Dust-Up: Day Three
My latimes.com debate with Marc Cooper continues today at this link. The previous installments are there as well. [UPDATE: Direct link to Day 3 is here.]
Meanwhile, my appearance on the radio yesterday garnered a kudos from L.A. journalist Sean Mitchell. A sample:
Anyone who thinks even the best bloggers (which would not describe you, I dare say) are any substitute for the salaried hard work, reporting, investigation and experience of newspaper journalists is just a fool. How much of the real news on the internet comes from bloggers? By the way, that’s a rhetorical question. I can’t believe Olney had someone as naive as you on the show.
You can read Mr. Mitchell’s pieces at the L.A. Times here.
I appreciate Mr. Mitchell giving me a real-life example of Big Media arrogance.
Patterico,
Do you feel like a Circus curiousity when dealing with MSM denizens in open public forums? They certainly treat you as such.
PCD (5c49b0) — 7/9/2008 @ 8:05 amPCD,
Visitors to an asylum often receive curious stares from the inmates. This may be the more apt analogy.
Patterico (bad48d) — 7/9/2008 @ 8:28 amthe salaried hard work, reporting, investigation and experience of newspaper journalists
I wonder what Judge Kozinski would say about that.
aunursa (1b5bad) — 7/9/2008 @ 8:48 amWell, jounalists don’t want to be journalists, they want to change the world. And that is why they lie. Facts get in the way of changing the world.
Jack (d9cbc5) — 7/9/2008 @ 8:52 amthe salaried hard work, reporting, investigation and experience of newspaper journalists
It is not merely this priggish pissant’s sanctimonious blather that is irksome, it is the institutional arrogance of these “gang rapists of our public trust”.
In the face of poll after poll after poll in which they rank at the bottom on the credibility and public trust measures…yet they still turn up their haughty little noses as they look down upon the masses.
Meanwhile, their “hard work” for which they draw a salary involves plagiarism, distortion, intentional omission of facts, misrepresentation through word and phrase distortion, burying of important elements to give the “report” the appropriate propagandized twist and spin.
“Digging” for facts includes photoshopping photos, forging documents, secreting evidence for one side of an issue, …basically conducting themselves as operatives for a particular political narrative.
In order to be a willing and complicit co-conspirator in the foisting of institutionalized distortion to your countrymen…you must swear an allegiance to the narrative above and beyond any to your country and your countrymen. You must never protest the editorial “improvements” which enhance the propaganda and further distort the truth. You may NEVER stray from the “narrative” nor get off “message”.
Basically…you must be a traitor, a coward and a liar. And for that…you can draw a salary.
It is little wonder that the deadwood media is slowly rotting away…from necrosis of the soul.
cfbleachers (4040c7) — 7/9/2008 @ 9:29 amI wonder if Mr. Mitchell is on the layoff list. It sounds like his ox is getting gored.
Hazy (c36902) — 7/9/2008 @ 9:38 am“It’s ok, we’re professionals.”
mojo (8096f2) — 7/9/2008 @ 9:45 am— Hunter S. Thompson
5, cfbleachers, you give them too much credit. The Devil took their souls long ago. Why do you think many of them have such an animus against Christianity?
PCD (5c49b0) — 7/9/2008 @ 9:55 amPCD
Satan can’t take a soul that’s not for sale for a price.
A person who offers to mislead his countrymen for a “salary”…in order to advance a narrative…is not only acting in concert to intentionally deceive them, he is willingly acting as a covert operative to strangle their voices.
It’s the “little treasons” that do far more damage than the large ones can in the long run. Public opinion is often swayed based upon a pile of lies, distortions, omissions of facts and intentionally misleading turns of phrases.
The Socialists have stolen the information stream and they have been gang raping it for forty years. We are about to pay the ultimate price in this election for allowing them to do so.
Sen. Obama isn’t the disease, he’s the lesion on the CT Scan.
cfbleachers (4040c7) — 7/9/2008 @ 10:16 amC’mon, Patterico’s just a dilettante verbal sniper. What credibility does he have?
daleyrocks (d9ec17) — 7/9/2008 @ 12:16 pmSean Mitchell wrote: Anyone who thinks even the best bloggers (which would not describe you, I dare say) are any substitute for the salaried hard work, reporting, investigation and experience of newspaper journalists is just a fool.
Oh, it’s the paycheck that makes one important and relevant?
I just read one of Mitchell’s pieces. When it comes to what Ed “Al Bundy” O’Neill is up to lately, I’ll call Sean. For clarification of legal issues masticated in the MSM once, I come to Pat.
L.N. Smithee (0931d2) — 7/9/2008 @ 12:28 pmHere’s my comment that I tried to post for Day 3 of this series. See if it gets posted as I say will allusion that the Emporor has no clothes.
Just like John the Baptist, Patterico preaches in the wilderness. The King is uncomfortable and looks to lop off the critic’s head, unaware that the critic is the Herald of a new world that is fortold by the prophet.
The Times is a dead company walking. It is on the Green Mile and shouting at the Governor to get off the phone.
PCD (5c49b0) — 7/9/2008 @ 12:31 pm“Contrary to what you might hear at Brentwood cocktail parties, the critics don’t want an ultraconservative paper that licks Bush’s boots. We just want a newspaper that gives us the facts from all sides — a newspaper that talks with, and not at, its readers. Simple as that.”
Exactly.
PrestoPundit (ff5e16) — 7/9/2008 @ 12:34 pmHe’s right. The best bloggers are no substitute for the salaried hard work, reporting, investigation and experience of newspaper propagandists.
Amphipolis (fdbc48) — 7/9/2008 @ 12:35 pmDay three isn’t there.
Hazy (c36902) — 7/9/2008 @ 1:07 pmWell, I’m a journalist and I appreciate Pat’s work. If bloggers don’t produce the same quality or quantity of news as traditional journalists, it’s because it is not their fulltime jobs. With that said, big MSM operations do have the ability to get info that even the best bloggers won’ t, out of sheer institutional power. Hopefully whatever takes place of the MSN will have the similar resources (a good lawyer, for example, when it comes to foia). Being an intelligent analyst and writer is unfortunately not enough.
J (bfd9f4) — 7/9/2008 @ 2:05 pmHow did Drudge make his bones again? Wasn’t it by scooping the entire DC MSM machine as regards the DNA dress?
Drumwaster (5ccf59) — 7/9/2008 @ 2:10 pmDrumwaster wrote: How did Drudge make his bones again? Wasn’t it by scooping the entire DC MSM machine as regards the DNA dress?
In January 1998, he revealed that Newsweek, in the last moments before press time, chose to quash Michael Isikoff’s reporting of Bill Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, and the fact that in his deposition for Paula Jones’ sexual harassment suit, Clinton said that he did not have a sexual relationship with her.
The American Spectator had for years published anecdotes about Clinton’s alleycatting. What made the Lewinsky story “legit” was that Clinton committed a crime (perjury) to cover up one of his “bimbo eruptions” for the first discernible time. It was only when the press could not avoid reporting that story that the other shoe fell: Taking the advice of unsung heroine Linda Tripp (from a suggestion by Lucianne Goldberg), Lewinsky preserved the stained dress, making her future admissions of her affair with Clinton more than a “he said, she said” situation (remember that among others, Sidney Blumenthal spread the word that Monica was an obsessed stalker).
I was getting ready to leave for a night out with visiting relatives when Drudge revealed the existence of the story, and had to pull myself away from the PC. Days later, I was in a college library when I refreshed Drudge Report and saw the siren and the headline about the dress. I’ll never forget it; it was one of those moments when your breath is truly taken away. I exhaled, and struggled to inhale as I continued to read.
Nobody who writes about the history of the Internet as a force in American life should fail to note Matt Drudge was the first self-made Internet superstar.
L.N. Smithee (b048eb) — 7/9/2008 @ 2:51 pmI recall how the mainstream media was vilifying Michelle Malkin for pursuing a story about proposed health care benefits for “poor” children and was chastised harshly for “stalking” a family with oodles of assets and possessions but no health insurance to cover their kids. But when a pig like Michael Moore is in someone’s face, that’s just fine. Ditto for Sixty Minutes.
All those fact checkers and layers of editors didn’t stop the pajama media from embarrassing asshole Rather.
madmax333 (d674ff) — 7/9/2008 @ 3:11 pmI’m not sure that Monica Lewinski would consider Linda Tripp a heroine.
aunursa (1b5bad) — 7/9/2008 @ 3:30 pmaunursa wrote: I’m not sure that Monica Lewinski would consider Linda Tripp a heroine.
……and?
L.N. Smithee (b048eb) — 7/9/2008 @ 5:01 pmI am listening to the replay – the first five minutes – Russ Stanton is a tool. How very troubling for the Times to have him anywhere near the leadership.
JackM (c8660c) — 7/9/2008 @ 6:11 pmEvery time I read about the sacrosanct “layers” of editors at a newspaper or magazine, I think of the congressional hearing in Godfather II. The rat is testifying as to the family structure and the concept of intermediaries arises…”Buffers, the family had lots of buffers. (snicker)”
The MSM has lots of fools/liars/incompetents/mendacious as buffers, huh?
Ed (d17ceb) — 7/9/2008 @ 6:16 pmFinished listening to the replay. Boy, is Russ Stanton a tool. If you work for this guy, you better find another line of work because he is going to preside over the demise of your job.
JackM (c8660c) — 7/9/2008 @ 6:32 pmNice work Patrick.
KP (fe9629) — 7/9/2008 @ 7:17 pmL.N. Smithee: ……and?
And what? Did I fail to end my sentence with a period?
aunursa (09c81f) — 7/9/2008 @ 9:21 pmNo, you failed to complete your thought.
steve miller (724340) — 7/9/2008 @ 9:28 pmSomething doesn’t add up here.
If the L.A Times is going down because it’s too liberal, where’s the conservative alternative?
Oh, that’s right, THERE IS NONE.
That pretty much says it all.
If and when right-wing whiners can produce a financially successful newspaper they approve of, we might start listening to their hurt feelings and astounding sense of intellectual entitlement.
bunkerbuster (e6849f) — 7/10/2008 @ 12:18 amI assume bunkerbuster means a conservative alternative in Los Angeles. Surely he knows the Wall Street Journal has the second highest circulation in the country, nearly twice that of the LA Times.
DubiousD (1cd844) — 7/10/2008 @ 12:57 amYou can not hope to bribe or twist,
Thank God, a British journalist.
But seeing what unbribed the man will do,
Adriane (b8ecd8) — 7/10/2008 @ 1:00 amyou really have no reason to.
The Wall Street Journal, arguably the world’s most influential newspaper and certainly one of America’s biggest, offers an excellent illustration of the dynamic.
It’s news coverage is indistinguishable from the biggest U.S. dailies that conservatives slag as too liberal. In fact, the WSJ now has a news tie up with the Washington Post in which they share stories.
The WSJ editorial page, however, offers right wingers something they like.
The WSJ is simply giving readers what they want: right wingers have no use for straight news. They crave a constant barrage of assertions that they are right and liberals are wrong. Anything else looks like “bias” to them.
Again, it says it all that there is no “conservative” daily in Los Angeles. Here you have people crowing that the LAT is getting a well-deserved comeuppance while the right has no daily anywhere.
You can talk about Murdoch’s papers like the NY Post, or Moon’s Washington Times, but no one takes them seriously for news — not even conservatives.
It boils down to intellectual entitlement. It doesn’t even occur to many of the press critics here that their ideology has failed. They’d never accept responspibility for the fact that they aren’t represented in successful newspapers. Rather, they just go on blaming everything else, as if there was some sort of conspiracy.
bunkerbuster (e6849f) — 7/10/2008 @ 2:03 ambunkerbuster spewed:
Again, it says it all that there is no “conservative” daily in Los Angeles. Here you have people crowing that the LAT is getting a well-deserved comeuppance while the right has no daily anywhere.
Well, what about the New York Post, which kicks all over the Times?
You can talk about Murdoch’s papers like the NY Post, or Moon’s Washington Times, but no one takes them seriously for news…
Ah, so the argument shifts. The Post gives the NY Times its comeuppance, but that doesn’t count because nobody takes the Post seriously. How conveeenient. Well, I don’t take the LA Times seriously.
You blather about “intellectual entitlement” of right-wingers, when reality is just the opposite of what you allege. It’s liberals who think only reporting that targets right-of-center people and causes is true “journalism.”
J-schoolers who think the purpose of journalism is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” look down their noses at journalists who work for a center-right guy like Murdoch (and use his name like a curse in voicing their disgust at Fox News) or Rev. Moon, yet had no problem working for left-wing lunatic Ted Turner, who married Hanoi Jane Fonda, hired a friend of Bill Clinton to run CNN during the Whitewater investigation, and said that if global warming continues unabated, the human race will become cannibalistic by 2040.
Remember in the aftermath of the 2000 recount the way moonbats accused GE CEO Jack Welch of ordering Tom Brokaw to declare Bush the winner of Florida on NBC’s election night coverage? At the time, Welch was evil incarnate because he was head of a military-industrial complex mammoth. Now, I don’t hear lefties crow about new GE honcho Jeffrey Immelt because he brings them Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, as well as a stupid PR stunt in which the net went “green” for a week.
Fox News has its faults — Fox & Friends may be the worst show on TV, even worse than Countdown — but there has never been a scandal at FNC to compare with fiascos like NBC’s blowing up a car and pretending it was a GM design flaw, or Peter Arnett’s bogus “Tailwind” story on CNN, or CBS’ Dan Rather’s outrageous attempt to smear President Bush with the phony TANG documents.
I live in San Francisco, where conservatives in the print media can be counted on the fingers of one hand. I stopped subscribing to the left-leaning Chronicle back in the early ’90s — I couldn’t take paying to be lied to by propagandists disguised as journalists. There’s no right-wing paper in S.F. DUH! There isn’t a market for one! But the Chron lost me, and I am never going back — especially since the net often allows me to get news from the source and fact-check the “jourrrrnalists.”
L.N. Smithee (ef90eb) — 7/10/2008 @ 11:46 pmbunkumpusher is claiming at Cooper’s site that I am admitting I don’t care whether the paper gets the facts right. That’s dishonesty worthy of the paper he is defending. Wonder if he works there.
Patterico (47e875) — 7/11/2008 @ 12:54 amAt some level “bunkerbuster” is right. Big media arrogance may explain why the L.A. Times is a worthless pile of crap no one should read, but it does not explain the fact that no one does. That has more to do with newspapers in general going the way of the dodo.
Liberals like Bunkerbuster absolutely love being talked down to by other liberals who are even more smug and smarmy than themselves. They go into orgasms when these same liberals have the chutzpah to claim their insanely biased “news” is the objective truth-with-a-capital-T and anyone who questions it must be biased themselves. L.A. has no shortage of such liberals, so if newspapers in general were doing well, and big media bias were the only problem the L.A. Times faced today, that paper would thrive.
Xrlq (62cad4) — 7/11/2008 @ 4:05 ambunkerbusted wrote: Why no right-wing paper in L.A.?
Are conservatives too dumb? Too poor? Too lazy?
It’s a simple question. Why can’t you even attempt to answer it?
I’ve already answered it. Or are you like most trolls on this blog, who ignore posts that waste their arguments?
L.N. Smithee (ef90eb) — 7/11/2008 @ 8:00 amL.N. Smithee: If the New York Post satisfies your newspaper needs, what’s your beef with the L.A. Times or the NY Times, for that matter?
If you believe right-wing newspapers are “beating” the left-wing competition, what possible concern is there about liberal newspapers?
In a free society, there should be room for newspapers with a variety of worldviews. Why do you insist that the L.A. Times has to conform to your worldview, or why would LAT even consider conforming to your worldview, when, as you point out, there are right-wing newspapers that are already filling that niche effectively?
bunkerbuster (da3978) — 7/12/2008 @ 7:48 ambunkerbuster wrote:
As I wrote before, “It’s liberals who think only reporting that targets right-of-center people and causes is true ‘journalism.'” Think about it, if you can — think anyone at the LA or NY Times believes they will win a Pulitzer or some other prestigious award for reporting, “Things are actually better in Iraq than we thought at first!” as opposed to beating the dead horse of Abu Ghraib? Of course not. And they know that if they did, they would be accused of being shills for Republicans or corporations even if their reporting was articulate and accurate.
You are deliberately misstating my opinion. Ideally, there would be no reason for “right-wing” or “left-wing” newspapers — there would be accurate and unbiased newspapers. As it stands, the Times papers on both coasts are neither.
L.N. Smithee (ef90eb) — 7/14/2008 @ 12:44 am