Press – No Runny Eggs

In other news, water is wet…news/entertainment source edition

steveegg — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 17:39:23 +0000

Craig Gilbert over at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel pretty much confirmed the stereotypes on the linkage between one’s news and TV watching patterns and one’s politics. According to data from National Media, we in the Milwaukee area are, for the most part, very divided in what occupies both our source of information and their entertainment options. I’ll make you go read Gilbert’s analysis for the full story, but I’ll give you a taste of the TV sports split:

– Packer fans, and football fans in general, tend to be somewhat Republican, though Badger football fans are split down the middle.
– While Brewer fans are pretty much split down the middle, those who care enough to watch the World Series are even more more Republican than football fans.
– Bucks fans, and basketball fans in general, tend to be Democratic. Two oddities on that front: Badger basketball fans were slightly Republican (and indeed more so than Badger football fans), and while NBA playoff viewers were quite Democratic, NBA finals viewers were only somewhat Democratic.

One more thing – the partisan skew between those who depend most on newspapers for news (the most-Democratic among 7 Midwest media markets reviewed by National Media) and those who depend most on radio for news (the 2nd-most-Republican among the same 7 Midwest media markets) is striking.

4-Block of the Day – The Evolution of The New York Times

steveegg — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:50:18 +0000

Tom McMahon does it again…

As is my custom when I “borrow” Tom’s 4-Blocks, the comments are off here to encourage you to go on over to his place. Tom truly is one of the unsung geniuses of the Cheddarsphere.

White House v. AP on Porkulus

steveegg — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:35:18 +0000

(H/T – JammieWearingFool)

Let’s walk through the timeline of the latest war on the media by the Obama White House, this time involving the Associated Press (that’s right, the AP):

At 12:02 am Eastern, the AP issued an “Impact” story stating that the White House overstated the effect of Porkulus by at least 16%, as in a partial review of 9,000 federal contracts they found that at least 5,000 of the 30,000 jobs “saved or created” were neither “saved” nor “created”. In some instances, they found that the same “saved or created” job was counted at least ten times; in others, there was no job at all.
At 12:15 am Eastern (via Fox News), the White House hit back saying that the AP cherry-picked the data, and that the larger set of data (100,000 contracts provided by state governments and various non-profits) to be released Friday will be correct.
The AP is not backing down, as they included the following in a 6:35 am Eastern story – “The reporting problem could be magnified Friday when a much larger round of reports is expected to show hundreds of thousands of jobs repairing public housing, building schools, repaving highways and keeping teachers on local payrolls.”

That, folks, is the reason why ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN stood up for Fox when the Obama administration tried to freeze it out of the pool. They know that they could be next.

Well Decide, Which Way Do You Want It?

Shoebox — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 10:15:55 +0000

The Coast Guard ran a training exercise today. It was routine in every way except that President Obama was involved in a 9/11 memorial in the same general area as the exercise. Oh, and nobody told CNN that it was a training exercise.

Based on what they had heard on scanners that overheard the Coast Guard communications, CNN began reporting that the Coast Guard was pursuing a boat on the Potomac and that shots had been fired. Needless to say, the reporting caused a bit of a stir.

Commenting on the incident, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs chided CNN:

“My only caution would be that before we report things like this, checking would be good,” Gibbs said.

Sage advice from Mr. Gibbs, to be certain. I wonder when Mr. Gibbs would have liked CNN to have begun “checking” before “reporting?”

Should CNN have done some “checking” before they “reported” that John McCain’s endorsement by John Haggee was the equivalent of Barack Obama sitting in Jeremiah Wright’s church and listening to his sermons for 20 years?

Should CNN have done some “checking” before they “reported” this puff piece on the self proclaimed communist, Van Jones?

Or, perhaps, just maybe, CNN should have done some “checking” before they “reported” that following President Obama’s most recent infomercial for health reform, 67% liked Obamacare based on significantly oversampling democrats?

It’s not very often I agree with Robert Gibbs. In fact, I’m not sure I ever have before. On this issue, I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Gibbs. I would like to see CNN doing some real checking and some real reporting. I suspect though, that if they did that, Mr. Gibbs would not be happy at having lost a compliant media lapdog. That leaves a quandary for Mr. Gibbs; which way do you want it?

If it had been Bush…

phineasfahrquar — Sat, 30 May 2009 17:09:25 +0000

You know the answer: late-night comics would have been all over it, the network news shows would have had wall-to-wall coverage for three days, the New York Times would have called it “troubling.” But, since it’s Obama, no biggie:

In which the president discovers an American intelligence agency at Five Guys

On his trip to get a burger with Brian Williams at Five Guys this afternoon, the president appears to have learned of the existence of a Defense Department intelligence arm, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, from an agency employee also at the burger restaurant.

“So explain to me exactly what this National Geospatial…” Obama said, after the worker mentioned his employer, according to a video of the event.

“We work with, uh, satellite imagery,” the worker, Walter replied.

Maybe the President doesn’t know about them because they save all the pretty pictures for Biden.

(Cross-posted at Public Secrets. Hi. I’m one of Steve’s stand-ins. :) )

Can bloggers replace journalists?

steveegg — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:45:26 +0000

(H/T – Charlie Sykes)

In Sunday’s Washington Post, columnist Marc Fischer bemoans the loss of journalists in state capitals. While Fischer asserts that bloggers can’t replace them, instead of actually making a solid case for his thesis, he spends almost all of his column-inches pining for the good old days of ink-stained fingers in dark rooms in the Capitol buildings and making claims that are, for those that actually paid attention to the media, laughable.

Allow me to take a crack at the question. It actually needs to be split into two parts, as there are two types of journalists. Columnists are already by and large being successfully replaced by bloggers. I have been around the blogosphere and have read enough great columnists like the late Mike Royko and George Will to realize that it does take some journalistic skills and a few sources to be even somewhat successful. However, anybody who can rub two brain cells together has an opinion, and at the end of the day, a column is an opinion piece.

Beat journalism, on the other hand, requires a highly-specialized set of skills few people naturally have as well as time that, by and large, can only be gained by making beat journalism one’s full-time profession. Most bloggers do not have the mindset or the sources required to run down even most of the angles on any particular story.

That is not to say that there aren’t bloggers out there that can, at least in part, fill the role of a beat journalist. I have had the pleasure to call some of them friends, like Patrick Dorwin at Badger Blogger, Fred Dooley at Real Debate Wisconsin, Trent Seibert, and Jon Ham at Right Angles. In fact, Siebert and Ham are journalists who have made the full jump from journalism to blogging.

Theoretically, since there are more bloggers than classically-trained beat journalists, bloggers could cover more than the beat journalists can. While the time constraints limit almost all of the bloggers, that has to be weighed against the unfulfilled promise of “unbiased” reporting from the current crop of beat journalists. That makes the question of replacement far harder to answer.

To be honest, even though I’ve taken my fair share of shots at biased reporting, I don’t want to have to fully replace journalists. I use various news sources as launching points for my posts. I also know my limitations; despite having acquired a few sources and worked some events in a journalistic capacity, I do not know whether I could be a full-fledged journalist.