Andrew Keen’s Fear Of Citizen Journalism

Posted by on November 27, 2007 at 1:32 pm. NO Comments :

In today’s Washington Post is an article audaciously titled Storming the News Gatekeepers. The author apparently meant to explore the nature of “citizen journalism” and its impact on conventional media and society. The end result however is far less significant than its ambitions as it focuses on a single Brooklyn blogger and fails to embrace the broader new media influence on the blogiverse.

At one point though, the article takes a noticeable dip in IQ by quoting Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture:

“The term ‘citizen journalist’ has an Orwellian ring to it. People are becoming Big Brother, either with a camcorder or a keyboard, and following the candidates around. It’s ridiculous. You can’t just be a great journalist, the same way you can’t be a great chef or a great soccer player.”

Journalists, he continues, “follow a set of standards, a code of ethics. Objectivity rules. That’s not the case with citizen journalists. Anything goes in that world.”

For Keen to associate citizen journalism with Orwell is…well…Orwellian. Big Brother, as illustrated in “1984” is the personification of an all-powerful and controlling government. The notion that the people, acting on their own behalf, could be characterized as such tyrannical overlords is preposterous to the point of idiocy.

Likewise, Keen’s dismissal of citizen journalists as distinct from the conventional variety, who are supposedly objective and have standards and ethics, is as insulting as it is naive. Sure, there are bloggers who fly fast and loose with facts, but the same is true for pundits on TV and in newspapers. The best of the online reporters actually have greater transparency and include live links to sources and documentation.

Keen obviously prefers media that is certified by corporate boards and is fearful of media that emanates from the streets. He would likely have denounced James Madison’s pamphlets as irresponsible and amateurish. On page 68 of his book he exposes his disgust for real people who have the temerity to engage in democratic discourse:

“The YouTubification of politics is a threat to civic culture. It infantilizes the political process, silencing public discourse and leaving the future of government up to thirty-second video clips shot by camcorder-wielding amateurs with political agendas.”

Contrary to silencing public discourse, YouTube and other web communities have expanded political dialog by including voices that previously were shut out of public debate. And the irony of Keen’s criticism of thirty-second video clips, without reference to the grandfathers of the genre – campaign ads – is the height of intellectual dishonesty.

Keen would like to leave the future of government up to news bites produced by the professional propagandists in Corporate Media ivory towers. Apparently the political agendas of the old-school media hacks are superior, in Keen’s mind, to those of average Americans. With any luck the future of government will continue to benefit from greater participation and diversity, and will keep as far away from Keen’s nightmarish abomination of democracy as possible.

For more on Keen and his book, see Lawrence Lessig’s excellent deconstruction.

For even more on Keen’s wankery, see his appearance on The Colbert Report where he favorably compares Nazis to bloggers saying, “Even the Nazis didn’t put artists out of work.”

I suppose that’s true if you define the corpses of assassinated artists as no longer being in the job market. What a repulsive piece of crap Keen is!

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Save Tucker ?

Posted by on November 26, 2007 at 10:06 pm. NO Comments :

Time for bit of comic relief…

A couple of guys in Florida have launched a campaign to Save Tucker Carlson. How pathetic does your life have to be to descend to rescuing one of the lamest programs on TV? The web site alleges that Tucker’s rumored cancellation is…

“…part of a move by MSNBC to swing left and become “FOX for the Liberals,” dropping any pretense of objectivity or balance.”

Well, maybe it’s actually part of a move by MSNBC to … um … have an audience bigger than the Milli Vanilli Fan Club.


Poor Rupert: Nobody Listens To Him

Posted by on November 26, 2007 at 5:22 pm. 2 Comments :

As if any further evidence was required, we now have it straight from Rupert Murdoch’s own pursed lips that the fingers of his bony hand are pulling the strings at his media properties and setting editorial policy. Murdoch was interviewed by the British House of Lords’ Communications Committee as part of its inquiry into media ownership. The committee released these comments from the interview:

“For The Sun and News of the World, he explained that he is a ‘traditional proprietor.’ He exercises editorial control on major issues – like which party to back in a general election or policy on Europe.”

“He distinguishes between The Times and The Sunday Times and The Sun and the News of the World (and makes the same distinction between the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal).”

The way that Murdoch distinguishes between his various properties is that those for which he has legal or contractual barriers to direct manipulation he doesn’t tell them what to do, he merely asks them what they are doing. Is there any employee that would not know what his boss means to convey under such an arrangement? It also goes without saying that Murdoch doesn’t have to give much guidance to managers he selected precisely because of their fealty to his interests. In fact, he has already tapped his long-time editor at the London Times to be the new publisher at the Wall Street Journal.

Murdoch also expressed his opinion that his Sky News “could be more popular if it emulated his Fox News Channel.” He said that the reason it isn’t already doing that is because “nobody at Sky listens to me.” That’s especially funny when you consider that Sky News is run by James Murdoch, Rupert’s son.

Here in the U.S., Murdoch took a glancing blow from his beneficiary, Hillary Clinton. At a campaign stop in Iowa, Clinton was asked about media consolidation and the risk of having one man like Murdoch with so much control. Clinton responded that…

“There have been a lot of media consolidations in the last several years, and it is quite troubling. The fact is, most people still get their news from television, from radio, even from newspapers. If they’re all owned by a very small group of people – and particularly if they all have a very similar point of view – it really stifles free speech.”

That’s a good answer and Clinton is commendably a co-sponsor of the Media Ownership Act of 2007. Too bad she had to dilute the impact of her response by letting Murdoch off the hook:

“I’m not saying anything against any company in particular. I just want to see more competition, especially in the same markets.”

Murdoch, his son James, and several other executives at News Corp have contributed to Clinton’s senatorial and presidential campaigns. I would sure hate to think that those contributions might affect her decision making with regard to Big Media.


Idiots At The New York Post

Posted by on November 26, 2007 at 10:09 am. NO Comments :

Does anybody at the New York Post read the New York Post?

This weekend Rupert Murdoch’s Post published the results of a survey that found that…

“Sixty-two percent of those polled thought it was “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that federal officials turned a blind eye to specific warnings of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.”

Accompanying that statistic was this blaring headline:

‘BLAME U.S. FOR 9/11’ IDIOTS IN MAJORITY
But just eight months after the World Trade Center attacks, the Post printed on their front page a story declaring that “Bush Knew” about warnings directed at U.S. civil aviation.

The following day White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters that Bush had indeed received…

“…vague warnings from intelligence agencies about possible hijackings last summer…”

Despite that admission, Fleischer called the headline “irresponsible” and “a poster child for bad journalism.”

So after publishing an article that alleged that federal officials knew about, but did not respond to, warnings about terrorist attacks, the Post now calls Americans who are aware of that fact “idiots.” Of course the real idiots are the editors at the Post who don’t even know what their own paper reports. But it’s even worse than that. After the “Bush Knew” issue hit the streets, Post editor Col Allen defended the headline saying…

“I reject the notion that the headline suggests that Bush knew about 9/11. . . . ‘9/11 bombshell’ was there to tell people this was a story about terror.”

Oh really? What was “Bush Knew” there to tell people if it wasn’t to suggest that Bush knew? Apparently, even when someone at the Post reads the Post they can’t understand what it’s saying – even its editor.


Tucker Carlson Gets A Vote Of No Confidence

Posted by on November 23, 2007 at 1:34 pm. 1 Comments :

MSNBC has been accused by many rightist pundits of adopting a liberal editorial policy. The sole basis of this charge appears to be the existence of Keith Olbermann’s Countdown. In an interview with NPR, MSNBC Sr VP Phil Griffin denies the charge saying that it is the host’s personalities, not their positions that make them popular. So Tucker’s already starting at a disadvantage. Griffin acknowledges that the network is trading on the audience identifying with the program’s anchors.

“Keith Olbermann is our brand; Chris Matthews is our brand. These are smart, well-informed people who have a real sense of history and can put things in context.”

That is an unequivocal expression of the faith Griffin has in Olbermann and Matthews. But when he is specifically asked whether Tucker Carlson is also their brand, he pauses and says…

“He is right now.”

Not exactly a vote of confidence. Griffin seems to be hinting that his answer might be different if you ask him again in a week or two. Looks like the only thing Tucker has to be thankful for is his well-connected family and a contract for an upcoming TV game show pilot. I still can’t get over this project – a remake of “Who Do You Trust?”

The remainder of the segment featured a couple of choice comments from Olbermann:

On his righteous cynicism: “We gave these people every benefit of the doubt. Our naturally contentious political arrangement in this country was silenced for well over a year after 9/11. We got hosed. We were manipulated. That trust that we put in these people, they did not deserve.”

On O’Reilly’s dementia: “As usual, Bill-O’s King Lear act, in which he threatens somebody with terrible consequences and boycotts and plagues of locusts, has produced nothing tangible other than making the object of his impotent rage richer.”

Speaking of Bill-O, his frantic efforts to disparage NBC and his nemesis Keith Olbermann (whom he refers to as “the smear guy”) are butting up against reality. O’Reilly has been falsely bashing NBC as a network in total decline, but the truth is that NBC News beat ABC and CBS in total viewers for the 2006/2007 season. And on the heels of Brian Williams’ appearance on Saturday Night Live, NBC has won the 25-54 demo for the month of November so far. O’Reilly’s analysis, as usual, is worthless, unless you’re really into childish fiction.


A White House Awash In Lies

Posted by on November 21, 2007 at 4:03 pm. 1 Comments :

Former White House Press Secretary, Scott McClellan, is joining the ranks of castoff Bushies to belatedly embrace truthfulness in advance of the publication of a new book. This is a disturbing pattern amongst public figures who lie while in office and then recant their deception, after they’ve been ejected from their perch, with a tell-some memoir of their nefarious official activities.

In McClellan’s case, the publisher of his forthcoming tome teased the press with this tantalizing morsel:

“The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.”

“There was one problem. It was not true.”

“I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the President himself.”

This admission of administration dishonesty could rise to the level of impeachability (as if we needed another reason). It demonstrates a deliberate effort on the part of high ranking officials to mislead the public and to obstruct justice. And it is telling that this criminality was shepherded through the White House press machine with the complicity of McClellan who was either terminally naive or incompetent.

While it is useful that these revelations are coming out, it is galling that it took so many years to do so. The administration has successfully quashed any discourse on the issue by refusing comment when the case was being actively litigated and then declaring that it was old news when the litigation came to a close. Both of McClellan’s successors, Tony Snow and Dana Perino, are just as guilty of covering up this affair as McClellan was. When asked to comment on the McClellan book, Perino said:

“The president has not and would not ask his spokespeople to pass on false information.”

That contradicts the president who admitted that he does lie to the press when it suits him, as it did when former defense secretary Don Rumsfeld resigned.

Contrary to Perino’s protest, the President, along with many of his top advisers, is simply not to be trusted. And the same is true of the mouthpieces like Perino, Snow and McClellan, who will do and say whatever their leader asks of them. They will prevaricate obediently and then, many years later, seek absolution through the purifying glow of book publishing and million dollar advances. The rest of the media will largely ignore this misbehavior because they are either too stupid to ferret out the truth, too frightened to report it, or too compromised by their own involvement or dreams of future book deals.

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Bill O’Reilly Insults The USO On His Afghan Junket

Posted by on November 21, 2007 at 12:34 am. 2 Comments :

Last week Bill O’Reilly left the comfort of his Manhattan studio to go on assignment. It was revealed this week that he had slipped surreptitiously into Afghanistan. As is his practice, his trip was not much more than a PR junket where he distributed Fox News swag and copies of his book, Culture Warrior. It is somewhat ironic that he would pawn that screed of an imaginary morality clash off on soldiers who are facing all too real dangers.

This time, though, O’Reilly wasn’t content with glorifying his own selflessness, he found it necessary to insult the sponsors of innumerable charities and entertainments – the USO. O’Reilly complained that they weren’t doing enough for the troops here:

“As far as I know, the only famous people in the past year were (country music singer) Toby Keith and me.”

When reached for a response, a USO spokesman corrected the record saying that they had hosted seven entertainment tours to Afghanistan this year. There were also 12 tours last year. Amongst the previous guests was the man that O’Reilly will only refer to as Stuart Smalley. Al Franken has, in fact, participated in six USO tours. And rather than going to promote a new book, he brought along country singers, TV stars, cheerleaders and put on a three hour show.

Someone should tell O’Reilly that Afghanistan is not just another stop on his book tour. And if he thinks the USO isn’t doing enough, maybe he should volunteer once in a while.


Falling For The Myth Of The Liberal Media

Posted by on November 19, 2007 at 6:14 pm. 3 Comments :

Tim Rutten is the media columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He is rare bright light in a dark media sky. I have written approvingly of his insight on several occasions.

That’s why I’m somewhat surprised at an article he published this weekend. Much of it accurately portrayed some of the media’s obtuse gyrations to mold itself into whatever they think the audience wants, but on one point he was so far off the mark that the mark became a microscopic speck in a distant universe. Here is Rutten attempting to describe the current cable news landscape:

“…we now have a situation in which the three all-news cable networks each have aligned themselves with a point on the political compass: Fox went first and consciously became the Republican network; MSNBC, which would have sold its soul to the devil for six ratings points, instead found a less-demanding buyer in the Democrats. Now, CNN has decided to reinvent itself as the independent, populist network cursing both sides of the conventional political aisle — along with immigrants and free trade, of course.”

Indeed, Fox was first, but it didn’t become the Republican network. It was conceived and hatched as such. There was never any intention for the network to be anything other than a voice for rightist rhetoric and a counter balance to what their delusions told them was a “liberal media.” Their air is dominated by Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, John Gibson, Bill Krystal, Geraldo Rivera, Charles Krauthammer, Ann Coulter, etc. Even their managing editor for news, Brit Hume, is overtly dismissive of Democrats and liberal points of view.

But Rutten stumbled when he wrote that MSNBC has assumed a Democratic posture. The only support he gives for that view is the presence of Keith Olbermann. It doesn’t take much observation, however, to erase the image that Rutten is painting. Countdown is a one hour daily program. Conversely, Joe Scarborough, the former Republican congressman, hosts three hours every morning. Tucker Carlson, the conservative son of the director of the Scooter Libby Defense Fund has his own hour. Chris Matthews, although he was an aide to Tip O’Niell, has become a reliable basher of progressive policy. And the guests on all of these programs run the gamut from neo-caveman Pat Buchanan to Pat Buchanan (seriously, is he the only number in their Rolodex?). And there is nothing notably liberal in their handling of straight news.

Rutten similarly tags CNN as reaching for a “populist” stance based solely on the blathering of Lou Dobbs. Beyond that the only identity CNN achieves is as a boot-licker for any symbol of political power. And if you extend the CNN profile to include it’s little sister, Headline News, you’ll find law and order priestess Nancy Grace, and the stupidest man on television, Glenn Beck.

Rutten cites a PEW study on the partisan make-up of viewers for the three cable news nets as proof that they are being divided by ideology:

“Republicans outnumber Democrats by two-to-one (43% to 21%) among the core Fox News Channel audience, while there are far more Democrats than Republicans among CNN’s viewers (43% Democrat, 22% Republican) and network news viewers (41% Democrat, 24% Republican).”

But all this really proves is that Fox News is wildly out of touch with mainstream America by attracting such an imbalance of Republicans. The viewership of CNN and the other networks actually are closer to representing the nation’s political mood as revealed in another survey by PEW:

“Today, half of the public (50%) either identifies as a Democrat or says they lean to the Democratic Party, compared with 35% who align with the GOP.”

Therefore, the fact that more Democrats than Republicans watch CNN and MSNBC is simply because there are more Democrats than Republicans. The fact that the numbers are reversed for Fox News is because Fox blatantly solicits Republican viewers via the conservative agenda planted in their reporting.

Rutten does make some good points including that CNN has become a “traveling wreck of a journalistic carnival” (Good one, Tim). But he closes his column by tying together Olbermann, O’Reilly and Dobbs as “the three points of what amounts to an ethical Bermuda Triangle.” The problem with that analysis is that there are many O’Reillys and Dobbs’ across the TV dial, but there is only one Olbermann. Nowhere on any of the news channels is there a such a reliably left-of-center voice – even on MSNBC which Rutten characterizes as the liberal point in the triangle.

The big question then is…Why not? Since we know that Democrats outnumber Republicans; we know that a majority of Americans rate Democrats higher on every major issue including Iraq, health care, the environment, the economy; we know that the Republican president’s approval rating has sunk to historic lows; knowing all of this, why is there only one program that serves the majority of the viewing audience? Some media critics claim that the partisan slant of the media is due solely to the marketplace and that if the public wanted more liberal views, the media would supply them.

Oh yeah? By any objective standard, that doesn’t appear to be the case.


Fox Business Not Hurting Business At CNBC

Posted by on November 19, 2007 at 1:35 pm. NO Comments :

It’s been a month since the launch of the Fox Business Network. Actual ratings data won’t be available for a few more months but data on CNBC is available. To the extent that you can speculate as to FBN’s performance based on the performance of it’s main competitor, there is no particularly good news for the fledgling net.

For the month that FBN has been on the air, CNBC has grown 32% in total daytime viewers and 21% in total viewers for the full day. Of course, there could be other reasons for the ratings growth, but there is obviously no noticeable dip for CNBC as a result of the competition from Fox.

To underscore why viewers may want to stay away from FBN, on Friday they interrupted their news chatter with an alert that Apple was buying an 8% stake in chip maker, AMD. After about a minute they corrected the report saying that it was not Apple, but the government of Abu Dhabi (which both anchors mispronounced) that was buying in to AMD. That minute was plenty of time for investors to have made trades and, subsequently, lost money.

More reasons: On Tuesday FBN reported that Hewlett-Packard missed their earnings estimate by a penny. Eleven minutes later they admitted that they had erroneously reported the net income instead of the operating income, which actually beat estimates by four cents. I really hope that no one is trading based on what they see on FBN.


Fox News Porn: For The Kids

Posted by on November 16, 2007 at 2:43 am. NO Comments :

Brave New Films has launched a new site that features the best of Fox News’ lascivious sexploits. FoxNewsPorn has accumulated an impressive collection of all-real and uncut footage of soft-core segments exactly as they were broadcast on Fox air.

Murdoch watchers should not be surprised by this demonstration of prurient excess. Just last month I posted an article on the launch of the Fox Business Network entitled “Porn and Patriotism.” A few days before that I noted that on the first day of the new network they featured an interview with the Naked Cowboy. London is, of course, familiar with Murdoch’s famous Page 3 Girls who appear half naked in his Sun Newspaper.

Apparently the content of FoxNewsPorn is so hot that Digg can’t tolerate it. They removed links to it and banned Brave New Film’s account. I can’t say for sure that Murdoch had anything to do with that, but Digg has been rumored to be an acquisition target of News Corp. as well as other big media players.

What’s really funny though, is that some right-wingnuts are floating allegations, completely unsupported, that FoxNewsPorn got itself banned. What won’t they lie about? The only reference they make to the content of the site is a defense that Fox is merely “running stories about the Girls Gone Wild aspect of todays troubled kids.” See? They have to show this smut to help save America’s youth.

Update: Digg retreats. The video has now been UN-banned.