All Blog Posts from Public Eye

There’s “Fake News” on the Daily Show and it works out fine. Such faux shows have even given us the first bipartisan presidential candidate of 2008.

So is there a problem with fake advice column letters?


After I put on my wetsuit this morning and began web surfing, I spotted a wave coming in from Southern California. Fishbowl LA had a troubling headline “Salon, Slate Advice Columns Get Same Fake Letter.”

I’m not sure whether the letter is fake or real – and my e-mails to two contacts within FBLA parent company MediaBistro asking “How did you conclude the letter was fake?” bore no fruit – but the letter that both sites posted was purportedly from a single divorced father whose ex-wife is raising their daughter to be a devout Evangelical Christian.

According to the letter, the daughter is being brought up so religiously, in fact, that she vocalizes her concerns for her father’s soul and tells him he is going to hell. (As opposed to the countless American teens who actually and loudly wish their parents would go there.) The letter showed up twice in the same week on both Salon and Slate. It led off:

I am the father of a 13-year-old daughter whose mother has been taking her to an evangelical Christian church her whole life. Her mother's family is entirely Christian. I am not a Christian, and in fact think that organized religion is actively harmful to her development into a rational adult…

As my daughter gets older, however, she has started to become fearful that because I am not a Christian, I am going to hell…

Her mom thinks that I am denying her freedom by not taking her to church on the weekends that I have her, but I am just trying to help her see that other people believe other things and that having an open mind is a good thing.

So, about the letter. Is it fake? Is it authentic?

I don’t think it matters.

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At this point it’s news to nobody that sites like YouTube are political players. (Though to what extent, and to whose benefit, remains up for argument.)

But Salon today dissects the anatomy of John McCain’s recent gaffe where – in response to an audience member’s suggestion that America “send an airmail message to Tehran” – he half-sang “Bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boy’s song “Barbara Ann” in front of a South Carolina crowd.

Was it news? None of the big boys in the mainstream media outlets considered it worth mentioning. Only the Georgetown Times – and even then 450 words into a 750-word story – decided the musical attempt at humor was newsworthy.

Despite this almost-unanimous omission, McCain’s song ended up becoming a national story. How?

An anonymous/guerilla opposition researcher uploaded the video to YouTube and then made sure to pass it along to the Drudge Report, where it became the lead item and entered the political mainstream.

Opposition researchers – people retained by different politicians or political groups to dig up inconvenient information about politicians on the other side – are doing a lot of the legwork for mainstream journalists nowadays, finding inconsistencies in candidates’ records and dirty little secrets in their past. And the public’s dissatisfaction with the mainstream media seems to ratchet up by the month, giving alternative media outlets increasing momentum and influence.

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Over at Salon, Linda Baker has a piece lamenting the fact that weather reporters don't much talk about climate change. Here's her argument in a nutshell:

Most Americans get their information about the weather and climate from TV meteorologists, who in turn provide forecasts to local newspapers. So the weather report would be a fitting, if not exclusive, place to inform the global warming discussion.

I'm not sure I understand the logic here. Don't most people check the weather on TV so that they know what it's going to be like outside that day? Seems to me that an issue as large and long-term as global warming would be the purview of a special report. It would be nearly impossible to get into any serious discussion of global warming in the two minutes or so most weather reporters are given to put out a forecast.

That said, there is something to Baker's argument that the skill sets of newsroom meteorologists are being wasted.

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