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Mark

In this way, “original” stores are created all the time in the major print and media outlets. For this reason, The New York Times and the Washington Post are little more than extended editorial pages.

2. Investigative reporting and opinion writing have never been highly specialized skills that must be entrusted to a media elite. No one ought to be surprised that out of several million bloggers, a few manage to break stories that haven’t appeared yet in the mainstream press. It ain’t that hard. Every working journalist has dozens of possible stories in the oven. Nobody has time to get them all done.

Of course. On the other hand, the choice of which items become stories in newspaper land, especially the big MSM, is decided by factors including how the stories matches the editor/producer whatever sees the world. That certain stories are ignored and others highly overplayed is definitely bias. Contrast the attacks on Bush’s National Guard service (and the coverage) with the vague scrutiny given Kerry’s anti-war activities. We heard a lot about a relatively minor incident and its vaying versions (medal throwing) and virtually nothing about his traveling to Paris to meet with the enemy (while still a US Naval Reserve office) and then producing his odios 1971 Senate performance, which is beyond any excuse. The MSM is highly biased in this instance.

Successful journalists got there by:
a. Showing up every day.
b. Working, at least early in their careers, long hours for low pay.
c. Writing with speed and facility.
d. Asking a lot of questions.
e. Not burning out.

That depends a lot on whether they are in the MSM big leages or not.

You can do it, too! The trick is finding somebody who is willing to pay you for it.

True. But editors do censor, among other things. MSM editors censor in the dictionary sense when the alter or ignore stories that don’t fit either their political agenda (if they have one) or their political world view.

In other words, when there are lots of things going on, the decision to focus very highly on a relatively minor incident (Abu Ghraib) vs a couple of major incidnets (Berg Beheading or the two chemical weapons finds last week, one of which, in the right hands, could have produced a gallon of Sarin, enough to kill tens of thousands of people if used right), is essentially censorship – more like true peopaganda than crude censorship. Just take the last case – the one gallon Sarin shell (which produced only traces because it wasn’t used right). If Al Qaeda has some of those (and there is every reason to think that they do), they can remove the two inert incredients from the shell, put them in bottles or whatever, smuggle them into the US, mix the contents together in a spray device and kill hundreds to tens of thousands of Americans in a major city – very soon.

2. Investigative reporting and opinion writing have never been highly specialized skills that must be entrusted to a media elite. No one ought to be surprised that out of several million bloggers, a few manage to break stories that haven’t appeared yet in the mainstream press. It ain’t that hard. Every working journalist has dozens of possible stories in the oven. Nobody has time to get them all done.

It is good to hear that from a professional journalist, because the MSM tries to give the opposite impression. Furthermore, the MSM tries to keep the disseminatin of the results under their control.

Successful journalists got there by:
a. Showing up every day.
b. Working, at least early in their careers, long hours for low pay.
c. Writing with speed and facility.
d. Asking a lot of questions.
e. Not burning out.

I suspect this is true in most working journalism worlds. But in the fevered world of DC and NYC, in the NYT and the alphabet networks, the world is a lot different. Stardom is a possiblity. Lots of money is possible. One is judged by one’s peers at least partly on how one produces news that matches the world view of the judges.

Of course this doesn’t mean one doesn’t have to do the steps you show. I would say, however, that what good journalists should do is to first know quite a bit about the world outside of journalism. The questions asked by the White House press corp in the Bush-was-AWOL debacle were pathetic. I watched the news conferences. Either those people had no clue about how the Guard and Reserves operated, or they for some bizarre reason acted that way.

And then we have the issue that Kerry recently tried to cover-up a cover-up of his military status (see this blog a ways down). If Bush had tried that, do you woubt there would have been huge outcries, congressional committees, etc? But the Kerrry story, which I found from public sources (all on his web site), has not run anywhere as far as I can tell without having access to Nexus.

You can do it, too! The trick is finding somebody who is willing to pay you for it.

But why would I wan’t to? I get payed pretty well now.

2. Investigative reporting and opinion writing have never been highly specialized skills that must be entrusted to a media elite. No one ought to be surprised that out of several million bloggers, a few manage to break stories that haven’t appeared yet in the mainstream press. It ain’t that hard. Every working journalist has dozens of possible stories in the oven. Nobody has time to get them all done.

Successful journalists got there by:
a. Showing up every day.
b. Working, at least early in their careers, long hours for low pay.
c. Writing with speed and facility.
d. Asking a lot of questions.
e. Not burning out.

You can do it, too! The trick is finding somebody who is willing to pay you for it.

Welcome to Spot On and this week’s Carnival of the Vanities. I am your host, Karol. You can read all about me here. I usually write about politics but indie rock and the Sopranos, among other things, make appearances. Please…

Cooke was too much a gentleman to state the obvious about low-life, and in his wisdom would have dismissed the long-term effect of a cultural abberation like the Democratic Party today. At every point in his professional life, he looked above the swarm and pressed hard on the subject of freedom and free societies. I loved him, even though he’s dismissed as a polemicist by The Left, a word they use pejoratively to scorn people they dislike. To them a great intellect is expressed in the fatuous crap produced by Maureen Dowd. This is worse than stupidity; it approaches an emotional disorder.

I don’t despair over the popularity of the three dolts on “major network” news, because somehow the cream always floats to the top. The history of our culture won’t be written by The Left, in the same sense that a bacteria doesn’t write a medical dictionary. Its contribution is merely part of a diagnosis.

I have noticed this, however. The info-fetish of the media and its furious demand for interviews, press conferences, press statements, leaks and the like is not a demand for information alone. It’s a demand for information-we-can-use. Consider is to be a version of the monkeys-with-typewriters example of probability. Monkeys with enough time and enough energy could produce all the works of Shakespeare. Lefty journalists with enough information can alter, edit and distort that information to produce the desired report and still have attributions. False attributions, but attributions nevertheless.

An observer of Cooke’s stature could deduce the essence of an event almost automatically. So could a dozen other truly great commentators, like Malcolm Muggeridge. Give them an event and they produced the information. The opposite principle applies today. Give Dan Rather enough information and he will produce an event.

Useful Fools: Why Dan Rather is like Tide Soap John Moore writes a lengthy piece on how Dan Rather is like Tide Soap (hint: it’s all about the branding). Here are some tidbits: A truth that many “media personalities” need…

Cooke, as most of you perhaps know, was the internationally-acclaimed voice of “Masterpiece Theatre,” and one of America’s very best friends (can we say the same of Brokaw, Rather, or Jennings? Can we say the same of Kerry, Clinton, or Teddy “Bear” Kennedy?)

His death on March 30 came as a shock to the international community despite the fact that he was 95, and ailing at the time. Eulogized U.S. ambassador William Farish, in London: “[Cooke]…had a first-class mind, and most flatteringly–a sincere and abiding interest in all things American….”

In 1932 Cooke came to the U.S. to study at Yale University, and he journeyed across the country by car. “The trip was an absolute eye-opener for me,” he recalled. “Even then, even in the Depression, there was a tremendous energy and vitality to America. The landscape and the people were far more gripping and dramatic than anything I had ever seen….”

–As tragic as Cooke’s death was, it was equally tragic that he left this world without ever having told us how he felt about DEMOCRATS!

All five are subsidiary phenomena of the star-system, the ages old thing that attributes quality to celebrity. I have hope, because I can’t imagine a world where the “Thoughts of Dan Rather” will sit side by side with even the weakest musings by, say, Alistair Cooke on a bookshelf. Or the opportunistic tomes by Brokaw about The Greatest Generation. Hey Tom! How about taking on a subject that would involved controversy and insight! Praising the praiseworthy isn’t very demanding.

Rather is just plain nuts. He slipped off his perch years ago when he thought Nixon was trying to have him killed. Brokaw climbed onto his perch when he won a battle at “Today” and didn’t have to do commercials (which he described as “revolting”. Hey Tom! Who the hell do you think you are, anyway). And Jennings? Have you ever see this guy below the neck? Russert is fast going the same way. He got his bloomers in a bunch when the Colin Powell interview from Amman was interrupted. Russert is forgetting that without tele-exposure, he’d still be doing the “AFTER” images in Don’t Marry Your Cousin advisories.