All Umbrage All the Time

Jonathan, just read your all umbrage all the time, I'm sure reporting is expensive, one of the reasons is tv networks and newsmagzines are paying exorbitant salaries to folks like you. And the reason so many of us prefer the blogs to your "reporting" is that the reporting is all one sided. If you are as fair and unbias as you would have us believe why don't all of you just put your political preference right under your name at the beginning of the piece. At least then we could decide for ourselves how much of what you write we want to believe. Wait, I know that we should just assume you are all well to the left of center but I, for one, would just like to see it in writing.

Forget the political stuff. I believe Mr. Alter has said something very important to everyone who is a producer of valued content. There is no current internet -based system to financially reward these content producers. Media corporations used to do so -- with salaries. Many reporters are being laid off. Some of the best have quit and are now blogging. But how will they support themselves? Ads don't make any money for most content sites

Jonathan,

While I often appreciate your work both in print and in television, I can't help but be disappointed in the tone of this article, particularly the implicit backslap and high-five given to the mainstream media at the expense of the blogging community. You mention that it is the public's distrust for the MSM which drives it to alternative sources of news, yet you completely gloss over the behaviors and actions which precipitated these feelings. To the contrary, you imply that these feelings are unwarranted by indicating that blogs simply reprint, which a touch of venom, what the dilligent MSM has already been published. In a political/media climate where the truth takes a backseat to giving both sides of the argument via a split screen pundit deathmatch, can you blame the populous for turning to another source for actual facts? When did it become okay for someone to utter complete falsehoods and for the media to dismiss and report the falsehood as an "alternative view". The media so fears being challenged as not fair and balanced thatit is more then willing to give equal time to both fact and fiction. As a result, the media has become the means by which the right has prosecuted an unending war on reality.

Excuse me if I don't need to hear for the 10,000th time the false notion that offshore drilling will provide short term relief at the pump, or that waterboarding is not a violatoin of the Geneva convention or that John McCain is a mavericky maverick who takes mavericky positions on tough issues, as any maverick would. How about the MSM just report the truth: NO off shore drilling will not provide price relief, YES waterboarding is a violation of the Genevan convetion and NO John McCain is not a maverick but a person who changes positions when it is politically expedient. When I start to hear hard hitting reporting which actually reports facts and dispells fiction, I'll start paying attention to the MSM.

Frank

Jonathan,

While I often appreciate your work both in print and in television, I can't help but be disappointed in the tone of this article, particularly the implicit backslap and high-five given to the mainstream media at the expense of the blogging community. You mention that it is the public's distrust for the MSM which drives it to alternative sources of news, yet you completely gloss over the behaviors and actions which precipitated these feelings. To the contrary, you imply that these feelings are unwarranted by indicating that blogs simply reprint, which a touch of venom, what the dilligent MSM has already been published. In a political/media climate where the truth takes a backseat to giving both sides of the argument via a split screen pundit deathmatch, can you blame the populous for turning to another source for actual facts? When did it become okay for someone to utter complete falsehoods and for the media to dismiss and report the falsehood as an "alternative view". The media so fears being challenged as not fair and balanced thatit is more then willing to give equal time to both fact and fiction. As a result, the media has become the means by which the right has prosecuted an unending war on reality.

Excuse me if I don't need to hear for the 10,000th time the false notion that offshore drilling will provide short term relief at the pump, or that waterboarding is not a violatoin of the Geneva convention or that John McCain is a mavericky maverick who takes mavericky positions on tough issues, as any maverick would. How about the MSM just report the truth: NO off shore drilling will not provide price relief, YES waterboarding is a violation of the Genevan convetion and NO John McCain is not a maverick but a person who changes positions when it is politically expedient. When I start to hear hard hitting reporting which actually reports facts and dispells fiction, I'll start paying attention to the MSM.

Frank

Your two ironies are not of the ???new age.??? This is how it???s always been, but its just that we have a new technology to interface with these days.

You note critically that the ???Web traffic??? (whatever you mean by this) tracks the fluff stories pushed by the cable news shows and admit you cover them as well. Can you appreciate that you (or perhaps its your editors) are part of the problem? Why do you do this when you well know its trivial and distracting?

You restate a valid concern that meaningful investigative reporting is being adversely affected by shrinking media revenues and budgets. Fine, but why not take the space you???re given to explore the significance and potential solution for this problem, rather than filling your column with observations that are obvious to any regular news consumer?

You are clearly an intelligent, well-meaning professional journalist with a prominent outlet in two national media outlets. Why not make it count?

Jonathn

J

Mr. Alter:
This note concerns your article last week about Obama's "no brainer" on education.
I agree that public education needs serious reform and that the NEA agenda does not always address what is best for kids, but I think that your union-bashing shows that you have not done your homework.
Unions have little or no real influence in most school districts in most states. Teachers are very conservative and my data indicates that most are Republicans.
In my thirty-plus years as a teacher and counselor I have learned that teachers join "unions' for two reasons...liability insurance and leverage in dealing with incredibly incompetent administrators.
There are bad teachers who must be (and can be) removed, but the greater problem is lack of leadership in an industry that has been politicized and misdirected.
Teacher-bashing is cheap and easy. It's akin to claiming that all journalists report only what stirs emotions with no regard for what is truly in-depth and informative.

Bloggers rarely pick up the phone or go interview the middle-level bureaucrats who know the good stuff. It's a lot easier to chew over breaking stories and bash old media. Where do they get the information with which to bash? Often from, ahem, newspapers.

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Mr. Alter, if it weren't for the blogs and news sources other than the MSM I wouldn't know that General Taguba accused the Bush administration of war crimes because the MSM (with a few exceptions) either downplayed it or didn't cover it at all. Newsweek was one of the publications who didn't find it "newsworthy" that a former Maj. Gen., who did the first investigation of the Abu Ghraib scandal ,said this:

"...there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account"

However, Newweek ran a story that answered Gen. Taguba's question about accountablility.

The Truth About Torture (To get a full accounting of how U.S. interrogation methods were used, the president should give those accused of 'war crimes' a pass).
By Stuart Taylor Jr. | NEWSWEEK - Published Jul 12, 2008

http://www.newsweek.com/id/145842

Because the MSM ignored this story I wrote this diary on Daily kos, what did you write about it?

Clark & Taguba - A Media Tale of Two Generals
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/7/3/24620/15502/320/545803

Alter blithely blurs a number of distinctions in the service of his specious argument. First, he blurs the very significant distinction between bloggers or political writers on websites with people who merely post comments. Obviously, they are very different groups and most bloggers and political writers identify themselves as clearly as any writer for traditional media. Second, he disingenuously implies that political bloggers somehow undermine reporting or fact collecting or news reporting. Just the opposite is true. The best political bloggers draw attention to news reports that are often buried by the mainstream media or over- shadowed by pontificating talking heads and celebrity commentators. And as for his comment that "Talk is cheap and reporting is expensive"? Let's compare the salaries of the pundits who do nothing but talk with the salaries of real reporters. Alter confesses that he too has pontificated from home in his PJs. There's no evidence that he's done anything besides that here. There is no reporting present in this column. There are no new facts, and his analysis is shoddy, and sadly predictable from a member of the establishment media.

More nonsense. Often,as it turns out,it becomes the blogosphere[or second-tier papers], that does the MSMs job for them. It would be a sharpeyed blogger that saw something wrong with photos used in ,among other places,NEWSWEAK during the 2006 War in Lebanon that were found to be photoshopped. Bloggers also dug up the dirt on the CBS /Rather/Bush Guards records mess in 2004. Others were among the first to comment on the strange sermons delivered at a certain Chicago church attended by candidate Obama. All of this flourished into ''hard''news,catching Alter and his cronies asleep at the wheel. In actuality,it becomes the fourth estate that exhibits rank laziness in ''digging for the news''. Iraq is a prime example,where secondhand reportage was duly gathered by the dubious usage of ''stringers''of Iraqi origin and passed on to MSM drinking gin-and-tonics in Baghdad hotels. ''Pack journalism. Untruthful,and irresponsible. A disgrace'' observed Cpt. Jeff Pool,USMC,2nd Marines,while in Ramadi in late 2005. In this year,American news services began pulling nearly all of their people out of Iraq. Whereupon does Alter become able to ''dig for news''from a Washington DC foxhole? Ernie Pyles these are not.[and yet among bloggers such as Mike Yon and Bill Roggio,they have been living in Iraq for years,and were the first to dispel the phony MSM -concocted ''Tet Offensive''in Ramadi back in 2006].

HA! Here on full display are the death throes of the journalistic Hindenburg that is the liberal media. You just can't make this stuff up.

HA! Here on full display are the death throes of the journalistic Hindenburg that is the liberal media. You just can't make this stuff up.

its because stupid peole use yhe internet... : D