edia control and incompetence has been one of the biggest issues in America since the early 1990s, when deregulation allowed news to become profit-driven and ratings became all that mattered. Since then we've had ever more media consolidation, where hundreds of newspapers and TV stations are owned by the same massive corporation, and reporting has steadily become less about truth and keeping the government and big industry honest, and more about celebrity, ratings, opinion, agenda-pushing, and ad revenue profit.

Obviously enough, you won't see many stories on the major media about why the major media sucks, so the articles I blog about and post on this page tend to be stuff from independent websites and papers. And if you read a lot of this sort of thing, I guarantee you will become deeply depressed at the spoon-fed bullshit we Americans consume on a daily basis.

More recent additions are added on top of this page.

January 22, 2004

Amusing recap of the recent exploits of Nedra Picklering, an AP wire reporter who has been writing articles about the various Democratic candidates, and throwing in several blatantly false insinuations or accusations into every article.

A Dec. 10 wire story took a look at a recent Democratic debate and concluded that Democrats "sometimes leave out the facts" in their critiques of the Bush administration. For example: "[S]everal of the nine candidates criticized the tax cuts George W. Bush pushed through Congress. But none mentioned that Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan . . . has cited those cuts as a reason for the recent economic growth." Shocking! Sources indicate that the candidates also failed to mention the Tuesday-evening chicken wings special at the Lucky Bar and my little brother's late guinea pig, creatively named Guinea.

Welcome to the exciting world of "Nit Picklering," a label devised by popular liberal blogger Atrios to honor Associated Press campaign reporter Nedra Pickler's invention of a new standard for honesty whereby a Democrat is lying every time his or her comments neglect to include literally the whole truth, whether or not the overlooked fact actually contradicts the claim in question.

This wouldn't be a big deal if she were just some blogger.  In fact, this sort of thing is pretty much what readers expect from blogs. *cough* The problem is that the AP wire is sending out her recaps of these speeches and such as though they were actual, honest, objective news, rather than very conservative nit picking editorials that remove all context from various things in order to try to snap at them. As the quoted article relates, on several occasions Pickler has included outright lies errors in her editorials articles, mistakes that have been corrected in revised versions of the articles, but a day later and without ever any explanation or retraction.

October 4, 2003

Good blog post on CalPundit about a new study showing the amount of misperceptions people hold about the Iraq situation, depending on which news source they get their information from.  The survey presented people who rely on only one source for their news (where do you find such people?) three main questions and charted their responses, then comparing them to objective reality and sorted it by what their source of news was. You can see the results in the chart here, with Fox leading the way in misinformation, but CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, and newspapers not far behind.

The whole report is pretty damn depressing, when you get right down to it. How do 69% of people feel that it's "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that Saddam was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks?  I mean Jesus Christ, even that nutcase Cheney has never claimed that. Hell, 20% of people believe that Iraq used chemical weapons in the Iraq Attack, and I can't recall there being even a hint or a whisper about that, even from FOX and other right wing news outlets.  Another question reveals that 25% of people think the majority of the world favored the Iraq Attack.  How is that possible? Where do people get these beliefs?  It's like the Bushies don't even need to make up the lies anymore; people are so eager to invent them themselves.

I also wonder where you find people who only get their news from one source.  That's almost true for me, but that source would be the Internet, and that's unclassifiable, since there are virtually infinite news sources online, coming from every ideological bent.  But I also check out print media from time to time, (newspapers or Newsweek) and I even occasionally turn on the TV news.  I can envision people who only watch Fox "news", just because they are true believers in Bush and don't want any reality to intrude into their sheltered little world, but I've always seen all the other news sources as pretty much interchangeable.  Is there any difference between CBS/ABC/NBC in terms of news coverage?  How does a person just watch say, NBC, and never click to CBS or ABC by accident?  How can you even tell which network you have on at a glance?

September 16, 2003

So a famous CNN journalist, Christine Amanpour, was on a talk show and actually copped to the fact that the US media was very self-censored during the Iraq Attack.  Every independent media source on earth has been talking about this for a year, and it's something I ranted about repeatedly on this site, so it's nice to see a real journalist with the balls (metaphorically speaking) to admit it.

Said Amanpour: "I think the press was muzzled, and I think the press self-muzzled. I'm sorry to say, but certainly television and, perhaps, to a certain extent, my station was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News. And it did, in fact, put a climate of fear and self-censorship, in my view, in terms of the kind of broadcast work we did."

Brown then asked Amanpour if there was any story during the war that she couldn't report.

"It's not a question of couldn't do it, it's a question of tone," Amanpour said. "It's a question of being rigorous. It's really a question of really asking the questions. All of the entire body politic in my view, whether it's the administration, the intelligence, the journalists, whoever, did not ask enough questions, for instance, about weapons of mass destruction. I mean, it looks like this was disinformation at the highest levels."

So basically Bush lied and the media was more or less complicit in things by not fulfilling their rightful critical role in a free society. I haven't seen any comment from the Bush Administration about this, but there is a comment from the media.  I would expect that news organizations would either take a mea culpa and admit to their failings now, as Amanpour did, or else would deny it entirely, and say they did things as well as they could be done under difficult circumstances, blah blah.

Fortunately we've got Fox News to make things far more interesting than that.

Fox News spokeswoman Irena Briganti said of Amanpour's comments: "Given the choice, it's better to be viewed as a foot soldier for Bush than a spokeswoman for al-Qaeda."

This is just a dream statement for Fox-haters.  I like how they don't bother to pretend to be a real news organization, or be objective, or even be adult about things. Instead they react instantly with an insult that's on about a 3rd grade level; one that attempts to completely confuse the issue.  So according to Fox, you either parrot everything Bush says unquestioningly, or you are a terrorist?

I could almost believe this sort of statement coming off the cuff from some local reporter, or dumb politician. But it's from the FOX PR department, which means every word was carefully chosen and it was approved by senior network personnel. So obviously they have no desire to appear to be impartial or balanced.  They are Bush cheerleaders, and anyone who isn't is the enemy.  Which is exactly what their critics say about them.  Nice that we've got that matter settled.

Plus, what the hell does al-Queda have to do with Iraq?  Aside from various lies and innuendos spread by Bush spokespeople, there is no connection at all.  Or at least there wasn't before the US invasion.  Now that Iraq is going far more militant Islamic and large parts of the country are pretty much in a state of anarchy, terrorism is growing by leaps and bounds.  Plus there's obviously far more motivation for your average Iraqi to hate the US and want to fight back via Al Queda now than there ever was before.

Fox's amazing reply reminds me of another funny news item last week, when new poll results came out showing that Bush's popularity was lower than ever before.  The White House PR replied that Reagan and Clinton were even less popular at the same time in their first terms, and that both of them won re-election. That's true, but it leaves open a ridiculously-easy punchline, when you consider which president came between Reagan and Clinton, and was not re-elected.

Yes, Daddy Dubya.  Like father like son?

September 12, 2003

Interesting interview with NYTimes columnist Jack Krugman in which he talks about why so much of the media is now utterly useless and cowed, and why they give Bush and co. such a free ride on things.

...being critical at the level I've been critical -– basically saying that these guys [the Bush Administration] are lying, even if it's staring you in the face –- is a very unpleasant experience. You get a lot of heat from people who should be on your side, because they accuse you of being shrill, which is everybody's favorite word for me. And you become a personal target. It can be quite frightening. I've seen cases where a journalist starts to say something less than reverential about Bush, and then catches himself or herself, and says something like, "Oh, I better not say that, I'll get 'mailed.'" And what they mean by "mail" is hate mail, and it also means that somebody is going to try to see if there's anything in your personal history that can be used to smear you.

As well as why the public perception of Bush is so much more positive than it was of Clinton.

BUZZFLASH: Why is it, even after the staggering deficits, and three million jobs lost, when you look at the polls, ordinary people perceive Republicans as better at managing the economy and the federal budget than Democrats. Even though we're just starting to understand just how good the Clinton-Gore economic policies were, the false perception still exists the Republicans can handle the economy better.

KRUGMAN: Again, I think it comes back to press coverage. Just this weekend, I was looking at something: There's an enormous scandal right now involving Boeing and a federal contract, which appears to have been overpaid by $4 billion. The Pentagon official who was responsible for the contract has now left and has become a top executive at Boeing. And it's been barely covered in the press –- a couple of stories on inside pages. You compare that with the White House travel office in 1993. There were accusations, later found to be false, that the Clintons had intervened improperly to dismiss a couple of employees in the White House travel office.

That was the subject, in the course of one month, of three front-page stories in the Washington Post. So if people don't understand how badly things are being managed now, and have an unduly negative sense of how things were managed in the Clinton years, well, there in a nutshell is your explanation.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.