All Blog Posts from Public Eye

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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Do antiwar protesters have a penchant for spitting on veterans? Or is the notion that they spit on returning soldiers a myth? That's the topic of a pair of columns by Slate's Jack Shafer and a story on Sunday's "On The Media."

Squarely on the side of the skeptics is Jerry Lembcke, who wrote a book in 1998 called "Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam." He calls the notion that protesters spit on returning soldiers a "face-saving device." Argues Lembcke: " It helps construct an alibi, the alibi being that we beat ourselves, that we were defeated on the home front, and that we, the most powerful nation on earth, was not defeated by the small upstart nation of Asian others. It's a dangerous myth because, coming out of Vietnam, it kept alive the idea that we could win wars like Vietnam if we just stuck together as a country, if we just stayed solid behind the war effort."

Lembcke, who is himself a veteran, doesn't say the stories are untrue – he can't say for certain one way or another. But he suggests the vast majority are likely fabricated: No news story, he says, has ever documented an instance of a protester spitting on a soldier. Shafer, who agrees with Lembcke's argument, complains that the press has continued to repeat the tale, as evidenced by a recent Newsweek piece reporting that "returning GIs were sometimes jeered and even spat upon in airports."

Writes Shafer: "Like other urban myths, the spit story gains power every time it's repeated and nobody challenges it. Repeated often enough, it finally sears itself into the minds of the writers and editors at Newsweek as fact."

On the other side of the fence are a number of conservative bloggers, as well as those who say they know the spitting took place, since it happened to them.

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Meaningless Platitudes! That's what Jack Shafer says the press is offering Gerald Ford in its remembrances of the former president. "…the press applied the word decent to him so often that it stopped sounding like praise and started to sound like an insult," he writes. "…When not calling him decent, the press called him 'honorable.' When not calling him honorable, it praised his 'integrity,' his 'virtue,' his 'common sense,' and his 'humble' style."

Reporters are resorting to clichés because Ford didn't have much of an identity, writes Shafer. Thus the generic platitudes. "When assessing the sons and daughters of that great flyover territory known as the Midwest, the formula suggests pale platitudes about honor, honesty, and being decent, as long as the word means 'adequate' and 'just enough to meet the purpose.'"

Excess Chatter! Washington Post arbiter of conventional wisdom Tom Shales has mostly good things to say about television coverage of the Ford funeral yesterday, though there was a bit of backhandedness in the compliment. "Yesterday's coverage of the funeral of former president Gerald Ford found network correspondents and technicians on their best behavior for the most part, the solemn beauty of the ceremony at Washington National Cathedral virtually forcing them to exercise restraint and good taste," he writes.

Alas, Shales deems CBS' coverage "disappointing." Among his gripes: "[Anchor Katie] Couric and many of her colleagues on the big networks committed the common error of talking over scenes that did not require any talking -- or, to the contrary, called for quiet." Shales also complained that "CBS coverage was marred by a director's or producer's insistence on dividing the screen up in boxes, with a large amount of space taken up by 'The Death of a President,' the title CBS gave its coverage."

Major League A's! As Dana Milbank notes, former anchorman Tom Brokaw eulogized Ford yesterday with a tale about a mock chicken head. (Really.) The story had Milbank wondering which reporter might eulogize President Bush. After all, "[t]he current president would probably have Hugo Chavez deliver his eulogy before he would bestow the honor on a member of the White House press corps."

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Hooray! Election Day is here. By all means, do not read the newspaper, Jack Shafer advised Slate readers yesterday. Why not?

The only newspaper with less genuine news than the Monday-before-the-election edition is the Tuesday-day-of-election edition, as we'll see in six or seven hours from now when the bulldog editions reach convenience stores and hawkers outside of bars. Nothing will have changed between Sunday night, when the Monday paper went to bed, and Monday night, when Tuesday's got tucked in. But across the country, tens of thousands of column inches will be sacrificed by talented, exhausted writers pumping nothingness out of the void and calling it news.

On that note, Happy Midterm Election Day.

UPDATE: Also, Howard Kurtz can tell you right now what will be in tomorrow's newspapers.

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Jack Shafer at Slate has written about a new study out of the University of Chicago that takes a fresh look at media bias. It's hard to summarize the study in a short post, and I recommend you read Shafer's piece for more, but here are the three main points he focuses on:

1) If a media outlet cares about its reputation for accuracy, it will be reluctant to report anything that counters the audiences' existing beliefs because such stories will tend to erode the company's standing. Newspapers and news programs have a visible incentive to "distort information to make it conform with consumers' prior beliefs."

2) The media can't satisfy their audiences by merely reporting what their audience wants to hear. If alternative sources of information prove that a news organization has distorted the news, the organization will suffer a loss of reputation, and hence of profit. The authors predict more bias in stories where the outcomes aren't realized for some time (foreign war reporting, for example) and less bias where the outcomes are immediately apparent (a weather forecast or a sports score). Indeed, almost nobody accuses the New York Times or Fox News Channel of slanting their weather reports.

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Unless you're glued to C-SPAN watching the Alito hearings (or maybe not), here's a look at some of what we came across here and there on the Web that's worth a quick look:



We’d be remiss if we didn’t share with you the news that our mothership, CBSNews.com, has launched a new feature on the site that culls the best of the best blog buzz – and not just that related to the media, that’s what we’re here for. This week, Blogophile, written by CBSNews.com’s Melissa McNamara, rounds up ‘spherians coverage of everything from the announcement that the messiah of fake news, Jon Stewart, will be hosting the Oscars to blog reax during Judge Samuel Alito’s confirmation hearings.



Speaking of culling the best of the best, Henry Seltzer over at PressGaggle.com pores over the White House Press Briefing transcripts (occasionally, at least) in search of the finest in gaggle humor. Here’s a nice bit from yesterday’s gaggle:

Q Scott, I just want to come back to this point about irresponsibility, because there seems to be --



MR. McCLELLAN: We're not talking about you.



Q Not today, anyway. (Laughter.)

Ah, woe is the White House reporter.

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