Monday In The Media's Stormy Seas

If the MSM simply reported the news by giving it straight out without opinion, then perhaps we would not see its total demise. Tell the truth and the people will come in droves to your newspaper, magazine or television news show.
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Throw in your liberal bias, and you loose.
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The late great newspapers and liberal media are wilting and dying on the media vine and I love it. America is waking up and using their wallets to show their disgust.

Michael I think you need demwoman to edit your pirate accent...

Rustydog, I think the word you're looking for is 'lose'.
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By the way, honest question, just curious. Why do you still post here? Obviously nobody listens to you or respects your opinions. This has been made abundantly clear to you for well over a year now that I've been here, and probably longer before that. Please understand I'm not trying to be insulting or trying to rudely imply that I want you to leave. I'm just honestly curious. I've posted on tons of blogs and forums over the years and I've never met someone stick around where they obviously weren't wanted for as long as you. So I guess you must really feel you're actually accomplishing something here? Or you're just the most stubborn man on Earth. I don't get it. I admire the fact that you are obviously making an effort to read and digest stuff that you so clearly disagree with, but sooner or later don't you just go crazy? Again, not trying to be rude or disrespectful, just honestly curious.

Er, that was all to Rustydog, just in case it wasn't clear =[

Speakin' pirate be gettin' me lost on moderation island here the past few days - it be too much trouble now fer me t' go back an' see if me comments from FRIDAY be sprung! I be thinkin' th' Department O' Homeland Security were gettin' all aflutter about "pirates", and confiscated me "cargo" in case I be sendin' some sort o' secret code out o'er th' net-waves. Truth be told, it were just me usual excoriatin' o' me two favorite coconut-brained clown fish, spongy an' rusty.

Avast, mates, let's be seein' if this be posted now.

BTW, Michael, me lad, it be ARRGH! Ye be pirate-spellin' challenged, mate .

Michael - I'd love to attend a "meatier journalistic fair," but I suspect you meant "fare."
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Fare enough?

Send me own mum dancin' down th' yardarm - rusty be right!
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If th' MSM would just be reportin' th' facts, an' reportin' th' truth, it be goin' a long way in restorin' th' integrity o' th' profession.
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Oh, wait - haul in th' jib, me hearties - th' truth be a LIBERAL notion - an' speakin' o' that...WHO was it won th' election, ye coral-headed barnacle??? An', WHICH PARTY were elected t' th' majority in congress? An' who's ideas an' policies be liftin' th' ship off th' reef o Republican financial, ethical, an' moral dry rot?
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It sure be not ye an' yer flea-bit seabag full o' sh*t notions - they been tossed o'erboard last November - when are ye' be goin' t' figure out ye LOST? Give it up an' step off th' end o' th' plank into oblivion where ye belong.
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ARRGH!

By the way, the newspaper are not suing google because they want them to stop aggregating their news. If they wanted to do that a simple hidden meta tag in the top of their page would suffice. Google makes it incredibly easy for you to not be ranked in their system. What the newspaper want is to force google to pay them money because they can't seem to force anyone else to pay them for their services anymore.

Old medias attack on the Internet is rather strange given the fact that it represents a big part, if not the whole of their future, the organizations that have a future, that is. Content can still be King, but advertising (the Google model) is the way to support it. The license model doesn't work on the net.

nhautamaki Says:
Monday, April 13, 2009 at 9:50 am
"Er, that was all to Rustydog, just in case it wasn't clear"
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Yes you are correct, nhautamaki, lose it is!
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Why do I post comments here? Well I suppose for one I like the format of how you post a comment. Most sites are so convoluted and un-friendly to the user. The one positive I can give to TIME, they did a good job on the format.
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2. I think it is very important for everyone to speak out, no matter what they believe. Especially in forums such as this that tends to be very one sided, including the self-professed journalists who write the blogs here. Most do not hide their die hard favor of liberal progressivism, isn't that right Karen Tumulty?
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3. I like to think that some wary traveler on the internet might just read something here that may at least cause them to re-think their liberal stand on certain issues. As well as I believe I bring out the more sane and rational stand on most things.
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4. I think it is fun too. Pi$$ing off the die hard liberals on this site, and having them show how stupid they are when they react to some of my more colorful comments.
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Hope that answers your question.

While you're at it, maybe you should capitalise your 'i' =p

Yeah I guess it does Rustydog, so thanks. If you really hope to convince the bystander or wanderer by, I think you might be well served try to adopt a more reasonable tone of voice. Of course that would conflict with your stated intention of pissing off the liberal posters (as in, basically everyone but you and spob and occasionally Yoshi I guess). Only you can decide what's really worth your time. My place is just to wonder at it...

I knew Carr before he was a virgin. A guy like him being Old Media defender makes me laugh.

Paul-NNTO--enquiring minds want to know: what exactly WAS Carr before he was a virgin?

Michael Scherer:
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I can't wait for newspapers to charge for content (again).
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It simply means that less people will link to their content, and therefore less traffic will be sent to their sites, and they'll be less able to charge whatever price they're asking from advertisers, and they'll go out of business in their current structure faster.
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Super. I don't like newspapers the way that they are. I knew forever that pricing structure for advertising revenue (for television too, btw) was both fake and unsustainable. I have no desire as a consumer to keep reading comics, movie reviews, local politics and foreign affairs reporting in the same arrogant, untrustworthy, poorly thought out, never-improving corporate news products.
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I remember Times "Select" (I can't even say that in my head without laughing), where I was told to pay a fee for the privilege of exposure to the rambling psychosis of Maureen Dowd. I remember thinking then "This is great! Now we'll find out if the world can live without that twisted freak. I bet there's virtually no market for their op-ed garbage in an online world.". I was right.
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We don't need newspapers. We need journalism.
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Let them try the iTunes model, or the Times "Select" model, or let them persuade the government to allow them to form anti-competitive cartels so that they can try to charge advertisers the same rates online as for print. Unlike, say, petroleum, the world can live without these businesses' product rather easily.
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It would be incredible to me that these pompous fools would have the effrontery to rumble about legalizing price-fixing cartels after the results of their failed management and awful decision-making come to light, if I hadn't already been exposed to a decades' worth of newspapers' worst failures.

Miller was criticized for her reporting on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD). On September 7, 2002, Miller and Times reporter Michael R. Gordon reported the interception of metal tubes bound for Iraq. Her front-page story quoted unnamed "American officials" and "American intelligence experts" who said the tubes were intended to be used to enrich nuclear material, and cited unnamed "Bush administration officials" who claimed that in recent months, Iraq had "stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb."[1]
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Miller added that "Mr. Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war." Although Miller conceded that some intelligence experts found the information on Iraq's weapons programs "spotty," she did not report specific and detailed objections, including a report filed with the US government more than a year before Miller's article appeared by retired Oak Ridge National Laboratory physicist, Houston G. Wood III, who concluded that the tubes were not meant for centrifuges.
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Shortly after Miller's article was published, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld all appeared on television and pointed to Miller's story as a partial basis for going to war. Subsequent analyses by various agencies all concluded that there was no way the tubes could have been used for uranium-enrichment centrifuges. Miller said of the controversy, "[M]y job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal." Some have criticized this position, believing that a crucial function of a journalist is to independently assess information, question sources and analyze information before reporting it.[2]
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Miller would later claim, based only on second-hand statements from the military unit she was embedded with, that WMDs had been found in Iraq.[3] This again was widely repeated in the press. "Well, I think they found something more than a smoking gun," Miller said on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. "What they've found is a silver bullet in the form of a person, an Iraqi individual, a scientist, as we've called him, who really worked on the programs, who knows them, firsthand, and who has led MET Alpha people to some pretty startling conclusions." This story also turned out to be false.[4]

If the newspapers believe that they're holding some kind of authoritative credibility gun to the world's head, it will fill me with great satisfaction when millions of people respond to their laughable ransom demands by ignoring them further.
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Good luck with that fear-uncertainty-doubt campaign to scare people into acquiescing to whatever fantasy league plan you come up with, newspaper executives. I'm sure that advertisers will just be lining up to pay price-fixed rates for your crappy, firewalled online news products. In fact, I happen to have a bridge close to my apartment that I'm selling, for which I'd like to take a classified ad out...
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I think that it's really important that journalists like yourself don't spread the papers' fear-uncertainty-doubt without at least identifying that the problem with newspapers isn't anything to do with charging consumers or aggregators, it's to do with the fact that they don't have a price fixing structure for online advertising that's comparable to their print operations that have enjoyed the benefit of near-monopolies in physical geographic areas.
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Thanks for reading this and considering it, Michael Scherer.

nhautamaki-before his life spun completely out of control Carr wrote for either The Reader or The City pages in the Twin Cities-maybe both.
They were independent weeklies.
He was a muckraker in the best sense of the term.
Doing stories that the local papers didn't, and this was back when the local papers were still pretty good.
It is good that he is personally and professionally in a better place but he isn't the writer he used to be.

Michael Scherer:
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And Jay Rosen, new media deep-thinker, scourge, scold and provocateur, makes a substantial argument for reporters making more of an effort to take sides in public disputes when facts can be ascertained.
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After having read the piece, Jay Rosen isn't arguing for reporters to "take sides" in public disputes, unless by "taking sides" you mean taking the side of the public.

The reason that readership at WaPo.com is down is because no one trusts their journalism or their brand. A significant reason for why their brand has taken a hit is their editorial page, which must be one of the worst in the country. Broder, Will, Kurtz, Krauthammer, and Hiatt simply make up facts out of whole cloth, or spin the facts, to support their political philosophies.

Try reporting facts. Cold, hard facts. And don't be afraid to burn a source when they are lying to you. Report it as fact that a source is outright lying to you.

Rustydog:
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Irritating people for the sake of your own amusement when they're trying to be good citizens in a democracy is, in fact, trollery.
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Less deliberate provocation, more fact-filled (without linking to Zionist world-conspiracy theorists) conservative perspectives, and it will be impossible for anyone except the most hard-core leftist political operatives (those out to discredit rightists even at the cost of the truth) to find fault with the legitimacy of your commentary.

The only real solution for them is to achieve nationalization. Get some stability and bring about a focus on journalism rather than one of chasing ratings. Big money needs to stay out of our journalism as this last era effectively demonstrates.
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Carr's whining and defense of Old Media is predictable. The gloomy revenue news means going to those outrageously priced restaurants in Manhattan becomes a lot more difficult. Woe is him.

I be havin' a wee bit o' trouble tryin' t' figure out who will be payin' journalists t' dig up an' report the facts, and who will be payin' fer th' web exposure if th' advertisin' or subscription models be not workin' fer th' new media?
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What be th' new model, and what be sustainin' it, purse-wise? Be ye not need t' be payin' th' crew their due, somehow? Thar be not too many be able t' keep up fer free.
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This be assumin' o' course, tha' there be actual journalism takin' place in th' new model...

I'd have to agree with choska. Once you've read Krauthammer, you've already read Hiatt, Diehl, and the neocon guest columnist of the day. And Politico founder, Von der Heigh is from the same school, so there's no compelling reason to read his blog.

MS-
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Stuart makes a really important point. Your framing of Rosen's piece on he said/she said journalism is an example of the idea that there are "sides" in every news story, that there is a he and a she. Rosen's point is there often aren't two sides. Forcing there to be two sides on every issue is a way of taking journalistic refuge.
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This has been heavily exploited by Republicans over the last three decades. They routinely engage in the use of talking points that are unexceptionably false, like the recent claims that Gates recommended defense cuts. That also featured the weird additional note that because David Boren said so too, that BOTH sides were saying that it was somehow even more clearly a possible understanding of the situation. That meant a couple of bad things happened. First people were misinformed. Second, they didn't hear the real story, that this was about pork, not national security, about Oklahoma's snout in the trough, not threats from North Korea. Writing that this was about pork would have been a more accurate story. IAC it was certainly inaccurate to simply repeat false claims on one "side" of the story.
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http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2009/04/13/is-he-said-she-said-were-clueless-coverage-dying/
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Chris Mooney points out that this is an especially egregious problem in science journalism. While there are scientific controversies and open questions, most reporting entails reporting the "sides" of a story when there is actually a broad consensus view of experts in the field. This is profoundly damaging, in the short run, to the public who are misinformed and, (as Rosen points out) in the long run to the media who lose credibility.
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This loss of credibility is exacerbated by a point Rosen has made elsewhere. The tradmed reporting role of calling up experts and writing stories about what they had to say has become obsolete. The experts are now on line, and readers who are interested can go to them directly. So it becomes both easy to check the accuracy of stories that rely on experts (and often find them sloppy or just plain wrong) and to bookmark an expert, bypassing the middleman.
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