Journalists’ Dilemma Makes Good TV

Posted on January 20, 2010 by Campaign Outsider

Haiti has been a petri dish of journalistic quandaries in the to-be-or-not-to-be-involved category. Especially for the TV doctors (via TVNewser):

Bob Steele, a journalism values scholar at the Poynter Institute, tells the LA Times’ Matea Gold, “I think it’s very hard for an individual who is professionally and emotionally engaged in saving lives to be able to simultaneously step back from the medical work and practice independent journalistic truth-telling.”

“I may blur the rules of dispassionate journalism,” ABC News correspondent Dr.Richard Besser tells Gold, “but I think it would be impossible to be a true physician working as a journalist and not help when you can contribute.”

Which raises the question: should physicians be working as journalists?

You tell me.

TV Newser’s question (in a reader poll) was, “In general, how do you feel about the intervention by anchors and reporters in Haiti?”

The thoroughly unscientific results had 34% saying it crosses a journalistic line; 59% saying it’s appropriate considering the circumstances; and 7% unsure.

Media watchers are unsure where the line is now between covering the story and being part of it, as one observer told the Washington Post.

“I understand that [offering medical assistance] makes for dramatic scenes, and it does bring a human face to the whole story, but this has to be treated very carefully,” said Stephen J.A. Ward, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin’s journalism school. Ward says such “emotion-based” reporting has its place, but it can become manipulative and obscure the larger picture.

Worse, it can become self-promotional: “Is this compassion or is it congratulations?” he asks. “It’s almost as if the networks are saying, ‘Look at our correspondent down there.’ It gives me an uncomfortable, queasy feeling.”

Pish-tosh, says a CBS exec:

“It’s a legitimate question to ask whether you’re jeopardizing fair and honest coverage by letting someone involved in the story report it,” says Paul Friedman, executive vice president of CBS News. “But we feel it’s something we can do without prostituting ourselves or misleading the audience.”

Not sure those are the only two pitfalls, but why get technical about it.

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Cave Drawings

Posted on January 20, 2010 by Campaign Outsider

Just about anything Damien Cave writes for the New York Times is worth reading, but this piece is downright riveting.

Lede:

TITANYEN, Haiti — A few miles north of the busted-down buildings in Port-au-Prince, up a hillside where cows graze, an empty hole awaits the dead. Rectangular, 20 feet deep and wide, 100 feet long, it is one of the newest mass graves, but there are many more.

The government’s dump trucks have been dropping off bodies here since Friday. No one counts, takes pictures or searches for names. In some places, legs and arms of strangers are knotted together in a frozen dance, but here the ground has been leveled by a backhoe that has erased all but the tiniest scraps of life.

Look and see: a torn photo of a mustached man in a silver tie; a canceled American passport for an infant born in Stamford, Conn.; and a shred of purple pantyhose never to lure a lover again.

It only gets more compelling from there.

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Dead Blogging the Massachusetts Senate Election

Posted on January 20, 2010 by Campaign Outsider

All day Tuesday, you got the sense that only the Ladies Who Lunch in the People’s Republic of Brookline still believed that Martha Coakley could actually win the U.S. Senate race.

It was special, alright:

• When the polls closed at 8 p.m., the only local TV coverage came compliments of NECN [and WCVB – thanks, Adam]. WBZ stuck with NCIS, WCVB put on Scrubs, and WHDH ran the prophetic Biggest Loser.  Props to NECN: Since there were no exit polls, the gum-flapping had to go supersonic.

• Dispatches from the Cyclopsian cable networks:

On Fox News, Boston media mavens Howie Carr and Mary Anne Marsh seem to have awarded the race to Scott Brown (R-Gas the Truck).

On MSNBC (which in desperation is displaying fractions in the vote count: Brown 52.3%, Coakley 46.7%) has Tinglin’ Chris Matthews bloviating about the evils of the 24-hour news cycle: “First Robert Gibbs says something, then Mitch McConnell says something, then some clown on Fox says something . . . ” (Yikes. Hey, Fox – you wanna say something?)

On CNN, John King is at Scott Brown headquarters. Say no more.

• At 9 p.m., WCVB scrubbed its second episode of Scrubs and went to (the real) Janet Wu with Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey (D-We’re Doin’ Good), who said “we’re going to win.”

• With 59% of precincts reporting, Brown leads by seven points.

• Back to Fox News: former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R-And My Hair Is Perfect) warns against “Democratic shenanigans” around the healthcare reform/government takeover legislation. He also points to GOP gubernatorial success in the Bay State: “Paul Cellucci, Jane Swift, Bill Weld ran for governor as Republicans . . . ” Actually, Jane Swift didn’t, since Romney big-bucked her out of the race in 2002.

• On MSNBC, former presidential candidate Howard Dean (D-The Scream) says, “A lot of this is not anyone’s fault. Well, maybe George Bush’s fault.” God, the GOP loves that kind of talk.

• 9:21 p.m.: The race is called for Scott Brown.

• If you chose “I think it’s a little bit of both” for your drinking game, you were knee-walking by 9:30.

• Preceding Martha Coakley’s concession, Massachusetts Senate President Therese Murray quoted poet Maya Angelou:

“We will rise up.”

Rise up? You own every political seat in the state except Brown’s. He rose up.

• Coakley’s concession speech was as tin-eared as her campaign. To what could loosely be called the crowd, she said, “Give yourselves a huge round of applause for what you’ve done.” Yes – lost a Senate seat that previously had been as secure as the average seatbelt.

Coakley also misquoted Ted Kennedy – of all people – at the end of her concession speech. That’s what we in the thumb-sucking racket call symbolic. [I stand corrected. That’s what we in the chin-stroking racket call an everyday experience.]

• Nutshell version of Scott Brown’s victory speech:  After thanking his daughters for helping him on the campaign trail, Brown said, “In case anyone around the country are watching, they’re both available.”

Enough said.

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Cable Vision

Posted on January 19, 2010 by Campaign Outsider

Striking contrast on the cable news networks at 10 p.m. Monday:

• Fox Newsie Greta van Susteren was in Boston to view the remains of Martha Coakley

• Thrillin‘ Chris Matthews, MSNBC’s video savant, was in a TV town hall meeting about his favorite topic – Barack Obama

• And CNN’s Anderson Cooper was in Haiti, where he snatched a young boy – who’d just been hit in the head by a chunk of concrete tossed off a roof – out of the path of a mob of looters. Cooper – on-camera but to all appearances oblivious to it – passed the boy, his head bleeding profusely, to safety. Clearly, the journalists’ dilemma was no dilemma at all to Cooper.

You can argue about CNN’s use – or misuse – of Cooper’s actions in promoting the network.

But it’s hard to argue that he was wrong to do what he did.

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Mish-M*A*S*H

Posted on January 18, 2010 by Campaign Outsider

From today’s Inside Track in the Boston Herald:

WE HEAR:

That Oscar-winning filmmaker Robert Altman and Elliot Gould are headed to Boston University on Friday to celebrate the 40th anniversary of “M*A*S*H” at the alumni association’s annual Winterfest .

That I’ve got to see.

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Typo o’ the Day (pat. pending)

Posted on January 18, 2010 by Campaign Outsider

Headline of Bill O’Reilly’s column in Sunday’s Boston Herald op-ed page:

Palin’s back and bigger then ever

It was corrected on the Herald website, but still . . .

The same edition of the Herald featured a piece about the Scott Brown/Martha Coakley bakeoff with this bit of dulcet prose:

The candidates held no punches in a day of fast-paced campaigning before high-spirited crowds.

Don’t you mean pulled no punches?

Grammar, children.  Grammar.

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Ads o’ the Day™

Posted on January 18, 2010 by Campaign Outsider

1) Scott Brown buys the Boston Globe

Scott Brown’s full-page “Open Letter to the People of Massachusetts” in the Sunday Boston Globe is yet another example of his campaign’s pitch-perfect media effort in the current U.S. Senate race. Here’s how Brown’s open letter ends:

I want you to know that no matter what happens on Election Day, I consider myself a winner for having gone through this campaign. I was born and raised in Massachusetts, and I’ve lived here my entire life. But it wasn’t until now that I got a chance to fully appreciate the true spirit of the people of Massachusetts. They are the most patriotic, hard-working and optimistic people in the world. I have come away with a much deeper love and appreciation for them.

For all of that, and for the privilege of meeting with you in your neighborhoods, your homes, and where you work, I thank you.

Pitch perfect.

One question: Is the candidate as classy as his campaign?

2) Tea Party Express Chugs into Town

Among the myriad third-party groups blanketing the local TV airwaves with Brown/Coakley for-and-against ads is an outfit called the Tea Party Express, which is currently running this spot (via Talking Points Memo) on Boston television stations as part of a reported $150,000 campaign.

The Tea Party Express describes itself this way on its website (which to all appearances hasn’t been updated for several months):

The Tea Party Express national bus tour will host a series of tea party rallies all across the nation from coast-to-coast and border-to-border. The effort will begin in San Diego, California on October 25th and travel eastward, building momentum as the tour reaches its final destination: a giant rally in Orlando, Florida on November 12th.

The tour comes exactly one-year before the November 2010 elections – and this will serve as a “Countdown to Judgment Day” for our elected officials. Those who are not serving in the nation’s best interest will be put on notice: we’re going to hand you a pink slip!

At each stop the tour will highlight some of the worst offenders in Congress who have voted for higher spending, higher taxes, and government intervention in the lives of American families and businesses.  These Members of Congress have infringed upon the freedom of the individual in this great nation, and its time for us to say: “Enough is Enough!”

And here’s how the Tea Baggers are described by the Boston Herald:

Brown has sought to downplay his ties to the Tea Party movement, a loose network that took root in a series of protests against the federal government last year, promoted by conservative commentators and denounced by liberal ones. “I’ve gotten support from everybody – Democrats, Republicans,” Brown said when asked about national Tea Party support.

Sounds like Brown is afraid voters will think the looney-tunes fit him to a Tea.

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Eternal Journalists’ Dilemma

Posted on January 17, 2010 by Campaign Outsider

From Time’s Swampland blog:

Another Dispatch From Haiti

Posted by KAREN TUMULTY Friday, January 15, 2010 at 8:35 pm

Please follow Jay Newton-Small on Twitter. Her tweets are heartbreaking:

2late, 2late, they say. I tell myself that i’m doing more good writing than digging, but it’s hard not to agree w/them. Heart wrenching

This is the age-old journalists’ dilemma: record or respond. It permeates the Broadway production of Time Stands Still, and it haunted Kevin Carter, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1993 photograph of a vulture waiting patiently for a starving Sudanese boy to die.
Carter committed suicide the following year.
Flash-forward to today, and here’s what CNN’s chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta did in Haiti (via the New York Times):
On Thursday night Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, led a camera crew through one of the few remaining hospitals in the region. As he passed wounded and dying victims, he explained that there were no doctors or nurses there to treat them. But CNN made a point of repeatedly showing another scene in which Dr. Gupta ran through the street to minister to an infant, the camera lingering on him as he cradled her in his arms and examined her head for lacerations.
Wonder what Kevin Carter would think about that.
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The Weakly Standard

Posted on January 17, 2010 by Campaign Outsider

The current edition of The Weekly Standard includes a piece headlined, “The Facilitating Leaks Act.”

Lede:

The title of the legislation is innocent enough: the Free Flow of Information Act. The motivation behind it is a seemingly worthy one. It would give anyone in the media a shield–special protection–against being forced to reveal the names of confidential sources of information. And the result would be more and more information flowing freely to the American people, satisfying their right to know.

But (there’s usually a but – in this case, a yet – with the Standardniks):

Yet despite the warm sentiments associated with it, the bill would do far more harm than good. Unless seriously cleaned up, it would have a distinctly negative effect on the federal government’s ability to protect sensitive national security information from being disclosed in the media. It would encourage leaks of classified information.

And then there’s this:

You may wonder why Congress is bothering to create a media privilege in federal cases at this time. It’s not as if critical, top secret information isn’t flowing to the media at a record pace. The New York Times, rather than being prosecuted, won a Pulitzer Prize for divulging highly classified information about the government’s use of electronic surveillance in the war on terrorism.

Not to get technical about it, but in that particular case, “the government’s use of electronic surveillance in the war on terrorism” was, well, ILLEGAL.

Not to get technical about it.

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Beauty Call, Part 2

Posted on January 17, 2010 by Campaign Outsider

Well the Missus got a phone call from a former president on Saturday and here’s what he said (in a surprisingly lackluster way; then again he does have some other things going on):

Hello.  This is Bill Clinton. I’m calling to urge you to get out and vote for Martha Coakley on Tuesday, January 19.

This election is critical not just for Massachusettes [kidding – kidding] but for our entire country.

The Republicans are spending millions of dollars to win Ted Kennedy’s seat . . .  [See below. Also see how many millions of dollars the Democrats are spending to win Ted Kennedy’s seat (see below).]

. . . and they’re telling you they’ve got a better economic plan when all they want is to bring back Pres. Bush’s economic policies. They’re telling you they’ve got a health care plan when all they want to do is leave the health insurance companies in control of Americans’ health care . . . and bankrupt the country.

So please get out and vote for Martha Coakley on Tuesday, January 19. I know her – she’s a good person – she’ll be a good senator.

Me? I got another lousy mailer from Scott Brown (R-Someone Pinch Me). It said:

Kennedy’s Seat?

Democrats’ Seat?

No. It’s YOUR SEAT!

The people’s seat.

Yes, and if Martha Coakley doesn’t win it, she’ll be on the hot seat for a very long time.

UPDATE (via Caller ID): Someone from Coakley’s campaign (maybe Bill?) called me today, but I wasn’t home. That’s what we in the chin-stroking racket call symbolic.

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