Yet again, thanks to Jon Stewart pointing out how retarded CNN is, we are blessed with watching clips of those retards do what they do best: lie their asses off. Who actually believes what the hell they “report” anymore, anyway? Unfortunately, the only time I’ve actually watched CNN in the last five years has been when I’m stuck in an airport terminal and the batteries on all THREE of my electronic, music-playing devices have died.
Update II: Last night, Sunday April 5th, Lesley Stahl issued an on-air correction about her mistakes from the previous week’s story about Conficker. She called it a correction, but it wasn’t even that much. Here is the transcript of her apology which lasts all of about 21 seconds as a part of the introduction to Andy Rooney’s weekly blathering.
“A correction now. We made a mistake last week in using a photograph in a story we called “The Internet is Infected,” about the computer worm known as Conficker. I described the picture as a gang of young Russian hackers. They were not. The photo was provided to us by an Internet security company that appeared in the story.”
I have included below the video of the correction with the original piece just below. However, please note that I have had to include the original story from YouTube (I’ve only listed the second half) because CBS has edited the video on its website to cut any mention of the photo, any hacker by the name of Tempest and other things which were proven to be incorrect. The portion of edited video on CBS’s website occurs at the 10:36 mark. You can see the cut portion, lasting 19 seconds, in the YouTube video below.
But tell me, what should CBS have done in this circumstance? Instead of simply acknowledging the mistake, apologizing to the Finnish kids defamed in the story and moving on, the 60 Minutes team decided on a different route. They made a mistake, attempted to correct it but in the process also deleted any evidence of the mistake from their website. If CBS wants to be taken seriously as a news organization, this crap cannot continue. We know CNN falsifies transcripts and inputs video from Hungary in a story about Serbian rioting, but for CBS to now stoop to this level is unacceptable.
“Science is not politics. You can’t just get two opposing viewpoints and think you’ve done due diligence. You’ve got to cover the multiple views and the relative credibility of each view.”
Dr. Stephen Schneider is an expert in climate change from both a scientific and policy perspective. Therefore, when he says something like the above quote, you should take its importance to heart. He knows what he’s talking about… Yesterday we discussed Bryan Walsh’s interview with Eric Pooley about the importance of accurate reporting and not just balanced reporting. In the podcast, Pooley gives a good idea of the situation from a journalist’s perspective. Schneider goes into greater depth about the importance of proper science writing, this time from the scientist’s point of view. Schneider spoke earlier this month at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Chicago, about the importance of proper reporting on the subject of climate change. (Thanks to the Stanford U News Service for the heads-up and the quotes.) One of the issues Schneider talked about was CNN’s recent decision to eliminate its science team. Not that CNN can be trusted anyway, knowing that it fakes its transcripts and injects false video clips into stories. But at least it was trying to report on science issues… As Schneider asked,
“The problem is CNN just fired their science team. Why didn’t they fire their economics team or their sports team? Why don’t they send their general assignment reporters out to cover the Super Bowl?”
A source in the business of reporting gave me the perfect response to Schneider’s rhetorical question,
“I think CNN and the other networks would keep their science reporters if they could find the scientific counterpart of their “money honeys” that seem to dominate all broadcast business coverage. Or the ranters and yellers on the economy that make for such compelling —- yet non-informative —- TV viewing.”
But back to the issue of reporting on climate change and the challenge both reporters and scientists face in getting this right… Schneider has coined a great term to describe what happens in reporting on climate change: Mediarology. On his website, he has written an enormous amount on Mediarology and I would encourage you to read more there, but his introduction to the subject follows.
“In reporting political, legal, or other advocacy-dominated stories, it is both natural and appropriate for honest journalists to report “both sides” of an issue. Got the Democrat? Better get the Republican!
“In science, it’s different. There are rarely just two polar opposite sides, but rather a spectrum of potential outcomes, oftentimes accompanied by a considerable history of scientific assessment of the relative credibility of these many possibilities. A climate scientist faced with a reporter locked into the “get both sides” mindset risks getting his or her views stuffed into one of two boxed storylines: “we’re worried” or “it will all be OK.” And sometimes, these two “boxes” are misrepresentative; a mainstream, well-established consensus may be “balanced” against the opposing views of a few extremists, and to the uninformed, each position seems equally credible.”
This is where Schneider hits it on the head: “…to the uninformed, each position seems equally credible.” This is why accurate reporting and not just trying for a semblance of balance is so necessary. The two biggest things business and special interest groups have done to harm the environment in the public debate are:
A) They changed the term from ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change.’ Warming is bad, change is just different.
B) By injecting doubt into the world of hard science, they have allowed the lazy reporters to merely transcribe the false drivel, instead of questioning its accuracy.
Walter Isaacson is an icon in present-day media circles. Starting as a beat reporter for local newspapers, Isaacson moved up the ranks of national and international publications before becoming the managing editor of TIME and later the CEO and President of CNN. Isaacson now leads the Aspen Institute, co-host to, among other things, the Aspen Ideas Festival (along with The Atlantic).
Isaacson has written a piece entitled, “A Bold, Old Idea for Saving Journalism” or “How to Save Your Newspaper” depending on whether you read the Huffington Post and TIME. The basic premise of the article, as you might have guessed, is that journalism needs to be saved and that he has a great, new/old idea on how to save it: Micro-payments.
Isaacson starts by describing how newspapers have lost their way, due to misaligned allegiances and now falling revenue with ad cutbacks are adding to the crisis (emphasis below is mine):
“Newspapers and magazines traditionally have had three revenue sources: newsstand sales, subscriptions, and advertising. The new business model (online vs newsstand) relies only on the last of these. That makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong. When it weakens, the stool is likely to fall.
In an advertising-only revenue model, the incentive is perverse. It is also self-defeating, because eventually you will weaken your bond with your readers if you do not feel directly dependent upon them for your revenue. Newspapers will end up producing a lot of sections about gardening and home improvement, which advertisers want, and getting rid of their book review sections, as the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post have done.”
Isaacson suggests that instead of relying on a complex layer of advertising revenues from various sources, readers should again pay for their news, therefore holding the newspapers responsible to their readership, rather than their advertisers. I don’t disagree that newspapers’ (and much of the mainstream media’s) allegiances are misaligned, they have been as such for more than just a couple of years. This confusion with one’s own righteousness dates back decades and we shouldn’t expect it to change even with a new pay-as-you-go micro-payment revenue model. But this isn’t even the main issue at the heart of his suggestion.
The first issue I have is that Isaacson suggests that newspapers use software that allow us, the reader, to pay 10 cents per article or one dollar per day and that this will somehow change the direction of dwindling dailies and sunken stock prices. But let’s stop and think for a moment if this will actually accomplish what Isaacson hopes it will accomplish. Think about how the music industry transformed itself with iTunes, which Isaacson cites as an example, by charging a fee per song downloaded. First, I’m betting Hollywood is looking to do the same. But more importantly, there are fewer similarities between these examples than Isaacson will have you believe, so first lets not confuse them as having anything to do with micro-payments.
The similarities between music, movies and newspapers are paper thin, at best, and concentrated more on each industry’s inability to adapt to new trends and technology. This similarity is not about how, if I pay .99 cents for a song, I will also pay .99 cents for today’s New York Times. It is that these industries, after years and years of consolidation, conglomeration and cutting out and pushing down the little guy, have found themselves too large to adapt while at the same time the little guy found a tool to fight back. The Internet is finally becoming known to this industry and its true power heralded by the Hearsts of this world, but the problem is they are late to the game, just like the music and movie industries were late to adapt to users’ demand for cheaper and easier access to their products. Bloggers and technologists are already recreating the newspaper industry for the newspapers, much like Napster and then Apple recreated the music industry. But what is so revered about the Internet is its ability to level the playing field. The rules have changed and it isn’t that traditional newspapers have become obsolete; just their method of revenue generation has become obsolete. It is awfully hard to recreate the rules of the game when you’re only just learning how to play the game. Bloggers and technologists may not have it all right, as McClatchy’s John Walcott made clear in a speech last fall (more on this later), but they at least have the ability not just to react, but also to create. This is something that mainstream newspapers have so hopelessly lost over the past decade or more.
The second major problem Isaacson will run into with his proposal is the difference in the information or service provided between music/movies and news. Downloaded music and movies allows the user to listen or watch the file over and over. Most newspaper articles provide information, news and background once and they have then served their purpose. Even if the charge is one cent per article, I can’t see the mainstream market going backwards. What Isaacson is asking us to do is go back in time, forget that at one time we were able to get our news for free, and instead ask for money for the service. That is a very, very hard nut to crack, even for this old and successful nut of the mainstream media.
The third issue I have is with Isaacson’s assumption that, even if a large group of people paid for their news, this would be enough to sustain this bloated industry. While the diminishing number for foreign correspondents and destruction of local news coverage continues, these holes will be filled in time by someone. Already the local news coverage has picked up where the newspapers left off, and in many cases the quality and depth of the coverage has improved. Isaacson cites Pew’s study in December showing online newspaper readership numbers overtaking physical newspaper readership for the first time and draws a correlation that this must mean that people are interested in reading the news online. While there will always be a certain percentage of the population who is interested, no matter what, in what The New York Times has to say (no matter where they publish it), there still has yet to be a mea culpa for all of the wrongs wrought over the last decade. I have yet to hear little more than a half-hearted apology for “getting things wrong” with the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq from any of the mainstream newspapers. It is so much more than just “getting things wrong” and they know it. I especially liked the way John Walcott, mentioned earlier, described the situation in his speech last year accepting the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence. It isn’t as if bloggers are ready to take the lead, Walcott says, but certainly newspapers are making bloggers’ jobs easier by not fixing their mistakes.
“We’ve reached a point, I fear, where the journalism of I.F. Stone is now very much at risk from a combination of economic, technological, political and philosophical developments. I’ve talked a little about the pressures on news companies to cut costs to compensate for falling revenues, and I know there are those out there who think that’s fine, that the traditional “Mainstream Media” have so discredited themselves on Iraq and other issues that we should all say “good riddance” to them and turn to the blogosphere for all our news and analysis.
There are two reasons why I think that’s foolish, at least for now.
The first is that the blogosphere, like cable television and talk radio, reflects the political polarization in our country today. People go to Fox News or MSNBC, to O’Reilly or Air America, to Daily Kos or to Redstate.org, to have their biases reaffirmed, not to have their assumptions challenged or unpleasant truths exposed. It’s been a good business model, but I don’t think that it’s good journalism, and I suspect that I.F. Stone, as hard to pin down ideologically as he was, might agree.
…The second reason that I don’t think that even the best blogsites are a substitute for the mainstream media is that bloggers cannot do all of the things that mainstream media companies can do, at least for now. In June, for example, we completed an investigation of the Bush administration’s detainee program, which you may have read about in a piece by Tony Lewis in The New York Review of Books. I think I.F. Stone might have liked it, but it took the lead reporter, Tom Lasseter, other reporters and Travis Heying, a photographer for the Wichita Eagle, to 11 countries on three continents over the course of eight months. It’s hard for bloggers, no matter how good they are, to do that kind of work.”
I want to emphasis his words, “at least for now” because they are of utmost important here. First, Walcott’s assumption that blogs have an agenda and newspapers don’t is incorrect, as we discussed earlier. Newspapers not only have to keep their advertisers happy, but with so many of them being owned by public corporations, this profit pressure is increased tenfold. Second, while most bloggers don’t have the resources to send reporters around the world, newspapers didn’t have these resources when they first published either. I think that, given time, the growth of citizen-fueled AND funded journalism will certainly become more mainstream, but I don’t know that mainstream media will play as big a role as they’d like to in this new phase of journalism. The Real News, which we’ve covered here before, has been able to give us the international reporting needed (and was more thorough than Isaacson’s alma mater CNN in covering the attacks on Gaza). If Walter Isaacson and others want to see their beloved legacy shine in history, perhaps they should make this industry non-profit again. Either way, here’s to hoping they can defy the odds and show a modicum of success like the record labels have finally been able to do. After all the end goal is to report the news, not make it.
Why is it that TV reporters (and their producers) feel the need to inject the reporter into the story? How is it actually relevant to the story? Everyone does it these days. Anderson Cooper has done it twice in two days. First on Sunday evening’s broadcast of 60 Minutes, Cooper had an MRI and 3D model of his brain created in order to describe the processes as they related to the story. Why wasn’t he able to just film a patient who was undergoing these procedures for medical reasons? I have no desire to see how his synapses fire (or don’t) and although some people might agree that Cooper is in a slightly vegetative state, having his brain scanned has absolutely nothing to do with “Medical Awakenings.”
Then, just yesterday on CNN, Cooper was reporting from New Orleans in the midst of Hurricane Katrina (I mean, GUSTAV). Aside from the fact that every major network was hoping this storm would wreck the city again, in order to secure your attention 24/7 for the next couple of weeks, every reporter “on the ground” felt it necessary to test the wind or show how high the water was. In the middle of Cooper blowing around and telling us that anyone who was actually left in NOLA was hunkered down, a couple of people walked down the street behind him seeming to enjoy themselves in the crazy weather. Not to say they weren’t a bit nuts, but is everything really as bad as CNN says it is?!? Mayor Nagin, of New Orleans, gave networks the perfect soundbite to lead off their broadcasts with, telling the public at a news conference, “Be very afraid!”. Well, if it keeps people glued to the TV, then keep on sayin’ it! Cooper (or CNN) isn’t the only one who does this, but the following collage of CNN-Gustav coverage gives a good dose of it.
A person or entity with an obligation to report the news who instead shirks this responsibility and creates false dogmas. Aside from ignorance, reasons include financial gain and self-love.
Ignoring calls from numerous critics, the New York Times refuses to own up to mistakes in the paper's coverage of the now-famous right-wing videotapes attacking the community organizing group ACORN. Instead, the paper's public editor, Clark Hoyt, is relying on an absurd semantic justification in order to claim the paper does not need to print any c […]
PBS is reportedly in final talks with Newsweek editor Jon Meacham to be co-host of its forthcoming Need to Know program (New York Times, 3/9/10). Meacham's consideration for a show that would replace hard-hitting independent programs Now and the Bill Moyers Journal sends a clear and troubling message about PBS's priorities (Extra! Update, 6/05). […]
According to a report on the New York Times website (3/9/10), PBS is in talks with Newsweek editor Jon Meacham to be co-host of its forthcoming Need to Know program. If the report proves accurate, it gives viewers little hope for the kind of critical, uncompromising programming that public television was created to foster. Meacham's consideration for a […]
