An eclectic roundup of gleanings from commentary and reporting on the press, near and far…
Flying home Monday from the East Coast I caught up with this Jan. 10 New Yorker article by Peter Maass on what really happened when that statue of Saddam Hussein toppled in the early days of the Iraq war in 2003. It’s worth reading all the way through, but the critical point is this: Although the toppling itself may have been instigated by U.S. forces, the responsibility for its overplay in the media – and when you read the story, Maass makes an irrefutable case that it was overplayed – really falls on news organizations themselves. Especially troubling is the way editors back in the U.S. overrode the judgment of journalists on the scene, who tried in vain to rein in the coverage. “[I]t was the media, rather than the government, that created the victory myth,” Maass writes. He adds later: “A visual echo chamber developed: rather than encouraging reporters to find the news, editors urged them to report what was on TV.”
February’s Vanity Fair looks at a lawsuit against Huffington Post‘s Arianna Huffington by two one-time, would-be collaborators Peter Daou and James Boyce. The piece, by William Cohan, reports that as originally conceived, the site was to have been a left-wing Drudge Report. Meanwhile, Gawker takes a look at the Daou/Boyce proposal posted with Cohan’s story and concludes the site as they envisioned it “was basically conceived as a con… a news site for public consumption with a partisan democratic political messaging operation and consultancy behind the scenes.”
Closer to home… The AV Club takes a good look at a 20-year-old case of sensationalism over public access TV in Glendale on the syndicated TV show “Hard Copy.” Also at AV Club, with the Packers going to the Super Bowl, it’s worth taking another look at Steven Hyden‘s thoughtful piece questioning whether some of the recent lionizing of fullback John Kuhn just might stem from his (white) race. It’s a nuanced argument, and one that a few commenters seemed to miss the point on. So why bring it up here? Answer: Media courage is worth noting.
That Mayfair/Facebook connection: I was heartened to see Don Walker take a closer look at the still-unsubstantiated claim that the Jan. 2 melee at Mayfair Mall had been cooked up on Facebook. In retrospect, should there have been an explicit statement when the claim was first reported (attributed to mall manager Steve Smith) that there was no independent evidence for the claim?
Crowd-sourcing at ProPublica: When the nonprofit investigative news site (which, by the way, supported the above-mentioned New Yorker Iraq story) posted a headline “Which Senator Secretly Sabotaged the Popular Whistleblower Protection Bill?” back on Jan. 10, I assumed it was just a “teaser” and the story would answer the question. No, it turned out – the site is employing crowd-sourcing to see if it can ferret out the answer. As of today, no evident results…
Ms. magazine rightly wonders just why it was that neither Time, Newsweek, the New Yorker, the Economist, Vanity Fair nor Harper’s featured Nancy Pelosi on their covers in her four years as “the most powerful woman in American history” – yet her successor John Beohner had already landed on at least four national covers even before he took the mantle.
And finally…
A national journalism ethics award is seeking nominations. The University of Oregon hands out the Payne Awards for Ethics in Journalism annually, and nominees should be “journalists who have demonstrated an extraordinary commitment to the highest ethical standards, especially in the face of economic or political pressure.” You can find out more here and here. Past winners have included a Wall Street Journal reporter singled out by an official government newspaper for “trying to instigate unrest in Iran” and The Seattle Times for its investigation of special treatment of University of Washington football players in the justice system – a project that the Payne judges noted “ran the risk of alienating readers and losing subscriptions” in a challenging economy. According to the Payne Awards, a 2009 winner has a Wisconsin connection: Glen Mabie, who quit WEAU-TV in Eau Claire after learning the station was considering a deal with a local hospital in which hospital employees would become the exclusive sources for medical news stories on the station. The station ultimately abandoned the plan, according to the Payne Awards.
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