I’d like to tell you about a couple of changes we’ve made to this site in recent weeks. One is a new home-page feature, “Elsewhere on the Web,” aimed at letting readers know about some excellent watchdog reporting. As news becomes more and more an online venture, a lot of good work is put out there and then just disappears. That was a problem before there was a Web; now it’s a bigger one. Our plan is to link to worthwhile watchdog stories as we spot them. A few other online groups are doing the same thing. One of them, the new Pro Publica, is aggregating items on a fairly large scale.

You’ll find “Elsewhere” right underneath our top features in Column 1. We’ll keep a few of the most recent “elsewheres” live; and right under them—“More Links from Our Favorite Sites”—will be ones we ran earlier. Some of the older pieces, as well as the newer ones, may be stories reporters and editors will want to replicate. If you see something you feel we should include, such as a particular story, or a site we should look at regularly, won’t you notify us at editors@niemanwatchdog.org?

Our second change is to make the site more interactive. It wasn’t hard to append comments to articles before; now it’s easier. There’s no need for registration or sign-in. At any item, simply click on ‘Read/submit comments’ and get started. To keep up with people’s comments, turn to our Discussions page. Whenever a reader appends comments, that article goes to the top of the page. You can add comments to any item on the site, not only the recent ones. We invite you to take part and help make NiemanWatchdog as interactive as possible. Let’s hear from you!

We’ve made a few other changes. Previously searches had to be done separately for the main section and for our blogs. Now you can search the two together. Also, recognizing the growing prevalence of wider monitors, we’ve widened our page accordingly. And we’ve changed the colors a little, too.

“Say it Ain’t So, Joe” was the legendary plea of a young fan when famed baseball hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson, testified to his part in throwing the games during the great Chicago Black Sox scandal of 1919. (The boy apparently was more grammatical and said “it isn’t so, is it Joe?” but media hype being the same then as now, “ain’t” became the blazing headline that echoes through the years.)

Now many in Obama’s left-wing base of idealists, those among the cadre who came 75,000 strong to hear him in Oregon, those minions who went door to door in an historical primary of Hope for a New Kind of Candidate, those chatterers who supported him on a gajillion blogs, are thinking “Say it ain’t so, O.”

Negative reactions to Obama’s shift to the center are flooding the web, television, newspapers and magazines. First he was attacked for his support of the Supreme Court decision to overturn a gun ban in the city of DC. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence emphasized their slippery slope plea for money by posting the NRA’s immediate crowing that this was “just the opening salvo”, to use gun-ho language. “The NRA is going to see that every American has equal access to guns.”

Then came Obama’s decision to join other Democrats who are supporting the FISA bill “compromise”– which grants immunity to telecom companies for past warrantless spying. Even chief cheerleader and apologist for all things Obama, Keith Olberman, has begun to challenge him. Some media bloggers, pundits and citizen-journalists argue that he had no choice; as a junior senator he didn’t have the clout to change the inevitable vote and so why give ammo to “soft on terror” smears. But an outraged ACLU pitched a plea to members, many of whom support Obama, blasting senators who are caving on a bill that would “let telecommunication companies off scot free after they broke the law by supplying mountains of your personal information to the government without a warrant.” Read the rest of this entry »

This first appeared as the “Curator’s Corner” essay in the Summer 2008 edition of Nieman Reports.

Nieman Fellows visiting Harvard’s Memorial Church often wonder about the last name engraved on the church’s south wall, listing those who died in World War II: “John Brigham Terry, Lucius W. Nieman Fellow.”

It had been a bit of a mystery to us at the foundation as well, until the fall of 2001 when Garrett M. Graff, a Harvard College senior, stopped by Lippmann House to talk about his plan to write his senior paper about John Terry. Garrett found information in the Nieman Foundation files and papers of the curator, Louis M. Lyons, in the Harvard archives.

The war years presented an interesting challenge to the young foundation. In the fall of 1942, Lyons considered whether to suspend the fellowships for the duration and sent letters to the editors of 40 major newspapers asking for their thoughts. The editors were divided, but Lyons and the university thought the arguments from those who favored continuing the program to be more compelling. One Midwestern editor wrote, “There is a vast need now for clear thinking on the problems that will come like an avalanche when the Axis powers go down.”

Lyons’ recommendation to President Conant included modifications for the 1943-44 selection cycle. Candidates had to be “outside the draft in age or military availability.” And their study plans should equip them “to deal with postwar problems.” Lyons considered allowing women to apply, acknowledging that “women are flowing into the news offices in unprecedented numbers.”
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Here are four lunacies the news media tried to foist off on me recently, four of many, I fear.

1. A local television station was bursting with pride because one of its employees had donated 77 gallons of blood last year to the Blood Center of Iowa. In addition to the breathless on-air report, the website of WHO-TV even crowed, “He donated 77 gallons, not pints.”

2. In reporting on the women’s shot put results from the Olympic trials, the agate in the Des Moines Register said the winning distance was 213 feet, 11 inches.

3. Over the weekend, Chris Matthews asked a panel of banal babblers, which will Americans choose, “change or security”?

4. On the CBS evening news Monday night (June 30), viewers were told that the pressing issues in the presidential campaign were Sen. Barrack Obama’s patriotism and Sen. John McCain’s military service record.

I weary of running screaming from our living room. It’s not easy on my wife, Joan, either. But is this what we have come to expect and accept from the news media? Are these the fruits of the First Amendment envisioned by James Madison?

Okay, so a few phone calls, and WHO-TV changed its Web site to report that the employee last year reached the 77-gallon level in blood donation, not that he had been wrung dry by vampires in one year.

And the agate shot put result — I guess the distances were for the discus — is silly on the face of it.

But the folly of political news coverage shows no signs of abating. Isn’t anyone thinking out there? How could “Change” and “Security” be viewed as mutually exclusive? What is meant by “Change” — following the Constitution? What is meant by “Security” — not being under government surveillance?

And what a hoot to suggest that patriotism and military service are major issues in a Presidential campaign — when just about any thinking person could tick off 100 or more salient issues.

This is what we have come to: the hope that, at best, news coverage will be irrelevant to the Presidential campaign. Not exactly what Madison, Thomas Jefferson and others envisioned, but apparently it is what the free press has foisted upon us.

The election may depend upon it: How to instruct the average American voter to discern the difference between a poisonous lie and a truth based on evidence. A fine June 30 Washington Post story written by Eli Saslow vividly and painfully illustrates the point.

The writer tells the tale of Jim Peterman, a 74-year-old retiree of Findlay, Ohio, torn between what he sees on television about Barack Obama and what he hears from his neighbors. The neighbors are passing on rumors including that Obama is a Muslim and is unpatriotic, while television ads portray him as a Christian family man who loves his country. “It’s like you’re hearing about two men with nothing in common,” Peterman says. “It makes it impossible to figure out what’s true, or what you can believe.”

The Obama campaign has established a “Fight the Smears” Web site, but it may be fighting an uphill battle because the rot goes deeper than we can know. Susan Jacoby, a former Washington Post reporter,has written a book called “the Age of American Unreason” in which she traces the many ways in which citizens of this country dwell in a world of willed ignorance: not understanding basic history, democratic principles, scientific thinking, rules of evidence, even the difference between fantasy and reality. How can we make up for that abysmal deficit in an election season, when it is especially vital that voters base their decisions on fact, not fiction?

Many years ago when I was associate dean at the Columbia University journalism school, the dean - former managing editor of Newsweek, Osborn Elliott - and I taught a class for undergraduates called “Critical Evaluation of the News.” The idea was to challenge young people to weigh the evidence before them, even when it is published in established media like The New York Times. Perhaps a course like that should be taught in high schools around the country because without knowing how to evaluate information critically the average citizen is not only flying blind, but a patsy for malicious rumor-mongers.

I would also like to second a proposal by Eboo Patel, a Washington Post blogger and director of an interfaith youth group. He suggests that John McCain should stand up and speak out against the lies, misrepresentations, and prejudices being propagated about his opponent. After all, Obama regularly praises McCain for his service to the country. This kind of straight talk could elevate the dialogue between the candidates to where they are being judged by their true character, their beliefs and proposals, rather than an underground trail of hate-filled smears.

If you go to Page 17 of the national edition of the June 25 New York Times, stop at a story headed “Bipartisan Group to Speak Out on Detainees,” then scroll down to the ninth paragraph, you will find the following statement by retired Major General Antonio Taguba:

“There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

Taguba made his stunning statement in the preface to a report released June 17 by Physicians for Human Rights. Sounded newsworthy to me, so when I could find no mention of it on or about the 17th in the Times I e-mailed the paper’s public editor questioning the omission. Perhaps he prodded Times editors to get Taguba’s statement into the paper.

Even so, a buried reference in a story a week late at the bottom of a page deep inside the Times doesn’t begin to do justice to what the paper itself described as Taguba’s “blistering” accusation. After all, the general led the investigation of what he found to be “horrific” acts of abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison; he charged in his 2004 report that actions at the prison constituted “grave breaches of international law.”
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Out of a decent respect for the memory of Tim Russert, I have held back from commenting on how most of the leading television organizations – CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC – handled the news of his untimely death.

Certainly it was appropriate to announce his passing and to add brief encomiums about a fellow newsperson who had filled his role well. But five whole days, hours of precious news time, lauding somebody who, after all, was not a major figure on the world stage? What’s going on here?

I interpret it as an example of the wider phenomenon of journalists so ga-ga about their perceived celebrity that they, like Narcissus, can’t help peering into the river to admire their image. It’s part of a growing tendency for television journalists to interview and talk about other journalists instead of going out to talk with people beyond their inner circle who, just possibly, might have different knowledge to offer..

It smacks of incestuousness, of vicarious self-aggrandizement, as though an on-air person could somehow be promoted to somebody truly important, somebody who actually passed laws, or led armies, or did anything beyond interviewing and talking. If Tim Russert could be made to seem the equivalent of a president, a prime minister, a talented artist, a hands-on healer, then why can’t we other reporters, too, claim a statue on the village square or our place on Mount Rushmore?

This illustrates that the inner circle of reporters is so out of touch that its members could think the death of one of their own trumps news about the ordinary people who need vital information – what we call news. Reporters, the folks who should have been minding the store, were too busy trying to turn one of their own into a star in the firmament to take notice.

While he may possibly have flat feet and at 55 is probably a bit long in the tooth for battle, gung ho neocon William Kristol still could join the “all volunteer” army if he wanted to serve in some capacity. After all, this is a war that he and other neocons have championed– for someone else to fight, that is. In his New York Times column, Kristol criticizes an anti-war MoveOn.org ad that shows a mother holding her baby boy, Alex, and saying “And so, John McCain, when you say you would stay in Iraq for 100 years, were you counting on Alex? Because if you were, you can’t have him.”

Kristol sees a different message than many who understand a mother’s fear of a child growing into a war viewed as senseless horror. And she would be backed by such war heroes as Republican senator Chuck Hagel and Democratic senator James Webb, who have protested our continuing presence in Iraq. But, says Kristol, the ad is “barely disguised in its disdain for those who have chosen to serve—and its contempt for those parents who might be proud of sons and daughters who are serving.” Kristol quotes an unidentified mother of an “actual soldier” who responded to the woman in the ad: “does that mean that she wants other people’s sons to keep the wolves at bay so that her son can live a life of complete narcissism?”

Kristol praises the fact that we “live in a free country with a volunteer Army” and that Alex, when he grows up, would be free to join or not. So the “you can’t have him” sentiment is obviously moot. What Kristol does not mention is that he and his fellow hawks are totally free of any sacrifice in a war that, like Vietnam, asked everything of a few and nothing of most. Read the rest of this entry »

I know, it’s a rule of the mainstream press. If the issue is not going anywhere, it’s not worth much of a story. Of course, if it’s not given much of a story, it’s not going anywhere. It’s like that old conundrum about the tree falling in the forest. Here are a couple of trees.

I’m thinking, first, of the June resolution by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, calling for the impeachment of President Bush. I would venture to guess that most of the reporters who cover Washington, politics or national security probably agree that if any president deserves to be impeached, it’s Bush, for getting the nation into a war on false pretenses, for consenting to the torture of prisoners and innocents, for circumventing the Constitution’s guarantees against illegal searches, wiretaps and the right of habeas corpus.

But Kucinich’s speech introducing his resolution made six paragraphs inside the Washington Post. That was followed by a snotty column by Dana Milbank belittling Kucinich for the more than four hours he spent reading the resolution into the Congressional Record. Another Post blog suggested that his threat to press his resolution would go nowhere and was simply a “fantasy.” He got similar treatment in every other newspaper I read, and even less on television news. Only the British and French press reported it prominently.
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Maybe it’s just the fact that I’ve got some plaque in my arteries, too, but Tim Russert’s tragic and untimely death at age 58 raises some unsettling questions that it seems to me the media should be exploring.

The first is: Why should we have any confidence in our health care system? Isn’t it time to lay to rest the propaganda that it’s the best in the world? Doesn’t the public need to know above all that “medical science” involves too much guesswork to be called a real science?

Tim Russert seems to have had what most of us would deem excellent health care. But that’s just the point. His internist told MSNBC that he had been diagnosed with coronary artery disease, but it was controlled with medication and exercise. Russert even did well on a stress test he took in late April.

And now he’s dead. An autopsy showed that the famous NBC commentator had an enlarged heart and that coronary plaque ruptured an artery, causing coronary thrombosis. There is something wrong with this picture. The media should dig into it and not just shrug and say, well, that’s the way it goes sometimes. Read the rest of this entry »