Letters to the Editor
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For Real Name
No, it's your posts which take any subject at hand and attempt to reduce it to the point where you can accuse your opponents of anti-semitism.
Your sarcasm and your obsession does no one any good.
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Then apply those standards to media today.....
Kamiya is absolutely right that it was "one of the greatest collapses in the history of the American media." And he's also right that this collapse is so well-documented that it ought to be beyond dispute.
If what Glenn says is true, then certainly our media should be able to give us the definitive state of Iran's nuclear program, and the relationships between Ahmahdinejad, the Mullahs, and the Iranian people. Where is the call for better information today?
After all Glenn seems to think media should have known exactly what the situation in Iraq was.
What's the real story in Russia, Norh Korea, or Saudi Arabia, that we aren't hearing from the administration? C'mon Glenn, fighting the last war doesn't help anyone if you are going to give a pass on the media today.
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freedom of press
The original press was more like the blogosphere than the current MSM. The transformation was not very visible until the nation got stressed by terrorism. The 'net neutrality' is therefore very important for "today's free press".
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It's the sources ...
The most interesting part of Kamiya's article was the sources of NY Times stories on Israel, who they quote repeatedly in their stories on that topic. That sort of analysis is easy to do and surely media outlets would welcome being pressured to use a range of sources when they cover different stories, not just one viewpoint.
I also think the fish rots from the head: these news outfits are run by corporate types, penny pinchers and lawyers (pace Mr. Greenwald, you know the lawyer types I'm talking about, the mandarins and apparatchiks). People tend to hire people like themselves and so it does not surprise me that most journalists are high minded but timid, unwilling to rock the boat with their sources, unwilling to risk their jobs by pursuing the truth wherever it sorts out.
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Upton Sinclair said it best
It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
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Correction, if you please :
As the exchange I had recently with The Politico's John Harris reflects, they dismiss most media criticisms as nothing more than the by-product of crass partisan bias...
Not true.. for the most part they dismiss media criticism as useless self wankery by uneducated clowns who don't know the first thing about journalism or politics.
In a word : Blogging.
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shooter242's culpibility in mass murder
C'mon Glenn, fighting the last war doesn't help anyone if you are going to give a pass on the media today.
That's rather the point, you walking afterbirth. The MSM's willingness to buy everything the Bush Administration was selling about Iraq and Hussein and repeat it all ad nauseum, its been left so barren of creditability at this point that it couldn't claim water is wet without it being suspect. In the process it has ceased to serve the American people in any meaningful way and contributed to the country getting into the current quagmire in Iraq (much like your own giving of aid and comfort to the enemies of the Republic).
In short, any 'report' it provides about Iran, Russia, and the color of the sky - particularly from 'unnamed' or 'Administration' sources - is unlikely to be believed. This won't stop worse mistakes from being made by the Administration, but it will make it all the harder for the American public to ever trust again.
If you're fine with such a state of affairs, I wish you luck and hope you were paid enough for your soul.
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Perception and Change in Media
The following is from Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. While Kuhn's subject is how science changes, I believe his model may be appropriate for other realms as well, including political change, and/or change in journalism. GG's post centers on what professional journalists are actually perceiving these days, and I believe the following is relevant to understanding them, the conservative right, and even conservative trolls on this site:
"In a psychological experiement that deserves to be far better known outside the trade, Bruner and Postman asked experimental subjects to identify, on short and controlled exposure, a series of playing cards. Many of the cards were normal, but some were made anomalous, e.g. a red six of spades and a black four of hearts. Each experimental run was constituted by the display of a single card to a single subject in a series of gradually increased exposures. After each exposure the subject was asked what he had seen, and the run was terminated by two successive correct identifications.
Even on the shortest exposures, many subject identified most of the cards, and after a small increase all the subjects identified them all. For the normal cards these identifications were usually correct, but the anomalous cards were almost always identified, without apparent hesitation or puzzlement, as normal. The black four of hearts might, for example, be identified as the four of either spades or hearts. Without any awareness of trouble, it was immediately fitted to one of the conceptual categories prepared by prior experience. One would not even like to say that the subjects had seen something different from what they identified. With a further increase of exposure to the anomalous cards, subjects did begin to hesitate and to display awareness of anomaly. Exposed, for example, to the red six of spades, some would say: That's the six of spades, but there's something wrong with it--the black has a red border. Further increase of exposure resulted in still more hesitation and confusion until finally, and sometimes quite suddenly, most subjects would produce the correct identification without hesitation. Moreover, after doing this with two or three of the anomalous cards, they would have little further difficulty with the others. A few subjects, however, were never able to make the requisite adjustment of their categories. Even at fourty times the average exposure required to recognize normal cards for what they were, more than 10 per cent of the anomalous cards were not correctly identified. And the subjects who then failed often experienced acute personal distress. One of them exclaimed: "I can't make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn't even look like a card that time. I don't know what color it is now or whether it's a spade or a heart. I'm not even sure now what a spade looks like. My God!"
Either as a metaphor or because it reflects the nature of the mind, that psychological experiment provides a wonderfully simple an cogent schema for the process of scientific discovery...In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation."