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Old 10-01-2006, 01:07 PM   #28 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by _God_
Very true. Clicking on host's link to an article at fair.org did not lead to an article anywhere that implied the current administration, or Republicans in general, have ever done anything right, I mean correctly.

<b>With a name like fair.org, the average person would expect impartiality.</b> However, one of the first available sections states that its editor, Jim Naureckas, is the author of "The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error." Another sample of his slant: "Former prisoners of Guantánamo have long complained that guards and interrogators mistreated their Qurans."

The article host references was written by Michael Dolney, who was recently an organizer for the Kucinich for President campaign......

......Presumably, if you oppose indoctrination of three-year-olds, government wealth redistribution, or think the working class should pay taxes, Dolney would consider you a right-wing fanatic. I'm forced to bear this in mind while awaiting the link that ratbastid promised us.
On fair.org, just to the right of the large "FAIR" logo is this link:
<a href="http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=100">About Us</a>
Quote:
<center><b>What's FAIR?</b></center>
FAIR, the national media watch group, has been offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986..........

.........As an anti-censorship organization, we expose neglected news stories and defend working journalists when they are muzzled. <b>As a progressive group, FAIR believes</b> that structural reform is ultimately needed to break up the dominant media conglomerates, establish independent public broadcasting and promote strong non-profit sources of information......

<p>........For an in-depth explanation of FAIR's critique of the mainstream media, you should start with our overview, <a href="index.php?page=101">What's Wrong with the News?</a> You might also check out the article <a href="http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1571">What's FAIR?</a>, by FAIR founder <a href="http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=10&amp;author_id=84">Jeff Cohen</a>. And see what <a href="http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=138">journalists, activists and scholars</a> have to say about FAIR.</p>
Quote:
<a href="http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1571">What's FAIR?</a>
Extra! June 1987

What's FAIR?

By Jeff Cohen

FAIR is a media watch organization offering constructive criticism in an effort to correct media imbalance. We advocate for media access on behalf of those constituencies in our society that do not have the wealth to purchase their own TV stations or daily newspapers. We scrutinize media practices that slight public interest, peace and minority viewpoints.

All of us who founded FAIR have media backgrounds. Our sympathies are with the working press. We do not view reporters, editors and producers as our enemy. Nor do we hunt for conspiracies. The villain we see is not a person or group, but a historical trend: the increasing concentration of the U.S. media in fewer and fewer corporate hands.

FAIR was launched in mid-1986 at a time when the major media were bending distinctly rightward. Big media businesses were being absorbed by even bigger ones, with dangerous implications for those viewpoints already underrepresented. <b>Well-financed right-wing groups like the misnamed Accuracy In Media (AIM) were harassing journalists who uncovered unpleasant truths about poverty, inequality, government corruption or U.S. military and nuclear policy.</b>

FAIR came into being to offer a different kind of media criticism -- fully in keeping with the First Amendment. We do not work to prevent the airing of viewpoints with which we disagree. Our approach is to work for the inclusion of new viewpoints, not the exclusion of old ones. We seek to invigorate free speech by striving for a more pluralistic media.....
<b>.....so, with just a few clicks to the "usual place" to find out more about any website, the preceding info was revealed, mystery solved.....</b>

I am including the following <b>"model" of what could be happening on this forum</b>, if I didn't find myself so often "engaged" in a discussion that is missing a substantative response, such as the ones posted in the middle and the bottom of the following three quote boxes:
Quote:
http://www.prospect.org/horsesmouth/...ia.html#006028

The Horse's Mouth
A blog about the reporting of politics -- and the politics of reporting. By Greg Sargent

« | Main | »

THE STATE OF PROGRESSIVE MEDIA CRITICISM. Thanks to Greg for the warm welcome. I'm hoping we'll have an enjoyable couple of months together.

I thought I would get things rolling by taking a look at the state of progressive media criticism today. As Greg mentioned, I used to co-edit Spinsanity, a non-partisan watchdog of political spin, but I believe that ideological media critics can also contribute a lot to the dialogue under certain conditions.

<b>In particular, I want to use the pathologies of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which is about to celebrate its 20th anniversary, to illustrate some of the problems with the worst media criticism on the left and right:</b>

1. Failure to take advantage of the Internet: Like Columbia Journalism Review, which just made the ill-advised decision to cut back its CJR Daily blog, FAIR is trapped in a legacy business model in which it has to reserve much of its best content for a slow-moving print publication that provides subscription revenue. This props up the organization at the expense of having any impact on the larger discourse.

2. A misguided focus on "balance": FAIR devotes a great deal of effort to complaining about ideological imbalance in think tank citations and talk show guests. The problem is these studies rarely have any impact. Meanwhile, FAIR devotes little attention to rebutting misinformation that's being pushed through the press -- an area where it is possible to have an immediate impact.

FAIR is still fighting the last war. In the late 1980s, when the group was founded, perhaps it made sense to focus on counter-balancing the conservative skew of talk shows like "The McLaughlin Group." But today, the Bush administration consciously takes advantage of the journalistic norm of "balance," peddling misinformation to the public via the "he said," "she said" format of many contemporary news reports. (See All the President's Spin for much more on this.)

3. Ideological ax-grinding and irrelevance: FAIR's analyses often exaggerate ambiguous evidence and criticize publications for failing to share the organization's leftist political views. My Spinsanity co-editor Ben Fritz showed, for instance, how FAIR twisted and exaggerated ambiguous evidence to attack newspaper editorials that were not sufficiently unfavorable toward an attempted coup against Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. (Indeed, FAIR's leftist predilections seem to result in a preference for obscure topics with little relevance to mainstream discourse. Hugo Chavez appears on FAIR's website almost as much as Ann Coulter. Meanwhile, Noam Chomsky appears more than Coulter.)

A better approach to ideological media criticism is suggested by Media Matters, which has quickly replaced FAIR as the most prominent and influential liberal media watchdog. The reasons it has succeeded mirror the reasons for FAIR's failure. First, Media Matters uses the Internet effectively, posting analyses quickly and providing documentation for all its claims. It also focuses more on correcting misinformation than complaining about "balance," which results in frequent corrections and public shaming of inaccurate journalists. And finally, the organization writes in a relatively neutral tone about topics that are relevant to mainstream political debate, making it accessible and appealing to both journalists and the public.

This is not to say that Media Matters is perfect (for instance, I've criticized them here, here, here, and here). Nonetheless, they are vastly more useful than FAIR because they write articles that are often convincing to non-liberals and publish them quickly on the Internet.

Indeed, I think we need a conservative counterpart to Media Matters to keep liberals honest. Media Research Center, the most prominent conservative media critic, is unfortunately much more like FAIR than Media Matters, as we argued at Spinsanity -- it complains about balance and perspectives it doesn't like, and its analysis is frequently untrustworthy.

So let me end with a question for readers. Media criticism is much more open to new voices since the advent of blogs. So which liberal bloggers besides Greg are doing the kind of media criticism that I advocate? Bob Somerby? Eric Boehlert? And what about conservatives?

--Brendan Nyhan (bnyhan@yahoo.com)
Quote:
http://www.prospect.org/horsesmouth/.../post_323.html
The Horse's Mouth
A blog about the reporting of politics -- and the politics of reporting. By Greg Sargent

« | Main | »

<b>FAIR RESPONDS. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has responded to my post criticizing them:

FAIR's Response to Brendan Nyhan:</b>

It's important for media critics-or anyone else-to know the subject they're writing about. But Brendan Nyhan's recent post describing FAIR's "pathologies" demonstrated clearly that he doesn't know much about what we do-aside from knowing that he dislikes our politics.

The first of FAIR's pathologies is our "failure to take advantage of the Internet." Nyhan's evidence: We have a print publication that "props up the organization at the expense of having any impact on the larger discourse." This is an odd point to make on the website of a print magazine; it will certainly seem puzzling to the people who paid more than 3 million visits to our website last year, and to the 45,000 members of FAIR's email list, who regularly receive timely analysis of ongoing media coverage from FAIR, and write letters to protest shoddy media treatment of important issues.

The letters generated by such activism are heard loud and clear by media outlets-which have reacted over the years, sometimes with anger, but also with corrections, retractions, and changes in content or approach. As the editor of CBS's Public Eye website noted recently (8/25/06), "When the liberal media watchdog group issues an 'action alert,' their community takes action." We've heard the same from mainstream media outlets for years. They don't always agree with our conclusions, but the charge that we don't take advantage of the Internet suggests a critic who just hasn't been paying attention.

As for our "impact on the larger discourse," Nyhan might consider the fact that dozens of media outlets, mainstream and independent, call FAIR every month for commentary and analysis of major events. And the fact that FAIR's syndicated radio show CounterSpin airs weekly on more than 130 stations in the U.S. and Canada.

Nyhan also chides FAIR for "complaining about ideological imbalance in think tank citations and talkshow guests," while giving "little attention to rebutting misinformation that's being pushed through the press." Actually, FAIR publishes exactly one article a year about think tank citations; it's one of our more popular online features. And we do think it's vital to monitor who is and isn't invited to speak in the media-these studies have led to a number of progressive advocates getting on mainstream TV and radio who otherwise would not have. Incidentally, studying sources is one of the few ways to actually demonstrate, as opposed to complaining about, false balance-a problem FAIR has been talking about since the 1980s.

Nonetheless, neither subject takes up as much of FAIR's energy as the thing Nyhan claims we don't do enough of-namely, rebutting misinformation. A casual reader of FAIR's website or magazine would see that this is the vast majority of what we do. Two of FAIR's most popular recent such reports-a compilation of wrong-headed predictions and congratulations about the Iraq War from 2003 (3/15/06), and an analysis of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's ever-flexible predictions about on the same (5/16/06) -were widely picked up by print, broadcast and online outlets across the political spectrum.

Nyhan also charges us with issuing shoddy, ideologically driven criticism. Readers should take a look at the single example he cites, taken from the defunct Spinsanity website (7/1/02); it criticizes FAIR for taking major papers like the Chicago Tribune to task for backing the 2003 military coup against elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Spinsanity's problem-as best as we can fathom-is that when the Tribune applauded the coup, it also wrote other unflattering things about Chavez that we did not cite. Honestly, if we put out criticism that was this incoherent and, yes, ideologically driven, we would be out of work.

It's worth mentioning that FAIR got the Tribune (4/20/02) to correct a gross error in one of its Chavez editorials (claiming he had praised Osama bin Laden), which makes this a dubious choice for the sole example of how our "ax-grinding" results in our "irrelevance."

But for Nyhan, writing about Chavez just shows our obsession with "obscure topics with little relevance to mainstream discourse"-a problem that he demonstrates with a search of our website that turned up more hits for Noam Chomsky than Ann Coulter, implying that we think Coulter less deserving of attention. This is correct; we do believe that a media critic and scholar widely considered to be one of the world's leading intellectuals is more important than the calculated rantings of a hate-mongering TV pundit. That said, we have repeatedly exposed Coulter's inaccuracies (the issue Nyhan claims we neglect)-and confronted Coulter with them in an interview we conducted with her on CounterSpin (8/9/02).

Nyhan equates FAIR with the right-wing Media Research Center, asserting that like the MRC, our "analysis is frequently untrustworthy." Given the flimsiness of his critique of FAIR's work, this comes across as a bow to the journalistic convention that criticism should be politically symmetrical. If Nyhan is truly interested in combating the evil of "false balance," he should point out his own blog entry as a textbook example.

Nyhan is, of course, welcome to believe that Media Matters is more valuable than FAIR. We think Media Matters does important work. But it's clear that what Nyhan really objects to is FAIR's politics-or "leftist predilections," as he puts it. There's an irony here: The critic who prides himself on his "non-partisan" work is patroling the ideological boundaries to make sure that no one travels too far from "mainstream discourse." Dressing this kind of centrist orthodoxy as serious analysis is precisely what Spinsanity used to specialize in. We invite readers unfamiliar with our material to check us out at www.fair.org and judge us on the actual quality of our work.

Let's review the evidence. The first charge I made was that FAIR failed to use the Internet effectively. Its response is to cite "more than 3 million visits" to the FAIR website and "the 45,000 members of FAIR's email list, who regularly receive timely analysis of ongoing media coverage from FAIR, and write letters to protest shoddy media treatment of important issues." FAIR further claims that "The letters generated by such activism are heard loud and clear by media outlets."

I'm not claiming that FAIR does not have a large audience. But despite its claims, the organization has failed to fully capitalize on the potential of the Internet or have a significant impact on the larger discourse. Compare how much more effective Media Matters has been in the short time since it was founded. Data from Alexa.com (here), Google (here and here), and Technorati (here and here) all indicate that Media Matters has higher traffic, more links, and more influence in the blogosphere. Its online analyses are more comprehensive, more timely, and more transparent (often including transcripts and video). And while FAIR action alerts do generate responses from the press, Nexis searches indicate that Media Matters has been cited much more frequently in major newspapers over the past year.

My second claim was that FAIR focuses too much on "balance" and too little on fighting misinformation. In response, it claims that "[rebutting misinformation] is the vast majority of what we do," pointing to two recent reports, "a compilation of wrong-headed predictions and congratulations about the Iraq War from 2003 (3/15/06), and an analysis of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's ever-flexible predictions about on the same (5/16/06)." This response also perfectly highlights my third point -- the way that FAIR's ideology gets in the way of useful media criticism. The March 2006 article lists a series of predictions that turned out to be false, while the one from May highlights a columnist's shifting deadline for progress in Iraq -- neither of which has anything to do with correcting misleading claims. Predictions (by definition) cannot be wrong at the time they are made, nor is there any objective standard by which we can judge an appropriate timeline for Iraq. FAIR's objection in both cases is largely ideological.

Finally, I respectfully submit that FAIR's claims that I espouse a "centrist orthodoxy" and that I "really object" to their politics are wrong. The standard I use is simple. An effective media watchdog should quickly and accurately document misleading claims and inflammatory rhetoric in the national debate using what the political philosopher John Rawls called "public reason," which is based on values on which reasonable people of different backgrounds, ideology, etc. can agree. The consistent failure by FAIR and Media Research Center to meet this standard represents a loss to the country. And I say the same thing when the non-partisan Factcheck.org occasionally fails to do so (see here and here). At Spinsanity, we also tried to meet this difficult standard. Readers can peruse our archives and decide for themselves whether we were successful.

<b>Update: MRC staffer Tim Graham has also responded to this post on the organization's Newsbusters blog.</b> He makes several points I agree with. In particular, Graham is right that part of the reason for Media Matters' success is that has more money and better Democratic connections than FAIR, and he is also correct that some MM items simply complain about reporters failing to challenge conservative rhetoric that is not factually inaccurate. (I'll leave aside the details of his objections to the 2002 Spinsanity column I linked to in my original post.)

--Brendan Nyhan (bnyhan@yahoo.com)
Quote:
http://newsbusters.org/node/7358
Liberal Critics Claim MRC's A 'Failure,' Obsession With Balance Isn't 'Useful'
Posted by Tim Graham on September 3, 2006 - 06:42.

<b>For his debut on The American Prospect’s "Horse’s Mouth" blog on political reportage, Brendan Nyhan accurately explained the new frontier of "progressive" media criticism:</b> that the Clintonistas at Media Matters for America have surpassed the Noam Chomskyites at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR).

There’s two easy reasons he doesn’t cite: MMFA is the liberal Democrat establishment, while FAIR is ultra-left. Or put it this way: MMFA is in the tank for Hillary, while FAIR favors her hard-left primary challenger, Jonathan Tasini. Two, MMFA has to have a lot more cash. Nyhan is right that MMFA’s online methods are more up to date, but I’m not so sure about "they are vastly more useful than FAIR because they write articles that are often convincing to non-liberals." I’m non-liberal, and I almost never find them convincing. I don’t really take issue, though, until Nyhan suggests the MRC is an untrustworthy pile of hacks:
FAIR, the national media watch group, has been offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986.
"Indeed, I think we need a conservative counterpart to Media Matters to keep liberals honest. Media Research Center, the most prominent conservative media critic, is unfortunately much more like FAIR than Media Matters, as we argued at Spinsanity -- it complains about balance and perspectives it doesn't like, and its analysis is frequently untrustworthy."

But in the Spinsanity article he links to, his colleague Ben Fritz misleads about what MRC does, as he treats MRC and FAIR like Tweedledee and Tweedledum:

Despite their blatantly ideological agendas, both organizations claim to engage in impartial analysis. In practice, however, these groups often treat reporting that reflects the other side's perspective as de facto evidence of bias, with facts supporting their own views ignored or dismissed as an aberration. With MRC and FAIR, it seems, there's often no such thing as a balanced report.

Now who’s engaging in "spinsanity"? First, MRC does not generally claim to engage in "impartial" analysis. We’re not trying to look as absurd as the "objective" media in claiming we have no allegiance to conservatives. We do claim to document, expose, and neutralize liberal bias. That would seem to be an admission of a conservative mission. We often tell reporters it's accurate to describe us as a "conservative media watchdog" -- even if we also insist they use the liberal label at least once in a blue moon.

Second, and this is where Fritz really punches low, MRC is not in the business of objecting to a liberal getting to speak on a newscast. We do not think that when a liberal gets to open their mouth on air, liberal bias has been committed. Often, we are pointing out that the liberal attitude isn't coming from a liberal think tank spokesman or a Democratic politician -- it's coming from an "objective" journalist like Katie Couric. Fritz tried to take apart a Cyber Alert item and a Media Reality Check, but his analysis is pretty lame. (I won't trying writing a book on this today.) Fritz underlines the conservative censorship argument: "It appears that both groups' real beef is that perspectives they disagree with are aired at all."

MRC is asking the news media to balance liberal viewpoints with conservative viewpoints. We don't generally say liberals should be removed from the air. This line is especially odd from Fritz or Nyhan, considering anyone who pays attention to Media Matters knows it's an aggressive promoter of taking conservatives off the air.

Third, MRC has acknowledged that there’s such a thing as a balanced report. Rich Noyes found a pile of them in his Iraq war study, for example. It’s just that we don’t tend to emphasize them, the same way the news media don’t emphasize planes landing safely on the runway. Balanced reports ought to be the norm.

Fritz is cartooning the MRC with terms like "it seems" and "it would appear," which are merely introductions to.....liberal spin. Oh, but Fritzy wasn't done. MRC is a failure, and a cancer on the political debate:

Perhaps the worst part of all this is that the methods of these ideological media watchdogs are spreading, with more and more commentators adopting their tactics of selective quotation, and lumping together all reporting they don't like under the rubric of "media bias." This is not only lazy; it is intellectually dishonest.

One is forced to conclude that FAIR and MRC are falling well short of their self-professed goals to, respectively, "invigorate the First Amendment" and "bring balance and responsibility to the news media." The American press, so desperately in need of less ideology and more objectivity, is worse off for their failure.

Doesn't it get a bit confusing for the reader as Fritz turns himself into a pretzel, saying on the one hand that seeking "balance" isn't helpful, and then turning around and saying the media's desperately in need of more objectivity? How on earth can you expose a lack of objectivity without discussing the balance of a story or the tone of journalist rhetoric? The big failure here is Fritz's failure to make a cohesive argument.

Now, back to Nyhan's original, newer valentine to Media Matters:

It also focuses more on correcting misinformation than complaining about "balance," which results in frequent corrections and public shaming of inaccurate journalists. And finally, the organization writes in a relatively neutral tone about topics that are relevant to mainstream political debate, making it accessible and appealing to both journalists and the public.

Once again, anyone who visits Media Matters will see that its focus isn't always on "misinformation." It's often, alert Ben Fritz, mere offense at conservative speech. Take these examples from their short list of recent items:

Robertson: "Osama bin Laden may be one of the true disciples of the teaching of the Quran ... because he's following through literally word-for-word what it says"

Hannity: "[M]aking sure Nancy Pelosi doesn't become the [House] speaker" is "worth ... dying for"

Coulter on Sen. Chafee: "They Shot the Wrong Lincoln"

Even this one: On Fox, boxing promoter Don King defended Bush on Katrina, claimed African-Americans supported Kerry in 2004 "because they didn't know any better"

But on so many occasions lately, Media Matters is interested at how reporters aren't "challenging" enough, that they let conservative arguments go "unchallenged." I get a kick out of this one. MMFA complains that Robin Roberts didn't bat around the First Lady half enough. Roberts touted a New York Times story saying Bush will be forever smudged by Hurricane Katrina, and Mrs. Bush said "consider the source." MMFA wanted Roberts to tell Bush off. This is a typical Media Matters post. "Misinformation" is not the issue here. It's about the reporter not having enough liberal spin.
<b>It seems to me that it is not difficult to find out the background of any author of any "story", and the background of their employer, financiers, partners, mentors, etc. To claim that it is "too difficult" to research the authors of what you encounter, and then retreat into a "parallel universe" of information streams that have been filtered and "cleared" by Murdoch's News Corp., Bozell's MRC.org entities, or other bastions of the false mantra of the existence of "Liberal Media Bias", seems to be more a symptom of intellectual "laziness", or a low level of curiousity, more than of any claim of "confusion" or of "victimization" as a result of being "misled" or "deceived".</b>
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