Should Terrorism be Reported in the News? In the New York Times (read it here without registering), columnist John Tierney argues that the media is performing a public disservice by writing about all the suicide bombings in Iraq. This only serves to scare people, he claims, and serves the terrorists' ends. Some liberal bloggers have jumped on this op-ed as furthering the administration's attempts to hide the horrors of the Iraqi war from the American people, but I think the argument is more subtle than that.
Before you can figure out why Tierney is wrong, you need to understand that he has a point. Terrorism is a crime against the mind. The real target of a terrorist is morale, and press coverage helps him achieve his goal. I wrote in Beyond Fear (pages 242-3): Morale is the most significant terrorist target. Consider this thought experiment. Tiernan writes: I'm not advocating official censorship, but there's no reason the news media can't reconsider their own fondness for covering suicide bombings. So why is the argument wrong? Why Political Coverage is Broken. Aug.26 My keynote address at New News 2011, part of the Melbourne Writers Festival, co-sponsored by the Public Interest Journalism Foundation at Swinburne University of Technology.
(Melbourne, Australia, August 26, 2011.) This talk had its origins in my appearance about a year ago on the ABC’s Lateline with Leigh Sales. We were discussing election coverage that looks at the campaign as a kind of sporting event. Every day journalists can ask, “who’s ahead” and “what is the strategy for winning?” A perspective that appeals to political reporters, I said, because it puts them “on the inside, looking at the campaign the way the operatives do I then mentioned the ABC’s Sunday morning program, The Insiders.
So this is my theme tonight: how did we get to the point where it seems entirely natural for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to describe political journalists appearing on its air as “the insiders?” Three impoverished ideas: # 1. 2. 3. Politics as an inside game See what I mean? I do. Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive. Live Streaming July 2, 11 AM: Julian Assange, Slavoj Žižek, Amy Goodman. Matt Taibbi - Taibblog - Fareed Zakaria's Manifesto. Deep down we all have a Puritan belief that unless they suffer a good dose of pain, they will not truly repent. In fact, there has been much pain, especially in the financial industry, where tens of thousands of jobs, at all levels, have been lost.
But fundamentally, markets are not about morality. They are large, complex systems, and if things get stable enough, they move on.via Zakaria: A Capitalist Manifesto | Newsweek Business | Newsweek.com. From a distance I’ve always vaguely admired the skills of Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, who is maybe this country’s preeminent propagandist. Wheras most writers grow up dreaming of using their talents to stir up the passions, to inflame and amuse and inspire, Zakaria shoots for the opposite effect, taking controversial and explosive topics and trying to help rattled readers somehow navigate their way through them to yawns, lower heart rates, and states of benign unconcern. Gosh it sucks that the crisis happened, but it’s not as bad as people say. Media Bias. Author Info Sendhil MullainathanAndrei Shleifer Abstract There are two different types of media bias. One bias, which we refer to as ideology, reflects a news outlet's desire to affect reader opinions in a particular direction.
The second bias, which we refer to as spin, reflects the outlet's attempt to simply create a memorable story. We examine competition among media outlets in the presence of these biases. Whereas competition can eliminate the effect of ideological bias, it actually exaggerates the incentive to spin stories. Download Info If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. Bibliographic Info Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 9295.Length:Date of creation: Oct 2002Date of revision:Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:9295 Related research Keywords: Other versions of this item: References Citations Blog mentions Lists Statistics Access and download statistics Corrections. Perceived Bias. Biased About Bias: The hunt for ideology becomes an ideology. Andrew Breitbart is a paid assistant to the excitable editor of The Drudge Report; he cheerfully describes himself as "Matt Drudge's bitch.
" "Twelve years into this adult nightmare," he tells me and two dozen other reporters, "I woke up, after having grown up in Brentwood as this liberal Jewish kid, and sensed that something was wrong--I started to realize that I was a conservative. " We're at the Los Angeles Press Club, and Breitbart, co-author of the breezy Hollywood Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon--The Case Against Celebrity, is on a panel discussing campaign coverage and media bias, in that narrow window of time between the Swift Boat controversy and Rathergate.
"Every day I wake up in the battle about media bias," he says. "The best analogy I can give to you is this: Have you ever gone to like the Santa Monica Pier, and seen one of those holograms on the wall, and you're supposed to stare at it for a while, and there's supposed to be, like, a magical castle in it? 2. Think Political News Is Biased? Depends Who You Ask. COLUMBUS, Ohio – Are the news media politically biased against people with “your” beliefs? If you’re a Republican, your answer depends on who you talk to, and how often. That’s the finding of a new Ohio State University study: Republicans who frequently talk politics with other Republicans are more likely to believe that the so-called “liberal media” are biased against them than are Republicans who talk with like-minded people less often. The same didn’t hold true for Democrats in the study, whose feelings about media bias didn’t differ based on who they talked to. Engaging in frequent political debates with people who hold opposing beliefs didn’t have an effect on either Democrats or Republicans.
“When we judge whether news coverage is biased, we must have some kind of baseline in mind -- a perception of what is fair and balanced coverage. “People who talk with a set of contacts biased in their favor develop an unrealistic notion of what is fair and balanced,” he said. PressThink's Questions and Answers about Media Bias.
May 22, 2004 PressThink's Questions and Answers about Media Bias I don't think "unbiased journalism" is a particularly noble or desirable thing. The Q and A explains why... You have said (here) that you prefer to leave “bias” criticism to others. Of course I see it. There’s bias in the conversation our biased reporter has with his biased editor, bias in the call list he develops for his story, bias in his choice of events to go out and cover, bias in the details he writes down at the event, bias in his lead paragraph, bias in the last paragraph, bias when his editor cuts a graph. Bias, bias, bias.
“Bias, bias, bias.” No, I don’t think it is. The trouble arises (and this is the whole reason we have the bias debate) because American journalists some time ago took refuge in objectivity, and began to base their authority on a claim to have removed bias from the news. Things like what? At each step in these strategic removals, the justification was objectivity: producing more unbiased news. For Honest Media Bias. Mark Jurkowitz, the Boston Globe’s media reporter, writes today about rising complaints of media bias. Some see a liberal tilt, others a conservative one. Jurkowitz, noting the now-common observation that voters who watch Fox News overwhelmingly support George Bush while CNN watchers opt for John Kerry, points to the “growing evidence that citizens may be matching their news sources with their ideology.” I complain about the tilted media also, though the tilt I object to most is the one toward the corporate-defined mainstream.
Still, I don’t think there’s any alternative to filtering news through one lens or another. Jurkowitz adds this: Thomas Patterson, a professor of government and the press at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, has characterized this phenomenon as the ”cafeteria dimension of selecting an outlet to fit one’s own views…. News is always filtered. In the old days, competing daily newspapers presented an array of political positions. Debates: Bozell v. Alterman on Media Bias on National Review Online. Marginal Revolution: Media Bias and Bias about Media Bias. Maybe Media Bias Has Become a Dumb Debate, part one.
October 24, 2003 Maybe Media Bias Has Become a Dumb Debate, part one Denouncing bias in the media has become a dumb instrument. The cases keep coming. The charges keep flying. Often the subject--journalism--disappears. The only thing I ever saw that came close to Objective Journalism was a closed-circuit TV setup that watched shoplifters in the General Store at Woody Creek, Colorado. . — Hunter S. Listen up, everyone engaged in the you’re biased style of press criticism. Hear this, those who, in civic-spirited fashion, have formed groups left and right, here and there to document bias in the press. This is also for the good authors who have taken up media bias at book length, and everyone who likes to argue about those books—some quite good, some terrible—and everyone who likes to shout at bias before blatant instances of bias just seen on television.
All within ear of reason, I have six questions. Questions 1.) 2.) 3.) 4.) 5.) 6.) Courtesy of Daniel Dezner, here is Brian C. Asymmetrical Information: The Media Bias Committee's Initial Findings. Restore Democracy in New York Elections Democracy is spreading around the world. Recent elections in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine give hope for greater freedom and peace. But in New York, home of the Statue of Liberty and the first U.S. Congress, democracy has practically disappeared. Help us restore fair elections. Read More... August 08, 2005 From the desk of Jane Galt: Public Service Announcement I'm guest-blogging at Instapundit this week.
Posted at 11:13 AM | Comments (28) | TrackBack (2) | Technorati inbound links August 05, 2005 Question of the day How long does it take after your average nuclear explosion for the kill zone to become liveable again? Posted at 03:41 PM | Comments (31) | TrackBack (0) | Technorati inbound links Taking recommendations . . . for campsites within reasonable travelling distance of New York City, with hiking suitable for a not particularly athletic journalist type, good for at least two days of activity.
Intelligent Design Redux. Can the Media be So Liberal? The Economics of Media Bias. "Media Bias" Revisited. Well, it was enough to make a cat laugh, as Mark Twain says. Normally, I don’t like to write about "media bias. " You can’t have an argument with someone who doesn’t argue in good faith, and those who deny the charge of bias are nearly always doing so in bad faith. The privileged position occupied by the media in the national debate depends absolutely on frequent and vehement official insistence on their neutrality and "objectivity" — even though these ritual and unbelievable assertions fly in the face of the obvious truth that everyone is biased except those who simply don’t care.
Apologists for "objectivity" acknowledge this fundamental truth on the one hand while insisting on the other on their "professional" qualification not to be affected by it, an absurd position. As a rule, the guardians of journalistic purity are too busy denying bias in themselves to be quite comfortable saying tu quoque. In short, there cannot be two opinions about something like air pollution. [Top][Back] What's behind the scorn for Wall Street protests? - Glenn Greenwald. It’s unsurprising that establishment media outlets have been condescending, dismissive and scornful of the ongoing protests on Wall Street. Any entity that declares itself an adversary of prevailing institutional power is going to be viewed with hostility by establishment-serving institutions and their loyalists.
That’s just the nature of protests that take place outside approved channels, an inevitable by-product of disruptive dissent: those who are most vested in safeguarding and legitimizing establishment prerogatives (which, by definition, includes establishment media outlets) are going to be hostile to those challenges. As the virtually universal disdain in these same circles for WikiLeaks (and, before that, for the Iraq War protests) demonstrated: the more effectively adversarial it is, the more establishment hostility it’s going to provoke. Some of these critiques are ludicrous. There’s a vast and growing apparatus of intimidation designed to deter and control citizen protests. Andrew Ross Sorkin’s assignment editor. (updated below) The Occupy Wall Street protest has been growing in numbers, respectability, and media attention for several weeks now. Despite that, The New York Times‘ financial columnist who specializes in Wall Street coverage, Andrew Ross Sorkin, has neither visited the protests nor written about them — until today.
In a column invoking the now-familiar journalistic tone of a zoologist examining a bizarre new species of animal discovered in the wild, Sorkin explains what prompted him to finally pay attention (via Michael Whitney): I had gone down to Zuccotti Park to see the activist movement firsthand after getting a call from the chief executive of a major bank last week, before nearly 700 people were arrested over the weekend during a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge. “Is this Occupy Wall Street thing a big deal?” As I wandered around the park, it was clear to me that most bankers probably don’t have to worry about being in imminent personal danger.
Why Establishment Media & the Power Elite Loathe Occupy Wall Street. Over the past ten days, hundreds of people have occupied Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan in New York as part of Occupy Wall Street. Citizens have faced down a city that has fortified Wall Street with blockades so corporate criminals responsible for the economic collapse in 2008 can avoid confrontations with angry, passionate Americans.
Citizens have camped out and held daily marches in the face of a massive police presence, which has sometimes been very intimidating as individuals have been arbitrarily picked off and arrested. And last weekend, the police corralled them into an area near Union Square and proceeded to make a number of violent arrests; eighty to one hundred were arrested on Saturday. The organizers, who pride themselves in being “leaderless,” have sought to bring together a diverse crowd of various political persuasions.
They have rallied behind the slogan, “We are the 99%,” to show they will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the top 1% in America.