All Blog Posts from Public Eye

You give a little love and it all comes back to you – whether you’re a bad Scott Baio flick or a soda commercial or here, at Public Eye.

Earlier this week, Slate gave a little love to “Whoop-Dee-Damn-Doo” – Public Eye’s examination of the coverage given to Clarence Thomas’ book interviews. So today we give back, to Jack Shafer who discussed Drew Curtis (of “Fark” fame) and his book “It’s Not News, It’s Fark,” featuring this passage:

For all its insight, Curtis' book has gotten scant attention from the mainstream press. Although Salon gave it decent exposure, the Tucson Citizen was the largest American newspaper to review it, and theirs was a mini-review.

Curtis did better on the broadcast side, with segments on NPR, Fox News Channel, and the nerd cable channel G4TV. Perhaps the book got overlooked because Curtis stuffed it with hilarious examples from his Web site, and Dave Barry blurbed it, making critics think it was a humor volume.

Since my predecessor Brian Montopoli is no longer here, I wanted to stick up a tad on behalf of this curious media outpost, which straddles the border of Blogistan and Mainstream Media. Montopoli had a great interview with Curtis earlier this year, where Curtis – one of the savvier tour guides of MediaLand – had this to say:

Most people treat the news media like the exercise bike they have in their basement. They're glad it's there but they never use it. This is obviously a ratings problem for the news outlets.

The number one question I get when I meet people who read my website is "Where can I go to get the real news?" The implication is the major news outlets aren't meeting this need. Most people I've talked to are convinced that they're not getting valuable information from news media anymore. I'm not talking about tinfoil-hatters either, these are intelligent people who believe their news media has failed them.

All that being said, however, two different people – from very different media outlets – suggest that the newsmedia’s not doing a half bad job.

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We’ve been taken to the woodshed. Rachel Sklar, of Huffington Post and Outside Voices fame, is disappointed in Public Eye for what she sees as an inexcusable lack of women participating in the blog. As Sklar notes in a post today, when she wrote for us in June, she chastised our blog for having only featured three women as Outside Voices since last October. I said she had a point and pledged to re-double our efforts in that area. Well, six weeks later, Sklar hasn’t seen any progress, writing:

Now. I hate to harp, but I have been keeping an eye on the column, and note today that this is the SIXTH male-authored column since my entry on June 23, 2006. I have no quibble with Messrs. Powers, Fenton, Barnhart, McLaughlin, Josseloff and this week's Vaina, but come on. It can't be THAT hard to mix it up. We've got a lovely and robust and diverse profession, let's celebrate it, whee! And, profession, when Public Eye asks you to step on up and write that column, step on up and rock it like you mean it. I don't really know what that last sentence means but the phrase "rock it like you mean it" is never inappropriate. It is, however, inappropriate for a media-watching blog to have a column about media that is so uniformly homogeneous.

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Each week we invite someone from outside PE to weigh in with their thoughts about CBS News and the media at large. This week, we turned to Rachel Sklar, a writer, editor and blogger based in New York. She is the former editor of Fishbowl NY and is currently the media and special projects editor for the Huffington Post and eof the site's Eat The Press page. Below, she discusses the recent departure of Dan Rather from CBS News, suggesting that the move may be a part of the overall “de-graying of the newsroom.” As always, the opinions expressed and factual assertions made in “Outside Voices” are those of the author, not ours, and we seek a wide variety of voices. Here's Rachel:

I watched the Dan Rather tribute video on CBS with a real sense of awe. He’d covered Kennedy’s assassination, Nixon and Watergate, Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall, hurricanes. He’d interviewed Saddam Hussein. I watched him go through various stages of 80s news graphics and sideburn prominence - he’d just been around for so long. Forty-four years at CBS News, 24 years in the anchor chair. Said colleague and competitor Tom Brokaw: “He wore CBS on his sleeve.”

Which makes his departure this week so sad -- and so bewildering. Much ink has been spilled on the how and why of the split, but it is bewildering to me on a larger level.

Aside from whatever may have been “due” to Rather after years and years of service to the network, it puzzles me that he wouldn’t be considered a valuable – indeed, vital – resource for the newsroom. Yet CBS isn’t the first network to seek out new, younger blood. Not by a long shot – it’s a trend across the networks embodied by the ascension of Katie Couric and Anderson Cooper and, briefly, Bob Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas. But is the pruning of elder statesmen from the ranks part of the natural order, or will the de-graying of the newsroom ultimately lead to a greening of the news?

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