All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Whenever you make a product and it becomes shorthand for all its competitors – like “Kleenex” or “Coke” or “Xerox” – you figure the company is making money hand over fist, right?

Well, one of the most popular media products in years, TiVo – which had the added bonus of becoming a verb as well – finds themselves in the red and is now apparently trying to patch up its relationship with the networks and advertisers it used to antagonize.

How did the 'stickin' it to the man' company change its approach?

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As a borderline pathological XM radio fan who can rattle off the channel numbers of "Cinemagic" and "Fine Tuning" and "Old School Rap" and "Open Road Trucking Radio" by heart, I enjoyed this anecdote picked up by the Los Angeles Times:

"I love lisning to your shows!" she wrote. "I love politics so much! I just have one problem, you are underestimating the number of days until the election! You are forgeting that 2008 is a leap year!...Plese add one day too your total to acount for leap day. Keep up the good work.

"P.S. Can you mabie read this on the radio? That would be super cool!!!!
"P.P.S. If you have time. I don't want to mess you up."

--8 year old political junkie-slash-Spongebob fan Sophia McCrimmen of Mechanicsville, Virginia.

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The Los Angeles Times has decided that just merely having an in-house ombudsman – or two, in their case – isn’t enough.

Since they don’t have a weekly ombudsman column in the print edition, they’re going to skip that step and go online with a more involved “Readers’ Representative Journal” blog sort of thing:

Anchoring the changes is today's launch of the "Readers' Representative Journal," a new blog aimed at taking the public deeper into the process of how editorial decisions are made. Hosted by readers' representative Jamie Gold and assistant readers' representative Kent Zelas, the journal will feature a Q&A-oriented conversation to engage reporters and editors in addressing reader queries and observations. Among the rotating features will be "Ask a Staffer," a chance to get the story behind the story; "Whatever Happened to ... ," where readers can ask for updates on past stories; and grammar critiques.

So the Times will be enabling readers to take their concerns directly to the journalists, under the watchful eye of the ombudspeople, and have them respond. To this writer, it sounded nifty enough in theory. Transparency is no longer merely an option for media outlets. It’s not ‘whether or not’ to be transparent. But ‘how far should we go?’

Still, though, the Los Angeles Times announcement raised a few red flags to this writer:

Ombudsmen are already an endangered species. (Case in point: Minneapolis’ Kate Parry.) Is this liason-esque tactic another attempt to phase out their "middleman" role?

Reporters are hardworking and conscientious and, yes, occasionally thin-skinned about their work. How will they deal directly with dissatisfied readers? Is this one instance where transparency might not be preferable to diplomacy?

But I’m just one man here. So I decided to open it up to some professionals whose boots are in the sand daily in newsroom battles. (Neither Gold nor Kelas responded to my request for an interview.)

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Media criticism oftentimes boils down to a "chicken" or "egg" argument, but often at the fever pitch of those old "Less Filling, Tastes Great" ads.

That came to mind when I read the Washington Post’s Outlook section this weekend, and looked over Naomi Wolf’s piece about how young people don’t understand capital-D Democracy.

According to a recent study by the National Center for Education Statistics, only 47 percent of high school seniors have mastered a minimum level of U.S. history and civics, while only 14 percent performed at or above the "proficient" level. Middle schoolers in many states are no longer required to take classes in civics or government. Only 29 states require high school students to take a government or civics course, leaving millions of young Americans in the dark about why democracy matters.

A survey released by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in September found that U.S. high school students missed almost half the questions on a civic literacy test. Only 45.9 percent of those surveyed knew that the sentence "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" is in the Declaration of Independence. Yet these same students can probably name the winner of "American Idol" in a heartbeat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The “Dumbing Down of America.” Amusing Ourselves to Death. We’ve seen this movie before. It stinks, but it’s true – which, yes, twists that knife even deeper.

That sense only got worse when I saw CNN’s commercial for tomorrow night’s YouTube Republican Debate.

The motto – splashed across the TV screen – came from a Los Angeles Times headline from 4 months ago: “Where the citizen is the star!!!”

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but when it comes to the process of electing the next leader of the free world, I’d rather the candidates be the focal points – or, in CNN’s language, “the star!” – of the event.

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Back when I was a tyke, I used to pore over Highlights magazine when I was at the doctor’s office. I’d was an ace at the hidden pictures. I’d check out what the The Timbertoes were up to. And if the Doctor was taking his or her time, I’d get to the “Secret Lives of Leaves” exposes.

But my favorite was always “Goofus and Gallant.” As if the title doesn’t spell it out clearly, G&G were two brothers that did the exact opposite when it came to certain situations. Dramatically overwritten contrasts were drawn for the reader: I seem to recall them being along the lines of ‘Goofus doesn’t tuck his shirt in when he’s at school but Gallant has a wonderfully-tight necktie knot and is dressed to the nines.’ Or even worse, almost to the point of 'Goofus uses food as fingerpaint while the other one volunteers at a soup kitchen,' or … you get the idea.

Well today in MediaLand we have a Goofus and Gallant of our very own. In this case, it is “Goofus tossed out rumor and hearsay and innuendo for no reason but political calculation.”

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Game, set, match, asterisk. The contest/discussion about who or what will be Time’s “Person of the Year” is over.

It’s Steroids. Yesterday’s federal indictment of Barry Bonds only sealed the deal.

From the home run king to 2000 Olympic champion Marion Jones’s public confession to professional wrestler Chris Benoit’s double murder-suicide to the forthcoming George Mitchell investigation to Americas competitive bicyclists, steroids have been in the news every month of this year, casting a pall over the sports worlds and American culture as a whole.

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We had a nice run, but it’s time to pass along the tiera. Our era as Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” is coming to an end.

Today the magazine is holding a panel to discuss who’s going to be the big newsmaker this year, and it’s going to be a tough call. After all, who stood out in 2007?

There’s a little more to the equation than you’d think, remember. It’s not an award. It’s not even a compliment. The magazine says the distinction goes to “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill.” Heck, Person of the Year doesn’t even have to be a person – Earth won once, and so did The Computer.

Time is holding an online poll right now, listing off ten possibilities. (Look! There go all the Ron Paul readers!) Some of the ones they’re tossing out? Al Gore, Barack Obama, Condoleeza Rice, J. K Rowling, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, General David Petraeus.

All notable public figures, to be sure. But none of them has a chance. The Time magazine is a complicated calculus of risk and PR, with a dash of quirk tossed in. It’s definitely a good annual publicity ploy by the magazine, but it always has a financial angle as well. Over the past 25 years, the magazine's decision has devolved into choosing a safe, newsworthy and palatable cover person or people.

So who might get it? It’s easier to say who won’t. And why.

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October is a month for arguments – Where’s the best foliage? Who’s going to win the World Series?

And, of course, the perennial: Should newspapers endorse political candidates? A couple newspapers in Iowa entered the debate in recent days.

The Sioux City Journal weighed in on the matter earlier this week, pointing out that USA Today founder Al Neuharth is strongly opposed to the idea – calling it “dictatorial” and “kingmaking” – before then defending their practice of backing candidates:

A good editorial or endorsement isn’t the end of the conversation, rather the beginning. It spurs conversation and thought among the readers of the paper, many of which will be printed in the form of a letter to the editor in the days following that editorial or endorsement. It is anything but a directive.

Then, as if on cue, the Storm Lake Times jumped into the fray on Saturday with the first Iowa newspaper endorsement of a candidate, the not-quite-cryptically entitled “Biden For President."

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About two weeks ago, I wrote in this space – shocked and agog, of course – that New York Times Magazine writer Deborah Solomon was taking great liberties with her weekly question-and-answer column.

According to my piece, Ira Glass of “This American Life” and advice-columnist Amy Dickinson – two well-known media types without an antagonistic bone in either of their bodies – took issue with the fact that Solomon quoted them out of context, massaged their quotes and manufactured a conversation quite different from the one they had.

That piece closed:

Journalism is the rough draft of history, the saying goes. And Carl Bernstein called it "the best obtainable version of the truth." I'm good with either one of those bromides. But when it begins to feel like a writer's workshop where you tinker freely, that's when it stops being journalism and starts to resemble creative writing.

And now today I find myself being called something of a rube by Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle ...

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It was the verbal shot heard ‘round the world on Saturday morning, echoing long into the Sunday morning talk shows: Former US Commander Calls Iraq a "Nightmare."

Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez – the top military commander in Iraq from 2004-2006, who resigned after Abu Ghraib – pulled no punches in his speech to the Military Reporters and Editors conference Friday.

The New York Times coverage led off:

In a sweeping indictment of the four-year effort in Iraq, the former top commander of American forces there called the Bush administration’s handling of the war “incompetent” and said the result was “a nightmare with no end in sight.”

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who retired in 2006 after being replaced in Iraq after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, blamed the Bush administration for a “catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan” and denounced the current addition of American forces as a “desperate” move that would not achieve long-term stability.

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