Bloggasm

Earlier today, I wanted to send an email to Steve Krakauer, who blogs for Mediaite. The only problem? Mediaite, like thousands of other news websites, only includes a general contact info email address for the entire site.

Compare this to Gawker, which provides email addresses for all its bloggers, so if there is a blogger that is covering a particular beat or story, I can contact him directly.

It’s annoying and frustrating that something so common sense could allude so many people in the news business. It’s evidence of the dinosaur mentality of news organizations, that it never occurs to them that the crowd can lead to valuable scoops and feedback. Shield off your journalists, keep them away from the masses.

I, on the other hand, have my contact info plastered on my blog, and I can’t tell you how many valuable connections I’ve received because of it.

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For my PBS MediaShift piece this week, I interviewed a Temple University Professor who wrote a paper juxtaposing the volume of media criticism before and after the rise of the web, arguing that a wealth of effective media criticism has arisen in the last decade. I also spoke to Salon’s Glenn Greenwald and Newsbusters’ Matt Sheffield about major media stories they’ve driven and how they’ve forced news organizations in some cases to alter their coverage.

In this week’s NPR’s On the Media, co-host Brooke Gladstone interviewed NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg, who has written about past disasters, most notably in his 2002 book, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. Gladstone asked him about the media’s coverage of the recent swine flu outbreaks, and during this interview Klinenberg told this anecdote:

Well, my favorite story, in fact, involves The New York Daily News, which sent one of their reporters around the streets of Manhattan in a surgical mask and they had him cough to see what kind of attention he would whip up. [BROOKE LAUGHS] And, of course, lots of people looked and thought, this is a weird thing.

But the best part of the story is that there was a British TV crew that had come the United States to capture how Americans were responding to this enormous outbreak of swine flu, and they stopped the guy and said they wanted to film him.

So here – [BROOKE LAUGHS] – this is a defining moment of a media event. It should be taught in media studies courses for eternity. You get the reporter who becomes the symbol of how Americans are acting, even though no one else on the streets is doing this.

So let’s review. A news outlet, unsatisfied that there isn’t enough panic in the streets due to swine flu, sets out to create panic about the outbreak on its own. And in the process of trying to create panic gets targeted by another news outlet who is out in the streets searching for panicked Americans.

Klinenberg is correct, when a historian writing on early 21st century epidemics covers the swine flu, this story will nicely represent the vapidness of the media when it comes to covering disaster situations

How random. A “psychographic-research company” called Mindset Media has performed personality tests on thousands of individuals, all in order to ascribe personality traits to different kinds of media consumption. Like horoscopes, I think personality tests lure people in with the irrational tendency to gravitate toward confirmation bias — especially if all the personality traits are positive — but some of the consumption trends for different mediums were interesting. For instance, did you know that heavy internet users are “153% more likely to always buy organic products and 104% more likely to drive a hybrid car”?

Oh, and we now know where the conservative blogosphere’s readership comes from:

Low-level consumers of the internet tend to rank high in dogmatism, and are described as socially conservative people who tend to look to a religious or moral authority for guidance. “People who are more liberal are more likely to have the internet as the most consumed media,” Ms. Welch said.

Why McCain is getting hosed in the press:

“As it happens, McCain’s campaign is going quite poorly and Obama’s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own.”

I have gone nearly six months now without cable. I keep myself fed with the occasional Netflix rental but otherwise I am now in a perpetual state of television fasting. This stems from my own cheapness rather than any objection to the medium — I moved to an apartment with more expensive rent and utilities and suddenly the idea of spending another $40 a month on cable seemed much less necessary.

But before this plunge I watched anywhere from a half hour to an hour of cable news a night, usually when exercising. Though in the past I was pretty eclectic about which network to watch, sometime early in 2007 I settled on watching MSNBC almost exclusively. What show I watched depended entirely on when I got around to exercising that night, but more often than not I would find myself following the ping-pong match that is Chris Mathews’s Hardball.

At first, I found the show entertaining. But then when we entered February and March of 2007, Matthews, unlike the rest of America, which was just starting to prepare itself for a presidential season, was ready to draw blood. He became obsessed, in every single episode, — every single god damn night — with who may or may not run. When he didn’t have a potential presidential candidate to pester with his annoying “areyagonnarun??” prattle, he and his guests would spend 15 to 20 minutes of every night repeating the same “analysis,” a mixture of the obvious and wildfire predictions not tied to any actual public opinion polls.

Soon, I found myself reaching some kind of internal crescendo and having to change the channel in the same way that I had to switch off the radio after listening to Dr. Laura Schlessinger tell yet another pregnant mom that she better quit her job and abandon the feminist notion of a career. You reach a point sometimes when bottlenecking no longer gives you pleasure; just as some movies are so bad that they sink lower than the realm of camp, Matthews had managed to frustrate me to the point of driving me away.

But then came the six months without cable and I didn’t give him much thought other than reading the occasional blog post or media article panning him. Today, though, I revisited Matthews at length when I read a profile of him in the New York Times Magazine Suddenly I was barraged with flashbacks of his contrived “Ha!” and duck-like speech, his sportscaster play-by-play shallowness, his horse race coverage. I realized then that he is the epitome of what’s wrong with cable news.

Matthews is the antithesis of wonkery. He and his guests almost never provide insight to policies; there is no depth given to the issues themselves, other than the occasional argument over whether a specific platform can get pushed through into law. Candidates like to repeat the cliche that they’re not running for themselves, they’re running for the country. But Matthews shows no pretense over his coverage; it is about the candidate. His show is a character study of the presidential hopeful, a back-and-forth sportscaster analysis.

What’s worse is that he is the definition of the mainstream media’s bizarre concept of a “centrist.” To them, fair and balanced isn’t about truth, it’s about making sure the scales are equally weighted with both liberals and conservatives. All opinions are created equal in this cable news world, regardless of which opinion is held up by facts. Nothing three dimensional is ever revealed in this world because, to pundits like Matthews, politics is a continuous game of “gotcha.”

To illustrate my point, take a look at this quote from Matthews’s profile:

On the morning of the Cleveland debate, Matthews was standing in the lobby of the Ritz when Russert walked through, straight from a workout, wearing a sweat-drenched Buffalo Bills sweatshirt, long shorts and black rubber-soled shoes with tube socks. “Here he is; here he is, the man,” Matthews said to Russert, who smiled and chatted for a few minutes before returning to his room. (An MSNBC spokesman, Jeremy Gaines, tried, after the fact, to declare Russert’s outfit “off the record.”)

If MSNBC is so afraid of being candid about something as simple as Russert’s exercise outfit, then why should we expect anything more from the politicians they’re supposed to cover? MSNBC — and other cable news channels — have become the two-faced political machines they’re supposed to counteract. They’re nothing but noise.

I’m certainly not the first one to ask this question: If either Obama or Clinton had claimed — on four separate occasions — that Shiite-led Iran was taking in and training Sunni-led Al Qaeda, wouldn’t it be played out over and over on an endless loop in mainstream media outlets?

Yet when McCain does this, not only does the media barely cover it, the reporters start making excuses for him when they do mention it. This is absolutely sickening, especially as the press — who don’t even try to hide the fact that they’ve been courting McCain — paints him as a foreign policy expert.