Category: Media, Journalism & Blogs

Read this Daily Howler entry on how Fahrenheit 911 brings out the class instincts of the media elite.

Moore brings a powerful class perspective to Fahrenheit 9/11—a perspective rarely seen, and often punished, in our celebrity press corps. It is rarely expressed for an obvious reason. Our modern press is itself a high elite; despite pious tales about Buffalo boyhoods, its opinion leaders are all multimillionaires, and even hard-charging young elite scribes know they’re on the millionaire track—and they’re careful not to blow it by getting outside the narrow confines of their elders’ world view. Most of these upscale scribes have little class perspective to suppress in the first place. But beyond that, they have no incentive to challenge their group’s perspectives, and that helps explain the nasty treatment Moore’s film has received in the press. After all, is there any elite more phony and fake than the one that is currently trashing Moore’s film? And make no mistake—these overpaid and pampered poodles tend to identify, not with Moore, but with the powdered phonies he mocks.

All sorts of great things to see and hear online:

Frontline: The War Behind Closed Doors
An episode of Frontline from more than a year ago that shows the fight within the Bush administration over whether or not to go to war with Iraq. Watch the entire episode online.

Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism
In the past two weeks I spent $9.50 on Dodgeball and $9 on Anchorman. Spending $9.95 plus shipping on this seems like a relative bargain. (I’m not saying I didn’t like Anchorman)

The Hunting of the President
No, it has nothing to do with Bush. Documentary/advocacy film that covers the systematic campaign to destroy President Clinton. Huh. There’s a trend happening here…

And one last one just for laughs: This Land: Starring George Bush and John Kerry

Bob Edwards will be leaving his position as host of NPR’s Morning Edition at the end of April — involuntarily, it appears. It’s something of a shock to imagine Morning Edition without him. He’s literally been the voice of the show since its inception in 1979. Morning Edition and Bob Edwards are some of the earliest memories I have of news media; the theme song and his voice emanating from my family’s ancient Grundig radio (wish I had that radio now) were the soundtrack of our morning routines as we prepared for school and work.

NPR seems to be systematically cleaning house in terms of on-air talent. Sending the old nags out to pasture might be more along the lines of how management thinks of it. Younger voices on All Things Considered and other shows are apparently bringing “unique freshness and spontaneity to their NPR hosting.” Whatever. I don’t want more freshness and spontaneity with my mornings. Bob Edwards has been doing just fine by me.

If you’ve got feelings one way or the other on this change, send a note to NPR at nprcomm@npr.org.

Walter Cronkite continues to offer superb essays on NPR. Today’s focused on a network news program with the courage to confront an out-of-control politician.

Happened in the past, of course.

All of Cronkite’s essays are available online.

Plenty of newspapers require registration in exchange for viewing their online content. If you’re a regular reader of these newspapers, registering makes sense. But if you’re just following a link to a story that looks interesting and don’t want to jump through the registration hoops, the good folks at The Morning News offer salvation. Look on their masthead page for a user name and password that will get you past the gates.

Give it a try by checking out this story in the Los Angeles Times.

CNN, which claims to be “The Most Trusted Name In News,” has admitted that it planted an audience question during a recent Democratic presidential debate. As if this weren’t bad enough, the question was given to an audience member “to encourage a lighthearted moment” in the debate.

CNN: The Most Trusted Name In News

FOX: Fair And Balanced

Bush: Mission Accomplished

There’s a fair amount of false advertising going around these days.

Cory Doctorrow posted the following passage at Boing Boing, and it’s worth reposting here. It’s from a book called “The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves,” by Curtis White (an excerpt from the book is featured in the current issue of Harper’s).

This passage goes right to the heart of how modern, corporate media — including the properties still undeservedly called news or, even worse, journalism — have assisted in the death of responsive democracy in America.

The New Censorship does not work by keeping things secret. Are our leaders liars and criminals? Is the government run by wealthy corporations and political elites? Are we all being slowly poisoned? The answer is yes to all of the above, and there’s hardly a soul on these shores who doesn’t know it. The reign of George II practically revels in this perverse transparency. Oil policy created in backrooms with lobbyists from Enron and ExxonMobil. Naked pandering to the electricity industry in rolling back clean-air mandates. Accounting firms such as Arthur Andersen buying even “watchdog” liberal senators such as Christopher Dodd. Elections rigged with brother Jeb’s connivance in Florida. All of the details are utterly public, reported in newspapers, television newscasts and books, yet it’s perfectly safe for this stuff to be known. The genius of the New Censorship is that it works through the obscenity of absolute openness. Iraq-gate wasn’t a secret. The real secret is that it wasn’t a secret, and certainly wasn’t a scandal. It was business as usual. The betrayal of a public trust is a daily story manipulated by the media within the narrative confines of “scandal,” when in fact it’s all a part of the daily routine and everyone knows it. The media makes pornography out of the collective guilt of our politicians and business leaders. They make a yummy fetish of betrayed trust. We then consume it, mostly passively, because it is indistinguishable from our “entertainment” and because we suspect in some dim way that, bad as it surely is, it is working in our interests in the long run. What genius to have a system that allows you to behave badly, be exposed for it, and then have the sin recouped by the system as a resellable commodity! I mean, you have to admire the sheer, recuperative balls of it!

While in Japan for the past year, I missed (well, that’s not the right word) the continued degradation of American broadcast news. I don’t have a television right now, so I haven’t been watching television news since I got home.

Last night, I caught an episode of CNN.

How sad.

It’s not even worth discussing the quality of news on television anymore. What was most shocking was how plastic and unreal it all appeared. They’ve managed to package reality in a way that is not real.

And even what used to be basic rules of good journalism are now delivered with a wink and a tittering laugh as if to say, “How silly that we have to continue with this facade!”

The moppet in the anchor chair practically exploded with enthusiasm while waving the latest edition of Time magazine before the camera — synergism at its most desperate in the AOL Time Warner kingdom. She forgot the disclaimer then, but managed to throw it in after the last segment, an in-house stroke job covering the $40 million sale of a penthouse atop the new AOL Time Warner Center in New York City. In a perfect Elle Woods moment (and I don’t mean that in a good way), she mentioned that the building in question was owned by CNN’s parent company, “but not that any of us here would ever be able to afford that apartment!”