All Blog Posts from Public Eye

The other day I kicked the tires of a theory espoused by a freelance journalist from up in Boston. He was suggesting that anybody – whether blogger or “citizen journalist” or YouTube uploader – should be considered a ‘journalist’ if they do something that “genuinely looks like journalism.”

More important than labeling, in the author’s mind, was the thought that these ‘genuine-seeming journalists’ should be afforded the legal protections granted to accredited media members.

Well, not that it should come as too much of a surprise, but old school White House scribe Helen Thomas isn’t drinking that “everybody’s a journalist!” kool-aid.

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Elon Professor Micheal Skube skewered bloggers Sunday in an op-ed column published in the Los Angeles Times entitled “Blogs: All The Noise That Fits.” And in doing so, he invoked the name and words of the eminent cultural critic Christopher Lasch to support his thesis. Wrote Skube:

"What democracy requires," Lasch wrote in "The Lost Art of Argument," "is vigorous public debate, not information. Of course, it needs information too, but the kind of information it needs can only be generated by debate. We do not know what we need until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy.”

There was something appealing about this argument -- one that no blogger would reject -- when Lasch advanced it almost two decades ago. But now we have the opportunity to witness it in practice, thanks to the blogosphere, and the results are less than satisfying. One gets the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more. The opinions are occasionally informed, often tiresomely cranky and never in doubt. Skepticism, restraint, a willingness to suspect judgment and to put oneself in the background -- these would not seem to be a blogger's trademarks.

But they are, more often than not, trademarks of the kind of journalism that makes a difference.

So what Skube is trying to say is that bloggers are cheapening public debate – in the Laschian sense – because they are too opinionated, unrestrained and self-righteous. Now, it’s not as if I’m Will Hunting and Lasch is Vickers’ “Work in Essex County,” but Skube is guilty of a little bit of selective quoting when it comes to Mr. Lasch.

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It’s a common complaint from frustrated media consumers: Why don’t journalists just point out the truth? When a politician says something fishy, why don’t they call them on it? The facts are easy enough to track down, after all. So why won’t Mr. Talking Head just use ‘em?

Perhaps because the “facts” aren’t always as straightforward as we’d like to think. Consider John Neffinger’s criticism of MSNBC’s David Shuster and his fact checking of last night’s debate. One of Neffinger’s examples: After Hillary Clinton said she would "put somebody in charge who actually cared about the people of New Orleans" – making a clear implication about the present administration – Shuster said that "To say that the Bush administration doesn't care about New Orleans - that's a leap."

Neffinger also notes that Shuster went after Joe Biden for taking about “how much [Bush] has ruined” the country. Shuster cited the dictionary definition of "ruin" as causing "irreparable damage" and said Biden’s comments were "a bit of a stretch."

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Back in March, Arianna Huffington wrote the following:

It says everything you need to know about the current state of TV news -- indeed the current state of our media culture -- that on a day that saw Iraq moving closer to all-out civil war, with at least 76 Iraqis killed and 179 wounded in sectarian attacks, the CBS Evening News devoted one minute and thirty-nine seconds to coverage of Iraq... and one minute and fifty-six seconds to coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's appearance in front of the Supreme Court. (ellipses in original)

Well, Anna Nicole is back, thanks to a Supreme Court decision in her favor, and Arianna is thus once again assessing "Evening News" coverage of "the Bomb vs Bombshells balance." Writes Huff:

CBS' update of the Smith story was given another minute and fifty-eight seconds of precious air time -- two seconds more than last time -- while its coverage of Iraq lasted two minutes and ten seconds. Aha, you may say, that's 12 seconds more than they gave Anna Nicole, and a 31 second increase from the last time the two stories went head-to-head. True, but Monday was also the third anniversary of Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech -- a fairly significant news peg, wouldn't you say?

Huffington deems the relative coverage between Smith and the war "seriously out of whack." Now, this is a news judgment question, so I'm not going to bother asking anyone at the "Evening News" about it – all they would likely say is they felt that the Anna Nicole story was an important one. And, well, it is: a victory for federal courts over state courts, a ruling that means federal courts can get involved in these kinds of probate cases, as CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen pointed out. That said, had the Trimspa spokeswoman not been involved in the case, it's safe to say it would not have garnered the same kind of coverage.

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Just a follow up to let you know the flap between actor George Clooney and blogger Arianna Huffington over something that was posted on the Huffington Post has a resolution of sorts. After some (including us) raised questions about Huffington's response to Clooney's complaints about a posting under his name, Arianna says: "Lesson learned":

I now realize that I made a big mistake in posting a blog without clearly identifying that the material in it didn't originate as a blog post but was pieced together from previous interviews.

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If you replaced the words “Huffington Report” with “The New York Times” or any other MSM organization in context of the George Clooney flap of the last couple days, Arianna Huffington would be leading the charge to skewer and denounce that entity. Instead she, and the vocal bloggers always scouring news reports for the smallest mistake, have said, well, hardly anything. What are we to take from this episode – that bloggers operate under a separate set of rules than what they hold the MSM to?

Update: Huffington lauds power of blogs.

Update II: Jeff Jarvis on "Bloggate."

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Fashion week may be long over, but people are still talking about labels – specifically, whether its time we stop applying them, at least when it comes to politics. "…the right/left view of American politics is slowly going the way of Betamax, the 8-track, and "Cheney '08" bumper stickers," writes Arianna Huffington. "It's well past time that right vs left gave way to right vs wrong." Her evidence: The fact that people like Tom Coburn and Barack Obama are pushing the same issue – earmarks.

During his first term, George W. Bush's Republican party was largely on the same page as the president, but as Bush has lost political capital in his second term, more and more Republicans have gone off the reservation on issues ranging from Iraq to wiretapping to immigration to whether an Arab company should take over major U.S. ports. As a result, the traditional labels, such as "conservative" and "liberal," have seemed less and less meaningful. And Bush himself has pushed the definition of these words – after all, one doesn't associate the word conservative with nation building and high government spending. Many Democrats have also pushed their labels: If you think of Democrats as liberals and liberals as pro-choice, have a gander at Senate minority leader Harry Reid.

But is it possible to have a political discussion without labels, imprecise as they are? Is there a point at which they become essentially meaningless? To call someone a "liberal" is linguistic shorthand for a series of values, although one's interpretation of those values often depends on his or her political perspective. Some people, after all, take the term "liberal" as a compliment, while others consider it an insult. (The latter may have won out – see the decision of many people to self-identify not as liberal but "progressive.")

One of the most striking distillations of this issue came not from someone labeled not a political commentator but a comedian: Chris Rock. This is a family Web site, so I can't give you Rock's routine in all its four-letter glory, but I did want to include as much of it as I could. (For the whole shebang, go here, but don't say I didn't warn you.) It's safe to say Rock's not a label guy:

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Arianna Huffington and Mickey Kaus are a bit worked up over James Carville, Paul Begala, and Mary Matalin's appearance on "Meet The Press" this weekend. I'm a little surprised they even watched the segment – I couldn't, having already seen enough Carville and company to last a lifetime. (The James and Mary show has hit "Meet The Press" alone 41 times since 1996, according to Arianna. Mickey says 35 times. But you get the point.)



Take it away, Huff:

James and Mary, plus their straight man Paul Begala, were on to promote Carville and Begala's new book Take It Back: Our Party, Our Country, Our Future -- which, I'm sure to their publisher's immense satisfaction, was mentioned 12 times in the course of the show.



But what made this appearance extra-special is how it was so luckily timed to coincide with Carville's upcoming gig as the host of a sports show on XM satellite radio.



And what made it all even more special is the relationship of Carville's radio co-host to Meet the Press's host…

Any guess who said co-host might be? Luke Russert, a sophmore at Boston College, who "attended two Super Bowls, a World Series, five Major League Baseball (MLB) All-Star Games, an NBA final, four NBA All-Star Games, two NCAA Final Fours, an NHL Stanley Cup Final, a U.S. Open and The Preakness Stakes," all by age 16! He is also…let me check…yes…Tim Russert's son! What a coincidence! Here's the chummy exchange on the subject between Russert and Carville. Note that they never quite spell out what's going on:

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