Two Views of Iraq

The New York Times vs. Juan Cole

UPDATE: The GAO weighs in (via WaPo)

Video Madlibs, Campaign Edition

Right-Wing Cartoon Watch

April-June edition. . . .

How Does the News Shape the Way We See the World?

The Election Online

From Pew:


(Executive Summary and Ful Report HERE)

Much Better

"Remembering Russert," from FAIR

. . . In reality, Meet the Press was the venue for some of the White House's most audacious lies about the Iraq War--most of which went unchallenged by Russert. On the morning that the New York Times published a front-page article falsely touting the now-famous "aluminum tubes" as components of an alleged Iraqi nuclear weapons program, Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on Meet the Press (9/8/02), where Russert pursued open-ended questions that seemed to invite spin from the vice president on Iraqi nuclear weapons.

Recalling such softball questioning, it's easy to believe the advice that Cheney press aide Cathie Martin says she gave when the Bush administration had to respond to charges that it manipulated pre-Iraq War intelligence: "I suggested we put the vice president on Meet the Press, which was a tactic we often used," she said (Salon, 1/26/07). "It's our best format."

In Bill Moyers' documentary "Buying the War" (PBS, 4/25/07), Russert expressed the wish that dissenting sources would have contacted him: "My concern was, is that there were concerns expressed by other government officials. And to this day, I wish my phone had rung, or I had access to them." Of course, any journalist could have found such sources--and certainly few critics of the war would have passed up an opportunity to air their views on such a prominent media platform. . . .

Hmm

. . . or die

"Tony Schwartz, a self-taught, sought-after and highly reclusive media consultant who helped create what is generally considered to be the most famous political ad to appear on television, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 84. . . . “Media consultant” is barely adequate to describe Mr. Schwartz’s portfolio. In a career of more than half a century, he was an art director; advertising executive; urban folklorist (in one project, capturing the cacophony of New York streets on phonograph records); radio host; Broadway sound designer; college professor; media theorist; author; and maker of commercials for products, candidates and causes. What was more, Mr. Schwartz, who had suffered from agoraphobia since the age of 13, accomplished most of these things entirely within his Manhattan home. Of the thousands of television and radio advertisements on which Mr. Schwartz worked, none is as well known, or as controversial, as the so-called “daisy ad,” made for Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidential campaign."

New from Pew

The Internet and the 2008 Election

Something missing?

Take a look at this NYT article, "Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic." Oddly, no mention of the words "net neutrality," or the substance of that long-standing (in internet years) debate, which has resulted in some reasonably substantive Congressional hearings and efforts at regulation that would protect access and limit the ability of service providers to discriminate on the basis of content. For the neutrality advocate's perspective, see here. For a more, ahem, neutral overview, see the wiki. It's decent. And while I'm complaining about the Times (well, Brad De Long has cornered the market on complaining about the Washington Post), take a look at this article on a protest directed at LES gentrification: does it seem a wee bit snide to you? ". . . the opening of the East Village summer social season"? Or is the tone actually somewhat affectionate, and I'm reading it wrong?

Against Hagiography

From The Washington Monthly, last December:

. . . . .Actually, the balls [Tim] Russert favors may be hard, but the pitches he throws aren't curveballs, which go someplace useful. They're sillyballs, which go somewhere pointless. Russert has created a strike zone of his own where toughness meets irrelevance. John McCain entered the zone last May, when he went on the show and repeatedly asserted that the Bush tax cuts had increased the federal government's revenue. Hearing this, a tough but conscientious journalist might have pointed out that this is demonstrably false. Russert, however, reached for a trusty hardball and sent it sailing. McCain, he pointed out, was now supporting extending the very same Bush tax cuts that he had once opposed.

. . . . the unbearable inanity of Russert transcends partisanship. It's an equal-opportunity bias against anyone with anything substantive to say.

. . . . . .To say that such exercises offer no information would be unfair. But the information is purely meta. Viewers watch a candidate getting grilled by Russert not to assess the candidate's views but to assess his or her ability to withstand the grilling.

. . . . . Russert's goal isn't to inform his audience. He's there to "make news"—to get his guest to say something embarrassing that lands in the next day's papers or on the NBC Nightly News. The politicians, in turn, go on the show determined not to make news. And why do they bother? Because, as Geraghty has noted, it's a rite of passage, and any politician too chicken to play Russert's inane games would never garner the respect of the political class.

John Cole observes that the wall-to-wall teevee encomnium is a product of the fact that DC reporters/newsreaders "have walked the corridors of power so long that they honestly think they are the story" (although, to be fair, this is hardly the only incidence of hour-after-hour coverage of a small story). The related problem, of course, as Ygelsias writes earier in the Washington Monthly article, is this:

Russert's brand of journalism, rather than being ghettoized as a pointless or perverse form of entertainment—like shoulder self-dislocation or cat surfing—has immense influence.

The Blogopticon?

Katie, What'd You Cover Instead?

Another Candidate

for The Turning Point. Needlenose offers this entry:

Sometimes it's Useful

just to have a little perspective. Note where our Sun is marked on this artist's rendering of what some astrophysicists think our galaxy may look like from afar. . . . .

How Dem Primary Voters Voted

Very, very cool animated data. . . . .

The Turning Pont

Perhaps this fall I can get some students (anyone? anyone? Bueller?) to help devise and execute a study to test this hunch (it's not really even a hypothesis, yet): this was the turning point in the primary campaign; not the cause, necessarily, but the marker of some moment at which significant change happened.



It inevitably brings this to mind:

News IQ

Take the Quiz, from Pew.

Media Culpa

An Architect on the Media, on On the Media