All Blog Posts from Public Eye

“Nobody phones the paper expecting to find a hero anymore,” according to the current New York Review of Books essay “Goodbye to Newspapers.”

And yesterday’s Harris Poll seconds that notion, as Editor and Publisher points out:

Hang down your head, journalist -- your fellow Americans don't think your career is much to be proud of.

The annual Harris Poll measuring public perceptions of 23 professions and occupations came out Wednesday -- and you can find journalists in the Bottom Ten.

It’s conventional wisdom, of course, that journalism has truly taken a beating in terms of esteem and prestige in recent years. Journalists take a back seat to used car salesmen and ambulance-chasing lawyers nowadays, prompting a sigh from the ink-stained crowd as they order another brew and talk about the Good Ol’ Days.

Read full post…

There’s an argument that always arises when some unsavory character drums up a whole lot of media attention for his or her latest unsavory project. The media, so the argument goes, in allowing said character to suck up a decent portion of the news cycle, is inevitably complicit in the eventual profit that the unsavory character makes. Such is the case with O.J. Simpson’s new book, in which he "hypothetically" explains how he would have murdered his wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend Ron Goldman, if he had done it. Fox Television is also broadcasting an interview with Simpson regarding the book with his publisher Judith Regan.

Predictably, the whole spectacle has generated a storm of media attention -- most of it reflecting utter disgust. It's a lot of the same disgust that arose during the trial of O.J. Simpson for the murders, an event that essentially coined the phrase “media circus.” Many a reporter’s career was invigorated by the coverage.

Intentionally or otherwise, the media is inherently complicit in Simpson’s eventual profit from sales of the book. St. Petersburg Times media critic Eric Deggans discussed it on “Reliable Sources”yesterday:

“Obviously, they knew that there would be a huge, critical reaction to this, that people would criticize it, that we all would talk about it. And unfortunately, in passing along the information that sort of lets people know how awful this is, we also wind up creating the publicity that fuels the machine that sells the book and gets people to watch the TV show.”

UPDATE: It looks like the outrage had an impact -- you won't have the option of buying Simpson's book or seeing the interview. NewsCorp, which owns book publisher HarperCollins and the Fox Network, has cancelled publication of the book and production of the interview. News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch called it an "ill-considered project" and apologized to the Brown and Goldman families.

Read full post…

When Mary Mapes’s new book, “Truth and Duty” came out last week, I pledged a full reading and a review for you. I’m going to modify that pledge somewhat after reading it and give you something less than a point-by-point critique. That’s because I fully anticipated some new information to be presented by Mapes, something that would at least throw some serious shadows or some light on the Thornburgh-Boccardi report, if not a smoking gun. I thought there would be a strong journalistic reason to write about the book here.



Instead, what we get is Mary Mapes' justification of her own self-declared martyrdom and nothing more except, perhaps, a glimpse of how she sees the world. What we don’t get is humility, new facts or any acceptance of responsibility for her role in a story that spawned an independent investigation and further tarnished the reputation of the media as whole, and CBS News in particular.



Stunningly, Mapes has taken the failings of the National Guard story and turned it into a kind of personal credo. She believed (and still does) the documents she used in the Guard story were valid and authentic but couldn’t prove them to be (and still can’t). She believed (and still does) that the documents did not need to be authenticated to be used on the air. She believed (and still does) that President Bush “walked out on his duty” but just couldn’t quite nail it down (and still can’t). In the book, she offers lots of her thoughts about Texas politics, corruption in the Air National Guard and good-old-boy networks but nothing in the way of hard, substantial proof.



And she approaches the book in the same way. She believes that she and her story were the victims of a coordinated political attack by Bush supporters. She even claims that Bush aide Karl Rove “was the mastermind of the Republican attack against the story.” But again, there’s no evidence brought forth-- just assertion, not even argument. Mapes claims a corporate executive harangued her about the damage her stories had done to Viacom’s bottom line. Who? We don’t know, she isn’t telling. And we’re told that the independent panel was a whitewash, engineered by nervous power brokers who feared the White House. Sexy claim, no actual proof.

Read full post…

Since Public Eye wasn’t on the pre-approved list of reviewers for the book written by former CBS News producer Mary Mapes about Memogate, we had to wait until it hit bookstores yesterday to get a copy. I’ll have my review of Mapes’ account when I’ve read the entire book but in the meantime it’s worth pointing out some of the comments and reaction to her PR tour for the book. For the most part, you can take what you want from these tidbits I’ve pulled out. I’ll have my say soon, but you can read my earlier take on Memogate here.


In her first television interview since the National Guard story, Mapes sat with ABC’s Brian Ross to talk about the events surrounding the story and her book. She defended the story and asserted, “I think I’m somebody who got fired for trying to do their job in a difficult atmosphere,” adding, “I don't think I committed bad journalism. I really don't.”


Ross asked Mapes if she still believed the story on President Bush’s National Guard service was true and she answered, “absolutely.” She said of the Killian memos, which were used to validate the story before their authenticity came under intense scrutiny, that they have not proven to be inauthentic, adding, “I’m perfectly willing to believe those documents are forgeries if there’s proof I haven’t seen.” Ross asked Mapes if the standard ought not to have been for her to prove their authenticity, to which she responded, “I don’t think that’s the standard.” (If that’s not a basic standard of journalism and professionalism, I don’t know what is).


Update: American Journalism Review's Rem Rieder weighs in with his take.

Read full post…

On Sunday, "60 Minutes" correspondent Ed Bradley interviewed Michael Jordan. It was a wide-ranging, in-depth interview, and you would have been hard pressed to have come away from it without insights into the man Jordan has become. There was something else viewers likely took away from the interview, however: The fact that Jordan's new book, Driven From Within, was hitting bookshelves the day after the broadcast.



The book was featured first in the introduction to the piece. Here's Bradley's intro:

Michael Jordan is one of the most recognized names in the world, and among the most dominant and gifted athletes ever to play professional sports. But how does a man who has been called the most competitive person alive still compete when there are no more games to play, no more championships to win? It’s a question Jordan tries to answer in his new book, Driven from Within.

Later, Bradley prefaces a question by mentioning what he "read in [Jordan's] book." And he notes that, "Over the years, [Jordan has] written four books, including Driven From Within, which comes out tomorrow." As he says this, viewers are shown images of the book being packed for shipment. In the interest of full disclosure, Bradley also points out that "The book is published by Simon and Schuster, a sister company of CBS."



According to "60 Minutes" Executive Producer Jeff Fager, publishers increasingly look to broadcasts like "60 Minutes" as platforms to sell books. Often, subjects will refuse to be interviewed unless they can time the interview to coincide with their book's release. "A publisher can go to a news outlet and say, 'you can have that story, but you have to mention the book,'" says Fager. "It's the way a number of stories are done these days."



I asked Bradley if he thought Jordan would have done the interview if he didn't have a book to sell. He responded via email: "NO."

Read full post…