American Madness

I am not a huge fan of Fox News, I feel that, for the most part, it is exploitive and uses scare tactics rather then actual journalism to get its point across. Fortunately I can get my news from about 200 other channels so I am not stuck listening to them blather on pushing their right wing agenda for Rupert Murdoch.

Unfortunately I catch little tidbits from and about Fox News that just get me all riled up. I hesitated to write up this most recent one since as the old saying goes “All news is good news” and folks might turn on Fox News or click on the website based on what I wrote (which is why I am leaving off any links to their website), but then there is the part of me who wants people to know about how ridiculous they actually are.

MediaMatters caught Fox recently in a segment they did on “Fox & Friends,” Fox News’ morning show. The hosts of the show were bad mouthing the New York Times, specifically reporter Jacques Steinberg and editor Steven Reddicliffe, claiming that despite all the good press Fox News has been getting recently, the NY Times was out to get them, writing a ‘hit piece’ on the “ominous trend” in Fox News’ ratings. They even went as far as showing Reddicliffe holding a leash of a Photoshopped poodle with the face of Steinberg. (more…)

“It’s hard to draw conclusions about her management style, because she is, in fact, not the manager of her campaign.”
- Hillary Clinton senior adviser Harold Ickes

The New York Times does a great job with this morning’s article on the Clinton campaign’s utter lack of direction or leadership.

I’m really really really tired of the press carping on Obama’s lack of experience. It’s the quality of the experience, dummies! The junior senator’s campaign has been a model of efficiency. Senator Clinton’s has been a mess.

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Last week the Village Voice had what they called an exposé on Iron Chef: America. Now, I cook a fair bit and also happen to be a big fan of Iron Chef. When this article came out virtually everyone I know who still reads the Village Voice (I think there were 2 people) contacted me to ask if I had read the article.

I originally had written a page-and-a-half rant that only covered the first third of the article and also assumed that you had read the article (here) and were familiar with Iron Chef. I am going to keep going based on those assumptions. For those of you hesitant to read it because you are okay with the magic of TV, well, I can tell you the article doesn’t really expose anything. There is no big surprise at the end that the food is actually prepared in 3 hours’ time or that the Iron Chefs don’t actually cook anything.

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New York City is lousy with rich people. OK, we get it. But New York City is also lousy with blind journalists.

I realize that rich people make interesting copy, as evidenced by this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine section, which does an extremely lightweight job of analyzing their impact on the city. But what rich people also do is to drive up the cost of living for everyone by paying more than anyone else can for housing, restaurants, goods and services.

So when are we going to start seeing a supposedly social-minded newspaper like the Times put together a compelling magazine article not on the rich, but on their victims? How about, instead of showcasing rich lawyers and party planners, we talk to some people who live in Stuy Town and will lose their cheap housing when a private equity firm completes turning what was a type of social cooperative into high end housing?

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All I can say is, don’t shoot the messenger:

But how can any responsible journalist not be disgusted by the Wall Street Journal’s apology today?

Senator Carl Levin’s office called yesterday to say we gave him far too much credit, or blame as we had it, for his role in the misbegotten 1993 law that limited the tax deductibility of executive salaries to $1 million. His long-time aide on the issue, Elise Bean, says the Senator wasn’t a promoter of the idea, and we’ll take her word for it. It seems we confused his general agitation at the time against large executive pay packages for support for the salary limit.

Ms. Bean couldn’t recall if Mr. Levin had nonetheless voted for the limit, saying it had popped up in a conference report sometime during that year and she wasn’t sure which one. In any event, our bad.

“In any event, our bad.” Is this a high school newspaper? The “misbegoten law” they refer to was, I believe, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993. It took about 2 minutes to figure that out. I’ll admit, it took another 5 minutes of searching, but I discovered that — wouldn’t ya know? — people keep records of senate votes. Actually, the U.S. Senate web site keeps track of these things. And if one takes a minute, one can find that Carl Levin did vote in favor of the measure.

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I don’t consider myself age-ist, I have plenty of friends who are old. I mean I even work for some one who is in their sixties. But, you know, with some older folks, they reach a point, well, when maybe it is time for them to retire. You notice small things, they forget little details and eventually that leads to bigger details. They are out of touch with the jargon of their industry or they start tacking on -machine after a device name, like a computer-machine or a fax-machine (oh wait, scratch that last one).

Normally I don’t think of the NY Times as an old newspaper , I mean, yeah the paper itself is old, but the writers don’t tend to show too much of their age in their writing. Well, I felt that way up until today. I was reading an article from yesterday’s paper by Bill Carter titled “NBC to Offer Downloads of Its Shows.” Presumably Bill deals with either television news or computers (and a quick search shows him to be a TV guy). True, it is an older technology, but there have been quite a few innovations to it in the last 10 years. I don’t expect Bill to know about all of them, but there is a pretty big one that I am guessing he is relatively familiar with- Time Shifting.

According to Wikipedia: “Time shifting is the recording of programming to a storage medium to be viewed or listened to at a time more convenient to the consumer.” Now maybe we are getting a little technical there, basically time shifting is what you do with a Digital Video Recorder (a DVR). Not the most complicated of ideas or anything, right? Well then, how come when Bill refers to the idea and the DVR technology that allows it he calls it a “TiVO machine.”

Okay, maybe he wasn’t thinking when he popped that phrase in, maybe he gets paid by the word and needed that extra few cents, but then his editor didn’t change it. Who are these people at the NY Times? How old are they? Maybe it is just me, maybe I am getting worked up over nothing, but seriously, “TiVO machine?”

I am not a big fan of Fox News. I try to avoid every aspect of it, even its logo bothers me. Every now and then when I am up for a laugh or want to get riled up about something I will flip it on for a few minutes and laugh at Bill O’Reilly as he gets red in the face.

So, I was more then surprised when I decided to write about an article I had read in Reuters about Nepal’s Airline sacrificing goats to fix plane problems. I did a quick web search to try and find the article and came across the Fox News article on it first. I decided to read it, figuring it would be a good laugh.

Instead I found that it actually had a better slant then the Reuters article. In Reuters it sounded like the airline had decided that sacrificing the goats was a sufficient measure to resolving their airplane problems. In the Fox News article the sacrificing of the goats was seen as a blessing after the plane problems were resolved. They compared it to a pilot saying a prayer before take off or blessing a new ship with a bottle of champagne.

A pretty level-headed article from an organization known for being inflammatory. Nicely done. I’ve got to give credit where credit is due. And Reuters, I hate to say it, but you could learn something from Fox News (just not too much).

I know we are a culture obsessed with fame. We look to celebrities constantly, trying to get the latest news and gossip about them. There are over a dozen magazines out there whose sole purpose is to keep us informed as to what celebrities are doing and not doing.

Which leads me to this one: When did it become newsworthy (or gossip worthy) to report about what celebrities are not doing? And I am not talking about drugs or who they are not sleeping with or no longer marrying, I am talking about the actual jobs of actors and actresses.

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I have started to notice this trend recently in the world of blogs where a post will claim to be “The Top 10________” and then will call itself “Part I” and only have a couple of entries. I found it a couple of weeks back in a post about CD storage and then again today.

I found a blog post from last week which I thought would be a good one to write about “Top 10 Organic Myths” Basically myths surrounding what it really means when a product claims it is organic. I was all set to read and write about it until I discovered upon opening the page of the post that it was “Part I” and only contained 4 points- not even half the list.

Now there are a few things that could be going on here. I present to you my “Top 4 List of Possible Problems You Could Be Encountering If You Didn’t Finish Off Your ‘Top 10′ List In The Initial Post”-
1. A lack of creativity; If you only have 4 points at the time of writing, but think you can come up with more, well, don’t call your list a “Top 10.”
2. Lack of time; If you had more to say then you thought you did and only had so much time to write, well then hold off on posting. Come back to the post and write the rest later and then post it.
3. Feeling it is too long; If this is the case you need to learn to edit yourself, or at least be more interesting in what you are writing. If people are interested in the topic you are writing about they’ll keep reading, if not, well you aren’t getting your target audience to begin with.
4.Thinking you’ll bring readers back for another day of reading your writing. Again, if you are concerned that reader will only come back if you continue your “interesting” post a second day, well then you should stop writing now. If you don’t have the content to bring people back a second day, stretching a single post out isn’t going to make much of a difference in the long run.

Oh yeah, and part 2 of the Organic myths, well that won’t be published until some time this week- seriously? A week between follow ups on a single topic. Maybe if I remember it later on I will actually write about what they had to say.

You know how every now and then you come across an article in a newspaper or magazine and after reading feel like you are owed that time back from the reporter? Well, that is why we have a “Poor Journalism” tag, that way, when we find these articles we can call the author out for their lack of effort in advancing journalism and maybe shame them into actually thinking about what they are writing. In fairness, the blame isn’t just on the journalist, also at fault are the editors for allowing the stories to be written in the first place and then publishing them.

Today we have a piece from the NY Post, just a snippet actually called “Aren’t Her Fifteen Minutes Up Yet?” by Marianne Garvey. With a nice full page picture of Paris Hilton wearing a shirt with her face on it from her line of clothing Garvey asks why people are still intrigued by her and still paying attention to her.

I almost feel obligated to respond to Garvey, pointing out that if you stop writing about her and featuring full page pictures of her in your papers people will stop paying attention because there will be nothing to pay attention to. In fairness to Garvey, she was clearly trying not to write about her since this entire “article” in the Post was only 94 words, and that includes the title and Garvey’s name.

This marks the second time a post about Paris Hilton has ended up with a Poor Journalism tag