All Blog Posts from Public Eye

As a borderline pathological XM radio fan who can rattle off the channel numbers of "Cinemagic" and "Fine Tuning" and "Old School Rap" and "Open Road Trucking Radio" by heart, I enjoyed this anecdote picked up by the Los Angeles Times:

"I love lisning to your shows!" she wrote. "I love politics so much! I just have one problem, you are underestimating the number of days until the election! You are forgeting that 2008 is a leap year!...Plese add one day too your total to acount for leap day. Keep up the good work.

"P.S. Can you mabie read this on the radio? That would be super cool!!!!
"P.P.S. If you have time. I don't want to mess you up."

--8 year old political junkie-slash-Spongebob fan Sophia McCrimmen of Mechanicsville, Virginia.

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"I just filmed a segment for Nightline, about The Mist, and one of the things I said to them was, you know, 'You guys are just covering — what do they call it — the scream of the peacock, and you're missing the whole fox hunt.' Like waterboarding [or] where all the money went that we poured into Iraq. It just seems to disappear. And yet you get this coverage of who's gonna get custody of Britney's kids? Whether or not Lindsay drank at her twenty-first birthday party, and all this other [stuff]…

"Britney Spears is just trailer trash. That's all. I mean, I don't mean to be pejorative. But you observe her behavior for the past five years and you say, 'Here's a lady who can't take care of her kids, she can't take care of herself, she has no retirement fund, everything that she gets runs right through her hands.' And yet, you know and I know that if you go to those sites that tell you what the most blogged-about things on the Internet are, it's Britney, it's Lindsay.

So I think it would be terrific [to have them as TIME Persons of the Year]. There would be such a scream from the American reading public, sure. But at the same time, it's time for somebody to discuss the difference between real news and fake news.

-- Stephen King, author, to Time, after wryly suggesting Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan be considered for Person of the Year.

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“You people are really nuts. There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.”

Anita Esterday, Iowa waitress who may or may not have received a tip from Hillary Clinton – and certainly doesn’t seem to care.

“What really sets me off? Anything. I mean, really anything. I’m a moody bastard. Actually, I’ve been banned from reading newspapers because the way they’re written angers me so much. If I want an opinion, then I’ll read the opinion part of the newspaper. I do not want it when I’m trying to get the facts. I get incredibly angry. It really [odd British expletive] me off. See, I have to calm down about it.”

--Keira Knightly and her cheekbones in December’s Elle

“Bloggers are talkers, commentators, not reporters. The talk-show hosts are reactors, commentators, not reporters. The search engines can search but do not report. All of them, every single one of them, have to have the news in order to exist and thrive.”

PBS’ Jim Lehrer defends basic reporting to a crowd at the University of Texas

Is there something in the jet fuel java at MSNBC?

First there was the “Shred Heard ‘Round The World” when we had Mika Brzezinski famously destroying her script featuring the Paris Hilton story.

Now today MSNBC’s Norah O’Donnell questioned the quote-unquote news she was being asked to convey this afternoon, when she reported on Duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” Chapman leaving a racist message on his son’s voicemail.

Why we play this stuff, I have no idea. But Chapman has since apologized saying he is ashamed for offending anyone.

Watch out, celebrities on TMZ.com and MSNBC producers. Hell hath no fury like an MSNBC woman dragged into covering tabloid chaff.

Note to Norah: You go, girl.

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Here at Public Eye, we measure all forms of media criticism. From the left, from the right … and today, we take a look at media criticism from above.

"The failure of the major media in the United States to cover the extra-terrestrial issue is one of the great failures of all journalism."

-- Stephen Bassett, to the Toronto Star. (And possibly pushing for a “Ghostsbusters 3?”)

The newspaper, first and chiefly, is easy to skim. Any single day's news is a motley collection of barely related events, many of which even the most wild-eyed news junkie finds quite boring.

The newspaper's genius is putting them together in a way that highlights connections and implicit categories, and that shows off enough of each to quickly tell you what you need to know.

It's like a shopping mall of news; you don't have to enter every store to have any fun. Just peering in the windows -- scanning the pictures and captions, passing over the headline and pull-quotes and the lead sentence, noting the story's placement -- can be worthwhile.

The print paper perfectly accommodates such shallow regard for certain stories. As you flip through it, you'll see the piece there on the International page and will be able to quickly glean from its design whether it merits your further attention.

Even if you decide it does, you still don't have to read the whole thing to get what you need from it -- just look at the caption and the photograph, or quickly cast your eye over keywords in the first few paragraphs. There, now you know all you need. Next story!

-- Salon.com’s Farhad Manjoo’s poetic paean to print newspapers. Amen, Farhad

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"There was a war going on that week, and attempted terror attacks in London. But these people were talking about onion rings."

-- David Chase, breaking his silence to the Associated Press, discussing the media hullabaloo over the series finale. (And we’re sure the timing has nothing to do with the DVD release.)

"One of the hallmarks of netroots culture was a complete disconnect from history – meaning, basically, anything that had happened before 1998. The political consciousness of most of the bloggers seemed to begin sometime around impeachment, when they had first tuned in. Whatever had gone on before then, the fight between Clinton and the liberal establishment, the very real debates inside the party over trade and taxes and defense – all of these things felt as ancient to the bloggers as the underlying causes of the Peloponnesian War, and about as useful. It wasn't just that the bloggers didn't know much about the political world before impeachment, it was that they didn't want to know, either. So burning was their contempt for "Washington insiders" and the "mainstream media" that they were moved to dismiss not just the individuals who fell into these categories, but all the knowledge such people had accumulated. In a sense, the way the netroots saw it, the more you knew about Democratic politics before 1998, the less relevant you actually were."

--Matt Bai, author
"The Argument – Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics "