Columbia Journalism “Professor of Professional Practice” Sree Sreenivasan, still smarting from an encounter with James O’Keefe, seems to have declared himself the ultimate arbiter of what is, or is not, citizen journalism:
PEOPLE LIKE O’KEEFE THINK THEY ARE ACTING LIKE JOURNALISTS. They think having a camera makes them a journalist. Instead, this is a cheap caricature of journalism…
No, Prof. Sreenivasan, scribes who hide behind the varnish of objectivity to sell a political agenda are what pass for cheap caricatures of journalism.
The erosion of faith in media began before O’Keefe was born, and “professors of professionalism” like Sreenivasan enable it. There is no such thing as journalistic objectivity–accuracy, yes, but objectivity, no. Objectivity is a fairy tale told to idealistic activists who want to enter journalism so they can “change things”; they already know there’s no glory in the role of an “objective observer.”
Granted, there are a few who strive for objectivity as an ideal–but they are rare, and they won’t be found under the tutelage of Sreenivasan or fellow Columbia professor Dale Maharidge.
Prof. Sreenivasan has the audacity to lecture citizen journalists–who report facts that the mainstream media leaves out for the sake of “objectivity”–simply because they have, rightfully, reclaimed journalism? Please. Go troll on Facebook and whine about it some more, “professional journalists.”
Perhaps Prof. Sreenivasan believes that citizen journalists are responsible for polling such as this:
The continual decline of public trust in media is not the fault of James O’Keefe or other citizen journalists–citizen journalists were created in response to it.
People like O’Keefe have it in for professional journalists.
Could Prof. Sreenivasan be more self-exalting and misleading? Do “professional journalists” send out profanity-laden emails to people with whom they disagree? Is this what Sreenivasan calls “journalism?”
In a new undercover investigation, my colleague James O’Keefe and I reveal the apparent collusion between Ohio public sector unions and their purportedly “objective” allies in media and academia as they try to undermine public support for new labor reforms.
Union front groups We Are Ohio (WAO) and Progress Ohio are currently promoting a “no” vote on Issue 2, which is a referendum on Ohio’s Senate Bill 5, to be held on Election Day 2011 (November 8). SB 5 requires public employees to contribute a modest amount more towards their benefits, to close the gap somewhat with their private sector counterparts.
In attempting to defeat SB 5, union advocates have loudly trumpeted a study by Rutgers Professor Jeffrey Keefe that claims that public employees already earn less private sector workers do in comparable jobs.
For instance, Jeff Bell of Columbus Business First reported that when inquiring about public employees’ superior pay and benefits, WAO spokeswoman Melissa Fazekas “quickly steered [him] to a study on the compensation issue completed this year by Jeffrey Keefe.”
However, Jason Richwine of the Heritage Foundation and Andrew Biggs (no relation to Jax) of the American Enterprise Institute have found Keefe’s study to be, in Biggs’ words, “a piece of junk.”
In their own September 14th study, Richwine and Biggs conclude that while public employees receive 2.5 percent less in wages than their private counterparts, “when pay and benefits are taken into consideration public workers received 31.2 percent more in total compensation.” When other factors are taken into account, such as job security, “Ohio public-sector workers are paid 43.4percent more.” Richwine and Biggs conclude that under SB 5, public employees would still maintain this edge over private sector workers.
Keefe also works for the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a Washington, DC think tank that boasts that it is “beholden to no one; we say what we think is true regardless of who might not want to hear it.” The EPI also claims that it “conducts research according to the rigorous standards of objectivity,” and “provides data … that allows for a clear, unbiased understanding of the economy’s effect on the living standards of working Americans.”
James and I had an agent at Project Veritas contact Keefe, posing as “Chris Fowler,” a researcher for a hedge fund manager who had chosen to work alongside the Ohio Education Association. “Fowler” offered Keefe a commission in exchange for authoring a study showing that cuts to education and collective bargaining “rights” hurt students, emphasizing that “if [EPI] find[s] evidence contrary to what our intended outcome is, we just, we want to make sure that they will omit that kind of data,” to which Keefe responded reassuringly, “Oh, what they’ll do, is they’ll not publish it … We’re not going to change the results of any study, but if it’s something you don’t want published, we’ll kill it.”
Shortly thereafter, I approached Keefe at a public symposium on SB 5 at the University of Toledo. I offered him an opportunity to defend his standards of objectivity, and, subsequently, to explain the phone call.
Keefe began by assuring that he had not and “never would” accept what I described as a “pay for play deal in which [he would] agree to kill any research that didn’t support a pro-union conclusion,” explaining that it was “the interviewer [who] said that” [emphasis mine].
However, at no point during the phone call did Keefe decline the deal. In fact, the word “kill” was not the interviewer’s. It was his–specifically.
I then asked Keefe if he “would not accept a pay-for-play deal,” to which he responded: “Never, in fact what I told the interviewer is they had to go bargain with the EPI, not me.” That is true. He did advise our agent that his compensation would be worked out with the EPI, but under the apparent implicit understanding he would be the one commissioned, explaining, “[the EPI] bring a lot of resources to the table that’s very helpful for me to do this work.”
When I read him the EPI mission statement, asserting that it “conduct[s] research according to rigorous standards of objectivity,” Keefe affirmed it, saying, “Absolutely.”
Yet during the phone call, Keefe had emphasized how it is “important to do business with policy institutes rather than academics,” laughingly noting that “[a]cademics believe in publish or perish … no matter what the outcome is.” He reassured us that “Policy institutes have an policy agenda … The thing about EPI is when they publish something, it’s highly reliable and credible, but if it’s contrary to what you want, and what they want, they just, they pay for it, and they kill it.”
Earlier in the call, Keefe recommended that our caller contact EPI President Larry Michele and Policy Matters Ohio executive director Amy Hanauer, which he did, offering the same deal. Sam Stein of The Huffington Post reported, after hearing from both of them, that both had declined the deal offered by our interviewer, with Hanauer explaining: “They were fishing for us to say we would release it if it had a pro-union point of view or kill it if it didn’t.” Michel added, “I told him, you know, you can’t buy results.”
Policy Matters Ohio released a statement claiming to be “amused” by our “trying to get [their] director, Amy Hanauer to reveal a desire to deliver biased research,” adding: “Policy Matters is not for sale. We do unassailable research.”
We commend Hanauer and Policy Matters Ohio for maintaining their integrity, but their deserved self-vindications do not make the situation any less awkward for Keefe or EPI.
Worse, like mosquitoes to a bug-zapper, mouthwatering liberal media flocked to Stein’s incomplete narrative. Deriding our investigation as a “ratfucking” effort, Huffington’’s Dan Mirvish accused James of getting “caught with his pants down.” David Dayen of Jane Hamsher’s FireDogLake mocked it, facetiously describing it as “a brilliant plan.” Joseph Anonymous of liberal Ohio blog Plunderbund, advised us: “Consider this your notice, boys. Everyone in Ohio is on to your scam.” Laura Clawson of Daily Kos wrote: “Calling [James] on it before he has the chance? That’s pretty awesome.”
As a frequent and vocal critic of Ezra Klein for reasons I won’t revive now, it pains me to note that he is practically the lone voice of reason in the series of JournoList installments from the Daily Caller. The focus this time is a discussion of message coordination for team Obama, i.e. should the JournoList come right out and overtly collude on media strategy to help him win?After the idea is floated by Luke Mitchell of Harpers, Klein comes in and slaps it down:
Nope, no message coordination. I’m not even sure that would be legal. This is a discussion list, though, and I want it to retain that character…
It’s almost enough to make me wonder if Klein’s problem isn’t dishonesty but self-deception. Perhaps his motives for this monstrosity really were academic. Perhaps, at some deep level he is reticent to now express, he too is disappointed at what it actually became. There must have been a moment when it first began that truly was inspiring and hopeful…
Columbia University is the place where leftists give leftist journalists Pulitzer Prizes and then tell each other how prestigious leftist journalism is because—wow!—look at all the Pulitzers they’ve won.
This week, the president of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, wrote a specious opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, crying that American journalism, dying in the free market, needs to be bailed out by government support.
Katie Couric Lip-Synching Foreground While Leftism Sings Behind.
Two memories come to mind from my years in England during the nineties:
In the first, recovering from an operation, I’m watching television and trying not to bust my stitches laughing at an hilarious sketch by young comedians Hugh Laurie (now TV’s House) and Stephen Frye. In a send-up of It’s A Wonderful Life, Frye’s angel is showing Laurie’s villainous Rupert Murdoch what the world would be like if he’d never been born: a virtual paradise!
And again, I’m watching TV. Innovative writer Dennis Potter, dying of pancreatic cancer, gives a final interview to presenter Melvyn Bragg. As Bragg chuckles amiably, Potter declares he has named his cancer after Murdoch and that he would use his last days on earth to “shoot the bugger if I could.” (more…)
Richard Cohen of the Washington Post is a troubled soul these days. Having seen the triumph of the “narrative” so dear to so many liberal columnists and editors’ hearts, he and they are now forced to witness the disintegration of presidential authority even as the aggrandizement of presidential power continues apace — unchecked either by any decent Democrats or the hapless idiots who pass for the leadership of the Republican party.
His column today is another in Cohen’s occasional series of reflections along his asymptotic way to the truth: “President Obama’s Enigmatic Intellectualism.” That’s one way of looking at it:
It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama’s foreign policy is no heart at all. It consists instead of a series of challenges — of problems that need fixing, not wrongs that need to be righted. As Winston Churchill once said of a certain pudding, Obama’s approach to foreign affairs lacks theme. So, it seems, does the man himself.
For instance, it’s not clear that Obama is appalled by China’s appalling human rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia. He treats the Israelis and their various enemies as pests of equal moral standing. The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much.
This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs? The president himself is no help on this score. When it comes to his own image, he has a tin ear…
A fixed fight: The Influence of Labor Unions in Academe. Part One is here.
In the academic world, employees are very often public employees. This means that they are also very often union employees. At all levels. This includes everyone from janitors, to dormitory housekeepers, cafeteria workers, clerical staff, and computer techs, to even the graduate assistants and professors. While the salary gap between a cafeteria worker and a senior professor may be huge, the solidarity of the unions is a powerful magnet that creates an unbreakable bond amongst them.
Unions are fond of bashing capitalism with seething rhetoric, decrying the economic system as irredeemably corrupted by greed and racism and classism. But the ideology they themselves embrace is itself driven by the same ugly characteristics they profess to detest. Except in their case, power is the motivating force, the passion that drives them.
The burning desire for the power to control your life is the tie that binds the union service worker to the academic intellectual. It is this common fabric that connects the union janitor more closely to the ideological academic intellectual than to his working-class counterparts beyond campus.
What’s far more dangerous is that the ideological academic, in his capacity as a professor, actually possesses the power to control. The power to influence students’ minds, to mold the students’ way of thinking to embrace their own power-hungry desires and believe in it as “social justice” – this is a frightening weapon. Via union solidarity, this weapon is shared with the mobilizers, the janitors and cafeteria workers who agitate the students with various demands against the university after ideologically minded professors have indoctrinated them to hear every grievance as a call for “social justice.”
On Tuesday, March 23, a symposium will convene in Laurel, Maryland on “Climate Change and Energy Imperatives for Future Naval Forces.” Sponsored by Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory and the US Navy, it will include roundtable discussions on a variety of topics to include: potential effects of global climate change, temperature increases, and reduction of sea ice, melting glaciers, desertification, deforestation, water and fuel shortages, rising sea levels, and forced population migrations. Alarming topics all, events that, should they happen, are the stuff of nightmares, of an environmental apocalypse, even the end of humankind.
They are also the boilerplate propaganda of anthropogenic global warming fanatics that have been so humiliated by exposés of their contrived science, they are frantically trying to stem the tide of public outrage, so much of their evidence has been debunked. Manipulations of research data to support warming fabrications have been too systemic for their claims to be taken seriously any longer. As the nation endures mammoth snowstorms and low temperatures, and as record low temperatures are being set across the globe, one wonders if it will take glaciers on Al Gore’s front lawn for them to see the fallacies of their ideology-driven “science.”
True to form, the media is publishing articles claiming the warming is causing the cold. “Global warming” has morphed to “climate change.” Their outrageous journalistic acrobatics would be hilarious were they not so pitiful. Time Magazine has a doozy entitled: “Snowstorm: East Coast Blizzard Tied to Climate Change” and apparently the citizen rabble are not buying it. One need only read the comments to this article on line to see what the peasants in fly-over-country think of press delusions. (more…)
During the rise of the tea party Anderson Cooper called conservatives "tea baggers" on CNN and remarked about "teabagging." The network featured a multitude of guests and contributors who likened tea partiers to nazis, bigots, pick your poison. No pressure was ever brought about to censor the speech of those...
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