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I Think You Know The Answer

2:54 pm EST October 27th, 2011 | Media | 24 Comments

Fox Hyped Steve Jobs’ Critique Of Obama, Will They Cover His Slam Of Fox News?

Numerous Fox News hosts have highlighted negative comments about President Obama from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of recently deceased Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Despite his comments about Obama, the book also notes that Jobs offered to help create advertising for the president’s re-election campaign.

What Fox has failed to report or comment on so far are Steve Jobs’ thoughts about Fox News, which he described as “an incredibly destructive force in our society,”

New NY Times Executive Editor: Conservatives Rule Our World

5:20 pm EST October 23rd, 2011 | Media | 61 Comments

There’s a very telling quote from new NY Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson in the lengthy profile of her in the New Yorker. The quote in question helps put to bed the notion that the most important media outlet in the world (arguably) is some sort of bastion of the “liberal media.”

Abramson, asked whether the Times has a liberal bias, says, “I think we try hard not to” be biased, but she adds that the Times, as its public editor argued in a column seven years ago, has an insular urban bias that is sometimes apparent in social stories. She fervently believes that the Times is an equal-opportunity prober of Democrats as well as of Republicans. Asked about her own upbringing, she responds, “I’m often the one who raises the point in page-one meetings that our mix of stories is too urban in outlook, too parochial. All my years in Washington, and in some ways being attacked by conservatives, made me more conscious of how a story might be seen in the rest of America.”

Here, Abramson tells us that she has in fact internalized the decades of conservative attacks on the media – led by Washington-based institutions that quite frankly have a very poor idea of how stories are really seen “in the rest of America.”

You’ll remember Nancy Pfotenhauer, a DC-based Republican who, while working for the McCain campaign, lectured on what regions of Virginia were “real” (the more conservative, rural areas) versus unreal (the more liberal, urban areas), an argument echoed nationally by Sarah Palin. These artificial, false distinctions are part of the conservative’s false construct of our world.

This is the kind of internalized criticism that led Abramson to be part of the team at the Times that put Judith Miller’s false WMD misinformation on the front page of the paper. As an institution, it’s also the brand of internalized criticism that caused the Times to be in front of the crowd demanding investigations of President Clinton for Whitewater, suspicions of guilt the independent counsel later dismissed after millions of taxpayer dollars had been spent.

The press should, above all, be fair. The Times believes as an institution that this means they should be unbiased in their approach (I would personally argue a news outlet can have a point of view while still reporting honestly, but that’s another discussion), but all the way at the top of the masthead, they overcompensate for what often turns out to be false allegations of bias (the MRC and its tentacles have a less than honest relationship with the truth).

That’s why your news is screwed up.

Conservatives Try To Work The Refs, Even For Herman Cain

12:22 am EST October 17th, 2011 | Media, Politics | 40 Comments

Herman Cain is neither going to be the Republican nominee for President or the next President of the United States. His is a bubble campaign of the Donald Trump variety, someone who can wave away conservative guilt for their racial past, but not a serious contender in any way.

That said, they’re still going to try and work the media refs in his favor. Case in point: Conservative blogger/writer (and Confederate apologist) Robert Stacy McCain reaching for the fainting couch because David Gregory asked Cain a few basic questions that he flubbed (in the post-Palin lexicon this is described as some sort of grilling).

Specifically McCain whines “When Democrats go on Meet the Press, it’s like Justin Bieber sitting down for a hard-hitting interview with Tiger Beat.”

So I decided to do what conservatives hope liberals never do, and they doubly hope the mainstream media doesnt: I checked.

I went back to May of 2008, and then-candidate Barack Obama’s appearance on Meet The Press with the late Tim Russert. What did I find? Did Russert annoint Obama the next President? Did he crown him? Did he ask him about puppies, or even kittens?

No, Russert did what Russert often did: He asked Obama a bunch of questions that sounded as if they were hot off the presses from the RNC. Specifically, Russert asked Obama about that most relevant of issues, Jeremiah Wright. A sampling:

* What has the controversy over Reverend Jeremiah Wright done to your campaign?

* You’re still a member of the church?

* Why do you think he re-emerged?

* What happened in those five weeks? Because you already knew, prior to the March speech, that he had suggested the U.S. government created the AIDS virus; you knew he went to Libya with Louis Farrakhan; you knew about his hate speech on September 11th, about the chickens coming home to roost and other things. What did you learn in those five weeks that you didn’t know in March?

* The critics have said he can attack the United States of America, he can do all sorts of things that divide the country, but only when he made it politically uncomfortable for you did you finally separate himself from him.

* Why didn’t you just say then, “You know, Reverend, we’re going on different paths because this country does not believe in white supremacy and black inferiority.”

* He said in a letter to The New York Times, he suggested that you apologized for not letting him do the invocation. Is that true?

* Is it fair for people to raise questions about your judgment for misjudging Reverend Wright?

* You’re done with him? If you’re elected president, you won’t seek his counsel?

* Could you have handled this better, differently, by severing your ties earlier? And what’s the most important thing you’ve learned from this?

These were the first questions Russert asked Obama on the supposedly softball Meet The Press: A litany of right-wing fed scarebait directly out of the school of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glen Beck. It doesn’t matter how far to the right the questions tilt, conservatives will be wailing about liberal media bias until the sun swallows the entire solar system.

Now, look, Herman Cain is a joke. He can’t answer basic 101 level questions, his economic plan is dumb — even for a conservative. But even for a Trivial Pursuit-bound candidate like Cain, conservatives are willing to pervert, twist, and distort history and act under the pretense that the big bad mean liberal media beat up on their poor widdle candidate.

It’s what they do, it’s how they operate. It’s dishonest, pathetic, moronic, and sadly it works.

The New Yorker Has Made A Factual Error!

3:19 am EST August 11th, 2011 | Media | 10 Comments

I just sent the following e-mail to The New Yorker. I’m pretty proud of the inherent geekery.

In your August 15 & 22 issue, in the article “Voicebox 360″, Tom Bissell claims that the Carmen Sandiego “cartoon series spawned a videogame spinoff.” This is incorrect. “Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?” the cartoon series debuted in 1994. It is based on the Carmen Sandiego series of video games. The Carmen Sandiego video games began with “Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?” which debuted in 1985 – almost a decade before the cartoon series. In between the game and cartoon, Carmen Sandiego was also a popular PBS game show for children.

I think this means they have to shut down the magazine.

Do it, Rockapella.

Tavis Smiley, Professional Obama Critic

2:46 pm EST August 10th, 2011 | Media | 15 Comments

And now, the other side of the story.

Tavis Smiley is ridiculously claiming that President Obama has frozen him out since being elected. As if the two of them were buddy buddy before.

Flashback to 2008:

Tavis Smiley said yesterday he will resign in June as a twice-weekly commentator on the syndicated “Tom Joyner Morning Show” after more than 11 years with the program. He cited fatigue and a busy schedule in a personal call to Joyner on Thursday night, but Joyner indicated otherwise on his program and in his blog yesterday, writing: “The real reason is that he can’t take the hate he’s been getting regarding the Barack issue — hate from the black people that he loves so much.”

The word has always been that Smiley was upset at Obama’s decision not to kiss his ring by endorsing his “Covenant With Black America.”

Thank Goodness Its The Future

12:19 pm EST August 9th, 2011 | Media | 7 Comments

I just recently re-watched All The President’s Men (the book is great too). It’s a great movie, and it is in the tradition of smart movies that don’t hold your hand.

But the funniest part about the movie is looking at it from a research perspective. I do a considerable amount of research at Media Matters, using numerous public and private data sources. And I thank God I didn’t have to do this kind of work in the 1970s!

There’s a scene where Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) is looking for a phone number, and he’s pulling out the phone book for each state off of the shelf. Oh my. While I was watching, I yelled at the TV: “Just do a Google search! Google it!”

We take for granted the idea that we’ve got so much of the world’s information at the tip of our fingers 24-7. But we shouldn’t.

VIDEO: Daily Show On The Murdoch Phone Hack Scandal

11:02 am EST July 12th, 2011 | Humor, Media | Comments Off

Hilarious.

Topic: News Corp., Rupert Murdoch

Murdoch Papers Hacked Gordon Brown, Got Child’s Medical Records

1:26 pm EST July 11th, 2011 | Media | 22 Comments

Not only is the Murdoch gang criminal, they are immoral as well.

Journalists from across News International repeatedly targeted the former prime minister Gordon Brown, attempting to access his voicemail and obtaining information from his bank account, his legal file as well as his family’s medical records.

There is also evidence that a private investigator used a serving police officer to trawl the police national computer for information about him.

That investigator also targeted another Labour MP who was the subject of hostile inquiries by the News of the World, but it has not confirmed whether News International was specifically involved in trawling police computers for information on Brown.

Separately, Brown’s tax paperwork was taken from his accountant’s office apparently by hacking into the firm’s computer. This was passed to another newspaper.

Topic: Rupert Murdoch

Report: Murdoch Journalists Tried To Access Phone Records Of 9/11 Victims

11:21 pm EST July 10th, 2011 | Media | 65 Comments

Wow.

Britain’s Daily Mirror newspaper reported on Monday that News of the World journalists had offered to pay a New York police officer to retrieve the private phone records of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Citing an unidentified source, the newspaper said journalists had wanted the phone numbers of the dead as well as details of the calls they had made and received in the days leading to the attacks.

The Poor, Powerless, Most Influential Newspaper On Planet Earth

3:42 pm EST July 10th, 2011 | Media | 7 Comments

There is a story today about how the unemployed have been globally ignored by the people who set the agenda. This story appears in print on page “BU1″ of the New York Times.

In a completely unrelated bit of trivia, the New York Times happens to be the most influential news organization in the world. On the left or right, the Times sets the agenda for the rest of the press. Whether its circulation is up or down for the year, the Times sets the tone.

So, a story lamenting a missing story is below the front page of the Times.

Imagine if the plight of the unemployed was on A1 of the Times. Imagine if they had done so for the last few years?

Then this story would probably not have made the cut because the plight of the unemployed would be national news, thanks to… The New York Times.

Topic: New York Times