Is it Olbermann vs. Matthews or Olbermann vs. Rupert Murdoch?

Gawker wants to know [but you'll need to click on the Gawker link to get the links embedded in this quote ---ed.]:

So the Post has posted the Page Six item Keith Olbermann was so worked up about yesterday, and it does indeed say Hardball host Chris Matthews “seemed” to be talking about a strategy for landing Tim Russert’s job at a memorial event for the NBC personality, and that Olbermann is threatening to quit if he doesn’t get Russert’s Meet The Press job. …

But the gossip item also quotes a source, ostensibly from the traditional broadcast side of NBC News, who claims that Russert himself wanted NBC News political director Chuck Todd as his own replacement, and that the network will never install someone from MSNBC on the show:

The insider said,

“They’re cable. They’re far too partisan. They have no gravitas. If gravitas is eight letters, they’re about seven letters short.”

I last wrote about Olbermann and the absurd notion that one of the MSNBC cablers would get to sit in Russert’s chair here and here.

But I reserve the right to hedge by saying that in the brave new media world, anything is possible.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m wondering when TV “journalists” will face the truth about their profession—namely, that what you see below is not just the future of “the news” but also the present.

(via FishbowlDC)

Fishbowl quotes some of the “juicy bits” from the upcoming NYT Mag article:

 

“By the way, have you figured me out yet?” Matthews said at the end of another phone conversation the following day. “You gotta under-stand, it’s all complicated. It’s not like Tim.” Tim — as in Russert, the inquisitive jackhammer host of “Meet the Press” — is a particular obsession of Matthews’s. Matthews craves Russert’s approval like that of an older brother. He is often solicitous.

In an interview with Playboy a few years ago, he volunteered that he had made the list of the Top 50 journalists in D.C. in The Washingtonian magazine. “I’m like 36th, and Tim Russert is No. 1,” Matthews told Playboy. “I would argue for a higher position for myself.”

Friends say Matthews is wary of another up-and-comer, David Gregory, who last month was given a show at 6 o’clock, between airings of “Hardball.” It is a common view around NBC that Gregory is trying out as a possible replacement for Matthews.

According to people at NBC, Matthews has not been shy in voicing his resentment of Olbermann. Nor, according to network sources, has Olbermann bothered to hide his low regard for Matthews, although when I spoke to him, Olbermann denied any personal animosity toward Matthews and told me that he appreciates his “John Madden-like enthusiasm for politics.”

Hmmm. Recognize anyone?

Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice, in The Entertainer
London, 1957, photo by Snowden

p.s. The last time I used that image was here, in May 2007.

The last time I wrote about Matthews was here.

————————–

*** When I claimed my blog on Technorati two years ago, this is how I described it:

They call it news. I call it infotainment.

No one can say that we weren’t warned well in advance. See, for example, Neal Postman and Michael Schudson and Joshua Gamson.

Just in time for the Episode Two of The Petraeus Show, which pre-game “reviewers” analyzed and critiqued well in advance of opening night (see the headlines on Memeorandum (at 9:30 a.m., just before showtime),
Gallup releases poll results on Americans’ attitudes toward the war in Iraq.

Upshot [e.a.]:

The 2008 presidential election will present voters with a clear choice on Iraq, with Republicans putting forth one of the Senate’s fiercest supporters of the war and Democrats choosing one of two leading Senate opponents, including Obama, who has made his opposition to the war from the beginning a major focus of his campaign. If McCain is elected, U.S. policy on Iraq will likely continue as it has under the Bush administration, with slower troop drawdowns tied to progress in establishing security in Iraq. If Obama or Clinton is elected, finding a quick end to the war will likely be the new president’s top priority.

In general, the public tends to side with the Democrats from the standpoint of favoring a timetable, but relatively few advocate a quick withdrawal. And most seem sympathetic to the Republican argument about the United States needing to establish a certain level of security before leaving Iraq.

Call me crazy, but it looks to me as if, all things considered, Americans would rather stick around and do the right thing by Iraqis than just get out.

It’s my opinion, based on an anthropological reading of the culture, that Americans would like to win in Iraq—as we like to win everywhere, because we Americans are a profoundly competitive people—but the conventional wisdom these days says otherwise.

See Glenn Greenwald, for example, in a post titled “Cokie Roberts speaks out on the war on behalf of the American people”:

Yesterday, Cokie Roberts — while expressing scorn for the “Responsible Plan for Withdrawal” advocated by 42 Democratic Congressional candidates and numerous military experts, and described by fellow panelist Katerina Vanden Heuvel of The Nation — said this:

VANDEN HEUVEL: It is not, but you know what, the responsible thing to do is withdraw. [you hear Cokie odiously chuckling at this point]

VANDEN HEUVEL: If we withdraw responsibly, the region would be more stable in the long term, America will be restored as a responsible global leader, and there are 42 challengers, you are absolutely right Cokie, who have a responsible plan to withdraw.

ROBERTS: Convincing the electorate of that I think would be very difficult, and I also agree that the notion that Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham you heard this morning putting forward, that Americans would prefer to win, is–

VANDEN HEUVEL: But what is winning? This war is unwinnable, there are no military solutions.

The video is also here. Roberts’ claim — that Americans agree with McCain, Graham and her that withdrawal is a bad idea and that they want to stay until we win — is just a lie. There’s no other way to put that.

Really? I don’t see any evidence to back up your claim, Mr. Greenwald. We may quibble about whether Americans want to “win” (since they’re repeatedly told by the MSM that we cannot win) or whether they just want to do the right thing, but the polling (for what it’s worth) suggests that relatively fewer people want to just get the hell out of there and call it “responsible.”

All things considered, people seem much more interested in the political theater surrounding The Petraeus Show. Here’s a gem from the NYT:

Testimony by General Will Test Candidates for President

All three senators running for president — John McCain of Arizona, Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois — will have a chance to question General Petraeus and Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Baghdad. Each of the three is determined to use the spectacle to advantage, but all face political risks as well as opportunities in the back-to-back hearings before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees. …

Mr. McCain, a Republican, has the logistical advantage in appearing before his two Democratic competitors. General Petraeus is set to testify first to the Armed Services Committee, beginning at 9:30 a.m., and Mr. McCain, the ranking Republican member, will be the second to speak, after the committee chairman, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan.

Mrs. Clinton, a more junior member of the panel, will speak later. Mr. Obama, a junior member of the Foreign Relations Committee, which is holding its hearing in the afternoon, will be the 13th on that panel to speak, perhaps after the evening news.

The headline of this piece (referring to a “test”) is yet more evidence of Andrew Tyndall’s thesis about the nexus between the campaigns and the media and the gameshow-type coverage that has evolved during this election cycle.

As for the substance of the NYT’s Elizabeth Bumiller’s piece: she suggests that Obama’s testimony occuring “after the evening news” would be a bad thing.

What century is she living in? Her own paper today cites the woes of the networks’ news divisions. The “evening news” is a woolly mammoth.

Cable “news” is the thing, dontcha know? Who cares if Obama’s “test” occurs last on the floor of the Senate? It will happen just in time for Campbell Brown of CNN and Keith Olbermann to lead with it!

I’ll try to follow up tonight. Stay tuned.

Back when we all had a sense of humor about the buffoon George Bush, we greeted that malapropism with the appropriate skepticism.It turns out, though, that PBS has found a way to do just that—increasing its viewership for Frontline, its superb documentary series,*** by streaming it on the Web:

Executives at “Frontline” do not yet know how many people watched their recent four-and-a-half hour documentary, “Bush’s War,” because of PBS’s complicated Nielsen ratings.Online, however, “Bush’s War,” which was produced for the fifth anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Iraq, has set a record, with more than 1.5 million views of all or part of the program, which was streamed in 26 segments.“Frontline” has streamed most of its documentaries free since 2002 (www.pbs.org/frontline), part of an effort to reach younger audiences than typically tune in to PBS. The online viewing to date of “Bush’s War,” which was broadcast in two parts on March 24 and 25, is an estimated “10 times the traffic of a normal show for us,” said Sam Bailey, the program’s director of new media and technology. Viewers are also sticking around much longer than they usually do on the site, typically for 7 to 10 minutes.

Who says that quality doesn’t sell?Think again.————–*** I have long been a devotee of Frontline. I’m on record as saying that I wish all hard-news on TV were done with the depth of Frontline documentaries. But of course I know it can’t and won’t happen.Still: kudos! serious television lives!

Somehow I missed this a couple of months ago, but it’s still worth noting (in light of Roger L. Simon’s comment the other day).

You know things are really bad in MediaLand when Newsweek editor Jon Meacham has to try to convince j-school students that his magazine is better than The Economist, which they seem to prefer [e.a.]:

“And how to communicate that we have things to say that are both factually new and analytically new and to get you under the tent is a fact that scares me—not The Economist per se. It’s an incredible frustration that I’ve got some of the most decent, hard-working, honest, passionate, straight-shooting, non-ideological people who just want to tell the damn truth, and how to get this past this image that we’re just middlebrow, you know, a magazine that your grandparents get, or something, that’s the challenge. And I just don’t know how to do it, so if you’ve got any ideas, tell me.”

I haven’t picked up Newsweek in at least twenty years. I pick up The Economist occasionally, but I never have time to read it. If I did have (or take) the time to read a newsweekly, though, I would definitely choose The Economist, which covers everything in-depth, at leisure, in a thoughtful way, with background, and free of cant; and whose editorial staff indicates that it has an interest in understanding the whole world—often from the perspective of those living abroad, not from a distinctly American point of view.

I think American journalism’s biggest weakness is its obsessive solipsism. For a media elite that prides itself on its sophistication, the columnists and commentators whose opinions seem to matter (in both the MSM and the blogosphere) are maddeningly—and even frighteningly, considering the bad intentions of some of the bad actors out there—provincial and America-centric.

That’s my cosmopolitanism showing, though, and I don’t consider myself a laboratory. I certainly don’t represent any typical bloc of voters. Still, some of the comments at the New York Observer site reflect my point of view. Like this one:

Dear Jon Meacham, you just don’t get it. I (a well-educated consumer of print journalism) do not exactly look down on Newsweek. I’m a big fan of yours, too. Nobody doubts that it has good journalism, even though it is is a somewhat dumbed-down, glossly format. But the Economist offers something beyond coverage of the same three, U.S.-focused issues. The Economist is far from perfect; it has a lot of problems. But, the fact is, there is a whole lot more going on in the world than the U.S. presidential election, Iraq, and Afghanistan, important as these issues may be. A lot more. The Economist regularly reports on issues in every region. The U.S. news media, a decade or so ago, got hooked on the “big story.” That’s a great scale economy, but is really does not do the trick. So, you know, if you want to become more global in your coverage and aim straight for the cosmopolitan set, without dumbing it down, then you will get new readers. But, I suspect you will lose a lot, too. You’d have to lay out more money for less subscribers. I doubt you will do that…

Yep. I think the narrow focus and simplistic storylines don’t appeal to those (the educated) who are willing to take out the time to read a newsweekly. It’s also likely that the concept of a newsweekly  is hopelessly outdated. News comes in rivers! It’s everywhere! Who cares what happened last week, fer crissakes? If we’re interested in the “news,” we wanna know what’s happening now.

But another reader at the Observer offers a different kind of critique, specific to Newsweek’s reporting—its compact with its readers—, and backs it up with evidence [I have taken the liberty of adding a link to the AJR piece he quotes, which I've been meaning to write about for a very long time but never got around to; it is the clearest indication by far that newsrooms now consider themselves to be primarily in the storytelling (rather than fact-reporting) business [e.a.]:

Baby Boomer Professor (not verified) says:

Dear Mr. Meacham,

You can’t figure out why we have deserted Newsweek because the political correctness you stand for made it unwise for us to tell you the truth. I subscribed to Newsweek for years. I remember George Will’s column pooh-poohing the China Syndrome the week Three Mile Island happened. I waited gleefully for Will’s next column, which came out headlined, “As I was Saying…” Once leaving Newsweek was as unthinkable as leaving the Democratic Party. But then came your beloved Clintons, and you changed.

Here’s your public face, the obnoxious Evan Thomas, trying to put the best spin on heading the Duke lynch mob:

[On Newsweek's coverage of the Duke rape case]: “The narrative was properly about race, sex and class…. We went a beat too fast in assuming that a rape took place…. We just got the facts wrong. The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong.”
– American Journalism Review, August/September 2007 issue.[1]

Consider the mind-blowing implications of that “defense” of Newsweek’s abominable reporting—they got the story right; it was only the facts (which is to say: everything) they got wrong. Huh? You can see why some former devotees of American journalism are shaking their heads and wondering what’s happened to the news business (beyond the obvious disappearance of news reporting from TV).

[update: here's a nice piece, similar in feeling to mine, from Robert Poole at Reason]

Back when I was a snotty whippersnapper and I was contemptuous of anyone who didn’t think like me and my obviously morally superior cohort, I worked in the same down-at-the-heels prewar building on East 36th Street where the National Review had its offices.

When I read this tribute, I was reminded of just how culturally out-of-favor the NR was back then in the post-Vietnam era:

Before Rush Limbaugh; before conservative talk radio; before Fox News Channel; before the Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, the Heritage Foundation and even Ronald Reagan, there was Buckley and his magazine. He burst upon the scene in the early 1950s, articulating concepts and ideas that were largely dismissed in that era–and even more out of favor in the 1960s. Still, Mr. Buckley never wavered, and his brand of conservatism became part and parcel of the Reagan Revolution that followed.

I’m no Republican. Having grown up among Republicans, I had a lifetime’s worth of exposure. I don’t even visit the Corner unless I’m sent there by a link. I’m just not interested in what conservatives are saying. I’m interested in my own tribe, not theirs!

Nevertheless, I admire William F. Buckley for his style, his wit, his erudition, and his persistence and faith, with which he built a place where the loyal opposition could talk amongst themselves. My hat’s off.

While Jeff Jarvis and Nicholas Lemann think out loud about how to improve journalism going forward***, CNN makes a laughingstock out of such agonizing efforts by doing the thinking for its “journalists.” The other day, on-air talent received instructions to be sure to remember to praise Fidel in its Cuba coverage. (Allegedly, the email reprinted below is authentic; I have no way of verifying this): 

 From: Flexner, Allison
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2008 7:46 AM
To: *CNN Superdesk (TBS)
Cc: Neill, Morgan; Darlington, Shasta
Subject: Castro guidance

Some points on Castro – for adding to our anchor reads/reporting:

* Please say in our reporting that Castro stepped down in a letter he wrote to Granma (the communist party daily), as opposed to in a letter attributed to Fidel Castro. We have no reason to doubt he wrote his resignation letter, he has penned numerous articles over the past year and a half.

* Please note Fidel did bring social reforms to Cuba – namely free education and universal health care, and racial integration. in addition to being criticized for oppressing human rights and freedom of speech.

* Also the Cuban government blames a lot of Cuba’s economic problems on the US embargo, and while that has caused some difficulties, (far less so than the collapse of the Soviet Union) the bulk of Cuba’s economic problems are due to Cuba’s failed economic polices. Some analysts would say the US embargo was a benefit to Castro politically – something to blame problems on, by what the Cubans call “the imperialist,” meddling in their affairs.

* While despised by some, he is seen as a revolutionary hero, especially with leftist in Latin America, for standing up to the United States.

Any questions, please call the international desk.

Allison

I’ve got some questions: why is CNN so shy about blasting a decrepit monster who has kept his people half-starving and cut off from the rest of the world for 50 years? why must CNN be “balanced” when talking about a megalomaniac who ruined the lives of three generations (if not more) of Cubans?

Christiane Amanpour, a loyal company soldier for CNN and the queen of moral equivalency (aka “balance”), apparently got TPTB’s memo and did her duty:

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well as Morgan alluded to, look it is a desperate place for a lot of people there because it’s poor and it’s badly run if you like, in terms of people can’t afford to make ends meet. By and large, there are a lot of rationing going on in terms of food. But it’s never enough to allow them to meet their monthly requirements of food and medicine and the like.

So there’s a lot of difficulty in day-to-day living, not to mention the fact there’s plenty of political dissidents. There are journalists who are dissidents. There are people in jail just for wanting to write the truth or speak the truth or even to organize politically which they cannot.

So, that’s a fact of life in Cuba and it has been for the decades that Castro has been in power. And that offsets some of the genuine progress that he’s made in terms of education, health care. People have talked a lot about that. But day-to-day life for them is very decrepit and very hand to mouth and, obviously, they want change.

—————

*** It’s an effort I salute wholeheartedly. I come down on the side of wanting some kind of “expertise” from journos along with their journalism skills—and we might start with refresher courses in geopolitics, geography, and international relations for on-air “talent” NOW.

As for the future, every profession is becoming more specialized, and why should journalism be an exception? People will always want and need reliable, vetted up-to-the-minute information about the things that disrupt or intrude on (or threaten to) their daily lives (hard news). The news media is an extension of our (i.e., humans’) survival radar; it’s an early-warning system to alert us about those things we can’t see with our own eyes or hear with our own ears. That’s what journalism is for.

Those people who aspire to do long-form general-interest writing in periodicals like The New Yorker or The Atlantic, or who want to offer long-form commentary in political periodicals like The New Republic or The Nation, should be given a different title. It’s not that they don’t qualify as journalists. It’s that they serve a different function: Their function is to examine people or phenomena microscopically and to analyze them deeply, in the service of  a reader’s long-term knowledge.

The news, by contrast, serves a different demand: up-to-the minute information, along with instant “analysis” of what it might mean for the consumer. Being a good writer is not the same thing as being a good reporter.

Mickey Kaus takes a whack at The New Yorker:

**–You won’t learn much else from Lizza’s article. It’s … not one of his best! A classic dumbed-down Remnick-era New Yorker piece–remedial reading for U.W.S. cocooners. Lizza skips over all the wonkish aspects of the immigration debate (like whether “comprehensive” reform will actually work) as if they have nothing to do with the politics, paints opponents as unfeeling racists, ignores well-publicized evidence (e.g., from Carville and Greenberg) that Democrats might have political problems from supporting legalization, falls for the recent Pew hype and generally fits the issue into a comfortable Civil Rights template (moral moderates vs. pathetic bigots). Did I mention that it’s a bad piece?

As long as we’re tearing down our journalistic institutions, why not The New Yorker? It’s not all that. Not anymore.

On behalf of TNR, Franklin Foer apologizes for publishing the “Baghdad Diarist” stories written by Scott Beauchamp:

In retrospect, we never should have put Beauchamp in this situation. He was a young soldier in a war zone, an untried writer without journalistic training. We published his accounts of sensitive events while granting him the shield of anonymity–which, in the wrong hands, can become license to exaggerate, if not fabricate.

When I last spoke with Beauchamp in early November, he continued to stand by his stories. Unfortunately, the standards of this magazine require more than that. And, in light of the evidence available to us, after months of intensive re-reporting, we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.

Another black eye for journalism. Sad.

One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers exposes the limits of even the best reporting. Here’s what the reader wrote to Sullivan:

The New Yorker report you cited is so bad it is scary. If this is what you are reading to figure out what is going then you need a better source. This article is riddled with incorrect facts and easements. It doesn’t just get things sorta wrong, it gets them 180 degrees wrong.

Unfortunately I can’t go through every part of the article, because much of what I would say is classified. I’ll just comment on the part you quoted from a Sheikh Zaidan. Sheikh Zaidan is not a “prominent Sunni tribal leader” at all. Actually, he is a nobody with no tribal power or constituency who probably isn’t even a Sheikh and who is likely still involved with the insurgency. The insurgency has been beaten so bad in Anbar that he is forced to cool his rhetoric. Of course they didn’t make us “crawl on our stomachs”. What happened was, we were killing insurgents like it was cool and the insurgents were killing Iraqis like it was cool. The tribes realized they were getting wiped out at both ends.

For what it’s worth: I believe that the New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson got and told the best story he could get, and could tell. But his understanding of the terrain and the larger context—his template, if you will—cannot compete with what is known by readers like Sullivan’s, who are on the ground.

It’s not that one storyteller is right and the other is wrong. Without Anderson’s template, it’s impossible for us to get a handle on a situation that for New Yorker readers is completely alien. Without the corrections to Anderson’s template offered by Sullivan’s reader, we cannot go deeper into the reality of facts on the ground.

The real problem isn’t whom to believe, however. The real problem is that people just aren’t that into finding out the truth about Iraq. They’re into political warfare at home.