I Cogitate

Reporter Hailed for Killing Hilton Story
David Bauder
AP Television Writer
July 8, 2007
 
NEW YORK (AP) - A lighter and paper shredder helped make Mika Brzezinski the symbol of television journalism's guilt trip about Paris Hilton.

Brzezinski used both to destroy a script calling for her to read about Hilton's release from jail on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program recently. Part serious, part an act, it has become an Internet sensation. More than 2 million people have watched a clip of the incident, around 10 times the number who watched it live on TV.

Apparently, she's not the only one sick of the socialite.

"Among journalists it touched a nerve because I think we're tired of pretending this is important," she said. "We also know that, deep down inside, our viewers know that we don't believe this is news. They can't. They can't think we're that dumb."

Brzezinski, who left CBS News last year, has been working as a news- reader and on-air foil for Joe Scarborough on the show MSNBC is trying out to replace Don Imus in the morning.

Hours after Hilton's June 26 catwalk to freedom, Scarborough and Brzezinski discussed one of the day's other big stories at their show's opening: influential Republican Sen. Richard Lugar's declaration that President Bush's Iraq strategy wasn't working.

It was then Brzezinski's turn to sum up the day's news. She looked down at her script and Hilton was the top story. She froze...

Corrections We'd Like To See
Norman Solomon
TomPaine.com
July 25, 2007

Former readers of Mad Magazine can remember a regular feature called "Scenes We'd Like to See." It showed what might happen if candor replaced customary euphemisms and evasions. These days, what media scenes would we like to see?

One aspect of news media that needs a different paradigm is the correction ritual. Newspapers are sometimes willing to acknowledge faulty reporting, but the "correction box" is routinely inadequate­the journalistic equivalent of self-flagellation for jaywalking in the course of serving as an accessory to deadly crimes.

Some daily papers are scrupulous about correcting the smallest factual errors that have made it into print. So, we learn that a first name was misspelled or a date was wrong or a person was misidentified in a photo caption. However, we rarely encounter a correction that addresses a fundamental flaw in what passes for ongoing journalism.

Here are some of the basic corrections that we'd really like to see:

"Yesterday's paper included a business section but failed to also include a labor section. Yet the vast majority of Americans work without investing for a living. They are employees rather than entrepreneurs. The failure to recognize such realities when using newsroom resources is not journalistically defensible. The Daily Bugle regrets the error."

"On Thursday, in a lengthy story about the economy, this newspaper quoted three corporate executives, two Wall Street business analysts and someone from a corporate-funded think task. But the article did not quote a single low-income person or a single advocate for those mired in poverty. The Daily Bugle regrets the error."

The Beltway Press Needs a Good PR Firm
Washington Babylon
Ken Silverstein
Harper's
July 2, 2007

I knew that there was a fair amount of hostility towards the high-end Washington press corps, but until Saturday, when the Los Angeles Times ran my op-ed, I had no idea how deep that hostility ran, and how many people shared it.

In the op-ed, I wrote about how members of the media have criticized my use of undercover tactics in a story in the July Harper’s. If you haven’t read it, the story details how I approached two lobby shops while posing as an employee of a shady London-based energy firm with a stake in Turkmenistan, and how those lobby shops proposed to whitewash the image of that country’s Stalinist regime.

Here’s an excerpt from the Times op-ed:

Now, in a fabulous bit of irony, my article about the unethical behavior of lobbying firms has become, for some in the media, a story about my ethics in reporting the story. The lobbyists have attacked the story and me personally, saying that it was unethical of me to misrepresent myself when I went to speak to them.

That kind of reaction is to be expected from the lobbyists exposed in my article. But what I found more disappointing is that their concerns were then mirrored by Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz, who was apparently far less concerned by the lobbyists’ ability to manipulate public and political opinion than by my use of undercover journalism.

“No matter how good the story,” he wrote, “lying to get it raises as many questions about journalists as their subjects” . . .

I’m willing to debate the merits of my piece, but the carping from the Washington press corps is hard to stomach. This is the group that attended the White House Correspondents dinner and clapped for a rapping Karl Rove. As a class, they honor politeness over honesty and believe that being “balanced” means giving the same weight to a lie as you give to the truth.

The response ­in the form of blog posts, emails, and interview requests­was overwhelming, and almost entirely positive. A lot of people, it seems, just don’t approve of lobby shops that do image-enhancement work for dictators. But for some in the media­and especially beltway reporters­my piece prompted a moral crisis. They just couldn’t figure out whether it was worse for me to trick the lobbyists than for the lobbyists to have proposed a whitewash campaign for the Turkmen regime. 11. I find it interesting that when Jeff Sharlet wrote an undercover story for Harper’s in 2003, based on his infiltration of a conservative Christian group, there was no media uproar about the piece and no questions asked about journalistic ethics. Could this be because Christian conservatives don’t drink, party, and socialize enough with Washington reporters?

I.F. Stone's lessons for Internet journalism
Dan Froomkin
COMMENTARY
July 9, 2007

The best blogger ever died in 1989 at the age of 81.

That's the conclusion I reached reading Myra MacPherson's wonderful biography of the great rebel journalist, I.F. Stone. The title of her book, "All Governments Lie!," is both a fitting summary of Stone's core philosophy and the organizing principle of many of the finest political bloggers on the Internet.

Although Stone worked for decades vigorously tweaking authority as a daily journalist, editorial writer and essayist, it was in 1953 that he created the perfect outlet for his extraordinary mind, starting I.F. Stone's Weekly, easily the scrappiest and most influential four-page newsletter ever sent through the U.S. mail. When Stone shut it down in 1971, the Weekly had 70,000 subscribers.

In many ways, the Weekly was a blog before its time. In format, it was a combination of articles, essays and annotated excerpts from original documents and other people's reporting ­ just like a blog. In content, it was a far cry from the passionless prose that afflicts so much mainstream political reporting. Like so many of today's top bloggers, Stone built a community of loyal readers around his voice ­ an informed voice, full of outrage and born of an unconcealed devotion to decency and fair play, civil liberty, free speech, peace in the world, truth in government, and a humane society.

The newspapers of his era could have learned a lot from Stone, as MacPherson ­herself an accomplished Washington journalist ­ so effectively chronicles. History repeatedly vindicated his courage, while condemning their timidity. Similarly, the newspapers of this era could learn a lot from Stone as they hunt desperately for a profitable future in the Internet age. Once again, they are being too timid. What bloggers have so effectively shown is that the Internet values voice and passion. Where newspapers can excel in this new era is in providing both­grounded in trusted information.

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