All Blog Posts from Public Eye

What’s more meta than a blog about blogs and funner than a barrel of monkeys? An ombudsman column roundup of other ombudsmen’s columns, of course!

Today, Public Eye continues its semi-regular look at the issues at play in Print MediaLand -- at least the ones that seem worth passing along. (As sometimes these things get too insider-y even for us.) So keep your hands inside the car at all times, and we’re off:

Heads or Tales:

Quick. Tell me what’s going on in Iraq in six words. Or explain the Red Sox sweep in five. Go ahead and try.

Both Deborah Howell at the Washington Post and David House at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram used their columns to talk about how difficult it is to boil down journalism into short, pithy, attention-grabbing headlines. Here’s Howell’s take:

As a former copy editor, I know it's tough work, especially on a tight deadline and in a tight count. As Vince Rinehart, Editorial copy desk chief, said: "Perhaps the greatest challenge in copy editing is reading 1,000 sophisticated words on a complex topic and finding six words to tell the story and convey its nuance and tone, often with less than five minutes to do so."

And House describes it this way:

Headline content often relies on connect-the-dots skills in which editors and readers assume shared knowledge and anticipate exchanges of information. As Lutz noted, "Often a headline writer is asked to convey one or more themes in a story in 3, 4, or 5 words."

That can be a mind-bending task, particularly when a copy editor is bearing in mind the Star-Telegram's mission ("Earning the people's trust daily") while dealing with supersensitive topics such as illegal immigration -- a complex, emotionally charged issue that permeates our nation's mind and pulls high readership, increasing the need for accuracy.

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What’s more meta than a blog about blogs and funner than a barrel of monkeys? An ombudsman column roundup of other ombudsmen’s columns, of course!

Today, Public Eye continues its semi-regular look at the issues at play in Print MediaLand -- at least the ones that seem worth passing along. (As sometimes these things get too insider-y even for us.) So keep your hands inside the car at all times, and we’re off:

The War of the Words

Words carry political weight. “Pro-choice” or “pro-life.” “Gun rights.” “Illegal immigrants.” “Surge.” And the Kansas City Star had to explain why it uses words like “militant” and “vigilante” to describe the Minutemen who watch America’s border.

I can see these readers’ point. But “militant” can also mean “aggressively active” or “strident,” and I think many people would find much of the language at their Web site fits those descriptors. One article refers to the U.S. Senate as “traitorous,” which is “putting a gun to the head of America’s national security and repeatedly pulling the trigger.”…

Then what about “vigilante?” Again to the dictionary, which says a vigilante is a group or individual volunteering to promote an interest, or to suppress and punish crime. That seems to me the exact definition of what the Minutemen claim as their purpose.

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What’s more meta than a blog about blogs and funner than a barrel of monkeys? An ombudsman column roundup of other ombudsmen’s columns, of course!

Today, Public Eye continues its semi-regular look at the issues at play in Print MediaLand -- at least the ones that seem worth passing along. (As sometimes these things get too insider-y even for us.) So keep your hands inside the car at all times, and we’re off:

This week’s piping hot batch of ombudsman columns dealt with a wide range of serious journalistic issues, and added a little patriotic twist in honor of Independence Day week.

Subtraction Through Addition?

We start off in Kansas City – Kansas City, here we come – where Kansas City Star ombudsman Derek Donovan heard from a concerned reader who had seen a curious change in the text of an article originally printed in another publication.

Reader Brian J. Finucane e-mailed me last Tuesday about that day’s lead A-1 story about a suicide bombing in Baghdad, which killed several Sunni sheiks who had been working with American forces against al-Qaida in Anbar province. Although the story was credited to The New York Times, Finucane noticed that the original version on that paper’s Web site read rather differently from The Star’s.

“I compared the stories and found that The Star’s story had a negative and speculative anti-American lead that was not in the Times’ story,” he wrote. While the original version stuck to the straight facts of the murderous bombing, The Star added as introduction: “In a setback to U.S. efforts to reconcile hostile factions.” The rest of the article varied from the original Times version, noting that reports from McClatchy newspapers contributed to the final version.

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Sick of Paris Hilton? Don’t particularly care about Anna Nicole Smith’s baby’s daddy? If you're a cable news consumers and are hunting for information from around the planet, your options are limited.

And while there is much hand-wringing over how information and news from the west can be distributed in the Middle East, we tend to think less about how the news from the rest of the world is being passed along to us here in the states.

There are obvious reasons why a cable company would be reticent to broadcast a foreign-based outlet, beginning with the language barrier. If you’re a cable provider, why do you want to cater to a very narrow Francophone niche? Or Farsi? But one channel – that magnet of Middle Eastern media controversies, Al Jazeera – has taken its programming to the English-speaking audience with a network that’s about a half-year old. And it has succeeded in convincing one of America’s top TV watchers – Aaron Barnhart of the Kansas City Star – of its importance and value in the media landscape:

I’ve been monitoring the new channel for several months over the Internet, paying $6 a month to watch a video stream supplied by Real Networks. And I am convinced it is the most important English-language cable channel to come along since Fox News.

It’s everything our cable news isn’t: global, meaty, consequential and compelling in the best sense of the word. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

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What’s more meta than a blog about blogs and funner than a barrel of monkeys? An ombudsman column roundup of other ombudsmen’s columns, of course!

Today, Public Eye continues its semi-regular look at the issues at play in Print MediaLand -- at least the ones that seem worth passing along. (As sometimes these things get too insider-y even for us.) So keep your hands inside the car at all times, and we’re off:

This week’s piping hot batch of ombudsman columns – aside from the predictable flagellations over Paris Hilton coverage – dealt with far more serious and weighty topics than they sometimes do. Race, ethics, death and objectivity were among the issues discussed.

What’s A Hate Crime?

The Chicago Tribune column this week dealt with the aftermath of a major piece from the previous weekend on hate crimes. Hate crimes are a tough nut to crack, as many readers’ first instinct is to question the term itself. As Tribune ombudsman Timothy McNulty wrote:

The story raised an important topic worthy of the front page, but it was undercut by its presentation and omissions that include asking but never fully answering the question raised by the large main headline: "What is a hate crime?" Even more, the secondary headline, "Some are asking why no media outcry over murders in which victims were white and defendants are black," simply played into allegations of a media double standard. It needed to say more.

There is a distinction between "hateful" crimes, which could apply to many violent crimes, and a "hate crime," which is a legal term with definition, even if it is controversial and depends on subjective judgments about motivation and thought.

A prosecutor and ultimately a jury decide whether race, religion, ethnicity or other factors qualify a crime as a hate crime, but the article did not go into such specifics. Nor did it mention the consequences of increased penalties.

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