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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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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After years (decades?) of eyeing each other suspiciously, could the cold war between the media and the military be thawing? Two recent news accounts seem to suggest so.

Slate’s Jack Shafer writes that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates “adores the press”:

Pointedly criticizing the conduct of the department and offering himself as the anti-Rumsfeld, Gates thanked the press (that would be the Washington Post) for uncovering the "problem" at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. "The press is not the enemy, and to treat it as such is self-defeating," he said.

While serving as president of Texas A&M University, he hit three very high free-speech notes at a September 2003 campus symposium on government-press relations, saying "there is good reason for journalists' skepticism and cynicism," "the press is the surest way for people to know the truth," and "secrecy is too often used as a cover for incompetence."

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Apparently, what the newspaper industry has needed to realize is an epiphany they could have figured out by watching “Afterschool Specials,” reading Hallmark cards or opening fortune cookies.

It seems, yes, It’s What Inside That Matters.

According to Jack Shafer at Slate, the coolest thing about newspapers is not what you find on the front page. Quite the contrary. It’s the A4 stories and the just-before-the-editorial-page content that is the lifeblood of papers, the stuff that differentiates them from other forms of media.

And I agree with him. Here’s what Shafer has to say:

In the Web era, I find myself spending more time with the inside pages of newspapers, probably because I've not tainted my consciousness by previewing many of them on the Web. Those inside pages tend to have a magazine feel to them because of their greater independence from breaking news. In recent months, I've noticed the Washington Post place heavier emphasis on graphics to illustrate the inside news, taking advantage of big pages whose acreage dwarves that of the average computer monitor. All to the good.

The point of Shafer’s piece is that we consume news nowadays in the spirit of muffintops– we consume the most visible stuff and cast the rest aside – but still we have that feeling that there was something we missed out on. As for the front page headlines we see on the morning paper? He points out that a lot of the time what is ‘news’ in the paper actually occurred 20 or so hours earlier – and we’ve already read about it online and chatted about it over a drink.

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Just as the graveyards are full of indispensable men, so is the Information Superhighway strewn with financial model roadkill.

It’s 2007 and almost nobody has devised a sustainable way of making money on content online. Heck, I spent a semester worth of grad school ten years ago – writing a hundred pages – looking into Internet financial models and could only end up with a heavily-footnoted shrug.* That was back in the days when Slate.com was still attempting to charge $19.95 for a yearly subscription. (They were saved by Microsoft in 1999.)

The problem, of course, is that you can find (almost) anything out on the web for free. So there’s absolutely no incentive to pay. Back in November 2005, the New York Times decided that they had figured out a way around this problem – a hybrid experiment where they would offer their news content for free, but charge for the unique commentary of Tom Friedman, Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, et al. So they began “TimesSelect” and began charging non-subscribers $49.95 to access the opinion page online.

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The blogging phenomenon has gone from mere curiosity to the over-analyzed topic du jour in near-record time. There is nearly as big a divide over the worth of blogs as there is in the political realm but I think there’s one thing we can all agree on: Slate’s “Blogging The Bible” is one good example of why blogs were invented. Slate deputy editor David Plotz has been blogging the bible for some time now and, having gotten through the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), is plowing straight ahead. You might want to check with the religious authority of your choice about some of the interpretations Plotz provides but it’s probably more of the good book than most are familiar with – and it’s fun to read. Here’s Plotz’s take on the first chapter of the Book of Joshua:

The most interesting moment in the chapter occurs during God's conversation with Joshua. The Lord instructs Joshua to read "the book of the law" that Moses prepared—that is, I suppose, the five books of the Torah we just finished reading. He tells Joshua: "You shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to act in accordance with all that is written in it. For then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall be successful." God never told Moses to read the law book, because Moses wrote the law book. This, in other words, marks the beginning of biblical scholarship. The Lord, like Justice Antonin Scalia, obviously believes in original intent. He certainly isn't telling Joshua to interpret laws, just to follow them. But without Moses to clarify, those laws must be discussed and analyzed. So let 4,000 years of argument begin!

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Journalists are notoriously thin-skinned … which is why it was somewhat surprising to find out how Slate was celebrating its 10th anniversary – by soliciting essays from critics under the banner, "What’s Wrong With Slate.” Well, they asked, and several critics unloaded.

From National Review Online’s Jonah Goldberg:

“[Slate] is the house organ of the guys who get invited to the professor's house for dinner and come back to the dorm to explain how they corrected their betters about this or that. In fact, Slate's editors are so confident in their own superiority that they have rejected the practice of fact-checking because Slatesters are so good they don't need a net.”

Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff:

“Slate, like Fox News, is part of the opinion media where even a negative reaction is a positive reaction. To me, the Slate people are insufferable in ways that are quite similar to the ways the Fox people are insufferable—at Fox, they like to be the toughest guys in the barroom; at Slate, the most overachieving guys in the classroom—demonstrating, perhaps, that affect rather than ideology is the culture's most irritating force.”

Blogger Eugene Volokh was a little less harsh, noting that Slate is “thoughtful, timely, and a pleasure to read,” before making three suggestions for how the publication might improve. Check out the essays in full, and as long as we're addressing criticism ... got any for us?

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Amid the Snowstorm (Get it? Get it?) that’s accompanied the appointment of Fox News commentator Tony Snow as the new White House press secretary, Josh Levin at Slate offers this, utterly frightening (and hysterical) hypothetical:

Press Briefing by Bill O'Reilly
James S. Brady Briefing Room
8:00 p.m. EDT

Some highlights:

Q: What was the president's reaction to the al-Zarqawi tape?

MR. O'REILLY: Since you're a premium member of BillOReilly.com, Ms. Bumiller, I'd be happy to answer that. We have the al-Qaida leadership on the run, and we're taking the fight to them in Iraq and in Afghanistan. We will continue to take these threats seriously, and we will win the war on terrorism. It's just a shame that Cindy Sheehan and Ludacris and the New York Times provided the funds to make this vile piece of propaganda.

Q: What does Cindy Sheehan have to do with anything? Ludacris?

MR. O'REILLY: When the president made The Factor a Cabinet-level agency, my producers and I got access to some classified stuff that would knock your socks off, if you follow me.

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