the media business

If you don’t read anything else in the Times, the Monday business section on media issues should be a must for “critical issues in journalism.”  On opinion-oriented cable news, MSNBC is called progressive but not partisan.  Partisan means supporting the party no matter what, while non-partisan, ideological means critiquing even like-minded partisans:

While much attention has been paid to the feud between the Fox News Channel and the White House, the Obama administration is now facing criticism of a different sort from Ms. Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other progressive hosts on MSNBC, who are using their nightly news-and-views-casts to measure what she calls “the distance between Obama’s rhetoric and his actions.”

Elsewhere, signs of the fluid definition of “journalism” are found in a couple of interesting places:  (1) the decision of Chicago prosecutors to go after Northwestern University student reporters (because that’s now increasingly where real journalism is happening) and (2) the Secretary of the Treasury inviting financial bloggers to a round-table discussion, another example of the Obama administration’s sophistication when it comes to adapting to new media realities.

Dobbs out at “opinion-free” CNN

The resignation of Lou Dobbs at CNN follows the general reshuffling of cable news to reflect ideological niche markets–with CNN striving for the audience that prefers its news in the more “objective” tradition.  It’s good news for those who saw Dobbs as a fear-monger, spreading rumors and unsubstantiated charges, particularly about immigration issues but including other fringe conversations like the “birther” movement.  Today’s Times has the story:

Mr. Dobbs had been the target of a campaign by Hispanic groups and media watchdogs who accused him of spreading misinformation. The media monitoring organization Media Matters even bought ads on competing networks condemning CNN for employing Mr. Dobbs.

On Thursday, the leaders of those anti-Dobbs campaigns said they were convinced they hastened the anchor’s departure and declared a victory. But CNN executives in private also sounded victorious — saying that they now have the opportunity to remake the 7 p.m. hour free of any anchor’s opinion.

So, on one hand it seems like a victory for more serious discourse, but more than likely Dobbs will find his way to Fox and retain his opinionated radio show.

crowd size and media bias

In analyzing media portrayals, one of the traditional measures of bias is estimates of crowd size.  Inflating the number of participants suggests a bias in favor of the social movement involved.  Visual inflation took place recently in a Fox program’s portrayal of the rally called at the Capitol by Minnesota Representative Michelle Bachman, with images of two separate rallies combined in the story to suggest a far greater number of attendees. These distortions are now much more difficult to get away with under the scrutiny of the blogosphere and programs like the Daily Show. Be your own judge whether the juxtaposition of crowd video was purposive manipulation or an “error” as host Sean Hannity has now acknowledged.

yet another take on Obama vs. Fox

I argued that, contrary to the pundits, Obama might as well criticize Fox for its news practices, since he will be attacked regardless by its lineup of opinionators.

Support for that, and a good example of claim checking, comes from Media Matters that shows the Fox ratings spike some claimed was a myth.

“I sent Barack Obama, President Obama a fruit basket for all that comments because our ratings are up 20% since he made it.” [Fox News' Bill O'Reilly]

“[R]atings at Fox are through the roof.” [Politico's Mike Allen]

“Every time the president or one of his spokespeople mentions [Glenn] Beck or [Rush] Limbaugh, the latter two enjoy increased ratings and bucks.” [Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker]“

recent tracking of partisan news trends

Over the years, the audiences for the cable news networks have become increasingly split along partisan lines–with the sharpest split among Fox viewers.  MSNBC is split toward Democratic viewers (as is Comedy Central), but CNN is not much less favored by Democratic leaning viewers, according to reporting in today’s Times.

By 2008-9, the network audiences tilted decisively, like Fox’s. CNN viewers were more Democratic by 50.4 percent to 28.7 percent; MSNBC viewers were 53.6 percent to 27.3 percent Democratic; Headline News’ 47.3 percent to 31.4 percent Democratic; CNBC’s 46.9 percent to 32.5 percent Democratic; and Comedy Central’s 47.1 to 28.8 percent Democratic.

The question arises:  is that pattern because CNN is “Democrat friendly”, or has Fox been uniquely successful in luring away the more conservative viewers who would otherwise have watched a more mainstream, quasi-neutral outlet?

more on obama vs. fox

The “case” of the administration’s conflict with the Fox News Network continues to get a lot of buzz, not the least of it from Fox itself. As often the case, the Daily Show has the most incisive take on the matter.

the news opinion boundary

A “journalist” with Fox Business News, John Stossell, will speak to advocacy groups opposing Democratic health care reforms. It’s another round of tension between Fox and the administration for the role Fox has played in the political debate.  Stossell, a libertarian for years, was a favorite target of liberal media watchdog groups when he was at ABC because of his opionated approach to news.  The irony here is that the advocacy groups seek him out as a “credible journalist.”  

Greg Sargent, a blogger for the Web site whorunsgov.com, a Wahington Post Company Web site, wrote last week that Mr. Stossel would be effectively working “as a political activist” by attending the forums, and said it “doesn’t seem like great timing” given Fox’s feud with the White House.

Fox and other networks are increasingly built around opinion-based news, but concerning being “credible jouranlists” they can’t have it both ways.

Obama vs. Fox

The administration has provoked a new round of discussion about the role and ideological basis for Fox News.  It was interesting to see that administration officials noticed comments in the New York Times public editor column, suggesting that the Times was slow to respond to topics dominating Fox coverage, causing them to ramp up their pitch that Fox is not a legitimate news organization and therefore not worthy of being emulated.

“We simply decided to stop abiding by the fiction, which is aided and abetted by the mainstream press, that Fox is a traditional news organization,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the deputy White House communications director. Later that week, White House officials said, they noticed a column by Clark Hoyt, the public editor of The Times, in which Jill Abramson, one of the paper’s two managing editors, described her newsroom’s “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” The Washington Post’s executive editor, Marcus Brauchli, had already expressed similar concerns about his newsroom.  White House officials said comments like those had focused them on a need to make their case that Fox had an ideological bent undercutting its legitimacy as a news organization.

Reporters followed their own professional instincts, which made some uncomfortable excluding Fox journalists covering the same beats. The tug of professionalism pulls against the partisan news organizational strategy.  This is new territory for journalism, and the Obama administration has brought the issue to a head by ramping up the rhetoric.  What remains unexamined is the basic claim:  that the opinion-based programs (Beck, O’Reilly, etc.) and the news-oriented programs are driven by the same political agenda.  In the early days, they certainly were.  Now the line still seems blurred, as I’ve posted elsewhere on this site.

a conspiracy hammer looking for a nail

In the echo-chamber world of opinion media, a political stance looks for facts that fit rather than a more disinterested search for truth.  Glen Beck is the conspiracy theorist host of his Fox network program, and his single-minded search for the facts that fit reminds me of the saying that when you’re a hammer the world is full of nails.  The latest version comes in his highlighting of an Obama adviser quoting China’s Chairman Mao as one of her favorite philosophers, evidence to him of her unsuitability to public life.  But as we have discussed with the McCarthy case, context is everything.  Consider for yourself from Beck’s own program clip in what context she was referencing Mao–(here, it seems clear, as an example of determination).

As for the “shocking” revelation in the conservative blogosphere that the Obama adviser admitted “controlling the press,” welcome to the modern world of public relations and the political campaigning industry.

Fox News vs. Obama

The administration has made a strategic choice to treat Fox as a political, not journalistic, opponent.

“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” said Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, in a telephone interview on Sunday. “As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

Fox has used various ways to describe what it does on the news network, first as a claimed “fair and balanced” news product, then as an appropriate counter-weight to the so-called “liberal media,” and now attempting to differentiate the news and “opinion” portions of the broadcast day (as a newspaper tries to claim objectivity by contrasting its news to the editorial section). Claiming, however, that the news side is not also colored by a conservative view is dubious given the selection of stories and promotion of events such as the Freedom Rallies.  Nevertheless, some Fox news anchors, such as Shepherd Smith, have been seen recently though to challenge the conservative orthodoxy.  Whether that’s a strategic effort to appear more detached or a real journalistic impulse is less clear.