Gahhd Bless Ya, Serra PAY-lin

RAWR, Courtesy of Ina, www.tiedyeina.com/

I experienced the Vice Presidential debate a day late through NPR, so I didn’t hear about Sarah Palin’s winks until a week later. I did, however, fall in love with her Alaskan accent. What can I say, it’s charming. Others, however, would rather dislocate their eardrums than listen to her voice for the next 4-8 years.

Mostly, the voice helps the Republican Camp.

Jason George writes that the Alaskan accent is attractive because it sounds "untrained" http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/09/sarah_palins_accent_explained.html. Compare this to Hillary Clinton’s voice, which could have been mistaken for a Northeastern news anchor, possibly a male one.

Palin didn’t have to reference soccer moms or mainstreet construction workers during the debate. Her voice expresses enough of a caring PTA persona already.

And the cute rhyming phrases--“I say it ain’t so, Joe… near and dear to my heart..” – speak directly to the average American citizen, fulfilling his need to see an authentic member of the middle class present in a high political position.

If desired, Palin could loose the accent with the help of a speech therapist as Stephen Colbert did. But why? Republicans don’t want robotic personalities, no Al Gores and no more Hillary Clintons.

Old-Fashioned Reporting Still Number One?

Anne Hull - image courtesy of asne.org

2008 Elijah Parish Lovely Award recipient Anne Hull, a Washington Post reporter honored for courageous journalism, delivered a convocation address at Colby College several weeks ago. In her address, Hull retells the story of her experiences documenting the Department of Labor’s guest-worker program and exposing maltreatment within the gates of Walter Reed. Her speech is powerful and her message certainly compelling, but there’s a small part of her argument with which I do not agree. Discussing the decline of truly intrepid exposé reporting, Hull belittles the rise of a “caffeinated society of bloggers…filing dispatches from a TMobile spot at Starbucks.” Citizen journalism may not necessarily take as much effort as what Hull calls “committed” and “invested” reporting, but Hull is greatly underestimating the kind of access that anonymous bloggers can get and generalizing all bloggers into one unaccomplished category. Perhaps it is that major stories can be broken more easily now and some feel that bloggers don’t have to pay their dues. Sensationalism of new media is also a threat (read about a student using Twitter to escape jail), and maybe we are better off with what Hull cringes to call “old-fashioned reporting.”

I think she's got a point (sort of).

(Ann Coulter shooting a gun. Courtesy of About.com's political humor section.)

Fresh off what we were discussing in class on Monday, the character (possibly?) of Ann Coulter showed up on Fox News this week to introduce her new column.

She does raise some interesting and valid points shockingly. She reviews last week's Vice Presidential debates between Biden and Palin, calling out Biden in the process (no real surprise there). She calls Biden's statements "wildly inaccurate" and compares him to Lyndon LaRouche.

Some of her gripes ranged from insignificant, like the fact that Katie's restaurant closed 20 years ago, to significant like interpreting incorrect articles of the constitution, which countries are actually in NATO and how much money we've spent in Iraq compared to Afghanistan.

Now to the part of the column I actually cared about. What if Sarah Palin had uttered a single misstatement as egregious as one of his? What if she were to claim that her running mate never said he would meet without preconditions with dictators, even though he said it numerous times, which are readily accessible all through cyberspace? What if she had pompously lectured about the duties of the Vice President and then cite the article of the constitution which lays out the responsibilities of the VP incorrectly, multiple times?

Coulter claims its the biases of the MSM who won't talk about this. Liberal media this, elite media that. She pushes the idea of the media as leftist (all mainstream media) vs. balanced (Fox) in sort of a fight to the death over exposing political agendas.

It's the conclusion where we differ though. I think it's far worse than that. A woman can't get a fair shake in politics in the media's eyes. Look at Hillary Clinton, look at Palin, and look at Geraldine Ferraro (remember when she was a 'racist' a few months ago?). The list can go on and on. It's not a Democrat / Republican thing. It's a woman thing.

It’s about confidence...

Does this seem like a healthy working environment?
Image from Alteringtime.com

On his blog “The Feed” media critic for St. Petersburg Times Eric Deggans wondered how CNBC’s tourette's afflicted financial “guru” Jim Cramer (host of his show Mad Money) kept his job after telling investors to get out of the market on NBC’s Today show.

On October 7th, Jim Cramer defended his statement on NBC's Today show, saying he still stands behind what he said. According to anchor Meredith Vieira, his comments caused a “firestorm." One email likened his comments to “yelling fire in a crowded building.” Another email pointed out that the financial system is based on “trust” and that Cramer was sabotaging it. What makes this all very ironic is that Cramer has been giving bad advice for a while (he told people to buy Wachovia and Bear Stearns stock), but he’s taking criticism for giving good advice this time: SELL!

Jim Cramer and business journalists (not that he is one) are stuck in a very odd position. Because the market is based so much on confidence, their collective coverage can affect the confidence of the market. It’s sort of like the “observer effect” in science that says in some experiments in quantum physics, the very observation of the experiment could change its outcome. Business journalists are in the same boat.

Howard Kurtz's column “Press May Own a Share in Financial Mess” is about how business journalists failed to foresee this economic crisis. He acknowledges their difficult balancing act: “If these journalists shout too loudly, they can be accused of scaremongering and blamed for torpedoing the stock of outwardly healthy companies.”

Using The Wall Street Journal as an example, he says some stories and opinion pieces did warn about possible collapse, but they failed to paint a full picture of the economic crisis. Basically, they played it down. Some of the journalists he quotes in his piece offer hints as to why:

"…If we had written stories in late 2000 saying this whole thing's going to collapse, people would have said, 'Ha ha, maybe,' and gone about their business." - Fortune Magazine Managing Editor Andy Serwer.

"When I would cover these very issues about problems with regulation, problems with 'is this a disaster waiting to happen?' people would say: 'Well, young man, you don't have an MBA like I do. Trust us. We went to business school.'" - David Brancaccio, PBS.

"The business press tends to get in with the people that they cover. They get in the bubble that is Wall Street, just like political reporters get in the bubble that is the White House and the traveling press of the campaign . . . and they don't see the obvious things." - Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post business columnist, Pulitzer Prize winner.

This does not sound like an environment where honest journalism can go down. Can you smell filters?! How much does sourcing and corporate ownership contribute to the sunny optimism of business pages, even on the verge of a financial crisis? There is real pressure on business journalists to paint a rosy picture and when they don't, they're punished, even when they're giving good advice at the time (a la Jim Cramer). There needs to be enough distance between the business journalist and the market, so that honest, objective reporting can go down.

...In This Economy? Even the Chains Fall

The Creative Loafing logo--more like shelter from the IRS...

In the model of WaMu and the rest of the world's more "stable" institutions, one of the country's leading alternative weekly chains (an ironic idea, no?), Creative Loafing, filed for bankruptcy last week. Print is dead, remember?

Simultaneously, the New York Sun published its "last issue" a couple of times, in the tradition of those Everything Must Go, one day only sales that end up lasting weeks.

New York Press had a vague obit for both rags, mostly wondering the eventual fate of each, a question that may have been answered when Loafing CEO Ben Eason told Atlanta Magazine that he, "wants his journalists to be filling their websites up every day with fresh content. And not just fresh content, but links to other stories written by anyone in the world."

But as laid out in this Gawker post, we have enough bloggers talking about each other's stories--we need someone to do some reporting!

And so Gawker's oddly self-aware blogger proposed a solution:

Fuck an alt-weekly. Become and Alt-monthly. Keep the features. Take your time. Consolidate. Save on printing costs. Save journalismism. And try not to go broke. Your cities will thank you.

Talk about a moment of clarity. Blogging on the level of news aggregation is less an alternative medium than a symptom of lacking capital. Opinions are cheap. We've seen it on the twenty-four hour news cycle and we see it daily on the web, and though ad revenue may be shrinking, I'd love to see someone (anyone!) attempt to make their dollar work for them. Shake it up if you have to, fire some people, cut some corners where necessary, and change the game. Just don't give up on journalism just yet. Not today, not in a world like this.

The Depression Will Be Twittered

"I want us to get in on the ground floor of the next band wagon."

(by William Haefeli, for the New Yorker)

“After the stock market crash, some New York editors suggested that hearings be held; what had really caused the Depression? They were held in Washington. In retrospect, they make the finest comic reading. The leading industrialists and bankers testified. They hadn’t the foggiest notion what had gone bad.” 

-Hard Times by Studs Terkel (1970) 

Speaking with NPR on the current financial situation, Jeff Jarvis supposed that, “I don’t think anyone—including the people in charge—can make sense of what’s happening in the country right now…it’s just too big and too complicated, and it requires both too much background and fundamental understanding about economics.” Meanwhile, news on the changing financial climate is flying in at a breakneck speed. People, seeming to want answers, or at least explanations—somebody to translate the current state of financial affairs into English, are tuning in: the week of 9/14 proved to be the highest rated in all of CNBC’s nineteen year history and viewer ship has more than doubled for shows like CNBC’s Mad Money. But what are they getting? What happens when the media can’t keep up with the news? And really, how many experts does it take to explain the news?

Locked into what NPR called a “quick-twitch story cycle, ” journalists are scrambling for the newest, hottest stories before they burn out and the next fire is lit.  Or as this cartoon from the New Yorker so aptly put it, they are fighting for "The ground floor of the the next bandwagon."  In the interim, seems like the MSM has resorted to melodrama to tide over the onlookers until they can sort out what’s going on. Flashy (and vague) headlines about “nightmares,” “meltdown,” and cute smiles are feeding viewers emotional needs, keeping them glued to the media like passerby’s to a car crash.

Is it possible for the media to break from this cycle and provide quantity and quality--up to the moment news and substantive reporting? Perhaps times of high turnover news are better handled by new medias, like bloggers and twitterers, who can provide up to the moment information. As Hamilton Nolan of Gawker put so kindly, “we don’t need more bloggers. Content is really much more worthwhile. Invest in it. Any asshole can blog, shit. You have reporters. Use them!” Talk is cheap, but perhaps, in an economy like this, news is worth investing in.

Offshore & Off Topic

Offshore Drilling Rig, Minerals and Management Services, US Dpt of Interior.  

With the devastation from Gustav and Ike, newspapers can’t stop talking about fuel and energy. But the media’s conversations aren’t putting the right questions out to the public. The physical extraction of nonrenewable resources require a geological/environmental perspective, but the talk almost always buzzes around politics and prices.  As a result, a majority of Americans support offshore drilling even though geologists say it’s a terribly unsustainable and economically unviable

resource.

In early summer, the media wrote of offshore drilling in terms of John McCain as the maverick pushing to end our dependence on foreign oil.

By September, media outlets (NPR, Huff Post) repeated the political shout, “Drill Baby, DRILL!” accrediting Republican representatives as the issue’s frontrunners.  

Search for “Offshore Drilling” on the NYTIMES.com and a huge list of McCain/Obama articles appear….No articles on the first search frames the issue from a factual, scientific approach.

But some outlets are getting a word in from experts.  Here’s a look at () one a blog post that drills deeper than politics and into the statistics/facts about oil shale (If politicians had a better understanding of oil shale extraction, they probably wouldn’t hunt for it).  Dr. Bill Chameides suggests here that news papers are also producing exaggerated figures for the billions of oil barrels that could potentially lie underneath our shore. 

This oil obsession could shift America’s future economy, environment, and foreign policy.  It’s an issue that needs broader perspectives from experts, but with the way the media reports offshore drilling, we only learn that politicians operate on two speeds: walk and drill.