On our media beat today, we have several entries. The first from Democratic Underground:”

“CNN’s Nuke Plant Photos Identical for Both Iran and N. Korea!

“Two stories posted in the last week on the CNN website, one on nukes in Iran last Wednesday, and another on nukes in N. Korea on Saturday, both use the same aerial photograph of the same purported nuclear power plant!

“But one is supposed to be in Iran and the other is supposed to be in North Korea!

“Who’s the source for these photos?

“The BRAD BLOG asks that and more at: http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001187.htm

POLITICAL REPORTS SHRINK

FreePress carried this item I missed from the NY Times:

“In the month leading up to last year’s presidential election, local television stations in big cities devoted eight times as much air time to car crashes and other accidents than to campaigns for House, state Senate or other local offices.”

http://www.freepress.net/news/6692

BURNED OUT

I caught this in the Toledo blade about Mike Cary a local TV journalist who wants out:

“I’m ready to try something else,” he said. “I think I’m a little burned out on the business.” TV news, he says, has become too predictable and relies too much on manufactured drama.

“It’s like we [in the industry] make a big deal out of everything,” he said.

When asked for an example, Carey did not hesitate. “The weather,” he said. “An inch or two of snow now isn’t what an inch or two of snow used to be.”

WHY DO WE HATE THE PRESS?

A must read: The Wayward Press by Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker 14 February 2005 Issue

“The press in the New World was originally a vehicle for political expression or an unambitious means of disseminating information - or a blend of the two. It also became a form of mass popular entertainment. In the late nineteenth century, the mainstream version of journalism — fair-minded, sometimes aggressive empiricism - emerged in a form that we’d recognize today. It’s always perilous to see the past as more placid than the present, because usually it wasn’t, but it is accurate to say that by the mid-twentieth century American society had become far more inclined than it is now to respect authority in all realms. The mainstream media, which by then encompassed not only newspapers but national news magazines and network television and radio, occupied a dignified position; and the Times was the most dignified outlet of all….

“The last few years have seen a series of journalistic scandals - if my grandfather hadn’t already been long gone, learning that Jayson Blair had published fabrications in the Times would no doubt have finished him off - and forthright self-examinations by the media organizations made it clear that journalism, like everything else, is full of choice and contingency. Such a confession invites more examination, from without and within. To make things worse, newspapers and the network evening-news shows are losing their audiences at an alarming rate, while openly ideological, anti-mainstream-media, quasi-news programs like Rush Limbaugh’s radio show have huge followings. The kind of ebullient confidence that Ben Bradlee displayed has, in most places, been superseded by an elaborately polite, pained respect toward anybody who takes issue with press coverage.

“E-mail (including orchestrated mass e-mails) and blogs allow press critics to address editors and reporters directly. Both of these innovations were heavily used in 2004. One blog, adamnagourney.com, was devoted to criticizing the Times’ chief political reporter. A conservative blog called freerepublic.com posted objections to the paper’s exposé of America’s failure to guard an important munitions dump in Iraq - even before the story, which appeared late in the campaign, was printed - claiming that its central premise was untrue and that its timing was politically motivated. During this campaign cycle, all four major cable-television channels - CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and CNBC - used a talk-intensive format, especially in the evenings, in which ideologically charged press criticism often filled the hours, and where one got to see and hear so many prominent journalists so often that it became more difficult to think of them as neutral reportorial figures. This did not seem to bother viewers: the most overtly political of the cable networks, Fox News, established itself as the clear leader in the ratings.

“The country was at war - not the kind of war that knits a society together - and appeared to be bitterly divided politically. Politicians - especially conservative politicians, and especially the Bush team - felt free to criticize the press more openly than in past election cycles. Conservatives are relativists when it comes to the press. In their view, nothing is neutral: there is no disinterested version of the news; everything reflects politics and relationships to power and cultural perspective. If mainstream journalists find it annoying that conservatives think of them as unalterably hostile, they find it just as annoying that liberals think of them as the friend who keeps letting them down. Mainstream journalists want to think that the public is aware of - and respects - the boundaries that separate real journalism from entertainment, and opinion, and propaganda, and marketing. If, instead, the public not only enjoys the quasi-journalistic pleasures that lie outside the boundaries, but also doesn’t accept that what’s inside really is distinct and superior - well, that would sting….

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/021405Z.shtml