Conservatives are jumping up and down over a report by an EPA analyst expressing skepticism about climate change, which, they claim, was suppressed by agency brass because it didn’t conform to Obama administration orthodoxy on global warming. The story has sparked explosive claims, on Fox News and other right-wing outlets, that the EPA censored scientific data for political reasons. And Monday, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) called for an outright criminal investigation into the matter.

But it’s hard to blame EPA for not paying much attention to the study. And it’s more than a little ironic that DC Republicans have chosen its author as their new standard-bearer in the defense of pure science against politics. Because the author, EPA veteran Al Carlin, is an economist, not a climate scientist. EPA says no one at the agency solicited the report. And Carlin appears to have taken up the global warming topic largely as a hobby on his own time. In fact, a NASA climatologist has called the report — whose existence was first publicized last week by the industry-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) — “a ragbag collection of un-peer reviewed web pages, an unhealthy dose of sunstroke, a dash of astrology and more cherries than you can poke a cocktail stick at.”

TPM Muckraker: Climate Skeptic: “I Was Hoping People At EPA Would Pay Attention” To My Work

When we look at Michael Jackson, I believe we’re looking at the future of our species. Michael is a creature from a future in which we’ve all become more feminine, more consumerist, more postmodern, more artificial, more self-constructed and self-mediating, more playful, caring and talented than we are today. But it’s hard to use those adjectives, because they’re Either-Or adjectives and he’s from the world of Yet-Also, a world I believe we will all come to live in if we’re lucky, a world where there is no more authenticity-by-default-through-brute-necessity and no more “human nature”. A world of pure synthesis, pure self-creation.

Jackson is what all humans will become if we develop further in the direction of postmodernism and self-mediation. He is what we’ll become if we get both more Wildean and more Nietzschean. He’s what we’ll become only if we’re lucky and avoid a new brutality based on overpopulation and competition for dwindling resources. By attacking Jackson and what he stands for — the effete, the artificial, the ambiguous — we make a certain kind of relatively benign future mapped out for ourselves into a Neverland, something forbidden, discredited, derided. When we should be deriding what passes for our normalcy — war, waste, and the things we do en masse are the things that threaten us — we end up deriding dandyism and deviance. And Jackson is the ultimate dandy and the ultimate deviant. He can fly across our Either-Or binaries, and never land. It’s debateable whether he’s the king of pop, but he’s undoubtedly the king of Yet-Also.

Consider all the extraordinary ways in which Michael Jackson is Yet-Also. He’s black yet also white. He’s adult yet also a child. He’s male yet also female. He’s gay yet also straight. He has children, yet he’s also never fucked their mothers. He’s wearing a mask, yet he’s also showing his real self. He’s walking yet also sliding. He’s guilty yet also innocent. He’s American yet also global. He’s sexual yet also sexless. He’s immensely rich yet also bankrupt. He’s Judy Garland yet also Andy Warhol. He’s real yet also synthetic. He’s crazy yet also sane, human yet also robot, from the present yet also from the future. He declares his songs heavensent, and yet he also constructs them himself. He’s the luckiest man in the world yet the unluckiest. His work is play. He’s bad, yet also good. He’s blessed yet also cursed. He’s alive, but only in theory.

Momus: Never land

(via Metaphorge)

10. June 19, 1972: The Occult Revival
9. April 5, 1976: The Porno Plague
8. August 6, 1984: The Population Curse
7. September 15, 1986: Drugs: The Enemy Within
6. May 7, 1990: Dirty Words
5. May 13, 1991: Crack Kids
4. July 3, 1995: Cyberporn: On a Screen Near You
3. Nov 22, 1999: Pokemon!
2. March 19, 2001: The Columbine Effect
1. June 7, 2004: Overcoming Obesity in America

Reason: The Top 10 Most Absurd Time Covers of The Past 40 Years

See also: Fox News Journalistic Masterpieces.

Under the circumstances, I think it may prove very difficult for commerce-oriented enterprises to succeed over the long term. Someplace like a dry cleaner is able to make money because it doesn’t need to worry about being undercut by competitors who aren’t trying to earn a profit. If for some reason Bill Gates decided to pour $5 billion into a foundation dedicated to offering not-for-profit dry cleaning services to Washington, DC then the existing dry cleaners would be in huge trouble. They don’t have that problem because nobody wants to run non-profit dry cleaners. But lots of people want to write about political issues for reasons that have nothing to do with profit-maximization. And my sense is that organizations are increasingly doing this. CAP/AF was a think tank early adopter in terms of building robust in-house new media capacity, but to the best of my knowledge just about every think tank and advocacy shop in town would like to get in on the action. And ultimately, a proliferation of content that’s not supposed to make money is going to make it even harder than it already is for those trying to make profits to do so.

Think Progress

(via Jay Rosen)

See also: Kevin Kelly’s article The New Socialism.

Dowd:

“More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

Marshall:

“More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

TPM Cafe: NY Times’ Maureen Dowd Plagiarizes TPM’s Josh Marshall

(via Jay Rosen)

What does it mean when NYT columnists are plagiarizing blogs?

Once again, speaking in defense of those of us who publish original news in blog format:

Yes, we have cultivated sources. Not “just” the community members who kindly turn to us when they see a crash or a fire or a crime, because they know we will cover it NOW, but also politicians, community leaders, government employees, other ‘insiders’ who know we understand that if they feel something is important enough to check out, chances are it matters to thousands of community members, so off we go to dig in.

And yes, we sit through never-ending community meetings. Almost every night of the week. Some afternoons too. From design review, to Hearing Examiner appeals, to hearings scheduled just as formalities for some ongoing government process - buried in published public notices - and we go to City Hall and the County Council Chambers and the courthouse downtown.

We cover important stories that others don’t bother with. No paper in our area, big or small, saw fit to bother with a murder trial last year that started with a shooting in an area of our neighborhood where “that just doesn’t happen” and led through a story of stalking and self-defense, with the teenage suspect ultimately exonerated after a year behind bars. They all read our work so they knew it was happening and chose to ignore it.

I paid a reporter to cover it daily — it lasted a few weeks — even though at the time I couldn’t really afford it — just knew it had to be done and I couldn’t do a full day of court justice while also managing the rest of the site. Now, months later, we have the revenue to pay more journalists to work with us - freelance for starters but I hope more permanent soon - including two veterans whose jobs were cut at local papers big and small for $ reasons.

So, dear old-media folks who I understand are acting out of pain and fear - I have been through layoffs myself — please stop attacking and dismissing everything with “blog” attached to it - it is only a publishing format. If there is a specific writer you are upset about, call them out by name/site, but get educated and learn that the “blog” world has a surprising amount of REAL JOURNALISM going on, produced by REAL JOURNALISTS, and since some of us small operations seem to be showing signs of sustainability, this just may be the way a lot of REAL JOURNALISM is produced for the foreseeable future - you are welcome to buy a domain, install a CMS, and get after it yourselves, too.

–Tracy Record, editor/co-publisher, West Seattle Blog
(Seattle, WA, 650,000 pageviews/mo., 20,000 homes/businesses visiting at least once weekly)

From: Jay Rosen’s Tumblr

West Seattle Blog

I caught some of David Simon’s testimony to the Senate on the radio the other day. It was like nails on a chalk board for me - listening to the same dead wrong arguments over and over again.

Ryan Tate says some of the things I wanted to shout through the radio:

I found this argument odd, because as a newspaper reporter who spent a few years covering a town much like Baltimore — Oakland, California — I often found that bloggers were the only other writers in the room at certain city council committee meetings and at certain community events. They tended to be the sort of persistently-involved residents newspapermen often refer to as “gadflies” — deeply, obsessively concerned about issues large and infinitesimal in the communities where they lived.

Gawker: David Simon: Dead-Wrong Dinosaur

Memo to newspaper journalists: “online news” doesn’t begin and end with Matt Drudge, and newspaper subscription never paid your salary.

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.

CNN: Survey: Support for terror suspect torture differs among the faithful

(via Sloppy Unruh)

“You don’t get it yet. Torture gives you false information. Now that wasn’t a bug but a feature. Only fake facts could validate a phony case.” - Jay Rosen

Aside: Does religious make one more virtuous? Say, more patient, more responsible, and more compassionate? I think not.

Doug Jehl, who’s the Washington editor for the New York Times, explains today why his paper cannot use the word “torture” to describe “waterboarding” when no legal or political or cultural authority from the Spanish Inquisition until the Bush administration ever doubted for a moment that it was torture. [...]

In the face of this, are there any legal decisions, judgments or trials in the last five centuries in which waterboarding has not been deemed torture? None that I am aware of. And this is not surprising. If waterboarding someone 183 times is not torture, then nothing is torture.

The fact that the editors of the New York Times cannot reflect this core truth in its use of plain English is a scandal of journalistic cowardice, evasion and willful ignorance. It is entirely a function not of seeking the truth but of placating those in power and maintaining a fictitious illusion of “balance”. The idea that the Bush administration’s insistence for the first time in human history that waterboarding is legal and not torture - when it has itself used the torture technique - is to be weighed equally against the entire body of legal, historical and cultural evidence in deciding what to call torture is preposterous.

Andrew Sullivan: Can Doug Jehl Read?

(via Jay Rosen)

I’m simply not comfortable with paying someone to be waterboarded, even if it is “for charity” and even if it is Sean Hannity.

Anyone else thinking of Videodrome?

Okay, the rampant Western media frenzy over Jackie Chan supposedly saying that “Chinese people still need to be controlled ” during a panel discussion at the Boao Forum in Hainan, China is…well, getting out of control. This is the kind of Western media bullshit that makes Westerners look like they’re frothing at the bits to use anything they can to paint China in a negative political light: “Oh look, even lovable kung-fu funny-man Jackie Chan has betrayed his own, selling out both himself and his kind to the evil Communist regime!” To which the Western masses reply in unison: “Gasp!”

The relevant excerpt from the Associated Press:

“I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not,” Chan said. “I’m really confused now. If you’re too free, you’re like the way Hong Kong is now. It’s very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic.”

Chan added: “I’m gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we’re not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want.”

And a Chinese report of what Jackie Chan said to foreign reporters:

现在自己对于到底自由好，还是不自由好感到很矛盾，因为太自由了，就会像台湾和香港一样，变得很混乱。所以他慢慢觉得，“中国人还是需要被管的。”

He himself is now very conflicted with regards to whether freedom is better, or is not freedom is better, because if [people] are too free, it will be just like Taiwan and Hong Kong, which have become very disorderly. So, he has slowly come to feel/think that, “Chinese people still need to be regulated.”

Jackie Chan Said “Chinese Need To Be Controlled”, Or Did He?

I’m not sure what Chan said is much better than what he was reported as saying, but I’m far less sure of just what it is he actually said now.

(Thanks Sydney)

If we wanted to deny Amazon all benefit of the doubt, and to construct the maximum case against them, it would go something like this: it was stupid to have a categorization system that would allow LGBT-themed books to be de-ranked en masse; it was stupid to have a technological system that would allow that to happen easily and globally; it was stupid to remove sales rank from sexually explicit works, rather than adding “Safe Search” options; it was stupid to speak in PR-ese to the public about something that really matters; it was stupid to take as long as they did to dribble an explanation out.

Stupid stupid stupid stupid, yes, all true. If it had been a critique of those stupidities that circulated over the weekend, without the intentional mass de-listing, it would have kicked off a long, thoughtful conversation about metadata, system design, and public relations. Those are good conversations to have, we need to have them, but they are not conversations that would enrage thousands of people in the space of a few hours and kick off calls for boycotts and worse.

Clay Shirkey: The Failure of #amazonfail

(via StephenWalling)

After all, the reason the winger crowd can’t find a way to be coherently angry right now is because this country has no healthy avenues for genuine populist outrage. It never has. The setup always goes the other way: when the excesses of business interests and their political proteges in Washington leave the regular guy broke and screwed, the response is always for the lower and middle classes to split down the middle and find reasons to get pissed off not at their greedy bosses but at each other. That’s why even people like Beck’s audience, who I’d wager are mostly lower-income people, can’t imagine themselves protesting against the Wall Street barons who in actuality are the ones who fucked them over. Beck pointedly compared the AIG protesters to Bolsheviks: “[The Communists] basically said ‘Eat the rich, they did this to you, get ‘em, kill ‘em!’” He then said the AIG and G20 protesters were identical: “It’s a different style, but the sentiments are exactly the same: Find ‘em, get ‘em, kill ‘em!’” Beck has an audience that’s been trained that the rich are not appropriate targets for anger, unless of course they’re Hollywood liberals, or George Soros, or in some other way linked to some acceptable class of villain, to liberals, immigrants, atheists, etc. — Ted Turner, say, married to Jane Fonda.

But actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff. And bound to get weirder, I imagine, as this crisis gets worse and more complicated.

Matt Taibi: The peasant mentality lives on in America

(via Chris Arkenberg)

Remember: Any government attempts to curb the powers of the wealthy is socialism/communism/fascism and will ultimately lead to the mass enslavement of the American people. The ONLY solution to ALL our problems is reduced regulation of big business.

So far so good. I told you what he said, she said is, and gave you an example. CJR chimed in, and told the New York Times it could do way better, showing how. Press criticism lives! (Twitter helps.) But this does not tell us why he said, she said reporting still exists, or ever existed. To understand that we have to cut deeper into news practice, American style.

Turn the question around for a moment: what are the advantages of the newswriting formula I have derisively labeled “he said, she said?” Rather than treat it as a problem, approach it as a kind of solution to quandaries common on the reporting trail. When, for example, a screaming fight breaks out at the city council meeting and you don’t know who’s right, but you have to report it, he said, she said makes the story instantly writable. Not a problem, but a solution to the reporter’s (deadline!) problem. [..]

In its heyday he said, she said was like a stamping plant in the factory of news. It recognized that production demands trumped truthtelling requirements. But these were the production demands of a beast that is now changing. Refusing to serve as a check on Hank Greenberg’s power to distort the news when the means for a such a check are available— this too can have a cost, just as importing the knowledge to do the check has a cost. At a certain point in this dynamic, he said, she said journalism loses its utility and becomes one of the things dragging the news business down. But as the industry sheds people and newsrooms thin out, there could be greater reliance on a more and more bankrupt and trust-rotting practice. That’s a downward spiral.

Press Think: He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User

If you’ve found yourself particularly stirred to social action after sitting through the latest episode of your favorite television drama, you may have the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to thank. Having tackled malaria, homelessness and everything in between, the Foundation is hoping that it can use prime time TV staples to raise awareness and move American audiences to help out in its global philanthropic mission.

Taking traditional product placement a step further, the Foundation has been working behind the scenes to influence public attitudes by inserting important themes into the storylines of television shows like “Private Practice” and “Law and Order: SVU.” According to The New York Times, money from the Gates foundation funded script development for an “ER” episode in which George Clooney, reprising his role as Dr. Doug Ross, advocated for organ donation.

Gates, once again the world’s richest man, met last week with representatives from Viacom, the parent company of MTV, VH1 and BET, to discuss the new “message placement” paradigm. A new partnership between the Foundation and the media giant, dubbed “Get Schooled,” will bring philanthropy experts and programming executives together to develop storylines and new shows that center on education. As the relationship develops, the Gates Foundation plans to provide funding for production of shows that support their philanthropic vision.

Take Part: Gates Foundation Funds Message Placement in TV Series

(via Disinfo)

(This is reposted from 2004)

These two quotes are by Edward Bernays, from Stuart Ewen’s PR!: a Political History of Spin

“[The term public relations] hasn’t only been misused, but people have used the name for press agents, flacks, publicity men or women, individuals who simply try to get pieces into the paper that are favorable to a client. Whereas, by my definition, a public relations person, who calls themselves [sic] that, is an applied social scientist who advises a client or employer on the social attitudes and actions to take to win the support of the publics upon whom his or her its viability depends.” (11)

“The job of a public relations counsel is to instruct a client how to take actions that ‘just interrupt… the continuity of life in some way to bring about the [media] response.” (14)

It’s 11:45 a.m. on April 1, and if you run a Google News search on Harold Koh, dean of Yale Law School and President Obama’s pick for legal adviser to the State Department, here’s what you’ll find: 13 pieces on far-right Web sites characterizing Koh as dangerous and anti-American; several Fox News stories, updated several times daily, one of which describes the anti-Koh screeds as “burning up the Internet”; and a measly two blog posts defending Koh from these attacks. By the time you read this, I suspect that Fox News will have a scrolling red banner that reads, “Obama’s Koh pick imperils us all” (and … wait for it … BINGO!), the anti-Koh pieces will number 18, and the pro-Koh blog posts will number three.

And yet by my most recent tally, every one of the anti-Koh rants dutifully repeats a canard that first appeared in a hatchet piece in the New York Post by former Bush administration speechwriter Meghan Clyne. She asserts that Koh believes “Sharia law could apply to disputes in US courts.” The evidence for her claim? “A New York lawyer, Steven Stein, says that, in addressing the Yale Club of Greenwich in 2007, Koh claimed that ‘in an appropriate case, he didn’t see any reason why Sharia law would not be applied to govern a case in the United States.’ ” [...]

The New York Post today published a letter from Robin Reeves Zorthian, who actually organized the Yale Club dinner to which Stein refers. In that letter, Zorthian writes that “the account given by Steve Stein of Dean Koh’s comments is totally fictitious and inaccurate” and that she, her husband, “and several fellow alumni … are all adamant that Koh never said or suggested that sharia law could be used to govern cases in US courts.” Why should we believe her and her colleagues over Stein? Well, for one thing, Koh in all his academic articles and many public statements has never said anything to suggest some dogged fealty to sharia. But the right-wing blogs have yet to take note of Zorthian’s version of events; the sharia fable is chuffing along on its own steam now; and Fox can continue to pass along Stein’s account of the story in a breathless game of sky-is-falling telephone.

Full Story: Slate

(via The Agitator)

The Huffington Post announced today that it is launching a new initiative to produce a wide range of investigative journalism — The Huffington Post Investigative Fund. It is being funded by The Huffington Post and The Atlantic Philanthropies, and will be headed by Nick Penniman, founder of The American News Project, which will be folded into the Investigative Fund.

“The importance of investigative journalism cannot be overstated — especially during our tumultuous times — and we are delighted to be creating an initiative whose goal is to produce stories that will have a real impact both nationally and locally,” said Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post. “Everyone who recognizes the role good journalism plays in our democracy is looking for ways to preserve it during this time of great transition for the media. The Huffington Post Investigative Fund is one of the ways we are addressing that need, while also providing work and a platform for seasoned journalists downsized by major media outlets. We are grateful to the American News Project and The Atlantic Philanthropies for their generous contributions, and intend to engage with other donors as we continue to expand the Fund.”

Kenneth Lerer, co-founder and chairman of The Huffington Post, said, “There is no more critical reporting than investigative journalism. This nonprofit investigative journalism venture is a very important and logical next step for The Huffington Post. Our mission will be to produce and distribute distinguished, independent journalism made widely-available to all news outlets. We are proud to be working with our prestigious partners and look forward to expanding and building upon this venture with other investigative news organizations from around the country, and the world.”

Full Story: PressThink

Shortly after 9pm on Tuesday the 24th of March 2009, seven police officers in Dresden and four in Jena searched the homes of Theodor Reppe, who holds the domain registration for “wikileaks.de”, the German name for wikileaks.org. According to police documentation, the reason for the search was “distribution of pornographic material” and “discovery of evidence”. Police claim the raid was initiated due to Mr. Reppe’s position as the Wikileaks.de domain owner.

Police did not want to give any further information to Mr. Reppe and no contact was made with Wikileaks before or after the search. It is therefore not totally clear why the search was made, however Wikileaks, in its role as a defender of press freedoms, has published censorship lists for Australia, Thailand, Denmark and other countries. Included on the lists are references to sites containing pornography and no other material has been released by Wikileaks relating to the subject. [...]

The raid appears to be related to a recent German social hysteria around child pornography and the controversial battle for a national censorship system by the German family minister Ursula von der Leyen. It comes just a few weeks after a member of parliament, SPD minister Joerg Tauss had his office and private house searched by police. German bloggers discussing the subject were similarly raided.

Full Story: Wikileaks

(via Cryptogon)

But as we prepare to string up Messrs. Geithner, Dodd, and others, maybe those of us in the press need to be asking this: What did we know and when did we know it?

The AIG bonuses were not some covert operation in a faraway land. And the stimulus bill language exempting existing contracts from new limits on bonuses was not particularly hard to understand.

In short, the two key facts of the case were both out there — that the AIG bonuses were due to be paid and that they would go forward, unaffected by the limits in the stimulus.

As the mob circles, there’s an element of what the psychologists call transference in the media’s relentless focus on how Dodd and Geithner must be held to account for the “outrageous” bonuses. Easier to point fingers at them than at ourselves.

If the potential of these bonuses to trigger all-consuming public anger was plain as day, why was the press not collectively screaming from the rooftops about them?

Full Story: The Politico.

What about “citizen journalism” - was the story covered in the blogosphere?

(via Jay Rosen)

Disclosure: Renegade Futurist sells paid link advertisements.

This article explains how paid links are not actually the way well financed interests manipulate Google. They have more insidious ways to manipulate search results.

Paid Links and Sponsored Conversations are minor problems compared to SERP-engineering of this magnitude - however, what can really be done about such tactics? This isn’t just a matter of paid links - it’s the wholesale creation of a large ‘paid network,’ tied in with real world, offline events optimized to manipulate search engine results.

And keep in mind that the example above is just one piece of one small and relatively primitive operation (from ‘way back’ in 2006, and privately funded). This is the merely the point of the tip of a huge, honking iceberg. Reputation Management SERP manipulation will only get more subtle, powerful, and pervasive, as more and more money is put behind the effort and as tactics are honed.

In the face of the power of money, does Google really have a hope of keeping the ‘World’s Information’ free from massive “inaccuracies and inequities”?

And how hard will they really try?

I Want to Believe - in the Internet’s Great Promise, and in Google’s commitment to “Not Be Evil” while “providing unbiased, accurate, and free access to information.” I really do. So if there are any White Knights of Truth in the Googleplex, keep up the good fight. Rage, rage against the dying of the light …

But sadly, it’s difficult to reasonably hope that the internet can fare any better against corruption than any other information medium so far has. Print, radio, television … all almost totally co-opted by power and money. The internet, giving citizens the ability to search for information rather than merely have it fed to them, has such potential to break this trend - but only if that very ability to seek and find the truth is not, itself, corrupted.

Full Story: Pass the Mayo

(Thanks Justin)

Jay Rose wrote: “CNBC brings out its Maoist side as Cramer is forced to take back everything contrite he said on Stewart.”

Every time Jim Cramer opens his mouth, he makes himself and NBC’s assorted news outlets look worse.

Cramer’s latest shot in the foot came this morning, during his first appearance on the Today show after his historic on-air spanking from Daily Show host Jon Stewart a week ago.

In a series of statements that read like they were scripted by his CNBC producers, Cramer offered a defense of the channel that he didn’t bother bringing up on the Daily Show, saying Stewart’s broadsides were “naive and misleading” without specifically addressing any of his criticisms Essentially, the CNBC host took back all the admission of mistakes and promises to do better he made on Stewart’s show seven days ago.

In particular, Cramer and host Meredith Vieira never addressed embarrassing clips unearthed by Stewart showing the CNBC host describing how he used to manipulate markets as a hedge fund manager in ways he never talks about on his TV show. Or clips Stewart unearthed before his appearance on the show displaying a history of bad calls and cozying up to corporate titans.

Full Story: TampaBay.com

(via Jay Rosen)

Best, most succinct examination I’ve read:

1.) The sphere of legitimate debate is the one journalists recognize as real, normal, everyday terrain. They think of their work as taking place almost exclusively within this space. (It doesn’t, but they think so.) Hallin: “This is the region of electoral contests and legislative debates, of issues recognized as such by the major established actors of the American political process.”

Here the two-party system reigns, and the news agenda is what the people in power are likely to have on their agenda. Perhaps the purest expression of this sphere is Washington Week on PBS, where journalists discuss what the two-party system defines as “the issues.” Objectivity and balance are “the supreme journalistic virtues” for the panelists on Washington Week because when there is legitimate debate it’s hard to know where the truth lies. There are risks in saying that truth lies with one faction in the debate, as against another— even when it does. He said, she said journalism is like the bad seed of this sphere, but also a logical outcome of it.

3.) In the sphere of deviance we find “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.” As in the sphere of consensus, neutrality isn’t the watchword here; journalists maintain order by either keeping the deviant out of the news entirely or identifying it within the news frame as unacceptable, radical, or just plain impossible. The press “plays the role of exposing, condemning, or excluding from the public agenda” the deviant view, says Hallin. It “marks out and defends the limits of acceptable political conduct.”

Anyone whose views lie within the sphere of deviance—as defined by journalists—will experience the press as an opponent in the struggle for recognition. If you don’t think separation of church and state is such a good idea; if you do think a single payer system is the way to go; if you dissent from the “lockstep behavior of both major American political parties when it comes to Israel” (Glenn Greenwald) chances are you will never find your views reflected in the news. It’s not that there’s a one-sided debate; there’s no debate.

[...]

The Stewart/Cramer discussion, as ancillary as it might seem to the greater crisis, was one of the first mainstream cracks in that veneer of always having the media define the boundaries of the argument.

Blogs and new media have been eating away at that veneer for quite some time and that’s why newspapers are suffering. Their inability to recognize the critical flaw in their coverage when the people are starting to demand more. Sure, they are having trouble with costs, scale and declining revenue, but the problem with their content precedes all of those things.

Buffalo Geek

(via Jay Rosen)

The Australian communications regulator says it will fine people who hyperlink to sites on its blacklist, which has been further expanded to include several pages on the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks.

Wikileaks was added to the blacklist for publishing a leaked document containing Denmark’s list of banned websites.

The move by the Australian Communications and Media Authority comes after it threatened the host of online broadband discussion forum Whirlpool last week with a $11,000-a-day fine over a link published in its forum to another page blacklisted by ACMA - an anti-abortion website.

Full Story: Sidney Morning Herald

(via Xtal)

On Monday, Seattle P-I owner The Hearst Corp. said that while it would end the print edition of the paper effective Tuesday, it would continue to maintain Seattlepi.com as a source of local news and opinion.

It marks the first time that a major metropolitan daily has attempted the switch from print and online to digital only. The shift could eventually be replicated in cities across the United States.

But at least in Seattle, the new digital product will be very different from the old operation — in both size and tradition.

Managers said the site will have an editorial staff of 20, down from more than 150. An additional 20 people are being hired to sell advertising. The staff writers remaining include columnists Joel Connelly, Art Thiel and Jim Moore, as well as cartoonist David Horsey.

Full Story: Seattle Post-Intelligencer