Be The Media

The Times refuses reprint in Michael Moore book

From the New York Times:

"The publisher of a coming book by the filmmaker Michael Moore said yesterday that The New York Times had denied permission for Mr. Moore to include in his book a May article in which The Times reviewed shortcomings in its own reporting about the events leading up to the war in Iraq.

Publishing industry executives say that such denials are rare, and executives at Simon & Schuster, the publisher, said The Times was the only one of several publications it had approached to deny permission to reprint articles, photographs, cartoons or editorials in the book."

A shot across the bow or a sign of the times?

From The Campaign Desk:

"In his speech at the Republican National Convention last week, President Bush garnered laughter and applause by taking a shot at the New York Times — and the New York Times, circa 1946, to boot. (One imagines a hapless Bush campaign researcher who's been told, "I don't care if you have to go back to 1946, Figby — find something on the Times!")

There are many reasons for the long march to low credibility, but chief among them is the rise of cable news, with its ratings-driven adherence to fluff over news, its bias towards conflict, and, perhaps most importantly, its reliance on what we've called carnival barkers, the talking heads who righteously parrot spin and invective without much regard for either fairness or truth.

The major institutions of the mainstream press have been nothing if not inventive in their unflagging, and largely unsuccessful, efforts to reignite consumer loyalty. But, in the end, if they can't reverse the gradual mortgaging of their own credibility, they will eventually die, buried under the detritus of their own failed gimmicks."

Tribune, Hollinger and Belo in circulation scandal!

Right after circulation numbers were being pumped in the magazine industry here and here, the same scandal hit the newspaper industry. First Newsday/Tribune in February, then the Chicago Sun Times/Hollinger in June, then Dallas Morning News/Belo in August. No one should be surprised, especially independents who suffer the most. How effective is the non-profit Audit Bureau of Circulations, and can they ever be trusted again? Will the radio industry be next?

Jacques Steinberg in the NY Times "After circulation scandal, a move to build trust":

"Pumping Up Their Numbers"

February 10: Four advertisers sue Long Island-based Newsdayand its Spanish-language sister, Hoy, claiming that circulation figures were inflated from 1995 to 1999. Parent company Tribune set aside $35 million to reimburse advertisers, and lowers ad rates. Several executives resign.

June 15: Hollinger International, publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times, says its circulation was inflated. A number of advertisers file suits.

August 5: The Belo Corporation set aside $23 million to compensate advertisers for exaggerated circulation figures at the Dallas Morning News. Belo owns three other daily newspapers including the Providence Journal and 19 television stations."

'Washington Post' says Iraq coverage was flawed

From Editor & Publisher:

"First The New York Times, now The Washington Post has confessed to fumbling the issue of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in the run-up to war. The Times handled it through an editors' note in May, then a mea culpa editorial last month. The Post, which has been widely hailed for its post-war coverage, bared its mistakes today in a lengthy front page story written by media critic Howard Kurtz.

Kurtz quotes Bob Woodward, the paper's assistant managing editor: "We did our job but we didn't do enough, and I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder. We should have warned readers we had information that the basis for this was shakier" than widely believed. "Those are exactly the kind of statements that should be published on the front page."

Kerry to journalists: "I read newspapers"

From Editor and Publisher:

"Is John Kerry making a play for one of the most influential "swing votes" in the upcoming election — working journalists? In contrast to President Bush, who has said that he rarely reads newspapers, Sen. Kerry told John Nichols of The Capital Times in Madison, Wis., "I read four or five papers a day if I can."

Nichols pointed out that this put Kerry in good bipartisan company, with other avid newspaper readers, from Eisenhower to Reagan to Clinton."

Report hits media coverage of terrorism before 9/11

From Editor & Publisher:

"While at first glance the 9/11 commission's report seems to offer little examination of the media, a key summary paragraph criticizes newspapers' coverage in the months leading up to Sept. 11, an E&P reading of the full report finds.

The very end of a chapter titled "Foresight — And Hindsight," reads, "Between May 2001 and September 11, there was very little in newspapers or on television to heighten anyone's concern about terrorism. Front-page stories touching on the subject dealt with the windup of trials dealing with the East Africa embassy bombings and [Ahmed] Ressam. All this reportage looked backward, describing problems satisfactorily resolved. Back-page notices told of tightened security at embassies and military installations abroad and government cautions against travel to the Arabian Peninsula. All the rest was secret."

The Iraq scandals: media failures are next

From MediaChannel.com:

"To the list of institutional failures, we can now add the powerful U.S. news industry, which gave the war its legitimacy and organized public support for it by a pattern of over-hyped and under-critical reporting in which jingoism was often substituted for journalism.

As US public opinion turns against the war, and world condemnation of the occupation increases, some voices in the media are now being heard as their scandalous complicity finally becomes an issue.

"The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was the first to identify this process, and wrote that "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident."

The process usually starts with a few individuals whose skepticism is rewarded with recriminations and even dismissal. In the news world, it began with the firing of small town newspaper editors and cartoonists who dared to dissent. Few nationally known newspeople came to their defense.

Popular TV talk show host Phil Donahue came next, purged by MSNBC for his anti-war programming. That network's most heavily promoted correspondent Ashleigh Banflied was "taken to the woodshed" when she questioned MSNBC's coverage at a talk at Kansas State University. The network later dropped her.

Soon, Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Peter Arnett was fired for saying on Iraqi TV what he was also saying on American television — that the US military was underestimating Iraqi resistance. That view, which has now been accepted, was branded then as treason and worse. Arnett was targeted first by Fox News and later made the subject of a campaign by the Free Republic website which flooded NBC executives with demands that he be fired.

Critics of the war were not just ridiculed. They were ignored and marginalized. Former BBC chief Greg Dyke (who was forced to resign because of a scandal involving BBC reporting which was later found to be baseless)said that of 800 experts interviewed on US TV in the run-up to the war and during the US invasion only six challenged the war,. A FAIR study of 1,716 on-air sources cited by TV news in this period found that 71 percent supported the war, while only 3 percent opposed it."

The Ordinary American, Under Stress and Oversimplified

From the Washington Post:

Too Outspoken?

"Ken Grubbs was director of the conservative National Journalism Center until he wrote a piece criticizing Washington Times founder the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Now he's out of a job.

The organization arranges internships and seminars while recruiting conservative and libertarian speakers for college campuses. Grubbs, an editor at the Times in the 1980s, has written for the American Spectator without incident, but his July 2 piece for the Wall Street Journal triggered his downfall.

Picking up on a Capitol Hill appearance by Moon, who proclaimed himself the Messiah and was crowned by one congressman, Grubbs wrote that the incident "has got to be freshly embarrassing to the many fine journalists who work at the Times." He also noted that the Times "has never been a mere lapdog" to Moon's Unification Church."

A pause for hindsight

From the New York Times:

"Over the last few months, this page has repeatedly demanded that President Bush acknowledge the mistakes his administration made when it came to the war in Iraq, particularly its role in misleading the American people about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and links with Al Qaeda. If we want Mr. Bush to be candid about his mistakes, we should be equally open about our own.

During the run-up to the war, The Times ran dozens of editorials on Iraq, and our insistence that any invasion be backed by "broad international support" became a kind of mantra. It was the administration's failure to get that kind of consensus that ultimately led us to oppose the war.

But we agreed with the president on one critical point: that Saddam Hussein was concealing a large weapons program that could pose a threat to the United States or its allies. We repeatedly urged the United Nations Security Council to join with Mr. Bush and force Iraq to disarm.

As we've noted in several editorials since the fall of Baghdad, we were wrong about the weapons. And we should have been more aggressive in helping our readers understand that there was always a possibility that no large stockpiles existed."
"But we do fault ourselves for failing to deconstruct the W.M.D. issue with the kind of thoroughness we directed at the question of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, or even tax cuts in time of war. We did not listen carefully to the people who disagreed with us. Our certainty flowed from the fact that such an overwhelming majority of government officials, past and present, top intelligence officials and other experts were sure that the weapons were there. We had a groupthink of our own.

By the time the nation was on the brink of war, we did conclude that whatever the risk of Iraq's weaponry, it was outweighed by the damage that could be done by a pre-emptive strike against a Middle Eastern nation that was carried out in the face of wide international opposition. If we had known that there were probably no unconventional weapons, we would have argued earlier and harder that invading Iraq made no sense."

40 years later, civil rights makes page one.

From the New York Times by James Dao:

"On July 4, readers of The Herald-Leader saw the results of the paper's inquiry: a front-page exposé, two sidebar articles and a full page of previously unpublished black-and-white photographs describing how the newspapers - The Herald in the morning and The Leader in the afternoon - virtually ignored the civil rights movement in Lexington.

Throughout the late 1950's and early 1960's, protesters conducted peaceful weekly sit-ins at the city's racially segregated lunch counters, hotels and theaters. But under orders from their top executives, the newspaper investigation found, both The Herald and The Leader buried coverage of the protests, when they covered them at all. (The two merged in the 1980's and the paper is now part of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain.)

The poor coverage was not the result of mistakes or oversights, The Herald-Leader concluded, but a conscious strategy by the papers' former managers "to play down the movement" in the hopes that it would wither away."