Abstract Musings

Category Archives: Media

Posts related to media (TV, MSM, etc.)

Picture This!

February 3, 2006 – 6:06 pm

The MSM shows concern for Bob Woodruff
View a larger image

My contribution to InstaPunk’s Rewrite the Cartoon Contest. Does this cartoon have impact, Mr. Toles?

Inspired by Doug Petch.

By Robby | Also posted in Politics | Comments (1)

Rest in Peace, Scotty

July 20, 2005 – 1:13 pm

James Doohan has been beamed up for the last time.

James Montgomery Doohan was born March 3, 1920, in Vancouver, British Columbia, youngest of four children of William Doohan, a pharmacist, veterinarian and dentist, and his wife Sarah. As he wrote in his autobiography, “Beam Me Up, Scotty,” his father was a drunk who made life miserable for his wife and children.

At 19, James escaped the turmoil at home by joining the Canadian army, becoming a lieutenant in artillery. He was among the Canadian forces that landed on Juno Beach on D-Day. “The sea was rough,” he recalled. “We were more afraid of drowning than the Germans.”

The Canadians crossed a minefield laid for tanks; the soldiers weren’t heavy enough to detonate the bombs. At 11:30 that night, he was machine-gunned, taking six hits: one that took off his middle right finger (he managed to hide the missing finger on screen), four in his leg and one in the chest. Fortunately the chest bullet was stopped by his silver cigarette case.

I never knew that he had fought in Normandy, much less, that he was wounded.

In a 1998 interview, Doohan was asked if he ever got tired of hearing the line “Beam me up, Scotty.”

“I’m not tired of it at all,” he replied. “Good gracious, it’s been said to me for just about 31 years. It’s been said to me at 70 miles an hour across four lanes on the freeway. I hear it from just about everybody. It’s been fun.”

It was fun for us, too.

By Robby | Also posted in General, Television | Comments Off

Ali responds…

January 20, 2005 – 4:51 pm

And he is more gracious than I would be if I were in his place.

The article was, despite Ms Boxer’s kindness, a bad piece of journalism. I had around 45 minutes long phone call with the reporter about my journey with Iraq the Model, my new site, the elections, the general situation here in Baghdad but she (or the paper) seems to have a certain agenda and managed to change the whole issue into a very silly gossip (going as far as quoting trolls!) that is way beneath any respectable paper and certainly beneath me so I won’t give it more attention but lesson learned and I won’t make the mistake of talking to anyone from the NY times again. It’s important to note though that my feelings of respect, gratitude and love for the American people have never and will never change.

Well said, Ali.

Mohammed responds to the article as well.

By Robby | Also posted in General | Comments Off

End of the MSM Monopoly

January 13, 2005 – 6:30 pm

Peggy Noonan writes about the end of Old Media’s monopoly.

Now anyone can take to the parapet and announce the news. This will make for a certain amount of confusion. But better that than one-party rule and one-party thought. Only 20 years ago, when you were enraged at what you felt was the unfairness of a story, or a bias on the part of the storyteller, you could do this about it: nothing. You could write a letter.

When I worked at CBS a generation ago I used to receive those letters. Sometimes we read them, and sometimes we answered them, but not always. Now if you see such a report and are enraged you can do something about it: You can argue in public on a blog or on TV, you can put forth information that counters the information in the report. You can have a voice. You can change the story. You can bring down a news division. Is this improvement? Oh yes it is.

This is a great piece overall, and Peggy Noonan does the subject matter much better justice than I could. But I do want to highlight a couple of points she fails to adequately mention.

First, she attributes the beginning of the end of Old Media’s reign, rightly, to the advent of talk radio and cable TV. But, these outlets alone wouldn’t have brought about the revolution in journalism she describes. The MSM monopoly would still be intact were it not for the rise of the Internet and — more specifically — the Blogosphere.

Cable TV and talk radio certainly give the audience more options in terms of where to get the news or what slant that news has. But they are still limited in two fundamental ways:

  1. High barrier to entry. The establishment of a broadcast studio for either cable TV or talk radio is prohibitively expensive, to say the least. There is the cost of acquiring the capital necessary for such an enterprise, not to mention the cost of the capital itself, licensing fees, salaries, etc. Then the prospective media baron would need to find outlets for the program. I can’t imagine radio syndication comes overnight, nor do cable outlets just accept any old broadcast feed. (My old cable provider did not have FOX News for several years.)
  2. The audience has no voice. Cable TV and talk radio are a one-to-many conduit for information. The audience of both cable TV and talk radio still has no outlet to correct or refute factual errors, except to try to alert the outlet itself (or a competitor)1. This keeps the same barriers that created the MSM monopoly in the first place intact, just adding new players.

The Blogosphere solves both of these problems. The barrier to entry is significantly lowered, to the point where all that is required is an internet connection, and free time. And by the very nature of a blog, its author has a voice.

Secondly, she misses the impact the Blogosphere is having on the network news. The networks are in decline, and Noonan’s answer for them to reverse that trend is objective news coverage:

Networks, on the other hand, may try harder to play it down the middle, and that would be wise. The days when they could sell a one-party point of view is over. No one is buying now because no one is forced to buy. But everyone will buy the networks when they sell what they’re really good at, which is covering real news as it happens. Tsunamis, speeches, trials–events. Real and actual news. They are really good at that. And there is a market for it. And that market isn’t over.

Only this won’t — can’t — reverse the slide of network news into irrelevance. Two forces will prevent the networks from ever regaining the premier position in news coverage (slanted or not) they once held:

  1. Immediacy of news coverage. Cable TV and the Blogosphere will always beat the once a day network broadcasts to reporting news as it happens. Cable TV news came of age during the First Gulf War when CNN reported live from Baghdad as the bombs fell. Sure the networks interrupted their regular programming to broadcast the eerie green night-vision images of scud missiles and anti-aircraft fire, but CNN had the story from within Iraq and it was on 24/7. In its turn the Blogosphere was way out in front of the networks on covering the Tsunami tragedy in southern Asia. Blogs were all over the story, reporting details, providing video, even marshalling donations to the relief efforts in ways with which the network news couldn’t compete. Don’t believe me? Then ask the poor soul at CBS who lost his job for daring to interrupt ‘CSI:NY’ with a news report about the death of Yasser Arafat. News divisions of the networks are currently playing second fiddle to the entertainment divisions. My guess is that’s where the money is, and it isn’t going to change anytime soon.
  2. Inertia in the personnel departments. The Rathergate report makes it abundantly clear is that from top to bottom no line but the party line — the Democratic party line, that is — was considered. There was no critical attention paid to the veracity of this story, especially the documents which purported to prove it, until it was forced upon CBS by the Blogosphere. There is a word for this phenomena: groupthink. Even under the mounting evidence that the memos were forgeries, the prevailing point of view at CBS (and other media outlets) was that the story was “Fake, But Accurate“. Until the news divisions can embrace more than token ideological diversity, it will be difficult for them to pursue a middle-of-the-road approach.

So, yes the monopoly is over, but the MSM will still be with us, warts and all, for at least a little while longer. And the network news divisions (and other media outlets) will attempt to adapt to this new environment, after all their survival is what is at stake. How well they can do that, or to what degree they are successful, remains to be seen. But as this Opinion Journal article expresses, the good news isn’t that the liberal news media is dead (it’s not), or the ascendancy of conservative media. But the development of a marketplace for news coverage which places a premium on the exposure of the truth, not spin.

Footnote:
1. In the case of talk radio, it is possible to call in and converse with a particular show’s host, but the host is always in control, and can simply cut the caller off at the host’s discretion.

By Robby | Comments (1)

Abbas to Israel: “Zionist enemy”

January 4, 2005 – 3:13 pm

For those who, like myself, were hopeful that Yasser Arafat’s death would lead to the peace between the Palestinians and Israelis, this must come as a disappointment.

BEIT LAHIYA, Gaza Strip (Reuters) - Moderate Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas called Israel “the Zionist enemy” for the first time on Tuesday after an Israeli tank killed seven Palestinian youths in a Gaza strawberry field.

The words were certain to stir concerns in Israel where images of Abbas embracing fighters during the campaign for a Jan. 9 election have led some to question hopes for reviving peace talks after Yasser Arafat’s death.

The Israeli army said it had targeted militants who had crept into the strawberry field and fired mortar bombs into a nearby Jewish settlement in the occupied territory.

Palestinian witnesses and medics in Beit Lahiya, a north Gaza village, said the militants had vanished by the time the tank shell crashed and all the dead were youths aged 11-17 from two farming families. Four people were critically wounded.

The field, where farmers had been harvesting strawberries, was spattered with blood and body parts.

Word of the incident clearly angered Abbas, widely tipped to win the presidential election, as he continued campaigning in the Gaza Strip despite further fighting between militants and the Israeli army.

“We are praying for the souls of our martyrs who fell today to the shells of the Zionist enemy,” Abbas told a rally in the south Gaza refugee camp of Khan Younis, a hotbed of militants.

Reuters leaves the impression that these were innocent Palestinian by-standers who were tragically killed. Presenting only the Palestinian version of events, Reuters conveniently leaves out the Israeli side of the incident. But the Jerusalem Post presents the Israeli version of events. (From LGF)

At a press conference Tuesday afternoon, Col. Avi Levi, commander of the Gaza District, said that seven Hamas members were killed in Beit Lahiya this morning.

Levi defended the IDF’s decision to fire a tank shell at the rocket-launching cells. “If civilians were wounded, it is because terrorists opt to launch attacks from within the civilian population and we regret the harming of any civilians.”

The army also confirmed that the tank fired toward Beit Lahiya, a town located in the northern Gaza Strip not far from Erez, when it identified the Hamas cell. Col. Levi said that six of the deaths were caused by shrapnel from the tank shell and two Palestinian terrorists died when a Kassam rocket they were trying to launch exploded prematurely.

How’s that for perspective? But, Reuters isn’t finished. The article also manages to portray Abbas in a sympathetic light.

Israel also demands Palestinian leaders heed a provision in an internationally sponsored “road map” peace plan for a crackdown on militants before talks begin.

Palestinian leaders demand Israel obey a parallel obligation under the road map to stop expanding West Bank settlements and Abbas has balked at tackling gunmen he calls “freedom fighters” without an Israeli promise of viable Palestinian statehood.

“They are freedom fighters and should live a dignified and safe life,” Abbas said on Monday in a campaign tailored in part to defuse the distrust of gunmen who branded him a stooge of Israel when their revered ex-guerrilla leader Arafat was alive.

Abbas said he was determined to ensure rule of law prevailed in Palestinian territories, a cautionary message to militants and one of reassurance to U.S.-led mediators encouraged by his credo of non-violence.

How can calling Israel “the Zionist enemy,” hailing these thugs as “freedom fighters” and refusing to confront their violent actions be called a “credo of non-violence”? Reuters makes it sound like he’s just campaigning and this is empty campaign rhetoric. Rhetoric that Abbas will not act upon it when he is elected. Only, this campaign rhetoric fuels more violence which, in turn, leads to more deaths.

UPDATE: Reuters has video.

UPDATE II: More commentary on Abbas from Damian Penny and Michael Totten.

By Robby | Comments Off

President Bush Named Person of the Year

December 19, 2004 – 8:40 pm

President George Bush has been selected by Time Magazine as its 2004 Person of the Year.

President Bush’s bold, uncompromising leadership and his clear-cut election victory made him Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2004, its managing editor said on Sunday.

Time chose Bush “for sticking to his guns (literally and figuratively), for reshaping the rules of politics to fit his 10-gallon-hat leadership style and for persuading a majority of voters this time around that he deserved to be in the White House for another four years,” Jim Kelly wrote in the magazine.

Congratulations also to Power Line, which was chosen as the first ever Blog of the Year.

Power Line is certainly an excellent choice, although both LGF and INDC Journal played significant roles in the breaking of Rathergate. Also, blogs were instrumental to getting the story of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth coverage from the MSM and keeping the MSM honest in its reporting of that story and many others. Perhaps, a better choice for Person of the Year would have been “Bloggers”. An strong argument can be made that a great deal of credit for the success of President Bush and the Republican party in this year’s election was due to the right half of the blogosphere.

By Robby | Also posted in General, Internet, Politics | Comments Off

There’s No Story Here

December 18, 2004 – 3:39 pm

Power Line points to the transcript of a press conference where the issue of up-armoring the vehicles in the unit of the National Guardsman who asked the question of Donald Rumsfeld about the lack of armor on various military vehicles was addressed. As the transcript makes clear, the Army was already deploying armor kits to the vehicles in Iraq, as part of a program over the past 18 months.

Now, we’re going to focus today on up-armoring tactical wheeled vehicles, but what I want to do is remind you also that what we’re doing today when we talk about tactical wheeled vehicles is only a part of a very broad strategy that’s been in effect for many months now, as all of us work under the Secretary of Defense’s direction to ensure that we properly protect Soldiers. So up-armoring is only a part of a comprehensive strategy. And although we won’t address these topics today, what we also need to bear in mind is that we have very important efforts that are going on and have been long-standing programs over the course of the last 18 months to ensure that we counter IEDs with an IED task force; that we properly ensure that we give Soldiers more fire power, more armaments so that they can shoot more effectively and with more effect, and then also to protect them, both not only their vehicles but also the personal equipment that they wear on their body.

…

Level two force protection says that you have an existing fleet of many thousands of vehicles out there, and what you have to do is put additional protection on vehicles that are already in use out across the Army’s inventory. And so that has been the other principal focus that we have. We can’t automatically or magically swap out all of the equipment that we have out in the theater, but what we can do is develop programs where we take kits and put them onto existing pieces of equipment.

Now this is not a trivial process. We’ll talk to you about the testing that goes into these level two kits, so that we put the right things on pieces of equipment. We’ll talk about making sure that the actual system can continue to operate with many thousand more pounds on it, in some cases.

For example, for a humvee, the typical add-on armor kit is just over a thousand pounds. And so you could imagine, if I took and put a thousand pounds more weight on your — the vehicle you drive back and forth to work, it would have secondary impacts in terms of your suspension and your powertrain. We have to test those things out to make sure that we’re giving a soldier something that can endure in combat; it won’t just break the minute he starts to operate it. So the level-two kit is a sophisticated requirement and one that we’ve been very successful in adapting, not just for humvees but, as we’ll show you, for a variety of systems. And then level three is locally fabricated armor.

…

But over time now we’ve grown to a very, very high standard, and when you go, for example, and visit the fabrication facilities that we have in Kuwait today, what you’ll see is, first of all, the Defense Logistics Agency-approved steel being used. You’ll see actual templates that have been designed in part by the drivers who operate the equipment. And you’ll see very, very experienced machinists and welders who are putting this stuff on. And we’ll show you some pictures of what high-quality work this is. This is an interim solution, but it’s a darn good solution that’s been very, very effective as we take a look at what we’ve done to protect the force.

This process isn’t limited solely to Iraq either.

So for example, right now, if you go to Fort Carson, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment is executing up-armoring this week, and they will have that effort complete here in the course of the next several weeks. The goal then being that when they deploy, the majority of the pieces of equipment that they’re going to deploy will already have up-armoring added to them. They will then complete that operation with fewer pieces of equipment when they actually get into combat zones. So we will have taken care of the bulk of their requirement at home station.

We have a similar effort under way in U.S. Army Europe. As you’re aware, we have forces there that are going to deploy to Afghanistan, and when they deploy to Afghanistan, what we want to try to do once again is get up-armoring solutions to them now instead of waiting till they get to the combat zone.

And here is the current status of the up-armored vehicles in Iraq:

Now, where are we today? We’ve had a discussion here about the level one, level two and level three. This is the status of forces today with respect to what has been armored in theater, okay? As General Speakes mentioned, we’re doing everything we can with respect to getting level one and level two there. At this point in time, because of the production requirements, we have actually begun to install level three. And between the two of them combined, today we have about 61 percent of the vehicles taken care of.

I would point out here, though, that with respect to the light tactical vehicles, and that’s the vehicles that have been suffering the majority of casualties and the majority of incidents, we’re now at 80 percent, and the plan is by March to actually have not only these vehicles taken care of but also the heavy truck fleet, so we’ll have those installed in theater.

And in regards to the unit of the National Guardsman who asked the up-armor question of Donald Rumsfeld:

Q Thank you. I was wondering if we should be thinking about the difference between soldiers who are going to be headed into Iraq and Soldiers who are already there. A lot of the concerns about who did and didn’t have were from soldiers who were going in, and I didn’t — I personally didn’t get a sense of what the people who are already there are using and what their needs and gaps are.

GEN. SPEAKES: Very, very good question. The first point is that you’ll recollect that one of the questions was the status of the 278 ACR; in other words, the date that we had the visit by the secretary of Defense, we had a question about their up-armoring status. When the question was asked, 20 vehicles remained to be up-armored at that point. We completed those 20 vehicles in the next day. And so over 800 vehicles from the 278 ACR were up-armored, and they are a part now of their total force that is operating up in Iraq.

Q When you say they’re 100 percent up-armored, does that mean 100 percent of their requirement or 100 percent of their vehicles?

GEN. SPEAKES: Yes, what we did is there was a total of 804 vehicles that were identified as part of our up-armoring strategy. That’s the wheeled vehicles that they brought north with them or drew when they got up in country. And so at this point the vehicles that they’re operating, that they’re driving, are all up-armored. There were a few vehicles that were put on heavy equipment transporters and moved up. The example would be, for example, the shop van, which is a large, essentially static vehicle. And it was taken up by a truck and dropped in position, but it was not operated on the way up there. So at this point, if you’re in Kuwait and you’re headed north up into Iraq, General Schoomaker’s guidance is real clear: you’re not going north of the berm, which means north of the border, in a non-up-armored vehicle, and that’s our requirement. And so what you now have is an accountability process during the reception, staging and onward movement where every vehicle’s accounted for and it gets up-armored or it doesn’t go north.

So no soldiers will leave Kuwait without the up-armoring of their vehicles being completed. And the specific unit of the Guardsman who questioned Donald Rumsfeld was up-armored within twenty four hours of the question being asked.

There is no up-armoring issue, nor in my opinion was there one to begin with. The issue was created by a planted question by a newspaper “reporter” who wanted to make Donald Rumsfeld and the U.S. military look bad.

The remarkable point of all this “controversy” has been the fact that the Secretary of Defense would take unscreened questions from the men under his command. When was the last time you heard bin Laden fielding questions from the Al-Qaida grunts in Iraq? Have any of them asked him why the United States hasn’t cut and run from Iraq or Afghanistan? The answer is the difference between America and her enemies. In America the military is answerable to the people; bin Laden answers to no one but himself.

By Robby | Also posted in Military | Comments Off

The Attacks Begin

December 13, 2004 – 10:03 am

Last week, I commented in a post that Old media will spend the next four years attempting to discredit the blogosphere
in order to silence its most vocal critics and as an effort to return to the “good old days” when mainstream media could insulate its preferred candidate from negative news stories. Well it seems we didn’t have to wait long for the attacks to begin.

The same day I posted that comment, CBS reported an ethical lapse by two South Dakota bloggers, Jon Lauck of Daschle v Thune and Jason Van Beek of South Dakota Politics, who did not disclose that they were paid by the Thune campaign.

Both blogs favored Thune, but neither gave any disclaimer during the election that the authors were on the payroll of the Republican candidate.

No laws have apparently been broken. Case precedent on political speech as it pertains to blogs does not exist. But where journalists’ careers may be broken on ethics violations, bloggers are writing in the Wild West of cyberspace. There remains no code of ethics, or even an employer, to enforce any standard.

At minimum, the role of blogs in the Daschle-Thune race is a telling harbinger for 2006 and 2008. Some blogs could become new vehicles for the old political dirty tricks.

This is a case of the pot calling the kettle black as CBS was party to political dirty tricks of its own in this election cycle. But beyond that, the CBS story hints at possible regulation of blog content.

Like all media, blogs hold the potential for abuse. Experts point out that blogs’ unregulated status makes them particularly attractive outlets for political attack.

“The question is: What are the appropriate regulations on the Internet?” asked Kathleen Jamieson, an expert on political communication and dean of the Annenberg School for Communications. “It’s evolved into an area that we need to do more thinking about it.

“If you put out flyers, you have to disclaim it, you have to represent who you are,” Jamieson said. “If you put out an ad you have to put a disclaimer on it. But we don’t have those sorts of regulations for political content, that is campaign-financed on the Internet.”

First Amendment attorney Kevin Goldberg called blogs “definitely new territory.”

“[The question is] whether blogs are analogous to a sole person campaigning or whether they are very much a media publication, which is essentially akin to an online newspaper,” said Goldberg, who is the legal counsel to the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Of course such regulation doesn’t cover the MSM:

Generally, the Supreme Court has ruled that restrictions on political advocacy by corporations and unions does not apply to media or individuals. The reasoning has been that media competition insures legitimacy. This has historically been the argument against monopolies in media ownership.

Personally, I read both Daschle v Thune and South Dakota Politics to follow the Daschle/Thune Senate race and I don’t feel particularly aggrieved that neither blog disclosed its relationship to the Thune campaign. Both bloggers made it clear that they supported Thune in the race. Should they have disclosed the connection? Absolutely. Did the failure to do so impact their coverage of the race? No more so than the New York Times or CBS pretending to be objective and non-partisan. Is federal regulation necessary to ensure the credibility of the blogosphere? Not at all. The blogosphere has a track record of sniffing out credibility issues (here is an example and one more example and yet another) and exposing them, far more so then the mainstream media does. And CBS’s example that old media is self-policing in this regard is laughable. Just look at Peter Arnett, for example. It looks like old media First Amendment hypocrisy is alive and well at CBS.

More commentary on this from Captain’s Quarters and Power Line.

By Robby | Also posted in Blogs | Comments Off