Journalism: January 2019 Archives
Media Miscues in the Covington Narrative | City Journal
"Reporters have always made errors, but mistakes should occur independent of ideology. What we're seeing instead is a pattern--media miscues always occur in the same direction, in favor of the liberal perspective. Over the last two years, countless "bombshell" reports have signaled grave danger for the Trump presidency, up to and including impeachment or resignation. Trump's son got an early look at the Wikileaks pages; Anthony Scaramucci was tied to a dodgy Russian hedge fund; Michael Cohen met Russians in Prague; Paul Manafort met Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London; James Comey would testify that Trump was under investigation; and so on. As outrage ebbs from each discredited story, it is relegated to the memory hole in time for the next one to emerge....
"Ever since Trump's arrival on the national stage, the media have devoted themselves to destroying him, and, by extension, the ideologies that supposedly account for his popularity--white supremacy and toxic masculinity. Major media outlets have shed any pretense to rigor or probity, even as they make ostentatious shows of 'fact-checking' the president's statements.
"Obsession with white privilege focuses maximal scrutiny on any incident that tracks with the right narrative. Over the last year, we've seen a spate of cellphone videos capturing petty disputes amplified across social media and reported in the national media--as long as the footage depicts a white person complaining to or about a black person doing something relatively minor. Whether the incidents in question have anything to do with race is unimportant. Pushing the narrative that Trump has ignited a firestorm of white racism across the country requires a continual flow of stories making that point, regardless of accuracy or context. The relentless search for Trumpian villainy has precast the meaning of every story. All that remains is to fill in the blanks."
Heads Should Roll at National Review -- Jack Cashill
Jack Cashill writes about NR's lust for respectability, as demonstrated by the pains they took to distance themselves from his investigative work on TWA Flight 800 and Bill Ayers' role in the authorship of Dreams from My Father, and most recently demonstrated in their knee-jerk response to the Covington Catholic video:
"In truth, National Review editors have been dancing to the left's tune since its founding in 1955. To justify its condemnation of the John Birch Society in the early 1960s, one of its editors gave away the game, writing, 'We can't afford to jeopardize the grudging status we've earned in the Liberal community.'
"For all of founder William Buckley's virtues, he overly worried about the 'status' the liberal community begrudged him. As Lowry once noted, 'Mr. Buckley's first great achievement was to purge the American right of its kooks.'
"Over dinner with Lowry [in 2001] and just one other person, I talked about the documentary I was working on at the time. The subject was TWA Flight 800. He gave me the look I would come to recognize from my conservative betters. It was the "kook" look. He showed zero interest in the subject.
"In September 2008, I introduced the theory, for which the evidence was overwhelming, that Bill Ayers had a major role in the writing of Obama's memoir 'Dreams from My Father.'
"At 'The Corner,' on National Review Online, Andy McCarthy called my analysis 'thorough, thoughtful, and alarming--particularly his deconstruction of the text in Obama's memoir and comparison to the themes, sophistication and signature phraseology of Bill Ayers' memoir....'
"...I am told that McCarthy caught a lot of heat internally for jeopardizing National Review's 'grudging status' among liberals. What I know for sure is that the link from Coates' article to McCarthy's goes nowhere.
"I suspect McCarthy's review was scrubbed almost as quickly as Frankovich's. I was unaware of it until I read Remnick's attack on it two years later."
Russell Baker: 'When Writing Is Fun, It's Not Very Good' - The Atlantic
"What I find about reporting now is you don't know what you don't know, because there aren't reporters there anymore. There's nobody covering closely the things they used to. The real valuable reporter is the guy who goes to the beat every day.
"That's the only way to do it. It's the guy who goes every day and says 'Hi,' talks to the secretaries, bumps into people in the corridors, urinates beside them in the men's room, they wash their hands together. And pretty soon he knows. You want to know what's going on in City Hall? We don't have many of those guys anymore. They're the people who have taken the buyout. We have too many stars now. I was aware of that when I started doing the [New York Times] column. I had to give up reporting and I hated it. I loved reporting. I just loved bumming around the Senate and talking to those people."
Satellite Image Guide for Journalists and Media - Pierre Markuse
"So you would like to use a satellite image in your article and you would like to explain it to your viewers? Here is a short guide covering some of the most frequently asked questions and giving some general explanations on satellite images."
Article covers image resolution, benefits of infrared and false-color images, using the Sentinel Earth Observation Browser to find an image, using open-source tools like GIMP to enhance or annotate an image and GIS tools like QGIS to overlay boundaries and other map features.
Pictures of You (#162) | www.splicetoday.com
Reflections from Russ Smith, founder of Baltimore's City Paper and the New York Press.
"I remember advice that Bob Roth, editor and part-owner of The Chicago Reader (which, by '77 had already zoomed in that city, six years after its similarly humble beginnings), gave me, saying that his editorial philosophy was to ignore major news events, even if they happened in Chicago--like the Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in '79--and focus on obscure topics that were elegantly written and researched.
"Scratching my head, I asked why, and he responded with an answer that became gospel: that people picked up the Reader for real estate classifieds, listings of events not found in the dailies and the small advertisements for independent retailers that would appeal to (the term wasn't yet in vogue) a yuppie demographic."
How To Write A Takedown Request Without Running Afoul of the Streisand Effect | Popehat
"Nobody wants a defamatory attack upon them to be read by a hundred times more eyes as a result of their own efforts. No lawyer drafting a cease and desist letter wants to become an internet meme. So how, in an internet culture that birthed the Streisand Effect and Carreon Effect, can you vindicate your rights without making things worse for yourself? How -as a victim of defamation or copyright infringement, or as the attorney for such a person -- can you send a takedown demand without finding yourself infamous?"
The dark arts of the press are on full display - Conservative Review
"Because if the press believes it is this reasonable to consider muting the voice of a sitting president of the United States simply because they disagree with him, what do you think they are doing every other day of the week when it comes to shaping the narratives of the day?"
