Month: September 2004

Here’s my reply to Mr. Wasserman’s email:

Mr. Wasserman:

Thank you for your reply. While I could wax poetic (and epic) in a reply, I will attempt to make this brief. I’m sure you don’t need or want to read a 5,000 word essay in refutation of your single paragraph.

First, I am certain that a lot of the responses received from “the loud and bullying sliver” of the audience are of the “SHUT UP!” persuasion. There is a least-common-denominator effect, after all. However, there’s a loud and principled set of voices out there who actually want the media to do what it is they claim to do: report FACTS. Impart INFORMATION. Not “tell us what to think.”

The difference now is that the so-called “new media” has given us, the previously voiceless, a real voice – as noted in a piece in today’s LA Times. That link, if you haven’t read it, is here:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-blog12sep12,1,1043155.story

That piece details how the “loud and bullying sliver” shined a spotlight on the centerpiece of CBS’s 60 Minutes II expose: the Incriminating Memos – memos so obviously forgeries that mere amateur sleuths were able to expose them in just a few hours. Yet CBS, apparently in possession of them for days if not weeks, were (and I’ll be generous) completely duped into running them as credible. Dan Rather (and oh, how I wish I could superscript the “th” in Rather in an email) has stood on the bridge of the sinking ship of his (and CBS’s) stock-in-trade, credibility, and protested that they must be real because they prove what he wants to believe.

And this exposes, in Glitter Gulch technicolor animated two-story lighting, the problem we “the sliver” have with the media: You aren’t doing your job and we can no longer trust you.

Why else do you think the (now derisive) term “mainstream media” was invented? Because that media has become “yellow journalism” once again. Only now they operate under the laughable pretense of “fairness.” And some of you STILL believe you are.

Your colleagues have, more and more often, come out and admitted bias since Bernard Goldberg published his first Wall Street Journal piece on the topic. Most recently the New York Times in the person of “Public Editor” Daniel Okrent in his July 25 piece “Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?” A paper that Bernard Goldberg quotes Dan Rather as characterizing as “middle of the road.”

Do you want to know why the Bush National Guard duty story can’t get traction? Because the majority of the public DOESN’T CARE. And we’re the arbiters of what is and isn’t important, in the end. We didn’t care that Bill Clinton actually lied to avoid the draft (letter to that effect available here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/clinton/etc/draftletter.html), we don’t care if Bush used connections to avoid dropping napalm on babies in rice paddies, or burning Vietnamese hooches with a Zippo in a free-fire zone. But we DO find it interesting that Senator Kerry has a memory SEARED into him of being in Cambodia on Christmas Eve of 1968 – a memory that affected his voting record in the Senate. A memory that he now says (though it’s etched forever in copies of the Congressional Record, at least) was in error. We, the irritating sliver, knew about this for WEEKS before the mainstream media decided they could no longer ignore it and had to tell the public “this is wrong and this is why.”

But if Kerry can be in error about that, what else can he be in error about? And why isn’t the media asking? Why is that up to us?

We DO question the “rightness, fairness and timing” of reports now because it’s blindingly obvious to us that the “mainstream media” has an agenda: Get Kerry/Edwards Elected. It’s even been admitted by another of your own, Evan Thomas, Assistant Managing Editor of Newsweek. He said as much in an “Inside Washington” roundtable discussion (available here: http://www.mediaresearch.org/cyberalerts/2004/cyb20040712.asp#1) back in July.

Apparently the “mainstream media” wants them to win REALLY badly.

I don’t want to correct you Mr. Wasserman, I want you to do your job. But it’s become blindingly apparent to me and many, many others that you won’t do that job any longer. Especially not when you brush aside our objections with the lame excuse:

“As long as such writers retain some minimal respect for fact, the transparency of their motives may even work to enrich the variety of information and interpretations available to all.”

RatherGate illustrates that the “minimal respect for fact” has gone right out the window. Right along with media credibility. We don’t trust the media because you no longer deserve to be trusted. So some growing proportion shouts “Shut up!” Perhaps you should think about why, rather than dismiss them offhandedly.

Kevin Baker
http://smallestminority.blogspot.com

P.S.: I’d like to continue this conversation if you’re so inclined, but if not, I certainly understand.

He surprised me once. We’ll see if he does it again.

I’m a little surprised, actually. A couple of posts below I put up an email I wrote to Edward Wasserman (“Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University” according to the piece I referenced from the Philadelphia Inquirer) concerning truth in journalism and how we, the “loud and bullying sliver of the audience” are asserting an “undue outside influence” on the media.

Or at least, that’s how he sees it.

Well, he responded. Here it is:

With respect, I don’t really think that the protest I’m talking about is fact-driven. (Not to say a fact-based critique isn’t fully warranted, and the instances you cite are disturbing.) But Bush supporters don’t, for instance, dispute the “facts” of his National Guard service. They do dispute the rightness, fairness and timing of the coverage of it. The Kerry people say that even if the Swift guys’ stuff was largely debunked factually, the media gave it so much attention the issue got undue credibility, and Kerry was forced on the defensive. The terrain of controversy isn’t over what’s factual, it’s about what’s important and about how much weight to put on this versus that. The people I hear from don’t want to correct me; they want to shut me up. Present company excepted.
EW

Now I’m going to have to write a rebuttal.

I wonder what he’ll have to say about Ra^therGate?

My reply to Mr. Wasserman is up.

This morning Instapundit linked to an editorial that complains about Newsrooms Under Siege. (Registration required, but Bugmenot works). I reworked an earlier piece and sent the author the following email:

Mr. Wasserman

I read with interest your column, available on the web at the Philadelphia Inquirer’s site
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/editorial/9613682.htm?1c

under the title “Newsrooms under siege”. For your information, it was linked by perhaps the largest of the “small slivers,” University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds at his site Instapundit.com. You seem upset that news sources are now being avidly fact-checked by “a loud and bullying sliver of the audience.” Well, apparently I’m part of that audience. And those sources are being fact-checked because of the bias you apparently embraced when you wrote:

“The attack doesn’t come from ideologically committed journalists and commentators who put together reports clearly selected and spun-dry to sell a political line. As long as such writers retain some minimal respect for fact, the transparency of their motives may even work to enrich the variety of information and interpretations available to all.”

Here are two examples of why this little “sliver of the audience” is “loud and bullying”, and please, explain to me how these two stories “enrich the variety of information and interpretation available to all.” If you can.

The Associated Press has put out two stories in the last week that are unadulterated, blatant, partisan hit pieces for the Democrats. The first was a report that, and I quote: “President Bush on Friday wished Bill Clinton “best wishes for a swift and speedy recovery.” “He’s is in our thoughts and prayers,” Bush said at a campaign rally. Bush’s audience of thousands in West Allis, Wis., booed. Bush did nothing to stop them. “ This was bullshit, and the AP yanked the offending lines – without initially issuing a retraction, and not before this lie had been picked up and spread by other news services. Links to this story in chronological order are:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/007712.php

http://spinswimming.blogspot.com/2004/09/ap-bias-strikes-again.html

http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article3765.html

http://galleyslaves.blogspot.com/2004/09/what-story-about-ap.html

Links to audio and video of the rally in question are here so you can fact check it yourself: http://instapundit.com/archives/017600.php

Second, the AP put out an article critical of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s RNC speech, accusing him of lying about the Russians in Austria during his childhood, and Austria having a socialist government.

The AP story can be read here: http://www.wstm.com/Global/story.asp?S=2257941

Unfortunately, again, it’s bullshit, as aptly detailed here: http://www.freewillblog.com/index.php/weblog/comments/4179/

These people have been, along with Reuters and UPI and other “news services,” the gatekeepers of the information the public gets. It’s supposed to be their job to INFORM the public, yet it’s obvious just from these two examples that they see their job is not to inform, but to MOLD public opinion. We must ask ourselves, what else are they lying to us about, and why should we trust ANYTHING coming from untrustworthy sources? People in the industry such as yourself who believe that slanting the news “enrich(es) the variety of information and interpretations available to all” are the reason for the backlash. So much for the much-vaunted neutrality of the media, eh?

You’ll appreciate this: James O’Shea, managing editor of the Chicago Tribune was quoted on the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth accusations in an August 24 column in Editor and Publisher magazine: “There are too many places for people to get information. I don’t think newspapers can be the gatekeepers anymore — to say this is wrong and we will ignore it. Now we have to say this is wrong, and here is why.”

(Link: http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000617053)

Or in the case of the AP and your “enriching the variety of information and interpretation,” newspapers and other media sources get to just make stuff up and pass it off as news, and it’s up to us, the “loud and bullying sliver of the audience” to say “this is wrong and here is why.”

As one blogger put it recently: “The Internet has detected the mainstream media as a form of censorship and simply routed around them.” Not quite yet. Not completely. But I intend to do my part in that routing.

Kevin

http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/

Part of that small sliver that’s stuck under your fingernail.

I doubt seriously that I’ll hear back from him.

UPDATE: Wasserman replied!