All Blog Posts from Public Eye

In an email this morning, CBS News Vice President Paul Friedman instructed staff not to use the Cho video without the approval of an executive producer. He also wrote that stills from the video should be used sparingly.

"In no case do we want this video to be used as wallpaper, in much the same way we did not want to use the video of the planes going into the World Trade Center or the buildings coming down," wrote Friedman.

This morning, the video and pictures were all over the CBSNews.com homepage. You could watch the video in the upper left hand corner of the site, and slightly further down on the right side; a large Flash slideshow of Cho's disturbing photos of himself ran in the middle of the page. As of this afternoon, the shooting is the lead story, but the video links are gone from the homepage, and the focus is now on the victims. That's by design, says CBSNews.com Editorial Director Dick Meyer.

"We felt we needed to make it prominent during one news cycle, because we have some readers who are primarily at-work users and they may not have had a chance to see it," said Meyer. "By mid-morning it didn't need to be smack dab in the middle. We're certainly sensitive to how disturbing it is."

I asked Meyer if it really mattered how prominently CBSNews.com showcased the video, since it is so easy for anyone who wants to find the video to do so.

"From a practical standpoint, no, it doesn't matter for most news consumers," said Meyer. "By this morning, it was omnipresent. It was omnipresent for savvy Web users by 8:15 last night."

Read full post…

I wrote a piece this morning called "Is This Column." It may be of interest to Public Eye Gazers as it deals neuroscience and social science research into the ways we process political information. Students of bias will find it relevant, I hope.

The Anchoress, a frisky friend of Public Eye made some interesting points about the column, giving me a chance to expand a few points, rather informally. Some of the other comments are interesting in all kinds of ways that I won't bore you with, or get myself in trouble over.

Read full post…

First, some plain set-up so as not to prejudice you readers:



Earlier this week, Hugh Hewitt, the conservative blogger and radio host objected to an item in Public Eye listing some journalists who blog on his blog. He didn’t post anything about it in our comment section but some of his readers seem to have. Hewitt did invite the author of the piece, Brian Montopoli to his radio show (the transcript is here).



Hewitt and I have a mutual professional friend. Public Eye had also invited him to write one its “Outside Voices” pieces. Though I felt he had very deliberately distorted the Public Eye item and then refused to listen to a word Brian said in their interview, I had also been told that Hewitt was a terrific guy. So I wrote him a personal e-mail. He responded (copying our friend, by the way) and we went back a few times. Eventually, Hewitt suggested that we both publish the e-mail train.



I agreed, but uncomfortably. I don’t know about Hewitt, but I intended the correspondence to be private. Whether it serves any purpose to publish these notes, well, judge for yourself. If you’d like to comment, you’ll have to do here since Hewitt’s blog does not post comments.



My goal in contacting Hewitt was to bring him into the conversation here in a civil, honest way. This wasn’t how I anticipated it would happen, but I hope it is useful or enlightening in some way. I won’t say anymore until later on and will let these e-mails speak for themselves for now. And by the way, my e-mails don’t necessarily reflect the views on Vaughn Ververs, the editor of Public Eye, or anyone else around here.



I’d suggest reading from the bottom up. The only editing I did was to remove e-mail addresses. I left the typos and mess-ups in both our e-mails. I don’t know what Hewitt did on his site.



Here it is:




Hi Dick:



Sorry for the delay in responding. I was taping a piece for the Newshour on the collapse of the media's levees in New orleans --the throat slashed 7 year old, the stacks of bodies in the freezer etc.

Read full post…

I think I'm on the scent of one of the differences of worldview that makes it seem, sometimes, as if bloggers are from Mars and old-fashioned, legacy MSM-type reporters are from Venus.



Except that too often, as we'll see, the traditional journalists are from Mars too.



I can make my point only by quoting Jeff Jarvis, proprietor of the blog, Buzzmachine, new friend, occasional consigliere to Public Eye. In a posting today, Jarvis says:

"Anybody can get facts. Facts are the commodity."

This made my blood boil. Read the whole post to get the context for yourself. I doubt that Jarvis wanted these two sentences to get the deconstruction they are about to get; I think he was trying to make a narrow and legit point that sometimes nit-picking the details of story are a means of avoiding the deeper meaning and moral dimension of the story. But…



Facts are not a commodity.



Anybody cannot get the facts.



True facts are very hard to come by.



And anyone who doubts that truly has no respect for journalism and reporting.



However legitimate all the calls for greater honesty, transparency, openness, bias-self-revelation and humility are, they are essentially insincere unless they acknowledge and empathize with some basic realities about journalism -- its limits, challenges and basic standards.

Read full post…

OK, Howie, you clearly need to stop writing Media Notes before 9 a.m. Or you need to drink stronger coffee. In Friday’s column you attributed my quote to CBS News anchor John Roberts and today, you’re attributing it to Vaughn Ververs. The correction in today's Media Notes was a worthy effort...

Don't you hate when someone quotes a blog and attributes a comment to the wrong person? Me too! So when I picked up a hurricane account from John Roberts on the new CBS blog written by Vaughn Ververs, I should have realized that the following comment didn't come from Roberts: "And to those reporters (all on cable, of course) who did grandstand, well, you know who you are."

Apparently he's not as snarky as Vaughn.

But, again, it doesn't quite cut the mustard. As I explained last week, IT WAS ME! Never in my life have I bent over backwards this much just to get credit for being a smartass. Vaughn is a friendly, Midwestern guy who spent his childhood “roaming the vast expanses of the Western plains” (really, he said that in his bio) and would never make a comment like that. And frankly, he’s not that witty anyway.



Signed,



Dick Meyer

Read full post…

In his Media Notes column today, Washington Post's Howard Kurtz includes an excerpt from a CBSNews.com feature in which CBS News correspondent John Roberts responded to a viewer who argued that news organizations were not using their resources to help hurricane victims. But Kurtz mistakenly put one of my sentences in Roberts' mouth -- and no one should have to suffer that fate.



Here’s what Kurtz wrote:

CBS correspondent John Roberts responds to a viewer who complained that the network should have used its resources to deliver food and water to the needy:

Read full post…