Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.
If you’re looking for someone to take a shot at the much-discussed Huffington Post, which debuts today, you’re going to have to look elsewhere. Sure, the site might run the risk of the odd celebrity rumination on how hard it can be to get good foie gras in Toronto. But banal observations aren’t just the province of celebrities, as any blog reader knows all too well. And besides, there are a lot of blogs out there — if you don’t like this one, don’t read it. (That’s our policy with Rosie.)
A bigger potential problem: lack of focus. We’ve got to agree with Howard Kurtz, who points out that while “[t]he best blogs, love ’em or hate ’em, have an unmistakable voice; this will be a cacophony of voices.” That’s not much of a stumbling block when the voices strike a similar tone — see Volokh and Oxblog — but the Huffington Post is all over the map. Theoretically, jumping from Ellen DeGeneres’ take on horse slaughter to David Mamet’s rumination on computers/blogging/hermaphrodites to David Frum’s complaint that Russia is moving in the wrong direction (the posts are back to back to back on the “featured posts” page) could be mind-expanding, the lack of focus perhaps appealing to the intellectual dilettante inside us all. In reality, though, all the jumping around makes one long for the soothing consistency of someone like Kevin Drum. But, hey, Arianna deserves her first hundred days, so we’re going to sit back and wait to find out if she’s given us a Model T or an Edsel.
Onward: Chris Mooney likes the way the Washington Post is “covering the Kansas debacle.” (The debacle in question, as Mooney puts it: “A phony ‘trial’ over evolution is being held [in Kansas] in order to generate a phony controversy.”) He acknowledges that it’s a newsworthy event, but writes that a journalist needs to figure out how to “both cover the event (rather than ignoring it) while also making clear (to anyone able to read through the lines) that it’s a scam.” Mooney thinks Peter Slevin takes the right approach in his lede:
Debating a question that the scientific establishment considers settled, Kansas education authorities put evolutionary theory on trial Thursday in a hearing marked by sharp exchanges over Earth’s origins and what students should be taught in science class.
More media criticism, thankfully not of the YOU’RE BIASED! NO, YOU ARE! NO, YOU! variety: Cori Dauber debates whether or not the New York Times should have published today’s article on the lack of security along what terrorism experts call “the most dangerous two miles in America,” a largely industrial stretch of northern New Jersey that includes a chemical plant that “poses a potentially lethal threat to 12 million people who live within a 14-mile radius.” Here’s Dauber:
What do you do, if you’re the Times, and you’re sitting on a story about a huge gap in national security, something really dangerous?
On the one hand, if you report it, there’s a chance that you’re giving information to terrorists. (Although the likelihood is that the really serious terrorists already have this information.) On the other hand, if you don’t report it, the American people remain in the dark, and if they remain in the dark, they don’t have the chance to raise hell.
It’s a tough call, but she concludes that the Times did the right thing, given the danger at stake, and we’re inclined to sign on with her on this one. Now let’s just hope the story doesn’t disappear faster than Jennifer Wilbanks.
Finally, we turn to the Anchoress, who jumps off a Drudge “flash” that Geena Davis will play America’s first female president in an upcoming ABC drama. “[T]his is just a means to an end,” she writes. “Start showing the American people a female president. Make her likeable. Tug the heartstrings. Use the emotions. Let them make an association in their minds with WARMTH, and COMPETENCE.”
Why, you might wonder? “Because,” the Anchoress informs us, “America must be softened up to the idea, in time for Hillary to win in ’08.”
You gotta admire those covert political operatives who have duped huge corporate conglomerates into giving them jobs as network programming execs. Pretending that your main concern is garnering ratings and keeping your job is the perfect front behind which you can concentrate on your real task: greasing the wheels for Hillary.
And we thought idealism was dead.
–Brian Montopoli
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
