Posted on 02/07/2005 5:36:00 AM PST by laurav
Hammered
Published: Sunday, February 6, 2005 8:43 PM EST
How blogs are shattering the arrogance of the Columbia Journalism Review ... and why that's good for journalism
Laura Vanderkam
Joseph Newcomer had never heard of the Columbia Journalism Review, the magazine of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, before friends told him to check out what CJR said about him in the January/February 2005 issue. Newcomer, a Microsoft programming teacher who has studied typesetting for decades, suspected the hubbub was about his recent assertions that CBS's 1972-73 memos on President Bush's National Guard service were fakes.
Sure enough, "Blog-Gate," by Corey Pein, a CJR assistant editor, said Newcomer was a "self-proclaimed" expert whose r/sum/ "seemed" impressive. His conclusions were "bold bordering on hyperbolic." Newcomer's font analysis, posted on his Web site, www.flounder. com., was "long and technical, discouraging close examination."
Then, without asking Newcomer for help on those long, technical parts, Pein concluded that Newcomer's ability to replicate the CBS memos with Microsoft Word (not available in 1972) proved nothing. Blogs had not been instrumental in exposing CBS and, through it all, "liberals and their fellow travelers were outed like witches in Salem, while Bush's defenders forged ahead, their affinities and possible motives largely unexamined."
Newcomer, who voted for Sen. John Kerry in November, was baffled. When I spoke with him recently, he told me that The New Yorker once called his wife, a botanical illustration expert, to ask whether a certain plant could grow in a certain area, because a fiction writer had mentioned it in a piece. That was fact-checking. CJR "did not do any fact-checking," he says. Pein did spend weeks researching his story, even traveling to Texas to report it. He wrote that CBS screwed up. But the suggestion that blogs were "guilty of many of the very same sins" that CBS committed, and that Newcomer did not know what he was talking about, set the blogosphere howling. More than 40,000 people read Pein's article the first week it was online (CJR's circulation is 22,000); CJR received over 100 letters. Many featured the same theme: "This was spin-doctoring, not media criticism," says Tim Graham, director of media analysis at the right-leaning Media Research Center. Pein received nasty letters noting his youth and his politics (he graduated from Washington's Evergreen State College, known for its lefty bent, in 2003).
Employees mostly left-leaners
Criticism of CJR and the "MSM" (mainstream media) for leftward bias is nothing new. "If you polled our office -- I'm sure most news organizations -- you'll find more Democrats than Republicans," Pein says. Many of CJR's employees and contributors, for instance, have worked and/or written for left-leaning magazines or causes (see sidebar).
But look a little deeper and you start to wonder if, perhaps, CJR's decision to attack blogs wasn't just a knee-jerk liberal defense of Bush critics but jealousy. The Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that blog readership rose 58 percent in 2004. Editor & Publisher reported in May 2004 that veteran newsman Eugene Roberts was leading a consortium to shore up the CJR's (and the American Journalism Review's) weakening finances and readership.
Blogs these days are holding the MSM's feet to the fire, forcing newspapers and TV news shows to reflect the country's politics more accurately. CJR, "America's Premier Media Monitor," on the other hand, has been nudging the media leftward for four decades. Now it has to compete -- and it's not happy about it at all.
"They are, to some extent, just another blog, except they have the brand," says Graham.
Bloggers 'upset' journalism
"We still don't know what blogging is going to do to journalism over all," says Phil Meyer, professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age, "but it's certainly upsetting it."
CJR was the first national journalism review, Meyer notes, so it maintains a certain clout. Its 22,000 readers are disproportionately opinion makers.
While the "quality has ebbed and flowed, depending on who's editing," Meyer says, many newsmen and women grew up reading the magazine, laughing at its "The Lower Case" round-ups of unintentionally funny headlines and shaking their heads at the foibles highlighted in "Darts & Laurels." Since its founding in 1961, CJR has tackled meaty issues from war reporting to the role class plays in media coverage.
Since the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism cranks out many of the media's leaders, and awards the Pulitzer Prizes, CJR has gained a reputation for showing the way the elite media looks at itself. Surveys show most reporters lean left; naturally, elite media criticism leans that way too.
But it's not clear that the MSM needs an influential leftward tug. With the nation evenly divided between left and right, and the MSM firmly on the left side of that divide, CJR's praise for all things progressive and distaste for suspected conservatism discourages the media from accurately reflecting its audience. It keeps the media from asking tough questions about why folks are so enamored with blogs and other alternative news sources -- while millions turn away from daily papers and the nightly news.
The double-standard
Certainly CJR holds any rightward baby steps in the media to a standard it doesn't hold for itself. CJR, for instance, panned the right-of-center Daily Oklahoman as the "Worst Newspaper in America" in 1999, partly because the Oklahoman had no liberal columnists. Yet a search through the past few years' CJRs finds no discernably conservative writers in its pages, either.
CJR asked about Fox News, in 1998, "Can a news network dominated by conservative hosts be genuinely 'fair and balanced,' particularly toward those on the left?" That's a fair question, yet in 1996, the CJR sent a regular contributor to The Nation magazine to profile the highly influential, and conservative, editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. The resulting assessment of the page, and its editor Robert Bartley, was not favorable. In 2004, CJR turned to a senior correspondent for the left-leaning American Prospect to assess editorial pages' stands on the war in Iraq.
CJR even allows writers from liberal interest groups to advance their causes without disclosing these relationships. Conflicts of interest often garner "darts" in CJR's "Darts & Laurels" section. But in 1996, CJR published former AJR managing editor Elliott Negin's critique of the conventional wisdom that the Natural Resources Defense Council had hyped the Alar chemicals-on-apples scare in the media. In this piece, called "The Alar 'Scare' Was For Real," Negin was referred to as a "Washington D.C.-based writer." CJR did not note that he was a writer for the same Natural Resources Defense Council he was defending.
Of course, people can have opinions and still be fair. "We all have our perspectives on the world," says CJR publisher Evan Cornog. "The fact that people perceive a bias one way or the other in what one does is not something one can do a whole lot about as long as you think what you're doing is solidly reported."
That's a sentiment that head honchos at Fox News, viewed suspiciously in CJR for its "unmistakable conservative biosphere," would no doubt agree with.
But Fox News' audience, unlike much of the mainstream media's, is growing.
The nation's premier media monitor should, if anything, help media leaders understand why they are losing their audiences. In 1964, more than 80 percent of Americans read a newspaper regularly. Now about half do. One reasonable question to ask: Is it the media's fault?
Not according to CJR. In the January/February issue, right alongside Pein's "Blog-Gate" article, publisher Cornog penned a piece called "Let's Blame the Readers."
"Let's Blame the Readers" advances the idea that Americans don't like the mainstream media because we're no longer civic-minded. We're no longer civic minded thanks to conservatives: "For decades the Republican Party and allies in the business community have worked to reduce the government's role in American life," Cornog writes. Prominent villains blamed for this decline include both Presidents Bush and, oddly, speechwriter Peggy Noonan.
Declining audiences must also indicate ignorance - and "Why is ignorance so widespread at a time when higher education is more widely pursued than ever before?" Cornog asks. Prominent villains here include the standards movement in schools and standardized tests. Everything is to blame for the decline of mainstream media consumption except the idea that journalists have a worldview many of their potential customers don't share.
Blogs are shattering that cocoon. "Blog-Gate" is the CJR's resulting temper tantrum.
Blogs reflect a different demographic than the media elite who graduate from Columbia University or write for the CJR. It's a demographic Steve Lovelady, former managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, suspects would have included his father. "My father was grumbling about the local newspapers and what he perceived as an anti-business bias as far back as 40 years ago," he says, "and as early as 1980 he had an anti-Dan Rather bumper sticker on his car." All his life, Lovelady says, his father was frustrated that his opinion wasn't being heard or reflected in the media. "The only difference is, now everyone has a blog instead of a bumper sticker."
Many such bloggers criticize the press from the right. Their criticism, Meyer notes, means the mainstream media can no longer safely set the day's news agenda. A howl in the blogosphere can generate so many letters to the editor and calls that soon the mainstream media has to cover the topics these "pajamuhadeen" (to use one image of cranky folks in their pajamas posting online) care about.
Of course, the idea that these folks know how to manipulate the media is not lost on the CJR. "The pajama thing is kind of a convenient cover," says Pein. "It creates this image of a citizen revolution when it's actually more complicated than that." The most popular blogs are written by folks with media and political savvy. Often, these bloggers have worked in media or politics.
Regardless, they bypass the traditional gatekeepers, and that is changing the media criticism game. CJR comes out six times a year; blogs can fact-check the media in hours. Blogs cost less to produce than paper publications.
But most bloggers aren't reporters. They don't make phone calls to sources; CJR usually does. To compete more directly as a blog, CJR received a grant last year from the Rockefeller Foundation to start a Web site called Campaign Desk to monitor media coverage of the 2004 election.
After the election, it became CJR Daily, a "very unbloggish blog," says Lovelady, who was coaxed out of "semi-retirement" to be Campaign Desk's managing editor. While a reported blog is an expensive undertaking - a revenue model of "all costs and no revenue" Lovelady jokes - it does draw readers; 300,000 hits a month with an average stickiness of 8-9 minutes. In a nation of premature clickers, three minutes is good. CJR Daily currently blends fact-checking with reported pieces and commentary; it is still tinkering with how to complement the regular CJR site.
Whether CJR can transition to the new world where everyone's a media critic remains to be seen. It's adapting to some of the Internet's give-and-take rules. The CJR web site, for instance, now links to Joseph Newcomer's critique of Pein's "Blog-Gate."
"Blogs are keeping the mainstream media humble," says UNC's Meyer, "and that's good for them." CJR's blog will try to keep the MSM humble as well. But unless folks at the nation's premier media monitor reconsider their constant tugging to the left, mere humility won't restore the mainstream media to its former place in readers' lives.
Laura Vanderkam, a contributing editor to Reader's Digest, is a member of USA Today's Board of Contributors and the co-author, with Jan and Bob Davidson of Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds (Simon & Schuster, 2004). She has also written for The Washington Times.
SIDEBAR: SWINGING FROM THE LEFT: Critics have long bemoaned the Columbia Journalism Review's political tilt. First, folks associated with CJR have solid liberal credentials:
Executive Editor Michael Hoyt's Columbia faculty bio lists him as a contributor to The Village Voice, The Nation and Mother Jones -- all liberal outlets.
Corey Pein, the "Blog-Gate" author, interned at the left-leaning American Prospect.
Publisher Evan Cornog was the press secretary for former Democratic New York City Mayor Edward Koch.
CJR Daily's top editor, Steve Lovelady, has been a contributing editor to Mother Jones.
CJR Daily Assistant Managing Editor Bryan Keefer has worked for both the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union.
CJR has tapped Scott Sherman, a contributing editor to The Nation, to write about everything from Enron to The Atlantic to investigative reporter Sy Hersh.
Then there are the Hall of Fame incidents:
In the Jan/Feb 1999 issue, CJR labeled The Daily Oklahoman as "The Worst Newspaper in America" largely because of its publisher (the late Edward Gaylord) and its conservative and religious content. Writer Bruce Selcraig did note that "many reporters and editors say they enjoy working there," but only after complaining that the editorial page editor, Patrick McGuigan, "called Ed Meese the finest attorney general of his lifetime."
In CJR, conservative publications are reviewed by liberals, and liberal publications are reviewed by, well, liberals. In the July/August 1996 issue, frequent Nation contributor Trudy Lieberman (referred to as an editor at Consumer Reports), notes that Robert Bartley's Wall Street Journal editorial page "rarely offers balance, is often unfair, and is riddled with errors -- distortions and outright falsehoods of every kind and stripe. Under editor Robert Bartley, the policy seems to be ideology above all else." In the July/August 1999 issue, on the other hand, Andrew Hearst, now editorial director of the Progressive Book Club, cooed over the liberal Washington Monthly. The only tsk-tskings went like this: "[Editor Charlie] Peters pays his young editors horribly (the current rate is -- this is not a typo -- $12,000 a year) and works them very hard. But the Monthly has had a bigger impact on both politics and journalism than magazines ... 10 times as big."
The only pre-1991 CJR piece posted online is "Citizen Scaife," a profile of right-wing philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife by Karen Rothmyer, in 1981. In a sidebar, Rothmyer recounts her failed attempt to interview Scaife; he called her a "f****** Communist c***" and said she was engaged in "hatchet journalism." CJR lists Rothmyer as a former Wall Street Journal reporter, but doesn't mention Rothmyer had written for The Nation and became an editor there, which could offer readers a hint at why Scaife unleashed his misogynist rant.
Of course, these are random gleanings. Do they mean anything? As CJR stated in its 1998 article on Fox News, "Such random gleanings from FNC programming can't be representative of the schedule as a whole, but the attentive viewer, over time, inevitably detects in the welter of talk, banter, chat, debate, repartee, raillery, and badinage an unmistakable conservative biosphere, and a tendency to launch dialogue from right-of-center assumptions that need sorting out before discourse can begin." Substitute "left" for "right" and "CJR" for "FNC," and there we go.
http://www.dcexaminer.com/articles/2005/02/07//opinion/op-ed/001aoped07colreply.txt
"You realize, of course, that in order to respond to this we had to take a break from our important afternoon of undermining American capitalism. OK, let's see. Laura Vanderkam, a Princeton graduate, says we're "elite."
Actually the three top editors here were born, raised, and educated in red states. On slow summer afternoons the one from Missouri used to go watch a neighbor cut the heads off the unlucky chicken who was headed for their dinner table; the one from Wyoming played football across the line of scrimmage from Dick Cheney, in nine-degree weather; and the one from West Virginia spent many happy hours peering through the scope of his deer rifle.
Readers who want to see what we really do in the magazine can can check us out at www.cjr.org (we particularly recommend our "Great Divide" cover package from May, and its article on the lousy coverage of evangelicals; or our look at the press and Ahmad Chalabi from last July, or "Re-thinking Objectivity" package from the July before that, or our new Ideas & Reviews section in any recent issue, or ...)
To paint her wildly unfair portrait of CJR, Vanderkam cherry-picks items ... to make her case, and then cherry-picks from within those items. For example, our reasons for naming the Daily Oklahoman "The Worst Newspaper in America" back in 1999 were hardly limited to its lack of a liberal columnist. It was because at the time the Oklahoman was, on nearly every front, aggressively stupid.
Vanderkam claims we are "jealous" of blogs. Actually, we have written glowingly about how blogs have shifted the balance of power toward readers and viewers (see our September 2003 cover package, "The New Age of Alternative Media"). We also run a blog, www.cjrDaily.org, a lively one.
Finally, Vanderkam says we've been herding the U.S. press leftward for 40-plus years. We are apparently failing miserably, by any rational assessment of what's on the airwaves and in print. So, back to work. Can't keep Fidel waiting.
Mike Hoyt
Executive Editor
Columbia Journalism Review"
bump
Ha Ha
What, the CJR's response? Yeah, I thought that was pretty funny myself.
Like most liberal "watchdogs", they can dish it out, but they can't take it. Pathetic losers all.
Note that Evergreen is Rachel Corrie's, aka 'Saint Pancake', alma mater.
And the place where Mumia Abu-Jamal was the graduation speaker, by audiotape from death row, in 1999.
Yes, a hearty Simpsons kid "Ha Ha" aimed squarely at the CJR with all the pajama-clad gusto I can gather!
< snicker >
Now a days, I have to take a second look at anything with "Columbia" as name...
We can tell one thing that blogging does...it has driven Mike Hoyt nuts...to the point that the only response he can muster is a smarmy, sarcastic little remark like "So, back to work. Can't keep Fidel waiting."
The other effect that blogging is having on "journalism" is that it is causing the young idealogues that went to journalism school only because they wanted to help "change the world" to become real journalists or go get a real job....
Newcomer, who voted for Sen. John Kerry in November, was baffled. When I spoke with him recently, he told me that The New Yorker once called his wife, a botanical illustration expert, to ask whether a certain plant could grow in a certain area, because a fiction writer had mentioned it in a piece. That was fact-checking. CJR "did not do any fact-checking," he says.Fact checking? We don't need no stinking fact checking!
It's interesting that in the CJR "response" they completely left out any mention of their failure to fact-check. That's the most damning accusation in the original piece, one that no true "journalist" would ignore if they really wanted to "respond" to a set of charges questioning their "journalism".
Hey, there ya go. Now we know they're just regular folks when they stoop to calling people stooooooopid! And they must have had a crossword puzzle dictionary hanty too, in light of the really big "aggressively" tacked on to the stooooopid!
The thing that journalists really hate is that they spent years and lots of money in college to learn how to do something that most people learned in Kindergarten: ask questions. They don't like people of higher intelligence and training in other areas of expertise usurping their "craft". And they really hate that these non-journalists are actually better at it than they are.
I know, I found that interesting. Also, one of the accusations is that CJR has no discernibly conservative writers. If Mike Hoyt would have named one, that would have been a suitable answer. Hmm... Instead, he says that they're from red states where they watched chickens being decapitated?
Its the cover up that always bites you. And I'd like to thank the bloggers for exposing CBS (Rather), CNN (Jordan), and now CJR - they now have as much credibility with me as Ricahrd Nixon. Thanks for doing my research for me! So many info sources to choose from, so little time to discern bias.
Kudos to Laura Vanderkam and the Washington Examiner, our newest and BEST tabloid-style paper. This paper is "like a breath of fresh air" (said in an Arnold Schwarzenegger voice).
People can subscribe, for free, to news aggregation services that will pull in relevant news feeds outside of the MSM. This gives people the abilityt o get first hand accounts of news stories and not just the liberal bias of the MSM.
I'm not joining their record club, either.
All the Olde Media Dogs have to do is proudly proclaim their leftyism. My entire problem with them is that they claim to be objective. They obviously aren't, and can't be.
On Food Analogy Day it's like a vegan cooking meat because their carnivore neighbors want it. Won't happen.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.