Day: 8/14/2009

Fox News’ Major Garrett Really Doesn’t Understand Email

Posted by on August 14, 2009 at 7:07 pm. 27 Comments :

At yesterday’s White House press briefing, Major Garrett of Fox News embarrassed himself by demonstrating his utter lack of understanding of the Internet and email. Today he is escalating his campaign to make a total ass of himself, and he is doing a magnificent job of it.

Garrett appeared on Fox News today to announce that he is pursuing White House press secretary Robert Gibbs to find out how emails, allegedly sent from the White House, were received by people who never requested them. He has even filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get to the bottom of this raging controversy. There are some rather simple and entirely innocent answers to this mystery, but Garrett can’t be bothered to investigate them. On his blog today he admitted to journalistic negligence that would make a cub reporter cringe.

“…in every instance so far, e-mailers insist the e-mail(s) they received from the White House was/were not forwarded. They are positive the e-mails arrived directly from the White House.”

“Fox cannot independently verify all of these accounts. Fox can only represent what hundreds of e-mailers have represented to me or to the network.”

So Garrett is relying on the accounts of the people who contacted him who said they were “positive” the emails came directly from the White House, but he can’t verify a single one. He is satisfied that these people whom he has never met, never questioned, never vetted, are so reliable that he is under no obligation to confirm their assertions. He produces two examples of aggrieved email recipients, one of whom complains, not of an email, but a pop-up ad containing an email from the White House. Of course, a pop-up ad cannot contain an email. It can contain ad, but Garrett didn’t verify this either and, frankly, I’m skeptical.

Click here to enlarge.
These are the people on whose “positive” assertions he was relying when filing his FOIA request. But Garrett is missing an even bigger piece of this puzzle. Apparently he never bothered to look at his very own Fox News blog on which there is a “SHARE” feature that permits anyone to send an email from that site to any other email address. And – surprise – WhiteHouse.gov has the very same feature. (see image at left)

I don’t know if Garrett is really this clueless about the Internet or if he is deliberately manufacturing a remarkably lame scandal. But before he gets himself in too deep, he may want to get former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens to explain this series of tubes to him.

For a network/party that had no problem with the Bush administration actually monitoring and reading their emails, they are sure making a big stink out of something as innocent as a contact list from which they can unsubscribe with a click.

Update: I’m curious if Garrett’s FOIA request would violate the privacy policy of the White House web site. I know that I wouldn’t want my email, or other info that I gave to WhiteHouse.gov, turned over to Fox News.

Update II: Fox News received a response from the White House regarding the mysterious emails:

“The White House email list is made up of email addresses obtained solely through the White House website. The White House doesn’t purchase, upload or merge from any other list, again, all emails come from the White House website as we have no interest in emailing anyone who does not want to receive an email. If an individual received the email because someone else or a group signed them up or forwarded the email, we hope they were not too inconvenienced. Further, we suggest that they unsubscribe from the list by clicking the link at the bottom of the email or tell whomever forwarded it to them not to forward such information anymore. We are implementing measures to make subscribing to emails clearer, including preventing advocacy organizations from signing people up to our lists without their permission when they deliver petition signatures and other messages on individual’s behalf.”

As it turns out, it was third-party organizations who entered the email addresses into the White House system, not some grand conspiracy by Obama and ACORN and Bill Ayres and the Kenyan Consulate. Who knew? Well, everyone but Major Garrett and the fraternity of Foxpods.

Media Consortium Contemplates Competiton To Nielsen

Posted by on August 14, 2009 at 12:58 pm. NO Comments :

The Financial Times is reporting that some of the top media companies are exploring options for creating an alternative to Nielsen Media’s monopolistic control of the television ratings system.

“Media participants in the consortium – including networks owned by NBC Universal, Time Warner, News Corp, Viacom, CBS, Discovery and Walt Disney – expect it to be operational by September.”

Neilsen’s service has been the subject of criticism for decades. Its methodology is virtually guaranteed to misrepresent the actual TV audience. Out-of-home viewing isn’t included. This is a significant portion of the marketplace that includes offices, dorms, hotels, bars, etc. Their sampling is skewed by being limited just to those respondents who aren’t creeped out by having a device attached to their TV that records everything they watch. They do not account for cultural viewing habits where certain groups of viewers gather together to view programs. That has a disproportional impact on young and low income viewers, as well as sports fans. And the new media marketplace (i.e. digital viewing) is almost completely ignored.

So it is well past time to overhaul this archaic and inaccurate process of measuring TV usage. But don’t get too excited. I have seen at least three of these consortiums come and go. It is a high risk, low probability exercise that is almost doomed to fail before it begins.

Here is how it generally goes. The stakeholders (producers, syndicators, advertisers) come together agreeing that the status quo is untenable and something has to be done. Then they solicit prospective enterprises to fill the gaps that Nielsen is missing. The consortium promises to support the new venture and help them to develop a product that all parties will find useful. The new venture invests millions of dollars and thousands of hours in building their service. At some point they are ready to provide the consortium with sample data. In the instances that I witnessed, the new data was often in conflict with the data from Nielsen, but it was well supported and appeared to differ only because they were more accurate than Nielsen.

This is where the trouble starts. With numbers that differ from Nielsen, some parties will be up while others are down. The parties whose numbers are lower will immediately object to the new service and complain that they are not being represented properly. Then the consortium begins to collapse. As the aggrieved parties back away, the remaining members are faced with greater burdens to support the new venture because the cost is distributed between fewer players. Plus, these higher burdens come as the project is in turmoil, which makes any continued investment even more risky, and thus, less likely.

A peculiarity of the television advertising world is that these folks prefer inaccurate data to accurate data that makes them look bad. Maybe that isn’t really peculiar, just self-serving and dishonest (like that never happens in business). But it bodes ill for any enterprise that seeks to promote themselves by boasting about their accuracy.

As the consortium and the new venture have been wrestling to put together the new service, Nielsen has been busily disparaging the new venture as untested and unreliable. At the same time, they have started to adopt the methods and features of the new venture and slash their own fees to undercut the new competition.

The result is that the new venture eventually loses the necessary support to be sustainable and quietly fades away. Nielsen, after preserving their monopoly, retreats to their previous levels of poor service and unresponsiveness to their clients. And with the threat of competition removed, they inevitably increase their fees to pre-consortium levels.

At this point, there is no reason to presume that this effort will end any differently. Any business that is lured into this space had better be careful and apprise themselves of the history of these projects. I don’t doubt the sincerity of those who are promoting this initiative. But I suspect that they have little historical memory of what they are proposing and they may be a bit naive. Time will tell.

Fox Nation Declares Victory: Death Panels And Hitler Edition

Posted by on August 14, 2009 at 9:55 am. 5 Comments :

This is the fourth time that the Fox Nation has declared a “victory” on their web site that is not attributable to Fox Nation nor even a victory:

Quoting me: Fox Nation has decided to make a habit of these “Mission Accomplished” moments. That stance in and of itself is evidence of Fox’s bias. They have ceased to even pretend to be a neutral news enterprise. They are now openly admitting that they have a stake in the outcomes of political affairs. And when they think their side has won, they won’t hesitate to declare victory and commence a celebration.

However, on this occasion there was an even worse display of the repugnant character of Fox Nation. Accompanying a link to a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll, Fox Nation selected an image that illustrates perfectly the Fox doctrine of division and hatred:

Take a good look at that picture. It is no accident that the Obama as Hitler poster is the first thing that draws the eye. Yet there is no editorial connection to that visual cue. The graphic links to a poll conducted by Fox News with predictably negative results for President Obama. But the revolting context suggested by the image is affirmed in the caption:

“FNC Poll: America Sides With Town Hall Protesters.”

The inescapable conclusion is that town hall protesters regard Obama as equivalent to Hitler and that the rest of America concurs. This is not merely a snapshot of a vile assemblage of ignorant hate mongers, it is confirmation that Fox is amongst those who side with the Hitler-invoking protesters. It was Fox editors who made the decision to publish this photo that was deliberately cropped to deliver a visual message.

What makes this even more repulsive is that Fox persistently denies the allegations that the Tea Baggers who populate these town halls are racist. Yet here they plainly flaunt the transparent loathing that infects these objectionable objectors and furthermore, they exalt them as the essence of American values.

Were this just an example of photojournalism capturing a real moment in the quilt of characters that make up our nation, it would be appropriate and enlightening. But to deploy this image in this context is simply disgusting, but not surprising coming from Fox.