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.

j-students clash with prosecutors over notes

Journalism students tackling real-world issues, of wrongful convictions, face real-life conflict with the legal system over their research. The School of Journalism at Texas has launched a similar project with the Law School, the Innocence Project, which just recently scored it’s first overturning of a conviction based on its work.

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.

dan rather in austin

Dan Rather has always aspired to the legacy of Edward R. Murrow, which is why he was so dogged in pursuing his case against CBS News–once the cream of the crop among broadcast news organizations. See previous blog posts on his court case. He’ll be speaking Thursday at 4:00 in the Union Ballroom, and we’ll attend instead of holding class.  Click here for more details.

the new wiki-twittersphere

National courts have a difficult time controlling the release of information, when it can easily slip across political and legal boundaries in the cyberworld.  A British company charged with toxic dumping in Africa sought to keep an internal report secret, but when posted on Wikileaks (a wiki style website for whistle-blowers) and pointed to by the twitter posts of a British newspaper editor, the report could no longer be kept from public view.  Reporting in today’s New York Times, Noam Cohen reports:

In addition to using Twitter, these sympathetic readers used a new tool fromGoogle — SideWiki — to post comments alluding to the controversy on the Web sites of Trafigura and its law firm, Carter-Ruck. Furthermore, Wikipedia, with its main servers safely sitting in the United States, freely linked to Wikileaks, giving coverage that was more comprehensive than anything a British news consumer could find.

class guest clifford krauss’s front-page story

I saw this story this morning on the front page, but didn’t notice the byline of our guest this afternoon. Interesting story on gas emissions into the atmosphere.  By ANDREW C. REVKIN and CLIFFORD KRAUSS

To the naked eye, there was nothing to be seen at a natural gas well in eastern Texas but beige pipes and tanks baking in the sun.

the public editor role

For ideas about where to find a good “case/issue” idea, a great place to look is with the Times Public Editor.  Also called an “ombudsman” in some papers, Clark Hoyt critiques his own paper’s coverage and responds to readers.  Each one of the issues he takes up could be the basis for a case/issue analysis–that is, considering how the press has done its job concerning some particular situation or issue.  For example, the health care debate:

The news media, including The Times, have been accused of failing to help clear up the confusion. …I understood her frustration. Health care is a sprawling subject that is hard for a newspaper to get right. It involves economics, politics, and philosophical and moral values.

the false and vacuous “balance” of American journalism

False balance and the agnostic perspective on “reality” by American journalism is skewered beautifully by the Daily Show last night.  Once again, Jon Stewart provides a revealing critique of the empty analysis in the name of “objectivity” that particularly cable news is guilty of hiding behind.

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.

American power, visually

The power of photography, as depicted by Mitch Epstein in Saturday’s Times.