CJR:

Eleven seconds. That’s how long the exchange lasted between Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain and Miami Herald political reporter Marc Caputo during a campaign swing through South Florida last week.

During a multi-city visit that took Cain to a senior center in Sweetwater, Miami’s Little Havana, Coral Springs, West Palm Beach and Palm Beach, the most newsworthy moment, judging by the resulting press coverage, occurred in those 11 seconds.

While in Sweetwater walking toward the senior center, Caputo, his video camera aimed at Cain, said to the candidate, “I want to ask you about, do you mind, about Cuba, about your Cuba policy, what you think about the wet-foot, dry-foot policy?”

Cain, looking and sounding puzzled, answered, “The wet-foot, dry-foot policy?”

[...]

[W]hile the Florida media did a good job of capturing the entirety of Cain’s Florida trip, media outside the state often took the easy way out: grabbing the tidbit about speaking “Cuban” and/or the “wet-foot, dry-foot” exchanges, both of which served to confirm the (again, not unfounded) media narrative that Candidate Cain does not have a good grasp of things foreign policy. That became the story —We’ve confirmed our hunch, again! Our work here is done. The episode may have revealed something about Cain, but the way it was covered revealed as much about the media. In the process, voters’ voices went missing.

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Now that we’re learning something about Cain’s accusers and how the National Restaurant Association settlements agreements were handled, Politico’s unwillingness to give us specific details in that mega-story of theirs is starting to make some sense, at least to me.

What we’re now discovering is that the facts are much less troubling than what was ginned up in our collective imaginations that were fueled only by Politico’s maddeningly vague allegations and innuendo. So now you have to wonder if the 144 story (and counting) feeding frenzy Politico ’s journOlisted up over the last ten days wasn’t all smoke and mirrors designed to cover up the fact that their original story was nowhere near worthy of the Normandy-like roll out they organized and commanded.

The there just isn’t there.

Jonathan — He Who Targets Private Citizens For His Precious One – Martin and Herman Cain

Do I personally believe Politico intentionally held back certain facts that would’ve subdued the sensationalism their vague innuendo created?

What is it our esteemed journalist class likes to say? I’m just raising questions.

Politico’s playing for keeps in 2012 and the willingness of left-of-center media watchdogs like ProPublica, Howard Kurtz, and now the “Columbia Journalism Review” to question its story and suggest it ease up on the feeding frenzy proves it.

Moreover, I’m looking at the polls for the lay of the land, and at least for right now, it’s looking like Politico did more damage to itself than they did to Herman Cain.

CJR:

Yet, while the allegations against Cain are significant, it is irresponsible the extent to which some segments of the political press has allowed them to dominate the political news cycle these past nine days.

Much coverage has had a sort of frenzied, single-minded focus that has come at the cost of coverage of just about everything and everyone else.

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The cover story in the current issue of Columbia Journalism Review is this article by Columbia University president Lee Bollinger calling for an American ‘World Service’:  “ … a media institution with sufficient funding to bring the highest-quality American journalism to the global public forum.”  To paraphrase Mel Brooks, it’s good to be the president, but nepotism is not the only reason the CJR gave such precedence, if you’ll excuse the pun, to a vapid liberal treatise that would make an Obama speechwriter blush; at every turn, Bollinger’s article perfectly encapsulates the elitist liberal academic view of the world.

After the usual Freidmanesque boilerplate about the world being interconnected/flat/insert cliché here, Bollinger explains that we must engage with it through institutions such as the university and the press, both of which, he informs us, “…are concerned with providing objective and accurate information, ideas, and analyses that we need in order to understand and act in our world” (I’ll pause here for the reader to pick himself up off the floor and rub his aching sides).  But as Bollinger surveys the global mediascape, he finds it dominated by the BBC, Al Jazeera, France 24 and China’s CCTV.  Sure, the US has CNN, but he yearns for a more authoritative – i.e. state-sponsored – American voice.  Bollinger offers the “highly respected” BBC World Service as a model of what a state-funded American global broadcast operation might look like; unfortunately, his exemplification comes as the corporation is being taken to court in the UK to force it to disclose the findings of an internal report on its anti-Israeli bias.

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The Columbia Journalism Review is a self-appointed “ombudsman” of the press. It’s mission statement is as follows:

Columbia Journalism Review’s mission is to encourage and stimulate excellence in journalism in the service of a free society. It is both a watchdog and a friend of the press in all its forms, from newspapers to magazines to radio, television, and the Web. Founded in 1961 under the auspices of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, CJR examines day-to-day press performance as well as the forces that affect that performance. The magazine is published six times a year, and offers a deliberative mix of reporting, analysis, criticism, and commentary. CJR.org, our Web site, delivers real-time criticism and reporting, giving CJR a vital presence in the ongoing conversation about the media. Both online and in print, Columbia Journalism Review is in conversation with a community of people who share a commitment to high journalistic standards in the U.S. and the world.

High goals. Professional journalists read this website / publication and are supposed to use it as a gauge to see if they’re doing their jobs properly. These are the alleged journalism experts. The “watchers” of the watchmen (the press). They’re meant to hold journalists accountable. They set them straight, if you will.

So I was shocked when I came across an item in their business press section, “The Audit.” This piece about the current coverage of the debt ceiling fiasco going on in Congress is a doozy. One section, in particular, made me literally say “bull[expletive deleted]!” out loud.

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JournoList scandal is back and prepare for it to be a driving force in the news for quite some time. The Daily Caller published an article tonight indicating they’ve obtained emails from the JournoList and the initial details are as damning as we expected when the list-serv, founded by the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein in 2007, surfaced with the Dave Weigel kerfuffle last month.

Snippets from the article below, but make sure to read the whole thing at the Daily Caller and return to Big Journalism early and often as we unpack the details that emerge and track the fallout from this seminal event in the history of left-wing media bias.  It’s unclear exactly what the Daily Caller has, but there’s certainly no indication from this article they’ve already laid all their cards out on the table.

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.” (more…)

Poet Ogden Nash knew the score:

…if called by a panther, don’t anther.

And that’s exactly what America’s liberal agenda-setting media has done. It has not answered the “New” Black Panther’s call daring it to report on voter intimidation by two paramilitary dressed Panthers, one of whom was brandishing a club, outside a Philadelphia polling place in 2008.

Bartle Bull, a former civil rights lawyer and publisher of the leftist The Village Voice, a paper in which I have been published, said it’s “the most blatant form of voter intimidation I’ve ever seen.” Worse, our media agenda setters cower in silence behind their constitutional protection at the prospect of digging into the corroborated sworn testimony of Department of Justice whistle-blower Christian Adams that the Obama DOJ won’t prosecute those Panthers because it has embraced a politically correct policy of not charging blacks for civil rights violations. (more…)

**Post UPDATED at bottom.

“We got him. We got him.” – Mediaite White House reporter Tommy Christopher to a few people just after badgering Andrew Breitbart with a race-baiting question.

My first CPAC and my first first-person look at how the corrupt left-wing media operates. I can’t pretend that anything surprised me, because as Mama used to always say, “Evil is as evil does.” But yes, Max Blumenthal, Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher and some guy named Daryle Jenkins with something called One People’s Project stalked into CPAC like three old-media hitmen ready and eager to do some dirty work. So eager, in fact, that you could picture them the night before lying in bed at their parents’ house with visions of ambushing right-wingers in their heads.

There was only one problem: the unholy three appear to have forgotten that in this digital age everything’s changed. It‘s no longer just the elites who come heavy. We all carry videos cameras and we all have access to a distribution system Al Gore named the Internet. So a funny thing happened while Max and Daryle were driving dad’s car home, maliciously editing manipulated footage in their heads (you know, kind of like this – gee, Max, what happened to Larry O’Connor catching you in a big fat lie? ), Big Journalism published the unedited footage for the whole world to see, and what the world saw was a raw look at how Journalistic Rendition operates.

And in the case of Tommy Christopher and Mediaite, they did our job for us. (more…)

Greg Marx at the Columbia Journalism Review has come out with his report on the James O’Keefe/Max Blumenthal/Salon dust-up last week, and the results are not pretty:

UNFORCED ERROR AT SALON

“O’Keefe’s race problem” story goes astray on key detail

… At issue here is a more specific point: Blumenthal’s claim in the original story that, “Together, O’Keefe and [fellow conservative activist Marcus] Epstein planned an event in August 2006 that would wed their extreme views on race with their ambitions.” That was the line that most directly tied O’Keefe to Epstein, whose record includes a subsequent arrest for assaulting an African-American woman, and that most directly gave him ownership of the event.

The problem is that, as it appeared in the Salon story, the source for the claim was unclear. And, as became apparent over the next couple days, Blumenthal’s sources—including Daryle Jenkins, director of a racism watchdog group called the One People’s Project, which monitored the event, and a pseudonymous freelance photographer known as Isis—did not actually know whether O’Keefe had planned the gathering.

But as a journalist, it’s incumbent upon Blumenthal—and any outlet that publishes his work—to distinguish between what his sources actually observed and what they believe to be true. A journalist’s claim to an audience’s trust is based on the implicit promise that he will take that step. And that responsibility, obviously, doesn’t go away just because you’ve got a good story or a worthy target. (more…)