Bloggasm

I have to agree with Chez on this one:

If you need any more evidence that — ironically, sadly — The Daily Show is responsible for some of the best, most necessary journalism of this entire presidential campaign, just watch this:

This is a little unsettling. Political correspondents for the New York Times trolled Facebook and messaged random 16-year-old friends of Cindy McCain’s daughter and this is what they sent to them:

I’m a reporter at the New York Times, writing a profile of Cindy McCain, and we are trying to get a sense of what she is like as a mother. So I’m reaching out to fellow parents at her kids’ schools.

Something about this just strikes me as creepy.

Apparently CNN’s iReport, its experiment in promoting citizen journalism, promoted a false story of Steve Jobs having a heart attack.

Expect this to be used as an anecdote in “but anybody can publish anything on the internet” arguments against online journalism.

While Republicans and Democrats engage in their own heated version of the Blame Game for who’s actually responsible for the current financial crisis, the business press has been standing in the corner, hands in pockets, avoiding eye contact. So the question is: what role did they play in not warning us of the coming disaster?

The Columbia Journalism Review:

Your beat just blew up.

From a journalistic standpoint, what we are experiencing today is the equivalent of the city hall reporter arriving for work one day to find the mayor and city council being led out in handcuffs. If the business press were, say, a nuclear industry reporter, this is having most of the reactors on your beat melting down to China. What to tell the boss?

In my opinion, the business press covers the financial industry in the same way the political press covers politics: As a horse race. They couldn’t see the coming storm because they were too fixated on how far the stock market had risen or fallen on that particular day. It was certainly surreal to listen to them months ago declaring that the world was ending one day and then act like everything was fine when the market experienced a brief bounce the next day.

Glenn Reynolds has an interesting piece at the New York Post arguing that politicians and other news subjects should bring their own cameras when they sit down with journalists — the logic being that if the journalist takes a quote out of context then they will then have the quote to prove it.

I’ve often thought about this myself, though I guess it works both ways. If you start releasing the videos to try to create positive spin, then you’re going to be asked to release them even when you say something foolish or damaging. Journalists often give a lot of slack when a subject makes a verbal gaffe. This might just create more fodder for the person’s critics.

The New York Times and other major publications get a lot of flak for writing “trend pieces,” which are essentially articles that try to splice together a pattern in culture by simply using a few anecdotal interviews to show said pattern.

But at least in those instances there are some anecdotal examples. Even worse is when a reporter for a major outlet sets out to write a trend piece that criticizes a particular group without providing a single example to back up the assertion: Salon’s Glenn Greenwald goes after the AP for committing such a journalistic crime.

If I remember the story correctly, New York Times fabulist Jayson Blair had lifted quotes from other news stories and then used them as if he had interviewed the sources himself. And New Republic fabulist Stephen Glass just invented people and entire companies out of thin air and then referenced them in his articles. I always wondered if such fabulists could exist in an age when Google has become ubiquitous. Now we know the answer to that question.