The Year In AIM Tweets

By K. Daniel Glover  |  December 29, 2009

The image below, generated by TweetCloud, recaps the topics that merited the most "tweets" in 2009. Follow AIm at @AccuracyInMedia to stay informed about those topics and more in 2010.

Mark Whitaker’s Bout Of Obamania

By K. Daniel Glover  |  December 29, 2009

Mark Whitaker, the Washington bureau chief of NBC News, has a bad case of Obamania, and it revealed itself yesterday in the first sentence of his column for The Washington Post:

Seeking to make sense of Barack Obama's first year as president -- and why he has come across as competent but less magical than many Americans hoped -- I've been rereading his autobiography, "Dreams From My Father."

Only a journalist with blinders on could have watched Obama's first year as president -- marred by international embarrassments, domestic failures and broken promises so numerous that it's a challenge to keep track -- and have concluded that it was "competent."

Yes, this year has been "less magical" than Obama dreamers had hoped. But that was inevitable because he lacks the leadership experience, political skills and governing qualifications to rise to the magical expectations set over the past two years by entranced journalists like Whitaker.

His fascination with Obama, the kind that even some liberal journalists have recognized as blatant bias, continues throughout the column. To hear Whitaker tell it, for instance, Obama's failures as president are the result of "the faults of [his] virtues." When you're in love, even your paramour's faults are virtuous!

The stimulus law wasn't a bad idea, you see. It was a great Obama plan perverted by pork-hungry liberals in Congress who are supposed to be on Dear Leader's team.

Whitaker redirects blame from Obama for every failure he mentions: Greedy bankers undermined Obama's solution to the financial crisis; manipulative generals and advisers made him "look dithering" on Afghanistan; and "grandiose senators" corrupted the legislative process on health care to the detriment of the "studious" Obama.

The message from NBC's bureau chief is that Obama is too virtuous to do anything wrong. He just needs to learn how to "exercise power."

Whitaker clearly hasn't lost his hope that Obama will change the world. He closed his column with praise for the president's "capacity for self-examination and self-improvement. He has applied that introspection to becoming a better person, a better writer and speaker, and a better politician."

Now we know, at least from the perspective of a liberal newsroom leader, why Obama took three days to publicly respond to an attempted terrorist bombing of an airplane in flight. He was walking the beaches of Hawaii during his ongoing vacation to reflect "on what he needs to do to be a more effective president."

PolitiFact Confirms Media’s ‘Palinoia’

By K. Daniel Glover  |  December 21, 2009

Back in November as Sarah Palin began her book tour for "Going Rogue," Megan McCardle of The Atlantic coined a new term for Palin hatred: Palinoia. "It's when you think people are out to get you, and then they do their best to justify your erroneous belief," McCardle wrote.

The latest manifestation of the disease surfaced Friday, when PolitiFact's predictably liberal audience picked Palin's infamous quote about "death panels" as the "Lie of the Year." PolitiFact gave Palin's critique of Democrats' health-care plan its strongest "Pants on Fire" slam when she made it on her Facebook page in August, and 61 percent of the nearly 5,000 people who voted in PolitiFact's poll agreed with the editors that it was the worst of 2009. (Politico also gave the quote top billing in its roundup of quotes of the year.)

"No other finalist in the field of eight statements came close," PolitiFact crowed when reporting the poll results. CNN also was noticeably gleeful when reporting the news Sunday:

That coverage prompted Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters to ask rhetorically, "If President Obama or any Democrat had actually won the dubious honor of committing PolitiFact's 'Lie of the Year,' do you think CNN would have reported it?" He added that "PolitiFact has a very hard time hiding its liberal bias" and noted that the "Pants on Fire" rating is predominantly given to conservatives. "Looking at how PolitiFact considers lies," Sheppard said, "it appears they're always hoping the offenders are right-wingers."

The selection of the candidates for the site's first "Lie of the Year" poll certainly lends credence to that conclusion. In a year where President Obama has broken promise after promise, including the recurring whopper that he would negotiate health-care legislation on C-SPAN for the American people to see, PolitiFact did its best to stack the deck against conservatives.

But the vote for Palin's quote about death panels is fitting in a sense. Palinoia ruled the news much of this year, and now the liberal media elite and their readers have made their obsession official.

UPDATE: Add Roll Call to the list of publications afflicted with Palinoia. Desperate to be one of the media cool kids, it took this year-end potshot at Palin: "Like former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's much-anticipated book, 'Going Rogue,' the tale of balloon boy riveted the nation and ate up plenty of cable TV time. But we watched to find out the fate of the kid thought to be trapped in a science experiment gone awry (and we dutifully read the Palin tome), and reached the same conclusion: There wasn't much inside."

Crucified By The Local Press?

By K. Daniel Glover  |  December 18, 2009

Early this week, the Taunton Daily Gazette in Massachusetts broke the story of a second-grader who reportedly was sent home from school and ordered to undergo psychological counseling for depicting Jesus on the cross as part of an open-ended class assignment. Ed Morrissey, Michelle Malkin and other conservative blogs helped spread the word, creating a public-relations nightmare for the school.

The school district, which failed to cooperate with the journalists reporting the news, didn't like the bad press and whined to The Boston Globe about the Taunton paper's coverage. That paper's publisher struck back in an editorial today, taking the school to task both for being close-lipped and for expecting the newspaper to give school officials time to figure out how to manage the crisis:

The Taunton Daily Gazette, as any credible newspaper should, interviewed the father of the child and sought balance through inquiries with both the principal of the school and the district's superintendent.  While the child's father was candid and forthcoming in his participation in the interview process, the school district was not.

The principal deferred all inquiries to the school superintendent as a matter of policy. The superintendent subsequently provided no details or background on the specific incident, citing confidentiality responsibilities in accordance with school policy. She additionally provided handbook-style responses related to proper protocol being followed by the school district and its employees. All dutifully recorded by our reporter. ...

Neither the superintendent, nor any other administration official, has as of this writing, contacted this newspaper related to charges of  inaccuracies or libelous reporting.  Instead, the administration has chosen to address these issues through The Boston Globe. While this is certainly the superintendent’s right, her candor with the Globe in describing the issues related to this incident not only stand in contradiction to her previous position regarding confidentiality of the student, but they appear to represent an attempt to undermine the credibility of  the Taunton Daily Gazette through The Boston Globe. ...

[I]t is not the newspaper's role to provide adequate time for public officials to organize and manage their response to crisis. The news was breaking, and if indeed the two weeks between the incident and the news inquiry were not enough time to prepare a response, it is not the newspaper's issue, but rather, the administration's. I personally understand and empathize with the superintendent's desire to call a timeout under the heat of scrutiny and inquiry, but the newspaper cannot, and will not, hold the news or serve as the pseudo public-relations arm of the school administration. Managing the news in this way would be a dereliction of our responsibilities.  We must report the news with or without the school district's full cooperation."

Kudos to publisher Sean Burke for taking that stand. His paper handled the story exactly as ethics demand. Reporters and editors gave both parties in the dispute an opportunity to explain what happened and why.

The story may well turn out to be something different than as told by the father, but if the facts from his perspective are wrong, the newspaper is not to blame for reporting them because it had no evidence to the contrary. By refusing to cooperate, school officials created suspicion, and they look even more suspicious now because apparently they still won't talk to the local paper out of spite for past coverage.

How petty and childish -- and they are the people responsible for educating Taunton's children. Maybe they should run for the U.S. Senate instead.

Conservative Media Outlets To Watch

By K. Daniel Glover  |  December 18, 2009

The heartland of America isn't immune to the media industry's woes, and the Kansas Policy Institute is taking steps to fill the news gap in its state. The free-market think tank has launched a news service call KansasReporter.org.

"The project, according to its mission statement, aims to 'provide vigorous and credible reporting on all sides of stories' and wants readers to hold it accountable to that mission," the Heritage Foundation noted in Insider Online. "Kudos to the Kansas Policy Institute for being willing to step outside of its “think tank” identity here. Surely, supporting good reporting can only help the cause of preserving the free society.

Add KansasReporter to the growing list of nonprofit and commercial news ventures emerging across the country, a topic I have noted in previous entries. This has been a good year for conservative journalism, and with plans for new publications come January, 2010 is looking like another promising year.

With that in mind, here's a list of the newest, and forthcoming, conservative media outlets that are worth watching next year:

Nonprofit

• Watchdog.org, which includes affiliates in Kansas, New Hampshire, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia. All are outgrowths of the work at the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity.
• Carolina Journal (from the John Locke Foundation in North Carolina)
• Face The State (Colorado)

Commercial

• 73wire
• Big Government, Big Hollywood and soon-to-be Big Journalism
• The Daily Caller (set to launch Jan. 11)
• Pajamas Media and PJTV
• Red County
• Washington Examiner (whose parent company also owns The Weekly Standard)

If you know of others, please include links in the comments and I will add them to the list.

Cut The Cutline Bias

By K. Daniel Glover  |  December 18, 2009

When a news organization wants to be fair and balanced, the little things matter. Little things like not publishing photo credits that parrot liberal talking points, like this one in The Washington Post.

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air calls it "almost literally the picture of media bias in reporting. ... That's an objective caption?  It should read, 'Rep. Larry Kissell explains his position on health-care reforms to his North Carolina constituents,' since that appears to be what the picture depicts."

He is absolutely right. I spent 14 combined years of my career at both National Journal and Congressional Quarterly, where this kind of sniper journalism was not tolerated.

We weren't even allowed to use the word "reform" at CQ when I covered the health-care debate in 1993-94 because the word implies that something is bad and needs changed. It gives credence to one viewpoint in the debate. We used phrases like "health-care overhaul" or the even more generic "health-care legislation."

Hopefully the Post will answer the valid criticism from conservatives like Ed, Jim Geraghty (also a CQ alumnus) and Tim Graham of Newsbusters by changing the cutline.

The Right Newsroom

By K. Daniel Glover  |  December 16, 2009

The pursuit of political diversity that would give conservatives a greater voice in America's newsrooms is not the right path to better journalism, liberal commentator Thomas Frank argued in The Wall Street Journal yesterday.

Frank penned a column on the subject in response to Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander repeatedly lamenting his newspaper's failures to embrace news broken on the right side of the political spectrum. But Frank said blaming the Post's failures on the reality that too few conservatives work in journalism is a dodge.

"[T]his way no one is really to blame for botched coverage of any sort, least of all newspaper brass. Their intentions are pure, just poorly executed by their annoyingly conformist info-proles," he wrote.

Frank then raised other objections to the idea:

Anyone setting out to appease bias-spotters on the right should know that the conservative movement feels that it is plagued by impostors and fakers, and it won't be satisfied until these [Republican In Name Only], too, are chased from the newsrooms of the nation.

Then, once all that is taken into account, there's the damnable problem of the bias-spotting left, like the Media Matters for America organization, which has documented the conservative tilt of the press in voluminous detail. How to deal with this? By ignoring it? Isn't that an act of bias on its own?

Besides, there's the mechanics of the job. How is the Post supposed to check up on its reporters' politics? I'm hoping for loyalty oaths and televised hearings, with stiff penalties for employees who refuse to talk or to name names: It would be the perfect spectacle for the end of the newspaper era.

Craziest of all, though, is the prospect of the Post ditching its decades-long pursuit of the grail of objectivity . . . because it got scooped on the Acorn story. If that is all it takes to reduce The Washington Post's vaunted editorial philosophy to ashes, what is the newspaper industry planning to do to atone for its far more consequential failures

Liberal excuses, one and all. The left wants to maintain its dominance of the establishment media because journalists who see the world the way they do, and report on it from that perspective, are essential to the future of liberalism.

Frank argues that "ever more catastrophic failures [in coverage] await" if liberals are forced to share their media power with conservatives because he sees any news uncovered by investigators on the right as "catastrophic failures."

But he's wrong. The Post and all other national news organizations can benefit from welcoming hard-nosed conservative reporters into their fold, and they would do well to look for some.

An Army Of Conservative Fact Checkers

By K. Daniel Glover  |  December 16, 2009

And the Pu-loser Award for "Correction of the Year" goes to ... The Washington Post for a correction that inspired the amusing hashtag #washingtonpostcorrections on Twitter.

Here's the correction: "A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number."

And here's the explanation: "It's Correction of the Year because it communicates that people notice and care about corrections, and because it demonstrates the participatory potential being unleashed by the Internet."

Craig Silverman, author of the book Regret The Error and the blog by the same name, gave the tongue-in-cheek award to the Post, and in the same article, he praised the fact-checking value of the Internet. Silverman noted that the practice gained prominence in 2009 despite the reality that professional fact-checkers are among the casualties of the ongoing media "market failure."

"As a result," Silverman said, "it appears as though the future of fact-checking is in open, public and participatory systems and organizations, rather than the closed, professional systems traditionally used by large magazines. The Internet has made this shift possible."

He is absolutely right about that, and that's good news for conservatives. They no longer have to lobby news organizations, often to no avail, to correct misreported facts; instead, they can do the legwork themselves and spread the word online.

Two efforts this year, one of which I contributed to, come to mind: The Heritage Foundation has been fact-checking the Obama administration on health care and other topics; and before it stopped published new material this fall, the newcomer nonprofit American Issues Project had bloggers like me writing fact-check pieces for its blog.

The emergence of organizations like FactCheck.org and PolitiFact, which won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for its 2008 campaign coverage, is an encouraging development for the future of journalism. But fact checkers have biases, too. Jim Geraghty noted at The Campaign Spot last year that FactCheck flubbed a report on President Obama's views about gun control.

PolitiFact, meanwhile, revealed its own bias this month in picking finalists for its "Lie Of The Year" award. (Voting ended at noon today.) The media outlet chose five "lies" from the right and three from the left; four of the five from the right also fell into the worst PolitiFact category of "Pants On Fire," while only one on the left reached that level. The subtle message: Conservatives lie more often and with more gusto.

Perhaps more telling, though, was PolitiFact's selection of Rep. Joe Wilson's infamous "You Lie!" rant at President Obama as he addressed a joint session of Congress this fall.

PolitiFact botched the story in September by accusing Wilson, R-S.C., of a lie of his own about healthcare coverage for illegal immigrants. Then it compounded the error by nominating Wilson long after the Senate in effect vindicated him by adopting language to close the loophole that prompted his outburst.

The Wilson episode and the reaction of the professional fact checkers to it (FactCheck and AP also took Obama's side) make a strong case for conservatives to be diligently recruiting their own army of fact checkers rather than exclusively trusting journalists with a liberal worldview to do the job fairly.

What Do You Read, Al Gore?

By K. Daniel Glover  |  December 15, 2009

My favorite part of a lengthy interview that Jose Antonio Vargas of The Huffington Post recently conducted with Al Gore came when Vargas asked, "What do you read?" He didn't get much of an answer.

"Oh, gosh," Gore said. "Well, I have a custom-designed iGoogle page that has lots of different sites on it that I scan all the time. Some of them come and go, but a lot of them stick around."

Vargas then prompted the former vice president, who apparently couldn't remember the names of any of his favorite liberal Web sites or blogs. "Like Daily Kos?" Vargas said.

"I think it's a great site, and I think it serves a great role," Gore said. "But I read sites that probably I know for a fact people don't. RealClimate.org. I wish more people read it."

Imagine if a politician running for office had been asked such a simple question yet answered so curtly and vaguely.

Oh, wait, you don't have to imagine. Just think Sarah Palin, Katie Couric and the Palin-is-stupid feeding frenzy that ensued after the two met mano y mano. By way of reminder:

Couric: And when it comes to establishing your worldview, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and to understand the world?

Palin: I've read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.

Couric: What, specifically?

Palin: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.

Couric: Can you name a few?

Palin: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news, too. Alaska isn't a foreign country, where it's kind of suggested, "Wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C., may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?" Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.Then it's off to the bus where Palin sits down for a wide-ranging interview.

Unlike Gore, who only has sitdown interviews with friendly reporters like Vargas, Palin was in enemy territory with Couric. She later explained her reaction to Couric's question: "I knew that whatever I threw out there, whether it's the USA Today or New York Times or whatever I said, that's just more fodder for someone to not only mock, but tear apart and presume to at least claim that that is a reflection of my own beliefs, so you know, so I just felt like, let's just move on to the next question."

Palin explained herself again and again and again this fall on her book tour. She even made the manufactured controversy a punchline in her appearance before journalists at the Washington Gridiron Club. But she is still portrayed as an imbecile who doesn't read newspapers, simply because she either didn't have a ready answer to Couric's question or wouldn't give it.

Rest assured that the media will not treat Gore the same way as Palin for mustering the name of only one obscure, alarmist blog on global warming when asked what liberal Web sites and blogs he reads.

[Cross-posted at Hot Air's Green Room]

Al Gore Opposes Media Bailout

By K. Daniel Glover  |  December 15, 2009

Al Gore is right. Those are words you probably never thought you would see here, but Gore got it right when, in an interview for Rolling Stone, he rejected the proposed "reconstruction of American journalism" via government support. Gore's view:

"I think those who propose government-funding for the support of newspapers are overlooking the essential number of the relationship between the press and the government. And you think about Richard Nixon or George W. Bush. Dick Cheney. The first time some news organization that receives government support decides to be antagonistic toward the government. Whatever source of leverage the person in charge of the government has is a potential danger to the integrity of that news organization."

Before his election to Congress, Gore worked in the newspaper business, and he apparently still appreciates the value of an adversarial relationship between the press -- even if he only appreciates it when conservatives lead the nation.

Granted, the Fourth Estate too often falls short of its mission, as Accuracy In Media has documented for 40 years, and that usually happens when liberals like Barack Obama are in control and journalists want them to succeed. But on principle, Gore is still right.

Hopefully he will have a heart-to-heart chat with Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who thinks "government's going to have to be involved" for American journalism to survive its ongoing "market failure."

The full transcript of Gore's three-hour interview is available at The Huffington Post. Here are other noteworthy tidbits, for better or worse:

• Gore said if blogs had developed in 2000 to the point where they are now, he would be president. "No question, no question. Absolutely."

• He scoffed at conservative columnist George Will's writings about global warming and praised the Internet as a tool that undermined Will. "No other serious writer after that storm would dream of citing George Will as a source for the particular point that he was trying to make because everybody knew, by then, that they were on notice, that the scientific community had blown the whistle on the information."

• "Environmental reporters, by the way, are among the first to be let go" as newspapers downsize. Considering the tainted record of environmental reporters, that would be the silver lining around a dark media cloud.

• "I see the Internet as a great source of hope for re-energizing representative democracy, and making it possible for people to really participate." Like, say, this year's tea parties?

• "There is a common view that the Internet itself is Balkanizing and spreading people into point of view communities. I have a somewhat different point of view of that. When you went to the conservative blogs, you found the link to the liberal blogs. The common protocol is to embed links whether it's a liberal blog or a conservative blog. ... That takes the dialogue back and forth to the point where it begins to move toward a higher order, and the arguments become more sophisticated."

• "I think the culture of the Internet is democratizing inherently because it really works against ideological conformity. Because the entry barriers are so low, and individuals have ease of access, you are so constantly seeing orthodoxy challenged by a million different perspectives. The architecture of the medium kind of pulls people toward more engagement with new ideas. And I think that's a good thing."

• "The Internet is now getting close to the stage where it will be possible for the Internet to eclipse television. ... But we're not there yet. We're still at a stage where TV is completely dominant in our political culture."

• On Obama's failure to incorporate technology into governance: "Basically, the whole arm of the campaign that used the Internet was severed from the group that moved into the White House. They used the Internet as a tool for enhancing the effectiveness of their grass-roots organizers, and they did it better than anyone else. They just haven't figured out yet how to move from campaigning to governance. ... It will happen. It will happen. But it's certainly not in evidence yet."

• On China and other repressive regimes: "The Internet is inherently a democratizing force -- even more powerful than the printing press was. ... The architecture of the medium, the basic design of the information infrastructure that's defined by the medium, has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. ... The political consciousness of people is empowered by the Internet."