All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Hate to break it to you, but you're not going to get the tried-and-true examples of media "wretched excess" critique here today.

Too easy. If that's what you're in the mood for, why don't you try here or here.

Nah, today we're looking at the Curious Case of Andrew Meyer, the University of Florida student who was tasered at a John Kerry event yesterday. As of this writing, it's been covered in 502 different news Web sites – or at least the news-related sites that Google News steers people towards – including the Agenzia Giornalistica Italia. (Don't know about you, but the AGI is the source I turn to when American college students are electrocuted by the police.)

And yes, truth be told, it's posted prominently on the CBSNews.com homepage.

According to the Associated Press story:

GAINESVILLE, Fla. - A University of Florida student was Tasered and arrested after trying angrily and repeatedly to ask U.S. Senator John Kerry about the 2004 election and other subjects during a campus forum. Tuesday morning, a judge ordered the student released from jail on his own recognizance.
Videos of Monday’s incident posted on several Web sites show officers pulling Andrew Meyer, 21, away from the microphone after he asks Kerry about impeaching President Bush and whether he and Bush were both members of the secret society Skull and Bones at Yale University.

But rather than have this be a piece about Media Overkill, it's more a post about how the existence of video transforms a lower-case story into a higher-case STORY. In the case of some knuckleheads online, video alone makes them a story. And it's a phenomenon that completely predates YouTube, though YouTube has definitely ratcheted it up.

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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."

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A column I published on CBSNews.com has earned me voluminous scorn and vitriol. Somewhat happily and certainly interestingly, condemnation has come in roughly equal portions from the left and the right.

Actually, it was just the opening sentence that so irritated bloggers, commenters and e-mailers. Here are the offending words:

This is a story I should have written 12 years ago when the "Contract with America" Republicans captured the House in 1994. I apologize.

Really, it's just a simple thesis: The men who ran the Republican Party in the House of Representatives for the past 12 years were a group of weirdos. Together, they comprised one of the oddest legislative power cliques in our history. And for 12 years, the media didn't call a duck a duck, because that's not something we're supposed to do.

A writer on the Daily Kos called “Numerian” is typical of the incoming fire from the left, furious that I withheld the truth for 12 years:

In an extraordinary confession of journalistic failure, CBSnews.com editor Dick Meyer reveals that the House Republican leadership for the past 12 years were a bunch of weirdos and misfits unfit for public office…

What are American journalists supposed to do when they are face to face, day after day, with hypocrisy and deceit in our nation's Congress? What excuse does an editorial writer have for not revealing these dangerous weaknesses to his readers? ...

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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.

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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.

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Since it’s obvious there is some confusion out there, let me get this on the record once and for all: Dick Meyer is not my evil twin. Smarty pants colleague? Yes. But we (Dick and I, Vaughn Ververs) are in reality two different people.



I mention this only because Howard Kurtz confused the two of us once again in his Media Notes today. I suppose I should be humbled to have been linked to Meyer. After all, Kurtz attributed his words to CBS correspondent John Roberts last week. Then, when Meyer responded, Kurtz said it was me.



Today’s mix up wasn’t of the “snarky” variety, but more of the “sharp rebuke” kind, taken from Meyer’s comments on a BuzzMachine debate. But I’m the nice guy around here, not the jaded and cynical former producer from the Nixon years. The way this identity thing is going, I may find myself there sooner than expected. But if there’s ever any question about who's writing what around here, you can always check the byline below.

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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.

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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

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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:

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