Keith Olbermann Does The Impossible: Admits He Was Wrong
(January 18, 2008 -- 4:02 PM EDT // link // )

Keith Olbermann made a big boo-boo on MSNCB last night. When he learned of it, he had a deeply bizarre, almost-unheard-of reaction:

He admitted he was wrong and apologized.

One thing this blog can't fathom is why this is such a rare occurrence among your top media stars. When Joe Klein made a hash of things with a piece on FISA, he dragged his feet about it for weeks. When The Washington Post took a big hit for front-paging the scurrilous Obama Muslim smears without declaring them false, the paper's editors dug in.

This blog doesn't make a regular practice of linking to Olbermann stuff, mainly because so many other folks do it. But this episode is worth flagging, because Olbermann really did handle this in a way that other top-shelf media figures might consider emulating.

Here's what happened. Yesterday Olbermann had writer Lawrence O'Donnell as a guest on his show. They talked about Edwards, Obama, and Reagan.

But then some people pointed out that Olbermann shouldn't have done this. Why? Because just a few days ago, O'Donnell wrote a piece for The Huffington Post called "John Edwards Is A Loser," which suggested that perhaps he just might harbor a bit of animus towards the guy and might not be equipped to discuss Edwards fairly.

When Olbermann learned what happened and heard that people were griping, he did a funny thing: He actually weighed the criticism on its merits. And he admitted that he'd screwed up:

His HuffPo piece was news to me.

Shouldn't have been, obviously, but it was.

...the point about this appearance, especially in the wake of such a freshly-written piece, is well-taken and I'm very sorry.

It will be addressed tonight on the show.

It's almost too obvious to bother pointing out, but doing this won't hurt Olbermann in the slightest, of course. If anything, it will only help him.

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Keeping More Than One Idea In Our Heads At The Same Time
(January 18, 2008 -- 10:23 AM EDT // link // )

The New Republic's Jason Zengerle doesn't think the media screwed John Edwards:

I think Edwards received plenty of media attention in the year before the caucuses and primaries began. Maybe he didn't receive as much as Hillary and Obama, but then his candidacy wasn't as historic as theirs, plus he trailed them in the national polls. Edwards ran a very good campaign and I think you can make the argument that he actually had the biggest impact in terms of policy on the race -- setting a progressive standard that the other candidates tried to meet -- but he lost, and the fact that he lost wasn't the media's fault.

I understand these arguments. But in response, let me just say that I think we should try to keep more than one idea in our heads at the same time. Here they are:

(1) It's true that it's understandable that the press has been devoting some more attention to Hillary and Obama because of the potentially historic nature of their candidacies;

(2) It's true that Edwards' travails aren't solely the media's fault and that he bears blame, should he lose;

(3) But at the same time, it's also true that in general the press has never accorded the Edwards campaign the level of seriousness it deserved and that the political coverage skewed too sharply towards covering it as a two-person contest.

The point is, these two arguments -- "Edwards bears blame for his likely loss" and "Hillary and Obama's candidacies were potentially history-making" -- simply don't refute the argument that Edwards in general has gotten shafted by the press. All these three things can be true at the same time.

As for Edwards trailing them in national polls, this one won't wash as an excuse, because lots of professional political journalists know -- and indeed, often told us -- that the national polls don't matter. Rather, the primary reason Edwards wasn't deemed viable long-term -- and hence went under-covered -- was that he didn't raise as much money that Hillary and Obama did. I think we can all agree that this isn't a good way to determine which candidate's words and actions are more deserving of news coverage.

It's true that at this point the lesser attention to Edwards is defensible. And Zengerle says he doesn't think that Edwards has been short-shrifted over the last year. I agree that this sort of stuff is very difficult to quantify. By nature judgments like these are mainly based on long-term impressions.

But I stand by my view of what's been happening. Whether it was the constant coverage of the $400 haircut; the subtext in much coverage that Edwards' personal wealth rendered his populism little more than a phony and ineffective gimmick; or the constant and relentless portrayal of the race as a showdown between two political superstars, there's just no denying that in terms of the scope and tone of the coverage, Edwards has basically gotten screwed.

No, this isn't the only reason he's losing. And yes, it's partly explained by the groundbreaking Hillary and Obama candidacies. But this is what happened nonetheless.

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The Edwards Media Blackout -- Now On Video!
(January 17, 2008 -- 2:42 PM EDT // link // )

Oh, this is fun -- not sure anyone has ever tried this before. The Edwards campaign -- which has for months felt shut out of the Dem primary by the political media's focus on Hillary and Obama -- is now resorting to black humor to draw attention to its media plight.

Camp Edwards has released a short vid lampooning the media's treatment of...itself:

Now, this blog has been admittedly obsessed with this topic, so of course this vid is getting covered here. I'm sincerely curious as to whether it will get covered elsewhere -- after all, it's news that one of the three major Dem candidates released a video chiding the media for not covering him, right?

On the other hand, perhaps reporters and editors will dismiss this as a stunt. And maybe it is kind of a stunt. But just to reiterate this point, for the past year now we've been hearing justifications for why the Edwards campaign doesn't deserve the same level of coverage as the two leading Dem superstar candidates. What coverage Edwards has received has all too often been marked by the kind of snide dismissiveness that A-listers at a private club might accord a serial party-crasher or second-rate celeb-impersonator.

I understand that Hillary and Obama are historic figures and that editors often have to make tough choices about how to allocate resources and so forth. And I'm not at all arguing that the media is solely to blame for the Edwards camp's problems. Just saying again that we should all admit that in a broad sense Edwards got screwed here, because, well, that's exactly what happened.

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The Good, The Bad, And The Very, Very Ugly
(January 17, 2008 -- 10:09 AM EDT // link // )

This blog has taken issue in the past with New York Times reporter Leslie Wayne's coverage of John Edwards, but it needs to be said that she turned in a very good piece today that used the word "false" or its variants a half-dozen times to describe all the lies that are floating around about the presidential candidates.

That's a very good development. And I think it shows that the big debate we all had over that Washington Post piece front-paging the Obama Muslim smears without declaring them false is having a palpable and salutary effect. At least, I'd like to think it shows that. But I'm pretty certain it does.

On the other hand, this Times piece -- which is about how phony and calculating Hillary and her advisers are -- is just bleedin' awful. It runs through all the personalities Hillary has tried to hoodwink the public with -- "Commander in Chief Hillary," "Strong and Experienced Hillary, "Teary-Eyed Hillary," and "I-Feel-Your-Pain Hillary" -- and suggests that Hillary and her advisers are "searching for the right personality" for her to connect with voters.

Of course, it's never explained why it is that these "personalities" are necessarily mutually exclusive or why a politician can't, you know, be a human being and present many faces to the public.

Yes, yes, I know, Hillary and her advisers really do discuss how to present her to the electorate. Nonetheless, this piece is plainly over the top and beyond ridiculous, and I challenge you to find a news section article in The Times that takes a tone like this with any other pol.

The piece then reaches this startling conclusion:

Her newest public face is a blend of policy and persona.

Hard to top this one for sheer inanity. Is there any way anyone can be a politician without blending policy and persona?

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Study: John Edwards Doesn't Exist
(January 16, 2008 -- 5:31 PM EDT // link // )

A new study finds that John Edwards doesn't exist.

Allow me to explain.

After John Edwards placed second in the Iowa caucus on January 3, Elizabeth Edwards took to the airwaves to argue that his finish should occasion the media to stop covering the Dem contest as little more than a showdown between two political superstars, Hillary and Obama. Not surprisingly, nobody listened to her.

Comes now some statistical evidence of this fact. The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its latest campaign coverage index for January 6-11, a study that does its damndest to try to quantify which political figures are sucking up the most media oxygen and why.

It found that Edwards only got 7% of political coverage during those days -- less than one-fifth of what Hillary earned, and less than one-forth of that accorded to Obama. Edwards even got less attention than Mike Huckabee, even though he, like Edwards, finished third in the New Hampshire primary. Take a look:

Now, before we get into a big argument about the study's validity or over whether Edwards deserved more coverage than he got, let me just say that I'm flagging these numbers just to make a larger point.

You can make a valid case, I suppose, that Edwards didn't merit more media attention during those days. Even post-Iowa he looked to be a long-shot for the nomination; New Hampshire made things worse. What's more, Hillary's New Hampshire comeback was obviously going to get a ton of attention. So the above numbers are understandable.

But here's the thing about this. For literally the past year we've been hearing justifications for the fact that Edwards, despite being competitive in Iowa polls, didn't get the attention that his Dem rivals got -- he didn't raise as much money; his candidacy isn't as historic as theirs; etc., etc. Indeed, the virtual media blackout of Edwards got so glaringly obvious that even New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt urged his paper to give Edwards more attention back in November. At a certain point we should just acknowledge that Edwards basically got screwed and that this shouldn't have happened to the extent that it did.

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On Hillary Hatred
(January 16, 2008 -- 11:01 AM EDT // link // )

Ezra Klein has written perhaps the best description I've ever seen of the seething irrationality underlying Hillary hatred:

Everything becomes evidence of personal cynicism and ambition. Nothing is a slip, or harmless, or just politics. Every word, gesture, and political feint is evidence of Shakespearian levels of cynicism and power-lust. And this belief in the Manichean size of her traits makes her the center of gravity. Her failures are so deep, her appetite for conquest so epic, that everything must revolve around her story.

Ezra is talking solely about Andrew Sullivan's view of Hillary here. What's really sobering about this, though, is that this very same disease -- albeit somewhat less virulent strains of it, perhaps -- also infects a surprising number of professional pundits, commentators, and, occasionally, reporters, to the point where it has had a dramatic impact on the political conversation in this country.

At this point it's necessary to add the obligatory caveats: Yes, the Clintons are ambitious. No, Hillary isn't merely a martyr. Yes, Hillary's team manages and manipulates the press. No, Hillary is not without blame for her treatment at the hands of the media. Yes, plenty of commentators and reporters don't subscribe to this view of her.

But all this aside, the degree to which this grotesque house-of-horrors view of Hillary has permeated so much of our political discourse really is astonishing. Equally bizarre is the fact that it's just an accepted part of our political lives at this point. Worth pondering.

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John Solomon: Washington Times Is An "Extraordinary News Brand"
(January 15, 2008 -- 5:43 PM EDT // link // )

This blog already had a bit of fun earlier today with John Solomon, the new executive editor of The Washington Times, but guess what -- there's still more fun to be had!

Via Romenesko, Fishbowl DC reports that Solomon has now sent an introductory memo to WashTimes's staff. Check out his effusive praise of the Moonie rag:

To the staff of The Washington Times

It is with great respect, admiration and enthusiasm that I soon will be joining you in the newsroom of The Washington Times. Under the steady stewardship of Wes Pruden, you have built an extraordinary news brand that delivers insightful analysis, cutting-edge investigative reporting and diverse coverage to a marketplace craving such reporting....

The Washington Times has charted one of the most ambitious courses toward 21st century journalistic success that I've seen in all my travels across the country.

This really is a perfect match. No wonder everyone is so excited about it.

Meanwhile, check out this rather odd bit of media analysis:

First, rest assured I do not share the bleak assessments of many industry leaders that the Fourth Estate has entered an era of inevitable decline. The news industry's greatest times still lay ahead of us. The next several years offer an unprecedented opportunity to liberate all of our products from the confines of two-dimensional story telling.

I'm sure working at The Washington Times will indeed prove liberating -- and not just from the "confines of two-dimensional story telling," whatever that means, but from certain other "confines," too.

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WaPo's Richard Cohen: I Don't Think Obama Has Questionable Views Of Farrakhan, But...
(January 15, 2008 -- 2:36 PM EDT // link // )

Everybody's already taken their whacks at today's reprehensible Richard Cohen column in The Washington Post recycling the latest smear of Obama. But I wanted to highlight one particular aspect of it.

Cohen notes that the minister of Obama's church, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, launched Trumpet Newsmagazine, which hailed Louis Farrakhan as a great man. This is supposed to raise questions about Obama, Cohen seems to suggest. Now take a look at Cohen's last graf...

I don't for a moment think that Obama shares Wright's views on Farrakhan. But the rap on Obama is that he is a fog of a man. We know little about him, and, for all my admiration of him, I wonder about his mettle. The New York Times recently reported on Obama's penchant while serving in the Illinois legislature for merely voting "present" when faced with some tough issues. Farrakhan, in a strictly political sense, may be a tough issue for him. This time, though, "present" will not do.

This is really something. Cohen says that Obama is voting "present" on the question of whether he agrees with Wright's assessment of Farrakhan -- thus insinuating, without quite saying, that Obama has not taken a position on this.

But earlier in the very same column, Cohen actually quotes a top Obama adviser, David Axelrod, explicitly saying that Obama disagrees with Wright about Farrakhan. Presumably you are meant to forget this fact by the time you get to the end of the column. This suggests that Cohen doesn't think very much of his readers, wouldn't you say?

Maybe Cohen thinks that Axelrod's description of Obama's views doesn't count. Maybe what Cohen means is that until Obama climbs to the roof of the Apollo Theater and denounces Farrakhan with a bullhorn, he's voting "present" and refusing to share his real opinions of him. Whatever. If so, did Cohen even try to interview Obama for this column, so that he could, you know, ask Obama what he thinks? There's no indication that he did. I emailed Cohen to ask him whether he did this. We'll see if he answers.

Cohen says: "I don't for a moment think that Obama shares Wright's views on Farrakhan." Okay, so what's the problem, then? Why did Cohen write the column at all?

Anyone care to hazard a guess?

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WaPo's Departing John Solomon: I Plan To Do "Fair And Balanced" Journalism At Washington Times
(January 15, 2008 -- 9:49 AM EDT // link // )

Updated below.

The Washington Post's story today on the departure of the paper's own John Solomon for the greener pastures of The Washington Times is a bit grating, but at least it hits these key points:

Solomon's reporting for The Post, where he worked for one year, has drawn both praise and criticism...

After he co-authored a front-page story on Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards having consulted for a hedge fund, The Post's ombudsman, Deborah Howell, wrote that "the facts are eminently worth reporting, but the tone of the story implied that consulting for a hedge fund . . . is incompatible with caring about the less fortunate."

Solomon also co-authored a report that the previously undisclosed buyers of Edwards's Georgetown house were under federal investigation. Howell wrote that "it seemed like a 'gotcha' without the gotcha," since the former senator said he never spoke to the buyers.

The key takeaway here is that The Washington Times is hiring Solomon precisely because he does stories like these and knows how to pass them off as real news. Meanwhile, at his new home Solomon will be able to publish stuff like this without facing any of this sort of nettlesome in-house criticism. Everybody wins!

Solomon also unintentionally commits a funny in the piece, describing the style of journalism he plans to do at The Washington Times as "fair and balanced." If you're trying to present yourself as non-ideological, as Solomon does here, that seems like an unfortunate choice of words, to put it charitably.

Update: Think Progress has a good rundown of Solomon's greatest hits.

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Fun With Comically Awful Headlines
(January 14, 2008 -- 6:33 PM EDT // link // )

Fun, fun, fun! This is an amusingly misleading headline from CNN:

Read this and it's easy to conclude that the story reports that Bill is compiling a list of things to attack Obama with. But that isn't what the story says at all. Rather, it says that Bill is cataloging all the criticism that Obama has lobbed at Hillary.

The Huffington Post got this right, rewriting the headline to say: "Bill: I Have "A List" Of Obama's Attacks."

Whoever you think is right in this whole ugly dust-up, this is some pretty rank headline-writing by CNN. Hey, maybe that's something we can all agree on! Headlines should be clear and accurate -- whoever they're about, and whichever side you're on! Deal?

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Times Edit Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal Responds To The Horse's Mouth
(January 14, 2008 -- 11:46 AM EDT // link // )

Updated below.

Updated again.

New York Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal is very ticked off about the post I did the other day pointing out that Maureen Dowd's column led readers to believe that she interviewed voters at Hillary's victory party when in fact she was in Jerusalem at the time.

Since the post went up, its argument was supported by several media-oriented writers out there, including writers at Columbia Journalism Review and on the MediaBistro.com Web site. This prompted Rosenthal to give an interview to The New York Observer defending the column and responding to his critics.

And just as he was when he labeled critics of the William Kristol hiring as merely "intolerant," the new round of criticism has the man very upset again:

"It’s driving me out of my fucking mind," Times editorial-page editor Andy Rosenthal told Media Mob this afternoon.

Oh, please. By outward appearances Rosenthal has a very good life. He gets to spout opinions for a living and has lots of influence. He can take it if some people question what goes on in His Lordship's journalistic sanctum once in awhile. Dialog is part of the gig. Deal with it.

On to the crux of Rosenthal's argument...

"[Dowd] reported the column in New Hamsphire. The fact of the matter is, particularly when covering a campaign which is a very high-speed story, it’s incredibly unusual for the reporter to be in the same place as the dateline when the story is filed. What do you do, stay in Des Moines while a candidate travels to New Hampshire? Oh, don’t go to Ramallah with the President because you have a Jerusalem dateline on your story! I mean this is just ridiculous! This is a complete invention, this controversy."

"Datelines are kind of an anachronism," he said. "It’s a little bit of an affectation."

Perhaps datelines are an "anachronism," in the sense that they aren't adequate to deal with the realities of modern high-speed campaign coverage. But just saying this and feeling clever about it doesn't get us anywhere -- the very idea suggests that there might be a problem here. If datelines are an "anachronism" and an "affectation," why bother having them at all?

There's no question that on a high-speed story reporters will be moving around a lot. And this isn't the hugest deal in the world. But the point still stands: In a case like this it's fair to ask whether a bit more clarity might be in order. This is a straightforward representation issue. Because of the combo of the dateline and the uncredited reporting, readers of the Dowd column came away with the belief that she went to the victory party and talked to voters, when she didn't.

Now, if Rosenthal doesn't mind that readers are coming away with this mis-impression, that's fine. It's his newspaper. But if he does mind, then a small fix might be worth thinking about. Rosenthal doesn't think a reporting credit is a good idea because it will take a line or two of space away from the columnist. But really, civilization as we know it will not grind to a halt if we get 10 less words from Dowd on any given day.

Rosenthal also points out that reported articles in the paper's news section are sometimes not fully clear about who's reported what. But this is different -- a column is the embodiment of one person, the columnist. The column, really, is the columnist. And in this case the column led readers to believe that this major journalistic personality was somewhere she wasn't -- at the victory party, taking the measure of voters.

Again -- I don't particularly care if Rosenthal or anyone else doesn't want to deal with this. It's not the hugest deal. But when Rosenthal protests that he's "not really sure" what the reader would get out of it if this were dealt with, the answer's pretty straightforward: Readers will come away from columns like these knowing what actually happened and how their favorite prestige columnist gathered her info, rather than not knowing these things.

************************************************************************************

Update: Some, such as Times reporter Adam Clymer, are saying there's no issue because no rules governing the use of datelines were broken. But nobody is saying any rules were broken.

The problem isn't just the dateline. Rather, the problem is the combo of the dateline and the reporting on-scene at the victory party, which led readers to believe that Dowd was there, when she wasn't. I don't particularly care about this anymore, but let's at least be clear what we're talking about here.

************************************************************************************

Update II: Over at The Huffington Post, Rachel Sklar gets it right:

"Datelines are kind of an anachronism," Rosethnal told the NYO dismissively. "It's a little bit of an affectation." That may be true, but it's an affectation Dowd and Rosenthal slapped knowingly on her column. In so doing, they were making a choice, and a statement: Maureen Dowd was here, our reporter was on the scene and in the mix. She's not just reporting on the same stuff we all saw on TV, she was there. Well, maybe she was, but barely, and, by the looks of it, with a little uncredited help. How to credit writers and denote datelines may be matters of internal Times policy, but insofar as they give a false impression of what that columnist actually did, it becomes an issue of greater journalistic import. Unless Rosenthal thinks being accurate and transparent is an anachronism, too.

Yep.

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New York Times Prints Truncated Version Of Hillary MLK Quote Yet Again
(January 13, 2008 -- 7:52 AM EDT // link // )

Updated below.

I'm not letting go of this one -- sorry. The New York Times has -- for the third time, now -- printed a truncated version of Hillary's controversial quote about Martin Luther King in a piece running in Sunday's paper.

Adding to the absurdity, this time the paper did it in an article that was about whether her words had been distorted. Seriously. The piece is entitled, "Clinton Accuses Obama Camp of Distorting Her Words."

Presumably an article about this subject would contain Hillary's actual quote, to allow readers to make up their own minds about what she meant. But this is how The Times's Adam Nagourney and Patrick Healy characterize the comments:

This was what Mrs. Clinton said on Monday: “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.” At a later stop, she said that her remark had not captured what she had sought to portray.

Actually, this isn't what Mrs. Clinton said on Monday, which is pretty bizarre, considering that The Times began that paragraph with, "this is what Mrs. Clinton said on Monday." The full quote -- what Hillary really said -- is right here.

I'm going to try to say this as clearly as I can. Even if you think the edited version of the quote isn't a distortion of the original in any way, that still doesn't mean you don't have an obligation to share the original quote with readers.

The other day, Josh explained on TPM why he thinks the shortened quote is a distortion. I think it's clear that while Hillary's comments were inartful and she herself walked them back later, the truncated version does change the tone, if not the substance, of the original, making it sound more condescending to King and hence more controversial. We've heard from lots of Times readers who agree.

Again -- the question of whether the shortened version constitutes a distortion is a very, very close call. Reasonable people can disagree over it. And I understand that reporters edit quotes for space and so forth.

But precisely because there's disagreement over it, readers are better served by the full quote. In this case, there's simply no good reason not to publish it.

Indeed, Healy himself used the full quote on The Times's political blog, in a Friday item co-written with Carl Hulse. Why can't Times reporters agree on a fact as basic and as consequential as this one? One version is factually accurate; the other falls short. This may be the most controversial quote of the campaign. So why not err on the side of 100 percent accuracy and print the whole thing? Not sure what the downside is.

*****************************************************************************

Update: Underscoring yet again why this is important, Tim Russert just read the truncated version of the quote on Meet the Press -- and he read it from one of the Times accounts. So I'm going to try to make this case one more time:

People keep saying that there's no need to publish the full quote because its meaning is the same as the truncated one.

But here's the point: Not everyone agrees with this. There's argument on this point.

Because of this fact -- that there's argument about this -- reporters should publish the full quote.

When it comes to issues of race, every single nuance matters enormously. This is incredibly sensitive. It could impact the presidential race. As a result, readers are better served if they are given every single nuance -- they are better served if they are told precisely what Hillary said, not given an edited version of it.

What's more, there is no harm in publishing the full quote. There's no reason not to do it. The Times is letting its readers down by not doing it. That's all there is to it.

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