From Amanda Terkel in the Huffington Post (2/1/12):

Newt Gingrich Florida Primary Results 2012: The Candidate Who Refuses to Operate Within Reality

...From the beginning to the end of Gingrich's election night party, the campaign and its supporters seemed to be operating outside of realities, denying the importance of this large state's primary contest and insisting that victory was going to be theirs as soon as voters opened their eyes and truly saw Florida winner Mitt Romney as a "Massachusetts moderate." Gingrich, in fact, never even congratulated Romney on his win.

I'm a fan of Terkel's work, but this genre of punditry is unfortunate. At the moment (Real Clear Politics, 2/1/12), Gingrich is the top choice of Republican voters nationwide, according to surveys by Gallup, NBC/Wall Street Journal and Rassmussen. True, Romney has major advantages in terms of fundraising, organization and party support.  But if Gingrich chooses to believe that being the candidate more Republican voters want makes him the candidate most likely to be nominated, that hardly makes him delusional.

Even if he were well behind in the polls, but still wanted to give voters a chance to hear his message and decide whether or not he deserved their support--is that really a reason to ridicule him? More than 90 percent of the nation's voters have yet to have a chance to take part in the nominating process; it's a little early to mock anyone for not having the same foresight as the political pundits who know the results are already a foregone conclusion.

No comment.

NBC Nightly News (1/29/12)

LESTER HOLT:

And a sign of the times tonight on a football field in Hawaii. The NFL is relaxing its strict social media policy and allowing players to use Twitter to interact with fans during the Pro Bowl in Honolulu. There'll be one designated computer on each sideline, no smartphones allowed. Players will be tweeting with the hashtag probowl. And by the way, you can catch the game coming up next, here on NBC.

Arianna Huffington had an announcement (1/19/12) about a new section in her Huffington Post:

I'm delighted to announce the launch of Global Motherhood, a new section within HuffPost Impact dedicated to the health and well being of mothers and babies around the world, and sponsored by Johnson & Johnson.

It goes without saying that it's a bad idea in general to have a corporation in the health industry sponsoring health coverage; the potential for conflict of interest is obvious. But given that these kinds of special sections are typically created to meet an advertiser's need--an impression strengthened by the fact that the second paragraph of Huffington's announcement focuses on Johnson & Johnson's efforts to "use technology to improve the lives of mothers and babies"--one has to ask, why this section for this advertiser?

You don't have to dig very far back into the Huffington Post archives to get a clue. On November 1, HuffPost Parents posted this AP report:

The piece described a boycott launched against the Johnson & Johnson by the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, which "has unsuccessfully been urging the world's largest healthcare company for 2 1/2 years to remove the trace amounts of potentially cancer-causing chemicals--dioxane and a substance called quaternium-15 that releases formaldehyde--from Johnson's Baby Shampoo, one of its signature products."

After Johnson & Johnson reached an agreement with the campaign to phase out the chemicals in the U.S. market, HuffPost Healthy Living (12/28/11) ran this post by Samuel Epstein, an expert on cancer at the University of Illinois School of Public Health:

Epstein's post pointed out the geographically limited nature of the company's agreement and the fact that its shampoo contains a third chemical, nitrosamine, that is also a potential cancer risk.

To be sure, as Jezebel (1/20/12) pointed out, there are numerous health concerns with Johnson & Johnson products--from birth control patches to insulin pumps, from the anti-psychotic drug Risperdal to Tylenol and Motrin. But if your news outlet reveals that a product might be giving kids' cancer and then the makers of that product offer you a sponsorship deal, it's a good bet that they aren't doing so because they're grateful to you for keeping them on their toes.

Remember last week's uproar about the New York Times and factchecking? In today's paper, we see a great example of how this works.

Former Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd's new job is as a lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America, which means he's leading the charge in support of SOPA, the bill that big media companies believe will stop online "piracy." Opponents see it as a potentially devastating blow to free speech on the Internet, and they seem to have had great success in turning the tide of the debate. This is not good news for people like Dodd, the Times reports:

Mr. Dodd said Internet companies might well change Washington, but not necessarily for the better with their ability to spread their message globally, without regulation or factchecking.

"It's a new day," he added. "Brace yourselves."

That's right, people--through the magic of the Internet, misinformation will spread without being checked. Not like the old days, when newspapers stepped in to stop this stuff from spreading. Just two paragraphs later, the Times reports this claim from the MPAA:

The Motion Picture Association of America says its industry brings back more export income than aerospace, automobiles or agriculture, and that piracy costs the country as many as 100,000 jobs.

Do the MPAA's jobs claims add up? They've been challenged on their research throughout this debate; is there any reason to believe these figures are any more reliable? It's something readers can check for themselves on the Internet. But that's where nothing is ever factchecked.

New York Times reporter David Carr (12/19/11) takes a look at comedian Louis C.K.'s recent decision to webcast his own comedy special:

A scabrous and successful champion of the everyman, Louis C. K. decided last week to go direct with his fans: no cable special, no middleman, just a simple download for $5 on his website to see his comedy show Louis C. K.: Live at the Beacon Theater.

The show could be viewed as the consumer wished, with no rights protection or expensive subscription. A buy-it-and-watch-it proposition, no cable company involved. He was also, of course, enabling people to watch it free--without digital rights management, it was there for the pirating--and some went right to the torrent sites and did so.

How many people did? Close to 200,000, which means the comedian could earn somewhere in the neighborhood of $750,000. But more interesting was his take on the modern media landscape:

"OK, so NBC is this huge company and they have all these studios and these satellites to beam stuff out," he said, "but on the Web, both NBC.com and LouisCK.com have the same amount of bandwidth. We are equals and there are things you can do with that. This has been a fun little experiment."

That, in a nutshell, is what the discussion about net neutrality should be about.

PBS has a website called MediaShift, billed as "Your Guide to the Digital Media Revolution." Based on an alarming post this week headlined "Tear Down the Wall Between Business and Editorial!" (12/7/11), the revolution looks rather revolting.

The piece is written by Dorian Benkoil, who "handles marketing and sales strategies for MediaShift, and is the business columnist for the site"--a job description that suggests that PBS has already torn down the wall between business and editorial, since those responsibilities would seem to put you in a constant position of conflict of interest. (He earlier worked as "a liaison between the sales and editorial sides" at ABCNews.com.)

The piece is a primer on "how to blur the lines in an intelligent and ethical way," in the words of MediaShift managing editor Courtney Lowery Cowgill. It offers such tips as "If Sales Influences Editorial, It's OK," and insights like:

It's easy to demean "link bait" such as "Top 10" or "How To" lists, but if your users like and share them, and they generate profitable page views, is there really harm? If there's sponsor interest, all the better.

To be sure, the piece includes caveats, like: "You do need core principles that can't be bent--even if that means the business doesn't meet payroll." But it seems completely oblivious to the dangers of basing your business model on giving the sponsors what they want. It's hard to maintain a line in the sand when you've started out with the intention of blurring that line--ethically, intelligently or otherwise.

The most striking thing about the column is its celebration of profit-making as a liberating force:

Profit is what lets you not only continue another day, but also gives you the freedom to determine your own mission.... The more profit your company makes, the more leeway it has to do its work, to remain independent of government or other interference, and the more freedom to do good work.

Well, no. The point of a for-profit business is to make money, not "to do good work"; the more profit your company makes, the more it will strive to make in the future, so it can show stockholders an ever-expanding return on their investment. The pressure this puts on journalists to warp their copy is why the wall between business and editorial was made one of journalism's "core principles that can't be bent."

And the difficulty of maintaining such principles in the face of the profit imperative is why PBS was set up in the first place, to provide a home for journalism free from the obligation to please sponsors. But when PBS has sales and marketing directors who also double as business columnists, I guess that kind of journalism needs to find a new home.

That's not my opinion-- that's what I learned reading the New York Times today (6/27/11). Jeremy Peters profiles the right-wing scam artist, telling readers (emphasis added):

Some of his reader-generated scoops have reverberated all the way to the halls of the United States Capitol, like the Weiner photos and undercover video he released of ACORN workers offering advice on how to evade taxes and conceal child prostitution. After the videos went viral Congress ended grants to ACORN, and federal agencies severed ties with the group.

That wasn't the lesson of the ACORN videos at all. After  a long battle, the Times admitted that much of its coverage of the Breitbart/James O'Keefe videos was misleading. The paper told readers that O'Keefe actually went into ACORN offices dressed in a ridiculous "pimp" get-up. He did not.

What the Times would not concede, though, was that the actual videos show very little in the way of tax evasion and prostitution advice. But that's the story Breitbart and O'Keefe were pushing; watching the actual videos doesn't provide much, if any, support for those claims. But they're still being made in the New York Times--which might be Breitbart's greatest triumph.

Peters goes on:

The stories and videos Mr. Breitbart plays up on his websites--which include Big Government, Big Journalism and Big Hollywood--tend to act as political Rorschach tests. If you agree with him, you think what he does is citizen journalism. If you don't, his work is little more than crowd-sourced political sabotage that freely distorts the facts.

This is absurd.

If you think that Breitbart distorts the facts, that's because HE DOES. To suggest otherwise is to assert that there's no way to ever know the truth about anything.  Is that the standard in "objective" journalism?

Seymour Hersh reports in the New Yorker (6/6/11--subscription required) that there is s virtually no evidence Iran has a nuclear weapons program, despite huge  efforts on the part of the U.S. to prove otherwise. Though Hersh's findings do not contradict the past two National Intelligence Estimates, they do fly in the face of long-held official and corporate media views.

Corporate media routinely treat the alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program as a matter of fact. New York Times reporter Michael Gordon has done it at least twice (2/24/03, 10/19/04), in one case suggesting that a U.S.-friendly regime in Iraq might pressure "Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program." With little variation in wording Gordon's Times colleagues Patrick Tyler  (6/27/05) and Scott Shane (3/26/05) have done the same.  So has the Washington Post's Walter Pincus and Karen DeYoung (9/28/09), and  Post editors and editorials routinely treat Iran's nuke program as a proven fact (e.g., 9/11/10, 6/17/09).

So it's not a big surprise that Hersh is coming under fire in in a corporate media which has largely internalized successive White House claims on Iran.

In a Politico report flagged by Glenn Greenwald , White House sources are quoted disparaging Hersh's New Yorker piece in a report the concludes by reminding readers that Hersh has been criticized in the past for relying too much on anonymous sources. Just a little problem with that angle though, as Greenwald points out:

That's the criticism that ends an article that relies exclusively on anonymous government sources, appearing in a D.C. gossip rag notorious for granting anonymity to any powerful figure who requests it for any or no reason.  The difference, of course, is that the Pulitzer Prize-winning, five-time-Polk-Award-recipient investigative journalist who uncovered the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib scandal grants anonymity to those who are challenging the official claims of those in power (that's called "journalism"), while Politico uses it (as it did here) to serve those in power and shield them from all accountability as they spew their propaganda (which is called being a "lowly, rank Royal Court propagandist").

The San Francisco Chronicle is apparently in trouble with the White House for posting video of a protest against the White House's treatment of suspected WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning. The Chronicle's Carolyn Lochhead reports:

The White House threatened Thursday to exclude the San Francisco Chronicle from pooled coverage of its events in the Bay Area after the paper posted a video of a protest at a San Francisco fundraiser for President Obama last week, Chronicle editor Ward Bushee said. White House guidelines governing press coverage of such events are too restrictive, Bushee said, and the newspaper was within its rights to film the protest and post the video.

Chronicle reporter Carla Marinucci was the designated "pool" reporter at an Obama fundraiser--meaning that her write-up would be shared with other reporters who were not allowed into the event.

But something truly newsworthy happened--and she reported it:

At the St. Regis event, a group of protesters who paid collectively $76,000 to attend the fundraiser interrupted Obama with a song complaining about the administration's treatment of PFC Bradley Manning, the soldier who allegedly leaked U.S. classified documents to the WikiLeaks website.

As part of a "print-only pool," Marinucci was limited by White House guidelines to provide a print-only report, but Marinucci also took a video of the protest, which she posted in her written story on the online edition of the Chronicle at SFGate.com and on its politics blog after she sent her written pool report.

The Chronicle's story closes with this ironic point about the White House's view of technology and information-sharing:

At Facebook the day before the San Francisco fundraiser, Obama said, "The main reason we wanted to do this is, first of all, because more and more people, especially young people, are getting their information through different media. And obviously, what all of you have built together is helping to revolutionize how people get information, how they process information, how they're connecting with each other."

Apparently Marinucci posting a video was a little too much revolutionizing.

The New York Times and London Guardian both published stories yesterday (4/25/11) examining the WikiLeaks documents about the Guantanamo prison. While obviously just a snapshot, it is interesting to see how the papers have headlined their findings.

The Guardian:

The New York Times:

And today the Times stresses the potential danger allegedly posed by those imprisoned there:

This is not to suggest that the Times' pieces are particularly bad. But the difference in emphasis is striking--and reminiscent of how differently the papers treated previous WikiLeaks disclosures.

A Drudge Report headline today (4/6/11) represents the tip of the rotten iceberg:

RACE BASE: Obama looks to Rev. Al Sharpton for help in re-election...

USA Today has a long piece (3/17/11) by Martha Moore about video hoax artist James O'Keefe's NPR project. The article does a pretty good job of running down the deceptions in O'Keefe's video. That's good. This, however, is not:

The video follows a long, if not always honorable, tradition of muckraking exposés. It also is a stepchild to the political tactic of tracking an opponent with video until a gaffe occurs, then capitalizing on it. The sting's impact was magnified by the quick dissemination-without-scrutiny that is a hallmark of Internet-driven media.

O'Keefe's video has nothing to do with muckraking. And please don't blame the Internet for the fact that journalists apparently can't be bothered to care whether a source is reliable.

That's annoying. But this part is at least somewhat amusing:

O'Keefe's tactics combine "the guerrilla of Borat, the gotcha of Dateline…and the gonzo approach of Hunter S. Thompson," O'Keefe said in an interview.

I hope if I'm ever profiled by USA Today, I'll get to sing my own praises like that.

Drudge Report headline, right now:

CLAIM: Iran Arranging to Buy Yellowcake in Africa...

Is my computer a time machine, traveling back to 2002-03?

WikiLeaks' Julian Assange believes people are out to smear him and his organization. That much seems clear. Today the New York Times' Ravi Somaiya writes a piece that would seem to confirm those suspicions.

The headline today:

Assange Complains of Jewish Smear Campaign

The issue here is what an editor at the British magazine Private Eye says Assange told him--that there is, in the Times' words, "a Jewish-led conspiracy to smear his organization."

There's no way for the Times to verify this information, as Glenn Greenwald points out at Salon. So why the definitive-sounding headline?

And the background to Assange's "rambling phone call" raises more questions about the Times story.  The paper reports that Assange

was especially angry about a Private Eye report that Israel Shamir, an Assange associate in Russia, was a Holocaust denier. Mr. Assange complained that the article was part of a campaign by Jewish reporters in London to smear WikiLeaks.

That makes it sound like:

a) Assange has some formal association with Israel Shamir, a Holocaust denier;

b) Assange is angry that this magazine reported that Israel Shamir is a Holocaust denier.

But Assange's anger actually seems to stem from the suggestion that he has a formal relationship with Shamir. As a WikiLeaks statement put it:

Israel Shamir has never worked or volunteered for WikiLeaks, in any manner, whatsoever. He has never written for WikiLeaks or any associated organization, under any name and we have no plan that he do so. He is not an "agent" of WikiLeaks. He has never been an employee of WikiLeaks and has never received monies from WikiLeaks or given monies to WikiLeaks or any related organization or individual. However, he has worked for the BBC, Haaretz and many other reputable organizations.

WikiLeaks went on to say that "Shamir was able to search through a limited portion of the cables with a view to writing articles for a range of Russian media." It's possible that WikiLeaks is downplaying Shamir's role; other accounts portray him as having a somewhat closer connection to the organization. But Assange's and WikiLeaks' public pronouncements take issue with the linking of themselves to Shamir, not the exposure of his anti-Semitism (which seems to be quite real).

You get a very different impression from the headline and thrust of the Times piece, which would lead you to believe that Assange consorts with anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers, gets angry when they are exposed as such and alleges that a Jewish conspiracy is out to get him.

It's clear that Assange does believe that people are out to spread misinformation about him and his group. The Times story won't do much to convince him that he's wrong.

The long 60 Minutes segment on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange from last night (1/30/11) is definitely worth a look. But this set-up from correspondent Steve Kroft was certainly odd:

Julian Assange is not your average journalist or publisher, and some have argued that he is not really a journalist at all. He is an anti-establishment ideologue with conspiratorial views. He believes large government institutions use secrecy to suppress the truth and he distrusts the mainstream media for playing along.

Assange believes the government keeps important secrets? And that mainstream media play along? That is kooky.