Spinning and Being Spun: The Idea of Journalism in a Postmodern Age

Politics

Tear down those news site firewalls!

Link: Advertising Age - MediaWorks - Paid Content on the Net? Not if the Content's News.

Funny how the numbers do not lie, about the lack of viability of these subscription model walled garden anachronisms online.

But the real question is, why were such stupid decisions made in the first place? There were plenty of reasoned arguments, well-supported, that should have been more than persuasive, not to mention the chorus of disapproval on the Internets.

My thought is that, regardless of those arguments, regardless of the widespread disapproval, it was all about a power struggle over who would dictate the terms in the politics of deep structure interfaces online, just as surely as Microsoft and browsers and Google are now fighting over what OS layer is really the "desktop."

If subscriptions and walled gardens held the day, Old Media could crow that the new boss was same as the old boss, and continue guarding and coveting its gatekeeper role at the choke points of information dissemination and analysis.

But if forced to capitulate to the predominant ethos of the web, it would mean control of the discourse of the day had been wrested away from Old Media by force, by populist force. The hilarious part is the fact that populist forces carrying the day was such a "radical" idea back then.

Most of us online never doubted it. But what actually goes on inside the heads of those who do?!

Sure, many of those past nay-sayers will point to the collapse of online advertising revenue in the dot.com bust as the reason for their ridiculous pay-to-play models. But the main reason that collapse hit as hard as it did was that the banner ad was hopelessly tied to pre-conceived assumptions that the ads HAD to be tied to click-thrus and conversions, that somehow eyeball exposure and branding meant nothing if a direct link from THIS ad to THAT sale could not be traced.

What utter bullshit. Print, radio, and TV advertising were never held to such a high standard, yet they continue to command big ad budgets (albeit shrinking, as the ad money river now flows more and more online)

And the primary reason the online ad market is booming now is that a different model of what online advertising can be has started to sink in. Google was the visionary through the hard times, and for quite a while, it was the lonely visionary.

Now everyone dreams of Google's electronic sheep.

Link: Advertising Age - MediaWorks - Paid Content on the Net? Not if the Content's News.

Paid Content on the Net? Not if the Content's News

CNN, Economist Take Down Walls Online; WSJ and NYT Could Be Next

By Nat Ives and Abbey Klaassen

Published: August 13, 2007

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- The experiment in paid content is over. No sale.

Charging for web content looked pretty promising back in 1996, when the pioneering new web magazine Slate was gearing up to try just that. "Our belief is that the medium will prove itself over time and people will pay for it," said John Williams, the founding publisher.

Chris Neimeth, senior VP-publisher at Salon

He never got a chance to test that proposition; he quit for Starbucks two months after launch. Then Slate made its move -- but lasted only a year before going free again in February 1999. Now there's a crescendo of similar falling walls at serious news sites -- including The Economist and CNN -- and the likelihood that the websites of both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal will soon be free.

Advantage of free
Even those that still plan to charge for content recognize that the free model has its benefits. This March, Slate rival Salon hiked prices on both its paid-subscription plans, but not because it saw paid content as the way forward. It raised rates the most for its ad-free subscription and raised them less for a subscription tier that includes some ads.
[...]

Two days after Salon's move, The Economist outright demolished a decade-old pay wall around much of the content on Economist.com. The paid-content plan had been intended to protect the print edition, but its pricing system was too complicated for consumers and, more important, it restricted traffic and time spent on the site. In June, after dropping the fees, unique visitors to Economist.com beat the previous June by 12%, the magazine said.

'Reaching true scale'
Then last month, CNN.com replaced its pay-to-play Pipeline video-news service with a free, ad-supported video player. "As popular as the service was," a CNN blog post explained, "it became clear to us that reaching true scale was gong to be impossible if the product remained as a pay service."

"Everyone started out thinking, 'OK, we'll sell some subscriptions and sell some advertising,'" said Ken Doctor, president of the Content Bridges media consultancy and a former VP for content services at Knight Ridder Digital. "Now the content world is becoming almost entirely ad-monetized."

The extent of the paradigm shift became really clear this June, when Rupert Murdoch fantasized to Time magazine, even before Dow Jones had accepted his $5 billion bid to buy it, about ending The Wall Street Journal's print edition and opening the gates to its online edition. During a News Corp. conference call with analysts last week, Mr. Murdoch reiterated that going free is very much on the table.

[...]

Then there's TimesSelect, the nearly two-year-old attempt by The New York Times to simultaneously monetize online readership and prop up print circulation. Its middling results, neither validation nor failure, strongly suggest that very few content publishers should even consider playing in the pay arena. And when the New York Post reported last week that the Times itself had decided to ax its tollbooth, the paper wasn't exactly quick to shoot down the story. "We continue to evaluate the best approach for NYTimes.com," a spokeswoman said, declining to say anything further.

"When the first bubble burst in 2001, 2002, the people who said that free access wouldn't work said, 'Ha, we told you,'" said Rafat Ali, publisher and editor of PaidContent.org. "Then the advertising market came back. And you know where the industry is right now."

[...]

The more, the better
None of that is compelling enough to support paid content in most situations, said Jeff Marshall, senior VP-digital managing director at Starcom/Pixel. "From a marketer perspective, the big reason for moving something like TimesSelect or Dow Jones is you potentially create greater scale for advertisers, and they want as much scale as possible," he said. "Fortune 1000 companies want to move a lot of products, and the more people you can reach in desirable audiences, the better."

[...]

As it turns out, buying online news is certifiably low among consumers' priorities. In a 2007 study by Frank N. Magid Associates, only 4% of surveyed adults 18 to 64 said they had paid a separate fee to read news online, on par with paying for sports information and online genealogy services. Fantasy sports ranked a little better, but at only 7%. Entertainment content performed fairly well, with 16% of respondents saying they'd paid something extra to get it. But even that area got fewer buyers than background and credit checks; dating services; adult entertainment; technical support such as spam filters; and games, the No. 1 category where people will pay to play.

Web publishers are also getting a handle on the math. Online ad spending in the U.S. grew from $6 billion in 2002 to an estimated $16.8 billion last year -- and is likely to top $35 billion by 2011 even as its rate of growth slows, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. By comparison, ad spending in U.S. consumer magazines grew from nearly $11 billion in 2002 to an estimated $13.4 billion in 2006 -- with a projected 2011 haul of $16 billion.

[...]

Behind the scenes in tech magazine-land

This story speaks volumes. Written by Kim Zetter.

Link: PC World Editor Quits Over Apple Story - Epicenter - Wired Blogs.

PC World Editor Quits Over Apple Story

Colleagues at my former outlet, PC World magazine, have told me that Editor-in-Chief Harry McCracken quit abruptly today because the company's new CEO, Colin Crawford, tried to kill a story about Apple and Steve Jobs.

The piece, a whimsical article titled "Ten Things We Hate About Apple," was still in draft form when Crawford killed it. McCracken said no way and walked after Crawford refused to compromise. Apparently Crawford also told editors that product reviews in the magazine were too critical of vendors, especially ones who advertise in the magazine, and that they had to start being nicer to advertisers.

Crawford was former CEO of MacWorld and only started at PC World about a month ago. According to the PC World source, when Crawford was working for the Mac magazine, Steve Jobs would call him up any time he had a problem with a story the magazine was running about Apple.

"Everybody is so proud of Harry but we're devastated that he's gone," said the source. "This is no way to run a magazine. But unfortunately, this looks like an indication of what we've got in store (from the new boss)."

He added that everyone at the magazine was upset by the news. "There's supposed to be a party with the MacWorld people going on right now, but no one's going," he said.

The source didn't know the specifics of what was in the story Crawford wanted to kill but said it was nothing new. "It was supposed to be light fare, just really innocuous stuff. The same kinds of things people have said about Apple before -- things that teased Steve Jobs," he said.

I reached McCracken on his cell who, from the sound of the background noise, seemed to be leaving the MacWorld party as we talked.

[Full Disclosure: Harry's my former boss at PC World and someone I greatly respect. He's a top-notch writer and one of the smartest editors I've worked with.]

He didn't want to discuss the details of why he resigned but said he quit "because of some fundamental disagreements with Colin." He emphasized that he wasn't fired or forced out and holds no ill feelings toward the company.

[...]

Murdoch admits he tries to sway public opinion for political purposes

Pretty disquieting, even if he does think his efforts were less than successful.

Link: Crooks and Liars: Rupert Murdoch admits manipulating the media…Surprise…Surprise.

Link: Hollywood Reporter: Murdoch: Big media has less sway on Internet.

Murdoch: Big media has less sway on Internet

By Georg Szalai

Jan 27, 2007

NEW YORK: Big media companies and governments ultimately can't stop or reverse their reduced agenda setting power brought about by the Internet and digital media, but must learn to live with it and embrace it as an opportunity, a panel at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland said Friday.

Big media conglomerates have less influence amid the continued explosion of news sites, blogs and podcasts, News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch said in the session moderated by Charlie Rose and available via Webcast. "It's so pluralistic," Murdoch said. "We all have less power, much less...(we) the big companies."

Not only are there many more places from which to get news and opinion thanks to the Internet, he said. He said traditional media are also "put right immediately" these days when making mistakes, citing the example of the CBS News affair surrounding allegations against president George Bush last year.

Similarly, Murdoch said "government now has to be much more open" because of the Web and suggested, along with Gordon Brown, chancellor of the exchequer and the possible future prime minister of the U.K., that governments should try to see it as an opportunity for them.

"We just have to let this go," Murdoch said. "We can't reverse it."

Asked if his News Corp. managed to shape the agenda on the war in Iraq, Murdoch said: "No, I don't think so. We tried." Asked by Rose for further comment, he said: "We basically supported the Bush policy in the Middle East...but we have been very critical of his execution."

The News Corp. CEO also once again signaled that he sees much more change ahead thanks to digital media. "We're in the very early stages of it," he said.

[...]

Juan Cole rakes Murdoch over the coals pretty good.

Link: Informed Comment.

Rupert Murdoch, who gives you Bill O'Reilly, Daniel Pipes, and other fantasists of the hard Right, by his ownership of a vast media empire, admitted at the Davos conference that his companies had "tried" to propagandize for Bush's Iraq War. He said that they were critical of the execution of the war, though. He doesn't watch or read his own media if he thinks that. It is never a discouraging word and 'what were the RNC talking points today?' over there in Foxland.

Murdoch's remarks are a good reason for which the news conglomerates should be broken up so that a wider range of views can be published. While Murdoch complains about competition from the internet, the fact is that far more people watch television than get their news from any blogger.

Murdoch's media have done more to cheapen American values and drive the country toward fascistic ways of thinking than anything since the McCarthy period in the 1950s. The airwaves belong to the public, and this man only licenses them. When will the public take them back and use them for purposes of which Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Franklin would have approved?

 

Interesting NBC/MSNBC news items on TV Newser

I don't know if I see a trend here or not, but it certainly is an interesting confluence of events, pulled from different times, etc.

Link: mediabistro.com: TVNewser: Viewers Tune In For NBC's Experiment.

Tuesday, Dec 05

Viewers Tune In For NBC's Experiment

Last night, for the first time in the program's 37-year history, NBC Nightly News had a sole sponsor: Philips Electronics. With less ads in between, 'Nightly' had longer-form pieces and expanded segments.

As noted below, the viewer response was big. And the ratings are reflecting that: According to 6:30 affiliate time period numbers (which represent about 75 percent of the country), Nightly News delivered 10,329,000 total viewers last night -- almost 1.2 million more than ABC's 9,156,000 and over 2.3 million more than CBS's 8 million...

[...] 

Link: mediabistro.com: TVNewser: Iraq: Williams Continues On MSNBC.

Wednesday, Dec 06

Iraq: Williams Continues On MSNBC

After signing off on NBC, Brian Williams continued anchoring on MSNBC. Tim Russert had this to say:

"I was so taken by the bluntness and how bleak this report was. When you hear someone, former Chief of Staff Leon Panetta say, 'we need one last chance.' When you hear Jim Baker, former Secretary of State, saying 'we have traded one nightmare for another.' Lee Hamilton saying 'we're not sure this is doable.' What they're doing is saying, 'this is our best effort. It may not be enough, but time is of the essence.'"

[...]

Link: mediabistro.com: TVNewser: MSNBC #1 In 18-34 Demo Last Week.

Wednesday, Dec 06

MSNBC #1 In 18-34 Demo Last Week

"All the news networks do miserably" in the 18-34 demographic, Reese Schonfeld rightfully notes. But with that disclaimer out of the way, it's worth noting that MSNBC "led all four cable news networks in viewers 18-34 in both prime and total day" last week. Schonfeld says MSNBC's primetime lineup has brought in a younger audience.

MSNBC actually had the top nine programs on cable news in the 18-34 demo last week. They were all taped shows, like To Catch A Predator or Lockup, and most aired late at night.

The #1 18-34 program was Sunday's 8pm special "Beyond Conviction," which averaged 142,000 in that demo. The second highest ranked was a 3am repeat of Lockup on Friday morning, with 134,000 in the 18-34 demo...

[...]

A Military Halloween Scare: Pentagon decides its PR staff isn't up to snuff

Link: Pentagon mounts public affairs ops to counter bad news, exploit "new media" - Yahoo! News.

Could you call it Pentagon 2.0?

Or should we prepare ourselves for a new media propaganda campaign that will plant stories virally, deep in the Blogosphere, to bubble up for "placement" in mainstream media through a back door?

A standard PR technique of the Bush administration has been to circumvent the national/Beltway media, and to primarily give audiences to local media outlets in various sites the talking heads visit. The presumption of such a technique is that the local media are "rubes" who are less critical and more suseptible to heavy-handed spin and message control. I am not saying I believe those things. I've been one of those local media people. I'm just saying that appears to be the overt the presumption behind such a strategy.

Are local media getting wise to that trick? Are Bloggers their new "rubes?"

If we can assume the GOP PR machine is faltering (given those bad poll numbers we see daily), a person can draw one of two conclusions:

1. Bad policies and incompetence in Iraq (and previous lies exposed) have derailed the previous good public opinion of this administration.

OR

2. The PR process (largely generating fiction) is faltering and failing to do its job properly in the current environment.

Generally, if I were the folks in charge, I'd lean more heavily on the first option and look to fix those issues. That's because the guy who taught me PR drummed it into me when I was in my 20's: Truth is the Best PR. Honestly, it works amazingly well.

Hurricane Katrina provided a big reality check and a turning point, and if the folks in charge couldn't get a clue through their insulated bubble for that one, they surely aren't going to figure out what a disaster they've created in Iraq. I suspect they're currently locked into a position of believing their own spin. Drinking their own Kool-Aid, so to speak.

Sort of like those last weeks of George H.W. Bush's re-election campaign, when his falling numbers could not penetrate the insistent "Go team!" optimism he'd worked himself into at the end of the campaign against Clinton/Gore.

So it appears from the article below that the Pentagon has chosen a PR assault on Option 2. Perhaps the situation in Iraq is so utterly hogtied and stalemated, the Pentagon has no other option besides intensifying the spin. But one would think actually getting the power on in Iraq, or the hospitals and ambulances running properly, would go a long way toward keeping people in the U.S. from thinking the situation there isn't being completely botched Katrina-style. I mean, we are half a world away. Just a token effort at competence in Iraq would have easily conned a lot of people, but even that was too much for this administration.

Iraq appears to have been botched Katrina-style from the very beginning, but since Iraqis were dying instead of people in New Orleans, the fictional spin held the upper hand for audiences half a world away.

I'm not hopeful that a New Media PR campaign can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, in this case. And on the more paranoid side, I shudder at the power of the military behind a massive propaganda campaign. It invokes images of Goebbels to me, the master propagandist.

But the masses lining the streets in Nuremburg, creating those striking images in "Triumph of the Will," that's a POPULIST movement, even if it was a manipulated populism. It had bodies. Masses of bodies, willingly cheering.

And next week we'll find out how easily manipulated the masses of bodies in the U.S. can be. Not because masses of people will be gathered in the disappearing public common spaces in our culture. We gather around our electronic hearths. Populist mentality in crowds has been factored out of the equation.

The Pentagon isn't seeking to actually influence masses in crowds. As Noam Chomsky would say, it seeks to "manufacture consent" among the masses individually, in that nearly one-on-one communion with both our electronic hearth, and now with the interactive screen, the viral social media spaces of the blogosphere.

The question is, freepers be damned, are interactive, viral social media spaces amenable to new Pentagon 2.0 PR tactics?

Maybe instead of asking what Lee Atwater would do, we should ask, "What would Goebbels do?" I found a neat clip on him from Wikipedia I'll paste in below the article excerpt.

Link: Pentagon mounts public affairs ops to counter bad news, exploit "new media" - Yahoo! News.

Pentagon mounts public affairs ops to counter bad news, exploit "new media"

by Jim Mannion

Mon Oct 30,  3:28 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The Pentagon is expanding its public affairs operations to counter "inaccurate" news stories and editorials and exploit "new media" to get its message out, its chief spokesman said, denying the effort was linked to the US elections.

The initiative comes amid plummeting domestic support for the war in Iraq and just before crucial mid-term congressional elections in which opposition Democrats are contesting Republican control of the Congress.

Eric Ruff, the Pentagon press secretary, insisted that the new public affairs program was not prompted by either the elections or polls showing that only about 37 percent believe the war is going well.

"What were looking at doing is, 'How can we get better, how can we get faster, how can we transform public affairs?'," he told reporters.

"And we're looking at being quicker to respond to breaking news. Being quicker to respond, frankly, to inaccurate statements," he said.

"And we're looking at this whole issue of new media -- podcasting, and IM-ing and all those kinds of things, where people are basically running circles inside us," he said.

Ruff disclosed the expanded operations after questions were raised about a wall being built in the Pentagon press operations center that will separate the new unit from Pentagon public affairs officials who deal with the media.

He denied that the intent of the new operation was to go around the mainstream news media.

Ruff said he did not know how much the operation is costing or how many people were being hired.

The unit includes a rapid response team, a "new media" group, and a team that specializes in getting Pentagon officials booked on radio and television shows.

[...]

But US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a strident critic of media coverage of Iraq, also has pushed for a sweeping overhaul in the way the military communicates with the public.

In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in February, he called for 24-hour press operations centers and an approach that would give Internet operations and other channels of communications equal status to "20th century press relations."

"It will result in much less reliance on the traditional print press, just as publics of the US and the world are relying less on newspapers as their principal source of information," he said.

Efforts to expand the military's use of "information operations" overseas aroused controversy following disclosures last year that a private contractor was used to secretly plant paid stories in the Iraqi media.

"Information operations" is a military term used to describe propaganda aimed at influencing foreign publics. Traditional Pentagon public affairs, on the other hand, is bound by laws that prohibit propagandizing of Americans.

Asked whether the new Pentagon operations fell under the category of "information operations," Ruff said, "I've not looked at it that way at all."

[...]

So what made Goebbels such a master? What did he do that was so revolutionary? Turns out, according to Wikipedia, at least, one of his greatest innovations was employing new communications technologies ahead of others, in ways others hadn't started doing yet.

Link: Joseph Goebbels - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Goebbels technique, also known as argumentum ad nauseam, is the name given to a policy of repeating a point until it is taken to be the truth (see Big Lie). Goebbels also pioneered the use of broadcasting in mass propaganda, promoting the distribution of inexpensive single frequency radio receivers (the so-called Volksempfänger (People's radio) to the German public which ensured that millions of people heard the output of the Reich's propaganda ministry while being unable to receive news and other broadcasts from outside Germany. Meanwhile his ministry busily broadcast Nazi propaganda around the world by shortwave radio. Newsreels, movies and books were impossible to publish without prior approval and censorship by Goebbels' ministry. He is credited by historians with developing the techniques of modern communications and propaganda.

[...]

[Kinda makes him sound invincible, doesn't it? Which is even more interesting in light of this next excerpt from the same Wikipedia entry.]

Goebbels is often remembered for his Sportpalast speech, given on February 18, 1943 (sometimes called the Total War speech) in which he tried to motivate the German people to continue their struggle after the tides of World War II had turned against Germany. By this time many Germans privately believed Germany was irrevocably on its way to defeat.

There was strong animosity between Goebbels and the popular Hermann Göring, whose political influence waned following his disastrous management of the Luftwaffe early during the war and Goebbels became the third most powerful leader in Germany (after Martin Bormann, of whom most Germans were not aware). As Germany's military situation collapsed, the increasing shrillness of the government's propaganda brought discreet ridicule from the German people who nicknamed Goebbels The Malicious Dwarf and The Wotan Mickey Mouse.

[...]

Soooo, it appears the moral to this story is...

That the Big Lie is not all-powerful if reality gets so strong it breaks through? Sure, everybody remembers the Big Lie theory, but they FORGET Part 2, where the dismal reality-based universe breaks through and the Big Lie is exposed. But note, the "increasing shrillness of the government's propaganda," in utter denial even though the Big Lie had been exposed.

Hey, why turn to the truth when you can go down lying, right? Take a leaf out of the book of every hard-core alcoholic or other abusive family system. Deny, deny, deny, in the face of ALL evidence to the contrary. Drink so much Kool-Aid (spiked with whatever) that you are incapable of believing anything BUT your own fictional reality.

Then shoot yourself in a bunker, after poisoning all your children with cyanide. That's what Goebbels did, at least. Few alcoholics or other abusers get to hang out in bunkers with Hitler.

If you're feeling a little deja vu on the way the Germans finally realized their military situation was collapsing, read this bit below on the Big Lie, and feel deja vu again.

It's Halloween! It's supposed to give you nightmares! Boooooo!!!!

Link: Big Lie - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Later, Joseph Goebbels put forth a slightly different theory which has come to be more commonly associated with the phrase big lie. In this theory, the English are attributed with using a propaganda technique wherein they had the mendacity to "lie big" and "stick to it".²

There is an uncited rumor to the effect that Goebbels also offered up his version of the big lie technique without attributing it to either Jewish or Allied propaganda. That uncited quote is the most wide-spread attribution of the big lie, and it is usually given in a context where the implication is that the propaganda technique was invented by Goebbels, who was the propaganda minister for the Third Reich.³

The phrase was also used (on page 51) in a report prepared during the war by the United States Office of Strategic Services in describing Hitler's psychological profile [1]

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it. - OSS report page 51 [2]

"Maximizing Shareholder Value" by any other name still stinks to high heaven

Link: Fresh Intelligence : Radar Online: Massive layoffs at NBC.

When last I wrote about media layoffs (by whatever euphemism they were going by at the time), the bloodletting was in print, New York Times corporation and Knight Ridder.

MSNBC has had some great scoops lately, and a great voice in the form of Keith Olbermann. Too bad my monopolistic cable company (Comcast) has decided I should get the useless CNBC instead of MSNBC, in my cheapo tier of service.

Regardless of those who gain most from newsroom purges in quarterly profit reports (shareholders who demand 20-30% returns, and "growth," above all else), I actually suspect an overt political motive. In the name of maximizing shareholder value, newsrooms are being gutted, turned into naive, sonambulistic, drooling receptories for Enron-like PR and marketing corporate and government snow jobs.

My poly sci professor in college drummed something into my head that will always be my touchstone. Those who watch the endless crime dramas on primetime know this game too. You ask the questions: WHO RULES? WHO BENEFITS?

The answers to those questions reveal the true motivations behind the decisions, regardless of the bullshit PR "TV 2.0" name attached to it.

So are shareholder demands for that high of profits enough to justify the purge of an entire industry (over a 20-year period, as well)? Or are there much BIGGER benefits, BIGGER beneficiaries who are cleaning up on a far bigger scale than mere shareholders?

I can't help it. I watched the Enron documentary the other day, "The Smartest Guys in the Room." It is wonderful. And demoralizing. Because you know that for all this fraud committed as the "big lie" (Hitler's henchmen advocated this approach as superior for propaganda), we know there are thousands of smaller instances of these frauds, cloaked behind the veil of PR obfuscation. Man, that Enron PR and propaganda machine was one piece of work.

Halliburton's subsidiaries are making money off Iraq (that used to be called "war profiteering, when people with knowledge of history still had jobs in smart newsrooms) on such a massive scale, I think the corporate imperative to utterly co-opt all honest journalistic enterprises that could penetrate that veil of propaganda far outweighs such insignificant things as "maximizing shareholder value."

I learned from the Enron film how little regard for shareholders and shareholder value actually exists inside many corporations. Using that for a "reason" is nothing more than a scammer's rationalization for a kind of wholesale corporate crime syndicate, operating on a global scale. I think corporations in the world today have turned criminal to the extent that they make the mafia or yakuza look like bit players.

CBS basically got gutted after Rathergate. ABC News has been co-opted since Peter Jennings died, due to the Disney masters, not because individual journalists there aren't trying. So this rounds it all out. Target: NBC. Currently the only evening newscast I can stand to watch most of the time without flinching.

New York Times Corp: limping. Knight Ridder: gutted. Village Voice... so sad. L.A. Times taking a beating. What's next? The Washington Post?

When will the "Pravda-ization" of U.S. mainstream media be final and complete?

Link: Fresh Intelligence : Radar Online: Massive layoffs at NBC.

THE IDIOT BOX

Plucking Party at NBC News

The massive layoffs at NBC that we predicted a month ago were announced this morning: The network will eliminate 700 jobs company-wide over the next year. And Radar has learned just how bloody a day it will be for the news division: NBC News plans to fire 220 staffers.

It's unclear how the cuts will be distributed across NBC News, but that number includes employees of the news staffs at the network's owned-and-operated local stations. The job cuts are part of "TV 2.0," a network-wide re-evaluation that NBC executives have described as updating the network for the 21st century and insiders call an excuse for massive layoffs.

Among the hardest hit areas will be MSNBC's production staff—NBC is expected to move MSNBC's operations from Secaucus, N.J., and consolidate with either CNBC in Englewood Cliffs or NBC's headquarters in Manhattan—and Dateline NBC. An NBC News spokeswoman did not immediately return a call for comment.

This is an interesting commentary on the move as well, from September:

Who's Afraid of TV 2.0?

THANK YOU, AND GOODNIGHT

If you work at NBC Universal, beware the ides of September. Peacock staffers are sweating bullets over the impending release of what the company is calling TV 2.0, a proposed top-to-bottom reorganization of the network to streamline it for the Internet age. While NBC Universal Television Group honcho Jeff Zucker is pitching the project—recommendations are due mid-month, according to one source—as a visionary look to the future, staffers suspect it will be a merciless look at the bottom line. "Everyone is waiting for the ax to fall," says an NBCer. "There was a board meeting a couple of weeks ago, and the word was, 'How much can you cut for the fourth quarter?'"

"Zucker says we don't want to be like the music industry," says another staffer. Translation: "They want to squeeze money out of this place."

And there's less and less money to go around. NBC, which dropped from first place in the advertiser-friendly 18-to-49-year-old demographic in 2004 to dead last for the past two seasons, sold $1.7 billion in ads for its non-sports programming last May at the Upfronts, when advertisers place bets on the networks' new shows. That's a 10 percent drop from its 2005 take, and a whopping 41 percent drop from 2004, when hits like Friends and The Apprentice raked in $2.6 billion.

An NBC Universal executive, speaking on background, insisted that no decisions have been made: "They're looking at a lot of different scenarios. Nothing has been decided yet." Staffers at the network's news division are particularly on edge because news budgets are a large and easy target, and because Jay Ireland, a former GE auditor and bean-counter at the company's plastics division who now runs NBC Universal's station division, is the exec tasked with wedging NBC News into the TV 2.0 scheme.

[...]

 

Are we all soaking in the "Foxification" of news?

Link: TIME.com: What Hath Fox Wrought? -- Page 1.

This is the most interesting take I've seen on the 10th anniversary of Fox News. I admit, I don't have much use for such a ridiculous excuse for a cable news network, but the author's thesis below carries some weight, more than I'd like it to.

Did Fox News get other news entities to "loosen up?" Think about the British press. To them, the American press is deluded in its attachment to fake neutrality, formulaic balance, presumed yet non-existent "objectivity." The Brits would say the only ones the American Media are fooling are the naive among their audiences.

So here's a strange thought: Is FOX on the same side as the UK's Guardian and Observer?!

Can I wrap my head around that idea? Let me stew on it. What they all seem to have in common is allowing POV to be present in their coverage. For the Brits, it is the norm for most media and news. They distrust media entities that don't admit to having a perspective or a political position. That doesn't mean they don't strive for fairness or to be comprehensive in their coverage. They'd lose crediblity among the more highly literate Europeans (and the barely literate Americans who read the British press) if they didn't.

Now Fox News pretends to be "fair and balanced," but it is unabashedly political and slanted. As the article below argues, by taking a position, even while denying it, Fox may have opened up US media markets for a more European style of news coverage, something no other US media entities have been able to do, save the blog movement.

Where Fox News diverges from the European POV news model that it emulates (heh) is that it doesn't appear to believe it loses credibility by not providing fair and comprehensive coverage of issues, by not covering the parts of the issues it doesn't agree withor can't spin. The Guardian readers expect comprehensive coverage, as do BBC viewers, and so on.

Regardless of the political perspective of the media entity, the model of Enlightenment Humanism most rational actors work from would require that all paths be investigated, not just the ones with which they agree.

I think that is what distinguishes a media entity that owns up to a perspective but still tries to have credibility (the European model) from a propaganda organ or persuasion machine (the Fox model).

But aside from THAT little thing, I'm sure the Foxies will start speaking French VERY soon!

Link: TIME.com: What Hath Fox Wrought? -- Page 1.

What Hath Fox Wrought?

 

Fox news, which is about to celebrate its 10th anniversary, has changed the face of
television. You're watching it, even if you don't think you are

By JAMES PONIEWOZIK

Posted Friday, Oct. 06, 2006

The most ambitious revolutionaries don't just topple regimes; they remake time. The Khmer Rouge started over the calendar at Year Zero. The French revolutionary government decreed a decimal day of ten hours, composed of 100 minutes, each with 100 seconds. The cable-news Jacobins at Fox News may be wishing they had rejiggered their calendar so that they could have celebrated their 10th anniversary a year ago, when they were at their ratings apex. Today, the channel is in its first ratings slump, still far ahead of CNN and MSNBC, but not by as much.

But it's still possible to divide the news calendar into BF and AF—Before Fox and After Fox. Much of what you see on TV news exists because of Fox, and not just the opinion shows. The graphics, the sound effects, the general tone of news is set by Fox. [...]

Even with its ratings down, Fox remains the network against which competitors define themselves. And not just news competitors. After Bill Clinton got off an on-camera harangue against Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace, for an aggressive line of questioning about his administration's anti-terror efforts, the New York Times reported that prominent Democrats, from Howard Dean to Paul Begala, had begun an open campaign of attacking Fox as a covert Republican shill.

[...]

But while "fair and balanced" may be propaganda, it doesn't seem to be fooling anyone. Conservatives see Fox as a comfortable haven for their worldview; their opponents pretty much agree. The balance here is that Fox winks just as broadly to both sides.

In the end, that wink—that is, the Fox gestalt of insouciance, attitude, and even playfulness—has had a bigger effect on the news media than any Bill O'Reilly rant. Fox taught TV news that voice, provocation and fun are not things to be afraid of. And for better or worse, probably every TV news program outside of PBS has been Foxified by now. The explosive graphics on your newscast: that's Fox. The "freeSpeech" opinion segments on the new CBS Evening News: that's Fox, too. Anderson Cooper yelling at a FEMA official or crusading in Africa: that's Fox. Keith Olbermann ranting at George W. Bush and O'Reilly on MSNBC's Countdown: that's Fox through and through, whether Olbermann would like to admit it or not.

Fox's ratings, in other words, may have declined for its 10th anniversary. But there are ratings and then there are ratings. You may tell yourself you don't watch Fox News. But as they used to say in the old Palmolive commercials: You're soaking in it.

Former President Clinton sees restless online media as a key factor in countering a co-opted traditional media

Link: New Media A Weapon in New World Of Politics - washingtonpost.com.

This Washington Post article says Clinton sees the necessity of such strategies as crucial to why Gore and Kerry lost (well, there are those questionable ballot issues, GOP caging, dirty tricks, etc.). And he says mastering that wild card is the most important piece of advice he gave Senator Clinton if she decides to run for president.

Mastering these new factors is seen as the key, but I believe that is wrong-headed at best.

Mastering implies control. Astro-turfing, making fake grassroots organizations, freepers, and, as we see below, inserting messages and talking points from viral points so they trickle UP... all of these techniques imply first that control is possible in a space that is a many-headed AND many-footed beast, a hodge-podge of online communities and cultures.

The illusion is that Rove & Co. have this mastery, that their presumptions of control based on initial successes mean that they have actual control. As the article accurately points out (in a section I did not quote), the scandal around Representative Foley could prove the lie to such an assumption.

Just the other day, a colleague and I were talking about the surreal and bizarre far-right spin on the Foley scandal, laughably blaming a "Democratic machine" for victimizing a poor helpless GOP with its "October Surprise." How quick bullies are to whine and cry and blame someone else for something that was brought on by their own divisive politics, hypocrisy, and deliberate pandering to religious, moral, and racial bigotry.

Do the GOP spinners really believe folks are so gullible? The transparency of the spin not only makes thinking people laugh out loud at the perfection of the karmic return, it also sets off guffaws at the fact that the top-down message architects are so power-drunk and arrogant as to think with a straight face that they can pass off something so stupid. It boggles your mind.

I believe such top-down control is illusory, as illusory as the statement made to Ron Suskind in the New York Times Magazine, that the current administration doesn't need to live in the "reality-based universe," because it is an "actor" and thus creates the reality others must adjust to.

When such notions are advanced, those with wisdom (or those who are not drunk with power) usually understand that a "reality check" is coming. I mean, they don't call it "denial" for nothing. Consult the description of the Tarot card, "The Lightning-Struck Tower" for more information.

And, I think the GOP's early mastery of viral message planting and astro-turfing is highly dependent on mainstream media naivete. We could call that deliberate, if we believe that corporations are gutting the staffs of journalistic entities in the name of maximizing shareholder value, when the REAL goal is to remove experience and skepticism from the newsroom so that the Fourth Estate essentially becomes little more than a vehicle for more sophisticated and better paid PR people and spinners to have their way. One could argue that a naive media maximizes shareholder value... in the P.T Barnum sense, I suppose. After all, shareholders make money from fraud (see Enron), from snake oil (see the pharmaceuticals industry), presumably from selling swampland in Florida, from Savings and Loan companies in the 1980s, hell, even from the U.S. mortgage and credit industry (cough-usury) right now.

If mainstream coverage of online activity were not so poor, Swift-Boat Veterans for Truth could not have been as effective, etc. The skepticism has moved online, but MSM coverage of the skepticism falls into the point-counter-point media balance formula, a formula that has been manipulated by PR and spinners to such a level that it is so meaningless, the Flat Earth Society or Holocaust Deniers could even be invoked in the name of "providing balance."

It is into this climate that those who question evolution or global warming spout their idiocy with a straight face. It is in this climate that I hear a congressperson (as I heard on NPR two days ago) explain away Representative Foley's actions as just another aspect of the oversexed gay menace. Perhaps this fellow believes all queers should be forced to register on sex offender registries, simply by virtue of their sexual orientation.

Then the state of Georgia can try to ban them from living within 100 feet of a bus stop, an attempt to force all on those registries to move out of state, like a garbage barge, because there would be no living space that is not within 100 feet of a school bus stop. But I digress!

Link: New Media A Weapon in New World Of Politics - washingtonpost.com.

New Media A Weapon in New World Of Politics

By John F. Harris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 6, 2006; A01

At first glance, three uproars that buffeted American politics in recent weeks have little in common.

Former congressman Mark Foley (R-Fla.) ended his political career over sexually charged e-mails to former House pages. Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) stumbled over his puzzling use of the word "macaca" and his clumsy response to revelations about his Jewish ancestry. Former president Bill Clinton had a televised temper fit when an interviewer challenged his terrorism record.

All three episodes, however, were in their own ways signs of the unruly new age in American politics. Each featured an arresting personal angle. Each originally percolated in the world of new media -- Web sites and news outlets that did not exist a generation ago -- before charging into the traditional world of newspapers and television networks. In each case, the accusations quickly pivoted into a debate about the motivations and alleged biases of the accusers.

Cumulatively, the stories highlight a new brand of politics in which nearly any revelation in the news becomes a weapon or shield in the daily partisan wars, and the aim of candidates and their operatives is not so much to win an argument as to brand opponents as fundamentally unfit.

In interviews, figures as diverse as Clinton, Vice President Cheney and White House strategist Karl Rove spoke about their experiences navigating the highly polarized and often downright toxic political and media environment that blossomed in the 1990s and reached full flower in recent years. Their comments, and those of their associates, underscore just how dramatically changes in media culture have influenced the strategies and daily routines of leading political figures.

[...]

Clinton -- who regards Rove with a mixture of admiration and disdain as the most effective modern practitioner of polarizing politics -- said in an interview that he has become fixated on the problem of how Democrats can learn to fight more effectively against the kind of attack President Bush's top political aide leveled. Associates of the former president said he thinks that Democrats Al Gore in 2000 and Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) in 2004 lost the presidency because they could not effectively respond to a modern media culture that places new emphasis on politicians' personalities and provides new incentives for personal attack.

While the Foley and Allen episodes burned Republicans, Clinton said in an interview earlier this year that he thinks the proliferation of media outlets, as well as the breakdown of old restraints in both media and politics, on balance has favored Republicans. Without mentioning Gore or Kerry by name, he complained that many Democrats have allowed themselves to become unnerved and even paralyzed in response.

"All of this is a head game, you know. . . . All great contests are head games," Clinton said. "Our candidates have to get to a point where they don't allow other people to define them as either people or as political leaders. Our people have got to be more psychologically prepared for it, and there has to be more distance between them and these withering attacks."

Associates said he regards this as his most important advice to his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), if she runs for president in 2008.

[...]

For a full generation on the conservative side, and more recently among liberals, ideologues have created a menu of new media alternatives, including talk radio and Web sites. New media have also elevated flamboyant political entrepreneurs such as Ann Coulter on the right and Michael Moore on the left to prominent places in the political dialogue. New media platforms make criticism of traditional "mainstream media" part of their stock in trade.

This development usually ensures that any politician in trouble can count on some sympathetic forums to make his or her case. It often ensures that any controversy is marked by intense disagreement over the basic facts or relevance of the story, and obscured by clouds of accusation over the opposition's motives.

Clinton benefited from this phenomenon during his recent showdown with Fox News. Appearing on a network that many liberals regard as enemy terrain, he said interviewer Chris Wallace and his bosses were distorting his terrorism record to carry water for conservatives.

Kerry advisers think the most important factor in his loss was the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which attacked his war record. The group initially received scant attention in old media outlets, but its accusations were fanned by the Drudge Report, Fox News and other new media platforms. By the end, the accusations dominated coverage in both old and new media.

Each time a similar episode occurs, it is often covered as an isolated and even eccentric event. But Clinton, in an earlier interview, said his party should understand that the ideological and financial incentives among politicians and media organizations mean that every election cycle will feature such episodes -- and it should plan accordingly.

But he said Democrats of his generation tend to be naive about new media realities. There is an expectation among Democrats that establishment old media organizations are de facto allies -- and will rebut political accusations and serve as referees on new-media excesses.

"We're all that way, and I think a part of it is we grew up in the '60s and the press led us against the war and the press led us on civil rights and the press led us on Watergate," Clinton said. "Those of us of a certain age grew up with this almost unrealistic set of expectations."

Few conservatives would make a similar miscalculation. Many of the first generation of new media platforms, including Limbaugh's show and Drudge's Web site, first flourished because of a conviction among conservatives that old media were unfair.

All this has given Republicans a comfort and skill at using new media to political advantage that most Democrats have not matched. At the Republican National Committee, leaking items to the Drudge Report is an official part of communications strategy.

[...]

Military bloggers: an interesting twist on citizen journalism

This comes from the Wall Street Journal, so it's not the most even-handed account of the military blogging phenomenon, nor does it really go into the influence zone of such military blogs (old media still only sees things in terms of the "broadcast" one-too-many moment, without understanding that interactive audiences participate and help shape the communities around these spaces, and the strength of such communities or blog-cites reflect the "sphere" of the military). Where's the mention of Technorati rank, attention to comments, anything that might reflect a wider view of the blogosphere than simply comparing it to MSNBC with Nielsen ratings-style information?

Personally, I think you can't chart this trend without going back to the former military colonel and often cable news pundit, the late Col. David Hackworth. A colorful character in his own right, Hackworth became a vehicle through which many soldiers could start thinking about getting their stories, their truths, out.

There are some neat bits to note in this story.

WSJ.com - Cry Bias, and Let Slip the Blogs of War.

Cry Bias, and Let Slip the Blogs of War

By MIKE SPECTOR
July 26, 2006; Page B1

J.P. Borda started a Web log during his 2004 National
Guard deployment in Afghanistan to keep in touch with his family. But
when he got home, he decided it was the mainstream media that was out
of touch with the war.

"You hear so much about what's going wrong," he says. "It gets hard to hear after a while when there's so much good going on."

Mr. Borda, a specialist, read other soldiers' blogs and found he wasn't alone. Hundreds of other troops and veterans were blogging world-wide, and many focused on a common enemy: journalists.

The 31-year-old software analyst, who now lives in Dallas, wanted to make it easier for people to read soldiers' accounts. So he started a Web site, Milblogging.com, to organize as many blogs as possible by country, military branch and subject matter. Today, the site links to more than 1,400 military blogs world-wide and was recently purchased for an undisclosed amount by Military.com, a Web site catering to soldiers that is owned by Monster Worldwide Inc.

Now, Mr. Borda finds himself at the center of a growing blogging movement. Military bloggers, or "milbloggers" as they call themselves, contend that they are uniquely qualified to comment on events in armed conflicts. Many milbloggers also argue that the mainstream media tends to overplay negative stories and play down positive military developments. For many of these blogs, says Mr. Borda, "the sole purpose is to counteract the media."

[...]

The backlash takes many forms. Some bloggers point out what they see as inaccuracies and post lengthy critiques of current reporting. Others post their own stories. Some simply sling arrows.

[...]

Not all milblogs wave the flag. Some have drawn attention for posts that irk the chain of command. Jason Hartley, a National Guardsman from New Paltz, N.Y., caught flak for posting comments on his blog, "justanothersoldier.com" that he said were satirical. Mr. Hartley, who served in Iraq, wrote that he loved dead civilians and wished he could shoot children. He claimed the comments were meant to highlight what he sees as the military's nonchalant attitude toward civilian casualties, but his superiors weren't amused. Mr. Hartley was eventually demoted to specialist from sergeant, and his commander, Capt. Vincent Heintz, wrote in a sworn statement that the blog "disparaged the Army in a manner unbecoming of an NCO (non-commissioned officer)."

[...]

The Pentagon, taking notice of the impact of such writings, has a committee studying military blogs over the next several months. In the field, the Army has issued formal guidance about blogging, reminding soldiers not to post information that might tip off the enemy. And U.S. Central Command officials in Florida have started contacting bloggers -- military and civilian -- when they come across posts that contain what they view as inaccurate or incomplete information. But overall, military blogs remain independent, with little organized oversight.

Military blogs receive a fraction of the hits generated by mainstream news Web sites. Mr. Burden's site, for example, receives about 210,000 unique visitors per month, he says. In comparison, Nielsen/Netratings data shows MSNBC.com got 24 million unique visitors last month.

But milbloggers, who only began online postings in earnest within the past three years, have become increasingly energized and organized in their efforts to counteract existing media coverage. In April, bloggers convened in Washington, D.C. for the first ever milblogging convention.

[...]

What's the future of military blogs? Mr. Borda would like to see milbloggers get their own TV shows or have their entries printed in major newspapers. The goal, he says, is to "continually be blurring that line between the media and blogging."

 

Why slavish "balance" reduces journalists to formulaic automatons, an easy tool for spinners to manipulate

Link: When media aims for balance, some views and facts get lost | csmonitor.com.

I know I've been preaching this gospel for a while now, as do most journalism school textbooks, but I've been in newsrooms where this very idea, that balance is too mechanistically-applied, is blasphemy, and oddly, these newsrooms seem to be the most vulnerable to direct manipulation by forces that not only want to control or influence story selection, but also want to influence whether a given bit of information is higher or lower in a story, or, with limited time and space, whether a piece of a information gets ignored or left out altogether.

Each decision of what bit to include or exclude is a political decision, an ethical decision, a journalistic decision. To make such decisions based on a mechanistic, deterministic formula is anti-intellectualism of the worst sort. I think those who advocate such a thing could very well be duplicitous and know exactly what kind of system they are putting in place, a system they can manipulate to their own ends, even as their job titles imply that their expertise and responsibilities lie elsewhere. Managers who set up such systems can easily appropriate greater editorial control in the newsroom, in other words, for their own agendas, while ostensibly masking what they are actually doing.

I really enjoy the Christian Science Monitor's take on it here below:

Link: When media aims for balance, some views and facts get lost | csmonitor.com.

Commentary

Dante Chinni
from the July 11, 2006 edition

When media aims for balance, some views and facts get lost

All opinions and points of view aren't equal when one digs into the facts.

By Dante Chinni

WASHINGTON – A few weeks ago in this space I asked you for your thoughts on the news media - what you don't like and don't understand about how reporters and news outlets go about their work. A few dozen responses later, it's safe to simply say there's a lot.

But if, as reporters always defensively say, the media are not a monolith, that is even more true of media users. Some of you turn to and trust the biggest media and some of you dislike them. Some of you think blogs are more honest news sources and some of you are leery of them - others don't use them at all and don't understand the fuss over them. Some happily sample a large number of outlets on the Web and others purposely restrict their choices.

But several of you raised the same point of concern: The media need to do a better job with "balance" in the news. That's not surprising considering the nation's current political divide that has led to considerable talk of bias in the news.

Again though, readers came at this issue from different vantage points. Some of you (and this came from conservatives and liberals) said that the stories are often too one-sided. Others felt that the media was too worried about giving "both sides of the story" at the expense of the truth and that this itself represented a form of bias. Still others said the media did a fine job of giving two sides of stories, but that there are often many more sides than that to give and those points of view are neglected.

Who's right? Well, that depends.

[...]

So it is with any number of stories. Just because there are differences of opinion doesn't mean both sides are equally correct. When reporters don't make the effort to sort through the evidence and simply fall back on "this side says this, and that side says that," they are being lazy.

That doesn't, however, mean giving "both sides" of an issue is inherently lazy.

With some issues the answers are simply unknowable - this is particularly true when a person proposes something and says it will have a specific impact, such as a policy proposal - and asking supporters and opponents what they think is useful. The actual impact of a proposal at a specific moment in time is unknowable. It hasn't happened yet.

Or consider scientific debates where the academic community is legitimately split. Giving both sides is essential.

But it isn't giving one side or giving both sides that has been journalism's biggest "balance" shortcoming in recent years. It is refusing to recognize that there are usually more complicated views on most issues. There simply aren't many issues that boil down to a nice, neat Hegelian dialectic where the possible answers are two clearly delineated opposites.

[...]

In other words, despite its prominent place in many media debates, "balance," as it is usually understood, is often not particularly useful in journalism. All opinions and points of view aren't equal when one digs into the facts and "both sides" leaves a lot of sides out.

• Dante Chinni, a senior associate at the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington, writes a twice-monthly column on media issues. E-mail Dante Chinni at: Dante Chinni.

One of the most dramatic examples of how pseudo-balance can be used to manipulate and spin a story is in the film I just saw last night, Al Gore in "An Inconvenient Truth." (INCREDIBLE piece, RUN, go see it right now!)

The scene I'm referring to is where Gore gives the statistics from a study of the number of scientific journal articles that doubt that global warming is actually happening. Out of 925 scientific journal articles, 0% had any reasoned doubt in the science behind global warming.  As the Monitor writer points out above, such articles need to entertain conflicting views in order to test whether the objections can be supported by the data (scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals are by definition an argument, an argument that carves its main path by negating or disproving all the faulty hypotheses and faulty paths along the way, so that the best truth is the path that remains).

The embarrassing indictment of the field of journalism follows, however, as apparently the same study looks at a much larger number of news articles on global warming, to determine the percentage there that represent serious doubt of the theory's viability. The number shown on the screen was 57%.

In other words, very nearly perfectly balanced, perfectly formulaic. Journalism is revealed above as more slavishly adherent to the concept of balance than to an accurate representation of the truths of a given scientific debate. (BTW, I'm interested in getting the full bibliographic citation of that study, if anyone has it)

Imagine if journalists had to cover a boxing match this way, so as not to give preference to either side, even if the boxers were hopelessly mis-matched. Imagine quoting sports commentators who spoke glowingly or critically of one boxer or the other with perfect balance, to make it look that either side could have won, even if one boxer has a longer reach, a 20-pound advantage, and just flat-out K-O'ed the other guy.

Imagine if the media weren't allowed to report sports scores at all if one side were to happen to beat the other, because that would break with the principle of balance!

You think you don't see this going on all the time? A court case is like that boxing match. Journalists cover the courts because, like with sports, there is a built-in agon, a struggle, with winners and losers. Unless representing the case thus breaks with the principle of balance on a topic that has some strange vibration about it in this curious media climate, the vibration of the sacred cow.

Consider Ken Lay, the notorious founder and defrauder of Enron. Coverage of his recent trial was heavily spun. I dunno, perhaps he was advised by the guy who dressed up Tom DeLay and had him smiling like a car salesman for his booking mug shot. Lay was totally upbeat going into his trial. He had some bad-tempered days in court, which were duly reported, but very few court analyst journalists I heard ventured to figure out which boxer in that agon (struggle) had the longer reach, the 20-pound advantage. The jury had a far easier time coming to a decision than people who had to follow the trial throught the television filter.

And then came the verdict, very very bad for Lay and Skilling. Did they let on that they understood they were going to jail for a long time? Oh no, they were confident in their appeals, as always, as if none of the evidence that easily convicted them had any weight, logical force, anything that could not be shamelessly denied, as if a person standing knee-deep in water could feasibly and continually insist, "It's not flooding."

Ron Suskind knows what kind of universe this happens in: the non-reality-based universe. You know, that Wonderland wilder than any dreamt up by Lewis Carroll (a political satirist, truth be told) where the Enlightenment never happened. And perhaps Lay and Skilling did know something we don't, where figurative bodies were buried, some trump card that read "get out of jail free."

Then Lay died of a heart attack (please tell me, did anyone hear if the coffin was open or closed? I just want to know if there is anyone outside of the reach of Lay's payroll who actually saw the body. I don't believe it is a conspiracy, or not a conspiracy. I just want to hear from someone who saw a real body. If Thomas could doubt Jesus, we ought to have MORE than enough doubt to go around for a known criminal like Lay).

How did the obituaries cover Lay's apparent and conveniently-timed passing? Good god, he was eulogized! Like Gorgias working to redeem Helen of Troy, and with good manners, broadcast media in particular sat and talked about Lay as if a great statesman had passed, and not a criminal who had deprived many people of their life savings.

And I had this odd feeling that somehow the media was slavishly applying the principle of balance, as if the outcome of the boxing match were even more unreportable once Lay was dead, because of its presumed bias.