- SNL parodies “resist we much.”

Is it really a parody though if it’s indistinguishable from the original content?

- “Face the Nation” expands to one hour.

- Television anchors and their mini me stand-ins. A cute art project.

- “Layoffs and cutbacks lead to a new world of news deserts” … or do they?

I had a discussion the other day about how new media, live media (i.e. Twitter) had taken the place of so much of our news diet. We were trying to recount the number of stories we first learned through traditional media. Neither of us could. Whether it was first learning about earthquakes, riots, scandals, we each learned of the biggest stories of the past couple of years via new media. Yet to hear the dying print newsies tell it, all of news is dying simple because of their lot in life. Look beyond your navel. Even in areas where governments cracked down on social media like Twitter, citizens still found a way around it with proxy servers and the like. News still leaked through the cracks, more urgently, grittier, and more immediate than the foreign correspondents, most of whom had been expelled from the country, to relay it.

- NYT shocked to discover that in 2011, some women anchors are working full time and juggling motherhood out in the open. How many male anchors are juggling fatherhood and work?

- If you tolerate Newt Gingrich but dislike Barack Obama, are you a racist? Or do you jut think that Gingrich’s brand of beltway is less heinous than Obama’s brand of socialism?

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This is certainly scary, although it should scare some of the progressive trolls whose content is built on innuendo and libel.

In a case that’s sending a frightening message to the blogger community, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that a blogger must pay $2.5 million to an investment firm she wrote about — because she isn’t a real journalist.

As reported by Seattle Weekly, Judge Marco A. Hernandez said Crystal Cox, who runs several blogs, wasn’t entitled to the protections afforded to journalists — specifically, Oregon’s media shield law for sources — because she wasn’t “affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system.”

The Obsidian Finance Group sued Cox in January for $10 million for writing several blog posts critical of the company and its co-founder, Kevin Padrick. Obsidian argued that the writing was defamatory. Cox represented herself in court.

The judge threw out all but one of the blog posts cited, focusing on just one (this one), which was more factual in tone than the rest of her writing. Cox said that was because she was being fed information from an inside source, whom she refused to name.

Without the source, she couldn’t prove the information in the post was true — and thus, according to the judge, she didn’t qualify for Oregon’s media shield law since she wasn’t employed by a media establishment. In the court’s eyes, she was a blogger, not a journalist. The penalty: $2.5 million.

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Jose Antonio Vargas is the perfect example of media bias. He presents himself as both an activist for illegal immigrants and a “journalist.” He’s uniquely suited to this claim in today’s PC world, too, because he is himself an “undocumented American,” as he styles it. And in a new interview he also claims that being an illegal alien made him a better journalist.

Vargas has blurred the line between journalist and activist since it became public knowledge that he has been in the United States illegally since he was a child. After his coming out, Vargas launched himself into advocacy for illegals. Only in the Old Media establishment can someone advocate for a political viewpoint yet still be consider a just-the-facts journalist. Vargas isn’t the only one, of course: Remember such “journalists” as Sanjay Gupta, Chris Matthews, Jay Carney, or Linda Douglas? Well, if you are a left-wing activist it works, anyway.

In the new interview with The Ithican’s TinaMarie Craven, Vargas posits that his status as, in his words, an “undocumented American” (nice conceit, that) made him a more careful reporter. He had to exhibit the utmost veracity, he said, because if not people might start looking closer at him and his background.

My job was to do the best job I possibly could. I was too paranoid to make a mistake, God forbid being charged with plagiarism or having a lot of corrections or people saying I needed to check a quote. I am a very diligent reporter. I’ve had maybe one dozen corrections in like almost a 12-year reporting career. That’s pretty good. And there are days where I think, yeah, I had to lie about my immigration status to get the jobs, but I don’t think my journalism — the work I produce — I don’t think people would question the quality of the work or the veracity of the work.

Well, that is some kind of justification, isn’t it? I mean, at that rate perhaps a crack dealer would make a good reporter, eh? Not that being illegal is like being a crack dealer, of course, but being illegal has no bearing on the “veracity” of a reporter’s work, either!

But what might impinge on that veracity is that since coming out as an illegal immigrant, Vargas has become a vocal and ardent activist in favor of illegal immigrant’s issues. So, how can one be an advocate for something yet still claim to be an impartial journalist? Well, one can’t, really, but since he’s in the proper, politically correct area with his activism the rest of the Old Media gives him a pass.

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- Blowing apart the meme that free speech is being suppressed due to journalist arrests:

Put together by Josh Stearns, this document has been a great resource to track journalists working on Occupy Wall Street stories around the country who’ve been arrested. So who are they? Only seven of the 25 arrested are full-time employed traditional news-gathering employees. A number were student reporters; a few were interns; a larger number were freelancers. Some work for traditional “objective” news organizations; others work for “non-objective” news organizations, like Alternet and Indypendent Reader.

Yes, Alternet and Indypendent Reader, two lefty websites, the latter which comes across more as activism (replete with glowing reports of #OWS) than an actual media website. The presupposition you’re supposed to share as a reader of their memes is that every single arrested journalist was the antithesis of Natasha Lennard. If the hyper-fellation of this movement in the press is any indication–as well as the press’s blatant obfuscation of the rapes, shootings, etc. therein–it’s not a leap of logic to assume that other members of lefty media sites perhaps crossed the line of observation-to-participation like Lennard.

Now consider this: the Society for Professional Journalists statement.

The number of journalists arrested at Occupy Wall Street has now reached six (there may be more), but the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) has had enough. It is publicly denouncing the arrests of those covering all Occupy protests and is demanding that Michael Bloomberg and city officials from across the country drop the charges against detained reporters.

Funny: According to SPJ’s own bylaws, some of those arrested might not even qualify for membership within the group. For whom are they speaking? The couple of AP photogs arrested? When the cops order you to get out of the way your media cred doesn’t recuse you from following the law. The press can be aggressive to the point where they ignore the physical safety of others, even presidential primary candidates. Why have some media present at the exact same locations not been cuffed whereas a couple others were? The futile attempt to argue this as an attack on the press only underscores further media bias.

I’m willing to give some of them the benefit of the doubt, but they can’t rage “against” the machine after being its lapdog for fifty years, all while expecting public sympathy. If they want to be truly revolutionary, they’ll pull a Steve Kroft and stick a camera in Nancy Pelosi’s face while asking her how she came in to that Visa IPO or maybe set up shop in the DOJ while Holder fidgets under Fast and Furious scrutiny.

- Remember when MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer freaked out over this? Will MSNBC breathlessly report on the firearms at OWS? Will they report on the shootings already happening? Or the other crimes?

- AOL/Huffington Post is hemorrhaging talent:

At least three top names from the company have departed this month, including Brad Garlinghouse, head of the company’s Silicon Valley office, who quit last week. Mr Garlinghouse’s departure came on the same day that Sarah Lacy, a senior writer at TechCrunch, said she was leaving, and just days after Saul Hansell, a former New York Times reporter who was a senior editor at the Huffington Post, quit his job.

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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:

Pew: Public opinion of media never worse

Americans See Liberal Media Bias on TV News

Distrust in U.S. Media Edges Up to Record High

The Hill Poll: Most voters see media as biased and unethical

Americans View Media Bias As Big Problem, Poll Shows

Public trust in US media eroding: Pew study – Yahoo! News

Shall I continue?

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?”

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- Happy Halloween. Scariest costume this year: Second Term Obama.

- Cheezburger vs WaPo. A very interesting slapfight, wherein WaPo loses. Great piece.

Journalism, particularly newspapers, have been fleecing America for decades and the bill has come due. Before the Internet, geography and distance has been a costly barrier to information. In fact, newspapers have exploited this to their enormous financial and social advantage, going as far as having Congress pass the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 — which exempted them from certain antitrust laws.

For decades, newspapers have used their power to charge inflated advertising rates, fill the paper with commodity wire articles, and pretend to act in the best interest of the community while ignoring their needs. With that, the vibrance and competitiveness of journalism withered on the vine. “Objectivity” became the religion, not serving the readers. Change was bad, and the status quo filled the coffers.

Until the Internet came along.

[...]

Sure, the new journalism may not look like the journalism of yore, but society isn’t under threat from the lack of journalism. Newspapers, however, are continuing to see declines as the readership shrinks due to an age demographic, inconvenience of print, and shrinking budgets.

[...]

What’s killing newspapers isn’t the lack of new ideas, it’s people who obstruct the change that’s required to survive.

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Bless WaPo’s increasingly irrelevant heart, it’s at it again.

Marco Rubio on national ticket could be risky bet for Republican Party

Just a week after the paper misfired badly at the Florida Senator, it’s not only giving it another go; it’s using its own discredited and quietly scrubbed smear piece as evidence to support itself.

But Rubio’s role in recent controversies, including a dispute with the country’s biggest Spanish-language television network and new revelations that he had mischaracterized his family’s immigrant story, shows that any GOP bet on his national appeal could be risky.

One of the biggest hallmarks of the MSM dinosaur in its death throes is the tendency to reveal which Republicans scare it the most, and to provide clues to the GOP as to how it should react (whether the GOP has honed its clue-taking ability is a story for another post).

The previously indomitable message machine for the Democrats is so unused to vulnerability that it panics way ahead of time. Predictably, the panic tends to manifestitself in stories about what is or is not good for the Republican party. Because, you know, the MSM has a history of really, really caring about Republicans.

Concern duly noted and heartily laughed at. (more…)

Joe Biden has traveled across the country, threatening Americans with “rapes and murders” if congress didn’t pass Obama’s jobs bill, the same jobs bill that Democrats killed in the Senate (so are on the hook for said “rapes and murders?”). He didn’t like the questioning he received from Human Events’s Jason Mattera on the subject, so now the White House is taking aim at Mattera with an investigation.

Joe Biden’s office has complained to the Senate press gallery about a confrontation the vice president had with a conservative journalist last week on Capitol Hill.

Biden aides asked whether Senate rules were broken in the wake of the contentious exchange between the vice president and the reporter.

[...]

Biden’s office has also contacted the standing committee of correspondents, which oversees the gallery, regarding whether Mattera broke the rules by ambushing him.

Heather Rothman, the chairwoman of the gallery’s standing committee, said the matter is under review.

“We’re aware of the concerns,” said Rothman, a reporter for BNA. “It’s being discussed.

“We’re aware this occurred and the vice president’s office [has made] contact,” she added, noting the standing committee itself hasn’t met to deliberate the issue.

The Hill says Biden was “lured” into the interview. No, he thought Mattera was another back-patting reporter with a satchel full of softballs, not an actual journalist who doesn’t trade principle for access like so many of today’s media. How difficult is it to answer why you’re fear-mongering with “rapes and murders” all week?

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Kudos to Jake Tapper for showing his fellow White House press members, save for Ed Henry, how journalism is done.

Media is supposed to be antagonistic towards the government; they are its check and balance. When media doesn’t do its job, government runs amuck, and the citizenry suffers. When media dropped the ball decades ago, the citizenry revolted, and, aided by new technologies, took up the mantle of watching the government.

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- Media sure does love them some fake Republicans. CBS hosts Jon Huntsman. Wishful thinking?

"To the moon, Alice!"

It’s hard to overstate how poorly Huntsman is doing. Among Republican voters nationwide, the latest Fox News poll shows him running last with 1% support. The latest Quinnipiac poll shows him running last with 1% support. The latest CNN poll shows him running last with 1% support. The latest Gallup poll shows him running last with 1% support.

There seems to be a pattern here.

And yet, Huntsman has been booked for three Sunday shows in three weeks, and is all over the media.

- Wikileaks staffer: “Why I felt I had to leave Wikileaks.”

- Lancet should apologize for fraudulent reports used by MSM.

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Newsweek magazine has brought the subject of media bias to the forefront with this week’s cover photo and headline.  It features a photo of Republican congresswoman and presidential candidate Michele Bachmann with a crazed look behind the intentionally nasty headline, “Queen of Rage.” Even the most naïve reader could not believe the article would be anything close to an evenhanded look at who Ms. Bachmann is and what she stands for.

This might surprise some journalists, but readers/viewers are much smarter than most of them think they are. They can spot media bias a mile off even when members of the media think they are getting away with it. Here are seven transparent ways media bias is detected by readers/viewers and what journalists can do about it.

Context: A journalist might edit down a 25-word comment into five-words to make someone they don’t like look foolish.  What to do about it: Be honest and keep quotes and themes in context.

Facts: Recently MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow played a quote by radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh which she said was “made earlier this week.”  It wasn’t. It was made over a year earlier, and it is highly likely the host knew it when she played it. What to do about it: Report the facts even if they are not as you want them to be.

Freaks and fringers: Media bias is spotted immediately when a journalist seeks out the most ridiculous representation of a subject or group they are covering. It happened many times with the media coverage of the tea party rallies as well as the Wisconsin state legislature’s battle over union issues earlier this year. What to do about it: Get your information from serious representatives and not freaks and fringers. (more…)

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You may have heard of it, but never actually been privileged enough to witness one.  It’s an elusive creature without a doubt. However, today I present to you … a positive piece of journalism! If you want to sell advertising dollars, you better stir up a crisis and fast. I’m here to tell you today, that a lot of it is BS. Sure things are tough, but some of the world’s most successful enterprises were spawned amidst depression.

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The activist old media have a dilemma here, what to do with one of their most powerful and favorite persons who lives in their favorite city on the planet? The Donald is causing them trouble and you can see their discomfort.

Let me say, the best interviews are the ones where you are surprised by the answers. Where the person you’re talking to shocks you with something you were not planning on. Good reporters know what 90% of the answers are going to be before they even ask the questions, so it’s something special when you get that number turned upside down.

Meredith Vieira, instead of embracing this unique moment, she was shocked, dismayed and disturbed that Donald Trump was saying the things he said about The Brilliant One.

Forget for a moment some of the specific things Trump said to Vieira the other day on “The Today Show,” but just watch her defensive reactions. Every time Trump blasted her Dear Leader she took it very personal. She had to fire back in defense as if Trump were going after one of her family members.

Trump actually said he supports the tea party!  Meredith must’ve thought she has been thrown into a “Saturday Night Live” skit, or April Fools was happening twice this year.

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Have you ever heard someone say that a rape victim was “asking for it” by dressing a certain way, entering a certain place, or behaving a certain way? You’d rightly dismiss them as sociopaths or enablers or sociopaths. However, a growing number of media figures– Mediaite,  Time’s Joe Klein, and now even FNC’s Bill O’Reilly– would have you believe it’s a valid assertion, if we’re to apply their logic concerning Floridian Koran-burner Terry Jones.  Instead of framing the recent murders in Afghanistan as a shocking overreaction to an insensitive expression of free speech, these personalities and publications focused their ire and blame on Jones.

Terry Jones

“This Terry Jones idiot has blood on his hands;  he had to know fanatical Muslims would go crazy,” O’Reilly stated. Ah, yes, because as we all know, the only possible response from the Muslim world would be violence; that’s not an ugly, condescending stereotype at all!  I’m no fan of Sharia, but to insinuate Jones “should have known” that someone would take anger beyond any acceptable societal standard without personally knowing any of the individuals who killed is just like saying that a rape victim “should have known” that the sight of her would cause her assailants to fly into an uncontrollable lustful rampage.

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The Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, once famously wrote, “Know thyself and thine enemy.” Even though Tzu lived in the late 6th Century B.C., his words offer good counsel to conservatives today in understanding the biased left-wing MSM.

Earlier this week, blogger David Carr was licking his chops at the prospect of a Beck ouster at Fox News Channel in the New York Times. Carr’s unruly salivary gland quickly set-off a violent chain reaction in the liberal hate-o-sphere with articles predicting Beck’s imminent demise with headlines such as:

“Is Fox News pushing Glenn Beck towards the exit?” – Entertainment Weekly

“Glenn Beck to Get the Boot?” – Seattle Post Intelligencer

“America is Bored with Glenn Beck” – Salon

“Glenn Beck on the Brink: Ad Boycott May Have Finally Burned his Bridges” – CBS

Regardless of their media push, Fox News senior vice president of development Joel Cheatwood, seems in no hurry to make or announce a decision about Beck. In fact, if Fox News’ history is any indication, it appears highly unlikely that the George Soros-backed left-wing media will have an impact on his decision-making process.

Most of the giddy hate-filled liberal rhetoric against Beck is nothing new. It is in the fine biased MSM tradition of remarks savaging the host this year:

Joy Behar calls Beck’s a “rodeo clown.” In psychology circles, this is called “projection.” (It’s the hair, Joy.)

Keith Olbermann (when he was actually on the air) called Beck an “idiot.” He had his writers script out funny names calling the Fox News Channel host the “Grand Poobah of Whackjobery.” He accused him of trying to recreate the Martin Luther King rally last fall at the National Mall. He gleefully, falsely, and recklessly blamed him (and every other conservative) for the shootings in Tucson. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

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With their most recent undercover video investigations, independent journalists James O’Keefe and Lila Rose have set a new standard of transparency in the field of journalism — a standard I call on all media outlets — print, online, and broadcast — to adopt and to institute immediately. Within hours of releasing what the AP called “heavily edited” video footage of a high-powered NPR executive’s troubling statements with respect to the Tea Party, conservatives, and Jewish control of the media, Mr. O’Keefe then released to the public the full, unedited two-hour video of the entire conversation. Another New Media pioneer, Lila Rose, also released the full video of her undercover investigation of Planned Parenthood.

While the biased AP apparently only whips out the term “heavily edited” when the institutional left is under fire, it’s difficult to disagree with them on principle, especially when we live in a world where  on a daily basis the network nightly news programs, Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, and every facet of the MSM broadcast and publishing world release reports no less “heavily edited” than Rosa and O’Keefe’s initial video releasse. However, unlike Rose and O’Keefe, the mainstream media never allows the public to view the full, unedited material in order to judge the full context for ourselves.

This can and must end today.

With New Media once again leading away, let’s start a new era of responsible journalism that we’ll call The  Rose/O’Keefe Standard of Journalistic Transparency, where the insidious practice of “heavily edited” interviews and reporting  finally  comes to an end. If the mainstream media is as devoted to transparency, truth, and context as James O’Keefe, here are some examples of how it can work….

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If I were to write a birthday card to President Reagan on his 100th birthday what would it say?

Happy birthday, Mr. President!

The phony liberal media loves you (now that it is politically convenient). Your son, Ron, Jr., who you did not agree with in life, also loves you. In fact, Ron, Jr. loves you so much that he has written a book about you, and for the purposes of publicity, has continued to allow himself to be used by the MSM to condemn your Republican Party and the Tea Party Movement in the build-up to your centennial birthday celebration.

It is a sorry state of affairs when your own son would allow your legacy to be misstated and abused for political purposes.

In his book, My Father at 100, Ron Jr. writes, “I argued plenty with my father when he was alive; I have no intention of picking a fight with him now that he’s gone and can’t defend himself.”

However, Ron Jr. apparently sees no problem in helping to enable the MSM in its 2012 strategy to recast what it means to be a conservative – his father’s true legacy. This week, we witnessed more comedy masquerading as journalism and Ron Jr. aided and abetted the effort to undermine and misstate his father’s belief system, a belief system that was in full public view for eight crystallizing years.

One case in point was a story by AOL News’ Andrea Stone, with the headline, “Son Says Reagan Would See Today’s GOP as ‘Mean-Spirited and Stupid.’” In the piece, Ron Jr. says, “I feel comfortable saying he [Ronald Reagan] would be very, very disturbed by the vitriol, very disturbed by the ‘birther’ business, that (President Obama) is a ‘terrorist,’” Reagan said. “All of that kind of stuff he would think was way, way over the top and just mean-spirited and stupid.”

How interesting.

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Within hours of the release of Lila Rose’s shocking and dismaying Planned Parenthood video, the leftist media trotted its favorite phrase for shutting out citizen journalists: “selectively edited.”  I suggested jokingly that it would happen, but sadly, the left is all too predictable.

Of course we see that smear from all the usual suspects:  Media Matters’ initial knee-jerk reaction was to dismiss the video merely for being “abridged,” then put in an update with a link to “what [Live Action] say[s] is” the full video.  The New York Times’ blurb coverage of the event repeated Planned Parenthood’s claim that the video was questionable because it was “edited.”  CBS News uses the phrase twice, first trying to associate the video with the discredited and unrelated allegations of selective editing levied against James O’Keefe, then as weasel-word insinuation: “Seemingly in response to criticism that it may have selectively edited the video, Live Action on Tuesday afternoon made public what it says is the full video of the New Jersey Planned Parenthood sting.”

First off, I would love to see what kind of “context” can justify recommending that a pimp have his post-abortion underage sex workers only perform sex acts “above the waist.”  Progressive commenters, please let me know what sort of ancillary statement can put that comment into perspective.  Second, it’s time to take that “selective editing” phrase and shove it back in the face of the MSM.

Editing, by its very nature, is selective and subjective.  You have too much video/audio for the time you believe your audience will pay attention to your message, so you select which footage you want to include.  “Selective editing” is as redundant as saying “jacket coat” or “blowhard Olbermann.”  But if the MSM believes that the very act of editing video immediately destroys its credibility, then we need to hold them to the same standard.

Take this recent news package from CBS:

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