Category Woeful Journalism

You don’t give Mrs. O’Leary a forum to bad-mouth the firefighters, or let Capt. Hazelwood criticize how they clean up the oil spill

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So extreme that they even scare Al Qaeda?  OK, you’ve got my attention.

What the hell is The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and how is it able to take over major Iraqi cities apart from the luck of only encountering feeble resistance from American-trained Iraqi government forces?  I don’t know, and it’s a little unsettling to read and hear the stories of these religious extremists blowing through city after city summarily executing those who don’t worship properly—as Sunni Muslims—and setting up their own governing authority.  The Iraqi government has asked the U.S. for help and our government is thinking it over.

In the meantime, because news networks have lots and lots of air time to fill, the punditocracy has cranked into gear to do what it does best: blow hot air.  Well, that’s just fine, I suppose, but…why, why, why, in the wide wide world of sports are they asking the opinions of the men who got us into the quagmire of Iraq in the first place for their opinions on what President Obama should do now?

Sargent Iraq arson

Thanks Ben Sargent and GoComics.com

Want to read some more—try here and here and here and here and here.  But as one might imagine, some of the best remember-what-these-nutballs-said-and-did-and-what-happened-because-of-it recollection has come from Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.  (click the pic to see what I mean)

wrong about iraq

Hey, talk show bookers and assignment editors: think, just for a minute, before you make your next move.  Looking for a good summary of what happened way back when–here’s one.

The totality of the Bush administration’s failure in Iraq is stunning. It is not simply that they failed to build the liberal democracy they wanted. It’s that they ended up strengthening theocracies they feared.

And it’s not simply that they failed to find the weapons of mass destruction that they worried could one day be passed onto terrorists. It’s that a terrorist organization now controls a territory about the size of Belgium, raising the possibility that America’s invasion and occupation inadvertently trained the fighters and created the vacuum that will lead to al Qaeda’s successor organization.

And all this cost us trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives.

(UPDATE: Yes, I did change the headline once I realized the error…I figure it’s never too late to get it right–PR)

America’s cable TV universe: where they turn news and tragedy into gossip right before your gullible eyes

Pat Ryan 2 Comments

During their coverage of Monday’s Washington Navy Yard shootings a good portion of America’s national cable news organizations clearly demonstrated just how far out of touch they are with what they’re supposed to be doing, at least if “reporting the news” or “practicing journalism” are what they think they’re doing.  (Hint: they’re not.)  Jon Stewart and “The Daily Show” stepped up Tuesday night to make the point, again, about as clear as it can be made.  Take a look (click the pics to see the clips):

Stewart starts out using their own work to show that the cable networks believe their job is to put people on the air to talk and talk and talk about an event, even when they don’t know what’s going on:

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Then he singles out CNN for special recognition as a paradigm…of regurgitation of contentlessness.  The funny part—and there is a funny part—is that the same people who are on the air, making wise pronouncements that much of the information learned early in a dynamic event like a mass shooting turns out to be flat wrong, keep repeating what they’ve heard without bothering to confirm the information.  (Confirming the information is a practice known as “reporting.”)  As Stewart points out, labeling the speculation as “speculation” doesn’t mean it’s OK to keep speculating…but they can’t help themselves:

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So, of course, “The Daily Show” news team springs into action to report on the CNN angle of the story…and knocks it out of the park:

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Cue Mr. Henley, please:

We can do “The Innuendo,” we can dance and sing

When it’s said and done we haven’t told you a thing

We all know that crap is King, give us dirty laundry

The TV news is an ass, the sequel

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I failed to give credit where it was due when I wrote early yesterday about how television “news” ignored the dramatic events at the Texas state capitol.  There was a filibuster-to-adjournment over a bill that would drastically reduce the availability of abortions in Texas and that caused citizens to fill the galleries, and later to express their anger when they saw, plain as day, the lieutenant governor and his supporters try to railroad the process, and at one point saw that an official record of a vote had been changed.  I was annoyed that I couldn’t follow the story on television–it was not being covered on any of my local stations in Houston nor on any of the national cable “news” channels.  I was keeping up on Twitter.

What I neglected to do was to consult other avenues available on the Inter-Webs, and I was reminded of that today by Time and by Rachel Sklar.  The state senate was live-streaming itself, and the big show was available on other live streams, too, with some great work done by the Austin American-Statesman.  Congratulations to them all for recognizing a newsworthy event when they saw one and doing something to let the rest of us keep up.

Time: “As protesters massed in the gallery, the GOP majority attempted to close debate and bring a vote, and Democrats maneuvered to stall after their rivals forced [Senator Wendy] Davis to stop speaking on procedural grounds, well over 100,000 YouTube viewers were tuned to the channel–closer to 200,000 as zero hour approached. That’s a six-figure viewership, after primetime in most time zones, watching legislators argue over Robert’s Rules of Order and who properly held the floor.”

Sklar: “The clock struck midnight. Victory! They had run out the clock! The chants continued. Twitter exploded. But that was weird, it seemed like that vague roll call was still going on. What, exactly, was going on in that huddle by the Chair?

This is what was going on: They were taking the vote. It was after midnight, and suddenly that strict adherence to rules didn’t seem so strict anymore. Whispers were trickling out, confirmed by the AP: SB5 had passed, 17-12.

Twitter was going bananas. I checked the networks again. CNN was re-running Anderson Cooper. MSNBC was re-running Lawrence O’Donnell. Fox was re-running Greta van Susteren. Journalist Lizzie O’Leary tweeted, ‘Interesting choice you made tonight, cable news executives.'”

By now you’ve heard how it turned out: the good old boys intent on changing a law that most Texans thought didn’t need changing (and despite having failed in their effort to change the law during the regular session, by the way) were gobsmacked at the reaction of the crowd, yet tried to push ahead and took a vote on the bill after the deadline and declared victory, only to be confronted with not only the evidence of their failure to act within the rules of the chamber but evidence that someone messed with the records (Anthony De Rosa posted screenshots of the evidence, here and then here) and ultimately conceded defeat of the bill on other technical grounds.  And just as expected, Governor Haircut issued a call for another special session starting next week so legislators can have a third bite at the apple.

Yeah, but we didn’t need to see any of that live as it happened, did we…

UPDATE 6/28 8:00 am CT: Patti Kilday Hart at Houston’s Leading Information Source solves the mystery over the conflicting reports of when the Texas Senate voted on the abortion restriction bill, and it turns out there was no hanky-panky.  The respected secretary of the Senate Patsy Spaw explains that the vote started before the special session ended at midnight–she knows because it’s her job to check the clock before starting the roll call–and the rules allow such a vote to count; because of the noise in the chamber the staffer charged with recording the vote had to leave her desk to hear the result, and it was past midnight when she returned to her workstation to enter the result; someone later manually changed the date in the system to reflect the correct date of passage.  But the bill ultimately was not passed legally because, as Lt. Gov. Dewhurst said at the time, it hadn’t been signed by the presiding officer “in the presence of the Senate” as required by the state constitution: all official action of the special session ended the moment the senators left the chamber (because of the noise) after midnight, and could not resume when they returned some time later Wednesday morning.

The TV news is an ass, and they proved it tonight in Texas

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

From all reports received—on Twitter—the people of Texas just filled our state capitol building and shouted down the Republican majority in the senate as it tried to trample a Democratic senator who’d been filibustering since 11:00 a.m. to stop passage of a bill that would have forced the closure of almost every abortion provider in the state.  It sounds like an incredible thing that I would have dearly loved to witness.

Too bad, because every Houston television station on my cable system that prides itself on being first with the news…kept running its regular programming.  And every cable news network that tries to convince us they’re covering the news continued with their reruns of the evening’s talk shows.

Shame on every one of you.  Worthless!

Now Twitter tells me that the senate voted to pass the bill, but did so after the statutorily-mandated midnight adjournment of the legislature’s special session, so there’ll be court hearings coming.

Something big happened in Austin, Texas tonight, and almost all of us didn’t see it.  The TV News that insists it knows best about these things decided it wasn’t important enough, not interesting.  Let’s all look at the local Austin video later today and see just how wrong they are.

Thank you, Twitterverse, for doing the job that journalists are supposed to do.

Ten years on, a partial tally of the Iraq War’s toll on American journalism

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There’s no time like a brisk spring Sunday to take a minute to remember the failure of our vaunted American journalism to expose the criminality of the Bush Administration, and call to mind the more than 4000 American deaths and 32,000 American wounded it caused by creating and selling the fiction that got America into war in Iraq in 2003.

Not the entirety of either, I agree.  There were some reporters and columnists who tried to make clear to us the truth on the ground in Iraq, a truth that did not include the presence of either weapons of mass destruction or Al Qaeda.  But there were others—many others—who took the easy path of accepting the government’s word for it, who even became cheerleaders for a war that didn’t need to happen.  And certainly, not every person in a position of power and responsibility in Washington, D.C., was in on the con; but enough of them, high enough up in the administration, were complicit, that it worked.   We continue to pay the price, in lost lives, lost trust, and lost treasure.

So, thanks to Jack Shafer (@jackshafer) for this tweet:

He provides a link to a piece today by Greg Mitchell about his recent column, assigned and subsequently killed by The Washington Post.  The column is highly critical of the news media for its credulous performance covering the run-up to war, and by “highly critical” I mean it simply recalls who did what, and who didn’t do what, and when.

For awhile, back in 2003, Iraq meant never having to say you’re sorry.  The spring offensive had produced a victory in less than three weeks, with a relatively low American and Iraqi civilian death toll.  Saddam fled and George W. Bush and his team drew overwhelming praise, at least here at home.

But wait.  Where were the crowds greeting us as “liberators”?  Why were the Iraqis now shooting at each other–and blowing up our soldiers?  And where were those WMDs, bio-chem labs, and nuclear materials?  Most Americans still backed the invasion, so it still too early for mea culpas–it was more “my sad” than “my bad.”
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By 2004 it was clear that Saddam’s WMDs would never be found, but with another election season at hand, sorry was still the hardest word.  But a few very limited glimmers of accountability began to appear.  So let’s begin our catalog of the art of mea culpa and Iraq here.

Take the five minutes to read the rest, and remember it the next time you pick up a paper or tune in to the broadcast echo chambers.