Posted on 02/07/2005 5:36:00 AM PST by laurav
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.
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