Media For Democracy Action Alert

Following up on yesterday's post, Media For Democracy has isued an action alert regarding the "horse race" coverage of the elections.

CBS Evening News, ABC World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News coverage in the weeks before the New Hampshire primary, tells the tale. According to Media For Democracy research, less than 4 percent of the networks' January broadcasts dealt with candidates’ positions on policy issues, such as health care, education, the war in Iraq, the economy and employment. American voters ranked these five topics as the "most important issues for the government to address."

Go to their website for more details, and take the time to fill in your comments for Jennings, Rather, and Brokaw.

MediaChannel.org to Add Activism to Fact Checking

MediaChannel.org has kicked off Media for Democracy 2004, a combination election coverage fact checking and activism site. The problem according to the website:

Mainstream media have gone AWOL in their duty to serve the public interest this election year. Americans rely on news outlets to guide civic participation -- by educating citizens on the democratic process, covering the issues that matter to us most and profiling all the candidates on the ballot. But election coverage has diminished in the last 20 years. And the reporting that does occur tends to ignore issues in favor of political caricatures and the "horse race."

Registered members (free) will get periodic alerts similar to FAIR Action Alerts that highlight occasions when election coverage strays from the standards for media coverage of democratic elections. What's more, members will be given a page where they can enter their comments and have them sent to the appropriate media contact.

We're sure this will fit in nicely with the new spirit of acivism that seems to be alive this election season. Visit often.

Michael Moore on "The General vs. The Deserter"

Michael Moore's website carrries a post by Moore regarding Bush's "lost year" while he was in the Texas National Guard. Why has Michael weighed in? Mr. Moore used the term "deserter" while introducing Clark to an enthusiastic rally of more than 1,000 people in Pembroke N.H. on the 17th of January. Moore said to the crowd, "I know what you're thinking. I want to see that debate" between Clark and Bush -- "the general versus the deserter." During last night's Democratic debate in New Hampshire, Peter Jennings challenged Clark and asked why he hadn't denounced Moore's comments, as there is no evidence to support the desertion claim. Clark supported Moore's right to his opinion.

George Bush was absent from duty with the National Guard for about a year when he went to Alabama to work on a family friend's campaign. We are not sure whether this constitutes the Armed Forces' definition of desertion, but we do know that when the original charges were brought, the White House was unable to refute them.

Rather than reprint Michael's post, I'll just link, but while at his site, I did take the liberty of grabbing some of the links to the original articles that reported the AWOL story. His article reprints several more.

One Year Gap in Bush's Guard Duty
No Record of Airman at Drills From 1972-73
By Walter V. Robinson, Boston Globe Staff, May 23, 2000

Records of Bush's Alabama Military Duty Can't be Found
By Wayne Slater, Dallas Morning News, June 26, 2000

Finally, the Truth About Bush's Military Service Record: George W.'s Missing Year
By Marty Heldt, TomPaine.com

FAIR Action Alert - Conflict of Interest at Dennis Miller Show (CNBC)

Another action alert has been issued from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), this time

CNBC's Dennis Miller Show hired Mike Murphy as a consulting producer. Murphy is a well-known Republican campaign consultant whose past clients have included John McCain, Jeb Bush and the 1992 Bush/Quayle campaign, and still works as a leader of Governor Schwarzenegger’s California Recovery Team and Californians for Schwarzenegger, two groups created by the governor to maintain his political image, raise money and promote his policies. To underscore the conflict of interest, the first edition of the Dennis Miller Show is scheduled to include, along with Republican Sen. John McCain and former Republican New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, California’s new Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The complete Action Alert along with media contacts and a more detailed explanation than was given here can be found on their website.

FactCheck.org to Check Campaign and Media Accuracy

This is from the Sci/Tech Internet section of the Chrisitian Science Monitor. The Monitor reviews two websites devoted to checking the accuracy on politicians and journalists in this election year. The first is FactCheck.org (online since December), a creation of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania - an entity which does not accept donations from "business corporations, labor unions, political parties, lobbying organizations or individuals." The site means to monitor the accuracy of political speeches, ads, interviews and any other method that one candidate, party, or special interest group might use in promoting a specific view - and then posts, shall we say, "clarifications," online. From the Monitor article:

In a recent example, "Gephardt Ad Quotes Dean Out of Context," FactCheck provides a summary of a misleading Gephardt campaign ad (as well as a video and transcript of the ad itself), and then exposes the claims to the cold hard light of reality. (In this case, a criticism Dean made about Medicare's administration was presented in the ad as a condemnation of the program itself.) Other pieces examine the claim that Wesley Clark is a late convert from the Republican Party, and the Republican National Chairman's assertion that "80 percent of the tax relief for upper-income filers goes to small businesses."

The other website reviewed in the article is Campaign Desk from the Columbia Journalism Review that was posted here Jan 15. In addition to criticism, they also offer a "Tip of the Hat" to particularly good reporting.

They are both new works in progress, but are really high quality sites. Bookmark them both and check regularly!

Newscrawl Abuse Part 2

On Jimmy Kimmel Live last night (this morning), Jimmy pointed out a wierd CNN crawl/breaking news notice that Michael Jackson had successfully passed through a metal detector on his way to his arraignment Friday.

FAIR Action Alert - Deplorable Nazi Comparisons

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has put out an action alert with regards to the Bush/Hitler double standard mentioned in our January 8 post. Conservative news media have not been called to task for their Liberal/Nazi comparisons, in particular the New York Post column by Ralph Peters that described Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean as a follower of Josef Goebbels, referred to him as "Herr Howie," accused him of "looking for his Leni Riefenstahl," called his supporters "the Internet Gestapo" and compared them to "Hitler's brownshirts."

FAIR requests that the public please ask the New York Post (Murdoch's NewsCorp) whether it stands by the column it published describing Howard Dean as a Nazi, or if it owes Dean an apology.

The complete Action Alert along with media contacts and a more detailed explanation than was given here can be found on their website.

The Campaign Desk from Columbia Journalism Review

For all you media junkies who are also political junkies, CJR has just launched Campaign Desk, a website devoted to critique and analysis of the 2004 presidential campaign (Link will be posted on the left under Election 2004).

According to the Campaign Desk Website:

"The Desk aims to decrease, not enhance, the self-referential and self-enclosed tendencies of the campaign press. It is quite difficult for reporters traveling with a presidential campaign to get information independently; the Desk intends to make this easier, by making available links to briefing materials, accurate information, and other documents from the outside world that will help reporters evaluate what the candidates are saying.

A few assurances are in order: The Desk will be politically nonpartisan. While it will call attention to journalistic sins, both of omission and commission, it will by no means be exclusively a finger-wagging operation. It will have a lively, engaged tone, not a grim, censorious one. One of the Desk's important functions will be to praise work of high quality, and one of its most useful aspects will be its ability to bring distinguished work in the local press to national attention, instantly and (through links) in full."

The first three postings are on whether the press has a vested interest in slowing Howard Dean's momentum as stated in a Salon piece by Eric Boehlert, a look at Ken Auletta's New Yorker article which examines the Bush administration's deeply-held conviction that the press is just another special interest group, not a champion of the public interest, and evidence of distortion in a Slate article by Chris Suellentrop on Gen. Wesley Clark.

We at the Monkey are looking forward to what this website will have to say.

Newscrawl Abuse

During the weather on my local news broadcast (why they discuss weather every five minutes is beyond me) the news crawl at the bottom of the screen informed me that Jennifer Anniston will not be reconciling with her mother who has been estranged from her for a few years. Giving the station the benefit of the doubt and assuming that Jennifer Aniston's relationship with her mother is newsworthy, I still have to ask why they felt it was necessary to make an announcement that there is no change in the relationship. It reminded me of an old, old Saturday Night Live News bit where anchorman Chevy Chase would open the newscast by announcing that the late Spanish Dictator Generalissimo Fransisco Franco was still dead. Newscrawl space is not like newsprint space. It's size automatically changes according to content and does not require filler material.

New Murdoch Page

With this post, our December 19th post which listed Rupert Murdoch's media holdings will be moved to the archives. We received many EMAIL's asking us to keep the list more permanently as a reference, so we have added a Murdoch Page. This page is only accessible through a link at the end of the postings (near the Blogger and Haloscan credits). The list is based on NewsCorporation's 2002 annual report, and will not be updated unless further acquisitions compel us to create another post. Caveat Emptor.

Bush in 30 Seconds - The Contest, The Controversy, The Double Standard

For those of you who may not have been following it, the MoveOn.org Voter Fund launched "Bush in 30 Seconds", a political ad contest where entrants create a 30-second spot to highlight failures in President Bush's administration. From the website:

For the last three years, President Bush's policies have ransacked the environment, put our national security at risk, damaged our economy, and redistributed wealth from the middle class to the very wealthiest Americans. Yet thanks to a complacent media, the President has managed to hide behind a carefully constructed "compassionate" image. As the 2004 election nears, it's crucial that voters understand what President Bush's policies really mean for our country. And to do that, we need creative new ads that clearly show what's at stake.

The fifteen finalists have been chosen and are available for viewing on the website. Two ads you will not be seeing are two that compared Bush to Hitler. Although they were rejected, the Republican Party continues to stir up the media by claiming the ads were sponsored by MoveOn.org.

Timothy Carr at MediaChannel.org has issued a News Alert on the website and by email detailing the controversy and exposing a double standard in the media which apparently is not concerned with a January fifth New York Post column by Ralph Peters which likens Howard Dean to Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and Dean followers to Nazi Brownshirts and the Gestapo.

Matt Blivens also made mention of the controversy in his Daily Outrage column for The Nation.

Speaking of MediaChannel.org, they are launching Media for Democracy 2004, an independent media initiative to monitor mainstream news coverage of the 2004 elections to prevent the types of media mistakes -- such as early, erroneous and politically biased projections -- that plagued the 2000 elections. Join the cause at their website.

Congratulations - Larsen's 1000th Headline!

Poynter Online's Multimedia Editor, Larry Larsen, has just posted his 1000th headline in their online feature, Headline of the Day, where registered users can add the headlines they like (good, bad, or ugly) and everyone else can vote on the list daily. Larsen, a self avowed news junkie claims to skim several hundred or sometimes several thousand headlines and articles a day. His favorites are posted on the site to commemorate the 1000th, Man Wearing Chicken Suit Robs Kroger, from the NBC affiliate in Columbus Ohio. All are real and correspondingly linked. My personal favorites all came from the "Obvious" category:

Bombs are frightening, SA human shield says
Investigators: Flaming Car With Body Inside 'Suspicious'
Lesbian Japanese monkeys challenge Darwin's assumptions
Authorities Seek Flasher - Police: Man Typically Wears No Pants

CIA Plans Iraqi Secret Police Squad

According to this article in the U.K. Daily Telegraph, nine months after the demise of Saddam Hussein's regime and his feared mukhabarat (intelligence) operatives, Iraq is to get a secret police force again - courtesy of Washington. The Bush administration is to fund the new agency in the latest initiative to root out Ba'athist regime loyalists behind the continuing insurgency in parts of Iraq. The force will cost up to $3 billion over the next three years in money allocated from the same part of the federal budget that finances the Central Intelligence Agency. Its ranks are to be drawn from Iraqi exile groups, Kurdish and Shi'ite forces - in addition to former mukhabarat agents who are now working for the Americans. CIA officers in Baghdad are expected to play a leading role in directing their operations.

No comment

2003 Media Follies

Geov Parrish writing for WorkingForChange.com presents his annual survey of the year's most overhyped and underreported stories.

The overreported stories make anyone's list - the ultra-spun Jessica Lynch story (corrected for the record by Ms. Lynch herself, much to her credit), Kobe Bryant, Arnold Schwartzenegger, and of course everyone's favorite train wreck - Michael Jackson. And what about this hyped economic recovery? What exactly is a recovery with no jobs?

Our favorite underreported story was Africa. The goings on there are routinely ignored by American media. (remember, Haliburton's African bribery scandal broke in the French media)

"Africa, Africa, Africa. So much is flying under U.S. media radar, it’s hard to know where to start -- from Mugabe’s terrorizing of Zimbabwe to AIDS to the renewed national and regional depredations of Nigeria, a country effectively run by the likes of Shell and Chevron, and whichever local generals have the franchise this week. But as always the place to start is Central Africa -- where a brutal, decade-long war has now killed a staggering four million or more people, replete with atrocities, civilian massacres, torture, sexual slavery, and lots and lots of U.S.-made weaponry. The war’s raison d’etre? The mineral wealth of the eastern Congo, which includes several rare minerals used in the production of computer screens, keyboards, and chips. Prominent among the numerous American companies getting rich by paying “rebel” armies to take over mining regions are -- surprise -- Halliburton and Bechtel. This should be a scandal rocking the globe -- but it’s sub-Saharan Africa, where they don’t value life the way we do [sic]. " (from the article)