16 February 2006 @ 10:43AM >> Taxpayer-funded NPR has decided against posting on its website or even linking to the twelve cartoons that caused the Muslim world to erupt in deadly rioting. According to Bill Marimow, the network’s Vice President of News:

[T]he cartoon is so highly offensive to millions of Muslims that it’s preferable to describe it in words rather than posting it on the Web. In this case, I believe that our audience can, through our reports — on radio and the Web — get a very detailed sense of what’s depicted in the cartoon. By not posting it on the Web, we demonstrate a respect for deeply held religious beliefs.

First of all, it’s not one cartoon, Bill, it’s twelve. Did NPR describe them all? If so, I can’t find it anywhere on your website.

NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin says the reaction to this decision has been overwhelmingly negative:

Of the hundreds who wrote to me, more than 70 percent insisted that NPR was wrong not to show the cartoon, while 20 percent agreed that NPR did the right thing in not reprinting any of the drawings to avoid exacerbating tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims. The remaining 10 percent expressed frustration over being forced to choose between the two legitimate values — freedom of speech and religious tolerance — that now seem to be in conflict.

Dvorkin posts a number of the e-mails he received. Here are two that struck me as particularly insightful:

I am a Norwegian and have seen the cartoons. They are not the least bit offensive compared to other depictions of, let’s say, Jesus, that have been printed throughout time. Seeing the cartoons will shock people, for if those innocent cartoons are considered blasphemous, then nothing questioning Islam should by implication be printed. Without the publication of the cartoons no fully informed decision can be made by your readers. You say that one should not publish lest one hurt religious feelings; I say that one cannot grant tactfulness to irrational feelings, for by doing so one sanctions the ideas behind those feelings and the aggressors who respond with violence instead of peaceful discourse.

Harald Waage

That’s the real shame of the media’s reaction. Free speech has been defined down to the lowest common denominator where groups can restrict speech to their liking, as long as enough violence is employed. If every aggrieved group used such tactics, speech would become little more than a recitation of numbers, because anything beyond that is sure to anger somebody.

I am surprised that in all of the coverage of the riots in the Islamic world following the publication of cartoons depicting Muhammad that I have heard on NPR (and I am a regular listener) that no one has mentioned the vile posters (regularly visible in network TV and cable news broadcasts) that plaster walls in cities throughout the Muslim world. Surely it is an important bit of the context of these riots that they occur in societies whose citizens seem to be utterly untroubled by posters that resemble anti-Semitic propaganda in 1930s Germany.

Jim Coonan

It shows the utter hypocricy of the situation. On the one hand, we’re supposed to ignore beheadings, “honor” killings of gang rape victims, cities where by law only Muslims may tread, and—relatively low on the list—any insult lodged at the religions of the West, yet we’re supposed to bend over backwards to avoid inflaming the insane sensitivity of those who have no trouble murdering others over relatively tame speech. Is that the kind of world you want to live in?

The sensitive souls running NPR seem to think so. And their decision does nothing but help cement in place the veto-by-murder that the Islamic world now holds over our speech.

27 June 2005 >> NPR reporter Nina Totenberg and Newsweek editor Evan Thomas bicker over the “liberal” label:

Evan Thomas: Can I ask, is this going to, is this attack going to make NPR a little less liberal?

Nina Totenberg: I don’t think we’re liberal to begin with and I think if you would listen, Evan, you would know that.

Thomas: I do listen to you and you’re not that liberal, but you’re a little bit liberal.

Totenberg: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s a fair criticism, I really don’t — any more than, any more than you would say that Newsweek is liberal.

Thomas: I think Newsweek is a little liberal.

Hey, at least Thomas is honest.

Speaking of honesty, the New York Times is once again admitting that it knows what it is. In a recent memo to Times staffers (PDF file, 10 pages), editor Bill Keller wrote:

[D]iversifying the range of viewpoints reported — and understood — in our pages is not mainly a matter of hiring a more diverse work force. It calls for a concerted effort by all of us to stretch beyond our predominantly urban, culturally liberal orientation, to cover the full range of our national conversation.

That would be a nice trick, if the Times can pull it off. Either way, it’s a good sign that the Times is thinking in such terms.

Five years ago, you never would have heard such admissions of bias coming straight from the mouths of the establishment media elites. We’ve come a long way...

18 May 2005 @ 6:20PM >> It’s good to see Jeffrey Dvorkin, the ombudsman of NPR, thinking about diversity. In his latest column, Dvorkin asks, “shouldn’t NPR sound a little more like its listeners?”

Sounds nice, right? It would, if Dvorkin weren’t being so literal. Yes, he’s actually worried that the accents of the voices on the network aren’t diverse enough. Not in terms of perspective, but twang:

When it comes to aural diversity, NPR sounds, well... like NPR. That is, not very diverse at all.

Listeners say they can always tell when they are tuned to a public radio station. They say they can tell by the sound of the voices, the cadence of the delivery and the intonation of the reporters and announcers.

Jeff, you’re working at a taxpayer-financed radio network that routinely gives short-shrift to the views held by a majority of Americans (if we’re to judge by election results), and you’re worried that there aren’t enough different regional accents on your network? While you’re at it, why don’t you bean-count all the different shirt colors worn by the NPR hosts, just to be sure that mauve isn’t underrepresented.

There are less superficial categories that Dvorkin could be getting worked up about. Intellectual diversity counts for something, too. Who cares if everyone on NPR has different accents if they’re all saying the same thing?

9 May 2005 >> Last week, NPR’s Jeffrey Dvorkin worried that taxpayers (in the form of bloggers) were undermining his taxpayer-financed radio network by expressing their opinions about its content. Here’s another revealing quote from Dvorkin in this Wall Street Journal article (subscribers only) by Jacob Laskin:

NPR “comes under attack quite frequently for its apparently left-wing bias,” [Dvorkin] explained, “but most of these criticisms come from media organizations that are openly conservative. So I take those kinds of criticisms with a certain amount of salt.” Mr. Dvorkin also noted that liberal bias, far from being a problem, should be seen as an occupational quirk among journalists: “There is some kind of liberal empathy on the part of some journalists, because their curiosity about how other people live tends to involve a certain liberal stance,” he said.

Let’s enumerate Dvorkin’s logic:

1. Charges of bias against NPR are not to be believed because they come from conservatives, and
2. Journalists are naturally liberal because curiosity is a job requirement and curious people tend to be liberal.

Doesn’t his second point prove the bias that he denies in his first point? I’m scratching my head trying to figure out what Dvorkin’s message is here. If he’s saying that NPR doesn’t have a liberal bias, then it must be because NPR has a bunch of uncurious (i.e. not liberal) reporters. And if NPR does lean left, then that’s okay, because those uncurious conservatives are not suitable to be decent reporters anyway.

How pervasive is that thinking in the media, I wonder? If the folks responsible for hiring reporters shared similar views, then isn’t it possible that it would affect hiring decisions? If conservative is just a synonym for uncurious, then wouldn’t a conservative candidate for a job in journalism be at a disadvantage? After all, who wants to hire uncurious reporters? NPR might, depending on which of Dvorkin’s statements he wants us to believe.

5 May 2005 >> NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin discusses a Pentagon report issued in the form of a PDF file that was insecurely redacted (blacked out). The insecure file made it possible to retrieve the hidden information, which some people did and then posted online. Dvorkin uses the occasion to smear the entire blog world. So, following in his spirit of painting an entire segment of society with a broad brush, I will engage in Dvorkin’s game.

[T]he blogosphere has proven once again to be an amoral place with few rules. The consequences for misbehavior are still vague.

As opposed to what? CBS News? The consequences for misbehavior there are hard to determine, since the head of CBS News is firmly in place, and an aging Dan Rather was allowed to keep his job for six months after airing a bogus report and then defending it for days. The only people who paid consequences were the no-name, relatively low-level hacks who did the grunt work. The people in charge of the actual vetting process, the professionals that supposedly separate the trustworthy establishment media from the fast-and-loose, wild west world blogging paid no price at all.

Actually, even though none of the honchos paid a price, CBS News did, and paid dearly: the damage to the network’s reputation will persist for years. And in the news media, where the only lasting currency is trust, that’s really the only consequence that counts. The thing is, the exact same rules apply in the online world. Get busted doing something bogus, and good luck getting your reputation back. The guilty have nowhere to hide in the world of Google searching and historical caches like the Wayback Machine.

The possibility of civic responsibility remains remote. It is a place where the philosophy of “who posts first, wins” predominates.

Again, as opposed to what? The establishment press places a premium on breaking news and getting exclusives. And when they make mistakes, they often blame it not on ideological bias (despite the fact that I rarely recall liberal Democrats getting burned by sloppy reporting) but on a rush to get a story out first. That’s apparently what led a New York Times reporter to promise one side of a story that nobody from the other side would be contacted: in order to get an exclusive.

Despite the shoddiness and complete unprofessionalism of the blogosphere, Dvorkin cites an odd example to bolster NPR’s blog cred:

Even one of NPR’s newest programs, Day To Day is collaborating with Slate.com, the online magazine.

Hey, look, kids! Daddy-O is hip to the scene, man! He listens to all the grooviest music like The Monkees.

Excuse me for cluing in the square guy, but online, you can’t get much more establishment than Slate, a web magazine funded by Microsoft and founded by current L.A. Times editor Michael Kinsley. Nor does the Slate association help NPR’s case as far as perceived bias goes. The closest fixture Slate has to a conservative is self-described Democrat (and must-read) Mickey Kaus.

The appeal of the blogs? Humor seems to be the biggest attraction. Ironic detachment from the news, an ability to deflate egos and refreshing, undisguised opinion are also valued.

Whereas in the establishment media, disguised opinions seem to be valued...

American newspapers traditionally and scrupulously segregate fact-based reporting from opinion by designating pages for each.

Hahahahahahahaha! Pardon me while I wipe up the coffee I just spat all over my monitor.

The blogs entertain, they provoke, and they are not constrained by journalistic standards of truth telling.

Has Mr. Dvorkin been sleeping for a few decades? Journalists don’t seem “constrained by journalistic standards of truth telling.”

At least the blogosphere doesn’t claim to be something it isn’t. The establishment media constantly assures us of its fail-safe editorial processes and vigorous fact-checking, yet we still see example after example where journalists have let their opinions drive their coverage of the news. Blogs are being honest about shoveling opinion, whereas the professional journalists continue to issue shopworn platitudes about a pristine objectivity that’s probably not even possible in the first place.

Perhaps these younger people will outgrow these youthful informational indiscretions and come to their senses — and back to media that can serve them best...

And while you’re at it, remember to buy from Amalgamated Buggy Whip. Don’t believe Henry Ford’s hype! Those so-called “automobiles” are absolute death traps. Why pour some putrid exploding liquid into a hard-to-understand machine when you can motivate your stately equine conveyance with one of our nice-smelling leather cords!

Dvorkin closes his column by quoting some big media editors who apparently hate getting e-mail. Here’s a solution: if you in the establishment media think you’d be better off by ignoring your customers, stop giving out your contact information. Step back even further from the people who consume your product. Go ahead. I dare you.

11 March 2005 @ 11:03AM >> Occasionally, I get an e-mail from someone who disputes the contention that, overall, the establishment media has a liberal bias. Some of those e-mails claim that the media is largely unbiased, with the notable exceptions of Fox News Channel, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times. In such a world, media bias doesn’t exist except for the handful of outlets that can arguably be described as conservative.

Other people write me to claim that the media has a generally conservative bias, and they often point to President Bush being in the White House and the Republicans controlling Congress as evidence of that bias. By this logic, voters are lemmings who pull the lever for whichever candidate or party the media supports, and that nobody can get elected without the support of the media. Also by this logic, if the media had a conservative bias in 2004, then it had a liberal bias in 1992, 1976, 1964, 1960, etc.

Apparently, Jeffrey Dvorkin, NPR’s ombudsman, receives similar e-mails from disgruntled listeners on both the right and the left. What’s interesting is the line of reasoning employed by his left-of-center correspondents and what it says about their view of the news media’s purpose:

From the left, I sense that some of the e-mail nastiness has to do with frustration over the re-election of President Bush. These listeners feel that the media was unwilling or unable to stop Bush’s ascent to victory.

So, in their world, the purpose of the media is not to dispassionately report the facts, but to actively prevent certain politicians from winning elections. This is really a gripe about the effectiveness of the establishment media, not it’s bias. After all, what was the goal of CBS’s phony memos if not to “stop Bush’s ascent to victory”?

Liberals may recognize the lessening effectiveness of the media’s inherent bias and assume that it means the media is shifting to the right. I would argue that the bias of the press hasn’t changed, it’s just that in today’s new media environment, impact of that bias is now diminished. This may really be what rankles the liberals who fume at folks like Dvorkin.