the cover shot

Sarah calls it sexist and degrading. Newsweek calls it interesting. In either case, she posed for the picture.

Read what Politico has to say here.

Read Newsweek's official statement here.

Your thoughts?

The media did it.

No need to round up the usual suspects. When things go south, just blame the media. No need to define the term. You might also tack "mainstream" onto it, as well. No need to define that, either.

But definitely, set up a tedious either-or: you're either part of the media or, uh, you love your country, for example.

Yes, this is about Sarah Palin's rambling resignation speech and her subsequent fourth of July Facebook post where she pits herself (the good) against the media (the bad) and what those elitists say about her (the ugly).

Slate's Anne Applebaum deconstructs Palin's message here, conceding that, as a writer for Slate, she must be part of that (sigh) mainstream media.

Even though I live in an obscure corner of Eastern Europe, I now recognize that it is impossible to escape the assumption that, by writing in this space, I belong to the "mainstream media." I therefore feel it incumbent upon me to respond to Sarah Palin's Fourth of July Facebook message, in which, among other things, she attacked the "main stream [sic] media" for its reaction to her surprise resignation from the governorship of Alaska—a reaction that, she wrote, "has been most predictable, ironic, and as always, detached from the lives of ordinary Americans who are sick of the 'politics of personal destruction.' " How "sad," she continued, "that Washington and the media will never understand; it's about country."

and now, when science goes bad

Here's an old post from the HuffPo on bad science, or what Geoffrey Dunn calls voo-doo social psychology, regarding a study that "found" that Sarah Palin's looks tanked her chances to be taken seriously. She was, according to the study, simply too sexy to be VP.

Once again (see below, on numbers) the methodology was the villain. From the post:

Let's look at the methodology itself. Heflick and Goldenberg assigned students to jot down a few lines about one of two American women celebrities, Palin or the actress Angelina Jolie. Half of the participants in each category were asked to write "your thoughts and feelings about this person," while the other half were asked to write "your thoughts and feelings about this person's appearance."

The participants were then asked to evaluate their subject (Palin or Jolie) in terms of various attributes, including "competence." Finally, they were asked to identify who they were intending to vote for in the upcoming election.

First of all, the study's sample of 133 undergraduates was hardly large enough for an accurate conclusion to be drawn. Moreover, the sample group, presumably in their late teens and early twenties, is hardly reflective of the American electorate. Generational distinctions cannot even be identified or assessed with this study. Moreover, the sample was heavily skewed toward women (96 females compared to 37 males). While party affiliations were identified, there were no variant markers for race, class or geographical origin of each participant. In purely statistical terms, its reliability is extremely low.

There's more. Read it all. bk

three-dot bloggery

Quick hits -- with very little in common:

Want a concrete explanation on how the economy has impacted journalism? Go here for a video on the end of "Day to Day" on NPR...

Go here for an eloquent and charming obituary -- in an era when most newspapers have abandoned that elegant art in favor of revenue-generating funeral announcements in agate type -- on Maitland Zane, an iconic reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle...

Go here for an editorial from the Toronto Star on why the paper does not "unpublish" stories that appear online. It's an interesting issue, related to one we've discussed in class often: words on paper have a limited shelf life -- unless you make a conscious effort to save them. Thanks to Google, words on the web live on forever....

And finally, please join me in bitching about the rumors that Brit has a book deal for $14 million and Sarah Palin may get $11 million. How many books will not get published because these will?! bk

going dark

So last week we got into a discussion about digital news, cable TV and traditional journalism -- all pegged to this story on Martin Eisenstadt, the anonymous McCain staffer who was reported to have leaked the much-told tale that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent.

Cable chatterers, from both sides of the dial, ate it up. We all did.

Except.

There is no Eisenstadt. He never worked on McCain's campaign. Even if he did, he doesn't know Palin from six bits. And his blog? Yeah, it's a hoax.

The question was how could journalists report anything like that without checking it out, and whether blogs and youtube tend to enable sloppyy reporting.

Chitchat evolved into a debate about political reporting, cable news itself, and whether any original journalism goes on there at all -- with one student, who may have been channeling Chris Matthews, finally saying that by the time night falls, everyone already knows what's happened anyway, so if folks tune in at all, all they are looking for is spin.

Really? In other words, people are so news hungry, they update themselves throughout the day? To test the theory, I looked at the clock (2:45 p.m.) and said to the class in general: okay, so tell me what's happened so far today. Sheepish looks, total silence. All of which led, in turn, to a serious discussion (okay, a rant) about whether the general (okay, appalling) lack of interest in current events -- even among journalism students, for the love of God -- is partly responsible for the implosion of the news media. We get what we ask for?

So the question became what do we do to support good journalism -- and how do we get people across the board to understand how vital it is to our communities, to our democracy.

Katie Powers, Editor-in-Chief of our campus newspaper, had brought up the original question about Eisenstadt. Her suggestion: maybe journalists across the country should go on strike for 24 hours. No news. Nothing for fatuous blogs to link to. No fodder for cable spin.

Just go dark. Kinda like it. bk

I don't know who's writing your questions...

One of my loyal readers told me tonight that today's post was a big fat bore. I didn't think so, but whatever...

So anyhow, remember that post about interviewing a few weeks back where I referenced John Sawatsky's interviewing techniques vis-a-vis (oops, getting boring again) Katie Couric's interview with Sarah Palin re the Supreme Court?

Here's a case study in how NOT to interview -- in how the opposite approach can backfire bigtime. Object lesson: any time your source responds to a question with "Is this a joke? Is that a real question?" -- you've blown it. Watch the video of an exchange between vice presidential candidate Joe Biden and WFTV reporter Barbara West. It hits the fan about two minutes in. (Be sure to jump past the online ad.)

Biden: 1, West, 0.

This one, not a bore. Alrighty? bk

on the tube

Gotta wonder:

Why Sarah Palin would do a drive-by on Saturday Night Live tonight, but has never been on "Meet the Press", arguably a more appropriate venue for a vice-presidential candidate.

And so I just emailed "Meet the Press" that very question, asking if they would publicly invite Ms. Palin to appear on the program, given the fact that she apparently has no aversion to NBC. (see above.)

Clearly, it's in the public interest for the voters to see either how she would come across on this influential, unscripted and important forum -- or her reasons for sending her regrets.

Just asking. Maybe you should, too. bk

onto fairness

There's an old saying in journalism: if you use half the information you've gathered in your finished piece, you haven't done nearly enough reporting.

All of which brings up the issue of selectivity. How do you select what you leave in and what gets left in the deep recesses of your hard drive? That's the kind of question that keeps reporters up at night. Or should. It's a big issue -- whether you're thinking column inches or the short attention spans of online readers. Given the limits of time and space, how do you make sure you are playing fair, giving the readers an adequate representation of the facts at hand?

If you read my post on objectivity yesterday, you can guess where I'm going with this. Sarah Palin was on a money-raising tour of the San Francisco Bay Area yesterday, where her "palling around with terrorists" (actually she changed the plural to singular) has become her new stump speech.

Her speech was covered by both the San Jose Mercury and the San Francisco Chronicle. Good pieces that covered what she said, within the context of what such attacks mean for the campaign. Both included responses from the Obama campaign as well. Balance, right?

But what struck me is what the reporters who covered the speech (or their copy editors) left out. Namely that Bill Ayers, the domestic terrorist to whom Palin refers, is a Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He and Barrack Obama met while working on a project that was a part of a national school reform effort financed by Walter H. Annenberg, the publisher and philanthropist and President Richard M. Nixon’s ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Seems to me, that little add should be included as well for the folks who read what Palin says, but never go any further than that.

Just to be fair. bk

object lessons in objectivity

It's about the methods, folks. Not some freakish sense of balance in the finished piece.

In class discussions on objectivity, I often quote something from a piece by Joshuah Bearman I found on alternet a few years back: "Contrary to dogma of J-schools across country, there are not always two sides to a story. Balance is often necessary and indispensable, but there are times when media might have to mediate a bunch of information and make a judgment. And in those instances, presenting contrasting information as if it’s equally important is, in fact, the false representation – more false than saying, 'I’ve gathered a lot of material and vetted it all, and here’s my assessment.'"

Take Sarah Palin's speech in SoCal on Saturday. She was quoted in the LA Times as characterizing Obama as someone who "pals around with terrorists". From the article: "Evidently there's been a lot of interest in what I read lately," she said. "I was reading today a copy of the New York Times. And I was really interested to read in there about Barack Obama's friends from Chicago. Turns out one of his earliest supporters is a man who, according to the New York Times, was a domestic terrorist, that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and the United States Capitol.' "

The LA Times piece balanced her claim thus: "The New York Times article, an investigation published Friday into whether Obama had a relationship with Ayers, concluded that the men were never close and that Obama has denounced Ayers' radical past, which occurred when Obama was a child. The article also said Obama 'has played down his contacts with' Ayers."

And then gave the Obama camp a chance to respond: "Gov. Palin's comments, while offensive, are not surprising, given the McCain campaign's statement this morning that they would be launching Swift Boat-like attacks in hopes of deflecting attention from the nation's economic ills," said spokesman Hari Sevugan.

"In fact, the very newspaper story Gov. Palin cited in hurling her shameless attack made clear that Sen. Obama is not close to Bill Ayers, much less 'pals,' and that he has strongly condemned the despicable acts Ayers committed 40 years ago, when Obama was 8. What's clear is that John McCain and Sarah Palin would rather spend their time tearing down Barack Obama than laying out a plan to build up our economy."

Balanced, right? But objective? You decide. Here's the whole story from the New York Times to which Palin was referring.

One last exasperated riff: Today's "Lies, Half-Truths Outed" chart, a weekly compilation of campaign lies and misrepresentations in the San Francisco Chronicle, focused on Thursday's debate between Biden and Palin. Take a quick look at the chart and it appears as if both candidates lied and/or stretched the truth in equal measure. Really? What a coincidence. bk

...can you think of any?

According to interview guru John Sawatsky, you don't need to be a pit bull named Bruiser to conduct a good interview. In a piece I read so long ago that i can't remember where I put it, he posits that the best interviews, in fact, are about discipline on the part of the reporter, rather than the power differential between interviewer and source. They are about listening, leading the source down the path toward the given goal: staying in control by playing nice.

Which brings up Katie Couric's exchange with Sarah Palin wrt the Supreme Court. Watch how Couric's quiet little follow-up gets the job done:

quick riffs

Mayka sent a link to an old article from The Guardian in which Nicholas Carr defines blogs as, well, parasites that rest on the work that other journalists have already done. He says that's a good thing: The blogosphere, he writes, "acts as a kind of global echo chamber. An idea gets swatted around like a ping-pong ball for a few hours until a fresh one takes its place." And while it's bouncing around we all make more sense of it. Or at least pay attention.

In that spirit, a few quick hits:

It will be interesting to watch the reaction to the very conservative Kathleen Parker's column in the uber-right National Review Online, suggesting that Sarah Palin step down for the good of the Republican party. A trial balloon? An echo of intra-party talking points? A way to pre-spin the VP debate by shooting expectations down to negative numbers?

Speaking of spin, the Washington Post's media critic Howard Kurtz takes us for a spin inside the spin-doc tents after Friday night's debate. Pretty ridiculous premise, actually. Let's review: reporters who watched the debate need -- or will listen to -- partisans to tell them what they saw? Really? Hope there was food.

Still on the campaign: The Nation's Eric Alterman questions the pseudo-objectivity of news orgs that will report what politicians say --- but are reluctant to call them on it when they lie. Referencing McCain's accusation that Obama pushed for sex ed for kindergartners, he writes, "... many in the media cling to the belief that it is the calling of a reporter to report a politician's lies without apparent prejudice. In the Washington Post, not only did Jonathan Weisman and Peter Slevin take no position on the truth or falsehood of McCain's dishonest allegations; they waited a full eleven paragraphs before noting that the Obama campaign believed 'all of the accusations against him are a reach, if not fabrications.' "

I riffed about this earlier this month, and again last week. Our job: not stenography.

On another topic entirely, Editor and Publisher columnist Steve Outing outlines his vision for news 2.0 (or possibly news 3.0) as newspapers migrate completely online. Taking the "we are our own editors" concept one step further -- he calls it "The Daily Me 2.0" -- we would all configure our own pages on our daily paper's website, combining content from staff reports, wire services, news from unaffiliated websites, blogs, user-driven forums and even social networking sites. All at our own choosing. Interesting.

And finally: tabloid journalism. Tracing the history of the National Enquirer, Newsweek reports that the tab, which once had a circulation higher than the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal combined, is now, like its respectable cousins, falling victim to the internet, where celebrity gossip is quicker and cheaper. Love it or hate it, its headlines (my daughter once had her bedroom door plastered with them) are always good for a laugh. Like this one, from Newsweek's piece: "FAMILY EATS BARBECUED MEAT—FINDS IT WAS THEIR DOG."

Cheers. bk

lies, damn lies and statistics

Numbers don't lie. Unless they do.

Polls are showing a sudden surge of support for McCain-Palin among white women. I'm feeling a little bit of backlash about the way those numbers are being used. I smell some sexism going on here -- not necessarily in the way Palin is being portrayed by the media -- but more in the way these polls are being spun by pundits and cynics.

I'm a white woman. I know lots of white women. Some of my best friends are white women. I don't know one of them who would kick her political ideals to the curb simply because a candidate shows up in a skirt.

I do know two who were impressed and intrigued by Hillary early in the primary season, but as lifelong Republicans, they have always sworn their allegiance to McCain. As for the PUMAs, yes, they make for sexy interviews, but clearly we are talking outliers here.

So my question is, who ARE these white women rushing to support the Republican ticket? Independents? Undecideds? Were they there all along and are just now making their numbers known? Clearly, we need to drill down the data to find out more about these women -- rather than to use the numbers to imply that white women voters on the whole are fickle, foolish and more interested in gender than issues.

As i said, backlash: demeaning, insulting, marginalizing.

Speaking of which, I heard a new term today to refer to a certain segment of the vote: "K-mart moms". Really?! Enough. bk

no such thing as bad ink

A funny thing happened while the Republicans were setting up the so-called elite media as enemy number one: The McCain-Palin ticket took complete control of the news agenda. According to The Project for Excellence in Journalism Coverage Index for last week, Sarah Palin dominated campaign coverage, even earning more press than her running mate. Her selection itself and her acceptance speech garnered the most coverage at 28 percent. Family issues came in at 10 percent, while stories about her public record scored 6 percent. Whether the coverage was positive or negative, it had one desired effect for the McCain camp: it knocked Obama off page one.

According to the report:

"Sarah Palin, the first woman on a Republican ticket, was the focus of feverish attention as the media tried to find out more about her, convey her record and biography, and calculate her impact on the race. For the week of Sept. 1-7, Palin was a significant or dominant factor in 60% of the campaign stories, according to the Campaign Coverage Index from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. McCain was fairly close behind, a significant or dominant factor in 52% of the stories.

Put another way, Palin enjoyed more coverage as a VP candidate during the GOP convention than Obama did a week earlier when he became the first person of color to accept the nomination for president of a major party. With the other ticket making most of the news, Obama was a focus in 22% of the stories last week, by far his lowest week of coverage in the general election season. His running mate Joe Biden registered at 2%."

Running against the press, redux

Ever since the RNC closed up shop on Thursday, one of the prime players in the inchoate campaign continues to be the "elite media". Check these links, and let me know what you think. bk

Jack Shafer writes about the way Sarah Palin will run against the press.

Howard Kurtz writes that Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews are out as news anchors for live political events at MSNBC because of their lack of neutrality.

Marketwatch's Jon Friedman interviews CNN's Campbell Brown on the aftermath of her questioning of Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for McCain's campaign, about Palin's qualifications shorty after McCain chose her to be his running mate.

Finally, in a public editor column in the New York Times, Clark Hoyt defends and explains much of the media vetting of Sarah Palin. He writes:

"The drip-drip-drip of these stories seems like partisanship to Palin’s partisans. But they fill out the picture of who she is, and they represent a free press doing its job, investigating a candidate who might one day be the leader of the Free World."

Speechification, 101

If last night's speeches at the RNC are any indication, the McCain campaign is running hard against two opponents: Barack Obama and that darned old Elite Media, suggests Jim Rutenberg in the New York Times. It's an old, old song -- Dan Quayle, anyone? -- but is a sure-fire trick to rally the faithful. This time around, the lightening rod is Sarah Palin, who is being portrayed as the victim of the nasty media -- read "liberal" -- which has had to the nerve to take a peek into her background beyond the campaign bio.

Hmmmm. I thought that was our job. Heartbeat away, and all of that, right?

Prepare to hear more of the same tonight -- and whenever else the news media deviates from the party line.

Speaking of which, there is a good lesson in the true meaning of journalistic objectivity in all of last night's speechiness wrt Palin. Meaningless definition: Slam, bam, thank you ma'am: Record what's said and your job is done. True definition: Add context.

Speakers can say whatever they want. Reporters need to remember that the speech itself is just the beginning. As Associated Press Writer Jim Kuhnhenn shows here, it's up to reporters to let readers/viewers know whether what's said in a speech is fact or fiction. Check it out.

Have just returned from a family va-kay, where we had a steady diet of sun, news, and political chitchat -- not necessarily in that order. Back on track tomorrow. bk