BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

December 28, 2003

More photos from Iraq
: Zeyad has new photos from Basrah.

Understudy
: Dan Drezner fills in for Andrew Sullivan.

The case for media bias
: Tim Rutten, the media critic of the LA Times, gets it wrong in so many ways.
Writing this weekend about media impartiality, he says the coming election is "a referendum not only on America's political future but also on the direction of its news media."

At issue is the question being posed with increasing frequency by right- and left-wing partisans: Have the American media simply failed in their decades-long effort to separate facts from opinions and to make impartial reporting the governing ethic of their news columns? Or, alternatively, has American society's changed nature simply made the whole project irrelevant?

Or, alternatively, are American media finally and simply catching up to the reality of what their audiences want?
You see, for years and years, it was assumed that American TV viewers wanted really dumb sitcoms because that's all that networks fed them and that's all they watched. But when, at long last, viewers were given quality choices -- Cosby (in his early years only), Hill St. Blues, Cheers -- they watched the quality shows.
News consumers in the U.S. have been fed only attempts at impartiality or objectivity. But now they have choices; they can watch FoxNews and read the Guardian and click on weblogs -- and they do. So perhaps all along, that's what news consumers have wanted: not dull attempts at impartiality but perspective honestly revealed, bias admitted, opinion included.

Rutten gets one thing right: Bias is a nonissue in most reporting:

There is a certain kind of bright but brittle mind that loves this sort of either/or thinking. What such minds cannot accept is the common-sensical notion that real life — including that of the press — is lived mostly in the pragmatic middle. There, experience has demonstrated that intellectual rigor and emotional self-discipline enable journalists to gather and report facts with an impartiality that — though sometimes imperfect — is good enough to serve the public's interest in the generality of cases.

(Get this guy an editor: "in the generality of cases"? Jeesh!)
But, yes, when I reported on a 4 a.m fire on the midnight shift at the Tribune years ago, I had no bias; I was concerned only with getting the facts and quotes and lead right. What bias could there be in a fire? Hot is hot.
Yet Rutten's missing the point. We're not talking about bias in workaday reporting; we're talking about bias (or perspective or opinion) in reporting on politics and war and such. So Rutten's one gimme is quite irrelevant.

Next, Rutten goes with the accepted -- but wrong -- wisdom that the base sociological reason behind all this is a deep division in America. I don't accept that. I said a few weeks ago that we're not a divided people; we're persons divided, each of us debating issues, wondering which way to vote. And the real truth is that most people don't think about or talk about these topics every day. Politics is not life, people. Politics is merely politics.

"It's certainly true that we are now two Americas," said CNN political analyst Bill Schneider, who is also a leading scholar of public opinion. "We're seeing this with greater clarity as we move further into this election cycle. There is no attempt to find a center. On the left, the Democratic front-runner, Howard Dean, wants to purge the party of its centrists, to repudiate the 'Third Way' Bill Clinton advocated. On the right, not even President George W. Bush talks about compassionate conservatism anymore. Look at the bestseller lists. They're dominated by people like Al Franken and Michael Moore on the left and Bill O'Reilly and Anne Coulter on the right."
Our nonfiction literature, in other words, is today a shouting match. In such a climate, according to Schneider, "people who are as angry and convinced as the activists are today don't want impartial journalism. They've staked out their positions, and now they want the press to take sides too.
"Partisanship has grown much harsher in recent years, no question. There is also a more bitter atmosphere in the country generally because our politics have come to involve issues of values and religion in a way they did not 30 years ago."

Rutten and Schneider both insult us, the people. We are not Franken and Coulter. They are our entertainment. They are to politics what Michael Jackson is to music: extremes, circus animals, clowns. We see that. Why can't you?
And I would say that the partisanship was much sharper, much more divided, much angrier in the Vietnam era. But then, some people want to paint this as another Vietnam era. It is not.

Rutten continues the patronization, saying that church attendance is the clearest indicator of voting behavior. That's statistically flawed and prejudicial. The implication is that church-goers are conservative. But most of the church-goers I know are liberal. This is not cause-and-effect; it is not even a one-to-one correlation. It's like saying that kids who watch TV eat junk food as if the TV fed it to them instead of their parents.
Besides, if this religous rule were true, why would Howard Dean suddenly start dropping Jesus' name?

At the end, Rutten rejects opinionated media from two historical perspectives. First, he says that in the Civil War, we had biased media and it didn't do us any good. Different world, man: different time, different country, different media, different technology, different people, different world, bogus comparison. Second, he says that the era of attempted objectivity has "coincided with a period of unequaled prosperity in the American media." Another meaningless correlation.
Look at Time Warner stock, Tim: CNN was once worth a fortune to the company (and to Ted Turner before that). Now, it has been eclipsed by FoxNews. Viewership for network news is down. Newspapers grow via online. The Internet is stealing the news audience.
Wishful thinking, mate.

No, the swing to news with perspective/bias/opinion does not come from (a) sharp divisions in the nation, (b) religion, (c) bad business. The swing comes because that's what the audience, the consumers, the people you want to serve want. But you're not listening to them. And that's not their problem. That's your problem.

: See more wise reaction to Rutten at Winds of Change.

Rutten seems to have missed that whole Reformation thing; the notion that truth might not have to be derived from a priesthood - and make no mistake, when he starts talking about 'intellectual rigor and emotional self-discipline ,' he's talking about a priesthood - is something that went by the wayside in Western society a number of years ago....
As I've noted before, I think that one of the most important functions of the blogosphere is to provide some public check on journalism, and to do so not because any one blogger is better-informed or smarter, but the because the dialog among blogs can quickly knock down bad facts or unsupported ideas.
Rutten, (and his boss Jon Carroll) in closing journalism off from that kind of dialog, are taking the position of Linda Ham, the shuttle manager for Columbia who cut off discussion of the possible damage from the foam strike.

But it's not rocket science. It's only reporting.

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Username: blog; Password: blog
: Glenn Reynolds is stomping his foot on the ground in frustration at the Hartford Courant's registration. I understand and sympathize.
Now I'm in a bit of a conflict of interest here because the sites I work on do now require lite registration (the online equivalent of name, rank and serial number: zip code, age, and gender). I don't mind that kind of effort if it helps a site that gives me free content build a better business -- it does -- and if I have to do it only once and if I don't have to remember a user name and password.
If a blogger I liked asked me for such registration or even more, I'd probably do it in a flash out of personal loyalty (wouldn't you?)
But like Glenn, when faced with the need to give blood type and sexual history and SAT scores and with the even more troubling need to try my feeble memory with another damned user name and password for a site I may visit once a year via a link, I often turn and run. Not worth it.
But I don't face that problem with the LA Times's onerous registration for a simple reason: I use the laexaminer username and laexaminer password so conveniently and generously created by Ken Layne (or was it Matt Welch?) long ago (and still used -- see this Winds of Change post linking to the LAT today).
And so I'm surprised we haven't seen people creating a universal username and password (blog/blog) for sites that demand onerous registration: Try to get into the site with the blog/blog combination; if it doesn't work, register under that combination to do the next guy in a favor.
But do that just for sites you're going to visit only occasionally. If you live in Hartford, you are, in fact, better off going through the full registration because you'll probably get advertising and perhaps content that is, in fact, more useful to you. If you plan to speak in forums that require registration, you won't want every Tom-Dick-and-Bozo speaking as you. But if you live in Knoxville, well, that's just a pain.

: Pssst, Glenn: I just tried to get into the Courant site with laexaminer/laexaminer. It worked. Maybe that's already the secret password everybody knows....

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At last...
: Someone has figured out a way to make cricket watchable. [via Tim Blair]

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Think global, listen local
: Greg Allen has a great idea -- collecting taxi music:

...the encounter rekindled a project I'd begun several years ago but abandoned: TaxiMusic.net....
I'd been in the habit of asking taxi drivers wherever I went if they had a tape we could listen to. The response was almost always the same: "you don't want to listen to it; it's ______ (Punjabi, Urdu, Island, Ethiopian) music," followed by the floodgates opening on an enthusiastic explanation of what the music means. ("She loves the boy but cannot meet him." "This is the Koran; it's a prayer.") Somewhere in our storage unit is a shopping bag of my own, full of tapes I bought from taxi drivers over the years before weblogs and mp3-streaming winamp.

Better yet, let's get taxi drivers weblogging: real moblogging.

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News is everywhere
: Bill Quick has a new vision for a weblog he's about to try out, so check it out.

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