Apt. 11D

Journalism's Age of Shame

Eric Alterman chastises the media for buying what Breitbart has to sell them. Instead of eating crow and repenting for circulating the edited Sherrod tapes, they apologized for Breitbart and equated his lies with the Journolist controversy. Alterman is pissed.

And the MSM machers? Well, they can't help but notice that they got taken this time, but they prefer to chalk it up to "ideology." "There's been this proliferation of partisan media—whether it's MSNBC and Fox at night, or it's Breitbart on the right or Huffington Post on the left," complains Politico executive editor James VandeHei, and it makes honest folk like MSM reporters "overreact." Writing with Politico editor in chief John Harris, VandeHei pronounces the dawning of an "Age of Rage," equating Breitbart and company's perversion of the truth with the fact that some liberal journalists and academics participated in occasionally less than polite discussions about conservatives (and one another). The private discussions of this listserv, called "Journolist"—discussed in my previous column—were either hacked by or leaked to Tucker Carlson's right-wing website, The Daily Caller, and, as with the Sherrod tape, edited for the purposes of deception and false accusation. In the careless reasoning of the Politico honchos, these discussions deserved equation with Breitbart's nefarious techniques because both "featured sharp personal attacks against political opponents. Both revolved around indignant claims from people claiming to be victims of bias and the corrupt ideological agendas of their opponents—all the while stoking and profiting from the bias and conspiratorial instincts of partisans on their own side." As a result, they worry, "Responsible people in power and in the mainstream media are only beginning to grapple with this new environment—in which facts hardly matter except as they can be used as weapon or shield in a nonstop ideological war."

Instead, of demanding facts, the mainstream media is too cowed by charges of being liberal to check conservative hacks, like Breitbart. Excellent article. 

Get ready for a big lawsuit, Mr. Breitbart.

The Nature of a Politician

Once a week, David Brooks and Gail Collins have quick little debates on one of the New York Times blogs. I often like these off-the-cuff discussion better than their actual columns. Last week they chatted about Disney Parks, David Weigel, and whether or not pundits should mock political figure. (via James Joyner)

David Brooks: But it’s harder to be scathing when you actually know the people. Occasionally you will run into a really bad person, but that’s pretty rare. Most people in public life are in it for the right reasons. They’re representing a point of view or a group. They’re faced with horrendous character tests — a system that perpetually tempts them to put loyalty to the team ahead of loyalty to the truth. I find the most accurate approach is to view them with sympathetic scrutiny but rarely outright scorn.

Of course scorn is more fun to write, but we’re supposed to be writing for the readers, not for ourselves.

Gail Collins: On behalf of the scorn contingent, I have to protest. I’m with you about there being very few evil people in politics, but there are a LOT of self-satisfied, shallow careerists, and I was put on this earth to make fun of them.

It's kinda quaint that in this world of blogs and twitter, people are still concerned that they could be too harsh on politicians. I'm with Collins on this one. Politicians should be mocked.

Weigel Explains

Weigel explains.

A Victory for Dinosaur MSM

When a blogger breaks a story, there's always one corner of the blogosphere that chants "WIN FOR THE BLOGGERS!," "EAT THAT, MSM," "WHY MSM WILL DIE A HORRIBLE DEATH AND BLOGGERS WILL DANCE ON THEIR GRAVES."

So, how about this major Rolling Stone article? Is this a victory for stoner media? I don't think anybody's talked about a Rolling Stone article, since Hunter Thompson was writing about the Kentucky Derby. (Yes, Wikipedia just told me that Thompson didn't write that piece for Rolling Stone, but I want to keep the link anyway, because I love that essay.)

UPDATE: Here's the actual article, Runaway General. Friends who never talk about politics are call me to ask for the link. Wow.

UPDATE2: Jon Stewart mocks the media's reaction to the Rolling Stone article. 

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Advertisements and Children

My buddy, Erin, has started a cool new blog aimed at educating parents about the impact of marketing and media on children. She's done a series of blog posts on FOX TV, which shows ads for The Family Guy during episodes of The Simpsons.

I was sitting down to watch the new episode [of the Simpsons] with my boys last night, and before it started, there was a promo for Family Guy in which the mother is dressed in a dominatrix costume, holding a whip, and the weird little old man baby is strung up by wrists and ankles in his diaper. So now there's an image of some deviant sexual behavior in the brain of my sweet little 11-year-old boy. How does this effect his mind, and his development? It made me very angry. Why can't we watch a fun show together without an assault on my values and on my kids health? I don't even mention the 14-year-old: He's probably seen it and worse.

She finds it ironic that a network that runs news shows with grumpy men grumbling about family values also runs entertainment shows that treat kids to images of dominatrices.

She filed a complaint with the FCC and is blogging up a storm.

Citations and Hyperlinks

A few months ago, my brother wrote a story about a woman who passed away and left 2,000 descendants. He wrote it for a small-ish newpaper that serves the Hudson Valley in New York. A few weeks later, the New York Times wrote nearly an identical column and even used one of the photographs from the original story. Clearly, the author had learned of the story though my brother's article. My brother and his local paper were never mentioned in the article, and I wrote a huffy blog post about it.

I understand that this happens all the time. Journalists and editors don't come up with ideas for stories out of the ether. They get story ideas from other newspapers and from conversations with others. They also get a lot of ideas from the blogosphere. If there's a lot of buzz about a topic in the blogosphere, that topic will be in the media within a week. I've seen it happen quite a bit, and journalists have admitted as much to me.

It's just annoying that the media doesn't give credit to the source of ideas, especially ideas that are in printed form in other newspapers or in the blogosphere. It's more than annoying. In academia, we cite EVERYTHING. Everything sentence will have a long string of citations. In the blogging world, we always provide a link to the where we first read the article. It's bad form to not include that "hat tip."

Lately, there has been a call for major media to embrace the hyperlink and to give credit to idea sources. See Alex Weprin and Danny Sullivan.

Making Money with New Media

How about that schmuck who left the prototype of the new iPhone in a bar? Was it a cool marketing ploy or was the guy loaded?

Have the bad jokes started yet? A rabbi, a priest and a drunk Apple engineer walk into a bar and....

And how about the Nick Denton who bought the iPhone and put it up on his Gizmodo website? He says that he didn't end up making money from the huge traffic upsurge that day. The advertising space was pre-paid. But a fraction of those new visitors will show up again. He's just permanently increased his traffic numbers and he can raise advertising rates for the future.

UPDATE: Police seize computer of Gizmodo editor.

Dooce in DC

Flipping through the mommyblogger posts in Google Reader, I see that there was some drama over the weekend.

Last week, Heather Armstrong, aka Dooce, was invited to attend a Forum on Workplace Flexibility at the White House. Dooce is perhaps the most well-known mommyblogger. Her monthly readership is in the millions. Pioneer Woman's readership is larger, but she's more well-known as a food blogger rather than a mommyblogger. I've been reading Dooce for years and really like her. She's been able to translate her skills with photography and graphic arts into a successful business that supports her family. Quite cool.

It was somewhat surprising that the White House reached out to a mommyblogger to be involved in this conference. Most of the other attendees were owners of big businesses or public policy experts. Mommybloggers aren't known for their involvement in politics, although it is arguable that politics is very much of a subtext in their rants about getting their husbands to help out around the house and their struggles to make dinner after a long day of work.

It was, however, a very smart thing to invite a blogger to this forum, especially one with such a large following. She told her readers that she was there. She and her husband tweeted information to her followers, including information about her panel which was streamed live over the Internet. CNN and other mainstream newspapers picked up the story. It brought a lot of attention to a very ordinary one-day conference, which was simply aimed at providing networking opportunities and letting the First Lady give a nice speech. Heather brought sex appeal to an event that would have been totally ignored. Nice.

But some of the mommybloggers mocked the decision to invite Dooce. Dooce got ticked off. I guess there was some catfights in Twitter. Whatever.

You know that there are some blogs that are just aimed at rebuking other bloggers or columnists. That's it. They don't write anything original themselves. They just wait until their most hated person in the whole world writes something, and then they make fun of it. I came across a blog that is aimed at making fun of everything that Megan McArdle writes. I thought about running an intervention on the blogger, because it struck me as the saddest thing I had ever seen. /tangent

Bringing Dooce to the White House was also a good thing, because it helped to blur the stark line between politics and women. A majority of bloggers are women, but few blog about politics and instead deal with "lifestyle" topics, which is fine. I like reading about kids and shoes and new cushions for the sofa, but a lifestyle can go beyond those topics, too. Politics can be part of a lifestyle, too.

Ramapo Mountain

In this week's New Yorker, Ben McGrath writes about the people of the Ramapo Mountain, known as the Jackson Whites. (Sadly, the article is behind a paywall. I'll save it for my local friends without a subscription.)

I live about twenty minutes from Ramapo Mountain. In nicer weather, we frequently take the kids up there for hikes. I also taught at Ramapo College for two and a half years, so I have some affinity for that area. 

McGrath does an adequate job describing the unique culture that has been living a stone's throw from Manhattan for generations. But perhaps the best writing about the area and the troubles that they have faced was in a series of articles done by the Bergen Record several years ago. It was a fine bit of reporting that hopefully won them some awards.

The Ramapo Mountains have been settled since the 1700s. The bullets from Revolutionary War muskets were formed with iron found in the mines in the mountains. In the 50s and 60s, the Ford Motor Company built paint plants up there. As part of the paint making process, sludge or waste from plant accumulated. The executives didn't know what to do with the sludge at first. Then they noticed all the holes in ground from the 200 year old abandoned iron mines. Aha! They dumped the sludge down the holes. Really smart, right?

Well, all the sludge has been bubbling to the ground in people's backyards and on the edges of playgrounds and everybody has thyroid cancer. There have been lawsuits, but, so far, Ford has been able to avoid paying damages to the local people.

Bergen County is a highly developed, suburban area. Real estate starts at $350,000 for a tiny home with an outdated kitchen. I was surfing the real estate websites last night and looking at houses that were advertised as teardowns that cost $500,000. Developers fight over little plots of land to build $900,000 McMansions with two feet of backyard space. So, Ramapo Mountain is prime space for development. It's one of the few untouched parts of our county.

McGrath explains the tension that is arising from the encroachment of developers and local law enforcement into the community of people who live there. It's like the Saddle River Junior league set up a garden party in the middle of Appalachia. And all within the shade of the Empire State building.

Giving Credit

Today's New York Times had an article on a woman in the Hasidic community in Orange County, who died at the age of 93 leaving 2,000 descendants. It's a wonderful story about a woman who was the honored guest at so many family functions that a son had to act as her social secretary.

Too bad that my brother wrote that story a month ago for the Times Herald Record. The New York Times even used one of the photographs from his front page article. They could have just run his story and given him the byline.

It's easier to keep track of your children and grandchildren than it is to keep track of your ideas and words.