Everything’s Cool — ‘Trust Me’
Filed Under Media, Musings, Orwellian | Leave a Comment
Not!
A new Gallup poll indicates a majority of US peoples don’t trust the mass media — Trust in the media is now slightly higher than the record-low trust in the legislative branch but lower than trust in the executive and judicial branches of government, even though trust in all three branches is down sharply this year. These findings also further confirm a separate Gallup poll that found little confidence in newspapers and television specifically.
And why are we not surprised?
(Illustration found here).
I was out of regular, daily journalism for nearly 20 years, and upon re-entering the field, what a difference a couple of decades — gone was any kind of media camaraderie, or the exciting, fun-filled joy of chasing a story or any kind of desire to publish something for the public to consume without choking.
The big suck was corporations’ ownership of media outlets — I watched a big company completely destroy a good, strong community newspaper in the quest to reduce deficits, all to the bad for writer and reader.
According to Politico, there’s too much politics: (Duh!)
Perhaps one of the leading factors for American distrust in the media is the high percentage who believe that reporting tilts too far in one ideological direction or the other.
Forty-eight percent believe the media is too liberal while only 15 percent of find that it tilts too conservative. Just 33 percent believe coverage is “just about right.”
Duh! Again.
From The Atlantic:
Who’s to blame?
You can start with the news, itself.
Sometimes, bad news breeds distrust, which explains why the high-water mark for media trust came in the late ’90s, and the peaks in distrust came during the most violent parts of the Iraq war and the recession. You can also blame the fragmentation of media, which is siphoning viewers off into their respective ideological corners.
Today, you can incubate in hyper-conservative medialand or the super-socialist blogosphere and ignore the middle in a way you couldn’t when there were only three TV networks and blog was not a word.
But I also blame journalists.
On the one hand, you can make the good case that we are in a golden age of journalism, where technology and innovation are enriching story-telling and creating a kind of infinite buffet that serves every interest and proclivity of the American audience.
On the other hand, mainstream media voices increasingly distinguish themselves by telling us not to trust the rest of the mainstream media.
Think about all of the mass media today that tells us how stupid mass media is.
Bill O’Reilly is the most watched person on cable news, and he regularly complains about the stranglehold of liberals on the news cycle.
Fox News and MSNBC attract a good deal of attention by identifying (or sometimes fabricating) media strawmen to slay with a quip.
Glenn Beck is the most ascendant figure in modern media, and his central message is: Don’t trust anybody. Jon Stewart is the most trusted figure in media, and his central message is: Don’t trust Glenn Beck.
The former treats media as a conspiracy.
The latter treats media as a joke.
And when a mock journalist is more trusted than a “real” journalist — WTF!
And 20-30 years ago there was no “mass media” — cable was just arriving in many US locations — and people snagged their news from “the big three” TV networks and, if you weren’t brain dead, maybe NPR, but that was most likely it for news.
Newspapers, of course, have slowly slid out of the view of news.
For major ‘for instance’ is the Washington Post, once the pinnacle of strong, reporter-working-hard journalism, but Kate Graham would most surely get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if she were alive today and could peruse the Post‘s pages.
Sad, but apparently that’s way it is.
“Life Back”
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Energy, Environment | Leave a Comment
We all remember what’s-his ass, Tony Hayward, whining last spring about this inconvenient oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico: “The first thing to say is I’m sorry,” he told reporters, when asked what he would like to tell locals whose livelihoods have been affected. “We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused their lives. There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back,” he said.
(Illustration found here).
Hayward is a turd.
He and the entire oil industry can not understand.
Results from a new Gallup poll:
Before the BP oil spill, the Gulf Coast was a place of abundant shrimping, tourist-filled beaches and a happy if humble lifestyle.
Now, it’s home to depression, worry and sadness for many.
A Gallup survey released Tuesday of almost 2,600 coastal residents showed that depression cases are up more than 25 percent since an explosion killed 11 people and unleashed a three-month gusher of crude into the Gulf in April that ruined many livelihoods.
The conclusions were consistent with trends seen in smaller studies and witnessed by mental health workers.
People just aren’t as happy as they used to be despite palm trees and warm weather.
A “well-being index” included in the Gallup study said many coastal residents are stressed out, worried and sad more often than people living inland, an indication that the spill’s emotional toll lingers even if most of the oil has vanished from view.
…
The level of mental illness was similar to that seen six months after Hurricane Katrina decimated the coast five years ago, and experts aren’t yet seeing any improvement in mental health five months after the oil crisis began.
Before Katrina, a study by the National Institute of Mental Health said only 6 percent of area residents had likely mental illnesses.
“From the types of patients we are seeing in our emergency departments, clinics and hospitals, the problems are persisting,” said William Pinsky of the New Orleans-based Ochsner Health System, which conducted the random telephone survey of 406 people in four states during the summer.
Sleeplessness, anxiety, depression, anger, substance abuse and domestic violence are among the most common problems reported by mental health agencies.
…
Tejuania Nelson, who runs a day-care center in fishing-dependent Grand Bay, Ala., said preschoolers whose parents were left jobless because of the spill are lashing out in unsettling ways.
“They’re throwing desks, kicking chairs,” she said. “It’s sad. With this, people do not have hope. They cannot see a better time.”
Yes, Mr Hayward, a shitload of people would like their lives back, even as the perpetrators — BP, Halliburton, Transocean — point fingers and cat-fight over whose real fault it was this horrifying incident took place.
When children go crazy, there’s shit in the water and it’s hard get any kind of life back.
Another Bob
Filed Under Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
Once again, and I couldn’t help, another post on Bob Woodward and the state of journalism as it covers national politics and war.
As a nit-wit young reporter, in the original viewing of “All the President’s Men” in 1976, I was much-more captivated by Dustin Hoffman playing Carl Bernstein than Robert Redford as Woodward — chain-smoking, disheveled and jotting notes on napkins, acting freaky sometimes.
I could really relate.
Woodward was too up tight, too-much tie.
And there was something not newsroomie about him — an appearance of something sinister shifting below the fold of natural reporting.
(Illustration found here).
And there was, and still is.
What perked my continued Bob-interest this morning was another piece on Woodward, this from another favorite, Jeff Huber, also an ex-military guy who pulls off the covers covering the military with humor and insight.
Huber’s column appeared at antiwar.com and guts open the “bull feather merchants” covering US military operations and how Woodward’s latest tome is nothing new.
The money bits:
Woodward does give us two bits of vital information that most likely nobody else could have delivered.
First is that both Obama and Petraeus know the wars we’re fighting now can’t be won.
Second, and even more crucial, is Woodward’s account of Petraeus saying:
“You have to recognize also that I don’t think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. … This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.”
Great Caesar’s Ghost, Bob!
The morning after you heard that little tidbit from King David, this should have been screaming at us in Fire Alarm font from the front page of your once-great newspaper: “Top General Says We’ll Fight for Decades, Still Won’t Win.”
Bob, it’s time to start being a real reporter again.
We need you. Put the books down, roll up your sleeves, and go back to fighting in your weight class.
Maybe, Bob, you need the noise and jingle of an old IBM Selectric to ring your journalism chimes.
A Couple of Bobs
Filed Under Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
UPDATE BELOW
The hard life of a modern journalist.
(Illustration found here).
In 1976, when the movie, “All the President’s Men,” was released, I’d been on the job about 18 months as a police reporter — a newbie nearly in the world of newspapers — and had discovered I was a natural at it, taking to the newsroom like a duck to water.
Watching Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford — couple of the most-noted actors of the time — portray Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward as they scrabbled through the Watergate scandal created a sense of time and place for young, impressionable journalists.
Fast forward to the now and the journalism practiced in the mid-1970s is all but gone.
Even the Washington Post, once the pinnacle of true journalism, has become a flack document spinning more bullshit than Ron Ziegler and is currently nothing more than a hack publication catering mainly to right-wing wing-nuttery and crap.
And Bob Woodward?
A rich, older man sitting on top of the media world — a gossip-mongering flack.
One of the best commentators around with an insight on the military and the media is Andrew J. Bacevich, who has replaced the late, great Gen. Bill Odom as my most-favorite best reflective voice on shitfaced US policy.
Bacevich as a great piece up at Tomdispatch on how Bob Woodward has descended from working journalist to Washington insider writing about tripe.
Incidentally, last fall a strategic document on General Stan McNasty (oops, I’m sorry) Stanley McChrystal and his counterinsurgency “surge” for Afghanistan was leaked to the Washington Post, and of course, under Bob Woodward’s byline.
And accordingly, if the so-called surge wasn’t okayed by Obama, McChrystal and the generals made it known the Afghan conflict was “will likely result in failure” — ratcheting-up pressure on the prez.
In a lead-in to Bacevich’s post, Tom Engelhardt, (the ‘tom’ in tomdispatch), put the McChrystal leak in a DC-political-beltway perspective:
The frustration of a commander-in-chief backed into a corner by his own generals, the angry backbiting Woodward reportedly reveals in his book, all of it was, at least in part, a product of that leak and how it played out.
In other words, looked at a certain way, Woodward facilitated the manufacture of the subject for his own bestseller.
A nifty trick for Washington’s leading stenographer. Woodward reportedly reveals in his book, all of it was, at least in part, a product of that leak and how it played out.
Woodward’s had the practice.
Bacevich’s whole column is well-worth reading.
A few snips:
Once a serious journalist, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward now makes a very fine living as chief gossip-monger of the governing class.
Early on in his career, along with Carl Bernstein, his partner at the time, Woodward confronted power. Today, by relentlessly exalting Washington trivia, he flatters power.
His reporting does not inform.
It titillates.
A new Woodward book, Obama’s Wars, is a guaranteed blockbuster.
It’s out this week, already causing a stir, and guaranteed to be forgotten the week after dropping off the bestseller lists.
For good reason: when it comes to substance, any book written by Woodward has about as much heft as the latest potboiler penned by the likes of James Patterson or Tom Clancy.
…
Essentially, news reports indicate, Woodward has updated his script from 2002.
The characters have different names, but the plot remains the same.
Talk about jumping the shark.
UPDATE
This evening Woodward was interviewed by Diane Sawyer at ABC News and came across not a journalist, but some kind of above-the-fray spokesman discussing Obama’s sad predictament — and Sawyer’s voice-over describing Obama’s Pentagon challenge, including him taking shit from the “brilliant David Petraeus” (Sawyer’s words).
See here the encounter between this lip-locking couple of long-time US media hotshots, who most-likely believe their news shit don’t stink.
And that young reporter sitting in the dark, intently watching Bob Redford play Bob Woodward more than 30 years ago, would probably think back then journalism as practiced in 2010 A.D. would be part of a dark and moody, science-fiction novel.
Another Unknown Known
Filed Under Media, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Odd is history.
What little of history I’ve seen, one truism for sure is that history does repeat itself — what comes around goes around.
People who’ve had a strong hand in developing parts-and-parcel the world’s current shit-storm also enjoyed a role in events past — revealing a character study in nasty, carry-a-big-stick-and-use-it warmongering.
Even in advanced age for some, there appears no remorse.
(Illustration found here).
And history in its tilted angle can produce extremely bad timing.
On April 30, 1975, Saigon finally fell to North Vietnamese forces — the last stage in iconic-photographed US Operation Frequent Wind, creating what then-president Gerald Ford called a “humiliating withdrawal” — less than two weeks later, came the Mayaguez Incident, in which US prestige played a bigger role than US military servicemen.
In short, the Mayaguez was a cargo ship in employ of Sea-Land Services for the US military in Southeast Asia and was in the Gulf of Siam when she was captured by Khmer Rouge naval forces in what Ford blubbered out as an “act of piracy.”
The ship and crew were rescued unharmed after a military operation — more to show US resolve and muscle than anything else — that left 41 total dead and missing (18 Marines and Airmen killed in action/missing in action. 23 Marines killed in a helicopter crash during the operation. 50 wounded).
Details of the nearly-forgotten incident were part of a documents dump Friday by the US Department of State.
An Associated Press story (from Saturday via antiwar.com) covers some of the dialogue among Ford’s advisers on how to react to the situation — Henry Kissinger, the secretary of state, Nelson Rockefeller, the vice president, wanted some heavy military action — while no one wanted to hear William Clements, the deputy secretary of defense, as he presented a case that the US shouldn’t be so paranoid: the incident might not be intended as a challenge to the U.S. but rather a misstep linked to a dispute over oil resources in the region.
“We should not forget that there is a real chance that this is an in-house spat,” Clements said.
“That is interesting, but it does not solve our problem,” Ford responded.
He called for a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier to head toward the scene and for plans to be drawn up for laying mines in the waters around the seized ship.
Further down in the AP story, near the end of the discussion on the US response to the Khmer Rouge, is this graph:
Donald H. Rumsfeld, the White House chief of staff who later that year became Ford’s secretary of defense, suggested a public statement declaring the ship’s seizure an act of piracy and saying the U.S. expects the crew’s release.
He argued against demanding their release — because, he said, that would “activate the Congress” and “seems weaker.”
The Rumsfeld two-cents worth.
He would later contribute way-more than a $3 bill.
And he will be hated by all stripes: So here stands the secretary of defense, long and widely despised by officers for rejecting their advice before the war and now openly criticized by the grunts for failing to give them proper cover as the war rages on all around them. And yet Rumsfeld is the one Cabinet secretary who has received explicit assurances that he will keep his job, with President Bush’s full confidence, into the second term.
And the last graph from a New York Times review of Bradley Graham’s book, “By His Own Rules : The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld:”
On the day of Mr. Rumsfeld’s farewell ceremony in December 2006, Mr. Graham writes, “the tally of U.S. troops who had died in the Iraq war had reached 2,939,” the “number wounded in action had exceeded 22,000,” and “countless others were mentally and emotionally traumatized from the nightmarish conflict.”
Rummy’s known by what’s he known.