Category: Media

Scanning the four-page long account of Jayson Blair’s lies and deceptions, I can’t escape the feeling that all this hoohah over Blair on the Times’ part is misdirection. OK, the guy lied, fabricated, and plagiarized, that’s a fact and we all know it by now. But he wasn’t just some guy with a blog slinging off opinion and attitude as he saw fit, he was an employee of a major news organization with editors, publishers, and fact-checkers; why did it take four years for them to figure out what was going on, and why isn’t this question addressed by the Times?

That’s the real scandal, the fact that this sort of thing could easily happen again and again, and may well have happened in the past. It’s time the Times got with the real story and stopped all this foot-stamping hysteria already.

The media establishment has told us that responsible news organizations are more reliable than the blogs because of all these editors and fact-checkers, but who seriously believes that a blogger doing what Blair did could have survived more than a few months without being caught out? I sure don’t.

UPDATE: Drudge reports Times management is having an open forum with newsroom staff to discuss the Blair matter Wednesday:

You will be able to ask questions from the floor, or write them on cards that will be distributed at the door. In addition, we have set up an email address — [email protected] — where you can send questions, either in advance of the session or afterward.

Gee, I wonder if they’ll address questions from the general public sent to that email address?

While lots of people are noting that Naomi Wolf can’t handle Ali G’s putting her interview on HBO in America, most haven’t talked about the questions he asked her. New York Metro hints at them with this quote from their interview with the man:

Who have been your best interviews so far?

Me bestest one woz wit de world’s most famous lesbian — called Naomi Wolf — it went very very well, me cant go into pacifics but lets just say she weren’t actin very lesbianically by de end.

She has some hangup about being asked what it’s like to be the world’s most famous lesbian for some reason, which might just explain why the makers of the Algore 2000 device had her program the “masculinity” module.

An off-hand post on the demise of the idiotic Mr. Sterling show continues to generate heat from Sterling’s disappointed minions (45 messages so far), many of whom think I have to power to dictate NBC’s programming schedule. If I did, I’d cancel The West Wing and replace it with an hour-long version of South Park.

I’m on blog hiatus until the invasion starts, which shouldn’t be too much longer. Best of luck to our fighting men (and women), and to the people of Iraq.

Moira has a lot of pictures on her Inappropriate Response blog – go over there and help use up her bandwidth quota.

Salon founder David Talbot’s review of Eric Alterman’s media book is the clearest indication I’ve seen that Salon is indeed going down the tubes this time. I’ve been predicting their imminent demise for a while now, reasoning that an enterprise that’s blown 80 million investor dollars and continues to lose money while living in pricey corporate digs and carrying an overhead that would make an oil sheik blush can’t be long for this world, but they’ve managed to stay comatose but alive thanks to donations from misguided rich guys like John Warnock.

The first sign that the donors aren’t coming through was the combative weblog post by Scott Rosenberg blasting Salon’s critics in the financial press, but this latest diatribe of Talbot’s really seals the deal for me. It’s a bitter, warped, and combative assault on the so-called conservative-dominated media, highlighting conservative dominance of small-market media such as radio and cable news, while ignoring the liberal bastions in the much larger and more influential broadcast TV news and newspapers. He can’t ignore broadcast TV completely, of course, so he lets us in on the secrets that Cokie Roberts and George Stephanopoulos are secret tools of the VRWC, which is proved because ABC didn’t summarily fire token conservative George Will when Stephanopoulos took over the anchor’s chair of ABC’s lackluster This Week show a few weeks ago. The facts that Stephanopoulos is a veteran of the Clinton White House who left after tiring of Slick Willie’s constant lying to his own press staff or that Cokie Roberts’ mom and dad were Lindy and Hale Boggs, among the most powerful Congressional Democrats of their era, are insignificant in this analysis, of course, as is the fact that the New York Times has been relentlessly Anti-Bush since Florida and more shrill every day.

Talbot’s subtext is that Salon was forced out by a right-wing conspiracy so powerful it tells liberals what to watch, read, and hear, and not because of his inability to watch the bottom line or put out a credible story amidst his soft porn and infotainment occasionally.

If it was competition that drove Salon to the brink, it clearly wasn’t competition from the right. There are still plenty of hard core Democrats and Greens who aren’t buying what Fox News is selling, and they’re not all welfare queens and crack heads. A more plausible story is that Salon’s competition is the New York Times, a publication with a strong on-line presence and an ideology, under Howell Raines, that’s indistinguishable from Salon from page 1 to the news to the Op-Eds. Left-wing partisan hacks can fill their bellies and their heads with more free on-line fare from the Times in a day than Salon offers in a month, and still have money left over to buy their porn at the news stand. Talbot’s niche has been taken over by better journalists, better marketers, and better thinkers, and all his whining about Murdoch and Scaife’s conspiracies doesn’t change the facts.

Talbot’s out-of-touch with his own readers, and no publisher who suffers from that condition can long survive.

UPDATE: Foreign devil Tim Blair has some observations on Mr. Talbot as well.

“Jealousy is for women, men are not supposed to be jealous”. Meg Hourihan snarks her ex-partner Evan Williams for his successful sale of Pyra Labs to Google, to wit:

I’ve noticed that both Ev and Jason Shellen, following Google’s acquisition of Pyra, now have disclaimers on their websites stating that everything written there is their personal opinion and not the views of their employer. I wonder if you see them in person if they have a similar message tattooed on their foreheads?

Nasty, isn’t it? Sounds like she’s upset she didn’t stick around Pyra for the sale, or maybe because Google/Pyra makes her current gig with Nick Denton much less tenable than it might have been, or maybe she’s just a crank. Either way, it’s a fine example of snark, yoking nasty images of tatooed masses to some obviously personal issues.

The Mercury News is now upset with President Bush for not dictating security policies to ISPs and others:

But the Internet is also a medium where anyone’s poor security can affect everyone else. In such an environment, setting basic standards makes sense. Why not require ISPs to secure their broadband customers with firewalls?

Editorial nonsense from Silicon Valley’s paper of record is routine and unremarkable, but this seems to set a new standard of stupidity and arrogance.

At long last:

Feb. 27, 2003 — Fred Rogers, who for more than 30 years touched the lives of children and parents as host of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, died of stomach cancer Thursday at age 74.

Thank God. Now we can raise a generation of children who don’t believe each and every one is “special” even if they never do anything special. Fred Rogers’ legacy is narcissism, nothing more and nothing less. His special effects really sucked, too.

Patio Pundit is a fan of I’m A Celebrity — Get Me Out Of Here!, the great reality show on ABC where semi-famous people are forced to undergo enormous suffering for charity. It’s a great concept, and I agree with Patio’s suggestions for future shows.