from easonjordan.com
Former CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan has launched IraqSlogger.com as "the world's premier Iraq-focused information source" about Iraq with no "political slant." The site will include material from the U.S. mainstream media, Iraqi media, European and Arab media, government and military organizations, U.S. blogs (from left to right, including yesterday ETP subject Bill Roggio), Iraqi blogs (like IraqPundit), and translations of Iraqi news content, all of which is meant to provide the fullest possible picture of the situation in Iraq across the board and on an ongoing basis. It's a resource with incredible potential, one that's long over due and clearly welcome, particularly now when there is such a desire for answers about Iraq and what the future holds (as indicated by skyrocketing sales of the Iraq Study Group Report last week).
Jordan's choice of name, "IraqSlogger" was taken from a Donald Rumsfeld comment that the war was to be a "long, hard slog" (StuffHappenser.com is no doubt just around the corner). Jordan was formerly the chief news executive at CNN, but resigned in February 2005 after 23 years at the network in the wake of comments made at a conference in Davos, Switzerland, concerning the involvement of the U.S. military in several accidental journalist deaths. An ensuing blog-and-media pile-on caused him to resign so as not to further mire CNN in the scandal. Jordan is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Committee to Protect Journalists and co-founder of the Iraq News Safety Group, as well as an Emmy, Peabody and Headliner award winner. Since CNN, he founded Praedict, a news company focusing on global hotspots; IraqSlogger is the first of numerous planned news sites.
Since yesterday's announcement of the launch, conservative bloggers urged him to examine right-wing claims that the Associated Press was using an unconfirmed source in their stories (the AP stands by its stories). Jordan responded by inviting conservative blogger Michelle Malkin to accompany him to Iraq on IraqSlogger's dime; she accepted (which ignited further controversy in the liberal blogosphere). Not bad for one day out.
Yesterday Editor & Publisher published a detailed feature on IraqSlogger, detailing Jordan's plans.
Related on Malkin and the AP controversy:
Truth & Rumor In Iraq [ETP]
Scott Beale
Rocketboom producer Andrew Baron ripped into the new ABCNews.com show by Amanda Congdon yesterday, calling it "a carbon copy of what I hired her to do for Rocketboom." He says about his former host (pictured here with him in happier times):
The Amanda Across America, ABC News and HBO projects are all Rocketboom projects that were usurped out of Rocketboom by Amanda when she quit.
Since Andrew (who now shoots Rocketboom with a new host) often speaks about New Media in a "death to TV" sense, it's possible that the TV deals (Amanda is also developing a comedy for HBO) looked sweeter to the networks without him attached. Indeed, his public feud with Amanda showed that they weren't the best business partners. If the networks had to choose one, they knew to go with the one with the name recognition (but the pretty face didn't hurt).
That all assumes that Andrew hasn't blown his involvement out of proportion. His criticisms of Amanda's new show don't help his credibility. Andrew says, "Seeing her take a 'turn to camera 2', just as we do in today's episode of Rocketboom is just embarrassing."
Earth to Andrew: You didn't invent Camera 2.
-- Nick Douglas
Earlier: Amanda Congdon on ABC: Rocketboom Gone Corporate [ETP]
AP
What's wrong with Barack Hussein Obama? Oh sorry, what? Does — does that bother you when I say Hussein? Like that? Hussein?
So goes the playful (or, in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, not so playful) mocking of Obama's middle name. It's only successful, says Maureen Dowd, because his aides are so uptight about it. When a Bush Senior official used Obama's full name on Hardball last week, Obama's PR chief said "it wasn't a slip of the tongue." Sure, but would it have made such a big deal if Obama's camp had just refused to comment? Whatever impact the name-dropping may have, the incident reveals a more legitimate problem with Obama: he's touchy.
And the pundits have noticed. A few days after Dowd casually mentioned in a column that "his ears stick out" (yes, exactly), Obama told her in person:
You talked about my ears, and I just want to put you on notice: I'm very sensitive about -- What at I told them was, "I was teased relentlessly when I was a kid about my big ears."
Which, of course, Limbaugh played twice on his show, as well as Dowd's reply: "We're trying to toughen you up." Maybe he'll at least learn when to ignore a taunt.
True, it's not as if Obama has dealt with much tough journalism lately. Recent spin centers on his "rock-star" popularity -- people paid money to see him! And he looks so dashing! -- followed by the same reservations about his inexperience. Then it's back to how many people attended his book signing and how sexy he looked in his suit.
Oh yes, the Ahmadenijad suit. Frankly, there are far better criticisms to draw from Obama's tie-less look than that an Iranian president happens to go for it too. It's a reminder that his type of press is (as Dowd points out) Men's Vogue and Vanity Fair.
Apparently what's wrong with Obama is that right now, he's too cultivated as a pretty-boy to handle some name-calling. And as the press looks for a new angle, this might be their new favorite.
— Nick Douglas
What an inspired, genius move on the part of the underexposed and under-carried Al Jazeera English network: Offer yourself up with abandon to "The Daily Show" for a long, meaty, hilarious, humanizing clip. Outstanding. Last night, crack correspondent Samantha Bee (and most senior correspondent, I might add) did a long segment on the new network which culminated in Bee's hilarious attempt to re-make the network in a manner appealing to Americans (Bee: "Whoa. News hour?"). The segment drove home the point that Al Jazeera is actually serious about serious news, with a pared-down no-nonsense style heavy on actual news content while at the same time humanizing the network by highlighting its employees, and the mission, which has not been overly popular, to say the least (and, in fairness, Al Jazeera is sort of associated with videos from terrorists who take credit for atrocities and shout about the glories of holy slaughter of American infidels, which sort of works against domestic viewer goodwill). Anchors Dave Marash and Ghida Fakhry are particularly excellent sports. It's a brilliant, hilarious segment, and is probably the best commercial Al Jazeera could have in this country. An amazing PR coup.
It's worth seeing in full (especially for Bee's impromptu Al-Jazeera disco jam) but is not yet available on the Comedy Central "Motherboard" (though, by the time the thing actually loads, it might be). Honorable mention goes to the subsequent segment on the French 24-hour news channel, "Les Newserables."
p.s. Watch Samantha Bee in this segment and don't ever tell me women aren't funny again — she is freaking hilarious all the way through, especially during the Al-Jazeera song. Last I checked, she wasn't Jewish, unattractive, or a lesbian, either.
Today during the White House Press Briefing, Tony Snow apologized to David Gregory for calling him "partisan" last week. This was the question Gregory asked, for those who don't recall:
The co-chairs say the following: "Stay the course is no longer viable. The current approach is not working. The situation is grave and deteriorating." Can this report be seen as anything other than a rejection of this president's handling of the war?
Talk about shooting the messenger. Snow said that Gregory was trying to "frame it in a partisan way" and this was his justification — then, and subsequently, on "Reliable Sources": The members of the Iraq Study Group had said they were there to "help" and that they "were deliberately not trying to have critiques of the administration performance." That, of course, is not what Gregory asked (and Snow further said on "Reliable Sources" that Gregory wasn't actually quoting from the report, which he was). Snow also said on "Reliable Sources" that he tried not to go "picking fights with the press corps" — yet just Monday blew off a question about Senator Gordon Smith's anti-Bush/anti-Iraq speech, saying "[W]hat would you like me to say? Should I do duels at 10 paces?" Yesterday, WaPo's Dana Milbank published a tally of Snow's obfuscating "I don't knows" and noted that they were often used as a "brushoff"; he also noted Snow's habit of — what was that phrase? — picking fights, like calling a question from CBS's Jim Axelrod "loaded" or telling Helen Thomas to "stop pestering the teacher."
That's all by way of background, from last week and yesterday — and, apparently, ancient history, because today, Tony Snow apologized to David Gregory. Gregory asked a question, and Snow responded like so:
TONY SNOW: OK, before I get to that, I want to address something else. Because you and I had a conversation last week that got a whole lot of play in a lot of places, where I used the term "partisan" in describing one of your questions.And I've thought a lot about that, and that I was wrong. So I want to apologize and tell you I'm sorry for it.
DAVID GREGORY: Thank you.
TONY SNOW: And the reason I do that is not only because it's the right thing, but because I want people in this room and also people who watch these to understand that the relations in this room are professional and collegial.
And if I expect you to do right by us, you have every right to expect that I'll do right by you.
So, at any event, I just want to say I'm sorry for that.
It's great that he apologized and great that the apology has been picked up and noted, but I also think it's worth placing that apology in context.
— Rachel Sklar
Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson outlined a casual proposal for the magazine's website (reclaimed from Lycos this summer and relaunching in February) on Tuesday, elaborating on his vision of radical transparency. The key word is "participation," says Anderson, listing "six tactics of transparent media." The tactics mostly involve showing readers (and letting them in on) the real-time editing process, and letting them take part. For example, Anderson suggests letting readers write headlines and voting for popular stories (using the model from Reddit, the social news site Wired acquired a few months ago).
With each tactic, Anderson lists an upside and a risk. These combinations deconstruct themselves: the upside to reader voting is "a front page that reflects reader interest better;" the risk is "a more predictable and lowbrow front page." If readers edit articles post-publication, stories will "live and grow" but also "get progressively less coherent as many cooks mess with them." Anderson thinks that upsides outweigh the risks, but it's hard to read the list that way: his upsides read as vague (and mockable) visions of a reader-on-writer lovefest, while his risks read as lessons learned from such other populist news efforts as last year's L.A. Times wikitorials. It feels like Chris Anderson doesn't trust his readers — and hasn't learned from experience.
Photo by Muli Koppel.
-- Nick Douglas
www.rottentomatoes.com
Welcome to ETP's new feature, "Baseless Rumor And Wanton Speculation," wherein we will rumor-monger and prognosticate on media goings-on so that we can say "I told you so" if we turn out to be right.
This past September, at a book party for Arianna Huffington's On Becoming Fearless, ETP was introduced to a well-known media critic. In a conversation about the state of the New York Times, he predicted that Bill Keller would be ousted as editor-in-chief within a year and that Dean Baquet would be tapped as his replacement. We subsequently referred to this information as the most obviously wrong piece of media gossip we were ever likely to hear. (Mind you, this was before there was any public indication that Baquet would be forced out at the LAT and at a time when Keller, relatively speaking, was out of the spotlight for any perceived missteps, such as the delay in publishing the NSA wiretap story or the decision to publish the SWIFT banking story.)
As today's Baquet-LAT-NYT news unfolds, current events may be in the process of vindicating that critic. Today's LAT piece suggests that NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger has been courting Baquet for something -- for what, it's not entirely clear. Baquet has suggested to friends that he has his eye on Washington bureau chief, but there's reason to be slightly skeptical about that. For one, Sulzberger and Baquet have been close for a very long time; for another, as New York magazine's Joe Hagan delicately put it in a recent piece, Keller, "famously, was not Sulzberger's first choice to be in charge" after Howell Raines was pushed out. And there's been no real indication that Keller and Sulzberger's relationship has warmed over time.
Meanwhile, Keller's response through the paper's spokesman to the LAT's inquiry — "We have not offered Dean a position" — is strangely defensive, although it may just involve the typical semantic games (i.e., Keller has been in talks with Baquet about ousting Philip Taubman, the current Washington bureau chief, but he technically hasn't offered him the job). But there's another possibility: If Keller hasn't offered Baquet a job, well, has Sulzberger offered him one?
Hard to say. But that previously-disregarded bit of speculation from Media Critic Guy may not have been as stupid as we thought.
— Ankush Khardori
(Bonus speculation that could easily be disproven: Eli Broad, with or without Ron Burkle, will submit a bid for the LAT within days. A recent Vanity Fair profile (alas, unavailable online) painted Broad as something of a cultural egoist — a guy determined to leave a big imprint on the Los Angeles area. Plus, David Geffen and him? They don't get along so much.)
from MSNBC
Apparently blockbuster novelist Michael Crichton, not content with making up science to debunk global warming, is now taking literary swipes at journalists who write stuff about him that he doesn't like. In his new book, Next, he introduces a character called "Mick Crowley" — a Washington political columnist who rapes a two-year old boy. Funnily enough, Crichton was the target of a highly critical New Republic cover story earlier this year....by Washington political writer Michael Crowley, who often goes by "Mike." Which sounds an awful lot like "Mick."
Crichton's literary hit can be found on all of two pages in his book, but it's memorable. Here's an excerpt:
Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers.
Charming! It's minds like that which merit private sit-down meetings with the President of the United States. Crowley — the real, non-raper of babies Crowley, that is — is pretty sure that Crichton meant the allusion as a dig, calling it "a literary hit-and-run" on today's TNR.com and confirming that at least some of the details about the fictional Crowley dovetail with the original: Both are Washington political writers, both went to Yale, both are in their 30s, both seem to not be Michael Crichton's favorite people.
There is one detail, however, that Crowley singles out as telling: The fictional Crowley is characterized as having a small penis (this detail is important to the narrative insofar as it show's Crichton's disturbing attention to detail). Crowley addresses this point head on by raising the little-known "Small Penis Rule," sourced to a 1998 New York Times article:
[I]t is a sly trick employed by authors who have defamed someone to discourage their targets from filing lawsuits. As libel lawyer Leon Friedman explained to the Times, "No male is going to come forward and say, 'That character with a very small penis, 'That's me!'"
Crowley, however, sees smallness not in his own penis, but in Crichton's heart, taking the literary low-blow as the highest compliment: That he was right. Says Crowley:
Call it the small man rule: If someone offers substantive criticism of an author, and the author responds by hitting below the belt, as it were, then he's conceding that the critic has won.
There's a "Penis, Mightier Than The Sword" joke in here somewhere.
Michael Chrichton, Jurassic Prick [TNR]
Columnist Accuses Crichton of 'Literary Hit-and-Run' [NYT]
NB: Crowley is a frequent guest on MSNBC's "Scarborough Country" and is a warm acquaintance of mine whom I've never met, in Washington, Malibu, or anywhere else.
Harry Shearer
I'm getting used to it--national media trumpet stories of FEMA's failure adequately to police its spending on Katrina (and Rita) victims, but routinely ignore more substantive stories about the pitifully slow release of grant money to compensate homeowners for the damage caused by the levee failures. So here's todays update from the Times-Picayune, complete with a graf I, at least, found startling:
Road Home administrators -- though they recently conceded a 25 percent error...
James Rainey, you're busy today: Now the LATimes reports that mogul David Geffen has made a $2 billion all-cash offer for the LAT. On the table! The Tribune Co. has "declined to accept or reject the bid as it continues to seek offers for the entire company" (and the best of luck to you there). The offer was apparently made last month. Now, it's up to Broad & Burkle, Gannett Co., Hank Greenberg and anyone else who might want to have a shiny, fun new plaything to ante up. Meanwhile, all the speculation about Dean Baquet below? All bets are off now, and the game is on. Bi-coastal drama includes possible intrigue at the New York Times (postulated by Gawker), where who knows if Sulzberger's "longtime courtship" of Baquet will include a plan to maneuver Bill Keller, who has eight years until mandatory retirement, out the door (that's rumor and speculation but heck, we'll reprint it). But, talk about the speed of the 24-hour media cycle! In any case, exciting stuff.
Geffen's offer for The Times: $2 billion [LAT]
Baquet To New York Times? [ETP]
Suitors Line Up For Tribune Company, Or Pieces Thereof [ETP]
from mediabistro.com
Oh, come now, this was too easy: Fox is advertising on Mediabistro's jobs board for a "Freelance Fact Writer." Job requirements include "writing on-air facts and press conference quotes for daytime programming" and an "ability to write in a concise, conversational and colorful style at an extremely fast pace" (familiarity with "The Cavuto Mark" presumably a plus). The ad reminds applicants that "this is a high-pressure position where your work product gets national exposure on a daily basis," so the facts you write better be good! Models include Mark Foley, Democrat, Dennis Hastert, Minority Speaker, and Bill O'Reilly, Gynecologist. Interested applicants should send a resume and John Moody-approved talking points to resumes@foxnews.com.
Freelance Fact Writer in New York [Mediabistro]
*Er, this may be a good time to disclaim that I've been a guest on Hannity & Colmes, where everyone was very nice to me, and am a semi-frequent guest on MSNBC, where I'm sure they make mistakes too, as do we all. Irena Briganti, please don't come after me!
from deadlinehollywooddaily.com
(NB: This article has been hugely updated above — David Geffen has made a $2 billion offer for the LAT. Details here.)
The Los Angeles Times reports today on the employment prospects of its former editor, Dean Baquet, who is reportedly considering taking a senior management job at the New York Times since his ouster from the LA Times. According to LAT media writer James Rainey, Baquet would prefer to be reinstalled at the LAT by the eventual new owners, but simply can't around that long to work again. (Rainey, whose beat has included coveringd the turmoil at his own paper, reports at arm's length but probably has an inside track here, given sources like "one Los Angeles Times editor who had reported to Baquet" and attendees at "a party with many Times staffers at the South Pasadena home of Associate Editor John Montorio," where Baquet was a guest — no word if Rainey was).
Baquet, whose ouster from the LAT broke on Nov. 7, 2006 — election day — was previously national editor at the New York Times, and has reportedly been in talks with publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., who the LAT says has conducted a "long-standing courtship" of Baquet, about a possible position. Baquet would not comment (at least himself, though plenty of associates speak for him here), and NYT executive editor Bill Keller said via spokesperson that "We have not offered Dean a position."
Yesterday, Editor & Publisher ran a long profile of Baquet and his brother, Terry Baquet, an editor at the New Orleans Times-Picayune in the Baquet's hometown; for more background, see here.
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Last week, the "CBS Evening News" with Katie Couric had its lowest ratings yet, dropping to 7.45 million viewers. This was 240,000 viewers less than the previous month's low of 7.69 million. The "NBC Nightly News" with Brian Wililams remained in first place, though ABC closed the gap between them to its narrowest margin yet. Last night, I watched both the NBC and CBS broadcasts (I can only tape/watch two programs at once - sorry, Charlie), and didn't even need to crunch the minute differences between them because one giant, glaring difference was so huge: The top story. Yesterday, on the day when South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson fell ill with an apparent stroke and seemed in danger of being replaced by a Republican handpicked by Republican governor Mike Rounds, thus changing the balance of power in the Senate from Democrat to Republican, the CBS news led with...holiday shopping. (12 shopping days left 'til Christmas!). NBC's Williams, meanwhle, led with the Johnson story, pulling in updates from correspondent Chip Reid and sitting with NBC Washington Bureau chief Tim Russert to discuss the move and its ramification. (See vid.)
This is not a one-off choice — someone had to have adjudged holiday shopping as a better lead-in for the news than the possible surprise upset in the Senate, and as Managing Editor of the CBS Evening News Couric ought to have seen why that was the less significant and compelling story. It's decisions like this that are causing people to criticize the broadcast, or simply to leave. You can't blame Katie for losing her dazzling Sept. 5, 2006 lead &mash; her debut wasn't just a newscast, it was a TV event. And it's too early to blame her for being in third place, just like Dan Rather and Bob Scheiffer. But she's the Managing Director. So, for scheduling "Holiday Shopping!" before a Senator's stroke and the potential Republican power shift it may entail, she gets the blame. Katie, take note.
