Tag: Media Watch

Heads up: The Yoda-like grammar of the headline of this post is an extreme example of the kind of undumb headlines you, gentle reader, can continue to expect from the crack editorial staff of Pensito Review. Why do we feel compelled to issue a reassuring statement like that to the smart people who visit our humble “politics & media” site?

Because of Google. And Yahoo. And RSS feeds. And newsbots.

See, there was this article in the New York Times on Sunday about how news organizations were experimenting with “dumbing down” their headlines so they would make more sense in a list of headlines supplied in an RSS feed.

So news organizations large and small have begun experimenting with tweaking their Web sites for better search engine results. But software bots are not your ordinary readers: They are blazingly fast yet numbingly literal-minded. There are no algorithms for wit, irony, humor or stylish writing. The software is a logical, sequential, left-brain reader, while humans are often right brain.

In newspapers and magazines, for example, section titles and headlines are distilled nuggets of human brainwork, tapping context and culture. “Part of the craft of journalism for more than a century has been to think up clever titles and headlines, and Google comes along and says, ‘The heck with that,’ ” observed Ed Canale, vice president for strategy and new media at The Sacramento Bee.

Well, we here at Pensito Review join Mr. Canale in a hearty “The heck with that � squared!”

Lest you worry that we will now begin to mine the arcane or bust our frontal lobes coming up with cool headlines, we would like to take a moment to explore Pensito Review’s history of headline hepness. Here are a few examples from the archives:

• “Doctor My Ears,” heads a post by Trish kvetching about how reporters always use the title “Dr.” before Condoleeza Rice’s name.
• “The White House Hopes You Won’t Read This,” is a self-referential head from Jon about how the WH released news of its social program cuts Friday evening � after the press corps had gone home.
• “Woodward Wants to Be Sweetheart of Cellblock C,” was my take on Bob Woodward’s sweet offer to do some of press paragon Judith Miller’s prison time.
• A truly great head that didn’t overtax the typesetters was Trish’s “MSM MIA,” about how the mainstream media missed a critical story.
• Jon’s “The Lying Liar�s Dumb Lie” headline demonstrates a classic rhetorical conceit involving repetition that has a Greek name that I’ve forgotten.
• And my “Bush: Et Tu, Silvio?” just shows we can do classical literary references in other languages.

So fear not, noble, and hopefully regular, reader. We ain’t dumbing down our headlines for Google, though we do promise to lay off the obnoxious Yoda grammatical constructions.

Caro at Make Them Accountable has a chart that shows the ratio of men to women in the leftwing echo chamber is about two to one.

She breaks out lists of leading personalities among radio talk show hosts, newspaper columnists, editorial cartoonists, magazine writers and editors, book authors and bloggers.

Check out the chart.

(Couldn’t help but notice that the ratio of straight to gay people on the list is probably better than 10 to one.)

WaPo snafu: The Washington Post today turned off the comments function of its Weblog at www.washingtonpost.com because people just wouldn’t follow the rules:

… there are things that we said we would not allow, including personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech. Because a significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused to follow any of those relatively simple rules, we’ve decided not to allow comments for the time being. It’s a shame that it’s come to this. Transparency and reasoned debate are crucial parts of the Web culture, and it’s a disappointment to us that we have not been able to maintain a civil conversation, especially about issues that people feel strongly (and differently) about.

So a few bad apples spoiled it for everybody. Now, if you have a comment on a washingtonpost.com post, you’ll have to keep it to yourself because someone used profanity in a comment.

Come on, give me a break, Posties. What level of discourse did you expect? The Harvard Debate Club?

We here at Pensito Review understand the WaPo editors’ frustration because we get a lot of comments on our posts, too. Well, not a lot, really, but some high-quality ones. Well, not that high-quality. Actually, some of them are nasty and hurtful and sprinkled with surprising examples of profanity that we have added to our personal arsenals.

You may not know this, but there are wingnut nutjobs out there with nothing better to do than go around to thoughtful, intelligent, well-designed and left-leaning Web sites like this one and squeeze the boils they have for brains into comments on multiple stories. They are rightly called trolls. But do we take off their comments? Nope. We let other readers respond with their own comments, often creating lively and pyrotechnic strings of comments.

We do, however, remove comments with death threats and refer them immediately to the FBI.

At Pensito Review, we would never turn off comments, mainly because the comments our readers leave often are funny, clever, thoughtful, insightful and make us feel like superior spellers and grammarians. We believe in freedom and free speech, and if you want to show your ass by leaving a ranting, rambling, obscenity-laced blurt of brain pus, why, that’s OK with us. Heck, we do it ourselves sometimes. Well, there was that one time on washingtonpost.com, anyway.

Silence of the Times: When it came to light that the New York Times had held its story for a year on the National Security Agency’s illegal wiretapping of American citizens at George Bush’s behest, we did a spit-take. And when it came to light that Bush himself had tried to spike the story by summoning the editor and publisher to the White House for a tete-a-tete, we did a “huh?”

Seems now everybody is asking questions and getting no answers. Even the Times’ own public editor, or ombudsman, lamented in his Sunday column that his bosses won’t tell him why they waited. Byron Calame sounded almost hurt when he got no response:

For the first time since I became public editor, the executive editor and the publisher have declined to respond to my requests for information about news-related decision-making. My queries concerned the timing of the exclusive Dec. 16 article about President Bush’s secret decision in the months after 9/11 to authorize the warrantless eavesdropping on Americans in the United States.

I e-mailed a list of 28 questions to Bill Keller, the executive editor, on Dec. 19, three days after the article appeared. He promptly declined to respond to them. I then sent the same questions to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, who also declined to respond. They held out no hope for a fuller explanation in the future.

Keller, the editor, issued a couple of statements that explained some of the arcane machinations that went on behind the decision to wait, but Calame is not satisfied that readers were well served by the information not being included in the original article. Maybe Keller and Sulzberger could be forgiven for not exercizing the best judgement with the president and the NSA breathing down their necks. I mean, these guys can make you disappear off a New York street corner and reappear in Romania, fer chrissakes.
[…]

All we want for Xmas: Bill O’Reilly has updated his media hate list of “defamers,” adding The New Yorker magazine, and once again, Pensito Review ain’t on it. Frankly, the entire editorial staff is damned frustrated.

“I’m puzzled,” said Editor Trish.

“I’m bumfuzzled,” said Editor Jon.

We just don’t get it — we’ve repeatedly slammed and insulted the Billster, run really unflattering and even doctored images of him, and encouraged people to flame his Web site with messages about why they (and by extension, we) should be included on his hate list. What more can we do?

Here’s the latest update direct from O’Reilly.com:

A Message from Bill: Media Operations that Traffic in Defamation

The following media operations have regularly helped distribute defamation and false information supplied by far left websites:
– New York Daily News
– The St. Petersburg Times
– MSNBC
– The New Yorker Magazine
These are the worst offenders. In the months to come, we expect to add more names to this list. We recommend that you do not patronize these operations and that advertisers do the same. They are dishonest and not worth your time and money.

Though it probably won’t happen before Xmas, be assured that the Pensito Review editorial staff is committed to MAKING THE LIST. If you, gentle reader, have any ideas about how we can MAKE THE LIST, please post them in the “comments” section. We’ll give you a hat tip when we MAKE THE LIST.

Wages of spin: Columnist Doug Bandow resigned Tuesday from Copley News Service, according to Editor&Publisher. Bandow had been under fire for accepting payola from indicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff to write op-ed pieces favorable to some of Abramoff’s clients.

Bandow had previously resigned from the Cato Institute last Thursday after admitting he took bribes — a transgression first revealed by BusinessWeek.com. Bandow said he accepted money to write 12-24 pieces starting in the mid-1990s. He received $2,000 for some of the commentaries.

The now-former Copley columnist is one of several conservative commentators who, in a series of 2005 revelations, were found to have accepted money to promote programs and initiatives without disclosing the funding. They include Armstrong Williams of Tribune Media Services (which dropped Williams), Maggie Gallagher of Universal Press Syndicate, and the self-syndicated Michael McManus.

Spin out: Fineman PR of San Francisco has compiled its 11th annual collection of PR blunders for 2005:

CRUISE, OUT-OF-CONTROL
Tom Cruise’s “War of the Worlds” press tour blew up on the Today show after he got on his Scientology soap box and lit into host Matt Lauer. Cruise’s diatribe against psychiatry included criticizing Brooke Shields for the medication she received during her post-pregnancy depression. The press jumped all over Cruise, and so did Shields. In a New York Times op-ed, Shields called his remarks “a disservice to mothers everywhere.” Cruise’s other bizarre antics in ’05, including Oprah Winfrey’s sofa jumping escapade to show his love for actress Katie Holmes, also earned him public ridicule. “Sure They’re in Love — with Publicity,” headlined the Boston Globe. PR Week said, “The more you jump up and down about it, the less people believe it’s the real thing.”

PAT ROBERTSON’S DIPLOMACY
Uncle Sam’s relations with oil-rich Venezuela worsened after televangelist Pat Robertson suggested the U.S. “take out” its president, Hugo Chavez. The rather un-Christian comments ignited fire and brimstone from the world’s press and lent credibility to Chavez’ contention that President Bush, somewhat of an evangelical in his own right, is out to get him. “He is that rare preacher who has invited the nation not to pray together, but to prey together,” wrote Tom Teepen in the San Jose Mercury News.

UAW UNWELCOMES MARINES
Organized labor is having enough trouble without alienating the U.S. Marines. United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger barred Marine reservists from the UAW parking lot if they drove foreign-made cars or sported pro-Bush bumper stickers. The Marines had parked there for years because they train nearby. Gettelfinger apologized for the unpatriotic ambush after the Michigan press played the story, but the Marines said they would find alternative parking. “In trying to stiff the Marines, the union signaled that its petty political concerns trump the needs of the armed forces and the sanctity of the voting booth,” wrote Daniel Howes in the Detroit News.

NO BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT FROM BENEFIT MANAGEMENT COMPANY
It appears that Michigan employee-benefits firm Benefit Management Administrators Inc. needs help managing its own employees. The company fired Suzette Boler for, among other things, taking too much time to say goodbye to her husband who left to fight in Iraq, according to an Associated Press story. The poorly timed pink slip fueled public outrage forcing the company to lock its doors and turn off its phones. When the company’s founder responded to TV station Channel 8 in Grand Rapids, he compounded the blunder by pressing additional complaints against Boler to justify her firing.
[…]

Oops, they did it again: It’s the time for round-up lists of the year’s whatevers, and Regret the Error is out with its list of 2005’s worst and funniest errors and corrections from the mainstream media. Here’s the Correction of the Year for 2005, as published in the Denver Daily News on July 27:

The Denver Daily News would like to offer a sincere apology for a typo in Wednesday’s Town Talk regarding New Jersey’s proposal to ban smoking in automobiles. It was not the author’s intention to call New Jersey ‘Jew Jersey.’

First Runner-Up
From the Dallas Morning News:

Norma Adams-Wade’s June 15 column incorrectly called Mary Ann Thompson-Frenk a socialist. She is a socialite.

Second Runner-Up
This jolly typo/correction comes from the Liverpool Daily News in England:

Technology has revolutionised most of our lives in recent years and the media has particularly benefited from developments in IT and communications. But all technology should always be treated with a degree of caution. This was a lesson brought into sharp focus last week following a review of the Welsh National Opera’s double bill performance of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci at the Empire Theatre. The problem arose when the computer spell checker did not recognise the term “WNO” (Welsh National Opera). A slip of the finger caused it to be replaced with the word “winos”. All stories in the Daily Post go through a series of checks for error, but unfortunately this one slipped through the net. It just goes to show that it’s hard to beat the good, old-fashioned dictionary.

For more errors, corrections, typos (“beef panties” from Reuters) and other examples that the MSM has lost it big time, check out the site here.