All Blog Posts from Public Eye

We've been following the debate over the strict rules that NBC imposed on non-NBC media outlets that wanted to use footage from the two MSNBC-sponsored presidential debates.

The rules prompted Jeff Jarvis to ask: "What makes NBC think it has the right to own the democratic discussion in this country?"

Now CNN has decided to make its debate coverage "available without restriction for other news outlets to excerpt, stream or otherwise use on-air and online." As Broadcasting & Cable notes, the move had been called for by political activist groups as well as Barack Obama and John Edwards

Said the network in a release: "Due to the historical nature of presidential debates and the significance of these forums to the American public, CNN believes strongly that the debates should be accessible to the public."

Writes Jarvis: "The wall has cracked."

I neglected this during last week's craziness, but Science and Technology Correspondent Daniel Sieberg's interview with BuzzMachine founder Jeff Jarvis is well worth checking out.

The two talk about whether anything should be done about the more vitriolic rhetoric and comments one can find on the Web. Jarvis says that guidelines over what people can say online would be a mistake. "You can't sanitize the whole world," he says. "You can't clean up everything. There are going to be miscreants and bad people around. And we all know to step around them." Click on the video box to watch.

Anyone curious about the future of television news, or television itself for that matter, should go check out this neat video put together by our old friend Jeff Jarvis. In it, Jarvis looks at the old way of doing television and the new. The old way is demonstrated with a behind-the scenes look at recent experiences Jarvis had with ABC News and PBS’s “Frontline.”

Here Jarvis provides a look at just how much work goes into an interview for broadcast news – the four technicians, the set-up time (a three-camera shoot) and all the waiting which accompanies such productions. Then, we see Jarvis shooting some “b-roll” for “Frontline,” which is actually just staged reality. You know all those images of someone walking down the street, sitting at a desk working or seemingly going about their normal business you see on the news? Surprise, they’re really just staged for editing purposes.

Lastly, Jarvis takes us to see how CNBC.com is now doing live TV on its Website – using just one computer. As Jarvis notes about his own video production, it’s fairly limited and simple and not nearly up to traditional broadcast standards – but “it’s still TV.” It makes one wonder how long it will be before that kind of television news becomes the new normal.

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Jeff Jarvis poses an interesting question in his latest Guardian column -- do critics matter anymore? Have we stopped caring about other people's opinions in an age where we all have our own, and also have the means to express them? Who needs us anyway?

Who needs critics, anyway? Not the producers of The Da Vinci Code, who launched a gigahit without showing the movie to critics much in advance. Not the latest Pirates of the Caribbean, which was deep-sixed by professional scribes - who as a group gave it only 52 out of 100 points, as calculated by RottenTomatoes.com - while the critics who count, the ones with tickets in hand, gave the sequel the biggest three-day box office in US history. Not newspapers in the US, which are laying off critics and refusing to send many of those left to soak up PR and parties at television critics’ junkets to Hollywood.

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You may have heard about the scandal involving gossip writer Jared Paul Stern, who has been accused of trying to extort more than $200,000 from billionaire businessman Ron Burkle in exchange for positive coverage in the New York Post's "Page Six" gossip column. The New York papers have been all over the story – particularly rival tabloid the Daily News. The New York Times has also offered a number of stories on the scandal, including today's "Behind Gossip, There's Often a Relationship." Here's a bit:

In two decades of running the page, [Page Six editor Richard] Johnson has built personal and quasi-business relationships with those he has written about; some of them have become sources of gossip for the column. In recordings made by the billionaire, Ronald W. Burkle, Mr. Stern uses some of Mr. Johnson's relationships as examples of what he called "the right approach, because it's a pretty complicated business."

There is nothing illegal — or even particularly rare — about the relationships that Mr. Stern brings up; the muddying of the line between gossip and public relations, subject and comrade, is a longtime tradition in various corners of the industry. It is a well-known element of the glossy magazine business and was even a kind of expectation for a society columnist in the days of "Sweet Smell of Success."

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Sometimes the collection of stories on a front page says just as much as the stories themselves. BuzzMachine's Jeff Jarvis makes this observation today:

The front of the Washington Post reports that Scooter Libby says Bush told him to leak Valerie Plame’s identity and on the same page it reports that a new translation of ancient text says that Jesus told Judas to betray him.

Life is spin.

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Friday was “media day” for the CBS “Evening News,” as the broadcast focused on “the state of the media” in the last part of a week-long series and unveiled a new weekly feature, “Assignment America” (more about that later). And CBS released the results of a poll on the media with some rather surprising results, not all of which made Friday’s show.



In introducing correspondent Anthony Mason’s package on the media, anchor Bob Schieffer mentioned some of the findings of the poll, namely that 63% of respondents had “at least some confidence” in the stories reported by the press while 69% generally believe stories to be accurate. That’s a pretty high number, but maybe I’m just jaded from reading all the criticism the media has gotten lately. Here are some other findings of that poll:

The numbers of respondents who said they felt stories reported by the media are accurate match exactly results from a 1994 CBS News poll. In both cases, 69% said they believed the media was generally accurate while 22% said inaccurate.

When asked, in general, how often the media tells the truth, 59% said all or most of the time while 40% said some of the time or hardly ever. When the same question was asked about members the Bush Administration, 39% said they tell the truth all or most of the time while 58% said they told the truth some of the time or hardly ever.

Asked to compare the media’s treatment of President Bush compared to past presidents, 35% said they thought the press has been harder on the current president, 18% said the media has been easier in its coverage and 45% said he’s been treated about the same as others.

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It was pretty clear what to expect from the Washingtonpost.com’s online forum on “the evolving nature of Internet commentary and ethics.” After all, the views of those invited to participate are hardly foreign to most of those who pay any attention to this debate (or blogs themselves). The group was made up of Jim Brady, executive editor of Washingtonpost.com, Buzzmachine’s Jeff Jarvis, Pressthink’s Jay Rosen and Jane Hamsher from firedoglake. But, hopefully many of those who tune in to read the conversation haven’t been exposed to all of this before and there were some interesting points made, so let’s dive in. (This was set up in response to last week’s blowup on a post.blog where comments to the site were closed after a flood of criticism. If you’re not up to speed on this story, see here).



In today’s forum, there was a lot of chatter about the difficulties involved in opening a site up to outside comments and the gist was: Registration systems help and the discussion usually takes place on a higher plane of civility when identities are attached to comments in some way. The downside to that approach is that it limits participation. Interactivity is important, especially for major media organizations and the Web is a pretty unrestrained place but those who own and operate sites have the right to do what they feel is right with comments. A few of the more interesting highlights follow:

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They aren’t exactly fighting words, but Susan Glasser, the newly-named editor in charge of The Washington Post’s Sunday “Outlook” section has taken a shot across the bow of the blogosphere. In the article announcing her promotion today, Glasser provided a glimpse of what she’s going to try and bring to the weekly commentary section:

“Outlook is one of the great pieces of real estate in the Sunday Washington Post, with a real storied tradition of helping shape the Washington conversation. … What I would hope to do is build on that and think of lots of exciting and interesting ways to update it for an Internet era when opinions and controversy have become the currency but reasoned commentary and analysis are sometimes missing from that new digital equation."

Having been through a few of these discussions before, I know her assertion that “reasoned commentary and analysis” is lacking on the Web is certain to draw some fire. I tend to agree with Glasser in this respect: there is a tremendous amount of loud and unreasonable chatter on the Internet, particularly in the blogosphere. But it is a powerful tool that isn’t going away and offers a lot the MSM can learn from. If Glasser and The Post can do their part to help bridge these two worlds, then more power to her.



Knowing that not everyone will share her opinion (or mine), Public Eye asked some bloggers to weigh in on Glasser’s comments.

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Perhaps predictably, my attempts to clarify the debate over objectivity succeeded only in confusing things so let’s take another crack at trying to make the original point. First off, BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis is befuddled at being thrust into the debate over whether or not Rep. John Murtha’s call for a pullout in Iraq was newsworthy, particularly since he had not weighed in on it.



Fair enough but allow me to explain. Jarvis is one of the leading advocates for scrapping the objective model of news and we have tangled over this before. I felt that the Murtha debate was a prime example of the need for commonality, at least in what we can agree on as elements for public discourse. Thus, the pairing.



Jarvis had a sharp take on my argument that, barring any common parameters of just what news is, we risk a future where even what should be discussed cannot be agreed upon:

“First, Vaughn misses the point on the objectivity debate. It isn’t that with the death of the objectivity ideal — or the admission that it was a false idol — you must now slant every newscast. That’s what he says and that’s what is simplistic, in my view. Instead, I say that the ethic of transparency requires you reveal the biases you do have because your audience deserves to know them, so they can judge your judgments. Having done that, then, of course, you should still try to be accurate, truthful, fair, balanced, and all that. But to refuse to reveal a bias — or rather, call it a perspective — and to, indeed, hide it is a lie of omission. There’s no agenda worse than a hidden agenda.”

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