Bloggasm

The American Prospect has a profile of Christopher Hitchens. Though it’s interesting, the article’s brow extends a little too high for my intellectual capacity. I don’t think I got half of the historical and philosophical references made in the piece, though thankfully I had my good friend Wikipedia at my side.

It has been two weeks since the US military announced it would release AP photographer Bilal Hussein, who was held by the military for two years without charges. The military had launched vague terrorism accusations at the journalist but provided no evidence for this — instead it released anonymous leaks to various right-wing partisan bloggers (led by Michelle Malkin). Unfortunately, these bloggers went to every extreme in amplifying these accusations with multiple posts saying the AP was associated with terrorists.

But after Hussein was ordered released (by an Iraqi judicial panel, with the US military saying, “he no longer presents an imperative threat to security”), many of those bloggers who had spent thousands of words smearing both him and the AP barely issued a peep. Those who gave brief statement refused to apologize and said that because Bilal was ordered released under an “amnesty law” (a law none of them read so could know nothing about its content) then it wasn’t proof of his innocence. But other than those few brief posts, only cricket chirping.

Eric Boehlert has a great article at Media Matters that gives a comprehensive background of the bloggers’ shameful reporting and their silence in the aftermath of his release. After reading it I couldn’t help but be depressed at the thought that these bloggers still have thousands of readers that are subjected to their writing. For some, there is no justice.

Anybody who has spent considerable time on the internet knows that one downside to online life is how easy it is to get caught up reading (and possibly participating in) an internet flame war. What’s most frustrating about this tendency is the fact that once you snap out of it and force yourself to stop, you come to this self-realization that you’ve just completely wasted an hour of your life performing an utterly inconsequential task. Despite the fact that you’ve spent the entire time reading, you haven’t learned anything new and chances are you’ve managed to get yourself annoyed with anonymous people, most of whom never even bothered giving their real names.

So the reason I’m telling you all this is because that’s my excuse for why I have so few links for you today. So here are (a small number) of media-related links for your amusement.

1. This year’s Pulitzers have been announced. Given that these link lists always result in me having to post news a day or two late and just about every media blog out there has already reported this news, I’m boring myself right now just by linking to it. Okay okay, here’s a link to Gawker trashing the Pulitzers and calling them worthless. You didn’t think I’d let you leave without a little red meat, did you?

2. Now here’s the real news. It turns out that the Huffington Post has surpassed The Drudge Report in unique visitors. I have long despised Drudge, not for his politics but because I could never for the life of me understand why he became so popular. He had an absolutely ugly site and most of the links he posts are to mainstream news sources. I could easily do his job for him by just subscribing to the RSS feeds of all the major news sites. Every now and then he publishes his own scoop, but they’re usually factually inaccurate and relatively rare. In fact, the only time I ever visited his website was when I was reading some news feature about how Drudge rules our world. Then I almost had to visit the site just to confirm, in my head, “You mean that Drudge?”

3. A new study released recently shows that news readers and newspaper editors widely disagree on how comments should be moderated on news websites. It brings up the good point that if editors are expected to avoid anonymous sources unless absolutely necessary, then anonymous commenting should be similarly shunned. I’m not necessarily against anonymous commenting, but I rarely, if ever, engage in it myself.

4. Will Feminism and porn ever be compatible? I explored this issue a long time ago over here. I think the problem with trying to remain PC when making porn is the fact that a lot of sexual turn-ons are non-PC. I’m not an expert on sexual theory, but I would think there’s some (dark) correlation between what is forbidden and what turns us on. This provides a dilemma for pornographers.

This is my first night getting home at a reasonable hour since Monday. I start nights like these with an overly ambitious to-do list and then it’s three hours later and I’m watching Youtube videos while eating oatmeal. So much for productivity.

Here are some media-related links for your amusement:

1. Romenesko gets the award for quote of the week: “”60 Minutes” creator Don Hewitt told a lunch crowd in Seattle that he once told Dan Rather to sock Abraham Zapruder in the mouth, “grab his film” recording the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, make a copy, apologize to him and then give it back. Hewitt said he called Rather back to nix the plan.”

2. Hypocrite sighting. Fox promotes a new film that is sympathetic to the immigrant experience and in the preview makes several jabs at CNN’s Lou Dobbs for his anti-illegal immigrant stance. But given that Fox News is a right-wing breeding ground of immigrant hatred, I’m surprised that they didn’t take the opportunity to engage in some cross promotion.

3. Maxim publisher, Felix Dennis, told a journalist that he once killed a man. But after reading about a thousand words of the profile you begin to trust this assertion less and less. Every journalist interviews someone like this once in awhile; a man so hyped on his own amazingness that he’ll shoot out every bullshit claim imaginable to try to shock and awe.

4. Remember the Craigslist hoax that resulted in an entire house being illegally looted? Well, the police nabbed the perpetrators by tracing the IP addresses through Craigslist. The internet wins again.

5. Here’s the first person account of a citizen journalism news room. While some might read this and feel inspired about the future of journalism, I react with a feeling of “bleh.” To me, this account boils down to “convince a bunch of amateurs to write mediocre copy for free and let you profit off it.” Why can’t citizen journalism result in all those amateurs starting their own individual blogs and creating the content themselves?

6. Venture Capitalists are apparently distraught because they can’t find enough websites to dump millions of dollars into. For some reason they’re upset they don’t get to create a new tech bubble of over-valued Web 2.0 companies.

7. Given my latest problems with Google, I’ve been of course thinking a lot about web traffic lately. Given that the internet is a form of media that is more measurable than any other, it’s odd that those measurements are so unscientific. Maybe this sheds light on how idiotic Nielsen and subscription numbers really are for other forms of media.

Every now and then Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald will find an article published by a major news source that is so littered with factual errors and blatant propaganda that I actually get depressed when reading his post tearing it apart. I got that depressing feeling today when I read his post on a Time Magazine article that tried to argue that Americans really don’t care if the government doesn’t use warrants when spying on them. This was a news article, not a column.

Here are some media-related links for your amusement:

1. A gay porn company has been exposed in an HIV scandal, resulting in several DVDs being taken off the market.

2. Apparently The New Yorker is on a hiring binge, welcoming in two new writers: Ariel Levy and Kelefa Sanneh. Since that’s my dream job, I’m definitely jealous.

3. If there was an award for melodramatic blog posts, this one would get it. Will a Gawker media blog cause a string of suicides? Not likely, though he does make some good points.

4. This article isn’t about media or journalism, but should be read as an example of what excellent new journalism is.

5. Why it would be stupid for a media company to try and buy up an A-list blog.

Every now and then I’ll receive an email at my Bloggasm account with a “this is off the record” thrown into it. So far I haven’t actually reprinted any of these emails, but I’ve always been annoyed with the person’s blatant disregard for what the statement “off the record” actually means.

Placing something off the record is not a one-way street. It is a mutual agreement between journalist and interview subject, and in best case scenarios should be avoided at all costs. In fact, there was at least one instance that I was working on an article for Bloggasm and I knew the interview subject I was interviewing might try to take parts of his reply email off the record. To see how I prevented this, here are some excerpts from the email I sent him:

Hey [redacted],

My name is Simon Owens and I write for bloggasm.com, a site that covers online media. I’m working on a piece about [redacted], and I was wondering if you’d go on the record with some questions about it

And then later in the email:

Please keep any answers on the record.

Thanks for any input you can give.

–Simon

By doing this, I wouldn’t have felt the slightest bit of guilt had I reprinted anything the person had announced was off the record.

I’m writing about this because Obama advisor Samantha Power just resigned because she was quoted in The Scotsman for calling Hillary Clinton a “monstor,” a quote that she tried to retroactively take off the record. But since there had been no mutual agreement Gerri Peev, the journalist, refused her request and printed it anyway.

The most shocking thing out of the entire incident is that when Peev went onto Tucker Carlson’s MSNBC show, Carlson spent the entire interview lecturing the British journalist over ethics:

CARLSON: What — she wanted it off the record. Typically, the arrangement is if someone you’re interviewing wants a quote off the record, you give it to them off the record. Why didn’t you do that?

To which Peev responded:

PEEV: Are you really that acquiescent in the United States? In the United Kingdom, journalists believe that on or off the record is a principle that’s decided ahead of the interview.

And then later:

PEEV: If this is the first time that candid remarks have been published about what one campaign team thinks of the other candidate, then I would argue that your journalists aren’t doing a very good job of getting to the truth. Now I did not go out of my way in any way, shape or form to hurt Miss Power. I believe she’s an intelligent and perfectly affable woman. In fact, she’s — she is incredibly intelligent so she — who knows she may have known what she was doing.

She regretted it. She probably acted with integrity. It’s not for me to decide one way or the other whether she did the right thing. But I did not go out and try to end her career.

I must say, Carlson really showed his true colors in that interview. It really is silly how much effort American journalists will go to to protect their government sources. This is why it’s almost impossible to do any real journalism without using anonymous sources, something which brings in its own truckload of problems when done too often.

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Related posts:
1. So long Mitt Romney
2. When a CNN correspondent writes you email