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Archive for the 'MSNBC' Category

All the News that Fits Your Bias

Published by William Beutler on May 6, 2008 in Barack Obama, Entertainment, Journalism, MSNBC and Television. 3 Comments

Here are two stories presently featured on Memeorandum that make for a revealing juxtaposition. First, this headline on a Huffington Post item by lefty activist Josh Silver:

Josh Silver in Huffington Post on the FCC

And here’s Michael Calderone of The Politico, reporting on a speech by Chris Matthews last night:

Politico’s Michael Calderone on MSNBC

First of all, Silver is wrong about TMZ.com; it belongs to Time Warner, not News Corp. This mental slip does betray the likelihood that Silver is one of those who also considers Fox News to be something other than a “real news network” because many of its hosts, and even some of its anchors, evince support for conservative causes and politicians. Meanwhile, I have no doubt that he would characterize MSNBC and its Obama activist/TV presenter Keith Olbermann as “bona fide news.”

To my knowledge, TMZ and 700 Club are not just making it up. I do know that 700 Club features as a correspondent David Brody, who is a legitimate journalist, even if he is one with a point of view. But then, so are many of Silver’s HuffPo colleagues. (I should note, the last time I watched 700 Club, Pat Robertson came out in favor of medicinal marijuana.) And TMZ’s idea of what’s news differs greatly from my own, but they cover those frivolous stories very, very well.

What Silver really wants is for the FCC to legitimize the kind of news he likes and de-legitimize others. I’m not sure which I find more disturbing: the fact that Josh Silver wants a federal agency to decide what counts as news, or the fact that a federal agency actually does get to decide what counts as news.

More Obama-Related Plagiarism?

Published by William Beutler on February 20, 2008 in Barack Obama, Cable News, MSNBC, Rhetoric and Seriously. 2 Comments

I can’t keep up with all the plagiarism-related allegations against the Obama campaign, but I did notice the headline on this story by John Dickerson, currently on the front page of Slate…

Slate Plagiarizes NBC?

…bears unmistakable similarities to this recent clip by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell…

Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC

…from a week ago Tuesday night. Which leads me to ask… well, nothing really. However, when it comes to the charges against Barack Obama, I am inclined to agree with James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal. As he wrote yesterday,

isn’t it a bit heavy-handed to accuse Obama of plagiarism? This is a serious charge in academia and journalism, professions in which words are the final product. By contrast, language is a mere instrument for politicians. They hire speechwriters to put words in their mouths, something that would also be frowned upon in academia and journalism. Are voters really going to be dissuaded from backing Obama because as a politician he failed to adhere to the ethical standards that would have applied if he were a professor or a reporter? Not likely.

P.S. It’s fair to note, it isn’t Dickerson I am elbowing here — it’s Slate headline writers, who are notorious more for being misleading than for being copycats.

P.P.S. For what it’s worth, I see Crooks and Liars commenter lokmon beat me to the punch.

In an Interstellar Burst…

Published by William Beutler on January 19, 2008 in Advertising, Entertainment, Fred Thompson, MSNBC, Metapost, Technology, White House '08 and William Beutler. 0 Comments

…I am back to save the universe. Or at least begin posting again, following just about the worst case of the flu I’ve had in years. I’ve got a few not-quite-ready-for-full-post ideas, so let’s clear them from the docket before getting back to blogging as usual:

  • First and most importantly, Blog P.I. would like to thank our advertisers. In related news, Blog P.I. has advertisers! Yes, the Blogads box at right has lain barren since I first signed up over a year ago. But now there are three — one from the left, one from the right, and one that I created to promote a friend’s website. Your support is greatly valued, even as remain officially neutral on the merits of your particular issue and/or cause.
  • I yield to no critic in my undying devotion to HBO’s “The Wire,” but I must concur with Slate’s TV Club that this fifth and final season is off to a rocky start. The newsroom stuff is too didactic, some of the older characters are speechifying a bit, and the pacing seems weird. I know, it’s a tall order to wrap up a series of this scope in ten episodes, while introducing yet another new plot strand. If this was any other TV show, I wouldn’t be complaining But about that newsroom — does anyone else think the show’s explicit “dead where it doesn’t count” message is somewhat undercut by the ongoing investigation into the death of four girls in Southeast DC? Unlike some fictional deaths depicted this season, these real ones made the front page of the Washington Post again and again, even making national (even international) news upon first discovery. I’m not discounting the trend — but current events at least prove it’s not fait accompli.
  • In a recent post, I pointed out that LinkedIn offered no option to turn off the acquaintance-recommending feature that automatically alerts you to people you may want to be networked with. As it so happened for my colleague, one such recommendation was an ex-girlfriend, whom he most certainly did not want to network with. Well, I still think LinkedIn should offer the option to disable (or enable) this feature, but he informs me that it is no longer appearing on his account. So, uh, Blog P.I. gets results?
  • Here’s something totally useless, but as an admirer of Douglas Hofstader, amuses me greatly: What’s the TinyURL for TinyURL.com? Well, if you plug the URL into its self-same website, it turns out to be:

         http://tinyurl.com/u

    So what’s the TinyURL for that?

         http://tinyurl.com/7uw

    And that?

         http://tinyurl.com/8ee

    I could go on, but I’ll spare you. The website remembers ever TinyURL generated for each page previously entered, so I assume that http://tinyurl.com was in fact the 21st URL entered into the website. Nice to know others are just as interested in the concept of reflexivity. (Hat tip: NM3.)
  • Today is a day I’ve been counting down to for nearly a year, even though I didn’t always know it: Fred Thompson needs a big showing in South Carolina’s primary this evening, and via Captain Ed, it looks like he just might get it. It’s been a great last few weeks for the campaign, maybe even the best few weeks of the campaign so far. Here’s hoping it’s not, in fact, the last few weeks of the campaign. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

I guess that’s all for the moment. Regular blogging about matters of politics and technology to resume shortly.

Tragedy 2.0

Published by William Beutler on April 17, 2007 in 9/11 Attacks, Asymmetrical Media, Blogs vs. MSM, Cable News, Don Imus, Facebook, MSM vs. Blogs, MSNBC and Tech Blogosphere. 0 Comments

Post-Columbine, post-9/11, post-Iraq, are we desensitized to mass murders these days?

Doesn’t seem to be: The tragedy at Virginia Tech has at least captivated the mainstream media, pulling it out of its embarrassing, Anna Nicole/Imus-obsessing doldrums to a hypertensive level not seen since the aforementioned debacles plus Katrina.

Each major media disaster story since at least the dot-com bubble reveals new voices and resources from the online mediasphere, and to the extent that we know to follow them — that we can devise filters to locate them — it helps us understand these things better than we did back when most of the media we consumed was on glossy paper.

And since Drudge and MSNBC and others have already reported the name and online profile of Emily Hilscher, the first victim of yesterday’s horrible awfulness* — and as an antidote to Wayne Chiang, the Asian-American Hokie gun fetishist with girl troubles and a Livejournal account — I might as well share this screen shot from Facebook:

Emily Hilscher on Facebook

Her page is not public, and I suppose it will probably remain as much in the hands of her friends and family. But there are also 27 groups with her name in their main content and with hundreds of members, which grew literally overnight.

Part of me thinks there’s something invasive in writing about this, but ultimately it’s all part of the record. Here there are no candles and no songs — but it’s a digital vigil. It doesn’t convey how it actually feels, but it does show that people feel.

P.S. Via Techmeme, I see Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls and Xeni Jardin have been thinking along the same lines. And somehow, Slate’s Michael Agger managed to write an entire article about the massacre and social networking without a single mention of Facebook. Plus, according to Hotline On Call, producers from ABC and NBC have been posting interview requests to Facebook:

Our thoughts are with everyone affected by the horrific tragedy at Virginia Tech. In our ongoing coverage, we want to speak with people that knew Cho Seung-Hui. We have anchors and producers on campus that would love to meet with you.

Okay, I feel a bit less of a ghoul now.

*I don’t know what else to call it, I’m never very good writing about these things, and I’ve already blown the chance to suspend blogging, which I might as well have because I didn’t have a Benchmark Poll ready to go today.

Wisdom Before it Was Conventional

Published by William Beutler on March 8, 2007 in CNN, Cable News, Defections, Hotline, MSNBC and Metapost. 1 Comment

Yesterday was the end of an era in Washington, and though it did not pass unnoticed, I would be remiss if I didn’t note that yesterday’s edition of The Hotline was the last one edited by Chuck Todd, who will soon assume the duties of political director at NBC News.

It’s hard to underestimate the magnitude of this change.

When I arrived as an intern at the tail end of the ‘02 cycle, the Hotline was purely an insider’s accessory — wielded by consultants and congressmen in green rooms, lobbyists in cabs and Hill staffers on lunch break. Chuck himself would show up occasionally on the late, lamented “Inside Politics” while most of the staff would check out shortly after deadline, off to fill another watering hole until starting over again at 4:30 a.m. the following day.

But Chuck had bigger things in store for The Hotline, including plans to expand its influence and reach non-subscribers. For one, The Hotline struck an agreement with liquor distributor Diageo to conduct regular opinion polls (alas, no cases of Crown Royal ever appeared on the third floor of Watergate 600). The public debut of The Blogometer was part of this plan, as was Hotline On Call, now one of the top Beltway news blogs (Marc Ambinder writes it, but Chuck hired him to write it). Once CNN had canned “IP” Chuck appeared more regularly on MSNBC, which eventually struck a deal to share and promote content from Hotline and National Journal on a new website, politics.msnbc.com. Then early this year he launched another project he’d been working on for a long time, the Hotline Political Network. And already he’s walking away, on to another challenge.

Of course, I owe a lot to Chuck. He gave me some of my best early assignments — covering the 2003 California recall, the collapse of the Howard Dean campaign, and then of course the blog beat — it was Chuck who realized this blogging hobby of mine could actually have some value to The Hotline. So I feel pretty safe saying I wouldn’t be doing what I am now without him.

Which brings me to the fun part of this post. While I can’t say I made Chuck Todd famous, I can say that I brought him to a new level of public recognition. A year before Time Magazine made “You” their Person of the Year (ahem) they had another gimmick running: anyone could submit a photo on the Time website and upon approval, your picture would play for a few seconds on a Times Square billboard. Me, I uploaded Chuck. And I still have the picture:

Chuck Todd, Times Square Person of the Year

Update: The Hotline doesn’t have a replacement new editor yet, so what does the masthead look like?

Chuck Todd, Goatee Model

We’ll see if NBC News will agree to let him continue in that capacity. But today’s Last Call, now that was the final indignity:

Chuck Todd, Overserved