Les Jones

Projection

Sunday, October 18th, 2009 | Health Care, Media Behaving Badly | Permalink | 2 Comments |

Obama accused hundreds of thousands of Tea Partiers of being astroturf planted by the insurance and health care industries. Turns out it was Obama using astroturf health care outfits.

They concocted two groups — Americans for Stable Quality Care and its predecessor, Healthy Economy Now . . . . That’s as good an example of astroturfing as you’re going to find. There’s nothing illegal about it (unless campaign-finance laws were broken, for which we have seen no evidence), but it’s fundamentally dishonest. The White House orchestrated support, played to the support, and crowed about the support.

If our media wasn’t so ridiculously in the tank for Obama you’d hear about this on CNN instead of on blogs.

Tags: obama

Media losing faith in global warming?

Thursday, October 15th, 2009 | Environment, Media Behaving Badly | Permalink | 1 Comment |

So says Tim Blair, quoting Marc Marano. “We have reached the ‘tipping point.’ 2009 can now be officially declared the year the media lost their faith in man-made global warming fears.”

And from The Daily Mail, Whatever happened to global warming? How freezing temperatures are starting to shatter climate change theory:

Closer to home, Austria is today seeing its earliest snowfall in history with 30 to 40 centimetres already predicted in the mountains. Such dramatic falls in temperatures provide superficial evidence for those who doubt that the world is threatened by climate change.

But most pertinent of all, of course, are the growing volume of statistics. According to the National Climatic Data Centre, Earth’s hottest recorded year was 1998. If you put the same question to NASA, scientists will say it was 1934, followed by 1998. The next three runner-ups are 1921, 2006 and 1931. Which all blows a rather large hole in the argument that the earth is hurtling towards an inescapable heat death prompted by man’s abuse of the environment

Warming advocates always liked comparing the 80s and 90s to the 50s and 60s, but the mid-century was remarkably cooler than the early part of the century. That fact never really fit with the idea of greenhouse gas-induced global warming.

And, yeah, record cold temperatures this year are shattering some people’s faith in global warming. If the temperature continues to drop then global warming advocates will be forced to defend theories and computer models that failed to predict the temperature drop. If that happens during this time of reduced solar activity then the solar theory of global warming and cooling is going to start taking hold in the media.

Tags: global warming

CNN reduced to “fact-checking” SNL skits

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 | Media Behaving Badly | Permalink | No Comments |

It took Saturday Night Live 9 months to really criticize The Chosen One. Now CNN has a humorless “fact check” of that SNL skit. Their lips must have quivered in outrage watching a parody of Dear Leader.

Tags: obama

All those articles by reporters going shooting for the first time

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 | Guns, Media Behaving Badly, Quotes | Permalink | 1 Comment |

“WTF? 39% of americans are gun-owners; 67% report having fired a gun. It’s not that unusual of an experience! By contrast, only 4-10% who are vegetarian, about 5% who are gay. How come there are no WaPo articles about what it’s like to eat organic cous cous for the first time? Or the first time cruising a truck stop?”
– Abdul on Reason

Too funny, though all of those articles about reporters firing a gun for the first time have been incredibly beneficial for gun owners. The experience tends to change the perspective of the reporters forever, and they almost invariably portray shooting in a positive light.

And the truck stop thing is stereotyping, which is wrong, except when it’s about white Southerners when they vote for Republicans.

Sanest thing I’ve read about the newspaper industry in forever

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 | Media Behaving Badly | Permalink | No Comments |

Howard Owens - The Newspaper Original Sin: Keeping online units tethered to the mother ship:

In both Ventura and Bakersfield, I saw it as my job to figure out how to make enough money online to pay for the newsrooms as constructed at the time.

It wasn’t until late 2007 that a switch tripped in my head and I realized I needed to flip the expense/revenue picture upside down. Instead of thinking about how to generate more cash, I needed to figure out how to create a news operation that could exist profitably based on a reasonable expectation for local online revenue.

In a market where the newspaper newsroom might cost $10 million, I knew how to make $1 million online, or even $2 million, but I didn’t know — and still don’t — how to make $10 million.

So if I can make a million online, why do I need operate a $10 million newsroom, especially given the greater efficiencies of online publishing?

Via Jeff Jarvis via Jack Lail on Facebook. What, you thought I read about this in a newspaper?

Another shoe drops in Rathergate

Saturday, August 29th, 2009 | Media Behaving Badly | Permalink | No Comments |

Mary Mapes knew Bush volunteered for Vietnam before she ran the bogus memo:

Continue reading the rest of this post right here ›››

MSNBC claims black man is evidence of white people being racist

Thursday, August 20th, 2009 | Media Behaving Badly | Permalink | 5 Comments |

A black guy who doesn’t like Obama shows up at a political protest with an AR-15 rifle and a pistol on his hip. MSNBC runs a clip carefully designed to show the rifle, but not the guy’s black skin. MSNBC reporter says she’s disturbed by “racial overtones” of these “white people” showing up with guns because they don’t like having a black president.

Anyone else getting tired of being called a racist because of the color of your skin? Or more likely because your politics don’t align with the Obamessiah.

Lots of people are covering this today. Ace of Spades has the best video clips.

“Why Most Journalists are Democrats”

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 | Media Behaving Badly | Permalink | No Comments |

Psychology Today - Why Most Journalists Are Democrats: A View from the Soviet Socialist Trenches:

As far as investigating the dark side of the Major Issues, there’s a critically important concept that students of journalism are rarely taught.  It’s easy to find any number of targets to write about in capitalist societies with an open press.  But totalitarian governments are journalistic black holes. Journalists can tickle their self-righteous neurocircuitry every day (and many do), by exposing easy-to-find faults in democratic societies.  But beyond their event horizon is the bigger story that often remains untold as it occurs—the horrific deaths of millions in totalitarian regimes like the former Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea and, yes, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.  That’s why, when Robert Conquest was asked whether he wanted to retitle his updated The Great Terror, about the Soviet purges, his answer was: Yes, how about I Told You So, You F—king Fools?

This reminds me of the naive articles and documentaries about Castro’s Cuba, where a free press isn’t allowed and dissidents are imprisoned or worse. Reporters regurgitate the Cuban government statistics on infant mortality and such as if there’s no reason to ever doubt el presidente’s numbers. Those are the same people who believed the Soviet reports on tractor factory output and wheat production and were shocked when the USSR collapsed.

Motor Trend “Car of the Year” selection process…

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 | Media Behaving Badly | Permalink | No Comments |

explained with a flowchart.

For those who don’t know, Motor Trend’s Car of the Year award is a cynical exercise in trading an award for advertising dollars.

Hat tip to Mickey Kaus.

One journalist who misses Bush

Monday, July 13th, 2009 | Media Behaving Badly | Permalink | No Comments |

The New York Times - Web Traffic (or Lack of) May Be a Reason for a Columnist’s Dismissal:

The Washington Post indicated that a slump in visitors to Mr. Froomkin’s well-known Web column, White House Watch, contributed to its decision not to renew his contract in June. The popularity of Mr. Froomkin’s column was tied in part to its consistent critiques of the Bush administration, and he acknowledges that his page views declined after President Obama took office.

Froomkin failed to adjust from the old paradigm (Bush Derangement Syndrome) to the new paradigm (Palin Derangement System).

Edgar Martins, photographer and bullshit artist

Friday, July 10th, 2009 | Media Behaving Badly, Photos | Permalink | 3 Comments |

Compare these two statements. First, le artiste:

Though my images are minimal in tone, they do not pare down my experience of place. In my work there is scope for so much more. What seem like highly controlled and manipulated photographs are but a product of illusion. The illusion of the photographic process. This is especially evident in “The Accidental Theorist” series. Most people assume that these image are manipulated. Or perhaps even staged. In reality, there is no post-production work, no darkroom or computer manipulation.
– Edgar Martins

And then the guy who doesn’t believe him:

I call bullshit on this not being photoshopped. Check it out. I’ll eat my hat if this is not fakery.
– unixrat

unixrat was right, his animated GIF proved it, and the New York Times has pulled Martins’ photos.You can still find them on the photographer’s Web site.

Now people are reviewing his other work. Despite his claims, Martins repeatedly mirrored and Photoshopped his images, both in the New York Times piece that led to his downfall and throughout his career.

Read the whole interview quoted above to see just how drunk on his artistic pretensions Martins is.

My work has an apparent formalism and aesthetic rigor that some define as being precise. However, the process by which the images are created is everything but precise. I photograph in often “unphotographable” conditions, whether in burning forest fires or the icy winters of Iceland. I also make use of long exposures. When you work in this way even the most natural of occurrences become difficult to quantify: light, time, focus, etc. For so long photography has been about control; I like to relinquish some of that control. This apparent contradiction, this dualism really interests me. I have always found photography to be a highly inadequate medium for communicating ideas—a subject and object of lack, if you like. However, it is this dissatisfaction with the medium that spurs me on to find a new visual language to work with, and, I suppose, a new vocabulary from which to derive my glossary of life.

Thing is, he has some good images. I wouldn’t care if they were Photoshopped if he hadn’t sworn up and down they weren’t, and if he weren’t so incredibly pretentious. You get the impression half of the guy’s cred was based on his patter rather than his portfolio.

Previously - YouTube, Meet Bullshit Artist. Bullshit Artist, Meet YouTube.

Tags: bullshit artists

WaPo influence-peddling

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 | Media Behaving Badly | Permalink | No Comments |

The story of the Washington Post selling access to government officials sort of flew by me last week, but it’s astonishing. The WaPo acts as if it never dawned on them that to get access to those officials they’d have to trade favors. If you’re a newspaper the most obvious thing you have that other people want is the ability to kill stories that make them look bad and to spin the news in their favor. Once you’re trading that virtue, you’re left with no virtues worth mentioning.

Best summary yet of the Honduras situation

Friday, July 3rd, 2009 | Media Behaving Badly, News | Permalink | No Comments |

Macon.com - Who cares about Honduras?:

The Hondurans are so concerned about potential despots, that Article 239 of their constitution states that any president who proposes extending his term in office is automatically removed from office. Article 313 of the Honduran constitution allows its Supreme Court to deputize the Honduran military to carry out its orders, including removing politicians from office who seek to extend a president’s term.

Ignoring the constitution, President Manuel Zelaya, a man less popular in Honduras than George Bush was when he left office in this country, ordered a “non-binding” referendum be put to the voters on extending his stay in office.

Glenn Garvin wrote in the Miami Herald, “After the Honduran supreme court ruled that only the country’s congress could call such an election, Zelaya ordered the army to help him stage it anyway. … When the head of the armed forces, acting on orders from the supreme court, refused, Zelaya fired him, then led a mob to break into a military base where the ballots were stored.”

The Honduran Supreme Court, congress, attorney general and members of Zelaya’s cabinet opposed his move as unconstitutional. The supreme court ordered the military to remove Zelaya from office. Honduras has no impeachment process as we know it.

Yet Obama, who felt he couldn’t meddle in the affairs of another country when the Iranian mullahs stole an election, is calling for Zelaya’s return, has broken off military relations with Honduras, and is part of an effort to have Honduras ejected from the Organization of American States.

Better still, compare the description of events in Honduras above with NPR’s coverage:

She explains that in this case a civilian government took power, as opposed to a military government, and plans elections. Nunez adds Zelaya was an unpopular leader anyway. She charges he had violated the constitution by planning a referendum that would have been a first step toward extending his rule. She says he had to be stopped.

American diplomats told NPR that the United States strongly disagrees with that interpretation. So much so, that the ousted president’s wife and son are staying in the ambassador’s residence in Tegucigalpa.

The U.S. says the non-binding referendum would have posed little threat to the constitutional order. And those diplomats say there’s little evidence that Zelaya had violated the constitution.

The Honduran supreme court found that Zelaya’s move violated the constitution. You would scarcely know that from the NPR piece, since it’s stated as a mere claim by one person, rather than as a factual matter of public record. Yet there’s “little evidence” he violated his country’s constitution, according to the U.S. diplomats NPR quoted in the story. NPR is supporting Obama’s narrative by ignoring the facts.

Hat tip to Instapundit for the Macon.com link.

Tags: obama

Ads that look like news

Friday, June 26th, 2009 | Media Behaving Badly | Permalink | No Comments |

The other week I mentioned seeing really bogus ads that looked like newspaper stories touting make money from home Google schemes. Wired has more: This Just In: Fake News Sites Are Great!.

There’s something icky about the fake news ads showing up on genuine news sites like Salon, Slate and Huffington Post. Are things really so bad that we’ll let scammers use the tropes of journalism to lure consumers into shady deals?

If I don’t like it, I can always quit the business and earn $1,700 a week posting links on Google. I know this because I recently saw this headline on Huffington Post: “How I Make $1700 a Week Posting Links on Google.”

The article is good, but the comments on fake news are even better:

“It turns out there’s a whole fake-media empire” Yeah ABC proved it last night. (run by the white-house)

When did HuffPo, Salon, or Slate become real news sites?

Wait a minute, Wired dot com is complaining about fake news sites? So all eight hundred of those recent “news stories” Wired dot com writes about how the new iPhone is transforming the entire universe and are the most important technological advance of the last two centuries are considered real journalism?? I’ve got to give it to Wired dot com for having enormous nerve to actually complain about web sites that have advertisements that look like news stories, considering that’s just about all you’ll find here.

If you like that last one you might enjoy Joel Johnson’s Awesome Gizmodo Rant.

And you guys just ate it up. Kept buying shitty phones and broken media devices green and dripping with DRM. You broke the site, clogging up the pipe like retarded salmon, to read the latest announcements of the most trivial jerk-off products, completely ignoring the stories about technology actually making a difference to real human beings, because you wanted a new chromed robot turd to put in your pocket to impress your friends and make you forget for just a few minutes, blood coursing as you tremblingly cut through the blister pack, that your life is utterly void of any lasting purpose.

Since when is a law giving people rights a bad thing?

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 | Guns, Media Behaving Badly | Permalink | No Comments |

Unc catches the Ass. Press in a slip.

LA Times: With Obama, pretty is as pretty does

Monday, May 18th, 2009 | Media Behaving Badly | Permalink | No Comments |

LA Times: Obama’s flip-flops and broken promises are signs of his flexibility and pragmatism.

Meanwhile, the fact that Bush stuck to any of his policies - say, staying the course in Iraq when it was unpopular, which ultimately led to victory - is a sign of his stupidity, because stupid is as stupid does, even if Obama is adopting many of Bush’s policies.

Tags: obama, obamanfreude

What media bias against guns?

Friday, May 15th, 2009 | Guns, Media Behaving Badly | Permalink | No Comments |

This media bias against guns.

The bias of perspective

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 | Media Behaving Badly | Permalink | No Comments |

Ace knocks one out of the park.

The bias I mean is the bias of perspective. The novelistic technique of making one “character” (in this context) the active character, making decisions that advance the “plot,” with whom the audience is “with” and through whose eyes the audience sees the world. And making the rest of the world, whether fictional or real, either objects of the hero’s action, or opponents for him to contest against. The press has a strong tendency to frame political stories from the vantage point of the heroes of their stories, who are, almost inevitably, Democrats.

Continue reading

Political stories are almost exclusively written “with” the Democrats, from the point of view of the Democrats. They are the Nouns who perform Active Verbs in the MSM’s sentences; they are the heroes whose travails we are invited to sympathize with.

For example, a polling story about Democrats on top will always be headlined like this:

Democrats Reverse Conventional Thinking on Defense; Win Public Approval Over Republicans on National Security

They’re the active-verb heroes in that sentence. The Republicans are the objects and the opponents.

And thus the NYT’s headline about the troops in Iraq. The headline could have made the troops the active-verb heroes…

Troops Greet Obama with Military Cheer

… but the NYT does not identify with the troops. The troops are not heroes in the NYT’s narrative, making their own decisions based on their own psychologies and agendas and drives and wants. No, in the NYT’s narrative, the troops are objects of the hero Obama’s actions, chips for him to win in a high-stakes game of geopolitical poker. And in their headline, he wins them.

Ass. Press trying to finish itself off

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 | Media Behaving Badly | Permalink | No Comments |

So the Associated Press is threatening legal action against an AP affiliate using its content, even when the AP itself uploaded said content to YouTube and enabled the sharing and embedding permissions.

From Michael Silence, who has been covering the shenanigans:

Nashville’s Christian Grantham interviews Frank Strovel, a LaFollette journalist and blogger, on AP’s cease and desist order served on WTNQ-FM of LaFollette.

Here’s part of what Grantham has to say about the situation: What is happening to the Associated Press? Does AP seriously have executives and attorneys who are this clueless about their own operations, the law and the internet in general? What kind of copyright attorney doesn’t even know what is and is not legal to do with embedable YouTube video?

This is exactly the kind of thing Clay Shirky was talking about:

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

LATER: The AP backed down. Score one for the good guys.

Tags: youtube

Go read Clay Shirky’s latest on newspapers

Sunday, March 15th, 2009 | Media Behaving Badly | Permalink | No Comments |

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable:

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

The music industry is having similar problems moving away from the “album of 10 songs you buy on a disk at a record store” model. One of the early, failed responses to MP3s was to have a machine in the record store that burned the customer’s choice of songs to a CD. The record companies couldn’t accept the idea that music could exist without CDs and record stores.

Now the record stores are gone. No more Sam Goody’s, Tower Records, or Virgin Superstores. Wal-Mart is the biggest brick and mortar CD seller and they could drop CDs at any time if they decide they need the floor space for something more profitable. The record labels’ role as gatekeeper and cash cow is disappearing and I don’t think they know what to do next. They’re just now starting to pull out of the “let’s sue our best customers” phase.

You’ll pay taxes to the King of England and you’ll like it

Friday, March 13th, 2009 | Media Behaving Badly | Permalink | No Comments |

Michael Silence notes that a newspaper has dropped a conservative columnist for daring to ask what he was getting for his tax money.

Tags: taxes

Jonah Goldberg on Newsweek’s “We’re All Socialists Now” cover

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 | Media Behaving Badly, Quotes | Permalink | 1 Comment |

Goldberg:

In and of itself, I have no problem with news organizations becoming more opinionated. Publications are not honor-bound to go out of business clinging to outdated business models. Still, the transformation does illuminate some things.

First, it demonstrates that mainstream reportorial and editorial staffs were always exactly as liberal as conservatives said they were. If mainstream journalists were as objective as they always claimed, you’d think that at least some of them would reveal themselves to be conservative once it became acceptable for them to express their biases openly. And, yet, time and again whenever “objective” reporters are permitted to let their hair down and express their opinions it turns out — surprise! — that they were liberals all along. For example, with possibly one exception (John Tierney’s short-lived column), every time The New York Times gives an opinion column to one of its reporters, they reveal themselves to be perfectly conventional liberals or leftwingers (off the top of my head: Maureen Dowd, Anthony Lewis, Bill Keller, Thomas Friedman).

Read the cover story, “We’re All Socialists Now” by Evan Thomas and Jon Meacham in the latest Newsweek, and you’ll see what I mean. Amidst the analysis, there’s a certain — totally predictable — tone of celebration.

They’re talking about a blackout of free news. Again.

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 | E-commerce, Media Behaving Badly, Tech | Permalink | No Comments |

Jack Lail - Crazy talk about newspapers:

TJ Sullivan proposes “It’s time for every daily newspaper in the United States, in cooperation with the Associated Press, to shut down their free Web sites for one week.”

Ah, you first TJ.

My guess is that the result would be one or more of: 1.) People wouldn’t notice and 2.) People who did notice would start thinking about the eventual death of newspapers and how they’d get online news without them. Either way, nothing good will come of this.

Lail also has a roundup of links reacting to Walter Isaacson’s stumping of micropayments and a link to Jeff Jarvis’s thoughts on bad models for financing newspapers:

Make Google pay. This one assumes that newspapers have a God-given right to the income they used to get from advertising and that Google (and craigslist and eBay and papers’ own customers with their own, free web sites, for that matter) stole it from the papers and thus are starving journalism. Show me where that commandment is written. Others competed with lazy, monopolistic newspapers, giving the marketplace a better service. Google and the rest owe them nothing. Indeed, newspapers should be paying Google for its distribution and promotion, as Google is the new newsstand and content gains value with links.

Someone in Jarvis’s comments mentions iTunes as an example of successful micropayments. First, iTunes isn’t really micropayments. The 99 cent songs are much more expensive than the vanishingly small amounts most people consider micro.

More to the point, Apple can charge 99 cents because there’s no free alternative for most of their content. There’s nowhere you can download the latest top 10 hits to your iPod for free and do so legally. In contrast there are lots of places to get news for free. If not the AP, then Reuters. If not Reuters, then AFP. If not AFP, then CNN or the BBC or the IHT or the NYT, etc.

There’s just no shortage of alternative news sources and in most cases one makes a pretty good substitute for another, which isn’t true of iTunes. Teenage fans will pay 99 cents for their favorite boy band even if they can listen to Engelbert Humperdink for free. Meanwhile, most people will gladly flee their current news outlets the second someone mentions money. Very few news outlets have enough clout and brand power to charge for online news. Most news outlets, in other words, are Engelbert Humperdink.

Previously

• A newspaper is publishing a list of handgun carry permit holders. Again.
• They’re talking about micropayments. Again.

Tags: micropayments

CNN runs fake Hamas video

Thursday, January 8th, 2009 | Media Behaving Badly | Permalink | No Comments |

Details at Confederate Yankee. MSM coverage of the Middle East wouldn’t be this bad if they weren’t wildly biased against Israel.

Previously:

• Daoud Kuttab’s crazy bias against Israel

Daoud Kuttab’s crazy bias against Israel

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 | Media Behaving Badly, Middle East | Permalink | 4 Comments |

Little Green Footballs - Washington Post: ‘Amateur’ Rockets ‘Nagging’ Israel:

The Washington Post gives column space today to Palestinian shill Daoud Kuttab, who turns in one of those very predictable whiny pieces claiming that fighting against terrorists “only makes them stronger:” Daoud Kuttab - Has Israel’s Gaza Attack Revived Hamas?

Includes this absolute howler of an opening sentence:

JERUSALEM — In its efforts to stop amateur rockets from nagging the residents of some of its southern cities, Israel appears to have given new life to the fledging Islamic movement in Palestine.

Other great Washington Post headlines from history:

• DALLAS - Amateur assassin nags JFK’s head with old milsurp bullets
• NEW YORK - Amateur pilots nag Twin Towers, much like Maverick playfully buzzed the control tower in “Top Gun”

I’ll have to check my copy of the AP Style Book, but I don’t think nag is an acceptable synonym for “murder.” This year Hamas rocket attacks on Israel killed a number of Israeli civilians, wounded others, and kept the population in terror.

Also, I don’t think Iran would appreciate the WaPo describing their Qassam and Katyusha rockets as “amateur.” Many of the press reports describe them as “Hamas rockets,” but Hamas couldn’t make a light bulb, much less a rocket. The rockets are provided by outside countries like Iran and Syria who are using Hamas in a proxy war with Israel.