Bloggasm

I understand why opinion columnists are not put under the same fact-checking scrutiny of regular reporters. After all, their writing is comprised of opinions which can never definitively be proven right or wrong, correct?

Not really. Though it is true that the opinions can not be fact-checked, the events upon which they are based can. This is why I can’t wrap my head around how hack columnists like Bill Kristol can make egregious error after error every week in a publication like the New York Times without an editor at least requesting that Kristol turn in a sheet listing his sources so a college intern can skim over them.

Take this week’s screw-up for instance. Kristol writes:

On Tuesday night, while the G.O.P. Congressional candidate was losing in a Mississippi district George Bush carried in 2004 by 25 points, Barack Obama was being trounced in the West Virginia Democratic primary – by 41 points. I can’t find a single recent instance of a candidate who ultimately became his party’s nominee losing a primary by this kind of margin.

Really Bill, you can’t find a single instance?

As others have documented, Mitt Romney won 90% of the vote in Utah and Huckabee beat McCain in Arizona (his home state, mind you) by 40 points and in Kansas by 36 points.

But the news here isn’t that Kristol was wrong. After all, he’s wrong all the time. The news is that the New York Times is aware that he has made several significant, easily-fact-checked errors during his brief stint at the Times and they haven’t done anything to correct this. When I said that a mere intern could fact check his columns, I wasn’t kidding. Most of his mistakes could have been caught with a simple Google check.

So how many more weeks are going to go by before an editor starts taking the heat for not fact-checking Bill Kristol? If this isn’t proof that the neocon was a an affirmative action hire (to try to deflect criticisms of liberal bias), I don’t know what is. They’re letting him play in his little corner and then pat him on the head and give him a lollipop once he turns in the latest column of drek.

Ever since Al Jazeera English launched not long ago, I’ve heard a number of interviews with western journalists who have worked for the company. Almost every single one has shed new insight into the Middle East, highlighting often arcane cultural understandings with the people who live there.

There has been a general push-back against Al Jazeera and its English station since its creation, to the extent that it’s having a hard time finding a venue in the US. This is sad considering that Al Jazeera English could bridge the cultural divide between western and Arab media.

Let’s face it. Western journalists not only experience culture shock when covering the Middle East, they’re also largely dependent on the US military outfits with whom they embed. Al Jazeera English has a number of western journalists who collaborate with their Arab counterparts. They’re able to utilize resources and cultural context in ways that US outlets could only dream of.

I think it’s high time that western news companies begin syndicating at least some of their content. Yes, I think some of the criticisms launched against Al Jazeera are valid, but it seems silly to throw the baby out with the bathwater by not utilizing their expertise, especially as the US continues to get more mired down in foreign policy dealing with the Middle East.

A few months ago it was reported that an Afghan journalist named Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh was sentenced to death for blaspheming Islam. His crime was to print up a document that was critical of the religion and show it to a few of his colleagues.

But then we found out that after much outrage from the Western media, Kambakhsh would get to appeal the court ruling. Some social progress, no?

Perhaps not. We now know that though it is true that he gets to appeal the decision, he still has to prove that he didn’t commit blasphemy. So it’s not that the government came to its senses that it was utterly barbaric to kill someone for insulting Islam, it’s just giving him a second chance to profess his devotion to Allah.

It happens all the time. A company spends millions of dollars advertising a product — creating slogans, musical jingles, product designs– only for it to be bought up by a larger company. That larger company wipes out the name of the original and incorporates it into its own products. All that money spent branding that original product is now useless because it no longer carries the same name.

Or is it wasted? It turns out it may be worth something. How many of you out there can still hum the advertising jingle of a product that’s no longer on the shelf? This is evidence that the brand lives on, and some companies are taking advantage of this.

The NY Times Magazine has a great feature article about how one such company is buying up the intellectual property rights of no-longer-existing products and using their still-remembered brands to kick-off sales.

Objectivism in journalism is dead. In fact it never really existed, and the unrealistic expectations we’ve had of journalists has led to a distrust of the media because those expectations are almost never met. While many still manage to decry the “liberal bias” in the mainstream media and the New York Times, there’s a growing number of media critics who are arguing that it’s time for the New York Times to embrace its liberal bias, that doing so will give it its voice. In previous years, when ad sales were booming, it could afford to shroud itself in the Objectivity Myth, but no more.

I definitely fall in the latter camp. You can be liberal and report the news, and assuming otherwise is to engage in the logical fallacy that all opinions are created equal. As Stephen Colbert would say, reality has a well-known liberal bias.

So this is why I was heartened to see an article this morning titled A Subdued Clinton, and a Subdued Audience. In it, you’ll find all kinds of journalistic violations that you’d never see in your average newspaper.

Let’s start with the lede. Rather than going with the boring, top-down inverse pyramid approach, the writer goes with metaphor:

On the day Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was endorsed by the governor of North Carolina, a supporter gave her a three-foot-long balloon replica of herself, complete with blond hair, black pantsuit and wide pink smile, which Mrs. Clinton promptly took on her plane and laughingly showed off to reporters.

On Thursday, little more than two weeks later, the doll lay on the sofa by her seat on the plane, shriveled and deflated.

After later injecting a funny quote from David Letterman, she writes this:

It has always been difficult for Mrs. Clinton to compete against an opponent who once received thunderous applause for blowing his nose. But as Mr. Obama seized nearly every headline in the last several days, Mrs. Clinton appeared zapped of her usual enthusiasm.

See, that’s what I call voice! This is the stuff that will attract readers’ eyes as the paper faces increasing competition from blogs and other online news sites.

By now everyone has seen the footage of Bill O’reilly screaming at his producer 20 years ago while he was a TV personality for Inside Edition. What most people don’t know is that another camera was rolling during that exchange. Watch the video embedded below to see how the producer handled the situation.

Not long ago I noted that Conde Nast, a magazine publisher, is vastly expanding its online presence — they recently acquired some travel blogs with hints that more acquisitions were soon to follow.

Today we learn that they just bought the popular technology site Ars Technica.

“The site will become part of Wired Digital (which in turn is under CondéNet, run by Sarah Chubb),” reports TechCrunch. “Wired Digital assets include Wired.com and Reddit (acquired in 2006).”

Arrington’s sources tell him that the buying price is somewhere around $25 million, the same it paid for Wired.com back in 2006 when it brought both the Wired site and magazine under the same roof.

It looks as if the magazine company, which already publishes venerable magazines like Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, is securing its place as an online juggernaut.