Editor And Publisher;

Laurie Garrett, the prize-winning Newsday reporter, left the Melville, N.Y., paper Monday with a blistering memo to her colleagues that may provoke debate elsewhere in the newspaper industry.

Well, there went the gold watch.

“When I started out in journalism the newsrooms were still full of old guys with blue collar backgrounds who got genuinely indignant when the Governor lied or somebody turned off the heat on a poor person’s apartment in mid-January. They cussed and yelled their ways through the day, took an occasional sly snort from a bottle in the bottom drawer of their desk and bit into news stories like packs of wild dogs, never letting go until they’d found and told the truth. If they hadn’t been reporters most of those guys would have been cops or firefighters. It was just that way. …
“Honesty and tenacity (and for that matter, the working class) seem to have taken backseats to the sort of ‘snappy news’, sensationalism, scandal-for-the-sake of scandal crap that sells. This is not a uniquely Tribune or even newspaper industry problem: this is true from the Atlanta mixing rooms of CNN to Sulzberger’s offices in Times Square. Profits: that’s what it’s all about now. But you just can’t realize annual profit returns of more than 30 percent by methodically laying out the truth in a dignified, accessible manner. And it’s damned tough to find that truth every day with a mere skeleton crew of reporters and editors.
“This is terrible for democracy. I have been in 47 states of the USA since 9/11, and I can attest to the horrible impact the deterioration of journalism has had on the national psyche. I have found America a place of great and confused fearfulness.”

You know, it’s tempting to just agree and applaud.
It’s more tempting to ask why she waited until after she quit.

This Bram Cohen (BitTorrent) piece turns the common complaint about the “lack” of fact checking in media on its head;

After a journalist finishes writing their story, it’s generally sent to a fact checker. Fact checkers serve to avoid embarassing gaffes, such as getting a person’s name wrong, or saying that they work for the wrong employer, or some other such straightforward, objective fact.
[…]
The fact checker, unlike the journalist, has usually spent no time researching the subject whatsoever, and so as a lay person reading the story they slightly misinterpret it, then paraphrase their misinterpretation and ask me if it’s correct. Inevitably this bastardized explanation says something grossly misleading or not quite factual, and though I’ve long since learned that I really ought to say ‘yeah, whatever’ and have them leave the story as is, I can never resist the temptation to provide a correction, at which point they go back to the story and rewrite some sentences based on their incorrect understanding of my correction of their paraphrasing of their incorrect understanding of the original explanation. Unsurprisingly, this always makes the explanation worse.

Or, to put it another way – the product of multi-level incompetence.

Retired CBS news correspondant, Tom Fenton is going public with criticism of CBS and TV news in general, in his upcoming book, “Bad News.” ;

“Once you get halfway through the CBS Evening News, the rest of it you can turn off,” Fenton told the News. “There’s nothing there you need to know. It’s an attempt to entertain people and pump up ratings. If I want entertainment, I’ll watch ‘The Daily Show.'”
“We have literally dumbed down our public,” he continued. “We have trained them to accept the coverage they’re getting. We so rarely explain what’s going on, there’s no context. So, people of course, aren’t interested. They have no idea what’s going on.

The rest is here.

…is a failure to communicate.

Out of curiosity, I ran a Google News search.

Results 1 – 10 of about 1,960 for Terri Schiavo right-to-die.
Results 1 – 10 of about 357 for Terri Schiavo right-to-life

The latter look to be mostly op-eds, or include references to “right-to-life” groups or lawyers. The hard news stories are nearly uniform in the “right to die”.

Drudge is currently quoting the New York Observer, that executives who were offered up in lieu of Dan Rather are fighting back and refusing to resign as ordered:

THE NEW YORK OBSERVER will report tomorrow: ‘Former 60 Minutes Wednesday executive editor Josh Howard has told colleagues that before he resigns, the 23-year CBS News veteran will demand that the network retract remarks by CBS president Leslie Moonves, correct its official story line and ultimately clear his name’…
In the event of a lawsuit, Mr. Howard has told associates that he would like to see Moonves put under oath to talk about his own roles in the network’s stubborn, hapless defense of the flawed segment on President Bush’s National Guard service.
Howard has also indicated to colleagues that he would subpoena specific CBS documents, including the e-mails of top executives.

As they say … developing

In other news;

hat tip – Sean.

All morning, Rawlco Radio’s CKOM has been playing hourly newscasts by David Kirton. His reporting is often tainted by editorial comment; this morning he’s characterizing Conservative Jason Kenney’s remarks that gays have always had the right to marry in this way;

“Jason Kenney MOCKED same sex marriage….”

Emphasis his. Now, considering that Kenney said nothing less factual or more “mocking” than judges who have ruled against same sex marriage in their decisions, the question arises as to whether Kirton is simply too lazy to bother with basic fact checking, or whether truth takes a back seat to his own bias?

A transcript worth reading. Jeff Jarvis (Buzzmachine) does the blogosphere proud, as expected.

JARVIS: We didn’t fire him, the bloggers. CNN did. I agree it doesn’t fit the crime, because we don’t know the crimes that are in CNN’s heart here. Something else happened here that we don’t know. The story’s not over. We have to see that transcript from Davos. There’s no reason for that to be hidden still, and CNN has to realize that they have to tell us more of what’s going on.
The problem here is that by just asking for the truth, knocking at the doors of the news temple and saying, tell us what’s go on, we’re being portrayed as a lynch mob. We’re not. We’re citizens wanting to know the truth. It used to be the job of journalists to report that. So let’s get to the truth, let’s get to the facts. I think if Jordan had come right out and said, I’m sorry, I blew it, I was wrong, I didn’t mean to say that, he wouldn’t have made any more friends that he has now, but he still would be at his job.

The NYT is unhappy and shows it by lashing out at bloggers with manipulative editing. Which of course, means it’s business as usual.

In the wake of Eason Jordan’s departure from CNN, this flashback from New York Times correspondant John Burns exposing the deep corruption in the media. With a near certain attempt underway by some in the mainstream press to transform Jordan from conspiracy theorist and propogandist into a “victim of the right wing blogosphere”, Burns’ words bear repeating. Originally published in September of 2003.

Terror, totalitarian states, and their ways are nothing new to me, but I felt from the start that [Iraq] was in a category by itself, with the possible exception in the present world of North Korea. I felt that that was the central truth that has to be told about this place. It was also the essential truth that was untold by the vast majority of correspondents here. Why? Because they judged that the only way they could keep themselves in play here was to pretend that it was okay.
There were correspondents who thought it appropriate to seek the approbation of the people who governed their lives. This was the ministry of information, and particularly the director of the ministry. By taking him out for long candlelit dinners, plying him with sweet cakes, plying him with mobile phones at $600 each for members of his family, and giving bribes of thousands of dollars. Senior members of the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from these television correspondents who then behaved as if they were in Belgium. They never mentioned the function of minders. Never mentioned terror.
In one case, a correspondent actually went to the Internet Center at the Al-Rashid Hotel and printed out copies of his and other people’s stories — mine included — specifically in order to be able to show the difference between himself and the others. He wanted to show what a good boy he was compared to this enemy of the state. He was with a major American newspaper.

Read it all.

When a distinguished author, one-time Chief of Staff to Brian Mulroney, and Globe and Mail columnist finds himself in the midst of a flamewar with a lowly “potty mouth” blogger, what does he do?
Why he does what any trained journalist and former Ambassador to Israel would do! He draws on his formidable academic credentials and experience to rally his loyal supporters.
Screenshot of comments thread:

Breaking news via Drudge – after nearly two weeks of blogosphere driven pressure to keep the story alive, CNN’s Eason Jordan has finally resigned;

CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan quit Friday amidst a furor over remarks he made in Switzerland last month about journalists killed by the U.S. military in Iraq.

Early reaction from Powerline, who predicted on Feb.7th that “Eason Jordan is finished”;

I don’t know, of course, what tipped the balance, but I wonder whether it might have been this: Larry Kudlow’s interview with three influential Senators, George Allen, Jeffrey Sessions and Norm Coleman, all of whom knew about the story, in contrast with many “mainstream” reporters who have been asked about it in recent days, and were incensed by it. This detail may have been telling:

Senator Coleman was not ready to open up an investigation, but he indicated it was worth looking at.

Senator Coleman is, of course, the Chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Larry notes that these and other Senators had to get their awareness of the Jordan affair through blogs.

James Joyner has been compiling a list of blogger response.
update
Howard Kurtz finally writes the column he should have the first time round, though still highly sympathetic to his co-worker at CNN.

Day-after media coverage of Chretien’s testimony before Gomery;

“…golfballs …. took out golfballs … golfballs … signed golfballs … Clinton’s golfballs … Bush’s golfballs … law firm golfballs … golfballs… “

Now, I ask you – if a commercial artist in the middle of rural Saskatchewan can spot a an intentional ploy to divert media attention from the denial, the obfuscation, the excuse making that passed for testimony from Chretien at the Adscam inquiry, why did every media outlet in the country fall for it?
Legitimate reporting would have ignored the made-for-tv stunt. Competent editorial review would have discarded that portion for more relevant testimony. Intelligent journalists would have recognized that Chretien wasn’t playing Gomery – he was playing the media as fools. And today, they look like fools, fawning over his cleverness, his craftiness, his successful attempt to one-up Justice Gomery.
Not one of them – not a single one – stopped chuckling long enough to ask whether it’s a wise tactic to attempt to embarrass and humiliate the judge who will be ruling on your involvement in a $100 million theft of public funds – and who may yet have the last laugh.

As the blogosphere continues to hammer at MSM stonewalling over the the Eason Jordan – Davos story; Michelle Malkin has useful updates here and here. Most interesting tidbit – copy of an email to Mickey Kaus, from Howard Kurtz;

I have a story in tomorrow’s paper. Had you been kind enough to check earlier, I would have told you that I flagged it for The Post on the day that I was crashing on CBS naming Bob Schieffer as Rather’s temporary replacement and said we should pursue it. Two other Post reporters pursued it, spoke to Jordan and decided not to write anything based on the fact that what was actually said was in dispute. I had nothing to do with that decision. I’ve since picked it up, done additional reporting and filed my story.

That sort of calls out for a “harumph!” emoticon.
update – The “narrowly focused” Kurtz piece is now online. Captain Ed is profoundly unimpressed and wonders why Kurtz – who reads his blog – didn’t mention that Jordan’s words at Davos were part of a long-standing pattern of unsubstanciated accusations against the military.

It took Kurtz over a week to finally get around to publishing this article on Eason’s Fables. In that time, it appears that Kurtz did as little investigation as possible on Jordan. My readers and I found all of Jordan’s earlier commentary within 24 hours, and we only have very limited access to Nexis and full-time jobs doing other things than media analysis. Worse than that, all of this information has been repeatedly presented on my blog — in fact, it was all presented on my blog today, and we know Howard Kurtz read my blog sometime this afternoon. Why didn’t Kurtz ask about his remarks in Portugal from three months ago, or about his identical accusations against Israel two years ago? Why didn’t Kurtz press Jordan on the entire story? Only Kurtz can answer that, and I doubt he will have much more to say to anyone about Eason’s Fables from this point onward.

As Glenn Reynolds noted a few days ago,

A story in today’s Christian Science Monitor asks, “Are bloggers journalists?”
Perhaps we should start asking if journalists are journalists.

Indeed.

Powerline is reporting that Jack Kelly of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has finally broken media silence on the Eason Jordan story that has been the buzz of the blogosphere for several days*;

The scandalous remarks of Eason Jordan, CNN’s top news executive, last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and the failure of the major media to report them suggest the distortions are deliberate.
Mr. Jordan told a panel that the U.S. military had killed a dozen journalists in Iraq, and that they had been deliberately targeted. When challenged, Mr. Jordan could provide no evidence to support the charge, and subsequently lied about having made it, though the record shows he had made a similar charge a few months before, and also earlier had falsely accused the Israeli military of targeting journalists.
Mr. Jordan’s slander has created a firestorm in the blogosphere, but has yet to be mentioned in the “mainstream” media.
Gee, I wonder why not.

Jeff Jarvis has been following it closely too – apparently a tape of Jordan’s statement is on its way from the event organizers, at the request of Sisyphus.
Updates: The Washington Times
is commenting, and Captains Quarters is catching other “cracks in the dam” of the mainstream media.

Still on the other side.

Via Mystery Achievement

Hugh Hewitt has his BS meter on high;

[L]et me underline two recent media events which deserve more scrutiny than they have thus far received.
The first is the genuinely scandalous assertion by CNN’s Eason Jordan, made at the World Economic Forum, that the United States military has targeted and killed a dozen journalists. The account of Jordan’s remarks – including his backpedaling and the crowd’s reactions–is available at ForumBlog. Thus far no major media outlet has demanded an accounting of Jordan, but the idea that a major figure from American media traffics
in such outlandish and outrageous slanders on the American military deserves attention and criticism, not indifference. It is no wonder that anti-American propaganda gains traction in the world when American news executives set fantasies such as this one in motion. If Jordan had no grounds for peddling this grassy-knoll garbage, he should be fired. If he did have even the flimsiest of grounds, he ought to share his evidence and let the public decide whether his judgment is as flawed as it was when he covered for Saddam all those years.

Well as Hugh points out – this is the man who confessed that CNN had become the “Voice Of Saddam in America ” during the years leading up to the war to ensure access … and there’s been no news he’s undergone an integrity transpant since then …

THE SECOND SUBJECT for mulling is John Kerry’s extraordinary interview with Tim Russert last Sunday. There’s a lot to absorb here, including Kerry’s assertion that he did indeed run guns and CIA men into Cambodia on secret missions–and to aid the Khmer Rouge no less!
What is really remarkable is not Kerry’s whoppers–he couldn’t have meant the Khmer Rouge, right?–or his almost certain not-to-be-fulfilled pledge to sign the form 180. It is the set of questions Tim Russert posed.
Russert is generally regarded as the toughest interview in television, and he did bleed Kerry a bit during the campaign; afterwards Kerry never again came close to Russert’s set before November 2.
But if the questions posed by Russert on January 30, 2005–on Kerry’s fantasy life in Cambodia, on the sequestered records, etc.–were legitimate and useful inquiries after the votes have been cast, why then did no one pose them to candidate Kerry when they might have made a difference in the election? The blogosphere and the center-right media were full of such demands from August 1 forward, but not a single reporter from mainstream media bothered to pose even one of the Russert questions prior to the vote.

The Russert interview with Kerry is simply jaw dropping. I am beginning to suspect that the reason media power brokers like Russert steered so far clear of the Swift Boat accusations wasn’t so
much a matter of fearing the questions were legitimate, but that Kerry may come unglued if he were pressed to answer them. Catching his exaggeration a military resume is one thing – uncovering his grave incompetence – quite another.

A glimpse into the process by which young reporters are indoctinated from the lowest levels in the food chain to conform to formulaic “if it bleeds, it leads” news coverage. The problem is, when you’re at the bottom of the food chain, you tend get bottom of the food chain assignments. There’s not a lot of blood to be found in dry, boring government press releases. Solution? Reach for the ketchup.
Case in point – this evening on the CTV local news (Saskatoon affiliate), reporter Shannon Spring began her segment by revisiting two particularly tragic multi-fatality crashes that occured in the province in 2004. The first involved a carload of pre-driving age teens, the second a horrific crash in which 6 died, caused by a multiple-offender drunk driver with a revoked license.
What was the story?
Transport Canada had announced a 24% decrease in highway fatalities in Saskatchewan over the past 5 years, attributing the improvement to a road safety program and increased police surveillance of rural highways. We also learned that Britain leads all countries in terms of lowest highway fatalities, while Canada is fifth, and that more emphasis is needed on preventing car-pedestrian fatalities….
Of course, just holding up a pamphlet and talking about that is pretty mundane stuff. What’s a reporter to do?
The story needs a “hook”, something to make it more palatable to an audience …. what better than a little hemoglobin on the plate? So, off to the film archives, dig up some corpses, arrange the wrecks to create a pleasing backdrop and voila! Your Transport Canada release is taking on life!
To hell with agony revisited by friends and family who may be watching, and to hell with the dignity of those who lost their lives – the scenes now reduced to a few images to be employed in lieu of your own creativity. Its all part of the hard “reality” of professional journalism.
Nice work. Shannon Spring. You’ll go far.

Events of this past week remind me of the first time I drove to Los Angeles.
I was 19, just out of college and living in northern Alberta on my own, trying to grab a piece of the first tar sands exploration boom. My younger brothers and sister were still at home, and our parents decided that a last “family vacation” was in order. Disneyland would be the destination. For the sake of comfort, we took two cars – the family Plymouth and my new Ford Pinto, complete with rather gaudy trick paint.
The journey was not undertaken lightly. Saskatchewan drivers are well equipped mentally for long distance driving – crossing the vast open spaces of the Dakotas, Wyoming, Arizona, and Nevada was a breeze. I can still recite verbatim most of the Steve Martin comedy tape Cruel Shoes. �(“Put them on me.”)
However, like everyone else, we knew that the infamous Los Angeles freeways were among the most dangerous places on earth. We knew that merely touching a brake pedal at the wrong time could transform 8 lanes of racing Detroit metal into a screeching, twisted, burning mass of death. The cars travelled “bumper to bumper” at high speed, only inches from one another in a death defying race, only moments from chaos. One blown tire and many dozens could die – and God help you if it rained. Carnage. Pure carnage.
We knew this to be fact, because every week or so we saw news reports and grisly film footage of multi-car pileups on smog obstructed, rain-soaked California freeways on CBC news.
California “hundred car pileups” were a favoured bleed-lead of the 1970’s, like the role played by giant snowstorms, floods and hurricanes on the networks today. Plenty of death, destruction and distraught onlookers. In fact, much like coverage in Iraq over the past two years.
We were determined to make the journey and set our concerns aside until that bridge had to be crossed. The plan didn’t include much LA driving, anyway – Disneyland, Marineland, Capistrano, San Diego, a day trip by bus to Tijuana.
After a couple of days doing the sights as a family from our small motel in Anaheim, my younger sister and I struck out on our own in my Pinto. We bought a simple freeway map, and headed to Long Beach, downtown LA and Hollywood. We went window shopping on Rodeo Drive, discovered (by chance) the mansion where the exterior shots of the “Beverly Hillbillies” were filmed, cruised around in the Hollywood hills, marvelling at the homes.

It was when we decided to return to the motel that we reailzed our timing was not so good. Deep in the evening “rush hour” and to make matters worse, the unthinkable – it started to rain. We were facing the most dangerous stretch of California freeway destruction of all; the Santa Ana.

To our relief and amazement, we discovered that the drivers on LA freeways were actually quite sensible. Contrary to what we had been led to believe, they did not plow into the cars before them at the first touch of a brake – they slowed down in an orderly fashion. The clogged lanes were capable of slowing to a full stop, then accelerating, which we did on multiple instances without so much as a dent to show for it.
It was nothing like we had been led to believe.
We returned to the motel safe and sound, with a newfound confidence in our driving competence – and a newly planted seed of skepticism about the CBC news.
Today, after an election in “war-torn” Iraq that will be forever remembered for confounding the dire predictions, defying the threat of violence, and exceeding popular expectations, as the anti-war left and Bush critics begin to concede (however grudgingly) that liberating the Iraqi people may have been the right thing to do – I’m taken back to that news footage we used to see of freeway pileups in California on the CBC.
The difference today is that some of us – a minority, admittedly – were not relying on the CBC, CNN, or CBS to get our information about the Iraq war and their prospects for democracy. We read Chrenkoff and 2Slick and Healing Iraq and knew that for all the horrific pictures and body counts on the nightly news, that there was a chance – even a good chance – that things were not quite as bad as our televisions would have us believe.
Just as California freeways of the 70’s weren’t one long demolition derby, most cars in Iraq were not full of explosives, most ordinary Iraqis, military and security forces left for work and arrived at their destinations, and returned home for dinner after an uneventful day.
I wonder how many of those who are seeing for the first time a larger picture of Iraq that suggests under-reported success and stablity, are reviewing what they were told in the days leading up to the election and considering the credibility of those who did the telling.
Despite the frustration of watching positive news being supressed by a media that was not so secretly hoping for a “Republican failure”, in the final analysis the mainstream media may have done the Bush administration, the Iraqi people and most importantly – the western world – a huge, unintended favour.
They oversold their case.
In days to come, there will be return to partisan business as usual, to bad news and negative spin. The glow of a successful election will wane and the Media Left will again try to bury progress under failure, to forecast grave outcomes, to second guess, to challenge the motives and intelligence of those leading the war against Islamofascism. They are, after all, slow learners. I suspect it’s just not going to matter as much as it used to. They threw everything they had at Iraq – and failed. Bush did not flinch, the American people held firm, and the Iraqi people threw it all back at them.
Like Dan Rather writ large, the credibility and influence of the mainstream media over public opinion has been dealt a crippling blow in Iraq. That it was self-inflicted just makes it all the more satisfying.

Roger L. Simon;

In the midst of live-blogging the Iraq election the other night, I received an email that got my attention. It was from the State Department situation room and, aside from the ego-flattering surprise that people so highly placed were reading this blog in the midst of such an event, it contained some disappointing (although not horribly surprising) information about CNN correspondent Jane Arraf.
Many of us had just watched Ms. Arraf waiting with what “seemed” like great dismay in front of an empty polling station in Mosul. The Iraqis were not turning out to vote. Then, an hour or so later, she popped up at another polling place in the same city that was crowded with voters, explaining that she had “switched polling places.” But she hadn’t. According to my situation room correspondent, her first venue was not a polling place at all. For whatever reasons (embarrassment? bias? both?), Ms. Arraf omitted this important fact.

Despite the “security situation”, the streets of Bagdad are fairly crawling with photographers.
Youd wonder why more of them don’t get killed, the way they loiter around in groups and all.
Via Instapundit.