Entries Tagged 'news analysis' ↓

Glenn Reynolds:

OUCH: In ’survival mode,’ newspapers slashing jobs. …

No wonder they’ve been telling us we’re in the midst of a second Great Depression. For them, it’s been true.

Later, Glenn explains his attitude:

It’s not “glee.” And, in fact — as I’ve said repeatedly — I think the reason that newspapers are tubing is that they’re replaced the kind of hard-news reporting described above with editorializing and “attitude,” often in support of political positions that many people don’t agree with. I’d much rather see them flourish while doing a good job, but they’ve been cutting budgets for actual reporting for decades.

I like it when newspapers do a good job, too. For example, when I read this straightforward piece in today’s NYT about the situation between Israel and her many enemies, I thought: Huh! Why can’t the NYT report like this (factually and straightforwardly) every day?

I reprint a few paragraphs to mark it as a sort of baseline of respectable, neutral MSM reporting on the Middle East.

Hezbollah seized the two Israeli soldiers shortly after the Palestinian group Hamas captured an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, in southern Israel, and it was the one-two punch of such actions that partly pushed Mr. Olmert to order such a fierce response against Hezbollah in 2006.

Both Hezbollah and Hamas are armed and supported by Iran, which has repeatedly urged that Israel be forced out of existence.

Nevertheless, apart from the prisoner deal with Hezbollah, negotiated through a German mediator, Israel also agreed with Hamas on a six-month truce that started June 19. The deal, mediated by Egypt, has been violated by dissident Palestinian groups that have fired rockets or mortar shells at Israel.

But so far, both sides seem committed to the truce, which involves Israel opening border crossings and reducing its siege of Gaza. On Sunday, about a third more goods were let through than had previously been, according to Hamas officials in Gaza. The goods included animal feed, diesel fuel, fruit, vegetables and frozen meat.

The acting Hamas interior minister, Said Siam, said in an interview that he had formed an emergency group to monitor truce violations by various factions. Clerics associated with Hamas spoke at Friday Prayer in favor of the truce, saying it was in the interest of the people that it not be violated.

Television is virtually a news-free zone—quick! how many TV programs can you name that tell you, with facts and figures and no spin or attitude, who, what, why, where, and when? huh? how many?—and yet supposedly sophisticated TV critics, like the NYT’s Alessandra Stanley, still refer to something called “cable news.”

The funniest thing about it, though, is that Stanley calls it “news” while describing it, essentially, as an unprecedented media and campaign clusterfuck [e.a.]:

The distinction of all three new hourlong programs is that the hosts are not the stars, the campaign is. Speeches, interviews, surrogate gaffes, opinion polls, delegate math and even party deliberations are showcased with the same swooshing sound effects and flashy graphics that tip viewers to an appearance by George Clooney on “Live With Regis and Kelly.”

It’s a marked change for cable news, which over the last few years has followed the lead of Fox News and promoted vividly opinionated hosts who shape the news flow to suit their own personas and pet peeves. It’s also refreshing …

I wouldn’t call it refreshing. I would call it over-the-top infotainment. But Stanley has got one thing right—it’s the campaigns that are the stars of these shows, and the folks running the campaigns understand the circus atmosphere that is today’s media world (much more so than does Alessandra Stanley. That’s why they’ve got their candidates doing the Ellen show, etc.

This kind of coverage is also, as Stanley points out, a ratings boon for the cable shows:

The public has not been this passionately absorbed in an election in decades, and the candidates are passionately intent on making their case on television. When they do, viewership goes up: it’s a boon for the 24-hour news channels, but even they are hard-pressed to keep up with the constant flow of debates, photo ops, tarmac tirades, so many words spoken and misspoken and so many talk-show appearances.

The candidates show up not just on “Meet the Press” or “60 Minutes,” but also on “Saturday Night Live” (Senator John McCain’s star turn dates back to 2002). More recently, Senator Barack Obama kissed and cuddled the ladies of “The View,” Mr. McCain traded insults with David Letterman on his “Late Show,” and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton joked about dodging sniper fire to arrive at “The Tonight Show” on time for Jay Leno. Mrs. Clinton is also scheduled to appear on “Ellen” on Monday, her first appearance on Ellen DeGeneres’s talk show since Mr. Obama’s last one. (In that appearance, Mr. Obama upped the ante by dancing for her — his second effort to, as he put it, “bust a move.”)

And the cycle is endless and self-sustaining: satirical shows like “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “Saturday Night Live” take clips from the news and make fun of them; news programs take skits from “Saturday Night Live” and replay them.

Andrew Tyndall writes about this campaign—and the TV coverage—much more perceptively over at HuffPo. He says the Horse Race has given over to a Gameshow Reality contest:

Stop thinking of this election as a race to the wire to be won by the candidate with the finest pedigree, truest form and best connections. Start thinking of it as a cast of larger-than-life characters, scheming against each other while simultaneously trying to appear attractive to the electorate audience. Week by week the group undergoes media trials such as candidate debates and Sunday morning interviews. Each primary election constitutes another potential elimination round.

The winner gets to be a constant television presence in our homes for four years.

With open contests in both parties, this Presidential cycle offered the perfect opportunity to unveil this new method of coverage. The casting of the contestants could not have been better. In one tribe, as they say on Survivor, there was a handsome Mormon businessman, a colorful big city mayor, a slimmed-down Baptist minister and a crusty war hero. The other tribe had a self-made trial lawyer, a globetrotting Hispanic diplomat, a diligent feminist with that interesting celebrity marriage and an inspirational young African-American.

That’s infotainment! It rules!

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!

Dave Marash beats around the bush a lot, but eventually he explains, more or less, why he left Al Jazeera English [e.a.]:

Just as Al Jazeera Arabic can rightfully claim to be a first-class news organization with high professional standards, but one that authentically represents the point of view and interests of the region defined by the Arabic language, less defined by but certainly involved in the Islamic faith, and most particularly the gulf region, I think that Al Jazeera English is a very competent, very professional news organization that does a particularly great job south of the equator, but tends to report almost everything from the point of view of either the Arabic-speaking world or at the very least what you might call the post-colonial world. And since I’m not authentically those things, I don’t belong there.

Huh?

Marash notes a shift in perspective, dating to the flexing of the Saudi Arabian muscle during the time of the Mecca Agreement (last year), when, Marash suggests, there was a shift in the balance of power in the region [e.a.]:

BC: What changed?

DM: I think that the world changed about nine, ten months ago. And I think the single event in that change was the visit to the gulf by Vice President Cheney, where he went to line up the allied ducks in a row behind the possibility of action against Iran. And instead of getting acquiescence, the United States got defiance, and instead ducks in a row the ducks basically went off on their own and the first sort of major breakthrough on that was the Mecca agreement, which defied the American foreign policy by letting Hamas into the tent of the governance of the Palestinian territories. This enraged the State Department and was one crystal clear sign that the Mideast region was now off campus, was off on its own. And it is around this time, and I think not coincidentally, that you see the state of Qatar and the royal family of Qatar starting to make up their feud with the Saudis, and you start to see on both Al Jazeera Arabic and English a very sort of first-personish, “my Haj” stories that were boosterish of the Haj and of Saudi Arabia. And you start to see stories of analysis in The New York Times where regional people are noting that Al Jazeera seems to be changing its editorial stance toward Saudi Arabia. I’m suggesting that around that time, a decision was made at the highest levels of [Al Jazeera] that simply following the American political leadership and the American political ideal of global, universalist values carried out in an absolutely pure, multipolar, First Amendment global conversation, was no longer the safest or smartest course, and that it was time, in fact, to get right with the region. And I think part of getting right with the region was slightly changing the editorial ambition of Al Jazeera English, and I think it has subsequently become a more narrowly focused, more univocal channel than was originally conceived.

Marash also explains what drew him to the concept in the first place:

[T]he thing that I loved best about the original concept was the sort of fugue of points of view and opinions, because I think that’s what desperately needed in the world. We need to know, for example, in America, how angry the rest of the world is at Americans. Our own news media tend to shelter us from this very unpleasant news. So if you watched and every piece seemed tendentious and pissed you off, and I don’t think that would be the case, but even if worst case the channel turned shrill and shallow, you would still want to watch them on the principle that millions—tens of millions—of people watch them every day and you need to know what’s going on in their brains.

Know thine enemy. Marash got closer than most.

Somewhere in my drafts folder, I have a long post about how TV in general and the big cable channels in particular are a “news-free zone,” and one day I will polish it and publish it—it’s a work in progress.

Meanwhile, as my ideas marinate, I would like to note that there’s a new ethos in Cable Land, most tellingly represented by Chris Matthews, one of the talkingest talking heads on MSNBC.

Here, courtesy of Gail Shister at TVNewser, Matthews explains how it is that he can send valentines to Barack Obama several times per hour every day on his show Hardball and yet claim that he is not endorsing Obama [e.a.]:

Matthews — dubbed “Rain Man” by Brian Williams in a Christmas staff video — is just reporting the facts, m’am.

The leg thrill “was an honest reaction to the speech,” he says. “I have no regrets. I report what happens. I report my reactions to speeches. I react emotionally and intellectually.

“People are allowed to criticize me. I want to be honest. I give an honest report of what I experience. It’s a fuller report than others have given.”

This kind of “reporting” is what’s considered important by MSNBC. You’ll note that Matthews’s feelings are issue number one—for him and his viewers.

Funny, I don’t see any news value in that metric.

In an interview, Andrew Breitbart describes the real impact of the digital revolution:

The Internet has created raw immediacy and raw connectedness to anything and everything.

It seems that if you’ve ever felt constrained by the bureaucracies of the world — whether it be government or corporations — it seems that now any individual can do anything that they set their mind to. A person can create a Web site that looks as if it’s a multinational corporation. You can go to GM.com or you can go to MG’s blog, and MG’s blog is 10 times more compelling. You can pretty much do anything. You can start your own T-shirt company, you can cultivate an audience, you can create a business from scratch. ….

Yep. It’s pretty goddamn cool. Not to mention that it’s a bonanza for us news junkies who’ve got something to say:

I’m a news addict, news aficionado …

The idea now, on the Internet, that I can read everything that’s being read inside the major newsrooms in the country — I’d pay top dollar for that, back in the day. And now it’s all there.

You know that you’re seeing the same exact information that the Dan Rathers, the Peter Jennings, the Tom Brokaws of the world are seeing. You’re like, “Wait a second. Why did you choose that to be the No. 1 story?” And you start gaining a level of confidence that there’s a conventional wisdom out there, set by people with a very parochial sensibility.

Given that anything’s possible on the Internet, you kind of feel motivated to say, “Let me have my say on this. Let me try and counteract the effect of there being a machinery that creates conventional wisdom without taking into consideration alternative viewpoints.” …

That pretty much describes my experience, and the long, long road I’ve traveled on the Internet, of which I’ve been an officianado aficionado since 1993, when I signed up for my first Pipeline (a local NYC ISP) account, up until today, when I mark sixteen months as a blogger (averaging four link-and content-rich posts a day).

Once, in response to a post by Jeff Jarvis on the topic of who we bloggers are, I left the following comment:

We are longtime thinkers and readers and writers who went to the same schools as MSMers (No insult intended. Some of my best friends are MSMers.) but decided to pursue careers and professions other than journalism. We make our living doing other things, but we continue to read and to be engaged by the dynamic world around us and by the world of ideas. We like to read. We like to write. We like to make fun of what we observe in public life, like in MST3K. We like to debate. We understand rhetoric. We know how to check facts and sources.

It’s not journalism, though–few of us are out there bearing witness or interviewing people or acquiring other primary-source material (although with the advent of podcasting and various blogging consortia, that may be changing).

It’s…I dunno. Maybe blogging is “opinion reporting.”

We’re different from journalists, because we seek to mix it up with our readers. We’re looking for conversation and debate. We want to be involved in the intellectual/cultural life of our country (such as it is). Some of us are tired of shouting back at the talking heads on TV and NPR and at editorial writers and columnists. We have areas of expertise and opinions, too.

The blogosphere is where thinking people go to debate the politics of the day, the ideas of public intellectuals, and the opinions of paid opinion writers. It’s where the national conversation is taking place. Be there or be square.

Here’s more from that inspiring Breitbart interview:

Q: You create your own news wire.

A: There are people who can go out there and become a creme brulee blog and obsess on creme brulee and have strong opinions on creme brulee, and which is the best type of creme brulee. They can fight against the creme caramelle people who don’t have the hardened sugar top. And eventually, people who like creme brulee will migrate to this place and that person will become the creme brulee spokesperson. And then maybe a dessert company finds this person, says, “You know more about this than our president does,” and hire them for $75,000 a year.

It seems that there’s been, across the board, a democratizing of everything. It seems that the American spirit of freedom is being exported. In a MacLuhanesque way, the medium is the message. The freedoms that we see online in this country — there’s no taxation of it — all these things have all benefitted from the growth of the Internet.

It’s very difficult to sell to totalitarianism in the Internet age. Do you want a free Internet? Do you want absolute control of your Internet life, or do you want to put that in the control of others? And I think that if people were to start taking away your freedoms online, you’d see a bloody revolution.

Q: People would fight for their online freedom.

A: Right. To many people, it’s everything. I think people take it for granted. I think people should be jumping up on top of their beds, thanking God every single day that this thing was invented.

Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s pretty goddamn cool. And it’s definitely liberating.

Khalil Hamra

Palestinian journalists hold posters of kidnapped BBC correspondent Alan Johnston during a protest calling for his release in front of the parliament building in Gaza City, Tuesday, March 20, 2007. Johnston was kidnapped last week in Gaza City and no group has yet claimed responsibility.

The photo above accompanies a depressing piece about the internal strife in Gaza between Hamas and Fatah, now that Arafat-era “strongman” Mohammed Dahlan has been put in the driver’s seat to oversee security. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Even more depressing, there is nothing new to report on the Alan Johnston story.

I was glad to see that ETP’s Glynnis MacNicol picked up on the story in a long post. Too bad she got her facts wrong about “Gilead” (much, much more frequently known as Gilad) Shalit. If you’re going to go “deep in the weeds,” *** you gotta know what you’re talking about.

It was not the kidnapping of Shalit that “ostensibly launched last summer’s Israeli attack on Lebanon.” [!]

The kidnapping of Shalit (and murder of two other soldiers), on top of continual Hamas-sponsored rockets lobbed into Israel, was what sparked an Israeli offensive into Gaza (which is to the south of Israel) in June 2006.

Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah, the terrorist organization dug in on its northern border, in Lebanon, started in mid-July 2006, three weeks later, after Hezbollah kidnapped two other Israeli soldiers (and killed three ) in a cross-border raid that violated Israel’s sovereignty. That was the casus belli of that conflict, which today was given its offical name: the Second Lebanon War. (I don’t much like the sound of that. Whenever they start counting wars, knowing it’s only one of a series—of indefinite length—it makes me nervous.)

————

*** I read that expression on Matt Yglesias’s blog today—twice in once post—and googled it, because I’d never heard it before. What I dug up was really interesting—with more than enough meat for another post. But who knows when I’ll ever get to that, so here’s the short version.

Googling “deep in the weeds” led me to Language Log (which I haven’t visited in waaaaaay too long)

Do six uses of a phrase in two years [May 2004 to May 2006 --ed.] count as “quintessential”? Well, I’ve observed before that a word or phrase may only need to be repeated a couple of times in order to seem characteristic of a writer or speaker, if the use in context is striking enough. In this case, five of the six TPM uses of “deep in the weeds” are used to introduce a post, as part of a ritualized warning to the reader that the content will involve a level of detail that some may find excessive.

In comparison, the phrase “deep in the weeds” has never been used on Language Log, on Language Hat, on the Volokh Conspiracy, on Crooked Timber, etc., although these blogs are more often deep in (what some might consider) the intellectual weeds than not

TPM, where Josh Marshall has used it a lot, is where Yglesias (who used to write under the TPM Cafe banner) must have picked it up.

We’re all Professor Donald Foster wannabes now. (He unmasked Joe Klein as “Anonymous,” the author of Primary Colors, the highly unflattering insiderish 1996 roman a clef about the Clintons. Foster has also gotten some wrong.)

The other day, casting a harsh judgment, I wrote in response to Jimmy Carter’s American Jihad to Create More Sympathy for the Palestinians:

When the Palestinians become more sympathetic—i.e., when they are seen to behave in a manner that befits sympathy rather than disgust, indignation, or outrage—they will garner more sympathy from Americans.

What I meant was this: The Palestinians have been in the news (sorta) again. No, I’m not referring to the long piece by Steven Erlanger (”Years of Strife and Lost Hope Scar Young Palestinians“) in the yesterday New York Times, which certainly elicited my sympathy.

What I’m referring to is this story, first reported on Monday:

BBC journalist feared kidnapped in Gaza
 

which is just now (more than 24 hours since it happened) starting to get play, according to Google News.

E Canada Now Johnston kidnappers ‘identified’ ic Scotland.co.uk, UK - 2 hours ago BBC television correspondent Alan Johnston was taken from his car by four masked gunmen in Gaza City on Monday. The abduction was the latest in a string of … Concern for missing BBC reporter ic Wales Palestinian authorities aim to free journalist Guardian Unlimited ‘Reward wanted’ for kidnapped BBC man Telegraph.co.uk Toronto Daily News - Washington Post all 395 news articles » PRESS TV World press body calls for safe return of missing reporter in Gaza Islamic Republic News Agency, Iran - 1 hour ago The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) Tuesday called for the safe return of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston in the Gaza Strip, … Palestinians denounce BBC reporter abduction PRESS TV all 3 news articles » BBC journalist kidnapped in Gaza Israel Insider, Israel - 15 minutes ago Palestinian Authority security officials were able to quickly identify the victim as Alan Johnston because the latter had thrown a business card on the …

This story is probably what most Americans will hear about the Palestinians today, if they hear anything at all (while they’re driving home or while they’re fixing dinner for the kids or wherever they tune in to the “news”… if they do tune in to the “news” … and, of course, if “the news” even bothers to cover the story rather than cover it up—or cover up for the Hamas shitballs, who will try to paint themselves as heroes when miraculously recover Johnston, as they did when they miraculously recovered Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig in August, after the two Fox journalists had been kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam on videotape. Which is certainly a topic for another post.).

But back to the point: It’s horribly unfair to those Palestinians who are indeed suffering because of Israel’s policies (and because of Israelis’ seeming indifference to this suffering—emphasis on “seeming“), but reports of the following do not create sympathy for “the Palestinians” (in quotes because it’s unfair to the suffering Palestinians to be lumped in with the Palestinians who create the suffering):

kidnappings,

bombs lobbed into Israel,

suicide killings,

shootings,

gang warfare,

terrifying violence,

corruption,

upheaval,

kidnappings that end only after the victims have converted to Islam, on pain of death, 

hard-line threats emanating from Hamas leaders with broken-record regularity (”We will never recognize Israel“).

What’s to sympathize with here? Where are the people we should sympathize with? I don’t see them here, for example, in the kind of image that Palestinians proudly broadcast to the rest of the world:

Nevertheless, there are suffering Palestinians. There are things the Israelis can do to ameliorate some of their suffering—particularly the suffering they themselves cause. And there should be forward movement between the Israelis and the Palestinians to secure an agreement under which they can live side by side in relative harmony. Which is why brave journalists like Alan Johnston continue to report from places like Gaza despite the many dangers.

He was one the few remaining ones, reports the Guardian:

Mr Johnston, the BBC’s Gaza correspondent, was one of the few foreign journalists who continued to work there despite the fear of kidnapping. Mr Johnston divided his time between Gaza and Jerusalem and had only arrived in Gaza this morning. Most journalists would contact Mr Johnston before travelling to Gaza to ask his advice on the level of risk and what precautions to take.

So: there are two strands to this story that we should follow—

1) how the Western media reports Johnston’s kidnapping;

2) whether the Palestinians elicit sympathy *** from this episode, which has put them in the headlines. 

And here’s what anyone with a cause should think about: what kind of image s/he wants to project to the outside world. Because it matters a lot in a world influenced by images.

—–

*** Though I gotta say: we are living in a remarkably unsympathetic time. I see an incredible lack of sympathy—and, even more important, a horrifying lack of empathy—in our contemporary life. That doesn’t bode well for the world’s many victims.

I feel like bragging today, because I’ve been way ahead of the pack on two stories that are finally getting play.

One of them is of consequence. The other is of little consequence (in the grand scheme of things), but it’s got tons of entertainment value. So, without further ado:

of consequence: In today’s New York Times, Helen Cooper explains (sorta; see below ***) how, thanks to the Saudis, Hamas has become the fulcrum in the Shia-Sunni split and the spoiler in the ongoing ”peace” negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis. On February 10, I wrote (much less delicately) that Haniyeh, the so-called prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, is the biggest whore in the region.

For now, it seems to me that the biggest winner is Ismail Haniyeh, who is also the biggest whore.

Why? Because just a couple of months ago he was visiting with Ahmadinejad (as I noted here). You do recall talk of the Sunni-Shia split, right? So it was indeed puzzling that Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh, a devout Sunni Muslim, would cozy up to the Shia Islamic Republic of Iran. But it’s puzzling only to those who don’t understand that Hamas is basically just like the Mafia and that it just managed to extort $1billion from the nervous Saudis (who are Sunnis and Iran’s arch-enemy, for those of you falling asleep in front of your monitors) and to thumb its collective nose—and possibly worse—at the politically weakened and battered forces of the Enlightened West.

Cooper has an entirely different spin on this story—she looks at this from the p.o.v. of it being another “failure” of the Bush administration. Which it surely is, because Rice is both incompetent and unprincipled. But the point of this story isn’t to wring our hands about how impotent Bush is, etc., etc. The point of the story is that Hamas is for sale—Hamas is dirty and corrupt, just like Fatah, although it claims to have clean hands and to be holier-than-everyone-else. The Palestinian Authority is a thugocracy. This is a wedge. Let us exploit it.

of no consequence but of great entertainment value: This was a no-brainer, but on January 26, I wrote “Now, this is gonna hurt” when I first found out about the dueling allegiances (Obama or Hillary?) among Democrats in Hollywood. (I also wrote, back in April of last year, about the Clintons’ seeming lack of popularity on the Left Coast.)

The story exploded with Maureen Dowd’s column ($$) this morning, quoting an incredibly bitchy David Geffen sticking it to the Clintons.

“Obama is inspirational, and he’s not from the Bush royal family or the Clinton royal family. Americans are dying every day in Iraq. And I’m tired of hearing James Carville on television.” 

The aftershocks are coming in waves. Hillary’s camp went ballistic. Obama’s camp replied in kind. Read about it here and here.

———

***  Cooper writes:

Put simply, in the past year, Iran has been wooing Hamas, which is Sunni. The Saudis did not like that. So they fought to get Hamas back. [ Throwing down $1 billion is not much of a fight. But it's only the first of many payments to come, I'll wager.  --ed.]

“The Saudis did a switcheroo,” said Martin Indyk, the United States ambassador to Israel in the Clinton administration. “The U.S. views the Middle East as a battle between the moderates against the Iranian-led extremists. But our regional allies see this as a divide between Sunnis and Shiites, and Sunni extremists like Hamas may be extremists, but they are Sunnis first.”