Video Blog: Reporters As Cops?
Welcome to my first of what I hope will be a regular series of video blogs. In this premier edition I rap the knuckles of the L.A. Times media columnist who actually argues that only real-life newspaper reporters, not lazy bloggers, are immune to professional political spin. Judith Miller, anyone?
Here’s the Jim Rainey piece referred to in my commentary.
Please take a moment and subscribe to my new YouTube channel where I will be archiving these V-blogs.
And while you’re at it, take another moment and subscribe to my Twitter feed. I promise that I don’t tweet trivia.
P.S. As times passes I promise to escalate the technical quality. But for the moment we’ll emphasize substance over style.
March 21st, 2009 at 12:23 am
I hope this becomes a regular — if not nightly — spot.
It’s saddened me to see Rainey and others “covering the media” turn into the very tools they criticize.
I can’t stand the cable news pundits clowning around. I prefer a myriad of voices, five minutes at a time. Keep it comin’ Marc!
P.S. Whose hands holding your face together in the video?
March 21st, 2009 at 8:32 am
That’s great, Marc! Did you use a teleprompter? There’s a rumor that Obama does, and people wouldn’t know it if they didn’t depend upon bloggers for information. — <a href=”http://www.gmsplace.com/2009/03/20/the-new-decider-of-the-united-states/Obama’s Teleprompter!
To help your liberal readers get well-rounded viewpoints of the news, let me recommend two other video sites.
Uncle Jay Explains the News: Helping small minds understand Big News
Red State Update with Jackie and Dunlap
Might we say that Jim Rainey’s piece about the superiority of “professional” journalists is…well…elitist?
I like your video approach because it reminds me of television and I don’t like to read posts over 250 words long.
March 21st, 2009 at 8:34 am
Oops, here’s a correction to the first link: Obama’s Teleprompter!
March 21st, 2009 at 9:00 am
Oh, maybe the government can save “professional” journalists from bloggers!
The Nation Mag: Time for Socialist Intervention for an ‘Independent’ Media
Oh, the horror! Prop up the newspapers before the bloggers take over. Think of it as the “Professional Journalists Full Employment Act.”
Marc! Get prepared and line up for your bailout, for when it surely is offered to bloggers. It’s for the public good.
March 21st, 2009 at 9:19 am
Okay, okay. Last one.
TechNewsWorld — Why It’s OK for Newspapers to Die — “The loss of print newspapers is akin to the loss of the horse and buggy. The Internet offers the potential for broader and deeper news reporting.”
We’re all for “change” and “progress” aren’t we?
March 21st, 2009 at 11:43 am
I’ll repost this Clay Shirky piece (that I put up last Monday on a thread off-topic.)
It’s excellent:
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
Gets to the heart of the “death of newspapers” discussion and where journalism needs to go. (Hint – a lot more blogging by intellectually-challenged, morally unhinged, last-to-know characters like Woody and GM Roper isn’t the the key to the future.)
March 21st, 2009 at 2:56 pm
reg, this may come quite as a shock to you, but neither G.M. nor myself have ever held ourselves out to be journalists, despite the apparent similarities in our product and your confusion over that. We’re just having fun–something that’s hard for left-wingers to experience.
In regards to your linked article which surpassed my word limit….
In my area, the slow death of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is occurring because people have gotten sick and tired of its left-wing Pravda content.
The internet isn’t winning because it’s more convenient or cheap, but because we finally have news options with balanced news.
I’d prefer to pull out a paper and casually flip through it, looking for the articles that catch my attention, but I’m not going to support the commie AJC, which had a monopoly once they combined the morning and evening papers, then did away with conservative editorials–all before the internet became a competitive option that the AJC ignored.
Here are typical comments regarding the news of firings and major financial losses of the paper. The last one is more analytical than emotional, and it is right on the mark.
The internet is not killing papers or “professional” journalists. The papers have been killing themselves by ignoring their audience and the truth by pushing their phony, elitist, liberal agenda. But, they continue blaming another force rather than their own liberal stubborness.
March 21st, 2009 at 3:26 pm
The usual drivel…
Rave on.
March 21st, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Marc, good stuff. If it’s okay, I’ll give Dissonance a shout-out at Patterico’s; you’re pretty much on the same page as he is on this topic, at least.
Don’t mean to come off as poker-obsessed (like I haven’t already, ha) but now that I’ve officially seen yer mug, I’ll also be better able to look out fer ya during my next trip to the Commerce hold’em tables.
March 21st, 2009 at 4:55 pm
You know, qdpsteve might be on to something. The head-in-my-hands posture does convey a “I’m not at all impressed, Mr. Rainey. I’ll see your reporter-cops theory and raise you a new generation of journalism, buddy” feel to it.
March 21st, 2009 at 6:10 pm
The argument isn’t about journalistic integrity its about whether or not the average shmuck can access his or her shit detector. The “unregulated” array of information sources means people need to learn discernment, be educated and depend on someone to tell them how to think.
March 21st, 2009 at 6:11 pm
rather not depend on someone else to tell them what to think.
So all this unlocking of information from every conceivable source is liberating.
March 21st, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Forces accountability–onus on the reader to also make friends with their inner common sense.
March 21st, 2009 at 7:41 pm
Good stuff.
But please, hands away from mouth on the next one if you can. It comes across like you’re trying to stifle your own facial expressions, and this is, after all, a visual medium.
March 21st, 2009 at 9:01 pm
reg, your comments can be classified as “eloquent nonsense” from a school dropout, and your responses specifically about me are the typical insults that one expects from white-trash who can’t come up with a good answer.
The fact that others may not be able to see how stupid you could be explained by this statement that I read:
Oh, and do you want to continue making false insults to me about about my accounting knowlege and bringing those attacks over here, when your knowledge on the subject is absolutely nil?
Quit insulting Marc and boring everyone else with you pathetic estrogen-filled ravings.
March 21st, 2009 at 9:54 pm
I’ll second reg’s link above. It’s basically a reality check, pointing out how far real conditions have outpaced/circumvented journalistic comprehension.
In fact, one of the points made in the link is that articles like Rainey’s are irrelevant at best, and more likely retrograde (or reactionary according to the basic definition).
Specifically: Pointing out the adverse consequences of the lack of reporting oversight is not going to stand in the way of the technological/economic forces that have dug the grave for the pulp-and-ink daily city newspaper. The newspaper is gone, folks. It’s not fixable.
The sooner people can stop writing Rainey’s article and start experimenting with new journalistic forms to fill this hole, the better.
March 21st, 2009 at 11:47 pm
I agree, Michael T.
This might be related to another reg link – that excellent Daniel Gross piece at Slate. I think the below interview intelligently plumbs into the questions of ownership and power in America. Obviously its carried by the public arm of the telly, unencumbered by corporate minders. Instead of more hyperventilating about the socialist tendencies of President Obama, it’s both brave and refreshing that someone in broadcast media actually found one -a real socialist – and inquired into what he thinks of the administration, ownership and power.
Might be a good companion piece to keep in mind while folks watch tomorrow’s Sunday morning chat shows.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/03202009/watch2.html
March 22nd, 2009 at 6:19 am
Gotta love Moyers for giving 40 minutes to a discussion with Mike Davis…
March 22nd, 2009 at 6:33 am
Woody – regarding “accounting knowledge”, after listening you yammer endlessly about teachers having no accountability, I pointed out that in the wake of Enron, accounting firms like Arthur Andersen making most of their profits off of “business consulting” and the emergence of made up shit like “mark-to-model” to evade market valuations of assets, the accounting profession wasn’t exactly a bastion of accountability itself. After refusing to even discuss this, because I supposedly couldn’t understand the complex secrets of the accounting profession, you posted a link from some guy at Yale that precisely verified my point about mark-to-model – some of the accounting constructs that are used at the upper levels of finance aren’t based on accountability to markets – which is supposedly the be-all-end-all in business circles – but to create bogus leverage, evade transparency and, ultimately, dupe shareholders and/or regulators (weak as they might be.) Examples of this are rampant, but watching bankers go crybaby because their assets are subject to market valuation – after their opaque, self-serving transactions in deliberately complex, near-worthless piles of shit, amidst total denial and as an act of evading the consequences of their short-term business decisions – is pretty sick. That the people supposedly responsible for evaluating financial health of companies go along with this hocus-pocus is disgusting. The “witnessla” link isn’t working right now for some reason, but needless to say you are blowing smoke out of your ass again. And again…and again…
March 22nd, 2009 at 6:44 am
It’s also beyond my comprehension why, rather than offering a response to my initial comment that either defended corporate accounting methods like “mark-to-model” as being somehow valid or – simply admitting it was not and that there were serious issues that went beyond bean-counting to corporate accountability and transparency – you came back with string of racist comments about my wife. I wouldn’t expect you to know what you were talking about, but you went off the charts – well beyond your usual mumbo-jumbo and ultra-partisan special pleading.
Classy as usual.
March 22nd, 2009 at 7:36 am
reg, this is not the proper forum to discuss your ignorance and deceit and emotional disorders.
In areas related to business, you’re clueless. In areas of courtesy, you’re blind. In areas related to reason, you’re overmatched.
It makes no sense for me to fight with someone like you who is uneducated and malicious and who tries to cover his inferiority complex with personal attacks on others.
Don’t embarrasss yourself any further and don’t bore everyone with your problems.
And, class? You have no room to discuss class.
Drop it.
March 22nd, 2009 at 8:16 am
Michael Turmon: …technological/economic forces that have dug the grave for the pulp-and-ink daily city newspaper
A couple of weeks ago, rosedog made an issue of cancelling her LA Times subscription for the same reason that people in my area have cancelled their subscriptions–we don’t like the content–not because the internet is cheap and easy. Cheap and easy is what you want in a date–not what you want for quality information.
The only difference with papers between today and the past is that we now have alternative sources of news, courtesy of the internet (and talk radio)–not that we’re tired of picking up a newspaper because the internet is easier, which it isn’t, or that I care about killing trees.
Plus, with the internet, you can’t pick up the TV section to see what’s on, you can’t leave the internet crossword puzzle on the table to casually fill out throughout the day, and you can’t quickly scan it for box scores.
If we once again had two separate city papers with different ideological views, the only paper that would be suffering would be the one that ignored competition and continued to try to cram nonsense down our throats. Newspaper publishers thought that they had a monopoly and ignored the competition available through other sources, and now are reaping the consequences of their short-sightedness and haughtiness.
Now, to limit a free media that has been presenting “the other side,” the next step for those who can’t stand other views will be to demand a return to the “fariness doctrine” in an attempt to kill talk radio and insist on controls over bloggers and other internet content. That’s more dangerous than papers that people don’t want going out of business.
Further, there is much talk about giving newspapers bailouts to continue their left-wing blathering? What’s wrong? Isn’t taxpayer money for PBS enough?
Publishers need to open their eyes and adapt to the the root problem, content, rather than the competition’s means of delivery.
March 22nd, 2009 at 9:06 am
Woody – you proved yourself a fool and a coward. First by refusing to even discuss an issue, then by responding with a link that underscored my point.
Then, to make matters worse, you protest too much.
You’re an idiot, but your worst sin is the steady stream of racism and homphobia. Culturally and ideologically you’re a Dead Man Walking.
March 22nd, 2009 at 9:17 am
Incidentally, this dishonest moron citing Celeste at WitnessLA as cancelling her LA Times sub for the same reasons the racists and hysterics that Woody cited for concelling their Atlanta Journal-Constitution subs is so misleading and out-of-context as to be merely another lie spouted carelessly by our sociopathic troll.
Here’s the link to Celeste’s post on why she cancelled her LA Times sub:
http://witnessla.com/media/2009/admin/breaking-up-with-the-la-times/
March 22nd, 2009 at 9:25 am
Great, reg! You proved my last point about you with your last two responses. You can’t make a defense without name calling and your lies and half-truths.
My point about Celeste was completely correct. We both object to the papers over the same reason — content, even though the direction of the content may be different for each of us.
March 22nd, 2009 at 10:12 am
You fucking idiot – her objection wasn’t to “content” but to lack of content and the cutbacks in the paper. Linking Celeste to the racists and reactionaries whose insane screeds you snipped and clipped and re-posted on this thread – creeps who have probably hated the Atlanta Constitution since Ralph Magill stood up for civil rights – is the height of dishonesty.
Obviously either you can’t read or you can’t comprehend what you read.
March 22nd, 2009 at 10:18 am
It’s telling that I posted the link to WitnessLA and you just made a dumb assertion in order to connect someone who people here respect, Celeste, to your stark raving madness and nonsensical screeds.
I’ll let others judge which was the “lie and half truth.”
March 22nd, 2009 at 11:43 am
Michael T – the exciting and innovative sites that are springing up in the wake of this journalistic turmoil ARE recreatiing structures of internal integrity and accountability that newspapers were supposed to have at their best – but too often let go soft for a variety of reasons. Josh Marshall’s TPM isn’t simply some partisan blog where anything goes. (Unlike Pajamas Media where Joe The Plumber is hailed as a harbinger of the “new internet journalism.”) Marshall has gone in a few short years from blogging at Starbucks (albeit using fairly traditional journalistic chops and contributing feature stories to mags like Washington Monthly along the way) to creating a digital newsite that combines the best of blogging with comprehensive aggregation of news, op-ed analysis and investigative journalism (superb stuff during the Bush AG scandals.) And Marc’s role at “Off-the-Bus”, along with the woman he worked with whose name escapes me, was essentially to insure that some journalistic standards were governing the project. What’s often problematic in these discussions is that a lot of folks don’t make any distinction between random blogging that is often produced as catharsis by folks who are as clueless as the next guy and are ranting rather than reporting, projects like Marc’s at HuffPo or TMP that are attempting to build credible, forward-looking projects from the ashes of print journalism. I also respect the nuance of Shirkey’s article in that it made it clear that high-end, gold-plated news operations that have a national and/or global reach will probably emerge relatively bullet-proof, while local newsgathering will suffer the most in a transition.
March 22nd, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Bloggers are the front line soldiers of the new citizen army created because the existing “media” (be it print or other) lost our trust.
The mainstream and corporate media can (and likely always will) play some people for suckers but most of us regular folk trust a blogger over any in the Wash Press Corps or those connected to conventional media outlets.
Sure these citizen soldiers have to learn what and who to believe, they have to learn by being burned but if they can be honest about what they are doing they will keep an audience.
I liked “Dissonance” – considering it is all so new – I think it’s great. It beats the pants off of Corn and Pinkerton trying to revive “Crossfire” on the internet!
Thanks
March 22nd, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Yep, for a lot of purposes — separating signal from noise, being a harbinger of where stories are going — I respect TPM more than any MSM source. And getting back to Marc’s vlog, it turned out that, during the pre-war Iraq media campaign, you were better off to go to Juan Cole’s site and ignore the media biggies, who proved to be totally suckered, for reasons Marc elucidated. Reading the NYT, in fact, proved to be a detriment to understanding.
Absolutely. Perhaps that nuance will make the pill easier to swallow?
March 22nd, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Books too, although replacement of media is not the precise subject of the thread.
March 22nd, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Woody’s blather as interpreted by Gary Larsen in a Far Side cartoon:
Woody with dog looking up at him and this is what the dog hears:
bblahblahblahPRAVDAblahblahblahblahblahPRAVDAblahblahblahINEVERREADANYTHINGBUT SUPMERMANCOMICSblahblahblahblahSOCIALISMblahbalhblahblahPRAVDA.
Dog keels over and dies from boredom.
March 22nd, 2009 at 4:24 pm
That’s another good point Michael T. I’m actually quite tempted to try that little kindle gizmo. How to ponder the fate of so many books? Might it be possible that the kindle could be a boon for public libraries? Since books are unlike newspapers in that instead of recycling newspapers, people might just haul in crates of books to the local library.
Then one might be liberated from the tyranny of trying to assemble all those IKEA shelving units.
March 22nd, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Hey Woody in your post from 8:16 am some of the word are darker than the others, kinda, sorta…bold. That’s really cool, its almost like those are the words you think are really important in your post. Very helpful to the reader as there are lots of words in your posts. From now on I’ll just read those and skip the rest. What a time saver!
March 22nd, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Woody is the Modern Racist Wingnut Marjor General.
He is the Republican Base.
Good Luck, GOP! Enjoy your swirling down the drain of history.
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:50 am
Thanks, for the tip, Patrick! From now on, I’ll make important words in bold for you.
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:56 am
reg: You f’n idiot – her objection wasn’t to “content” but to lack of content
Oooooh, that’s a major distinction. I see. Content left, content right, lack of content, too much content, not enough rainsbows in the content…. Why, my simply saying that the problem was with the content must have been very confusing to you.
Now, let’s discuss my problem with your brains…I mean, lack of brains.
March 23rd, 2009 at 10:21 pm
I’ll stay out of this mudfight, thanks.
QDPSTEVE: Well, yes, you’ve seen my mug. Now the question is would u recognize it under the hoodie and shades??
Action’s on you.
BTW, Ive been playing mostly at Hollywood Park since I hit a big jackpot there two months ago. Have gone to Commerce once this year and got creamed at the $40 table. About 5 rebuys until I got the message: you can’t bluff total donkeys. And you can’t outplay them either. They’re too dumb and crazy to even think of the hand their opponent might have. Bottom pair with a 6 kicker is always enough for them to make any size call on the river!
I’ve found the one thing the Big Time Donkeys all have in common at the low stakes table: they’ll call just about any pre-flop raise with any two suited cards. 9-3s in the small blind ? No problem calling a $20 raise from AK on the button. Arghhh.