News Corp Is a Criminal Enterprise. Why Is Anyone Surprised?

Paul Krugman says what is plainly true:

At this point it’s starting to look as if News Corp is better viewed as a criminal enterprise than as a media organization.

Just to recap: A British News Corp paper, News of the World, shut down after 168 years because it got caught hacking into the phone messages of a missing 13 year old girl who turned up dead. Because her messages got erased, the family had renewed hope that she was alive. The same newspaper apparently hacked the phones of 9/11 victims. The Sun, also News Corp owned, hacked into former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's son's medical records and the family legal files. Turns out, this has been going on a while:

Brown joins a long list of Labour politicians who are known to have been targeted by private investigators working for News International, including the former prime minister Tony Blair and his media adviser Alastair Campbell, the former deputy prime minister John Prescott and his political adviser Joan Hammell, Peter Mandelson as trade secretary, Jack Straw and David Blunkett as home secretaries, Tessa Jowell as media secretary and her special adviser Bill Bush, and Chris Bryant as minister for Europe.

They've also paid off police and secretly settled with former victims that found them out.

Quick Comments on Weinergate

Ok, this whole Weinergate thing is really, really, dumb. What is really does is confirm that Democrats are not really all that good at political warfare. Look, it sucks that Democrats are going to be held to a different standard than Republicans, especially given Democrats like Rep. Weiner campaign on sexual privacy and Republicans like Larry Craig on "family values." But that's the way of it. Period. So if you're going to be a Democrat and try to do some good in this world, you just can't do the stupid stuff like sending pics of your junk over the internet. The deck is stacked against our side, but we've got to overcome it for the good of the country.

Cheering for Death and Other Reactions to Last Night's News

Last night, Jacob and I both took to Twitter, as we tend to do these days when big news is released. It was a crazy two hours or so of speculation and confirmation, dark jokes, reactions to the MSM coverage, elation and bloodlust, and odd looks at the elation and bloodlust. I wanted to share a few of my reactions from the announcement of Osama bin Laden's death, its coverage, America's reaction, and what it means going forward.

Overton Defenestration

The Defenestration of Prague

There's been a lot of talk about Paul Ryan's budget. One thing I haven't seen though, is Ryan's budget discussed as a play for an expanded Overton Window, which is what I think it primarily is. For those unfamiliar with the concept, the idea of the Overton Window is that there is a generally acceptable range of positions that people are willing to debate on an issue. This is the Overton Window. If a player in the debate proposes something far outside of that window, then suddenly, more moderate proposals on that end of the window, or maybe even proposals previously outside the window, become debatable positions. The concept is similar to the negotiation strategy known as "anchoring," but in a political debate, rather than a two-party negotiation. The Bush Administration very successfully used this tactic all over the place, most notably with respect to torture, which went from never acceptable to suddenly being debatable to a large portion of the public, because some people were cheering for it outright.

Coverage of the Wisconsin Protests Is Unsurprisingly Lacking

Haven't written in a while. Been having a few of those "everything is so obviously awful that there's just no point in commenting on anything" weeks. Anyway, here's something short: the television news coverage of the Wisconsin protests. Well, actually, Digby already made the point pretty much as well as anyone can. (It's a short post with image and video, so I can't really quote it - just go check it out.)

Perhaps I should be surprised and outraged that two weeks of 70,000-100,000 protesters are ignored by the same CNN that for two years has breathlessly covered tea party rallies described by Fox News as "thousands strong." But in reality, it's not the least bit surprising. That's your "liberal media."

And because I feel this post is too short, I'll end with a "joke" I'm going to blatantly steal from reddit: A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party, and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table there is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies looks at the tea partier and says, "look out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie."

The Absurd Conservative Double Standard for the Media

Today, Juan Williams, a NPR senior news analyst, was fired after saying that "seeing people in Muslim-style dress on airplanes sometimes makes him 'nervous.'" The right is predictably howling with rage about the persecution of conservatives. Bill O'Reilly and Newt Gingrich have both apparently called for NPR's funding to be cut as a result. (This particular remedy wouldn't happen to have anything do to with the knowledge that NPR tends to be the only really liberal part of the "liberal media," would it?) Mike Huckabee will now refuse NPR's interview requests.

AP Takes a Big Step Toward the Future

The Associated Press is a huge force regarding trends in journalism. This is true mostly because of the sheer number of news articles reported in each news sources that are taken directly from wire services, simply because no news source has the resources to do everything themselves. Thus AP's announcement last month, that they will officially begin to credit bloggers as news sources, is monumental, and is almost certainly an inflection point in the way old media interacts with new.

The internet has forever changed the way we do news. Blogs are here to stay, and they make up a growing portion of the journalistic landscape. More and more traditional newspeople people are even going from print to online. Yet, for some reason (likely survival instincts), this reality and its consequences often prove tough to grasp for the traditional media. Many in the old guard still sneer at "bloggers." This dismissiveness is what gave rise to Atrios's ever present "Blogger Ethics Panel" joke - old media people keep complaining that bloggers have no ethical standards to live up to, and thus that they shouldn't be trusted. Of course, while this is true of some bloggers, you can tell which. The beauty of the internet is that it makes transparency possible, so that you can always look up what someone has written and determine for themselves if the writer's a hack (and if a writer not transparent, you can usually assume he is a hack.). People can also much more easily source-check within one piece. It's starting to become accepted in journalism circles that transparency is the new objectivity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this notion's acceptance is coming along as about the same speed as the acceptance of bloggers as legit news sources.

Health Care Polls and the Unrepresented Left

Greg Mitchell asks a question today:

Obviously, he's correct about this. People have noted this fact from the beginning. There have also been polls saying this for a while. However, it's just now, finally, that people are listening. The reason people are somewhat shocked is that the left simply has no voice and cannot penetrate media coverage with facts. Because it's a favorite pastime of the MSM to claim the everything is good news for Republicans, we tend not to hear about these sorts of things.

EPSN Ramadan Follow-Up: Why Did They Take Down the Video?

(Updated below)

A few days ago, I praised ESPN for what I thought was a great report on two NFL players' experience with Ramadan and preseason. As I said at the time, the piece was important because while much of the mainstream media is fanning the flames of Muslim hatred, lending credence to this "Ground Zero Mosque" pseudo-controversy, the piece "was very sympathetic to Muslims, and tries to show what Islam really is, explaining customs most Americans do not know about, and demonstrating that observant Muslims should be respected." Exposure to something is the best way to overcome a fear of it, and Islamophobia is to a large degree just an extension of xenophobia.

However, shortly after I posted this, ESPN removed the video. I emailed them (as, apparently, did a lot of people). Here was their response to me:

Unfortunately, the video was unpublished due to NFL practice footage. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Similarly, Rachel Nichols tweeted the next day:

Many of you asking about the Ramadan/NFL story - got taken down from ESPN.com bc of video rights issues. But it will re-run on TV today.

To me, this did not and does not seem a very convincing reason to remove the video. ESPN shows NFL practice footage all the time, like in their 32 team NFL preseason preview. Also, they're not some fledgling network; if they did not have the rights, and there was not some ulterior motive to remove it, they probably could have secured the rights to the footage from the NFL. It's also unlikely that it was originally posted online by mistake.

The bottom line is that this really looks fishy. Good for them for at least re-airing it, but on TV is not the same as online, where anyone can view it at any time, and if Rachel Nichols's tweet is any indication, people were doing just that.

I think that if ESPN can re-air it, they should be able to put it back online, or provide a better explanation for why they cannot than "practice footage." For example, what makes this practice footage different than others? Please join me in asking ESPN do to that. I have emailed them for a fuller explanation, and you can send this post out or RT our corresponding tweets about the issue.

Update: I asked ESPN to elaborate on the "copyright" issues, and I have now received a second email from ESPN saying that the NFL owns the copyrighted footage, and it was returned. That is, they refuse to elaborate.

ESPN Helps Fight Islamophobia

(updated below)

ESPN's Sportscenter has a recurring feature called Outside The Lines, in which they report on off-the-field human interest stories related to sports. Sunday night a story aired, titled "Keeping The Faith." It was about two brothers, Hamza and Husain Abdullah - NFL players who are observant Muslims and who are fasting during Ramadan, as they always do.

Can Party Realignment Ever Happen? Not If the Establishment Media Has Any Say.

I've been saying for a while now that if there were any sense in politics, we would see another party realignment like we haven't for a long while. The inevitable two-party system guaranteed by the structure of our voting systems would remain, but the new parties would essentially become the Blue Dogs and the Progressives, with the Republicans becoming irrelevant. If we think about the debates we've been having lately - mostly the economic ones: Social Security, stimulus, health care - all the substantive issues from both sides have come from Blue Dogs and Progressives. Anyone to the right of the Blue Dogs was busy yelling "socialism" and other various racist and classist things, and thus were not even trying to contribute, despite the media's constant amplification.

Today I learned that this alignment is pretty much how the debate is explicitly structured in Britain, and that there are more general terms that map pretty well onto Blue Dogs (or maybe more accurately Obama-liberals, a little to the left of the DINO Blue Dogs) and Progressives--"neoliberals" and "social democrats."

A Columnist Fills the Gap Left By the Ombudsman and Media Critic

Thank you to E.J. Dionne (who is neither Andrew Alexander, the Post's ombudsman nor Howard Kurtz, their resident so-called media critic) for writing in the Washington Post what needs to be said over and over again where more eyes can see it.

The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that "fairness" requires treating extremist rants as "one side of the story." And there can be no more shilly-shallying about the fact that racial backlash politics is becoming an important component of the campaign against President Obama and against progressives in this year's election.

"Both Sides" Journalism and the Role of Media's Subservience To Government

I'm a little late on this, but I wanted to mention something about the study that came out of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government a couple weeks ago, regarding newspapers' use of the word torture. Specifically, I want to use it to put in context my assertion that unfortunately, the potentially bad results of government funding of journalism are already here, with none of the benefits.

The study documents a "significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding." Basically, in the last 100 years, the newspapers discussed waterboarding occasionally and unequivocally called it torture, right up until the government began asserting that it was not torture.Glenn Greenwald sums up the implications well:

We don't need a state-run media because our media outlets volunteer for the task: once the U.S. Government decrees that a technique is no longer torture, U.S. media outlets dutifully cease using the term. That compliant behavior makes overtly state-controlled media unnecessary.

What it also does is make the bogeyman specter of government control irrelevant to the discussion because for better or worse (obviously worse) it's already here.

Suddenly lots of stories about interracial dating. Weird.

Not sure what this means, but there sure have been quite a few stories about interracial dating and marriage lately, since the Census estimates in particular (noting, among other things, that interracial marriages are ever so slightly up, and predicting that by 2050, mixed-race people will be a majority in the US (perhaps not though)).

Government Subsidies are a Part of the Future of Journalism, and That's Not a Bad Thing

Ready for a controversial statement that I fully believe? Here goes: Government subsidies and funding of journalism will be included in future news models in this very country, and I don't believe that's a bad thing. As far as whether it will happen, I just think it's pretty much a given, since there's just no other way the papers will be able to afford to keep making quality news. Advertising’s drying up; non-profit models just don't work because there's not enough money, unless the paper is beholden to a few very wealthy donors, which is also problematic.

Government funding raises a couple very interesting questions though. Why are we so viscerally opposed to it, and does it make sense to be? Is it worse than what we will, (or already do) have? Could it be better? (By the way, this post was inspired by the discussion in the comments section of Dan Kennedy's post berating a local paper from taking a rotating small business loan from the local government. The comments hash out a lot of the issues on all sides of this debate, and are quite interesting.)

When Is a Terrorist Attack Not a Terrorist Attack?

There was a terrorist attack on US soil Monday. I was going to write myself, but Matt Yglesias wrote about it in close to the same tone that I would have, so I'll send you there. Like he does, I'll leave the answer to my headline question as an exercise for the reader.

A Sign of Improvement in Journalism?

A recent surge in fact-checking in the MSM turns out to be pretty popular. Who knew? The trend started with NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen's "simple fix," and was picked up first by ABC's Jake Tapper on This Week, then by the always inept CNN and Howard Kurtz that managed to take a good idea and apply journalistic "balance" to it. Here's Jay Rosen's timeline of the whole thing, including the ridiculous refusal by David Gregory, host of MSNBC's Meet The Press to adopt it, saying that viewers can fact-check "on their own terms," whatever that means. This prompted the creation of Meet The Facts, a website attempting to crowdsource the fact-checking that Gregory refuses to do, for whatever reason. (I apologize for for the link barrage on a new topic - I had a draft post about this a month ago and just realized I never posted it. This topic is important, however, and the links are well worth reading, particularly the timeline.)

Right around the time David Gregory said no, Colbert even jumped in on the action. (I linked it because embedding the video isn't working for some reason.)

Anyway, so the fact checking is catching on, and the AP is noticing its popularity. Amazingly, they've even noticed that Kurtz's version of "both sides lie equally," "balanced" fact-checking is not what people want.

Obama's Still Got It (Part I - The Good)

(updated below)

Yesterday, President Obama gave the commencement address at Michigan, and I immediately realized that a) I was basically the only law student that didn't see it (I was at a friend's wedding - congrats again Johnny and Jen!), b) it was worth the hours of waiting in line, and c) it was a speech that could have been designed just for me (I was told so by several friends). So I read through it, and I almost began tearing up and couldn't stop smiling, except in the points where I wanted to yell out that he's being a hypocrite. And again, this was just while I was reading (full text here). But I've also seen enough of his speeches that I could recreate the delivery in my own head. Anyway, given my varied and strong reactions to his address, I figured I'd write about the different parts. This post is incredibly long, so I'll write here about the good, and about the bad separately.

Saving CNN Should be About News, Not Business

(updated below)

Let's look at two different proposals for how CNN can and should fix itself.

A couple weeks ago, Ross Douthat wrote a column for the NYT about how to save CNN, that was fundamentally flawed. The basic problem with his column was that while he identified the core of CNN's problem: its vapid, empty version of non-partisan journalism that basically says nothing at all and is thus just boring, he proposes an inherently problematic solution, essentially merely calling on them to bring more "debate" into the news room.

Partisan News Trumps Pretty Graphics?

Bad news for CNN:

CNN continued what has become a precipitous decline in ratings for its prime-time programs in the first quarter of 2010, with its main hosts losing almost half their viewers in a year.
...
At the same time, Fox News, which had its biggest year in 2009, continues to add viewers. Greta Van Susteren’s show was up 25 percent from a year earlier. Bill O’Reilly, whose show commands the biggest audience in prime time with 3.65 million viewers, was up 28 percent, and Glenn Beck was up 50 percent from a year earlier.

I've actually often wondered whether the partisan news model or the "ooh shiny..." news model was worse at getting the information out - off-handedly, I'd guess the latter. I guess it's becoming clear which is worse as a business model, at least. I guess if you're not gonna get useful news either way, crazy wingnuts are more entertaining than pretty graphics. So yeah, CNN sucks.