Archer, whose perjury was exposed by the paper; and Sven-Göran Eriksson, whose sex life became a tabloid obsession.

Is Free the Future?

The New York Times allowing one of its staff to advocate stealing images from Flickr is one thing, but Chris Anderson wants to expand upon that equation.


“Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (Chris Anderson)

Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker reviews Chris Anderson’s new tome to the mantra, information is going to be free, bitches, so relax and enjoy it.

At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he’d just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper’s content to the Kindle, Amazon’s new electronic reader. “They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue,” Moroney testified. “I get thirty per cent, they get seventy per cent. On top of that, they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device.” The idea was that if a Kindle subscription to the Dallas Morning News cost ten dollars a month, seven dollars of that belonged to Amazon, the provider of the gadget on which the news was read, and just three dollars belonged to the newspaper, the provider of an expensive and ever-changing variety of editorial content. The people at Amazon valued the newspaper’s contribution so little, in fact, that they felt they ought then to be able to license it to anyone else they wanted. Another witness at the hearing, Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post, said that she thought the Kindle could provide a business model to save the beleaguered newspaper industry. Moroney disagreed. “I get thirty per cent and they get the right to license my content to any portable device—not just ones made by Amazon?” He was incredulous. “That, to me, is not a model.”

Had James Moroney read Chris Anderson’s new book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (Hyperion; $26.99), Amazon’s offer might not have seemed quite so surprising. Anderson is the editor of Wired and the author of the 2006 best-seller “The Long Tail,” and “Free” is essentially an extended elaboration of Stewart Brand’s famous declaration that “information wants to be free.” The digital age, Anderson argues, is exerting an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things “made of ideas.” Anderson does not consider this a passing trend. Rather, he seems to think of it as an iron law: “In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.” To musicians who believe that their music is being pirated, Anderson is blunt. They should stop complaining, and capitalize on the added exposure that piracy provides by making money through touring, merchandise sales, and “yes, the sale of some of [their] music to people who still want CDs or prefer to buy their music online.” To the Dallas Morning News, he would say the same thing. Newspapers need to accept that content is never again going to be worth what they want it to be worth, and reinvent their business. “Out of the bloodbath will come a new role for professional journalists,” he predicts, and he goes on:

There may be more of them, not fewer, as the ability to participate in journalism extends beyond the credentialed halls of traditional media. But they may be paid far less, and for many it won’t be a full time job at all. Journalism as a profession will share the stage with journalism as an avocation. Meanwhile, others may use their skills to teach and organize amateurs to do a better job covering their own communities, becoming more editor/coach than writer. If so, leveraging the Free—paying people to get other people to write for non-monetary rewards—may not be the enemy of professional journalists. Instead, it may be their salvation.

[Click to continue reading Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson: Books: The New Yorker]

After the Revolution is Over
[After the Revolution is Over]

So is it true? Are paid content creators going to be the 21st century version of hansom cab drivers? I’m still not convinced. If I have the choice, I’d rather pay The New Yorker for a subscription to their magazine1 so they can pay writers like Malcolm Gladwell instead of paying nothing and reading hacks like the writers of B12 Partners Solipsism on my kindle-like device. I would not assert there are zero non-hack writers who write for free, but if one made a list of all the blog writers who do their own original reporting without relying on the resources of paid journalists and journalistic institutions, the list would be surprisingly short. Especially since billmon retired.

Ballad of the West Loop - Kodachrome version
[Ballad of the West Loop – Kodachrome version]

Malcolm Gladwell is skeptical as well:

Anderson is very good at paragraphs like this—with its reassuring arc from “bloodbath” to “salvation.” His advice is pithy, his tone uncompromising, and his subject matter perfectly timed for a moment when old-line content providers are desperate for answers. That said, it is not entirely clear what distinction is being marked between “paying people to get other people to write” and paying people to write. If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can’t you pay people to write? It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for “non-monetary rewards.” Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels? Anderson’s reference to people who “prefer to buy their music online” carries the faint suggestion that refraining from theft should be considered a mere preference. And then there is his insistence that the relentless downward pressure on prices represents an iron law of the digital economy. Why is it a law? Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power. “Information wants to be free,” Anderson tells us, “in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.” But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle? But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Keep reading

Footnotes:
  1. as I have done for nearly 2 decades []

Idiots running Washington Post fires its best columnist

Sorry to hear that Dan Froomkin (a frequent source of material for this blog, and many others) has been fired.

Glenn Greenwald speculates it might be because of the whiny-titty-ass-baby, Charlie Krauthammer complaining.

Charles Krauthammer last night said that Obama critics on Fox News are “a lot like [Hugo Chavez’] Caracas where all the media, except one, are state run.” But right-wing polemicists like Krauthammer are all over the media.

In addition to his Rupert Murdoch perch at Fox, Krauthammer remains as a regular columnist at the Post, alongside fellow right-wing Obama haters such as Bill Kristol, George Will, Jim Hoagland, Michael Gerson and Robert Kagan — as well as a whole bevy of typical, banal establishment spokespeople who are highly supportive of whatever the permanent Washington establishment favors (David Ignatius, Fred Hiatt, Ruth Marcus, David Broder, Richard Cohen, Howie Kurtz, etc. etc.). And that’s to say nothing of the regular Op-Ed appearances by typical Krauthammer-mimicking neoconservative voices such as John Bolton, Joe Lieberman, and Douglas Feith — and the Post Editorial Page itself. “Caracas” indeed.

Notably, Froomkin just recently had a somewhat acrimonious exchange with the oh-so-oppressed Krauthammer over torture, after Froomkin criticized Krauthammer’s explicit endorsement of torture and Krauthammer responded by calling Froomkin’s criticisms “stupid.” And now — weeks later — Froomkin is fired by the Post while the persecuted Krauthammer, comparing himself to endangered journalists in Venezuela, remains at the Post, along with countless others there who think and write just like he does:  i.e., standard neoconservative pablum. Froomkin was previously criticized for being “highly opinionated and liberal” by Post ombudsman Deborah Howell (even as she refused to criticize blatant right-wing journalists).

All of this underscores a critical and oft-overlooked point:  what one finds virtually nowhere in the establishment press are those who criticize Obama not in order to advance their tawdry right-wing agenda but because the principles that led them to criticize Bush compel similar criticism of Obama.

[Click to continue reading The Washington Post fires its best columnist. Why? – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com]

Nothing Can Go Wrong in Blue

From my humble experience, the only reason I ever (and I mean ever) visited the Washington Post was to read Dan Froomkin’s column, then to read his blog. I guess I’m the wrong demographic for Washington Post, I’m unabashedly liberal, educated, technologically savvy, and even (shudder) bourgeois, by income if not by mentality. The Washington Post is happy competing for conservative readers, and following the Washington Times Fox News model of all Republican news all the time. I trust Mr. Froomkin will land somewhere soon, and continue his responsible journalistic approach.

Dan Froomkin comments:

I’m terribly disappointed. I was told that it had been determined that my White House Watch blog wasn’t “working” anymore. But from what I could tell, it was still working very well. I also thought White House Watch was a great fit with The Washington Post brand, and what its readers reasonably expect from the Post online.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I think that the future success of our business depends on journalists enthusiastically pursuing accountability and calling it like they see it. That’s what I tried to do every day. Now I guess I’ll have to try to do it someplace else.

Krauthammer might have burst into tears when he read this article:

Charles Krauthammer, in his Washington Post opinion column this morning, tries to find loopholes for impermissible evil.

“Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances,” he writes.

“The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent’s life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy.”

Actually, no. The ticking time bomb scenario only exists in two places: On TV and in the dark fantasies of power-crazed and morally deficient authoritarians. In real life, things are never that certain. And trained interrogators say that even in the most extreme circumstances, traditional methods are the most effective.

Krauthammer continues: “Some people, however, believe you never torture. Ever. They are akin to conscientious objectors who will never fight in any war under any circumstances, and for whom we correctly show respect by exempting them from war duty. But we would never make one of them Centcom commander.”

Actually, no. They are normal people who share the post-World War II international consensus that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Indeed, the idea of putting someone without a healthy respect for human rights at Centcom is abhorrent — unless of course you believe that human rights don’t matter.

[Click to continue reading White House Watch – Krauthammer’s Asterisks ]

After flaying Krauthammer a bit more, Mr. Froomkin concludes:

Precisely what members of Congress were told and how they responded should absolutely be a part of any thorough official investigation into the abuses of the Bush years. The enablers must be exposed as surely as the complicit. And members of Congress who knew what was happening and remained silent must be held to public account for their moral cowardice.

But their failure to speak out does not change the fundamental moral equation.

If the United States is to live up to its core values, if it is to once again be a beacon of human rights to the world and a champion of human dignity, then when it comes to torture — to impermissible evil, as Krauthammer himself puts it — there can be no asterisks.

Death of the Chicago Tribune

Seems like an almost done deal. The Chicago Tribune has chosen to become a shallow, tabloid newspaper, chasing 20-somethings with a short attention span.

Pippen Peruses the Newspaper
[Pippen already prefers the WSJ]

I got in touch with Coleen Davison. “We’d been [Tribune] subscribers for 12 or 13 years,” she told me. “Obviously we’ve seen changes we weren’t thrilled by, but the last redesign was the final straw. It was sound-bite journalism — all pictures, no stories.”

They gave the new Tribune a week and then decided to cancel the subscription to their Naperville home. At the suggestion of the woman in circulation she spoke to about that, Coleen participated in a readers’ phone survey. “As I recall,” she told me, “almost all of the questions were extremely vague and general. The respondee was asked to answer on a scale of 1 to 5 whether they agreed or disagreed. The only question that came remotely close to allowing me to voice my displeasure was something like ‘I think the redesign contains too many pictures.’ I was frustrated that the survey seemed designed to only allow for positive feedback.”

So she wrote a redesign feedback link she found at the Tribune Web site and complained. She told the paper that although its survey hadn’t let her say so, she was “also appalled by the significant drop in the quality of what little news is reported. Rearranging and renaming the sections I can deal with, but the new Tribune looks and reads like a tabloid magazine.”

She went on, “I understand the need to update your look periodically, and I also understand the desire to attract more readers. It’s just terribly sad that the way you chose to do this was to pander to those who prefer tabloid journalism to real news.” Her long note, which I’m merely excerpting here, she signed “Sadly and sincerely.”

She heard back from John McCormick of the Tribune editorial board

[Click to read more Chicago Reader Blogs: News Bites]

Daily News

I’ve been a Tribune subscriber since 1994, and I’ve just about decided to cancel my subscription as well. There just isn’t much news in the Tribune these days, and so why bother getting it delivered? I already subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and the weekend New York Times, perhaps I’ll just expand my NYT subscription. The Trib is a pale shadow of the paper it used to be, and Sam Zell obviously doesn’t give a shit about readers like me.

End of Blogging

If GateHouse Media succeeds in their lawsuit, this blog, and many others will have to cease existence. What percentage of blog materials is quoted, fair-use information from other sites? Just using B12 as an example, I’d say over 75%.

GateHouse Media filed a lawsuit Monday against the New York Times Co. alleging copyright infringement after the NYT-owned Boston Globe frequently posted links containing headlines and the first sentences from articles on GateHouse’s community news sites.

-View the Document: The 25-page lawsuit [PDF]
-View the Document: Request for an injunction [PDF] to stop the Globe from posting GateHouse links.
-View the Document: 35-page support document for the injunction [PDF]
-View the Document: Affidavit by GateHouse Media Metro Editor-in-Chief Gregory Reibman [PDF]
Your Town Newton, one of the Boston Globe’s community sites that sparked the lawsuit. See the news links in the center content gutter.

The lawsuit, if successful, could create a monumental chilling effect for bloggers, news sites, search engines, social media sites and aggregators such as Topix and Techmeme, which link to articles, display headlines and use snippets of copyrighted text from other sites. Initiatives such as the NYTimes.com Times Extra, which displays links to related articles from other sites, could be shut down for fear of copyright lawsuits. It could lead to a repudiation of one of the fundamental principles on which the Internet was built: the discovery and sharing of information.

In its complaint, GateHouse called the article links “deep links” because they do not link to the home page of the site. The “deep link” language in the complaint is meant to invoke cases such as the Supercrosslive.com case, wherein a motorcross news site was successfully prohibited from deep linking to a competing site’s streaming video file, which bypassed the site’s advertising.

GateHouse’s assertion is that the Boston Globe community site’s use of the headlines cannibalizes GateHouse’s content and causes it financial harm because readers gather news from the links and snippets on the Globe’s site rather than visit GateHouse’s sites. Although not explicitly stated in the complaint, this means GateHouse likely believes the loss of readers from possible increased use of the Globe’s site will not be offset by the readers brought in by its competitor’s links.

[From Journalistopia » GateHouse Lawsuit vs. New York Times Co. has Dire Implications | Danny Sanchez]

I had never heard of GateHouse Media before today1, but they put out a lot of publications, mostly weeklies it looks like.

No joke, if this lawsuit is successful, I will have to shut down this blog immediately, as will the majority of other news-related blogs. The risk of liability is just too great.

Footnotes:
  1. well except for being mentioned in the Tribune bankruptcy as a debt-ridden newspaper company []

Freddy Goodwin Hides Drug Company Funding from NPR audience

Dr. Goodwin sold his ethics, and NPR, for such small amounts.1 Petty greed. Is the money really worth it?

Neon - NH Ballin Drugs Prescriptions

An influential psychiatrist who was the host of the popular NPR program “The Infinite Mind” earned at least $1.3 million from 2000 to 2007 giving marketing lectures for drugmakers, income not mentioned on the program.

The psychiatrist and radio host, Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin, is the latest in a series of doctors and researchers whose ties to drugmakers have been uncovered by Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa. Dr. Goodwin, a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, is the first news media figure to be investigated.

Dr. Goodwin’s weekly radio programs have often touched on subjects important to the commercial interests of the companies for which he consults. In a program broadcast on Sept. 20, 2005, he warned that children with bipolar disorder who were left untreated could suffer brain damage, a controversial view.

“But as we’ll be hearing today,” Dr. Goodwin told his audience, “modern treatments — mood stabilizers in particular — have been proven both safe and effective in bipolar children.”

That same day, GlaxoSmithKline paid Dr. Goodwin $2,500 to give a promotional lecture for its mood stabilizer drug, Lamictal, at the Ritz Carlton Golf Resort in Naples, Fla. In all, GlaxoSmithKline paid him more than $329,000 that year for promoting Lamictal, records given to Congressional investigators show.

[From Radio Host Has Drug Company Ties – NYTimes.com]

Kudos to Senator Grassley, by the way, who isn’t all bad.

My radio-listening mornings have been replaced by sleeping in, so I cannot verify or deny NPR’s claims to be canceling the show as soon as the current episodes are aired, but the controversy first emerged way back in May of 2008. NPR’s Ombudsman tried to spin the fact that technically, The Infinite Mind is not an NPR show:

But more importantly, the show didn’t disclose that the guests and host had some financial ties to makers of anti-depressants. “To me, it’s not terribly relevant whether there’s a clear scientific link between anti-depressants and suicide,” said Gary Schwitzer, publisher of HealthNewsReview, an independent website that evaluates health coverage. “Bill Lichtenstein does good work. But he should have disclosed the financial ties.”

One of the guests was Peter Pitts, a former Food and Drug Administration official. The show’s host doesn’t mention that Pitts is senior vice president for global health affairs at a public relations firm. That firm represents drug companies that make anti-depressants. Lichtenstein acknowledged that Pitts’ business ties should have been mentioned. He said Pitts didn’t disclose them while the Website Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, where Pitts is president, says he did.

“If we had known, and (full mea culpa here) we should have, we would have disclosed that connection,” wrote Lichtenstein in a response on Slate’s, The Fray. “Pitts apparently didn’t disclose it elsewhere, either – he’s appeared on NPR’s Talk of the Nation as well as PBS’ News Hour with Jim Lehrer, without either of those programs mentioning the PR company ties.” (Slate responded to Lichtenstein on May 12.)

Lichtenstein is correct about Talk of the Nation. Pitts appeared on the show in June 2005, one year after joining the public relations firm Manning Selvage & Lee, according to the firm. The call-in show identified him only as with the Pacific Research Institute, which lists itself as a non-profit educational charity promoting free market policy solutions.

Another issue is The Infinite Mind’s funding. According to Lichtenstein, he takes no more than 15 percent of the budget from any one sector. In 2006, he told me, the program got $100,000 from Eli Lily, which makes the anti-depressant, Prozac.

All that said: Is The Infinite Mind an NPR show?

Technically, it depends on what you mean by an NPR show.

but then recommended NPR add disclaimers:

a few things should happen. On NPR’s website listing “popular public radio shows,” NPR should make it clear which are distinctly NPR-produced shows and which ones are not. For instance, the site lists Prairie Home Companion and provides a link, even though the popular show is produced and distributed by American Public Media, a competing public radio service.

The Infinite Mind, particularly since it deals in the controversial world of science and medicine, should include information on its website about how it is funded. It should also add Peter Pitts’ public relations job to the link for the “Prozac Nation” episode and to any related transcripts.

Being upfront about real or potential financial conflicts of interest is key to establishing credibility. Financial associations don’t mean that experts should necessarily be disqualified as commentators, but the public must be told about them.

With the Internet, it is much easier for news operations to be transparent, and they should take advantage of the ability to be more transparent if they ever want to win back the public’s respect and trust.

Again, I don’t listen to the show, but it seems as if NPR never followed this advice:

Margaret Low Smith, vice president of National Public Radio, said NPR would remove “The Infinite Mind” from its satellite radio service next week, the earliest date possible. Ms. Smith said that had NPR been aware of Dr. Goodwin’s financial interests, it would not have broadcast the program.

and Dr. Goodwin was very concerned about maintaining his home in Aspen, and wasn’t going to let any damned ethics get between him and that sweet, sweet drug corporation cash…

In the fine print of a study he wrote in 2003, Dr. Goodwin reported consulting or speaking for nine drugmakers, including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Novartis. Mr. Grassley asked for payment information only from GlaxoSmithKline. Dr. Goodwin said that in recent years, GlaxoSmithKline paid him more than other companies.

He said that he had never given marketing lectures for antidepressant medicines like Prozac, so he saw no conflict with a program he hosted in March titled “Prozac Nation: Revisited.” which he introduced by saying, “As you will hear today, there is no credible scientific evidence linking antidepressants to violence or to suicide.”

That same week, Dr. Goodwin earned around $20,000 from GlaxoSmithKline, which for years suppressed studies showing that its antidepressant, Paxil, increased suicidal behaviors.

Footnotes:
  1. well, $1,400,000 isn’t petty cash, but Dr. Goodwin wasn’t hurting for cash []

When did experience become a flaw?

Lest we forget, the national media will be looking for any controversy to build their coverage of the new administration around. If there isn’t any drama, they will manufacture it.

Jamison Foser of Media Matters writes:

Midway through Bill Clinton’s first year as president, Time magazine reported that among the new president’s problems was “a staff that has almost no White House or executive experience,” pointing to then-political director Rahm Emanuel as a prime example.

Fast-forward 15 years: President-elect Barack Obama has chosen Emanuel to serve as his chief of staff. With years of high-level White House work under his belt, not to mention the connections and clout that come from having been one of the most powerful members of Congress, it would be quite a stretch to say that Emanuel lacks the experience to effectively serve Obama. So this time, some in the media have a different complaint. As CNN’s Anderson Cooper put it, Emanuel is “probably the ultimate Washington insider. … [T]he critics will say, well, look, if Obama is talking about change, why is he having a Washington insider?”

So: Emanuel was insufficiently experienced to serve as political director in 1993 — and now we’re to believe that he’s too experienced in Washington to serve as chief of staff? What gives? Was there a brief window in 2003 in which Emanuel’s level of experience was just right? Or is there something strange about the media’s assessment of President-elect Obama’s staffing decisions?

That Time assessment of Emanuel in 1993 was not unique. For 16 years, there has been near-universal agreement that the Clinton administration’s early struggles (real and perceived) were in large part due to a lack of White House and Washington experience on the part of Clinton’s staff.

[Continue reading Media Matters – Media Matters: When did experience become a flaw?]

Just like the public vetting of the Clintons, which turned out to be mostly based on allegations that there was dirty contributions to Bill Clinton, any little angle will be relentlessly hyped. Is it too soon to write off the corporate media?

Drudge campaign influence has collapsed

Drudge sucks. I never visit the site because there is never any real news to be found there, only slime and innuendo, but apparently the Washington pundit class loves ’em some Drudge. Figures. Eric Boehlert notes that The Drudge Report has lost a lot of influence recently, and is pleased.

Reflections upon a fragile life

Matt Drudge is still doing his loyal best to boost the chances of the GOP down the homestretch in the form of a blizzard of anti-Obama and pro-McCain links on his site. (Last week, it was the half-baked McCain “comeback” that Drudge hyped relentlessly.)

Well, I’m here to call bullshit.

And no, this isn’t just a wishful, I-don’t-like-Drudge-so-I’m-going-to-claim-he’s-irrelevant column.

This is fact.

Because it’s obvious that since Wall Street’s meltdown commenced five weeks ago, and since America’s economic crisis became a tsunami of a news story that’s not only dominated the media landscape, but also irrevocably altered the course of the campaign, the Drudge Report has become largely irrelevant in terms of the setting the news agenda for the White House run.

That’s because a story like the unfolding credit crisis — sober and complicated — knocks Drudge completely out of his element of frivolous, partisan gotcha links.

The race is unrecognizable in terms of where the players are situated now and where they were five weeks ago. (Between September 15 and October 19, there was a 12-point swing in the Gallup daily tracking poll.) Now ask yourself: What role has the Drudge Report played in that burst of campaign movement? The answer, of course, is zero. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. His trademark flashing red lights have gone missing.

The dynamics of the campaign have irrevocably changed, and the mighty Drudge Report, the news site Beltway journalists trip over themselves to genuflect in front of, has been a complete bystander in the closing weeks of the 2008 campaign. (Not that this is the first time Drudge has choked down the stretch of a nationwide election.)

The reason is simple. Because of the unprecedented economic turmoil, we’re now in serious times. (Fifty thousand home foreclosures this year, in the state of New Jersey alone, is serious business.) And the Drudge Report doesn’t do serious. The American public’s attention has shifted from the campaign to the economy, and that’s why the Drudge Report remains largely irrelevant to that unfolding story.

[From Media Matters – Drudge unplugged: How his campaign influence has collapsed]

Whenever anyone publicly admits to reading The Drudge Report in a non-ironic manner, I lose a lot of respect for them. Corporate Media’s love affair with Matt Drudge says more about Corporate Media than anything else.

Cokie Roberts Is Such a Republican

Cokie Roberts has a real problem sticking to facts, especially when the facts support Democrats. During the VP debate, I heard a word I didn’t know, and so I looked it up. Took me about 5 seconds to discover that Bosniaks is a valid word. Apparently, Ms. Roberts doesn’t know how to use any of the internets or their traditions.

During coverage of the October 2 vice-presidential debate on PBS’ Charlie Rose, Rose asked, “Did either of them make any mistakes that you noticed?” National Public Radio senior news analyst Cokie Roberts responded that Sen. Joe Biden “talked about the Bosniaks.” Roberts later said: “[I]f [Gov. Sarah Palin] had said ‘Bosniak,’ everybody would be making a big deal of it, you know.” In fact, Biden correctly referred to certain residents of Bosnia and Herzegovina as Bosniaks. According to the U.S. State Department, as of 2002, the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina consisted of the following ethnic groups: “Bosniak 48.3%, Serb 34.0%, Croat 15.4%, others 2.3%.”

The CIA World Factbook states: “Bosniak has replaced Muslim as an ethnic term in part to avoid confusion with the religious term Muslim — an adherent of Islam.”

[From Media Matters – On PBS, Cokie Roberts falsely suggested Biden’s reference to “Bosniaks” was a gaffe]

Cokie Roberts has never heard a Republican talking point she won’t repeat.

YouTube Pulls Obama Spot

Now I’m really curious to see the ad, I wonder if it is available.

Google-owned YouTube has pulled a Barack Obama ad from its site at the insistence of NBC, which charged that the spot infringed on its copyrighted content and that it did not give Obama’s campaign permission to use the material.

The ad, titled “Bad News,” is designed to get out the vote by appealing to voters and potential voters who do not want John McCain to win the election. At one point, NBC’s Tom Brokaw and MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann are shown — with Olbermann announcing that McCain has “won.”

NBC has demanded that Obama stop using the clip altogether. But his campaign balked and instead attached a disclaimer to it that said, “NBC and MSNBC did not cooperate in the making of this video.”

[From YouTube Pulls Obama Spot]

I checked YouTube, and found the ad, removed, with this disclaimer: This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by NBC

If I find a copy, I’ll post it. Must have really irked NBC to be hoisted with their own petard.

Palin Lies About Obama

As we noted earlier, Palin lied about Obama’s record in her speech last night, and the corporate media didn’t bother fact checking before repeating the lie. In fact, this line was touted as one of her best zingers.

In reporting on Gov. Sarah Palin’s September 4 speech at the Republican National Convention, numerous print media, including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Time Magazine, the Dallas Morning News, Reuters, and an article and a column by Debra Saunders in the San Francisco Chronicle, uncritically reported Palin’s claim that Sen. Barack Obama “is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform — not even in the state senate,” without noting that Obama has played key roles in the passage of reform legislation at both the federal and state levels. For example, Sen. John McCain, a co-sponsor of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, thanked Obama for his work on the bill.

Obama was a lead co-sponsor of that bill (S.2590), which sought to “require full disclosure of all entities and organizations receiving Federal funds” — an amount that approximately totals $1 trillion in federal grants, contracts, earmarks and loans. While signing the bill into law on September 26, 2006, Bush recognized Obama as a sponsor of the legislation, saying, “I want to thank the bill sponsors, Tom Coburn from Oklahoma, Tom Carper from Delaware, and Barack Obama from Illinois.” Moreover, in a press release upon Senate passage of the bill, the bill’s primary sponsor, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), referred to the legislation as the “Coburn-Obama Bill.” In media reports, the bill has also been referred to as the “Coburn-Obama” legislation or bill.

[There’s plenty more details at Media Matters – Media report Palin’s claim that Obama has not “authored … a single major law or reform” without noting laws he has passed]

No wonder newspaper circulation is falling – if one has to go to the web to get actual facts, why bother subscribing to a newspaper? What are the newspapers delivering? Press releases interspersed with advertising?

Does the WSJ Hate Michelle Obama?

I meant to note a similar complaint regarding this front page1 of the Wall Street Journal from August 26, 2008:

Because -seriously- this is the worst photo ever:

Her tongue is sticking out for Christ’s sake. And poor Sasha just looks bored. Cute, but bored.

[Click to see a photo of the front page: The Conventional Thinker: Does the WSJ Hate Michelle Obama?]

I wondered more about the headline itself. A shaky (Bush-created) economy challenges Obama Agenda. Umm, seems like it would be just the opposite, no? A shaky Bush-McCain-McSame economy would seem to be ripe for some ‘change’.

Corrections & Amplifications:

Sen. Barack Obama says he would raise the tax rate for married couples with taxable income of more than $200,300 to 36% from 33%. This page-one article incorrectly said the trigger level would be $165,000. In addition, Douglas Brinkley is Rice University’s presidential historian. The article incorrectly gave his name as Alan Brinkley, who is a Columbia University historian.

Footnotes:
  1. strangely enough, the archived version at the WSJ.com website has a entirely different photo of Ms. Obama, perhaps there were complaints? []

More on the Decline of Newspapers

More on the Decline of Newspapers and media in general, from Digby, who was on a panel about the media and the blogosphere with Arianna Huffington, Chris Cilizza, Jonathan Alter and Gregory Maffei:

Alter insists that nobody listens to the gasbags and pundits so we shouldn’t worry about them. I asked him how he thought people got their information about politics and he said from their talkative coworker or politically engaged relative and things like chain emails. It’s apparent that many in the mainstream media have not see the documentation and analysis that’s been done online about how the stories and themes of elections, as conceived by political operatives and political pundits, dominate the campaigns and color the voters impressions of the candidates. Maybe the inside of the bubble is too heady a place to be able to connect those dots.

(In the meantime, perhaps I should just direct everyone to Bob Somerby…)

I find it difficult to keep my patience with the inevitable discussion about how the news media is losing money and can’t afford to do the all important news gathering on which we internet parasites depend. It’s as if this problem has happened in some vacuum in which journalism itself has no culpability. They brought a lot of it on themselves, particularly when they gleefully allowed Drudge to rule their world and Rush to be feted and groomed by mainstream conservative politicians without raising an eyebrow. (Live by the wingnuts, die by the wingnuts.)

[From Hullabaloo]

Builds upon the late-great Molly Ivins’ point: the best way to get more subscribers is to put out a better paper, not just whine.

Newspapers in Decline

I don’t want newspapers as an institution to fade away like the 78 Victrola, I depend upon the news-gathering services of several national papers, including the Chicago Tribune. I have print subscriptions to three papers, but even more so, I rely upon their online presence. I may disagree frequently with the slant of newspaper coverage, and lament the obvious pro-corporate sympathies, but if suddenly the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal started cutting their reporting staff to ridiculous levels, I’m not sure what would happen.

News You Can't Use

This is why Dr. Alterman’s article troubles me:

Spend some time on the “future of news” conference circuit, as I have recently, and believe me, you’ll need a drink and perhaps a Prozac. The flight of readers and advertisers to the web has led to an unprecedented assault on stockholder value, making newspapers the investment equivalent of slow-motion seppuku. For instance, on July 11 Alan Mutter’s invaluable Reflections of a Newsosaur blog reported that in “perhaps the worst single trading day ever” for the newspaper business, “the shares of seven publicly held newspaper companies today plunged to the[ir] lowest point in modern history.” When these losses continued to accelerate, Mutter calculated that newspaper stocks had shed an amazing $3.9 billion in value in just the first ten trading days of July, leading to the disappearance of more than 35 percent of these companies’ combined stock price in 2008 alone

It’s been nearly two and a half years since the much-missed Molly Ivins observed of media moguls that, “for some reason, they assume people will want to buy more newspapers if they have less news in them and are less useful.” And yet the strategy continues unabated. The Los Angeles Times just announced that it will cut loose another 250 people, including 150 in the newsroom–this on top of a series of job cuts by the previous owners, which led to a revolving door of resigning editors and publishers who could not in good conscience carry out the cuts demanded of them.

As a result of this avalanche of industrywide layoffs, buy-outs and firings, Mutter notes, the industry’s age-old ratio of one journalist per thousand papers in circulation is about to disappear. But as a contributor to Romenesko pointed out, this is “a self-correcting mechanism. As subscribers find less and less to read because newspaper staffs are thinned too much to produce quality copy, subscriptions will lapse and the ratio will be restored–until, of course, additional layoffs refresh the cycle.”

[From I Read the News Today… Oh Boy]

Very troubling indeed. Television news is a joke, the news-weeklies (The Nation, et al) don’t have the depth, or space, to cover each days events. The blogosphere, while valuable, would be hard-pressed to step into the breach. Blogs function more as a correcting mechanism, teasing nuance out of already published material. Hardly any blog actually does any hard reporting (Josh Marshall‘s empire, of course, and a few others, a very small percentage).

Answers? I have none, or I’d become fabulously wealthy selling advice to publishers. I do wish more corporate media moguls would take Ms. Ivins advice and find other ways to cut costs other than firing staff.

Of course, executives don’t have to worry about their salary: they’ll continue draining the blood from the goose1

Virtually the only expense still intact is executive pay. On the Recovering Journalist blog, Mark Potts notes that the average compensation among the thirteen public-company newspaper CEOs was just under $6 million a year in 2007, according to corporate proxy filings with the SEC. These figures, one can only conclude, are entirely unrelated to performance.

Footnotes:
  1. or however that cliche goes []