All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Hell hath no fury like a blogger scorned.

Former White House aide Dan Bartlett has drawn a MediaLand of attention for an interview he did with Texas Monthly, disputing the notion that the media wasn’t aggressive enough with pre-war reporting.

White House correspondents have been tagged, unfairly, with not being tough enough on the administration and President Bush in the run-up to the war. If you go back and look, they asked all the right questions. The problem is, they’re acting now like they have to be five times more critical, and I think they’ve gone overboard.

But what really caught this writer’s eye was Bartlett’s characterization of conservative bloggers:

I mean, talk about a direct IV into the vein of your support. It’s a very efficient way to communicate. They regurgitate exactly and put up on their blogs what you said to them. It is something that we’ve cultivated and have really tried to put quite a bit of focus on.

"Regurgitate?" Really? Coming from a former Bush aide? Oh no he din’t. That’s basically the equivalent of calling White House reporters ‘stenographers.’ (And we've learned you don’t go there.)

I figured that this wouldn’t sit well with right-wing bloggers. But I wasn’t quite sure. So I pulled a Captain Renault and e-mailed some "usual suspects.”

Read full post…

Stephen Colbert, like savoir faire, is everywhere.

It’s no news that the host of “The Colbert Report” is running for President. It’s been the talk of the political world and blogosphere ever since he announced two weeks ago.

But today’s New York Times piece got me wondering. Former TVNewser Brian Stelter wrote:

Stephen Colbert’s presidential candidacy may be phony, but his supporters are very real…

One of them — a group created by Raj Vachhani and titled “1,000,000 Strong for Stephen T Colbert” — has grown to more than a million members in just over a week, making it the most popular political group on Facebook by far.

Read full post…

From the files of "nifty in theory" media criticism – and I've had to toss a lot of my ideas
ideas in that very file – comes today's suggestion from Washington and Lee journalism professor Edward Wasserman.

In the wake of media frenzies in Blacksburg, Virginia and weather-torn areas and grief-stricken disaster victims, Wasserman has two words for the news media: Keep Out.

Wasserman's critique of over-the-top media Tragedy TV starts out:

In the age of round-the-clock news, misery gets plenty of company. A bad event, if it's bad enough, unleashes a flood of reporters, producers, camera crews, satellite trucks and all the techie plumage that accessorizes the media-industrial complex. Whether a mine cave-in, mudslide, bridge collapse or school shooting, the media swarm around disaster sites has become such a routine of contemporary Americana that rarely do you hear anybody ask whether, on balance, it's a good thing.

Read full post…

From the files of "nifty in theory" media criticism – and I've had to toss a lot of my ideas in the very same file – comes today's suggestion from Washington and Lee journalism professor Edward Wasserman.

In the wake of media frenzies in Blacksburg, Virginia and Minneapolis, Minnesota and covering grief-stricken disaster victims, Wasserman has two words for the news media: Keep Out.

Wasserman's critique of over-the-top media Tragedy TV starts out:

In the age of round-the-clock news, misery gets plenty of company. A bad event, if it's bad enough, unleashes a flood of reporters, producers, camera crews, satellite trucks and all the techie plumage that accessorizes the media-industrial complex.

Whether a mine cave-in, mudslide, bridge collapse or school shooting, the media swarm around disaster sites has become such a routine of contemporary Americana that rarely do you hear anybody ask whether, on balance, it's a good thing.

Read full post…

Beat The Press: According to The Politico’s Ben Smith, John Edwards is the “first major Democratic candidate for president” to take a page from the Republican playbook and make attacking the press corps a part of his campaign strategy. He’s aggressively responded to stories about his expensive haircuts, for example, releasing a video flashing images of misery in Iraq and New Orleans while the theme song of the musical "Hair" plays. And at the end, this question: "What really matters?" (He has also used the issue in fundraising emails.) Perhaps if Internet video and the “Tank Girl” soundtrack had been around in 1988, Michael Dukakis could have put together a nifty response of his own.

Read full post…

Marseilles? Oui. You-Know-Who? Non! (With a big juicy asterisk)

The only way that Us Magazine is going to feature the words “Paris Hilton” this week is if they’re talking about a hotel in France.

Us Magazine – you may know them from their recent investigative pieces unveiling Jessica Simpson’s weight loss and Nick Lachey’s romantic life – has decided to take the journalistic high ground. They’re not going to talk about the recent jailbird for the entire issue this week.

Okay, well except for that “100% Paris Free” on the cover.

And except for their Web site focusing a lot of attention on the celebutante.

And, yeah, except for their staffers on TV talking non-stop about her.

But, you know, those are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Read full post…

Check out this “See It Now” report in which Edward R. Murrow and a host of CBS News correspondents take viewers “on a rather grim tour” of bombed-out Berlin after the airlift. Click on the video box to watch.

In 2003, as Greg Sargent notes, the New York Times anonymously quoted a "Bush associate" calling John Edwards "the Breck Girl of politics.” Now the Times' Adam Nagourney is expressing regret for helping the unnamed "associate" spread the slur. "Our story may have had the result of not only previewing what the Bush campaign intended to do, but, by introducing such memorably biting characterizations into the political dialogue, helping it," he writes.

Continues Nagourney: "Was that a mistake on our part? Perhaps… faced with the same situation again, I would press the Bush officials to be named in offering their characterizations; no justification for anonymity here. And based on my experience in trying to insist more often that sources speak on the record in this campaign season, I think I might have succeeded."

The issue is back in the news because of revelations that Edwards got two $400 haircuts paid for by his campaign. (Edwards is reimbursing his campaign $800 to cover the cost of the cuts.) Sargent writes that the "decision by many in the media to devote the amount of attention to Edwards' fair locks that they did was idiotic and indefensible." He cites an Associated Press report and a Maureen Dowd column as evidence of the media's obsession with the topic.

I understand Sargent's criticism, and it's hard to disagree completely: A haircut should not be a major election issue. At the same time, we're talking about a $400 haircut, paid for by the campaign, for a candidate who champions himself as an advocate for America's poor. Is that really something the media should simply ignore? Isn't it possible that it tells us something, even if it's just that Edwards needs to exercise better political judgment so as not to play into the criticisms favored by his political enemies?

The haircut isn't even close to a major story, of course. It's no more than a footnote, and should be treated as such. Here's hoping that Nagourney and his peers spend this election cycle covering stories like this with restraint -- and make an effort not to let themselves be used by partisans looking to score cheap, and anonymous, political points.

"For an imperial power, the United States is an oddly incurious place. Our media don't help. They should poke and prod and demand that we pay attention to people abroad even when they're neither disaster victims nor terrorists. Instead, by their inattention, the media perpetuate the dangerous belief that our divine right is to speak and be heeded, never to listen."

--Edward Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, in the Miami Herald.

"My reaction was that Katie Couric asked questions that the American people are asking themselves, and I think they were completely legitimate questions. And I think the American people deserve answers from me and from Elizabeth to those questions. I mean, I'm asking America to support me and vote for me as their next president, and I think part of the evaluation of a candidate for president is a personal evaluation of the character and integrity and honesty of a candidate. So, no, I thought the questions were fair. Tough. I thought they were tough, but they were fair."

--John Edwards on the questions asked by Katie Couric in her controversial "60 Minutes" interview with the Edwards.