South Capitol Street

This item isn’t news but its low profile is:

Nobody knows better than journalists that the best way an organization can bury an announcement it knows will make news is to do so late on a Friday.

So it’s little wonder that the Society for Professional Journalists decided to announce its retirement of the Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award on January 14.

Of course, the SPJ’s release makes clear it’s not because the organization had a change of heart about Thomas’s worthiness of having a namesake award but because “No individual worthy of such honor should have to face this controversy. No honoree should have to decide if the possible backlash is worth being recognized for his or her contribution to journalism.”

It’s understandable they should want to retire it. A journalist getting the Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award would be kind of like an actor getting the Mel Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award. In either case, if someone Jewish got it he/she might feel a little (ahem) uneasy..

The Moderate Voice

Any time someone commits an act of violence that grabs headlines, journalists scramble desperately for a scapegoat, some person or social force to crusade against and extend the story’s expiration date (and thus ratings).  While it appears that Jared Lee Loughner’s motivation for shooting Gabrielle Giffords was nonpartisan (aka mental illness), there have already been reports from CBS, CNN, and the Associated Press attempting to pin Loughner’s motivations to Sarah Palin’s gun-target map, Giffords’ opponent Jesse Kelly using an M16 at a campaign event, and a general atmosphere of fear and animosity created solely by Republicans in Arizona.

As long as they’re bringing this subject up, I believe it’s a good time to discuss what the media could do if they really wanted to prevent future violence.  The answer is not to force conservative speakers to be “more careful” with their rhetoric.  In fact, I believe that the greater responsibility to prevent violence lies on the shoulders of journalists themselves; the media must stop suppressing conservative voices and increasing the ire of the nation.

This is not what makes us angry.

Only a literalistic idiot could find Palin’s “target” map something that would inspire violence, and only a partisan idiot could think that Loughner, a fan of flag-burning, would be a big enough Palin fan to have ever seen that map.  I find it extremely unlikely that someone can be inspired to violence through the words of a political leader unless it’s a direct order, which neither Palin nor Beck nor Rush have come anywhere close to saying.  The people who claim that these three use “coded language” to incite violence are as paranoid as Loughner; only crazy people see calls to violence in innocuous speech, such as John Lennon’s shooter claiming The Catcher in the Rye as his inspiration.

Indeed, when these conservative media personalities talk about removing politicians through the power of one’s vote, that is actually a deterrent to violence.  For Palin fans, her political speech gives them joy and hope, a cathartic reminder that someone out there is speaking for them.  Her defining political contribution has been giving hope to all the flyover country-dwellers deemed subhuman and unworthy by the elites in the media — hope that their votes mattered and that they could change things through their speech and political involvement.

In fact, the only thing that I see inspiring violence without a direct command is if someone feels that there is no effective alternative to violence, that they cannot resolve their dissatisfaction without violence.  People use violence to get money when they feel they cannot get it (or the amount they want) through working; people use violence to get sex when they feel they cannot get it (or the amount they want) through a normal, committed relationship.  In the same way, those who want a political change would turn to violence only if they felt that other means of change their political landscape are ineffectual.  Looking through the quotes of violent revolutionaries through history, one can see that same sentiment — that what they needed to accomplish could not be done through democratic means:

“Not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history except by violence.”   -Vladimir Lenin

“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” –Mao Tse-Tung

“The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.”–Che Guevara

“It is humiliating to remain with our hands folded while others write history. It matters little who wins. To make a people great it is necessary to send them to battle even if you have to kick them in the pants. That is what I shall do.” –Benito Mussolini

The way to fuel such feelings is disfranchisement, which is Priority #1 when it comes to the media’s treatment of the tea party.  Leftists talk incessantly of maintaining “civil discourse,” but in practice that becomes a euphemism for shutting down discourse altogether.  The last 50 years has been spent redefining “acceptable,” “normal,” and “moderate” political speech to exclude anyone who applies the argument for gay marriage to economic transactions, that the federal government should have little or no say in the business of two consenting adults.  For reasons that are still inscrutable to me, the favored line of attack/derision against conservatives remains painting them as racists who only believe what they believe because of their simmering, hidden bigotry.  Because they are racists, they are ontologically corrupted and cannot be given even a proverbial kiosk in the marketplace of ideas.

When you remove the tea partiers’ option to speak their minds by putting words in their mouths, ignoring them, and proliferating slanderous rumors about them, their only remaining options are to shut up and bear it or vocally protest, as we saw in the summer of ‘09 (as their frustration was exacerbated by a congress who ignored them and the media’s active suppression).  Consider the quiet, civil conversation David Letterman had with a local Tea Party organizer Pam Stout; when a media figure allowed a conservative to speak her mind and respectfully listened instead of asking barbed questions to paint her as a puppy blood drinker, the conversation was civil.  When Katie Couric insultingly asked Sarah Palin a question equivalent to saying, “Prove to me you’re not a trailer-trash rube who doesn’t know how to read,” it spurred anger and vitriol for months afterwards.  When the media enters into the conversation with hostility, attempting to delegitimize legitimate voices, it only provokes greater hostility.

Suppression makes us frustrated.

As I watched tweets and articles that poured in yesterday during the aftermath of the Giffords shooting, I was so frustrated I wanted to scream, to act out.  Anyone who knows me knows I have no temper, and such feelings are extremely abnormal for me.  I didn’t feel this because of some secret racial code word from Sarah Palin; my anger was caused by the lying, smearing, smug, condescending crap spouted by slimy partisans who blamed us for the actions of a mentally unstable man and couldn’t put aside politics for one tragic day.  It was the same anger I felt when Charlie Gibson lied through his teeth, claiming ignorance about Big Government’s ACORN videos when the federal census had dropped ties with the organization the night before.  It was the same anger I felt when the LA Times said that uploading their video of Obama toasting the virulent anti-Semite Rashid Khalidi was irrelevant to the ’08 campaign when they had already hosted a video of Sarah Palin strutting in a swimsuit for a 1984 beauty pageant.

At the risk of becoming the latest Media Matters example of tea party violence (although I will admit, I have sneezed a couple times today), I firmly declare that any frustration I experience is directly caused by journalists’ obstinate refusal to do their jobs and give a fair shake to mainstream political viewpoints.  Progressive journalists, in their search for ways to prevent more political violence, should look in the mirror and ask themselves whether their dismissal and sliming of the tea party are contributing to people’s anger more than a stupid map.  By denying a place on the nightly news for the actual positions of conservatives, are they eliminating the possibility of peaceful expression by the American right?  In the words of liberal hero John Kennedy, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Big Journalism

Over at Ace's place, Purple Avenger ponders whether today's journalists can really be deemed "yellow" in the late 19th-early 20th century sense. He(?) finds that "what we're seeing now is a somewhat different and more dangerous beast than traditional yellow journalism."

The one thing that clearly distinguished the early vanguard of yellow journalism from media today is the perspective it took. The Pulitzer and Hearst types were shameless self-promoters and didn't hide anonymously behind a corporate facade.

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NewsBusters.org – Exposing Liberal Media Bias

“The shooter’s motivation is still unknown,” Katie Couric announced as she anchored Saturday’s CBS Evening News, but that didn’t deter CBS, nor CNN, NBC and ABC on Saturday night and into Sunday morning from forwarding attempts to blame Sarah Palin and, by implication, the Tea Party, for the Tucson shooting.

“Giffords was one of 20 Democrats whose districts were lit up in cross hairs on a Sarah Palin campaign Web site last spring,” CBS’s Nancy Cordes declared in referring to a political map, adding that “Giffords and many others complained that someone unstable might act on that imagery.” Hours later on CNN, Jessica Yellin noted “we don't know the motive” before she proceeded to raise how “on Twitter and Facebook, there is a lot of talk, in particular, about Sarah Palin.” On Sunday’s Today, leading into a clip about Palin, NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell asserted: “Giffords, a conservative Democrat, was concerned about heated campaign rhetoric from the Tea Party.”

ABC connected Palin to the Wild West, as David Wright reported on This Week:

Congresswoman Gabby Giffords liked to joke that her district includes Tombstone and the OK Corral. Until yesterday morning, most people here would have said that rogue gunslingers were part of the distant past. On election night in November, 18 of the politicians in the crosshairs of Sarah Palin's political action committee lost, but not Gabby Giffords.

Audio: MP3 clip, matches 2:45 video below compilation of six soundbites.

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NewsBusters.org – Exposing Liberal Media Bias

Very interesting piece in Vanity Fair about why the news media has turned on WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange.  The story tells us as a lot about Assange..and the news media.  Part of the falling out has to do with the fact that Assange is incredibly controlling, saying that he believes in transparency-but not acting that way.

“Assange’s position was rife with ironies. An unwavering advocate of full, unfettered disclosure of primary-source material, Assange was now seeking to keep highly sensitive information from reaching a broader audience. He had become the victim of his own methods: someone at WikiLeaks, where there was no shortage of disgruntled volunteers, had leaked the last big segment of the documents, and they ended up at The Guardian in such a way that the paper was released from its previous agreement with Assange — that The Guardian would publish its stories only when Assange gave his permission. Enraged that he had lost control, Assange unleashed his threat, arguing that he owned the information and had a financial interest in how and when it was released.”

Writer Sarah Ellison also notes that part of the clash is financial,  because the mainstream media and Assange and both in financial trouble.  Britain’s left-leaning Guardian was a early Assange partner,  but they’ve had a falling out.

“When the C.E.O. of the Guardian Media Group, Carolyn McCall, announced her resignation last March to take over the C.E.O. role at the discount airline company easyJet, Kelvin MacKenzie, the former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun tabloid, offered some unsolicited advice for her successor. ‘As a fiscally responsible chief executive, my first move would be to shut down The Guardian and The Observer tomorrow, thereby saving about £50 million a year,’ he told a local paper. ‘It would also have the pleasing effect of chucking a lot of untalented left-wing turds onto [Gordon] Brown’s bonfire. It’s a total nightmare of a job and nobody with an ounce of business acumen would touch it.’

Julian Assange’s business model appears to be no better. Although his overhead was once modest-[WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn] Hrafnsson estimates that before “Collateral Murder” [the video of American troops killing civilians in Iraq] the organization could function on a budget of $ 200,000 to $ 300,000 a year — financial needs have ballooned as the work of WikiLeaks has become more high-profile and labor-intensive. “I don’t have the exact number of people on our payroll,” Hrafnsson says, but he estimates that there are now “a few dozen people who are committed full-time” on either short-term or long-term contracts, with hundreds of volunteers contributing their work. WikiLeaks operates almost entirely on donations, and they have fallen woefully short. Finances aside, Assange’s editorial model gives pause to anyone who gets close enough to see it firsthand. And it’s not clear that an organization like his, run the way he runs it, could ever achieve anything like longevity. Committed to a form of transparency that verges on anarchy, and operating on the sly and on the fly, it is inherently unstable.”

Big Peace

Nostalgia just ain’t what it used to be.
American Thinker Blog

In his January 4 article, "Why Journalists Aren't Standing Up for WikiLeaks," Newsweek's Ben Adler offers three reasons, the first of which is quite risible given the media's persistent advocacy for ObamaCare in the year past:

So why are American journalists hesitant to speak up for Assange? There are essentially three reasons.

 

1. Refusal to engage in advocacy: American journalists, unlike many of their foreign counterparts, have a strong commitment to objectivity and nonpartisanship…

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NewsBusters.org – Exposing Liberal Media Bias

by Zoë Pollock

In classic style, Alex Pareene gloats about Judith Miller's new gig at Newsmax, "a goofy right-wing magazine where conservatives you've never heard of (and John Stossel, apparently) report, constantly, that Barack Obama is bad and unpopular":

While someone who's wrong about everything is an odd hire for any magazine, even one that exists mostly to sell old people Acai berries, Judith Miller, you must remember, was fired by the liberal New York Times. If liberals hate her, Fox and Newsmax will have her, no matter her sins.

But this must still be galling to Judith. Becoming a right-wing martyr is generally a pretty good career move — it'll make Juan Williams a millionaire — but Judy Miller is used to the respect afforded a New York Times foreign correspondent superstar. Filing a piece from Iraq to a wingnut's pet newsletter is probably not how she envisioned her career shaping up.

But it works for me.

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Of course the Society of Professional Journalists would have a “Diversity Committee.” How else could liberals continue on with the thought policing of which they became so fond in college? Now, according to the SPJ’s The Quill, they think the AP style book should be changed to provide amnesty to illegal aliens until they are proven to be in the U.S. illegally.

Frequent use of the phrases “illegal immigrant” and “illegal alien” by our mainstream media is being questioned in order to remain faithful to the principles of our U.S. Constitution.

SPJ’s Diversity Committee met during the 2010 convention in Las Vegas and decided to engage in a yearlong educational campaign designed to inform and sensitize journalists as to the best language to use when writing and reporting on undocumented immigrants.

Megyn Kelly picked up on the topic at Fox News. Now, TPM is taking out after her. Given that so many self-professed journalists so routinely perform journalistic malpractice of the JournoList variety today, in the spirit of being certain, I propose we stop calling all of them journalists. We can just call them something fun, like typing monkeys, until we’re absolutely convinced they are capable of producing something akin to objective journalism, as opposed to the usual liberal spew they regularly regurgitate on cue.

Unfortunately, thanks to foolish constructs like the SPJ’s diversity committee, what was once thought to be a vital, objective and independent force in American democracy – journalism, is very often little more than liberal tripe. Genuine free thinkers need no longer apply.

Plenty of conservatives are pretty upset over a campaign by the Society of Professional Journalists to convince reporters to stop using the terms “illegal aliens” and “illegal immigrants” in favor of “undocumented immigrant.” But none are as livid as perpetually outraged Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who on Wednesday afternoon asked if journalists were going to start calling rapists “non-consensual sex partners” next.

“You could say that a burglar is an unauthorized visitor. You know, you could say that a rapist is a non-consensual sex partner which, obviously, would be considered offensive to the victims of those crimes,” Kelly said. “So how far could you take this?”

Big Journalism

by Conor Friedersdorf

One school of thought contends that balance is paramount: a contested matter demands that the reporter gives equal space to "both sides," presents the debate to readers, and allows them to make up their own minds.

"We report, you decide!"

But there are those who lament that approach. For example:

It's depressing to see how often dubious and even outright false health claims, such as the claim that vaccines cause autism… are reported credulously. Often this takes the form of a journalistic convention that is more appropriate for politics and other issues but not so appropriate for scientific and medical issues, namely telling both sides as though they have equal or similar weight… almost invariably there is an anti-vaccine crank like Barbara Loe Fisher, Jenny McCarthy or someone else from Generation Rescue, or someone like Sallie Bernard from SafeMinds cited as though she were on equal footing, scientifically speaking, with scientists who have dedicated their lives to the science of vaccines.

I've just delved deep into a debate of this kind. Its subject is chronic lyme disease. The Chicago Tribune published a story that casts doubt on the diagnosis. "There's little good evidence that chronic Lyme disease exists," the subtitle reads. "Yet doctors are treating it with drugs that put patients and the public at risk." It's rare to see so forceful a conclusion stated in an American newspaper. The piece is savaged here as biased. And it is praised and defended at length here as appropriately skeptical of chronic lyme disease, and refreshingly willing to give the results of double blind studies more weight than the anecdotal assertions of doctors and patients who represent a minority opinion.

Below the defense of the article there appears a dissenting comment that is the most fascinating aspect of this whole kerfuffle. It is written by Pamela Weintraub, features editor of Discover Magazine, and justifies a long excerpt:

This blog and other protests by non-journalists reminds me of patients going to medical journal sites to protest the scientific method. If you don't like the results, just change the methodology to get what you want. Likewise, at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, the most credible and important source of science journalism peer review, not a single journalist agreed that the story in question represented appropriate journalistic practice, or met the standards of good journalism. Not a single classically trained journalist disagreed with the reviewer, Paul Raeburn, who is himself one of the finest and most credentialed science journalists in the United States. The site was then invaded by voices with knowledge – and especially, by set positions – in medicine, but zero credentials, training, or experience in journalism.

These people rushed in to a space reserved for journalist peer reviewers, to impugn the standards of good journalistic practice endorsed by the journalist peer reviewers, and to insist there was another, better way of doing things: their way, which would rewrite the ethics and guidelines of journalism practice, whole cloth. To wit, these non-journalists feel that they should be enfranchised to peer review journalism along with journalists themselves -and that while they are at it, they should change good journalistic practice and write new rules to suit themselves. This is not going to happen: There is a lot of bad journalism practiced, for instance, the journalism in the Tribune story, but the profession still has standards, still has ethics, still has requirements, still has a set of guidelines to differentiate good work from bad. I don't want to respond much on the science because to me, this is an issue of journalism, pure and simple.

A comment written to discredit the conventions of traditional journalism could hardly do a better job. Strip away all the arguments from authority and you have a woman asserting that the truth of the matter at hand is less important than adhering to the protocol that "credentialed science journalists" have set forth. In her telling, a "peer review" of an article doesn't assess its accuracy so much as whether its authors met "the standards of good journalistic practice." It's a rather stunning confusion of means and ends.

It also implies a consensus about journalistic "rules" that doesn't actually exist. Clearly the editors of The Chicago Tribune thought the story they published was just fine. After reading Weintraub's comment, NYU Professor of Journalism Jay Rosen remarked that "Some day, when kids ask, was there really a priesthood in journalism, did people really think that way," he'd point them to Weintraub's comment. Perhaps most odious of all is Weintraub's remark that "these non-journalists feel that they should be enfranchised to peer review journalism along with journalists themselves." I'm unsure what magic she takes to be conferred by the title journalist, or how exactly one becomes "credentialled" in the field, but among my peers in the press I know very few who regard the work we produce as beyond the capacity of non-journalists to critique, especially if the critics have direct expertise in the subject matter we're writing about. In fact, some of us particularly value outside critiques because we know from long experience that all professions are prone to blind spots, and that a profession meant to inform the public must be especially vigilant in guarding against group think.

Insofar as journalists are owed deference, it springs not at all from their title or credentials. Here at The Atlantic, articles in the print magazine are fact-checked, certain writers have through long hours of reporting developed expertise on certain subjects, and reputations for intellectual honesty have been earned. Non-journalists are perfectly capable of hiring fact-checkers, developing expertise, and building reputations too. The question of who is a journalist and who isn't need never be adjudicated. Longtime readers know that I earned a masters in journalism from NYU. At least at my alma mater, the faculty generally reject the approach to the craft taken by Weintraub, as do most of the journalists I've befriended in the course of my career, and most of the editors that I've worked under.

Judge us not by Weintraub.

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

A diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks has revealed that American television programming is making strides in the war of ideas against Islamic radicalism that far outpace any American government-backed programming in the Arab world.

A favorite among Saudis, according to the UK Guardian, is a TV channel called Rotana, which is partially owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. And yes, Rotana does broadcast the Fox News Channel.

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NewsBusters.org – Exposing Liberal Media Bias

Washington (CNN) – Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday that he has authorized “significant” actions related to the criminal investigation of WikiLeaks as the website faces increasing pressure worldwide for publishing sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables.

“National security of the United States has been put at risk,” Holder said. “The lives of people who work for the American people have been put at risk. The American people themselves have been put at risk by these actions that I believe are arrogant, misguided and ultimately not helpful in any way. We are doing everything that we can.”
FULL STORY

CNN Political Ticker

Since former “Green Czar” Van Jones was ousted from the White House he has yet to be challenged about his radical views and associations. From his admitted communism and 9-11 trutherism to his appearance on a radical anti-government rap album, no one has asked him the tough questions.

Most recently, the Jones-founded group “Color of Change” led the attack on Andrew Breitbart’s free speech, resulting in Breitbart’s removal from ABC’s election coverage. Again media silence.

With Jones visiting Washington University in St. Louis it was once again time for citizen journalism to fill the vacuum left by the “mainstream media.”

Big Journalism

Since former “Green Czar” Van Jones was ousted from the White House he has yet to be challenged about his radical views and associations. From his admitted communism and 9-11 trutherism to his appearance on a radical anti-government rap album, no one has asked him the tough questions.

Most recently, the Jones-founded group “Color of Change” led the attack on Andrew Breitbart’s free speech, resulting in Breitbart’s removal from ABC’s election coverage. Again media silence.

With Jones visiting Washington University in St. Louis it was once again time for citizen journalism to fill the vacuum left by the “mainstream media.”

Big Journalism

Sarko’s temper flares again in response to a reporter’s question about allegations that he took kickbacks from a weapons deal with Pakistan to fund his presidential campaign:

"And you! I’ve no evidence against you. But it would seem you’re a
paedophile. Who told me? I have an absolute conviction. I’ve seen the
intelligence reports but I won’t tell you which ones; I’ve seen someone
but I won’t tell you who, and it was word of mouth. But I have an
absolute conviction you’re a paedophile … Can you explain yourself?"

After
a 10-minute diatribe against various journalists, during which he kept
returning to the paedophile analogy, he walked off declaring: "See you
tomorrow, paedophile friends."

Well that should throw them off the trail.

While reading Eric Pape’s informative profile of new French Foreign Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, I was struck by the fact that she’s managed to keep such a low international profile despite her remarkable rise to power and pulling off the first ever ministerial "grand slam" — she’s headed the Justice, Interior, Defense, and Foreign Ministeries — in French history. It seems to be largely because she’s remarkably managed to rise to the highest levels of French government without a major personal scandal, accusation of political malfeasance, or high-profile feud. 

FP Passport