Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.
While most people spent the weekend biting their nails over their NCAA brackets, Patterico’s Pontification pondered the Associated Press’ announcement last week that it will begin to offer its clients two different ledes. The normal lede will play it straight, in typical AP news-of-the day fashion. The optional lede, says the AP, aims “to draw in the reader through imagery, narrative devices, perspective or other creative means.” Harmless innovation? Not so, thinks the PP. He points out a line from the original story that he missed on the first reading — “The AP stressed that the optional leads will not be available to the news service’s Internet providers. They are designed strictly for print.” PP poses the question, “Is this just a way for the AP to get out its bias in print, without being criticized by Web pundits?”
(Having read an endless string of AP stories over the past 14 months, we, for one, are a bit curious what bias the PP thinks AP is trying to sneak past the Googling monkeys? The only bias we’ve found is one for speed over accuracy.)
Bloggers continue to call corporate media MSM (ample evidence to the contrary), and MSM v. Blogger is a popular story this morning as Kaptain Kaptial responds to a Chicago Boyz post from last week. The Boyz linked to the news that Agence France Presse is suing Google for including its content in its Google News aggregator without the news agency’s permission. The Kaptain writes that the Boyz express some fear that bloggers are the next target for the corporate media outlets. In other words, “a legal campaign by the MSM to shut down prolific linkers.” The Kaptain thinks bloggers and Google are different, in that Google News just aggregates, while blogs “aggregate with a certain amount of discrimination and analysis.”
So, for now, no alarm bells for the steady Kaptain, who writes that, “When Instapundit gets sued, I’ll start worrying.” The Kaptin then goes meta: “The bigger question is to me far more interesting. Would the blogosphere still exist if bloggers could only link to other bloggers?”
Provocative question. But, hey, at the very least, we could still pump out the blog report every morning. Of course, it’d be void of these type of stories, or at least links to them.
The Rantingprofs respond to Emily Wax’s story in this morning’s Washington Post highlighting United Nation aid workers’ sexual abuse of impoverished girls in war-torn Africa. The Rantingprof uses the opportunity to call attention to Fox News’ Steve Harrigan, who reported a series on the abuses of UN employees in the Congo. And then, as if the Washington Post plastered “EXCLUSIVE” on the top of its story, the Rantingprof rants that “it isn’t really news until it’s considered news by the New York Times and the Washington Post and that’s just the way the world works.” This is then parlayed into an argument that everyone should take Fox News more seriously because it does report on things besides domestic politics.
He’s not done there, though. The Rantingprof is a bit upset that the Post “story focuses almost exclusively on ‘obligation sex,’ on peacekeepers exploiting women and girls” and ignores the more outrageous crime of child rape — a topic that Fox News’ Harrigan took on.
That criticism, based on one story, is a bit unfair to say the least, as the Washington Post, and Wax specifically, have an impressive track record of bringing the lives of the terrorized and impoverished to print.
Finally, the Big Brass Blog spent the weekend laughing it up over the White House’s latest move: bringing out Barbara Bush — the grandmother, not the twin — to drum up support for her son’s plans to overhaul Social Security with private accounts. Linking to a MSNBC story that cites a Newsweek poll showing only “one-third of all Americans (33 percent) approve of his proposal to create investment accounts under Social Security,” Pam writes, “Let’s see, since his plan has zero merit and it’s going over like a lead balloon, how long do you think it will be before the White House engineers some sort of crisis to put fear into the sheep and the media so they follow him like Homer Simpson after a rolling donut?”
Homer Simpson? We’ve been called worse.
–Thomas Lang
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
