the Zimbabwean media
Apr. 5th, 2008 07:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
realthog. . . except the venue isn't Zimbabwe, it's here. Glenn Greenwald of Salon has some pointers as to one reason why election results can sometimes seem so dissociated from the merits of the candidates. Here's the opening of his piece at
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/04/05/media/index.html:
The U.S. establishment media in a nutshell
The U.S. government suspended the Fourth Amendment and expressly authorized torture. The attorney general lied about how the 9/11 attack happened. Barack Obama can't bowl well. Which revelations did the media cover?
Glenn Greenwald
Apr. 05, 2008
In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to "domestic military operations" within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.
Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:
"Yoo and torture" - 102
"Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73
"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16
"Obama and bowling" -- 1,043
"Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
"Obama and patriotism" - 1,607
"Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079
These are the supposed news media that are being talked about -- the shapers of opinion, the educators of the voting public, the Fourth Estate -- not, as you might assume from the Nexis results above, the rags at the supermarket checkout which tell you the latest about Brad, Angelina and Jen. Or Katie and Tom. Or Nicole and Joel (which is really baffling Pam and myself because we haven't the first clue who Nicole and Joel are, and neither have the cashiers we've asked).
Not so long ago,hutch0 (at http://hutch0.livejournal.com/67874.html) rightly took issue with the numbskull US tv pundidiot Tucker Carlson, who made the absurd claim that the standards of journalism at the Scottish national newspaper The Scotsman were somehow shabbier than those of himself and his like.
(They must have been laughing themselves senseless at The Scotsman as they watched the clip. It's not the best of the UK newspapers, but it is somewhere in the upper echelon. A few years ago I'd have said the top UK newspapers weren't as good as US equivalents like the New York Times and the Washington Post. In the wake of Judith Miller and the decline -- plummet -- in standards at the Post, it's now hard to make that case. So today, despite the fact that its breadth of coverage can in no wise match the NYT's, The Scotsman is arguably the better journalistic venue. And that's said by someone who prefers Scotland's other main newspaper, the Herald.)
Tucker Carlson almost immediately lost his job, of course, due either to the man's complete incompetence or to the fabled Curse of Hutch0. But, with hindsight, it seems unfair that the Fates singled him out.
1043 mentions of Obama's (lack of) bowling skills.
118 (all told) mentions of Yoo's memo responsible for turning the US into a Torture State.
73 mentions of Mukasey's lie about 9/11.
These are the supposed news media that are being talked about -- the shapers of opinion, the educators of the voting public, the Fourth Estate -- not, as you might assume from the Nexis results above, the rags at the supermarket checkout which tell you the latest about Brad, Angelina and Jen. Or Katie and Tom. Or Nicole and Joel (which is really baffling Pam and myself because we haven't the first clue who Nicole and Joel are, and neither have the cashiers we've asked).
Not so long ago,
hutch0 (at http://hutch0.livejournal.com/67874.html) rightly took issue with the numbskull US tv pundidiot Tucker Carlson, who made the absurd claim that the standards of journalism at the Scottish national newspaper The Scotsman were somehow shabbier than those of himself and his like.(They must have been laughing themselves senseless at The Scotsman as they watched the clip. It's not the best of the UK newspapers, but it is somewhere in the upper echelon. A few years ago I'd have said the top UK newspapers weren't as good as US equivalents like the New York Times and the Washington Post. In the wake of Judith Miller and the decline -- plummet -- in standards at the Post, it's now hard to make that case. So today, despite the fact that its breadth of coverage can in no wise match the NYT's, The Scotsman is arguably the better journalistic venue. And that's said by someone who prefers Scotland's other main newspaper, the Herald.)
Tucker Carlson almost immediately lost his job, of course, due either to the man's complete incompetence or to the fabled Curse of Hutch0. But, with hindsight, it seems unfair that the Fates singled him out.
1043 mentions of Obama's (lack of) bowling skills.
118 (all told) mentions of Yoo's memo responsible for turning the US into a Torture State.
73 mentions of Mukasey's lie about 9/11.
Brad, Angelina and Jen, anyone?
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no subject
Date: 2008-04-06 07:39 pm (UTC)There's a magazine called Columbia Journalism Review (I get its email updates, which are free) that covers a lot of this sort of stuff, and in fact I'm surprised it hasn't come down heavily on the mainstream media for this particularly appalling instance of disparity between real news and crap.
Meanwhile we have the new owner of the LA Times, which until recently was a pretty good newspaper, telling his hard news reporters, his DC bureau and the like that really they're just burdens on the overheads bill: what his readers really want are lots of fluff articles about the entertainment industry, which he can get Real Cheap.