All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Yesterday, the anti-New York Times crowd took to the streets, with "almost 100 people" gathering outside the Times' office to protest the newspaper's decision to publish information about government financial monitoring programs. The New York Sun reports that Caucus for America president Rabbi Aryeh Spero called for a boycott and prosecution of the Times, a newspaper that is only read, he said, by "snobs on the Upper West Side" and "trans-nationalists and cosmopolitans," who "think that they have had graduated from America and see themselves more as Parisians or something like that."

Among the protesters were men dressed as Osama bin Laden declaring their love for the Times, and a man with a shirt showing a mockup of the Times and the headline "Army To Land On Normandy Tomorrow!" There were also a group of counter-protesters present, who were separated from the Times critics by police.

Michelle Malkin, Atlas Shrugs and Allahpundit have pictures of the protest, and Gawker has some shaky video.

Times editor Bill Keller and others have said that Republicans are using attacks on the Times as a political tactic – Keller told Bob Schieffer that "it's an election year, [and] beating up on The New York Times is red meat for the conservative base" – and it should be noted that yesterday's event was co-sponsored by the Brooklyn Young Republican Club.

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Speaking of staged media events, “On The Media” last week highlighted a far more intricate example. Bob Garfield interviewed Alan Cullison, a Wall Street Journal reporter who, along with James Bandler, uncovered a scheme in which people were paid by the Kremlin to participate in demonstrations against Chechen militants in various U.S. cities. According to the Journal, Russian émigrés have orchestrated “nearly a dozen paid-for protests” in the U.S. in the past two years:

They spent $150,000 to $200,000 in some months, accounting records indicate, to rally thousands of demonstrators near spots such as United Nations headquarters and the World Trade Center site. State-controlled Russian television, whose content is closely guided by Kremlin handlers, covered some of the events, often as the only news organ present, showing video of them on the evening news back home.

Organizers said the effort was funded by private individuals they declined to name. Some former insiders of the campaign told a different story: that both its instructions and its funding came from Moscow. Specifically, they said it came from the Russian founder of a youth group that staunchly supports the Kremlin and has gotten lavish support from the Kremlin in return. This account was supported by emails and other documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

One source told the Journal that “influential people within Russia” ordered state-controlled Russian television, First Channel, to cover the demonstrations despite the fact that, according to the source “ ‘at First Channel, everyone knows it is a fake.’”

In a shocking twist, the Journal reports that “the Kremlin declined to comment” for the story.

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Journalists regularly have to make decisions about how much prominence to give a particular piece of news. Sometimes the decision is easy – no one's going to put the moon landing on page 2, for example. But other decisions are more difficult. The presence of a screaming protester at yesterday morning's White House ceremony for visiting China president Hu Jintao could be seen as either big or small news, depending on your perspective. I asked Dan Collins, CBSNews.com's senior producer for hard news, how he decided how to play the story. Here's what he said in an e-mail:

One of our competitors, MSNBC.com, made the disruption the lead on its site under the headline "White House Protest … Heckler disrupts China president during ceremony." This was true enough, but we decided that the disruption wasn't significant enough to warrant changing the focus of the story from Bush and Hu. We opted instead for mentioning the disruption high in our story about the meeting between the two men.

There was disagreement all over the media universe about the importance of the protester, a woman named Wenyi Wang who had obtained temporary press credentials through a Falun Gong newspaper. Just look at the New York tabloids: The New York Daily News screamed "Boo Hu" and featured a large picture of Wang, while the New York Post put Bush and Hu on the cover with no mention of the protester.

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We’ve noted it before and we’ll probably note it again: woe is the media in China. You’ve probably noticed that much of the coverage here in the U.S. of Chinese president Hu Jintao’s visit to the White House centered on an outburst from a protester who attended the event as a member of the media. From the Associated Press’ lead:

In a surprise outburst that cast a diplomatic shadow, a screaming protester confronted President Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao and interrupted the welcoming ceremony on the White House lawn Thursday. Bush later apologized to the Chinese leader.

"President Bush, stop him from killing," the woman shouted, to the surprise of hundreds of guests spread across the lawn. "President Bush, stop him from persecuting the Falun Gong" — a banned religious movement in China.

While that may have been the headline around here, in China, you’d probably have no idea it happened. A network stringer reported as much, noted National Review’s The Corner and CBS Correspondent Barry Petersen, who is based in Beijing, explains further in a “Reporter’s Notebook” piece on the Web site today:

The Falun Gong are especially frightening to China's Communist leaders because Falun Gong is an organization able to mobilize tens of thousands. The Communist Party wants to make sure there is only one such organization in China: that would be the Communist Party.

So they are a bit, shall we say, hypersensitive, about Falun Gong.

Which is why the 1.3 billion Chinese who happened to watch Chinese TV or read the government-controlled press might be excused for knowing nothing about the protest - because the official press did not report it.

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As the newspaper industry’s dismal financial outlook results in more downsizing at papers across the country, the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists has christened today as “Black Ink Monday,” a “nonviolent protest” in the form of a collection of 100 cartoons at EditorialCartoonists.com. The protest is a response to “the Tribune Company's recent elimination of editorial cartooning positions at several of its newspapers, as well as a commentary on newspapers everywhere who have lost sight of the value of having a staff editorial cartoonist” (hat tip to News Dissector and E&P).

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