Look at these faces. While the rest of the world wrings its hands and waits helplessly on the sidelines, Burma’s government says it will accept aid, but that it doesn’t want the help of foreigners in getting it to the people. (BBC News) The UN is pretty sure the government’s own unaided efforts won’t be enough.
The UN says that up to 1.5 million people may have been affected by Cyclone Nargis, which devastated the Irrawaddy Delta region on Saturday. Burmese state media say 22,980 people were killed, but there are fears the figure could rise to 100,000.
Hundreds of thousands of people have no food, water or shelter. Officials say people could die because no help is getting to them.
In a statement, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged the junta to prioritise the aid effort over tomorrow’s nation-wide referendum on a widely-criticised new constitution.
It would be "prudent to focus instead on mobilising all available resources and capacity for the emergency response efforts", he said. (BBC News)
First, if you’re wondering what I as a Hillary supporter think about Hillary’s decision to continue running after yesterday, the answer is I don’t know what I think of it as a strategy. Naturally I would like to believe that she could still somehow prevail. I am not sanguine. People are speculating that she is now running for the VP slot. We’ll see.
But — and this matters more to me — I most definitely admire her for her unswerving commitment to see the process through. Despite the pissing and moaning in the media, and whatever the outcome, I predict that the day will certainly arrive when people will look back with awe and amazement at Hillary’s insistence in going the distance against all odds and wish that they had chosen her. She is indomitable. I like that in a Democrat and so should other Democrats. Alas, many of them are so beguiled by the media myths about Hillary that they just can’t see what a force of nature she really is.
Obama could learn a lot from her and he’d be a better (future) president for it. Instead, I imagine we’ll be stuck with him in his current incarnation — all rhetoric, all the time.
This Guest Voice post is by journalism professor and author Walter Brasch who is also a syndicated newspaper columnist and radio commentator, and president of the Pennsylvania Press Club. Guest Voice posts do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Moderate Voice or its writers.
People. People Who Don’t Need People
by Walter Brasch
From a pool of about seven billion, those hard-working geniuses at People magazine have managed to find the hundred most beautiful people in the whole wide world. And—get ready for the surprise—almost every one of those beautiful people are rich American celebrities.
For almost two decades, People’s editors believe they have been given the divine right to anoint who they believe to be the most beautiful people on the planet. The ethnocentric celebrity-fawning People editors are so secure in their self-imposed knowledge that they don’t even tell us what criteria they used to make their determinations. Not even an “editor’s note,” common in most magazines.
For the first few years, People etched their version of reality into our minds by attaching cutesy capsulated biographies to full page color pictures of the most beautiful. This year, the writing is minimal, the design is almost to the level that a good college journalism or graphics arts student could create and, except for a few full page and two-page spreads, most pictures are no bigger than thumbnail size.
Leading off the 69-page special section is actress Kate Hudson. Advance stories about her selection appeared in just about every American newspaper and major website, all of which think stories about celebrities are more important than stories about the recession. Also on the list are Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Ashton Kutcher, and Norah Jones. The seven member cast of TV’s “Gossip Girl” made the list. “Onscreen,” People told us, “they are gorgeous, scheming, backstabbing high schoolers.” Just what America needs. More future business executives and politicians.
The first few years, when the magazine editors could find only 50 beautiful people, there was a fairly even split between men and women. This year, about 90 percent are women. Except for six athletes (three men and three women), the rest are actors, singers, dancers, and models.
Three years after the first list came out, People recognized the elderly. Of course, the elderly were Paul Newman, Faye Dunaway, and Barbara Babcock. This year, there’s a special two-page spread–it barely got into the magazine, look for it on pages 174-187–for 40 celebrities, 10 in each of the categories of 20s, 30s, 40, and 50s.
People once selected size 5-foot-11 size14 model Emme as a beautiful person. It championed her as representative of the “burgeoning large-size modeling industry.” Of course, these vacuous editors have no idea that a size 14 isn’t large—it is the average size of American women. This year, the only large size models are in full page ads for Jenny Craig diets and Curvation underwear, which declared, “Style starts with the Side Shaper Underwire bra and shaping panty.”
Teachers, social workers, and medical researchers, no matter how beautiful, didn’t make this year’s cut. But, they shouldn’t worry about it. Neither did Miss America, Miss USA, Miss World, Mr. Universe, or, for that matter, Miss Crustacean, Ocean City, New Jersey’s, salty tribute to hermit crabs, and a spoof of the beauty contest that once inhabited next-door Atlantic City.
People magazine may need people to justify its $254,000 full page advertising rate. But, people, even with insatiable curiosity about celebrities, really don’t need People.
Respondents to my “Macrame Journalism” post make some engaging points, while other points need clarification.
The post was not a defense of journalism (I’ll get into that another time), but a definition of it. Readers are correct to say that journalism today suffers from self-inflicted damage. But what divides journalists from macramé journalists is education and training. The traditional journalism industry, both on and offline, would not hire applicants who could not show a baccalaureate level of journalism education. A macramé journalist, meanwhile, can join the field with an ISP connection and a blog account. Much of their work is very good, but at its best, it is commentary, not journalism. At its worst, it is the same as an avalanche of unsigned letters to the editor. Assigning such blather the stature of “citizen journalism” is inappropriate and dangerous.
he word “abridge” in the First Amendment makes clear that the authors understood that the power of the press predated the Constitution. The origins of such a press were with the Zenger decision in 1734 that established truth as justification to publish. The weight was on “truth.” It was not enough for Peter Zenger and his attorney, Andrew Hamilton, simply to say his newspaper, The New York Weekly Journal, had printed the truth about government officials. Truth required documentation and verification. For almost 300 years, that documentation and verification has been the cornerstone of America’s press. Investigative reporters won’t publish information without triple verification, and then only after a phone call offering the opportunity to verify or deny to the story’s subject.
Enforcing the First Amendment has required the enforcing of such standards, both in freedom of the press and in freedom of speech. The press was granted such power that in the courts a body of law was created and started to grow, protecting citizens from press abuses of its power. The standard of truth is the first burden placed on the press by that law. Free speech is held to a similar standard, which has also shown up in courts since 1789. Classic example: Is an individual who yells “Fire!” in a crowded theater, when there is no fire, protected from prosecution by the First Amendment? Not many Americans have turned their backs on the standards of free press and speech. When they do, thank God, it makes news.
Any out-of-work reporter (plenty of those around) could operate independently online, not writing commentaries like this one, but doing real journalism. As I pointed out in the last post, such work would be instantly recognizable as journalism, just as macramé journalism is instantly recognizable.
I won’t tell my 100 college journalism students what one respondent said about “kids these days and their blogs and rock ‘n roll music and long hair.” They will be the online reporters and editors of tomorrow. Traditional journalism, in converged (print and broadcast) form is moving steadily toward the Internet, where doing business is infinitely cheaper than the traditional broadcast model that has been in place for the last 500 years. I call the new model “incast.” No longer will news organizations (and other media) spend millions sending information out to the audience at large. Online, all that content is just files in a computer, accessible at any time to consumers coming in, a ridiculously cheap and efficient (one-to-one marketing!) model.
What are the news organizations going to do with all that money they save? They won’t have to repeat cycles anymore like CNN, as one respondent pointed out. And they will have millions to hire journalists to fill a practically infinite news hole. That’s where my little longhairs come in.
If one wanted to know the difference between being an American and being a European, this article from France’s Le Figaro newspaper would be a very good place to start.
From Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky to client number nine Eliot Spitzer and ‘Kristan,’ Europeans have looked at the effect that sex has on American politics with a collective shake of the head. Read the rest of this entry »
It sounds as if this morning’s special Town Meeting format “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on ABC could give ABC’s — and Stephanopoulos’ — critics ammunition to say he and his network gave Senator Hillary Clinton an hour of largely softball interview airtime.
Several reports suggest Stephanopoulos looked awkward, and that the ABC show was not akin to the grilling Clinton rival Senator Barack Obama got on NBC’s competing “Meet The Press” by Tim Russert. At least 10 minutes of Russert’s show was devoted to asking Obama to comment further on the politically-toxic controversy involving Obama’s former pastor (complete with questions about why he didn’t distance himself further sooner).
A look at this account of the ABC Show on CBS’s From The Road blog suggests that the Clinton appearance likely helped Clinton and undermined Stephanopoulos’ reputation as an independent journalist who is tough on both sides. A journalist doing his/her job persistently asks follow up questions until the interview subject gives a substantive answer:
Hillary Clinton appeared on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” this morning in an interview filled with awkward moments and strange interactions between the two former colleagues (Stephanopoulos worked under President Bill Clinton for 4 years.)
The interview was billed as a “town hall” where Indiana voters would get a chance to ask Clinton questions. Minutes into the interview, Clinton decided to ditch her chair, preferring to stand and address the audience. What ensued was an awkward interaction between Clinton and Stephanopoulos when the ABC host was forced to ask a few questions from his chair while Clinton loomed over him. (In fairness to Stephanopoulos, oftentimes in seated interview settings the journalist and/or the guest have their microphone cord taped to the chair, restricting one’s movement.)
Stephanopoulos tried to recover by standing alongside Clinton, but was forced to stand in a strange position as he remained tied to his chair.
On most NEWS shows the interviewer is supposed to set the rules about where guests sit and the format. And the interviewer/journalist is supposed to be the one in control of the setting.
After the first commercial break, the two were seated again, but within seconds Clinton decided she had had enough, forcing Stephanopoulos to stand, again.
But it reportedly got worse: Clinton reminded viewers that George S used to work for her and her husband. Just what Stephanopoulos and ABC need after being under fire from progressives who allege (with no proof) the debate in Philadelphia was set up to get tough with Obama and hurl softballs at Clinton (actually it seems to have turned out that way due to judgments involving news values and news story interest):
The interview took another unpleasant turn when Stephanopoulos tried to pin down Clinton over her position on NAFTA, a trade program introduced by her husband during his presidency. Clinton has come out against the plan saying it was not good for American workers. Stephanopoulos said, “The Clinton administration didn’t do enough to address the downside of globalization and therefore failed the workers in Indiana and the workers of the West?”
Clinton clearly took offense to the tone of the question and while answering, decided to take a jab at the host.
“Well I believe, George, in the 1990s we had a booming economy that created nearly 23 million new jobs, more people were lifted out of poverty in any time in our near history. It was an economy that worked for everyone, not just the rich, the wealthy and the well connected, but there were underlying issues that we didn’t understand fully. Now, you remember this, because George did work in that ‘92 campaign - George and I actually were against NAFTA - I’m talking about him in his previous life, before he was an objective journalist,” Clinton said to a visibly annoyed Stephanopoulos.
Some have speculated that Clinton prefers appearing on Stephanopoulos’ show because she can often turn a question around to include him as a former staffer for her husband.
The rest of the program involved questions on issues and questions from voters.
As noted in a previous post here, ABC would have been far better served if a DIFFERENT journalist had done the actual questioning of Clinton during this segment. It isn’t the same as a judge bowing out if he has a conflict of interest but Stephanopoulos and ABC would have come out a lot better with their reputations intact.
Russert finishes today still being perceived as Tim “GOTCHA!” Russert; Stephanopoulos finishes the day being perceived by some as a former Clinton employee still seemingly intimidated by his former boss.
Howard Dean was on The Daily Show last night. The interview was all smiles and laughs but chock-a-block full of important and substantive information. It went on for an unusually long 9 minutes and ran right up into the commercial break.
Stewart commented on Jeremiah Wright on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday’s shows and — in contrast to every other cable news show — his clear and conclusive emphasis was on how miffed with the media he was because “this issue which should have only had enough fuel to last one news cycle has somehow lasted eight news cycles.”
Now Stewart’s is not a news show. It doesn’t have to obey the “News” rules, so it is not able to speak with that “News” authority. No, Stewart’s is a comedy show.
Any comic fool can rush in, where the angels of journalists and historians fear to tread. And as we know if we’ve ever watched any Shakespearian tragedy, fools can often be the wisest people on the stage.
Bob reminds us that comedy does not have to deal with the inconvenience of checking facts, getting multiple sources, or trying to get it right. Comedy gets to make stuff up! But it’s also able to intellectually explore lots of the stuff that neither journalism nor history can because they’re both so bound by facts.
That comic freedom has obvious attractions to intellectually active and politically engaged young minds. So I’m thinking that Stewart and his spin-off Stephen Colbert are out there dog-whistling to the youth-vote. And I’m wondering how accurate we’ve got that measured. Aren’t they — with their cell phones and non-traditional media habits — a demographic we’ve traditionally had trouble tracking anyway?
Maybe the Colbert bump holds a clue. It was in the news a while back as a legit phenom for Dems (Republicans need not apply). Thompson gives it the benefit of the doubt:
You know, some people might say, well how can this be? I think the burden of proof is on proving that there is no such thing as the Colbert bump. I think the common sense assumption would be that, yeah, there probably is. Until proven otherwise, that seems to be the commonsense thing that one would have.
We don’t usually link to Drudge Report because so many of his original news items have later proven to be inaccurate. But this Drudge item is backed up with info from elsewhere — and it could mean ABC News will be thrust into Democratic primary controversy once again.
Here’s his lead:
Just hours before the Indiana and North Carolina presidential primaries, ABC NEWS has offered to air a ‘town hall’ meeting with Hillary Clinton — to be hosted by former Clinton staffer George Stephanopoulos!
Embracing and racing through a brave new era of journalism, it is not clear if ABCNEWS will inform viewers of Stephanopoulos’s past employment.
Stephanopoulos helped run Mr. Clinton’s first presidential election campaign and acted as his press secretary and advisor on policy and strategy before joining ABC NEWS.
An executive at a rival network mocked, “We look forward to ABC holding the next town hall meeting with President Bush, hosted by Karl Rove!”
ABC will air the hour-long Hillary forum live from Indianapolis on Sunday.
There’s a lot more so go the link and read it all.
Drudge also notes that Clinton’s prime rival Senator Barack Obama will appear on Sunday on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” where he will be grilled by Tim Russert.
Some websites have called this the dueling Sunday showdown between the two — but these two events and the issues raised by them are NOT the same.
1. Clinton has paid for televised Town Hall type events in the past. ABC is basically giving her a chunk of time to take questions from voters. Did ABC offer Obama the same thing? If not, the event is setting up the network — rightfully or wrongfully — to charges that it is doing the show to bolster Clinton. If these charges are made, they are most likely “wrongfully,” since despite what partisans on all sides think, most news directors don’t rub their hands with glee and try to figure out ways to undermine one candidate and promote another.
2. Stephanopoulos was bitterly criticized by many progressives and by some mainstream media staffers for co-moderating a Clinton-Obama Pennsylvania debate where the first half seemed to be focused largely on putting Obama on the spot about political and process questions and talk radio subjects. Stephanopoulos was accused of using a question proposed by conservative talker Sean Hannity. Progressives also pointed to his past employment with Clinton and suggested he was working with her to undermine Obama. Again, rightfully or wrongfully, this will further undermine perceptions of him, particularly if he doesn’t throw unquestionable hardball questions at Clinton as tough, persistent and assertive as the ones he threw at Obama.
3. ABC News as a network could come off OK if Stephanopoulos conducts an event that isn’t the equivalent of giving Clinton a free Town Hall meeting that she would have otherwise paid for. This will be a difficult task: a) Obama partisans will want to see Stephanopoulos giving Clinton the same treatment he gave Obama or they’ll say it was biased (and they will use a very tough standard — in some cases wanting blatant bias against Clinton), b) unless Obama was offered the same format to be televised before the closely-fought primaries, some progressives will say the omission proved ABC was favoring one candidate.
4. Meet The Press is not the same as a Town Hall. That show is a traditional TV talking heads Sunday morning interview program. The guest is in a studio — not interacting with members of the public. Russert has the reputation of taking politicians apart on his show and while many (including Clinton) have survived and thrived, and few except Vice President Dick Cheney have viewed Russert and his show as a p.r. or easy-spin vehicle.
The Bottom Line: After the debate, Stephanopoulos was highly controversial, suspect in Obama quarters and basically-damaged goods. ABC would have been better served if it had arranged for another ABC reporter to conduct its Town Hall.
By its choice of a controversial host who many believe is not above the Democratic primary fray, ABC’s Town Hall will be closely watched — but perhaps in ways ABC and Stephanopoulos did not originally have in mind.
When I came into the newspaper business in 1967 at the tender age of 20, most reporters and editors drank like fish and smoked like chimneys (on the job), lived and died for the news scoop, type was set on massive linotype machines using molten lead, and when the presses of morning and evening newspapers rolled it was like printing money.
Today newsrooms are like vegetarian cafeterias, the scoop is most often the purview of cable news channels, or Internet sites, the entire typesetting and printing process is electronic, and when the presses roll for the remaining morning papers (there are no evening papers as such anymore), one can only wonder how many years it will be before they are silenced.
The reasons for the long downward spiral of the industry are complex and multi-layered, but basically boil down to something that I was saying well before I wrote my last story and quit a few weeks before the 9/11 attacks:
Newspapers will not survive if they don’t change and change damned quickly by embracing the Internet and hugging it to their collective bosom.
I take no satisfaction in being right. (And yes, it was weird to feel like a fireman without a ladder when the first aircraft slammed into the World Trade Center on that beautiful September morning.)
When the history of the New York Times‘ long slide from grace and profitability is written, there should be a chapter for op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd, who has gone from being a must-read to an obnoxious crank.
Don’t get me wrong. There are far too many op-ed political columnists who are as dull as dishwater (Broder and Collins come to mind), but agree with their opinions or not, there is usually some semblance of a factual underpinning for what they write.
Not so with Dowd. At least not any more, and to use an old newspaper term, she’s been phoning it in for some time now. Translation: MoDo may go through the motions of researching a subject but merely throws a bunch of words together — the edgier the better in her instance — and presto! she gots herself a column.
My break with the Queen of Snark coincided with the collapse of the TimesSelect subscription firewall last September, when hers and other op-ed columns could again be read for free.
I had declined to pony up for TimesSelect and quickly found that I didn’t miss the op-ed crew. (Frank Rich was an exception because, sentimental soul that I am, I have continued to buy the dead tree edition of the Sunday Times). Nevertheless, I was shocked when I resumed reading MoDo again and found that someone who was cogent and moderately amusing on her best days wasn’t having best days any more and had become a bottom-feeding trivializer.
Maybe yes, maybe no, but lately Birmingham, AL, has come under the microscope because ABC News 20/20 chose to do a sensationalist hidden-camera ratings-grabber of a story ostensibly to find out.
Since that time it has been ricocheting around the blogosphere and again today this popped into my RSS reader:
On Friday, ABC’s 20/20 tackled a palpable double-standard facing same-sex couples who are affectionate in public. […] Read the rest of this entry »
As we all know, this is the country with the largest reserves of drinking water in the world. And where is the water? In the Amazon! Read the rest of this entry »
One must hand it to the Beijing authorities. It takes tremendous gall for a regime that outlaws press freedom or open criticism of any kind, to liken the failure of Western reporters to parrot the Communist Party line to a lapse of journalistic ethics.
Yet another study finds Democrats and Republicans going to our separate media corners. This one from University of Georgia associate professor of journalism Barry Hollander as reported by the AJC’s Political Insider:
What he documented was a quiet stampede.
In 1998, 27 percent of Republicans and 25 percent of Democrats tuned in regularly to Atlanta-based CNN. Eight years later, the number of Democrats had risen to 29 percent.
But the number of Republicans who tuned in to CNN had shrunk to 19 percent. Gosh, where do you think they went?
Over the same period, Fox News’ share of Republican viewers jumped from 14 to 36 percent.
Hollander documented a media shift among Democrats to friendly sources, too, but the most dramatic change has occurred among Republicans. And, possibly, among more casual consumers of news.
“Republicans have dramatically dropped news sources that they perceive as being biased against their position. They’ve completely fled into Fox and have left CNN, broadcast news and all the others,” Hollander said.
Outrage over alleged liberalism could explain this, except for one inconvenient fact. Republicans, Hollander said, have even dropped C-SPAN, which — because of its verbatim approach — is widely considered neutral in content.
Something larger is happening, the University of Georgia professor asserts. “People have always hung out with people like themselves,” Hollander said. The water-cooler world that most people live in is a huge echo chamber of attitudes and ideas.
“It was always thought that the media was the savior in this,” Hollander said.
Of course, “always” is a relative term. And some of us don’t want or need a big media “savior.”
Hollander comes from a very particular media biastradition. His concerns are clear and sincere, this from the university press release for the study:
Television news audiences are divided along party lines like never before, according to a new University of Georgia study that warns the trend may have damaging consequences for political discourse and democracy in America.
“Ideology and partisanship used to be completely unrelated to the television news people consumed,” said study author Barry Hollander, associate professor of journalism in the UGA Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. “But they’ve become significant factors in the last five years.”
Hollander sounds certain that ideology and partisanship are bad and that certainty is the received wisdom of the day. But if we go back in history, say, to a time before journalism schools… Read the rest of this entry »
I watched the one hour Bill Moyers interview with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and came away impressed with the Reverend and disappointed that he has been so abused by the media.
To me, in context, the Reverend is passionate, articulate, reasonable and accurate. His comment about “God Dam America” makes sense to me as a condemnation of the selfish and vicious policies of our country that were often justified as with God’s blessing. He was expressing the startling conflict between the promise of America and our actions, and what God might conclude. In his comment that “the chickens came home to roost” on September 11, he said he was actually quoting a former US Ambassador. And the point he was making is that our nation has a history of perpetrating violence on on innocent bystanders who were in the way of America manifesting its destiny.
I am disappointed that Senator Obama felt he had to distance himself from this man to accommodate pervasive small mindedness.
It seems to me that every one of us can have something we said, or did, taken out of context and distorted in a way to make it into something it is not. I have owned a service business for over 25 years. Almost 20 years ago I stopped hugging my staff because one of them filed a legal complaint that my hugging others made her feel uncomfortable and sexually threatened. I was not prepared to spend thousands of dollars to somehow prove that my behavior was not abusive.
It is the nature of media to take items out of context in order to inflame a conflict. But that is handicapping our societies opportunities to progress towards mature discussion of issues.
It is the nature of amoral political operatives who believe that the ends justify the means just to get their candidate or party elected.
And it is the failure of good people to allow themselves to make conclusions based on the flimsiest of information.
I can only hope that the internet and bloggers can be a force to keep expanding responsible public dialog. And that political reforms can be made to create a level playing field for the truth.
April 22nd, 2008 by SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
Prophets of (Hillary Clinton’s) doom have again been proven wrong. The prophets’ strident claim that this Pa. primary elections would sound the death knell of Clinton’s ambition to get the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, has yet again fallen flat on its face.
To those living abroad, the American media/blogs might have contributed in a substantial manner in accentuating a virtual “civil war” within the Democratic Party. There is a visible air of “aggression” within and outside the US. Whether it is the US administration’s foreign policies, or the attitude of the supporters of Democratic presidential candidates, or the media/blogs, few seem to take recourse to a meaningful debate and discussion.
When the history of the New York Times‘ long slide from grace and profitability is written, there should be a chapter for op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd, who has gone from being a must-read to an obnoxious crank.
![[Het Parool, The Netherlands]](http://www.parool.nl/columnisten/joep_bertrams/beeld/041608-doodstraf.jpg)
