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Archive for category Media Criticism

In The Pouring Rain

Jun 7

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Media Criticism | 2 Comments

Every newspaper in the country keeps a coterie of solons on staff; a group of such surpassing wisdom and intellect that they can write on any topic with cogency and empathy, able to advise from the most exhaulted potentate to the humblest personage; comfortable at all levels of government from President to Governor to Mayor; equally adept in advising CEOs, school boards, and fellow citizens; nimbly covering politics, business, fashion, entertainment, science, and society at large or small — any and all subjects they put a mind to — and all for no extra cost to the reader. For them the past is illlumed like midday in the tropics and the future is no more the undiscovered country. What are these august sages called you might wonder? Why, editorial writers.

But it is passing strange that on the subjects nearest and dearest to the hearts of newspaper owners, circulation and reputation, these solons are not consulted, nor do they propound their wisdom to the masses. The subject must gnaw at them day and night – why do our readers abandon us? Yet the editorial writers remain silent – unasked and unanswering. Why are they not consulted? Yet not consulted, why not act still? Why do they approach their doom without their customary overflowing, uncontainable wisdom and knowledge? It remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma that the owners do not ask, and the editorialist do not tell.


(After composing most of this in my head I find out that Michael Kinsley wrote something similar. Great minds think alike.)

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The Post Is Like A Box Of …

Jun 6

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Media Criticism, The War on Terror | No Comments

The St. Louis Post Dispatch (“stupid is as stupid does”) runs a stupid article on the war in Iraq that asks the question “Are we losing because US casualities are increasing?” and unsurprisingly only interviews people who say yes or maybe.

The premise is stupid and if you think but a moment you can figure it for yourself. In the spirit of science, perform this Gedankenexperiment: A war starts and ends. The casualites for one side starts at zero before the war, increases, and then decreases to zero at the end of the war. Does this describe the winner or the loser? It describes both, doesn’t it? So when casualties were increasing did this mean one side was losing? You can’t tell, can you. And it’s not just a thought experiment, but it’s the reality of war — look at US casualty figures from WWII and you’ll discover that they increase dramatically year after year until 1945 – and had US soldiers not been saved by the deus ex machina of the A-bomb from invading Japan, they would have been highest of all in 1945. So using one side’s casualty figures as a proxy for who’s winning is both theoretically and practically an error.

But even if you think the figures indicate who’s winning or losing, isn’t there something(s) missing from the story? Like shouldn’t we use numbers for coalition forces, not just US? And shouldn’t we include Iraqi figures as well? Wouldn’t that give a more complete picture? And shouldn’t we compare the two side’s casualty figures? I mean if you think these figures have meaning, shouldn’t you be comparing the two sides?

You’d also have to know what kind of stratagies the two sides have picked. Are we fighting a battle (or battles) of attrition, maneuver, position, what? What kind of strategy is the enemy fighting? If their goal is to kill enough Americans to cause war fatigue at home, isn’t reporting only American casualties the stupid thing to do? If you run articles that only mention or highlight failure are you really being objective, cynical, or stupid? Is there any mention in this article of the comparitive strategies and what they would mean when looking at casualty figures? This is it:

“While Americans are hoping that the training of Iraqi forces will mean the end of a major U.S. presence, Abenheim says the plan harks back to a failed strategy in America’s last major war. 

“It does suggest Vietnamization,” he said, speaking of the U.S. policy during the Vietnam War to train the South Vietnamese to protect their own country so American soldiers could slide into the background. “

More stupidity. The failed policy in Vietnam was Americanization – the policy persued by Kennedy and especially Johnson along with a strategy of attrition picked by Westmorland. Those were the strategies that failed and in so doing so turned so many people against the war. Vietnamization and positional warfare were successes under Nixon and Abrams. South Vietnam fell because when invaded for a second time after the peace treaty was signed, the US cut off not only all aid, but any purchases of weapons and ammunition as well. The penultimate tragedy of Vietnam was this very real stab in the back of an ally. (The ultimate tragedy is the floodgates of death and misery that were opened on South Vietnam following its occupation by the tyrannical communists of the North).

To further prove the writers don’t understand what they’re writing about, they back up the assertion that iraqification is a losing strategy with a quote by a wounded guardsmen:

“”It doesn’t matter how many troops you have there or what they do, you are never going to beat an insurgency like that,” said Oversmith, now a police officer in Smithville. 

“In their view, they think they are being conquered. If they think they are being conquered, they’ll fight for years and years. Look how long the Vietnamese fought.” 

Gee, you’d think putting in place a democratically elected government commanding Iraqi troops that do the day to day policing and fighting would be the way to eliminate that conquered feeling.

And an earlier quote is also priceless:

“The evidence to date suggests that U.S. military officers don’t really understand the sources of the insurgency or how to blunt its effects,” he said. “For example, every day we hear stories of suicide bombers killing innocent Iraqis, but we have no detailed insight into the recruiting mechanisms or the training to produce suicide bombers in such large numbers.”

But the article doesn’t consider the effect of the suicide bombings on the Iraqi people, and how they view war, and how it has soured a lot of onetime supporters and fence sitters on the so called insurgency. Can anyone cite an actual successful suicide bombing campaign? The only suicide bombing that worked was against Spain and it took only one attack; the ones against Russia and Israel have been failures. Oh, it’s been successful in capturing media attention and killing innocents, but that’s about it.

One of the things I do wonder about, and which isn’t covered in the article, is what is taking so long in standing up a viable Iraqi military. We’re seeing it now, but what took so long? And then I harken back to WWII (again), and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. In Europe, it was clear that the decisive blow would be an invasion of France and then on to Germany, yet the first step was to secure North Africa where 13 long months after entry the American Army suffered a stinging defeat at Kasserine Pass. After North Africa, the next stepping stone was Sicily, then Italy where Allied forces would be bogged down for the rest of the war. It wasn’t for 2 and a half years after the US entered the war that France was invaded and the war was really taken to the Germans (and American casualties really mounted). The new Iraqi army in a little over 2 years has begun the decisive battles for Iraq – not bad by American historical standards.

The most appalling thing about this appalling article is that it is so American centric.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: 
Right now, successfully replacing a murdering, terrorist supporting dictator with a half way decent, reasonably representative government in Iraq is critical to the US, but it is with no exaggeration a matter of life and death for Iraqis. For decades, they haven’t held their own futures in their own hands. Right now, they do. We can support them to the best of our abilities, but ultimately, what Iraq becomes is up to the Iraqis.

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Clarity From The Post

May 19

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Media Criticism | No Comments

As regular readers (the both of you) know, I often jump on the Editorial page the of St. Louis Post Dispatch with both feet.  But my hat’s off to them today, they got it right:

“It is tempting to point out the Bush administration’s credibility on Iraq and the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib is also suspect. It is especially tempting after the White House high-handedly told Newsweek “it would help to point . . . out” that military has procedures for respecting the Quran. 

But trying to shift blame back onto the White House doesn’t further the pursuit of the truth. Nothing the White House does or doesn’t do absolves the media of responsibility for its errors.”

Of course, they did manage to slip in a moment of cluelessness amonst the clarity:

“Journalists must face the fact that the failings of the Times, USA Today, CBS and now Newsweek have made an already skeptical public deeply suspicious of everything they read and see in the mainstream media. Many cynics say they find more truth in the unsubstantiated rantings in the blogosphere than the careful reportage on the front page of the daily newspaper. That breach of trust could prove deadly to journalism and damaging to democracy.” 

How much careful reportange is there on the front page of the daily newspaper anymore? That’s the question, and it’s increasingly being answered with very little. How much unsubstantiated rantings in the blogosphere is there? Plenty, but there is plenty on most editorial and op-ed pages too, and there seems to be more careful reportage and substantiated opinion in the blogosphere than in MSM these days. 

I long for a paper I can read and trust, but I can’t buy one today. The problem is simple — they’ve become hollow organizations that just don’t have the processes in place to deliver that kind of quality. You will always have mistakes, yes even among American troops in wartime, but what you don’t always have are the systems in place to minimize and correct those mistakes. And it seems that most of the people in the business don’t even realize there’s a problem, let alone what it is. But at least for today the Post Editorial staff gets it.

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Standards? Ha

May 10

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Media Criticism | 1 Comment

The ever offensive St. Louis Post Dispatch celebrated Mother’s Day in style, with a picture too graphic to run in full on their own lousy website plastered on the front page. Some poor lady has horrific scars from a liver transplant, and the Post decides to run that photo on Mother’s Day.  Brian Noggle is made of sterner stuff than me, because he was actually able to pick the paper up and read the accompaning article about the hazards of donating organs. I figure the article is just the legal-journalistic complex laying the ground work to sue docters, hospitals, etc. over live organ donations, which is even more offensive than running a gross picture on Mother’s Day.

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Clock Cleaning of the First Rank

Apr 15

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Media Criticism | No Comments

As long as I’m on takedown’s, Glenn Reynolds pretty much knocks Sylvester Brown’s block off. The problem isn’t that Sylvester has a poor memory, it’s that so many people have bad memory’s and share the same view. And if you don’t understand our strategy in the War on Terror, you won’t be able to decide if it’s the right one or not, or if it’s effective. 

But I have to admit I read Sylvester pretty much to find out what a particular demographic is thinking, not reality. Reality rarely intrudes, usually as a distant line on the horizon, sometimes glimpsed but never arrived at.  Here’s another howler of a column, wherein Sylvester grapples with the real meaning behind an IMAX film at the local Science Center. Seems some local peace activists (where were they during our war in Kosovo?) don’t like an aviation themed movie financed by Boeing with the full cooperation of the Air Force — it’s just a long military recruitment ad in their opinion — no word on their take of Top Gun. I loved the response of the Science Center:

John Wharton, vice president of strategic initiatives at the Science Center, said he can hardly comprehend the activists’ concerns. 

“The film may not deal with the Iraqi war, it may not teach aviation, but it certainly deals with the application of technology,” Wharton said. 

“We recently ran ‘Super Speedway,’ a film about auto racing. We weren’t trying to recruit drag racers. We ran a film about raising the Titanic. Was that an attempt to recruit scuba divers?” 

Still, Sylvester’s not sure:

“Are there ulterior motives behind the military film? Maybe, maybe not. I haven’t seen it. I’m more bothered that since President George W. Bush’s election, Americans are often asked to accept a manufactured reality. “

Like no pre-war speechs about delivering democracy to the Middle East? Or 
“That news came on the heels of the conservative fake news reporter-Internet porn escort who was allowed access to the White House for two years. That exposure came after revelations that conservative columnists were paid to promote the administration’s pet projects and policies.”

Of course you can’t blame Sylvester, he recalls reading it the paper, so it must be true. Or perhaps in a book or even a movie. I mean, just read this howler of a column(you’ll laugh until you realize he isn’t alone in his paranoid fantasies) all about seeing a movie based on a book about Karl Rove and how he pretty much runs the country with his brilliance containing gems like this one:

“It would take an audacious genius to create fake news and slip it under the radar of seasoned journalists. Dan Rather, a real newsman, damaged his reputation and almost lost his job under such accusations. Rather produced documents critical of Bush’s military record shortly before the election last year. OOPS! He didn’t bother to validate the authenticity of the documents and was accused (mainly by conservatives) of a partisan attack against Bush. No one knows definitively if the documents were forged. We do know, however, that media attention shifted away from Bush’s dubious military record to the origination of dubious documents. Some wonder whether Rove somehow leaked dummied documents to CBS? Hmmmm.”

And in Sylvester’s not uncommon trademark, he doesn’t have the facts straight. It isn’t that Dan didn’t bother to authenticate the documents, it’s that he did and his experts told him they couldn’t authenticate them. And every expert has in fact reached the conclusion that the documents were forged – even the experts CBS brought in for their internal investigation.

And if you go back to when he was gloating about his bet with Bill O’Reilly, there’s this gem “You’re no Bush clone. In fact, I heard you criticize Bush on your radio show Jan. 19. You were commenting on his ever-morphing reasons for invading Iraq.”

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm

Would one of those ever morphing reasons be, oh I don’t know, perhaps bringing democracy to the Middle East? Of course, no mention of what those reason’s might be. 

If you want to know what the latest weird leftest fantasy is, Sylvester is your man. If you want a grasp of reality, best to give Sylvester a wide berth, along with most of the rest of the paper he appears in.

One Blog Roundup

Mar 17

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Media Criticism | 1 Comment

Are you reading Ranting Profs? You ought to, or you might have missed a few things, like 

Rick Bragg was fired by the New York Times for using uncredited stringers — that is passing off someone else’s reporting as his own. Guess what, everybody is doing that in Iraq. What’s the difference? Good question Cori.

No weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Could it have been because they were moved at the start of the war? According to the NYTs, it was more of that looting George Bush failed to prevent. According to Hitch, it was a carefully planned military operation. Still, if there were no WMD, what was looted? Just the equipment to make them, which wasn’t used because?

What really happened with the Italian kidnapping in Iraq? Like did the Italians refuse to cooperate with the Iraqi investigation during and after the kidnapping? Just like they didn’t tell the US what was going on? Great job there Italy. 

Which is more important — the sentencing in the Peterson case, or the first meeting of the Iraqi Parliament?. It’s a trick question of course, because who cares about the Iraqi parliament. No wonder some people don’t think the American sacrifice in Iraq is worth it, because we have no idea what’s really happening.

Now that it’s just Cori, I’m wondering when she’ll change the name.

The Future of News?

Mar 16

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Media Criticism | 2 Comments

There have been two things that have marked the news business from its start: distinction by time and media. That is to say, the news business has been divided up by when and how the information is delivered. Right now we have three media: paper, TV, and Radio, and we have several times a day, daily, weekly, and monthly. Media has often determined when information is delivered. Now some news ownership may span multiple media and times, but typically the gathering and dissemination end of the business has stayed fractured in those cases even while the business end of the business may have been more closely meshed.

What is the future of news? Convergence. I know that’s a buzzword of long duration but little effect, but that doesn’t mean that it’s time won’t ever arrive. Sure, we’ve seen some of the future already with different news media putting their product on the web, but you know instantly what kind of parent organization produced the product based on content and how it is organized and presented. But convergence will arrive, and with it, the balkanization of news delivery will end. CBS news will compete directly — in the same time and media — with the NYT, the WaPo, and even the St. Louis Post Dispatch and KMOV. OK, nothing you haven’t heard before, just barely seen. 

With this digital convergence, the media will be the internet, not the airwaves or paper, and the time will always be now, not tomorrow’s edition or the 10 O’Clock broadcast. And so we will go from the push model to the pull model, and a great deal of the conventions of the news media will go out the window. Information will not be structured the way it is now. It is unhelpful to have information thrown into broad category buckets like “international news” or “entertainment” and then below that a series of unrelated articles – articles based on the current model of puting out a slug of info at a certain time – even when the articles are related. 

Quite frankly, time will disappear as a basic organization element – it makes no sense when information is updated on an as gathered basis and grabbed by different people at different time. I think we’ll see a persistant structure populated by dynamic data — kind of like libraries (only more dynamic). While you know where to go look for a certain subject, what’s actually on the shelves changes with time – as new books are written. Only in the case of news, I think you’ll just get down to a single file that is updated, rather than a series of files over time (which is how we get news stories today).

Not All Bad

Mar 9

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Media Criticism | 1 Comment

The St. Louis Post Dispatch is not a very good newspaper, even as newspapers go, unless you like your leftism served up smug and unthinking. And the columnists there are generally pretty awful, at least since they fired Elaine Viets for reasons not apparent to her readers. Yes, that includes the sports page, although I’m partial to Jeff Gordon who is a nice guy, at least he was to my wife when she worked briefly as a bank teller. 

But in the interest of fairness and giving credit where credit is due, I’d like to point out that there are two spots you can read good columns – the business section and the outdoor section at the back of the sports page — and I don’t even hunt or fish. The Talk Tech guy is pretty good, as this column on iPods and PDAs shows. But Dave Nicklaus is far and away the best they’ve got — he’d be worth mentioning even at a good newspaper. Try this column on the minimum wage and see what I mean – balanced, factual, thoughtful. Something you rarely get in the rest of the daily fishwrap — any daily fishwrap. What’s funny is reading one of his columns, and then not much later get the editorial page’s take on a subject. Nicklaus writes about how college prices are driven up by third party pay and their ability to engage in “perfect pricing” through the financial disclosures involved in financial aid – the editorialists complain that the Bush administration isn’t providing enough public money to reduce the cost of private tuition. When Nicklaus writes about soaring healthcare costs (here for example) you get a thoughtful look at competing factors with no villains, and the editorialists counter with how big companies and rich doctors work a “patchwork quilt of payers” to drive prices up — mainly because they unswervingly advocate a single payer, namely all of us paying taxes. Actually, I should be happy that the rest of the columnists don’t seem to read Mr. Nicklaus, or he might just disappear from the paper.

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I Heard The News Today

Feb 14

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Media Criticism | No Comments

Is it scalp hunting for people to question journalists and their stories? Isn’t it journalism’s finest tradition to question authority, to speak truth to power, to investigate and let the chips fall where they may?

Let me be clear on about one thing: the downfall of Dan Rather and Eason Jordan were brought about by Dan Rather and Eason Jordan, not bloggers.  Bloggers just presented the words and deeds of these gentlemen to a wide audience.

But these scandals, and others like them, and the relentless fact checking of bloggers, have demonstrated that news media has been doing a lousy job for years. The problem isn’t that the news media is made up of fallible and biased people because that’s the nature of people, but that the systems the media touts – editors, fact checkers, oversight and review – simply have decayed to the point where they do nothing. The president of CBS news raised concerns and was ignored, and then circled the wagons when the exact same criticism came from outside the organization.

The wonder isn’t so much that Eason Jordan (or Dan Rather for that matter) was fired, but that he stayed around for as long as he did. He should have been gone as soon as he admitted that in fact CNN had knowingly, deliberately lied in its Iraq coverage under Saddam Hussein just so that it could continue to misreport the news from Iraq, after he had denied doing any such thing. Both men lost huge market share while destroying the brand, and yet somehow they managed to stay employed. 

Bias isn’t so much a cause as it is a symptom – because the system is broken, the biases of the people involved are unchecked.  The problem that is that the news media is simply unable to deliver accurate information, or correct the misinformation they flood us with. How many times has the Bush presented a fake Turkey at Thanksgiving story popped up? My personal favorite is the 43 million dollars we paid the Taliban, which has only faded because of another media bug, namely the inability to maintain focus on anything but one story at a time, so Afganistan has fallen out of the news taking the spectacular payment with it. Jason Blair put fabrication after fabrication into print not because he was a brilliant guy, but because the news media doesn’t routinely fact check what they present as facts.

What the news media doesn’t seem to realize is that more and more people are catching on to this, and simply do not trust the news media to present accurate news. And why buy or watch what you know to be unreliable? American manufacturers (especially car makers) learned this lesson a couple of decades ago and made adjustments. Americans have flocked to alternate news sources not because it’s a fad, but because they are looking for a better product. Until the mainstream media takes some real steps to safeguard the accuracy of the information they present, Americans will continue to desert them and look for alternatives.

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Meta Media Questions

Sep 22

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Media Criticism | No Comments

Does the success of Fox News tell us something? Does the Main Stream Media (MSM) resemble more a cartel or the rough and tumble of real competition? Why was Dan Rather still anchorman after years of dismal and declining ratings? Why does MSM attack Fox News so regularly and so vehemently? Is Fox News part of the MSM?

Can I fire the MSM? Does the MSM have any idea about how popular or trusted any particular member is? Do its members rise through the ranks more on the opinion of their fellows than their audience? If the work of the MSM is judged by the MSM and rewarded by the MSM, is groupthink the only possible result? Why doesn’t MSM make better use of all the tools and resources at it’s command?

Do the vaunted layers of editorial control add to or subtract from the final product? Is MSM focused on the method of delivery (a particular newscast or a particular edition of the paper) to the detriment of providing their customers the information they need? Will this fixation carry over into the internet age? Does it make sense to bundle information in the internet age?

Do we need a source of trusted, unbiased information? Is it even possible to have an “information referee” who is completely unbiased?

Are TV shows and movies part of MSM? Do they reinforce, contradict, or have no effect on MSM message? If what MSM says has no effect on its consumers, wouldn’t advertisers be wasting their money?