Tag: Media Watch

FAIR Finds Quantifiable Rightwing Bias on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal

Jon Ponder

Unbalanced: Here in the West Coast wing of Pensito Review’s electronic garret we start our day seven days a week by watching “Washington Journal” on C-SPAN. (Yes, it starts at 4M.) It is a great source of news about the goings-on in the Capitol, and one gets the sense that they try hard to prevent pros and cons for each side of every issue. But one also gets the sense that they tilt to the right.

Now Extra, a service of FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), has done an analysis that quantifiably proves just that:

To test C-SPAN’s claims of fairness, Extra! studied Washington Journal’s guestlist, tabulating all 663 guests that appeared on the show in the six-month period from November 1, 2004 to April 30, 2005. Guests were classified by gender, ethnicity, party affiliation (if any) and occupation. The study also looked at the think tanks most prominently represented on the show.

Despite C-SPAN’s stated goals, Extra!’s study found Washington Journal skewing rightward, favoring Republican and right-of-center interview subjects by considerable margins over Democratic and left-of-center guests. The study also found that women, people of color and public interest viewpoints were substantially underrepresented.

Overall, people of European ancestry made up 85 percent of Washington Journal’s guestlist—563 out of 663. (Extra! was able to identify the ethnic background of more than 99 percent of guests.) People of African (26) and Asian (24) heritage accounted for 4 percent each, while those of Middle Eastern (22) and Latin American (18) descent represented 3 percent each. No Native Americans were identifiable on the guestlist from November 1, 2004 to April 30, 2005.

Craigslist Founder Considering Online News Project

Jon Ponder

Says MSM not doing its job: Craigslist founder Craig Newmark gave voice to millions of us when he spoke at an Oxford University event earlier this week:

Saying U.S. newspapers “are afraid to talk truth to power,” Craigslist founder Craig Newmark hinted that he’s about to launch a major online journalism project within the next few months that will copy the successful “wisdom of the masses” approach to classified advertising and apply it to journalism.

In a follow-up interview with the British newspaper the Guardian, Newmark expressed the frustration so many Americans feel about the overpaid lapdogs who report the news, especially those in the Capitol:

When talk turned to the problems plaguing the U.S. news industry, Newmark let fly: “The big issue in the U.S. is that newspapers are afraid to talk truth to power,” the Guardian quoted him as saying. “The White House press corps don’t speak the truth to power — they are frightened to lose access they don’t have anyway. … The American public has lost a lot of trust in conventional newspaper mechanisms. Mechanisms are now being developed online to correct that.”

Newmark also said coverage of the Iraq war and the press’ involvement in the Valerie Plame case had damaged American journalism.

About his new venture, Newmark said this on his blog:

I’m working with some folks on technologies that promise to help people find the most trusted versions of the more important stories… and this is personal, helping out another group not associated with craigslist. This kind of technology is intended to preserve the best of existing journalistic practices, and should help retain newsroom jobs.

You Too Can Be On Bill O’Reilly’s Enemy List!

Buck Banks

Beware the ire of the Irish: This is an e-mail being circulated among a group of like-minded friends that was just too good to not post. Kudos to MH.

Here’s something that’ll make you feel a little better. As many of you know, Bill O’Reilly last week said this in response to a San Francisco ballot measure that barred military recruiters in city schools:

“And if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we’re not going to do anything about it. We’re going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.”

Then, when everybody got mad at him for this, he popped his cork and said he was going to post an enemies list on his website. How wonderful!

Why is it so many loony, list-making demagogues seem to have Irish names? Father Coughlan? Joe McCarthy? Bill O’Reilly? I’m sick of it! Gives my people a bad name.

Anyway, now you too can ask Bill to add you to his enemies list by writing to him at oreilly@foxnews.com. I just did. This is what I said:

Dear Bill O’Reilly —

Please add me to the enemies list you’re compiling for your website. I feel I deserve to be on the list for the following reasons:

  • I think you’re an ugly stain on the fabric of this nation.
  • I think you play to the lowest, most hateful of human instincts.
  • I think you drag the level of political discourse in this country straight into the gutter.
  • I think you’re willing to twist the facts any way at all in order to advance your views, and truth be damned.
  • I think you purposely drive wedges deeper between groups that might otherwise find common ground and work to address our nation’s problems.
  • I think you’re unbearably rude. Didn’t your mother teach you any manners?
  • Finally, I’m embarrassed that your ancestors came from the same country as mine. Please tell me your name is really Cromwell. I’d believe that.

Thank you for your time —

Matt H.
Brooklyn, New York

We Can Do Better Than Trash TV, Obama Says

Trish

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) is trying to wake us up from our TV stupor, just as a new study shows that sex on TV is becoming ubiquitous. Ad Age:

One reason I think George Bush gets away with so much is that we are becoming a nation of George W. Bushes

In its fourth biennial study of TV, the [Kaiser Family Foundation] reported that both the number of shows with sexual content and the number of sexual scenes has risen sharply. Some 70% of shows now have some sexual content, compared to 56% in 1998, and there are 5 sexual scenes per hour compared to 3.2 in 1998. The study excludes news, sports and children’s shows.

Obama, although threatening broadcasters with legislative action, makes some great, long-overdue points not just about sex on TV but the vapid assumptions behind “entertainment.”

“We don’t teach our children that healthy relationships involve drunken, naked parties in a hot tub with strangers — but that’s what they see on ‘The Real World.’ We don’t teach them to express their anger by seeing how much blood they can draw with a round of ammo, but that’s what they learn in the most popular video games. And we don’t teach our kids that the height of success is inheriting a family fortune to buy Gucci bags without ever working a day in your life, but that’s how Paris Hilton gets by on ‘The Simple Life.’”

“You can say that kids know this isn’t real,” Mr. Obama, said, “but when they’re fed a steady diet of these depictions over and over again from the time they’re very young, this behavior becomes acceptable — even normal.”

I’ll go Obama one better, and say that not only do kids not question this bilge, but neither do adults. People get tired of hearing me say I don’t watch TV because they think my point is that I am superior because of it. The truth is I can’t afford cable, plus I’m only home in the evening one or two days a week (that second job). But what happens when you are not exposed to a steady diet of this stuff is that over time you notice differences in thought between yourself and people who are exposed to it, even cool people with their hearts in the right place. There are built-in assumptions that go along with TV-watching, and the more you watch, the more they become internalized. […]

Blogging Slammed for Syphoning 551,000 Years from Work Day

Trish

Advertising Age magazine analyzed employee blog-reading during work time and published the results.

U.S. workers in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs.

About 35 million workers — one in four people in the labor force — visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week engaged with them, according to Advertising Age’s analysis. Time spent in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs. Forget lunch breaks — bloggers essentially take a daily 40-minute blog break.

And so, what’s your point, Ad Age?

The article seems to suggest that time spent reading blogs is wasted, that little work-related information or work-related benefits could result. I mean just because you work at say, Acme Transportation Company’s call center doesn’t mean you don’t need to know about the larger world. And it totally ignores the contribution that blogs (sorry, “News and Information Web Sites”) like Pensito Review make in keeping employees informed, well-rounded, and smarter than the competition. How am I doing?

Besides, we love blogs.

Technorati, a blog search engine, now tracks 19.6 million blogs, a number that has doubled about every five months for the past three years. If that growth were to continue, all 6.7 billion people on the planet will have a blog by April 2009.

Whoa, that might be taking things too far. On second thought, quit reading this and get back to work.

Wingnuts Using Hurricane to Smear Liberal Journo

Buck Banks

Pundits from the far wrong are resorting to schoolyard-level smears in the wake of Hurrican Katrina. Blowhard Rush “Feelin No Pain” Limbaugh has taken to referring to the storm as “Hurricane Katrina vanden Heuvel,” after the editor of The Nation, which is solidly left of center, to say the least.

In her Editor’s Cut column vanden Huevel responds with wry humor:

When Fox started calling the storm Killer Katrina, I prayed some right-wing idiot wouldn’t stoop so low as to link me to this human suffering. But wouldn’t you know, the biggest dittohead on the block, Rush Limbaugh, is calling the storm Hurricane Katrina vanden Heuvel. National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, who has never seen a bad-joke bandwagon he could resist jumping on with both feet, blogged, “It would be pretty cool if Fox played to caricature and repeatedly referred to the hurricane as Katrina vanden Heuvel.” He went on to imagine the lines, “The destruction from Katrina vanden Heuvel is expected to be massive. The poor and disabled are particularly likely to suffer from the effects of Katrina vanden Heuvel.”

vanden Huevel’s point is well-made — such third-grade name calling merely belittles the people who are living through and dying in the United States’ worst natural disaster in history. She also nails both numbskulls:

At least Limbaugh has the excuse that drug abuse tends to stunt emotional development. What Goldberg’s problem is nobody has yet discovered. Natural disasters should be above infantile politics.

Gubmint PR Blogger Might Say Something Interesting — Someday

Buck Banks

A new blog among the 30,000 to 40,000 that allegedly appear daily worldwide has entered the (ho-hum) fray. Ragan Communications, a disseminator of corporate communications how-to publications, conferences and other self-help stuff for professional communicators (read: corporate mouthpieces) has sponsored Deep Background, supposedly written by a high-placed government PR person who seeks to remain anonymous.

A quick gander through the site revealed a lack of anything remotely interesting or insightful. Although it is creating some buzz in some media, the site content is too self-referential and too superficial to justify the time it takes to read it. Typical of Ragan products, the blog promises much but delivers little. Maybe that will change over time as the anonymous blogger gets his bearings and figures out exactly why the heck he’s doing this. Or not.

Perhaps it’s better to leave Deep Background deep in the background. Stick with Pensito Review, gentle reader, for cool political and cultural insights, snarky satire and occasional outbursts of heavy stuff.

Trump Starts Weblog; Internet Surrenders

Buck Banks

There’s a new and improved reason why we here at Pensito World Headquarters are proud that we are not just another weblog — Donald Trump has started blogging on his Trump University site. It makes us glad that we are instead, in the words of Jon Pensito, “an on-line news and opinion journal” where the elite meet to bleat.

In an article on TechWeb.com, Alexander Wolfe quotes Michael Gartenberg, vice president and research director at Jupitermedia: “If Donald Trump is blogging, then blogging is about as mainstream as it gets.” Ew!

And while Gartenberg expressed hope that The Donald would embrace the medium and post a lot of cool, insightful stuff so “we could see what makes him tick,” a sampling of some of Trump’s postings bodes ill in the insight department:

June 28: Trump has ultimately become a great brand name due to my rigorous standards of quality. The Trump brand carries a promise that whatever bears the name will be elite.

July 5: I’d be lying if I said I don’t think about my legacy. The values I hold true and the buildings I’ve put up are intended to carry beyond the here and now; I want them to survive well past my own time on earth.

August 8: The glamour and grandeur of my buildings and my life are no mere trappings.

Add to that claptrap the fawning posts of Trump’s circle of obsequious toadies, and you’ve got something akin to a Trump fanzine for middle-aged white men:

From Adam Eisenstat, director of communications for Trump University, comes “Donald Trump is the colossus of the New York City skyline. He stands astride the buildings that bear his name–his signature branded on the cityscape.”

From Michael Sexton, president of Trump University, we get: “Donald Trump has long had a high profile, but only recently, with the popularity of The Apprentice, has he assumed the dimensions of a folk hero.”

Man, what I wouldn’t give to say “YOU’RE FIRED!!” to all three of these Bozos.