It's fall, and once again I'm looking for links to blogs being written by student journalists. If you have one, or know someone who does, drop me a note!
Fox v. Limbaugh, Round II Could it get any more surreal? We've got a life-and-death debate going on over embryonic stem cell research going on in this nation, and the hot issue is whether a talk show host is being mean by accusing an actor of faking or exploiting his Parkinson's Disease symptoms. (LA Times)
Facebook Photos Haunt Campaign You know those photos of two girls kissing that seem to be posted everywhere these days? If your daddy or mommy is running for the U.S. Senate, especially as a conservative, you might want to take them down. (Memphis Commercial Appeal, thanks Wonkette)
Disability, Illness and the Media Dept. I've long been interested in the issue of how the media handle issues of illness and disability, though I really can't tell you where the interest came from. I had a neighbor back when I lived in Arizona who used a wheelchair after losing the use of his legs following a bicycle accident. He rode an old Goldwing motorcycle with a sidecar for balance, that was part of it. And I was a big fan of John Hockenberry back in his radio days when I had no idea that he was in a chair. Finding out that he had lost the use of his legs as a 19-year-old in a car accident prompted me to learn a bit more about the issue. More recently, it was the brilliant documentary Murderball, about quadriplegic rugby, that brought the issue forward.
What really made disability, illness and the media an issue for me was a collection of poetry by West Virginia native Tom Andrews called The Hemophiliac's Motorcycle. In it, Andrews talks about dealing with his own hemophilia as well as his brother's kidney failure.
In his memoir Codeine Diary, Andrews talks about not wanting to "turn pro" as a hemophiliac:
"The battle is over identity. Every day the question arises: Am I a hemophiliac who happens to be a writer (or cashier or househusband or whatever), or am I a writer who happens to be a hemophiliac?... "
Andrews talks about dealing with that issue during a pickup game of basketball with much better players. He stunk as a player, and wanted to use the excuse that he was a hemophiliac. He was flirting with "turning pro."
"Once a hemophiliac starts using hemophilia as an excuse, once he... allows himself the status of victim, then the word survival is leached of meaning. You may survive the disease, but it has defeated you."
It's a story from CBS news about a women's college soccer player who's become a star player for Michigan despite missing most of one arm from birth. To me the thing that makes this story fascinating is not that "Oh, this brave girl is such an inspiration. Look what she's done with only one arm." What is impressive about it is that it tells a story of how this young woman has made a life for herself without "turning pro" as Andrews would put it.. In fact, ever since her childhood she's resisted using an artificial limb because it feels unnatural to her.
When we, as members of the press, talk about people who are ill, people who are disabled, it is vital that the stories give an account of the whole person, not just the obvious factor that makes the person seem different.
First Reporter From Black Press Embedded in Iraq This audio story from NPR is an interview with journalist Leonard Sparks. He's the first reporter from a black newspaper to be embedded with the troops in Iraq.
Google Gives Election News A Geographic Twist I'm a big map junkie and spend way too much time playing with Google Earth. Now Google has added on a layer to their maps of all the congressional districts, the candidates in the congressional races, and news about each congressional race. Just fire up Google Earth on your desktop, and click on the 2006 US Election Guide layer. Engineers at Google are given 20 percent of their time each week to work on their own special projects. This election layer was one of those special projects. While I'm a big blog fan and appreciate (sometimes) the changes blogs have brought to the news business, I think this is a revolutionary way of looking at news - starting with a map rather than a headline. (CNET News)
How Well Did the Washington Post Handle the Gallaudet Uproar? As you may recall, the WPtook some flak last week for failing initially to caption or transcribe an audio interview with on its web site with the embattled new president of Gallaudet college, the nation's premier college for the deaf. Ombudsman Deborah Howell looks at how the Post handled the overall story of the controversy.
And How Are The Rest Of The Media Handling Captioning? They're ditching it, given half a chance - which the FCC is giving them. An audio story (with no transcript....) at NPR on how the FCC is giving a large number of permanent waivers to small TV broadcasters to the requirement that they close caption their programming. (Yes, I realize that NPR does not routinely provide transcripts of their programs, and that the deaf community is interested in all news, not just news about the deaf. But it seems to me that they could put up a story that is all about deaf access to the media in an accessible form. Just saying.)
I just got word this morning that a friend of mine died following an years-long battle with colon cancer. News like this is always hard, and all the more so because I had my own (pretty easy) battle with cancer in December of 2002,
Cancer is one of those topics we just don't want to talk about.
Nothing kills a conversation faster than someone asking, "How are you?" and you answer, "Fine, I just had cancer surgery." That is inevitably followed by a long, awkward silence.
Unless you are my friend, Tim. When he asked about my arm being in a sling, I told him I had had a cancer removed. His response was, "Me, too!" While I just had a melanoma, Tim had colon cancer, which involved major surgery and months of chemo. But for the next several months we would go out to lunch regularly to talk about living with cancer. If he was in the midst of chemo on that day, he might take an egg salad sandwich with him to the restaurant, as that would be all he could tolerate eating. I sometimes felt like I'd had "cancer lite" since I didn't have to have any of the icky treatments he was facing. (Four years later, Tim's hair is thinner than it used to be, but otherwise he is well.)
It rather stunned me a couple of years later when I got invited to a cancer survivors picnic at the local hospital. It's funny, but I had never seen myself that way -- as a cancer survivor, though I certainly am.
In the years following my surgery, my colleagues at WVU worked on a wonderful documentary film and book, Cancer Stories: Lessons In Love, Loss & Hope, that tells the story of how several patients and their families deal with cancer and its treatment. It doesn't soft sell the pain and suffering (including death), but it also finds the humor and life in it as well. Best of all, it doesn't sanitize the experience. Cancer Stories doesn't paint a rosy picture, but it doesn't make life seem hopeless, either. It shows that patients can get cranky during treatment and that they can crack jokes about it as well. I strongly recommend the book to everyone, but especially to those who are dealing with a diagnosis of cancer. When my colleagues were searching for a title for the book and film, my wife suggested "Cancer Sucks!" While everyone agreed the title was accurate, cooler heads prevailed in selecting a somewhat calmer title.
Marchetto's story has a happy ending, with a new, loyal husband and cancer in remission. But being young, smart and plucky isn't always enough to defeat the Big C. Miriam Engelberg, who wrote another cancer graphic novel Cancer Made Me A Shallower Person, died Oct. 17 of complications of breast cancer. In her comic book memoir, she talks about all the taboos of cancer - how do you react to people staring at your chest when you tell them you have breast cancer, and using the "cancer card" as an excuse not to talk to telemarketers. Along with her wonderful cartoons, her web site also has a link to a blog she kept with news both good and bad.
For myself, it's always hard to hear another cancer story. I know that I was fortunate. I was referred to a dermatologist early enough that she was able to get all the cancer out, along with a sizable chunk of my upper arm.
Though the surgery was four years ago, I still have to go in for regular follow-up exams where every inch of my skin gets scrutinized. About half the time there's a biopsy to go with the exam, when a mole doesn't look quite right. You are supposed to get a postcard if everything is OK, and a phone call if there's a problem. Inevitably I fall into a middle group - the tissue taken will be "atypical" but not cancerous. So it's a phone call, but not the bad one.
I will be starting my fifth year of follow-ups next month, so I'm starting to look in the mirror after my shower, trying to decide if any of the hundreds of moles I have look somehow different. I'm not completely sure what I'm looking for, as the mole that was melanoma didn't look any different to me. I will complain about having to go in for one more doctor's appointment, and I'll stress over the biopsy (should there be one) until the results get back.
But I am lucky. I've got good health insurance, good doctors, and a good family. I had treatable cancer that was caught early. I'm a cancer survivor.
A transcript of the interview was posted at Post's web site on Oct. 17 at 4:21 p.m. The interview was broadcast on Washington Post Radio on Oct. 16.) For those of you interested in dealing with the issue of captioning and the web, here's some suggestions.
Why Do Books Still Matter In The Age Of Instant News? Because they give us time to reflect on what news means instead of getting caught up in the factoid of the moment. The WP's Howard Kurtz takes a look at why we have so many significant books out right now on the war in Iraq.
Sparking Debate - How Should The Press Handle School Shootings? We've had at least three school shootings in the last month, and a raft of threats from kids who think that talking about a school shooting sounds like fun. Which raises the question of how journalists should cover this story. There's no question that school shootings are news and need to be covered in depth. But is there a point where journalists go to far? Is there a danger of under-covering these stories for fear of launching copy cat incidents?
On Oct. 6, NPR's On The Media did a segment interviewing suicide prevention consultant and school violence researcher Loren Coleman on what he thinks the consequences of over-coverage are. You can get a feel for his point from the title of his book, The Copy Cat Effect. He argues that excessive media coverage of all the lurid details of the shootings gives other potential shooters details to emulate. Of course, this begs the question of whether they would have made up their own scenarios if they hadn't had one to emulate. And does the threat of this justify not reporting all of the details. After all, we've heard from a lot of folks lately that there's news going on we just don't need to know about.....
So if the one argument is that there is a copy cat harm from running too much news on the shootings, there's also the issue of invasion of the victims' privacy. They've been harmed once by the shooter. Are they harmed a second time by the press coverage? This is the question raised by Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell. We've heard a lot about respecting religious sensibilities as of late, so how do you handle a group like the Amish who have religious objections to having their photo taken? Even if it involves real news?
Difficult questions without easy answers. Good topics for journalistic ethics units.
What Does It Mean To Be A Liberal? Lots of talk about liberals and conservatives in the press, with much of the definition of what is liberal coming from conservatives. So it's fascinating to see a liberal talking in a conservative paper (the Chicago Tribune) about what characterizes liberals.
There Is No MSM Dept. Part I - What Does The Media World Look Like?
Over the last few weeks, I've written extensively about YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and the companies that own them or are negotiating to buy them. This has gotten me thinking a lot about what our media world looks like.
We all know (or at least ought to know) about the traditional Big Media companies out there: Time Warner, Viacom/CBS, Disney, Bertelsmann, News Corp., and General Electric (owner of NBC Universal). And we've heard endlessly (and correctly) about how the major media outlets in the United States are becoming more and more consolidated with fewer and fewer owners.
While I still feel strongly that this is the case, it also is missing the point that our media world has changed drastically in the 21st century. (Does anyone besides me remember the great Walter Cronkite series that used to run on CBS back in the Sixties called In The 21st Century?)
So who are the new big players in the media who weren't back in the 20th century? Note I'm not using the term Mainstream Media. That's because I don't believe they are definable group. It's really a term used to describe media you don't like or don't think is relevant. As an example, look at talk radio. Talk radio is dominated by trash-talking shock jocks and the conservative political talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Limbaugh, in particular, is fond of complaining about how the Mainstream Media doesn’t “get it.” But how mainstream are the MSM? On a typical day, CNN will have approximately 880,000 viewers of its evening programming, Fox News will have 1.7 million viewers, MSNBC will have 360,000, and the individual broadcast network newscasts will have in the vicinity of 6-to-8 million viewers. The Rush Limbaugh show, on the other hand, averages 20 million listeners a week. (Note that television audiences and radio audiences are measured differently.) So who is more mainstream? A popular afternoon radio host with a large daily audience or a television news program with a much smaller audience?
Everything That Happens In The Past Will Happen Again Dept. - Google Continues Path To Becoming a 21st Century Media Giant By Acquiring YouTube
The big media business news this morning is that Internet search giant Google is going to be acquiring the broadband video site YouTube for an estimated $1.65 billion in stock. This will make co-founders Chad Hurley and Steven Chen quite wealthy. It will also take their independent company and make it part of a media giant. So far, Google claims they will keep YouTube as a separate brand that will keep its own site and staff. Who knows? It might even happen that way.
But this is a prime example of how our modern media operate.
Take the example of Black Entertainment Television (BET) founder Robert Johnson. The great-grandson of a freed slave, Johnson started one of cable television’s most profitable channels with only $15,000 in borrowed money and an investment of $500,000 from cable mogul John Malone. Just over 20 years later, Johnson sold his channel and many of its connected media properties to media giant Viacom for $3 billion. Johnson received more than $1 billion of the purchase price and stayed on as chairman and CEO of BET. Thus the largest black-owned media corporation was assimilated into mainstream corporate America. The pattern in which a founder develops a new media outlet and then sells it to a large media company is fairly common in the business.
YouTube is only the most recent of the web startups to get bought out by Big Media (a term I like much better than Mainstream Media, which has all sorts of wildly questionable assumptions built around it). Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (one of the top five or six media companies in the US) bought the social networking site MySpace for about $580 billion; and Facebook's owners are said to be asking at least $1 billion in their negotiations with Internet portal Yahoo.
The other side of this story is that Google is slowly but surely becoming a media giant. We generally talk about it as a search engine company, and that is certainly what it is best known as. But in reality, it is the world's largest online advertising company, serving up those small context-sensitive text adds that appear next to your search results, or your e-mails on Google Mail, or your searches on Google News, or.... well, you get the picture. Google reported $6.1 billion in revenue last year, according to USA Today. And, as Martketwatch points out, Google buying out YouTube keeps companies like Yahoo or Viacom from getting it.
Of course, if Google wants you to see their ads, they need content to attract you to their sites. That's where the YouTube acquisition fits in. YouTube has become one of the most popular sites on the web, and clearly the place to go for user-produced video. It also is enlisting corporate partners to put up content on their site. Just this week they inked deals with CBS, Sony BMG, and Universal Music Group. What's interesting about these deals is that they will allow consumers who produce their own videos to include copyright protected materials from the partners. It would appear to me what they are talking about is letting audience members create their own music videos and share them with the world legally. Engaging consumers in a direct interaction and not branding them as criminals. What a concept!
Welcome To My Nightmare Dept. Part III - Podcasting Hits The Mainstream & The Long Tail Part of an occasional series of what and how I consume my own preferences in media.
I first wrote about podcasting in February of 2005, when USA Today ran two major stories on the new medium in one day. Podcasting, for those of you who've slept through the latest trendspotting, is taking digital audio programming off the Internet and stuffing it into your iPod or other MP3 player so that you can listen to it at the time of your choice. Or, as far as that goes, just listening to it on your computer.
"The most popular podcasts were those produced by a range of eclectic individuals. As an example, the first podcast I subscribed to (and still the one I listen to most often) is Brian Ibbot's fascinating Coverville featuring covers (new versions of old songs). You haven't lived till you hear Jason Falkner's punk version of Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now. And it was through Coverville that I discovered Skipping Discs outrageous CD Saturday Night Hay Fever - a collection of disco hits done as bluegrass covers.
It used to be that you needed a special program to collect together your podcasts, but then Apple added support for podcasts into iTunes, and suddenly it was just point-and-click to subscribe and automatically update your iPod.
Today, if you go to iTunes, and check out the top 100 podcasts subscribed to, you'll see a collection of fairly traditional media connected with a number of alternative or long tail options. For example, as I write this the top podcasts are from Comedy Central, HBO, ABC (Lost), The Onion, and HBO. It's not until we get down to number 6 (Windows Weekly) that we get to our first speciality podcast not directly associated with traditional media.
I am now a committed podcast junkie. In fact, I even have an iPod Shuffle that I use exclusively for listening to podcasts at the gym. Here's my weekly podcast diet:
I download several public radio podcasts daily. The first on my list is NPR's hourly news summary - the latest five-minute newscast from NPR. Not always the most cheerful way to start off my morning workout, but it keeps me informed. Much more enjoyable is Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac from American Public Media. It's an brief, idiosyncratic "today in literary history" that ends with him reading a poem. It is the high point of my morning listening.
I also download NPR's most E-Mailed stories, though as of late I've been replacing it on my place list with a slightly more eclectic and interesting NPR Shuffle. Both of these get left behind, however, when I have some of my specialty podcasts to listen to.
There are several weekly podcasts I try to listen to, including Frank DeFord's sports commentary, the This I Believe series, media news from the essential On The Media, and Elvis Mitchell's interview show The Treatment. I also enjoy the Ebert and Roeper movie review podcast, though it lacks a bit because you listen to the movie clips rather than watch them. With Roger Ebert out from cancer surgery, Richard Roeper has been joined by a range of guest reviewers, including filmmaker and comic book writer Kevin Smith. The Official Lost Podcast has now become The Official Lost Video Podcast, and while I will try to watch it on my computer, I can't listen to it on my shuffle at the gym.
Finally, there are the independent, long-tail media weekly podcasts that are at top of my listening list. The first of these is Lostcasts which is a relatively intense analysis of the theories behind what's happening on ABC's Lost. I have listened to a number of other Lost podcasts, but none of the rest have the depth of discussion of the literary roots of the show. The second is SoupKast from the folks who do the Supebike Planet website full of news of superbike and MotoGP motorcycle racing. It includes audio columns from racers, interviews, and even the occasional song about racing. Lots of great behind the scenes news and analysis if you care about superbike racing. And finally, as I wrote about above, there is Coverville, which I've been listening to steadily for at least a year.
No Uniform Bias Dept. - How The Press Is Covering Mark Foley Case As I implied yesterday, I really don't have a lot of patience for charges of a uniform bias in the press, either from the left or the right. Here's a round up of a wide range of stories from various media about the Mark Foley scandal. Does each story have a distinctive point of view? You bet it does. Is there any consistency between them? Not that I can see.
The Drudge Report: It Was All A Prank Gone Bad Drudge, who made his name reporting that Newsweek was working on a story about Bill Clinton having an affair with an intern, has been reporting that the Foley's Instant Messages were a "online prank that by mistake got into the hands of enemy political operatives."
ABC News: Transcript of Foley's IM with a former page A transcript of the incriminating IMs, for those readers who want to see for themselves what was said. I'm not sure what the FCC would make of this if it were read on the news. A good example of news that could only be online or in a magazine. (Whether these transcripts should have been published is a great topic for a debate in an ethics class. Also, while ABC had intended to remove all identifying information from the IMs, at one point the page's name was included on the transcript.)
CJR Daily: Is a Mistake A Sign Of Bias? On at least three separate occasions, Fox News put a tag under Foley's image that said "Former Congressman Mark Foley (D-FL). Some bloggers have charged that this shows that Fox is trying to make Foley look like he was a Democrat. But Columbia Journalism Review's Daily blog notes that Foley was repeatedly referred to as a Republican on air and that Bill O'Reilly talked about how Foley was a problem for conservatives. They suggest that it was a simple error, not a conspiracy.
Welcome To My Nightmare Dept. Part II - "News Has A Kind of Mystery" Part of an occasional series of what and how I consume my own preferences in media. (In the first, I looked at the many ways of enjoying Lost.)
When it comes to consuming news, I'm a big believer in the comment that I believe the publisher of the New York Times made a few years ago, that he didn't know whether people would always be reading a newspaper with the New York Times name on it, but they would always be consuming New York Times branded news.
Now, I'm not a big reader of the NYT for a number of reasons, but the comment still applies.
My one "must read" every week is the Sunday Washington Post. The rest of the week I read the paper online through a customized MyWashingtonPost page. Why the Post over the Times? First of all, I just like the paper better. I like media columnist Howard Kurtz, I like their Washington news, I like their professional standards, and I like the fact that everything on the site doesn't go pay-per-view after a week (as they do on the Times site).
Next up are the physical newspapers I read. One is my local newspaper and the other is USA Today. As a journalism professor, I'm sure I'm not supposed to admit to liking USAT, but it has some of the best and most complete media news available. I also believe that it is a radically better paper now than it was 10 years ago.
I make the argument that it is very difficult to make generalizations about "the media," and my local paper illustrates why you can't talk about things like "the liberal media." No doubt there are liberal media out there (though to tell you the truth, the New Yorker magazine is the only truly liberal media outlet I consume), but my local newspaper certainly is not liberal. It is owned by the brother of a Republican senate candidate, and it runs as many stories criticizing a local Democratic congressman as possible.
Ilisten to as much of NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered as I can. It's a great source of in-depth news, and it carries some of the most interesting commentary out there. (When I get to the entry in this series about podcasting, I'll have quite a bit more to say about NPR.) I will generally check in on what Rush Limbaugh is saying for a few minutes in the afternoon. I would listen longer if he wasn't so predictable in his take on the news.
For television news, I, well, I don't go there much other than The Weather Channel, which is the first thing I look at every morning. If there is a big story breaking, I might take a look at CNN, and if there's big goings-on in Washington, I'll tune in C-SPAN, but otherwise I don't look at a lot of television news. I do take a look at C-SPAN's, CNN's, and the BBC's web sites on occasion.
So that's most of my real news for the week. If I had time, I would watch Jon Stewart, who in many ways gives the most honest look at the news of the day of any television news outlet....
So Why Does The Whole World Get Afghanistan On The Cover Of Newsweek And We Get Annie Leibovitz? Not that there's anything wrong with Annie Leibovitz. I mean, she's one of my favorite photogs. But Europe, Asia and Latin American editions of Newsweek all got "Losing Afghanistan" as their covers. And we know that the controversy over the covers is news because Jon Stewart told us so. It's also interesting how Newsweek minimized their mention of Leibovitz's relationship with Susan Sontag. As I wrote at the time of Sontag's death, "I would not so much argue that Sontag's lesbianism was news, but certainly the fact that a major writer had a long-term relationship with a major photographer should certainly be a fact of note. Certainly when writer Erskine Caldwell died there was mention of the fact that he had been married to photographer Margaret Bourke-White."
Welcome To My Nightmare Dept. - What Does My Lost Media World Look Like? I spend a lot of time talking about how and why people use the media. But it's always about "them." How do "they" use the media? How does it affect "them." So in some upcoming entries, I'm going to examine my own media use - what and how do I consume my own preferences in media? And does doing so turn me into a mindless zombie?
The big news for me is that Lost will be back starting Wednesday. Now you will likely think of this as my favorite television show, and you would be correct in that. But Lost has become much more than just a broadcast television show. How do I consume Lost? Let me count the ways:
I watch it when it is broadcast. Actually, that's not completely true. I generally watch it an hour or two after it airs using my DVR and skipping through the commercials.
I watch it as a paid download from the iTunes store. I've bought several episodes of Season 2 at a $1.99 a pop. One was when I missed it because I was travelling and so I downloaded it using the wifi connection in my hotel room. On another occasion I wanted to watch an episode for a second time, and I'd already erased it from the DVR.
I've got the bonus disk from the Season 2 DVD set in my Queue at Netflix. No need to purchase the entire disk when I can have the disk with the special bonus figures on it sent to my mailbox.
I listen to the Official Lost Podcast when it airs while I work out at the gym. I also listen to the fan produced Lostcastfor the latest in theories of the smoke monster (and everything else Lost related).
BTW, The Rambling Junior wonders why I like Lost so much. Probably because I like convoluted drama with lots of literary references better than angsty comedy.
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back in his radio days when I had no idea that he was in a chair. Finding out that he had lost the use of his legs as a 19-year-old in a car accident prompted me to learn a bit more about the issue. More recently, it was the brilliant documentary 
More recently Marisa Acocella Marchetto has published the graphic novel (a comic book for adults) 