Category: Business

Having been unemployed for a few months, I can sympathize with Jayson Blair’s current employment status. Therefore, I would like to offer him a lead for his next blitz of resume-bombing: try Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show on Comedy Central. Your style of reportage would fit beautifully with their existing format, you’d get to be on TV, there’s very little travel involved, and, like the Times, the show has no pesky fact-checkers to muck up your prose.

What could be better?

The illustrious Dr. Frank has a new CD out, called Eight Little Songs:

This home-made CD contains eight new songs, recorded in Dr. Frank’s bedroom. The whole idea behind the CD is explained here– comments and feedback are encouraged. These CDs were originally intended to be sold only at shows, but there have been a lot of requests for mail order from people who couldn’t make to the shows, so we’re going to give it a try.

I’ve heard them all, and it’s great stuff, so check it out.

The New York Times reports on their massive group therapy session over Jayson Blair:

“Our paper has a commitment to diversity and by all accounts he appeared to be a promising young minority reporter,” Mr. Raines said. “I believe in aggressively providing hiring and career opportunities for minorities.”

“Does that mean I personally favored Jayson?” he added, a moment later. “Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance too many by not stopping his appointment to the sniper team. When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes.”

I think the point is that Mr. Raines is paid to be an executive editor of a major daily paper, not to be a “white man from Alabama,” and as such he’s a dismal failure. His paper is losing credibility and circulation, his quixotic campaigns, like one on behalf of rich, white, female golfers in Georgia and another one against the liberation of the Iraqis, are an embarassment to the entire staff, and the policy of removing the firewall between the Op-Ed pages and the news pages has hurt the paper and the people it serves enormously.

He should resign.

NBC has officially axed Mr. Sterling:

Missing from the fall lineup and presumed to be dead are “In-Laws,” “Just Shoot Me,” “Hidden Hills,” “Watching Ellie” (the “Seinfeld” curse strikes again!), “Mister Sterling” and “A.U.S.A.”

…which proves studio dawgs aren’t as dumb as they appear to be. In its place:

“Miss/Match” stars Alicia Silverstone and Ryan O’Neal. Silverstone plays a divorce lawyer working for her father (O’Neal). Dad, in turn, has a knack for matchmaking. This series has been described as “lighthearted.”

sounds like progress. Now if they’d just added Baghdad Bob to the show, they might have had a chance.

Gray Davis, you’re next, sucka.

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.