Tag: newspaper

Palin Lies About Obama

Seth Anderson0 comment

As we noted earlier, Palin lied about Obama’s record in her speech last night, and the corporate media didn’t bother fact checking before repeating the lie. In fact, this line was touted as one of her best zingers.

In reporting on Gov. Sarah Palin’s September 4 speech at the Republican National Convention, numerous print media, including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Time Magazine, the Dallas Morning News, Reuters, and an article and a column by Debra Saunders in the San Francisco Chronicle, uncritically reported Palin’s claim that Sen. Barack Obama “is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform — not even in the state senate,” without noting that Obama has played key roles in the passage of reform legislation at both the federal and state levels. For example, Sen. John McCain, a co-sponsor of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, thanked Obama for his work on the bill.

Obama was a lead co-sponsor of that bill (S.2590), which sought to “require full disclosure of all entities and organizations receiving Federal funds” — an amount that approximately totals $1 trillion in federal grants, contracts, earmarks and loans. While signing the bill into law on September 26, 2006, Bush recognized Obama as a sponsor of the legislation, saying, “I want to thank the bill sponsors, Tom Coburn from Oklahoma, Tom Carper from Delaware, and Barack Obama from Illinois.” Moreover, in a press release upon Senate passage of the bill, the bill’s primary sponsor, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), referred to the legislation as the “Coburn-Obama Bill.” In media reports, the bill has also been referred to as the “Coburn-Obama” legislation or bill.

[There’s plenty more details at Media Matters – Media report Palin’s claim that Obama has not “authored … a single major law or reform” without noting laws he has passed]

No wonder newspaper circulation is falling – if one has to go to the web to get actual facts, why bother subscribing to a newspaper? What are the newspapers delivering? Press releases interspersed with advertising?

The Wall Street Journal in decline

Seth Anderson0 comment

Reluctantly agree: the WSJ has changed its blend of news coverage in a less interesting style. Joe Nocera of the New York Times writes:

With its new orientation toward Washington and politics, The Journal was bound to overflow with stories about the presidential race, as indeed it did. Still, what struck me about The Journal this week — what struck me hard — was how little business news the first section of the paper contained.

Every day the lead story, and the big photo, was devoted to the convention — stories that said more or less the same thing as everyone else’s. And most days, only one of the four front-page stories was devoted to business. Inside, it was even worse: pages of political and international coverage, which came at the expense of business. On Tuesday, in fact, there wasn’t a single mainstream business story in the entire first section. And the business stories that did run lacked the kind of nuance, analysis and wonderful story-telling that used to characterize The Wall Street Journal I loved.

[From The Wall Street Journal, R.I.P. – Business, Power and Deals – Executive Suite blog – NYTimes.com]

I’ve been a subscriber since 19941, give or take, with a few years off when my finances got shaky, and there is certainly less compelling content in the WSJ as of late. Maybe only a momentary glitch? Possibly, yet Murdoch does have a very strong vision for how newspapers should function, and I’m afraid the WSJ will never be the same paper.

But to me — and I’m speaking now not as a someone who works for a competitor but as someone who has always adored reading The Wall Street Journal — the paper he is producing is less distinctive, less interesting and less important to its core business readership. The Journal of yore always assumed that its readers knew the basic facts of a big story, so it worked hard to find new, fresh angles that required smart reporting and original thinking. The old Journal could barely bring itself to publish a quarterly earnings story without putting it in context for the reader. Most painful for me are the memories I have of the rollicking Wall Street Journal narrative that was such a staple — a behind-the-scenes story about some shenanigans inside a company that only The Journal would ferret out and tell. Nobody else in journalism wrote those stories on a regular basis, and now that The Journal has largely stopped writing them I fear they are going to disappear, like an ancient dialect that dies out.

Footnotes:
  1. and still skip the editorial pages without a second thought [↩]

More on the Decline of Newspapers

Seth Anderson0 comment

More on the Decline of Newspapers and media in general, from Digby, who was on a panel about the media and the blogosphere with Arianna Huffington, Chris Cilizza, Jonathan Alter and Gregory Maffei:

Alter insists that nobody listens to the gasbags and pundits so we shouldn’t worry about them. I asked him how he thought people got their information about politics and he said from their talkative coworker or politically engaged relative and things like chain emails. It’s apparent that many in the mainstream media have not see the documentation and analysis that’s been done online about how the stories and themes of elections, as conceived by political operatives and political pundits, dominate the campaigns and color the voters impressions of the candidates. Maybe the inside of the bubble is too heady a place to be able to connect those dots.

(In the meantime, perhaps I should just direct everyone to Bob Somerby…)

I find it difficult to keep my patience with the inevitable discussion about how the news media is losing money and can’t afford to do the all important news gathering on which we internet parasites depend. It’s as if this problem has happened in some vacuum in which journalism itself has no culpability. They brought a lot of it on themselves, particularly when they gleefully allowed Drudge to rule their world and Rush to be feted and groomed by mainstream conservative politicians without raising an eyebrow. (Live by the wingnuts, die by the wingnuts.)

[From Hullabaloo]

Builds upon the late-great Molly Ivins’ point: the best way to get more subscribers is to put out a better paper, not just whine.

Newspapers in Decline

Seth Anderson2 Comments

I don’t want newspapers as an institution to fade away like the 78 Victrola, I depend upon the news-gathering services of several national papers, including the Chicago Tribune. I have print subscriptions to three papers, but even more so, I rely upon their online presence. I may disagree frequently with the slant of newspaper coverage, and lament the obvious pro-corporate sympathies, but if suddenly the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal started cutting their reporting staff to ridiculous levels, I’m not sure what would happen.

News You Can't Use

This is why Dr. Alterman’s article troubles me:

Spend some time on the “future of news” conference circuit, as I have recently, and believe me, you’ll need a drink and perhaps a Prozac. The flight of readers and advertisers to the web has led to an unprecedented assault on stockholder value, making newspapers the investment equivalent of slow-motion seppuku. For instance, on July 11 Alan Mutter’s invaluable Reflections of a Newsosaur blog reported that in “perhaps the worst single trading day ever” for the newspaper business, “the shares of seven publicly held newspaper companies today plunged to the[ir] lowest point in modern history.” When these losses continued to accelerate, Mutter calculated that newspaper stocks had shed an amazing $3.9 billion in value in just the first ten trading days of July, leading to the disappearance of more than 35 percent of these companies’ combined stock price in 2008 alone

It’s been nearly two and a half years since the much-missed Molly Ivins observed of media moguls that, “for some reason, they assume people will want to buy more newspapers if they have less news in them and are less useful.” And yet the strategy continues unabated. The Los Angeles Times just announced that it will cut loose another 250 people, including 150 in the newsroom–this on top of a series of job cuts by the previous owners, which led to a revolving door of resigning editors and publishers who could not in good conscience carry out the cuts demanded of them.

As a result of this avalanche of industrywide layoffs, buy-outs and firings, Mutter notes, the industry’s age-old ratio of one journalist per thousand papers in circulation is about to disappear. But as a contributor to Romenesko pointed out, this is “a self-correcting mechanism. As subscribers find less and less to read because newspaper staffs are thinned too much to produce quality copy, subscriptions will lapse and the ratio will be restored–until, of course, additional layoffs refresh the cycle.”

[From I Read the News Today… Oh Boy]

Very troubling indeed. Television news is a joke, the news-weeklies (The Nation, et al) don’t have the depth, or space, to cover each days events. The blogosphere, while valuable, would be hard-pressed to step into the breach. Blogs function more as a correcting mechanism, teasing nuance out of already published material. Hardly any blog actually does any hard reporting (Josh Marshall‘s empire, of course, and a few others, a very small percentage).

Answers? I have none, or I’d become fabulously wealthy selling advice to publishers. I do wish more corporate media moguls would take Ms. Ivins advice and find other ways to cut costs other than firing staff.

Of course, executives don’t have to worry about their salary: they’ll continue draining the blood from the goose1

Virtually the only expense still intact is executive pay. On the Recovering Journalist blog, Mark Potts notes that the average compensation among the thirteen public-company newspaper CEOs was just under $6 million a year in 2007, according to corporate proxy filings with the SEC. These figures, one can only conclude, are entirely unrelated to performance.

Footnotes:
  1. or however that cliche goes [↩]