I'm disappointed.
FMCDH
Schools of journalism, stocked with professors like Al Gore, turn out biased reporters, ready, willing and anxious to be advocates for the Left.
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During the Elian Gonzalez affair in 1999 and 2000, for example, several Cuban journalists on the staff of the Miami Herald openly sided with the anti-Castro families trying to keep the boy in America, and one Herald columnist was photographed in a prayer circle with the Gonzalez family. Rather than simply taking her off the story, the paper had special meetings between the publisher and the paper's Cuban-American reporters to discuss their complaints about coverage of the story.
In the Cauldron (journalistic omphaloskepsis)****Santiago, who as a feature writer was not involved in the daily stories, adds that some of the media coverage seemed biased. "If you took some of the coverage and replaced the noun Cuban American with the noun African American, people would have been screaming about stereotyping," she says. In one instance, Santiago says, a writer blew out of proportion the importance of the cigar business in Little Havana. Santiago says the industry hasn't been vibrant in Miami for years. "It just left the impression the people in Little Havana were cigar-chomping Latins," she says.
Larry Olmstead, the Herald's managing editor, issued a memo responding to some of the concerns: "This is a sensitive, potentially volatile situation for the newspaper and the community. Our journalism should reflect that sensitivity."
Santiago says she's also concerned that the actions of Cuban American journalists were watched too closely. She pointed to the case of Liz Balmaseda, the Herald's Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who was photographed participating in a prayer vigil outside Elián's house. The columnist told AJR that while she was there gathering material, a friend grabbed her hand for prayer. She says it would have been rude to refuse the friend's hand.
"I didn't set out to make a political statement," she told a Herald reporter.
Herald Executive Editor Martin Baron says Balmaseda's actions were inappropriate: "We should always keep our distance from news events."
Balmaseda says she thinks it was her heritage, not her ethics, that were in question. She says she has prayed other times on assignments, including with the Dalai Lama. "The only time anyone has had any questions about my prayer was when I prayed with exiles in Miami," Balmaseda says.
Baron says that this particular prayer vigil "appeared to be making a statement about this case" and thus was inappropriate for a Herald staffer to participate in.
It was the appearance of favoring Elián's return to Cuba that Bernadette Pardo, a Miami newscaster for Spanish-language WLTV and a radio commentator, says brought her criticism. She never declared her position on the air, in deference to journalistic standards of objectivity. As a result, she told Miami New Times, she received abusive and threatening mail. "To keep above the emotions sometimes is very hard when you are getting hate mail," she says.
That's milder than what Jim DeFede, a columnist for New Times, received. After he criticized Miami-Dade's Cuban American politicians for siding with exiles, anonymous callers phoned in death threats. Chuck Strouse, the alternative weekly's managing editor, says the paper took the threats seriously. But nothing happened to the columnist, and the threats didn't soften his bite. In a column for the April 20-26 issue, DeFede declared, "This boy has proved to be the single most destructive force in South Florida since Hurricane Andrew."****
Unfortunately, I see more and more recent j-school grads who not only cannot write (does no one teach grammar or spelling any more?), but truly believe their job is to shape the readers' beliefs and opinions, rather than report the who, what, when, where, why and how of a story. Maybe that's the way "journalists" are portrayed in movies, I don't know, but that certainly is what we're seeing in the examples cited in the article.
Good find indeed, RAT.
FGS
What other factors are there? We could start with elitism. Reporters and editors are assiduously courted by politicians, and the Democrats have historically been better at it than Republicans. The GOP thinks it should prevail on the strength of its ideas. The Democrats need a cozy press in order to win and preserve their fragile coalition of society's "takers." So the Democrats have cultivated the notion that the press is ELITE - a fourth branch of government, a group to be lavished with food and wine and as many favors as possible...the so-called "A-List Cocktail Party Circuit." To write a story that would anger this coterie of society is unthinkable. And it would endanger all the perks and privileges that newsers think they're entitled to.
Add to this group The Do-Gooders and Activists. Colleges and universities have largely created this subgroup of reporters in the last 30 years or so. Some start out with the idealism of youth and a bent to "change the world." Others are molded by disaffected communists or other left-wingers who, excluded from mainstream thought, find their way into the classroom and somehow gain tenure. If you take a Do-Gooder or an Activist reporter and give him/her Elitism, then you've got one very powerful propogandist - one that will ignore all inconvenient truth in order to press a viewpoint.
A third subgroup are those with the Politics Of Convenience. A loose-moraled lothario likes abortion as a convenient way out of an unwanted pregnancy. The Democrats like abortion, so this reporter leans Democrat. There is a huge number of "if-it-feels-good-do-it" generational members in the press corps today - and Democratic policies appeal to them more than personal responsibility. At that age, I fell for it, too. Then I grew up. And although a great many of the feel-good-do-it generation HAVE, in fact, grown up to a degree, the fact is that they still like permissive societal attitudes, and that makes them Convenient Democrats. Not to mention the fact that if they ever somehow commit some infraction against the law, it's a lot easier to get away with it (in most cases) if you're a Democrat.
And then, to top it all off, you have the ignorant and intellectually lazy. These are people who are only curious about PEOPLE and EMOTIONS - and feel that FACTS often get in the way of a good story. They do not wish to learn how things work. They, instead, prefer to concentrate on how PEOPLE FEEL about things. You'll find them committing grievous errors in their reporting on aviation, electronics, monetary matters(and anything to do even remotely with math), the sciences, history - to bluntly lump it, anything technical or anything requiring a degree of factual precision. Add to this a propensity this group has for a startling lack of attention to perspective - i.e., what a story MEANS - and you've got the recipe for journalistic disaster. Oh, they've been taught that this approach "makes good TV," but if it does, it only succeeds on the Jerry-Springer level.
Not even touched is the business angle news organizations must face. They are, after all, businesses that are expected to make a profit. To make a profit, you must take in more revenue than you spend, and that revenue is solely in the form of cash paid by advertisers. To attract advertisers, you need readers and viewers. The more of each you have, the more you can charge for your advertisements. So the economic pressure is severe to make as many people watch and read as possible. This pressure then invades the realm of news judgement - and stories selected for air (and their treatment, often) are functions of what the management feels will attract the most desireable audience.
This inevitably leads to the lurid and sensationalistic, an emphasis on crime stories (even though all stats say crime in this country is DOWN), and pieces designed to evince a visceral reaction. In so doing, many times only part of a story is told - that part which the editors feel will get the most attention.
I'm hoping that the book this author has reviewed will have touched more upon these other pressures, as they all influence what is covered and how it's covered. I'll buy a copy and find out. If it is as comprehensive as I hope it is, I'll forward it to a particular TV news director who is sorely in need of a little awakening.
Michael
newsrooms full of little Bolsheviks-in-training, who have party lines on all sorts of issues, from affirmative action to crime to AIDS, and who consciously manipulate stories, fail to cover stories, and belittle stories that run counter to their political views
!!!
Bush: "they are either with us or with the enemy" -- applies here, especially.
To save you the googlification: Kandea Mosley graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1993, making her, I'd guess, about 27 now. She then went to UCLA, where she became the chairwoman of the African Student Union in 1996-7, and then ran for student president as the Students First! candidate, which opposed Nike on campus and the ending of affirmative action in California (Proposition 209), and won. The protests in her year as president took various forms: she was quoted as saying:Our opposition to Prop. 209 ... is not a result of a skewed perception of affirmative action as a cure-all for all of our communities and the racist, classist violence perpetuated on our people daily. Rather, the reasons behind raising a political struggle in this university is created out of our understanding that organized struggle ... is necessary on every level.
At the inauguration of the new UCLA chancellor that spring, a web report notes:
Inside USA president Kandea Mosley delivered a speech decrying the end of affirmative action and then sat down on the stage for several minutes, her fist raised in protest.
Graduating in 1998, Mosley then returned to New York, covering the Green Party for the Village Voice (!!) during the 2000 elections. And now for the last few months, she's been upstate, working as a beat reporter at the Ithaca Journal.
I'm sorry, but I just can't believe someone with those credentials is going to come to [any political issue] capable of clear-headed judgment.
(To order "Ithaca is the City of Evil" merchandise, courtesy of FREEPER "the," Click Here).
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For more on "Coloring the News", check HERE
They're all going to ride that beast right into the ground as the American people turn to them less and less and ad revenues continue dropping. They won't even notice it until the day they come to work and find the place boarded up.