16 January 2009 @ 8:28AM >> Today’s Quote of the Day:

[L]et me take this opportunity to say that of all the innumerable print and broadcast journalists who have interviewed me in the U.S. and abroad since I arrived on the scene nearly 20 years ago, Katie Couric was definitively the stupidest. As a guest on NBC’s “Today” show during my 1992 book tour, I was astounded by Couric’s small, humorless, agenda-ridden mind, still registered in that pinched, tinny monotone that makes me rush across the room to change stations whenever her banal mini-editorials blare out at 5 p.m. on the CBS radio network. And of course I would never spoil my dinner by tuning into Couric’s TV evening news show. That sallow, wizened, drum-tight, cosmetic mummification look is not an appetite enhancer outside of Manhattan or L.A. There’s many a moose in Alaska with greater charm and pizazz.—Camille Paglia

27 September 2007 @ 7:13AM >> When CBS dumped Dan Rather and replaced him with Katie Couric, the network changed the gender, the generation, and as Kenneth will tell you, even the frequency of its top newsreader.

The one thing that remains constant at CBS is the ideology of the anchor:

Speaking at the National Press Club Tuesday evening, CBS “Evening News” anchor Katie Couric pulled back the curtain on her personal views of both the war in Iraq and former “Evening News” anchor Dan Rather.

[...]

The former “Today” show anchor traced her discomfort with the administration’s march to war back to the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“The whole culture of wearing flags on our lapel and saying ‘we’ when referring to the United States and, even the ’shock and awe’ of the initial stages, it was just too jubilant and just a little uncomfortable. And I remember feeling, when I was anchoring the ‘Today’ show, this inevitable march towards war and kind of feeling like, ‘Will anybody put the brakes on this?’ And is this really being properly challenged by the right people? And I think, at the time, anyone who questioned the administration was considered unpatriotic and it was a very difficult position to be in.”

I don’t think disagreeing with the administration makes one unpatriotic, although I do have to wonder about someone who becomes uncomfortable when she sees people displaying American flags or referring to fellow Americans as “we.”

8 May 2007 @ 8:35AM >> Media bias isn’t usually as obvious or explosive as, say, Dan Rather’s laughably bogus memos intended to torpedo a presidential campaign. Most often, slanted reporting is far more subtle. It takes the form of adjectives and adverbs that inject the reporter’s opinion, or in the form of sloppy errors that reflect erroneous beliefs held within certain ideological communities.

Let’s deal with the latter first. Reuters is an outlet that for some reason seems constitutionally incapable of accurately reporting the history of the Kyoto global warming treating. Here’s the latest example:

President George W. Bush pulled the United States out of Kyoto in 2001, arguing it would cost U.S. jobs and that it wrongly excluded 2012 goals for poorer nations such as China.

The only problem with that statement is that the Kyoto treaty was never ratified by the U.S., never signed by an American president, and never even submitted to the Senate for ratification. How can President Bush pull out of a treaty that the United States never approved? In fact, in 1997, the U.S. Senate unanimously voted against ratifying any treaty structured the way the Kyoto Protocol was, which may explain why then-President Clinton never signed the treaty or even bothered to submit it for ratification.

But in Reuters-land, the fact Kyoto was effectively rejected before President Bush took office doesn’t matter. In fact, Reuters’ record on this is so bad that the transgression is repeatedly caught by eagle-eyed readers who write in with corrections. The tepid explanation from editors was, “It appears our record on explaining this isn’t great.”

Yeah. It appears that way.

But maybe Reuters is just trying to keep up with rival AP, which has its own past problem getting this right.

Often, though, media bias takes forms not nearly as obvious as this blatant distortion of fact. Take, for example, this piece in the Washington Post:

In the heady opening weeks of the 110th Congress, the Democrats’ domestic agenda appeared to be flying through the Capitol: Homeland security upgrades, a higher minimum wage and student loan interest rate cuts all passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.

The word “upgrades” used above implies improvement, leading me to believe that the writers agree with the fact that the legislation passed by the newly-elected Democratic congress is in fact an improvement. I suspect that the people who voted against it did not necessarily see it as an upgrade. But if you’re a reader of that piece, you’re left with the impression that it is an uncontestable fact that the Democrats improved Homeland Security. The word “changes” would have worked just as well there, and it wouldn’t have attached the reporter’s opinion to the piece, either.

On rare occasions, media bias is outright: the newsman proclaims himself to support this or that cause. Sure, you sometimes see signs of a previous political prediliction. The titan of the Sunday morning talk shows, Tim Russert, worked for Mario Cuomo, the twelve-year governor of New York. Hardball talker Chris Matthews worked for Tip O’Neill, the former Speaker of the House, a man who spent nearly 40 years in Congress. And then there’s George Stephanopolous—now sitting in the chair once occupied by David Brinkley—who helped get Bill Clinton elected in 1992 and helped him weather many a scandal as well. The one common element among these giants of the establishment political media is that they all worked for Democrats.

Nothing wrong with that. In theory, adhering to the rules of strict objectivity should prevent any of those affiliations from making a difference. Assuming, of course, that the conscious mind alone is capable of shutting down the subsconscious mind in order to prevent a person’s own preferences from coloring the way they describe their view of the world to others.

Personally, I have a hard time believing that true objectivity is possible on a frequent enough basis that we shouldn’t consider junking the obsolete notion altogether. Instead of reporters pretending to be unbiased and only having that lie revealed in some subsequent scandal, why don’t they level with us and tell us where they stand? If anything, that would only make us more informed consumers of the product they’re selling.

If the ingredients of food we ingest should be listed so that we can be wise consumers, why shouldn’t the ideological components of the often opinion-tinged news also be listed? What’s wrong with us knowing the thought patterns of the people who string the words together and decide what images we see?

That’s why I applaud Brian Montopoli of CBS News for revealing his own beliefs. Montopoli was roundly criticized for sharing his personal view that the media should jump-start a national discussion on gun control. He laments the fact that “politicians who would prefer tighter laws, usually those on the left, don’t want to talk about the issue,” and hopes that Cho Sueng-Hui’s mass murder spree at Virginia Tech will give the media the proper “hook” to “focus on a huge issue”—gun control—”that isn’t going away any time soon.”

What Montopoli fails to realize is there is always a political debate raging about topics that still stir sharp divisions around the country. But when a national political consensus has been reached, it’s because people in both parties have recognized that the electorate clearly favors one position over another. Most Democrats who seek statewide or national office have given up on stricter gun penalties because they want to win elections.

So while I suspect that Montopoli’s true desire is to re-open a debate in the hopes of changing the outcome, I respect Montopoli for at least being up front about his beliefs. In the future, if I encounter Montopoli’s reporting on gun control, I’ll know a bit more about his motivation. And as news consumers, our ability to evaluate the product put out by the news media would be far superior if all reporters were as open about their views as Montopoli is.

Maybe the journalists of tomorrow recognize that exposing one’s own biases is the future of honest reporting:

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Robert S. Mueller was interrupted by protestors last night, during a speech at the Institute of Politics’ John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum.

Mueller, who was set to speak before a full crowd managed by tight security detail, had just begun his prepared remarks when the first protestor interrupted with screams from the second floor.

[...]

“We will never forget the role of the FBI in McCarthyism!” screamed Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky ‘07, who is also a Crimson editorial editor.

It should be noted that the Harvard Crimson is not an opinion paper. It’s the university’s daily student newspaper, and is a stepping-stone for the type of person who wants to move on to journalism school and eventually join the media elite.

So some day, Mr. Gould-Wartofsky may end up working at Reuters, or at CBS News.

And in all likelihood, he’d do very well there.

9 January 2007 @ 7:49AM >> The Blue Fund is an investment portfolio that—among other criteria—only holds stock in companies whose political contributions favor Democrats. Not surprisingly, the fund invests in the New York Times and CBS.

4 December 2006 >> A study of how the media has been distoring war reporting since the September 11th attacks:

Convincingly and without resorting to partisan politics, [study author Jim A.] Kuypers strongly illustrates in eight chapters “how the press failed America in its coverage on the War on Terror.” In each comparison, Kuypers “detected massive bias on the part of the press.” In fact, Kuypers calls the mainstream news media an “anti-democratic institution” in the conclusion.

“What has essentially happened since 9/11 has been that Bush has repeated the same themes, and framed those themes the same whenever discussing the War on Terror,” said Kuypers, who specializes in political communication and rhetoric. “Immediately following 9/11, the mainstream news media (represented by CBS, ABC, NBC, USA Today, New York Times, and Washington Post) did echo Bush, but within eight weeks it began to intentionally ignore certain information the president was sharing, and instead reframed the president’s themes or intentionally introduced new material to shift the focus.”

29 August 2006 >> As Katie Couric ascends to the anchor chair at CBS Evening News, her first big challenge will be to overcome her morning show persona as a fluff-peddling soft-news pusher. Theoretically, CBS would be interested in helping her with this. After all, the CBS News throne was once warmed by the buttocks of such gravitas-oozing alleged legends as Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather.

But apparently, staffers at CBS’s promotional magazine Watch! did not get the memo. Treating Couric like any other cover-gracing floozy-du-jour, her picture was photoshopped to de-frumpify her by several inches.

I’m guessing that Katie’s first story as CBS anchor will not be a discussion of women’s body image issues. (That was more of a Today show thing, anyway.)

But at least if you own stock in CBS parent Viacom, you should be happy with the company’s frugality. Flashier networks would have paid for the plastic surgery.

8 December 2005 @ 6:51PM >> 60 minuteman Mike Wallace was apparently turned down by President Bush for an interview. He recently revealed what he would have asked the president if given the chance:

What in the world prepared you to be the commander in chief of the largest superpower in the world? In your background, Mr. President, you apparently were incurious. You didn’t want to travel. You knew very little about the military. . . . The governor of Texas doesn’t have the kind of power that some governors have. . . . Why do you think they nominated you? . . . Do you think that has anything to do with the fact that the country is so [expletive] up?

11 November 2005 >> Former news producer Mary Mapes is still defiant.

Shortly before last fall’s election, Mapes was forced to resign in disgrace from CBS News after she and Dan Rather were caught peddling bogus memos intended to hurt President Bush’s chances for re-election. But Mapes still can’t figure out why people questioned her reporting:

In her first television interview since the National Guard story, Mapes sat with ABC’s Brian Ross to talk about the events surrounding the story and her book. She defended the story and asserted, “I think I’m somebody who got fired for trying to do their job in a difficult atmosphere,” adding, “I don’t think I committed bad journalism. I really don’t.”

Ross asked Mapes if she still believed the story on President Bush’s National Guard service was true and she answered, “absolutely.” She said of the Killian memos, which were used to validate the story before their authenticity came under intense scrutiny, that they have not proven to be inauthentic, adding, “I’m perfectly willing to believe those documents are forgeries if there’s proof I haven’t seen.” Ross asked Mapes if the standard ought not to have been for her to prove their authenticity, to which she responded, “I don’t think that’s the standard.”

Mapes assumes everything she sees is true, assuming it fits with her preconceived political notions. Apparently, she’s not alone in the media these days.

Many media outlets have breathlessly reported the charges of Jimmy Massey, a former Marine who became a prominent peace activist after witnessing what he says were war atrocities in Iraq. Problem is, none of the reporters who repeated his accusations ever bothered to check them out. And now that Massey’s been exposed as a fraud, it leaves a bunch of credulous reporters with egg on their faces:

For more than a year, former Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey has been telling anybody who will listen about the atrocities that he and other Marines committed in Iraq.

In scores of newspaper, magazine and broadcast stories, at a Canadian immigration hearing and in numerous speeches across the country, Massey has told how he and other Marines recklessly, sometimes intentionally, killed dozens of innocent Iraqi civilians.

[...]

Each of his claims is either demonstrably false or exaggerated - according to his fellow Marines, Massey’s own admissions, and the five journalists who were embedded with Massey’s unit, including a reporter and photographer from the Post-Dispatch and reporters from The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports:

Editors at some papers look back at the Massey articles and are surprised that they ran them without examining whether the claims were true or without ever asking the Marine Corps about them.

“I’m looking at the story and going, ‘Why, why would we have run this without getting another side of the story?’” said Lois Wilson, managing editor of the Star Gazette in Elmira, N.Y.

David Holwerk, editorial page editor for The Sacramento Bee, said he thought the newspaper handled its story, a question and answer interview with Massey, poorly.

“I feel fairly confident that we did not subject this to the rigorous scrutiny that we should have or to which we would subject it today,” he said.

Rex Smith, editor of the Albany (N.Y.) Times Union, said he thought the newspaper’s story about Massey could have “benefited from some additional reporting.” But he didn’t necessarily see anything particularly at odds with standard journalism practices.

[...]

“You could take any day’s newspaper and probably pick out a half dozen or more stories that ought to be subjected to a more rigorous truth test,” he said.

“Yes, it would have been much better if we had the other side. But all I’m saying is that this is unfortunately something that happens every day in our newspapers and with practically every story on television.”

1 August 2005 @ 5:26PM >> Esquire Magazine gives Dan Rather a platform to demonstrate what a corny relic sounds like.

21 July 2005 @ 8:31AM >> When President Bush nominated one John Roberts for the Supreme Court, a certain CBS News reporter with the same name apparently suffered an ego blow. Now that CBS’s John Roberts is no longer the John Roberts in D.C., the reporter took the occasion to pen a smirky commentary piece that reveals his overinflated sense of self importance:

After my four and a half years covering the Bush White House, I couldn’t imagine the name “John Roberts” and the phrase “widely admired for his intellect, his sound judgment and his personal decency” being used in the same time zone, let alone the same sentence. More likely would have been “John Roberts” and “should join Judith Miller in jail”; or “frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs”; or, “Oh yeah, we’ve got a dossier on him”.

Yeah, that’s it, John, you’re such a dangerous, fearless reporter that the Gestapo-like Bush White House would like nothing more than to put you in jail.

This feeble attempt at humor—at least I’m assuming he was aiming for humor here—reveals more about his perceptions of the White House and the media than anything else:

It’s no secret that the White House doesn’t hold a lot of respect for the media at large [...]

Gee, I wonder why that is!

Does Roberts expect that the White House should hold respect for the media? When was the last time you saw the media show respect towards this White House? Reporter Roberts might not understand an important dynamic of respect: people rarely respect those who find them contemptible.

As a correspondent, it was one of the most frustrating days of my life. A lot of my fellow White House denizens share the same sentiments. My BlackBerry was buzzing all day with messages from colleagues – “I HATE this” and “Just SHOOT me now” were two of the more popular expressions of exasperation.

Just a hunch, but the dread expressed by these news insiders might have something to do with the president making the Supreme Court choice, not with the process itself. I doubt these same insiders “hated” the day President Clinton announced Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a nominee. At the very least, they probably weren’t requesting to be shot.

29 June 2005 @ 12:21PM >> A columnist for Newsday (Long Island, New York) thinks that CNN should hire Dan Rather. Among the author’s arguments is that Dan Rather would bring “credibility” to CNN.

8 March 2005 >> How many times can Walter Cronkite gleefully fork the corpse of Dan Rather in a single interview? Find out.

Meanwhile:

It is barely six weeks since the U.S. President delivered his second inaugural address, a paean to liberty and democracy that espoused the goal of “ending tyranny in our world”. Reactions around the world ranged from alarm to amused scorn, from fears of a new round of “regime changes” imposed by an all-powerful American military, to suspicions in the salons of Europe that this time Mr Bush, never celebrated for his grasp of world affairs, had finally lost it. No one imagined that events would so soon cause the President’s opponents around the world to question whether he had got it right.

That debate is now happening, in America and beyond, as the first waves of reform lap at the Arab world. Post-Saddam Iraq has held its first proper election. In their own elections, Palestinians have overwhelmingly chosen a moderate leader. Hosni Mubarak, who for 24 years has permitted no challenge to his rule in Egypt, has announced a multi-candidate presidential election this year. Even Saudi Arabia is not immune, having just held its first municipal elections. Next time around, Saudi spokesmen promise, women too will be permitted to vote.

Not gonna gloat. Wouldn’t be prudent. Not at this juncture.

7 March 2005 >> Bogus memos may have been Dan Rather’s downfall, but it certainly wasn’t his first foray into outright political fraud. Apparently, in 1963, Dan Rather lied when he reported that a group of school children cheered the assassination of President Kennedy:

The tale was perfect for the moment, reinforcing the notion among distant media elites that Dallas was a reactionary “City of Hate.” It slyly played to a local audience, too: The school named was in upper-income University Park, one of two adjacent municipal enclaves that shared a school district and a reputation for fiercely protected, lily-white privilege.

So, if Rather’s four-decades-plus career is capped on each end by politically-motivated lies, it’s natural to wonder how many times in between he’s gotten away with it.

2 March 2005 @ 1:24PM >> As Dan Rather’s career comes to a close, it’s a good time to look back at some of his greatest hits.

16 February 2005 >> The truth about those mysterious memos may still come out. Court discovery procedures are like mental equivalents of rectal exams. And in the process, incriminating e-mails always manage to get leaked. (Just ask Microsoft.) So I would not relish being a boss at CBS News right about now:

[F]ar from resolving the problem of the network’s credibility, the independent report commissioned by CBS appears instead to be leading to a confrontation, with defenders of both the ousted CBS staffers involved in the debacle and top CBS management asserting two different truths from the same document.

Mr. Howard and two other ousted CBS staffers—his top deputy, Mary Murphy, and CBS News senior vice president Betsy West—haven’t resigned. And sources close to Mr. Howard said that before any resignation comes, the 23-year CBS News veteran is demanding that the network [...] correct its official story line and ultimately clear his name.

[A]ll three remain CBS employees and collect weekly salaries from the company that asked them to tender their resignations.

[...]

Legally, CBS and the ousted staffers are in an unusual stalemate: The network cannot be sued for breach of contract unless it actually fires them. Theoretically, the network could refuse to offer an apology or correct statements and simply drag its feet, continuing to write paychecks to the trio until their contracts expire.

[...]

On its own, CBS management has little motivation to publicly revisit the details of the Thornburgh report—let alone admit any errors in its own interpretation, which assigned little or no blame to Mr. Moonves, CBS News president Andrew Heyward and CBS executive vice president of communications Gil Schwartz.

There are also questions remaining about the way the report itself was assembled. No one at CBS has taken credit for determining the format of the investigation, which excluded recording devices or transcripts of interviews with the 66 people who were involved in the segment. No written record exists of Mr. Howard, Ms. Murphy, Ms. West or Ms. Mapes telling their side of the story to the investigative panel. None were allowed to take notes or voluntarily speak under oath.

In a recent article in The New York Law Journal, James C. Goodale, the former vice chairman of The New York Times, called the CBS investigation “a flawed report. It should not be swallowed hook, line and sinker.”

He added: “Surprisingly, the report is unable to conclude whether the documents are forgeries or not. If the documents are not forgeries, why is the panel writing the report?”

Good point.

10 January 2005 @ 5:55PM >> Four months and two days after the original fraudulent report aired, CBS News has finally released its report on the forged memo scandal (emphasis mine):

[The] independent panel that concluded that CBS News failed to follow basic journalistic principles in the preparation and reporting of the piece. The panel also said CBS News had compounded that failure with a “rigid and blind” defense of the 60 Minutes Wednesday report.

(The full report has been released as a 234-page PDF file.)

According to the report:

While the panel found that some actions taken by CBS News encouraged such suspicions, “the Panel cannot conclude that a political agenda at 60 Minutes Wednesday drove either the timing of the airing of the segment or its content.”

That does not dispel the possibility that a political agenda existed, just that one can’t be proven. The report continues:

The producer of the piece, Mary Mapes, was also faulted for calling Joe Lockhart, a senior official in the John Kerry campaign, prior to the airing of the piece, and offering to put [Bill] Burkett [the source of the memos] in touch with him. The panel called Mapes’ action a “clear conflict of interest that created the appearance of political bias.”

In other words, it looks like political bias, but because the investigators couldn’t read Mapes’s mind, there’s no way to prove it for sure. But what other than bias could explain such blatant disregard for journalistic standards by a life-long professional who colleages say “made no secret of her liberal political beliefs”? If she wasn’t trying to help the Kerry campaign, then why did she tip them off about the story?

Considering all the evidence, it’s hard to conclude that anything other than pure political bias was at play:

• When CBS News ignored basic journalistic standards, they did so in a story that was clearly intended to be damaging to a sitting Republican president in the midst of a re-election campaign.
• The producer of the story tipped off the campaign of the challenging Democrat and offered to put them in touch with the chief accuser before the story aired. The day before CBS News ran the story, the Kerry campaign started playing up attacks on President Bush’s National Guard service. And the morning after the story aired, the Democratic Party started running its “Fortunate Son” ads that attacked President Bush using footage from the CBS story.
• For days after the story was called into question, CBS News refused to look at the evidence. Dan Rather, who once spoke at a Democratic fundraiser, dismissed the doubters of the fraudulent story as being “partisan political operatives” instead of investigating the flaws in the story he reported.

When we see such sloppy reporting at CBS News sting liberals or Democrats occasionally, then I might more willing to believe there’s no partisan bias. But such bias at CBS News has already been well-documented in the past, and the direction of the slant seems consistent.

Maybe CBS News isn’t biased. Maybe these lapses merely represent a remarkable string of coincidences. Either that, or CBS News is playing us for fools.

8 January 2005 @ 3:48PM >> After CBS News was caught airing bogus memos in an story critical of President Bush’s service in the National Guard, CBS News President Andrew Heyward promised that a full accounting of the fraudulent report would be released in “weeks, not months.” Nearly four months later, CBS News still hasn’t explained what happened, and the network’s affiliates are getting antsy.

Bob Lee, a former Chairman of the CBS Affiliates Board, was quoted by PoynterOnline, “I was, on the one hand, encouraged that the network brought in independent investigators to conduct a thorough look. I am, on the other hand, perturbed that it has taken so long.”

Lee continued:

“It was the first time that the bloggers and the Internet component took to task a story that one of the traditional network news department had aired. The immediacy and the apparent precision with which the bloggers disassembled the stories took us by surprise. Suddenly we had a new watchdog.”

[...]

“The public puts an extraordinary trust in those who are permitted to come in to their home each night with their daily news. It was like people really thought they were scammed on this one; that they were given a concocted story. They were asking ‘If I can’t believe this what else can I not believe?’”

Or, to think of it another way, one wonders how many times CBS News has aired fraudulent stories and gotten away with it.

3 January 2005 @ 4:06PM >> Broadcasting & Cable reports that two executives from CBS News recently met with White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett. According to the report, the meeting was a fence-mending session meant to convince the White House that, despite last fall’s bogus memo scandal, CBS News would “from here on out would do everything it could to be fair and balanced.”

Doesn’t that sound like an admission that they weren’t fair or balanced before? After all, if they’ve been fair and balanced the whole time, why say “from here on out”?

Meanwhile, what ever happened to that investigation on the discredited CBS News report? Shortly after admitting that there were problems with the original 60 Minutes segment, CBS News President Andrew Heyward promised that the investigation would be completed in “weeks, not months”. Next Sunday will be the four-month mark from when the dubious story aired. So where are the results of the investigation?

30 September 2004 >> For years, the media’s promise to news consumers has been, “trust us. What we say is true.” But after CBS News gets caught airing a fraud, it’s easy to wonder how many times we’ve been snookered before. We may never know, but one thing is clear: when reporters say their opinions don’t shape what they report, they’re deceiving you, plain and simple. If the news media wants to regain our trust, they’re going to have to level with us. More >>