On Target Blog - Accuracy In Media

Toward An ‘Equally Vicious’ Press Corps

2009-07-10T15:54:44+00:00

Sam Donaldson was "the embodiment of liberal media bias" to many conservatives during his White House stint with ABC News, but every conservative should agree with Donaldson's view that the press needs to be "equally vicious" to all presidents.

He made that point in an interview with Politico. "[T]he only way to save yourself as a reporter, when you're a political reporter questioning various presidents, like Helen Thomas does, is to be equally vicious to all of them," Donaldson said.

Donaldson didn't always practice what he is preaching now, and while Helen Thomas has been feisty with President Obama lately, she certainly isn't a role model for equally vicious reporting. But Donaldson is preaching journalistic truth.

Good reporters -- like ABC's current White House reporter, Jake Tapper -- ask tough questions of all politicians. They don't go soft -- like Dan Froomkin did at The Washington Post -- when a president more to their liking replaces one they mistrust.

In another honest assessment of media liberalism, Donaldson also acknowledged that journalists struggle to keep their own views out of their coverage.

"We all say, 'No, we don't let our personal opinions interfere with objective coverage, particularly of a president,' he said. "But on the margins, I think maybe it does."

Two perfect examples from Donaldson himself in the Politico interview: 1) "I think there's great promise in this presidency"; and 2) "Here's a man who, like some other presidents, came into Washington walking on water, in a figurative sense."

Here are other noteworthy nuggets from the interview:

"In the press room today, there might be some restraint [toward Obama] left: Who wants to be the first reporter to savage the first African-American president?"
"To tell a reporter in advance, 'We'll call on you,' I think that's just not the way to conduct something like this. ... This orchestration of the press, I think it's dangerous."
"Against George Bush, this guy is an open book. But against his own standard that he preached as a candidate, they pulled back, quite clearly."

Journalism Standards And Values At Reuters

2009-07-09T20:20:47+00:00

Transparency is as good for journalism as it is for government, so the international wire service Reuters deserves kudos for making its "Handbook Of Journalism" available online. Now the public can decide whether Reuters is adhering to its own standards and values.

Here are "The 10 Absolutes Of Reuters Journalism," as noted in the handbook:

Always hold accuracy sacrosanct
Always correct an error openly
Always strive for balance and freedom from bias
Always reveal a conflict of interest to a manager
Always respect privileged information
Always protect their sources from the authorities
Always guard against putting their opinion in a news story
Never fabricate or plagiarize
Never alter a still or moving image beyond the requirements of normal image enhancement
Never pay for a story and never accept a bribe

The handbook also includes detailed sections on accuracy, independence, freedom from bias and integrity.

Conservatives, who exposed a doctored war photo by Reuters in 2006, have lodged many valid gripes against the company over the years and should be even more diligent about calling the wire service out when it forsakes its own admirable journalistic values.

The Left’s Investment In Investigation

2009-07-09T19:43:31+00:00

American Journalism Review interviewed former Washington Post investigative team leader Larry Roberts about his new gig with a nonprofit investigative journalism venture funded in part by The Huffington Post. He'll be hiring about a dozen editors, reporters and multimedia staffers, as well as working with freelancers.

Here's a glimpse into the kind of money the left is pouring into investigative journalism:

Joining The Huffington Post and the American News Project in providing the venture's initial $1.75 million funding is Atlantic Philanthropies, a foundation that focuses its giving on issues of social and economic inequity. The Huffington Post Investigative Fund joins the ranks of other nonprofit startups attempting to pick up the slack as beleaguered traditional news outlets significantly cut their staffs and carry out fewer investigative efforts.

ProPublica, an investigative journalism Web site that launched in early 2008 with a guaranteed budget of at least $10 million dollars for three years, now has 32 journalists working on pieces ranging from AIG's bailout to health care reform. While ProPublica tends to focus on national investigations, smaller nonprofits are popping up to investigate at the local level as well.

As noted earlier this week, TPM Media also just received an infusion of venture capital that will be used to hire seven more staffers.

Add the new hires to the 32-man team at ProPublica, and that's more than 50 liberal journalists who will be dedicated to investigating the government from a progressive worldview. And that total doesn't include investigators at The Huffington Post itself, the American News Project, the Center for Independent Media, the Center for Investigate Reporting and the Center for Public Integrity.

The right needs to get busy. It's time to start doing journalism rather than just criticizing the journalism the left does.

Making Sense Of Political Math

2009-07-09T00:32:36+00:00

On April 24, Matthias Shapiro of Salt Lake City uploaded to YouTube a video that exposed the emptiness of President Obama's promise to cut $100 million from the federal budget. He stacked about $100 worth of pennies on a table and then illustrated how Obama's plan would amount to taking 1/4 of a cent from the stack.

Yesterday, Shapiro came to Washington on the Republican National Committee's dime to receive its first "Grassroots Logic" award for his political math videos and to dispense his everyman wisdom inside the Beltway.

Shapiro made a brief appearance on "Fox & Friends" and spoke to a gathering of Senate Republicans, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and 2008 presidential nominee John McCain. He also shared his insights about politics and social media with groups like American Solutions and Americans for Tax Reform.

During a break from his whirlwind tour of the capital political scene, Shapiro chatted with Accuracy In Media at RNC headquarters. Here are excerpts from that interview.

When Barack Met Michelle

2009-07-08T15:26:20+00:00

We all know "When Harry Met Sally," but do we know "When Barack Met Michelle?" We thought we did, but now there seems to be a discrepancy in the story.

Adding to the mystery of Barack Obama's background, was this comment he made yesterday when he addressed the graduating class of the New Economic School in Moscow. In his opening remarks, he said that he had met his wife "in class." The exact line was: "I don't know if anybody else will meet their future wife or husband in class like I did, but I'm sure that you're all going to have wonderful careers." You can view it here or read the transcript from the White House website.

But that's not how Michelle remembers it. She told CNN's Suzanne Malveaux last January that she was working at Sidley Austin, a law firm in Chicago, and Barack, who had just finished his first year at Harvard Law School, had been hired as a summer associate. She was picked to be his adviser, she said, probably because they both went to Harvard Law School and were "both minority students."

This on its own is no big deal. Perhaps. One could be generous and infer that he meant that he was a student when he met his future wife, but that is quite different from saying that you met your wife "in class," while addressing a classroom full of students.

Tech Entrepreneur Funds Left-Wing Journalism

2009-07-07T20:19:27+00:00

The liberal journalism world has a new sugar daddy -- Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape Communications and a co-founder of Ning, a social-networking platform popular in some corners of online conservative politics.

TechCrunch reported yesterday that Andreessen is leading a round of financing of between $500,000 and $1 million for TPM Media, which publishes Talking Points Memo, TPMMuckraker, TPMDC and TPMCafe.

This is the first outside funding for TPM, which was founded by Marshall in 2000 after the presidential election recounts. In the past [Josh] Marshall has funded TPM via advertising and three reader fundraising events, each of which raised "tens of thousands of dollars," he says. The company is profitable and has 11 full-time employees.

The TPM network of blogs has 1.5 million unique monthly visitors and 15 million page views according to Google Analytics, says Marshall.

The new funding has enabled TPM Media to double its editorial staff by hiring three more reporters in Washington and four in New York.

Wake up, conservative donors. You're ceding the new media ground to the same liberals who already dominate old media.

Dan Froomkin’s New (Huffington) Post

2009-07-07T19:49:00+00:00

I blogged these words back on June 19 after The Washington Post fired liberal blogger Dan Froomkin as its White House watchdog:

Odds are good that Froomkin will continue his blog as a solo venture or move it to another publication, perhaps a liberal outlet. (Can you say Huffington Post?) I hope he does -- if he is finished wrestling with his inner watchdog and ready to consistently be a thorn in Obama's side as he was for Bush.

Today, a mere three weeks later, comes word that Froomkin has landed on his feet at ... you guessed it, The Huffington Post. He will serve as its D.C. bureau chief.

Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com (doesn't that publication seem even shadier after last week's dust up over The Washington Post's "salons"?) has the details on the courting of Froomkin:

Almost immediately upon the reporting of Froomkin's firing, screenwriter Nora Ephron, an editor-at-large for The Huffington Post, e-mailed [Arianna] Huffington with a one-line note: "I hope we're hiring him." Within hours, Huffington called Froomkin, met with him in Washington last week, and a deal was finalized this week.

I'd like to say I was clairvoyant, but the Huffington Post's quick move was the most logical conclusion to the Froomkin affair. His liberal worldview, blatantly obvious at White House Watch for years, will be a better match for Huffington's left-wing propaganda vehicle than it ever was for The Washington Post, which at least professes to cover the White House objectively.

In theory, Froomkin now can drop the pretense that he ever intended to watch the Obama adminstration with the same hawkish eyes as he did the Bush White House.

Froomkin and Huffington are two peas from the same liberal pod, where their "passionate" view of the world is "truth" and everyone else, including Froomkin's former Washington Post editors, is either a liar or enabler of liars:

Huffington argues that establishment journalism is failing due to "the idea that good journalism is about presenting both sides without a voice -- without any passion." The outlets that continue to adhere to that "obsolete" model "are paying a price." Froomkin -- who has written extensively about how passion-free, "both-sides-are-equally-valid" journalism is the primary affliction of the profession -- echoes that view: "The key challenge is to present an alternative to the 'splitting the difference' culture that has infested traditional media."

And they blogged happily ever after.

Great Deals At The Washington Post

2009-07-03T01:36:27+00:00

The big media news inside the Beltway today was the brouhaha over The Washington Post planning, and then canceling, dinner parties that promised deep-pockets lobbyists access to Obama administration insiders, members of Congress and even the Post's own editorial staff.

Bloggers across the political spectrum condemned the idea; the Post's ombudsman called the story a "public relations disaster"; the paper's executive editor said he never would have let his staff participate; publisher Katharine Weymouth reaffirmed her commitment to "our journalism and our integrity"; and the Obama administration had to answer questions about whether it had been invited to the "salons" and agreed to attend.

Everyone agrees, the Post blew it big time and will have an ethical cloud over its work for quite a while. Now that we have all that serious talk out of the way, let's have a little fun by imagining what kind of deals the Post might offer next.

Plenty of people are letting their imaginations run wild over at Twitter. There is even a new hashtag (#WaPodeals) to make all of the wisecracks (including the predictably vile ones from lefties) easily searchable. Here's a family-friendly sampling:

For $10 million none of the Post's staff will say anything negative about Sarah Palin for a day.
For $7,000, David Broder will write about the need for more bipartisanship. (Who are we kidding? He'll do it for an ice-cream cone.)
For $10,000, WaPo will hire and fire Dan Froomkin again and let you watch.
For $1,250, Al Kamen will consult the Obamas on their Christmas card before it goes to the printer.
For $25,000, we'll have [Bob] Woodward write a book on you. For $250,000, it will actually be complimentary.
Just $100,000 gets you a Date Lab with the governor/member of Congress of your choice.
For $10,000, George Will will wear jeans for a day.
For $30,000, Richard Cohen will fly to your house and yell at those annoying kids on your lawn.
Hey, maybe for $20, WaPo will let me RickRoll its editorial board.
How much does it cost to get my paper delivered before I leave for work?

Here's my contribution: For $1, the Post will hire the worst "conservative" blogger it can find as a token to counter the boatload of liberals already on the blogging staff.

Share your ideas in the comments section.

The Post scandal also spawned a great new word on Twitter (at least its new to me) -- "presstitutes." Any other words you would like to suggest for the media lexicon? Post them in the comments, too.

The Press Corps Gets Feisty

2009-07-02T14:44:32+00:00

Helen Thomas, the veteran White House reporter who thinks there aren't enough liberals in the press, reached her breaking point yesterday with the Obama White House's attempts to manage the news. She publicly scolded Obama's team for handpicking the questions at a faux virtual town-hall event on health care and then insulted President Obama by saying he is worse than Richard Nixon.

First the video from the daily White House press briefing, where Chip Reid of CBS joined Thomas in grilling press secretary Robert Gibbs about the town hall:

Now for Thomas' profanity-laced rant to CNSNews, where she complained that not even Nixon, the epitome of a bad president to liberal reporters from the Watergate era, tried to control the press like Obama has in his early days:

"What the hell do they think we are, puppets?" Thomas said. "They're supposed to stay out of our business. They are our public servants. We pay them."

Thomas said she was especially concerned about the arrangement between the Obama administration and a writer from the liberal Huffington Post Web site. The writer was invited by the White House to President Obama's press conference last week on the understanding that he would ask Obama a question about Iran from among questions that had been sent to him by people in Iran.

"When you call the reporter the night before you know damn well what they are going to ask to control you," Thomas said.

"I'm not saying there has never been managed news before, but this is carried to fare-thee-well -- for the town halls, for the press conferences," she said. "It's blatant. They don't give a damn if you know it or not. They ought to be hanging their heads in shame."

Yesterday's public airing of press grievances is the latest sign of trouble for Obama's stage managers, and Michael Wolff's essay in the July issue of Vanity Fair may have something to do with that. Like the "Saturday Night Live" skit that embarrassed Obama worshippers in the press into tougher coverage during the 2008 Democratic primary, Wolff's essay reminded reporters that every White House (and presidential candidate) tries to manipulate the press -- and that the Obama team is especially adept at doing so.

The media navel-gazing has been intense since then:

Phil Bronstein of the San Franciso Chronicle scolded the press for being seduced by Obama;
The Washington Post fired a liberal White House columnist who acknowledged that he was still trying to get his "sea legs" in covering Obama;
Doug Bates of The Oregonian decried today's "gerbilism" as "soft and warm and cuddly, safe and timid, with no sharp teeth and no bite whatsoever";
The establishment press in Washington went nuts when the White House gave liberal blogger Nico Pitney special treatment for Obama's most recent press conference;
And Dan Thomasson of Scripps Howard News Service bemoaned the fact that Obama has "done a masterful job of keeping the Fourth Estate, if it even exists these days, off balance and frustrated.

The sudden burst of introspection is a good sign. Democracy benefits when the press is skeptical and feisty. But the media's outcry about Obama's management of the news isn't necessarily signaling an end to his presidential honeymoon.

For now, journalists are asking more tough questions about how Obama is selling his messages than about what messages he is selling. Their egos have been bruised because Obama is bypassing them as often as he is using them, so they are striking back at the bruiser.

When the media are truly tired of being controlled by Obama, they will stop whining like puppies about process, get off his lap and start acting like the watchdogs they are supposed to be.

An Honest Assessment Of Media Liberalism

2009-06-25T15:50:24+00:00

Vanity Fair better be careful, or it's going to be labeled as part of the vast right-wing conspiracy. In the past few weeks, the magazine and its online sister publication have taken aim at the liberal media.

The first jab came in an essay for the July print edition about the Obama White House's success in taming the liberal media. Michael Wolff called it a "perfect re-creation of a relationship between president and news media that has not been seen since the White House pressroom was a clubby place with reporters invited into the press secretary's office for whiskey and cigars."

The Web side of the Vanity Fair operation followed that lead a couple of days ago by publishing on its Culture and Celebrity Blog a piece that asked and answered why Americans hate the media these days. Writer Matt Pressman gauged the validity of each complaint.

"We're too liberal" was the gripe at the top of the list -- and Pressman confirmed that the complaint is extremely valid. On a scale of 1 to 10, he gave the media a 7 for its liberalism and then explained why:

It's true that the overwhelming majority of people who work in media vote Democratic. But most of the people reporting the news (as opposed to editorializing) make an honest attempt to hold both parties to account and not to allow their personal views to impact their work.

Liberal bias is a legitimate complaint, but it's vastly overblown, especially given the proliferation and power of unabashedly right-wing media outlets. Plus, reporters may sometimes overcompensate for their liberal leanings by giving excessive credence to certain right-wing arguments (see global warming, Iraq war).

The apologetic explanation doesn't mesh with the 7-point ranking, but admitting that "liberal bias is a legitimate complaint" is a good start. The overall grade is about right, too.

Some journalists, like CNN's Susan Roesgen, have scored a perfect 10 for bias, and the press collectively deserves a 10 for its coverage of President Obama to date. But based on my nearly two decades as a reporter and editor, most of it in the Washington press corps, I agree that most of my colleagues, most of the time, "make an honest attempt to hold both parties to account and not to allow their personal views to impact their work."

When they fail, it's often because they are blind to their own biases. Pressman's bias toward the Al Gore school of thought on global warming is a perfect example.

I don't doubt that he honestly believes liberal journalists have given "excessive credence to certain right-wing arguments" on that topic, but he's flat wrong. The reality is that too few journalists even care to be objective in covering the debate about climate change.

They, like Gore, believe that manmade global warming is "settled science," and they give no credence whatsoever to the scientists and politicians who disagree. They may include critics in their stories, but they work hard to marginalize those sources and don't report stories about science that contradicts their preconceptions about global warming.

Pressman deserves kudos for acknowledging what has long been obvious to most Americans -- that journalists let their liberalism seep into their reporting. Now he and the rest of the press need to take a closer look at how they report individual stories like global warming, or they're going to start moving the wrong direction on the scale, from a 7 to a 10.