Media Criticism For Dummies
by digby
Howie Kurtz on live chat:
Knoxville, Tenn.: Why do so many media outlets, when mentioning "Fox News", say "which some say has conservative views"? This seems to be the equivalent of saying "The Washington Post, which some say is a newspaper..."
Why is the rest of the press corp afraid to call a spade a spade, particularly when (as in this case) it is so virulently blatant?
Howard Kurtz: Because some say a distinction must be made between Fox's opinion shows (O'Reilly, Beck, Hannity) and its news programming. Just as you have to make a distinction between The Post's news pages and its left-leaning editorial page.
First of all, "some say" there isn't any distinction between Fox news and its opinion shows. Unless you call a minutes a day of "news" jammed into various rabid wingnut opinion shows, they don't have any news to speak of. And even that "news" is suspect since the reporters all get the same talking points from management every day and when caught off camera, are found doing things like this.
But that's not the astonishing thing about Kurtz's comment. It's this:
Just as you have to make a distinction between The Post's news pages and its left-leaning editorial page
Hahahahaha! That's a good one ...
Meanwhile, John Amato caught a very interesting exchange Between a Boston Herald Reporter, Margery Egan and Kurtz on Reliable Sources this week-end:
On Boston newspapers’ coverage of the Massachusetts Senate race:
EAGAN: Well, she[Martha Coakley] got very good press from "The Boston Globe," not from my paper, "The Boston Herald." But you know something? People don't like -- TV journalists and newspaper journalists do not like to talk about the influence of talk radio. Let me tell you something. There was a nonstop hammering of Martha Coakley on the AM stations here, on the huge sports stations here. She was the evil incarnate and Scott Brown was the next coming. And, you know, the New England Patriots in the playoffs lost early on. It was as if there was this transference from Tom "Terrific" Brady, the quarterback of the Patriots, to Scott "Terrific" Brown. You look at the rallies for Scott Brown, they were very white, they were very suburban, they were Gillette Stadium fans, and there was almost this...
KURTZ: But just briefly, did you mean to say earlier that "The Boston Globe" tilted towards Democratic candidate Martha Coakley, and your paper, "The Boston Herald," tilted towards Scott Brown in the news coverage?
EAGAN: Well, I would say my paper was pretty much cheerleading for Scott Brown. We're the conservative paper in town, and The Globe, I think, was -- they were evenhanded somewhat, but I think that they were definitely cheerleading for Martha Coakley, absolutely. They're the liberal paper in town. That's the way it always is.
The two rival papers do break down that way. But what she said about talk radio is important. And nobody wants to talk about it for some reason.
And the sports talk radio influence is something I was unaware of until Amato started writing about it. He says in this piece:
I cover the sports media on C&L all the time because I think it's important to show how they act like the Beltway media elite -- they have their own Village. And their political reach is greater than people think, because the sports talkers are uniformly right-wing and they love to bash liberals, just like their "opinion show" counterparts.
I follow baseball closely and watch my share of football and the Olympics etc., but I hate sports talk radio and always have. And right wing talk is modeled on it: macho blowhards screaming into the ether. What I didn't know was that they often get into political discussions, which validates the wingnut talking points among sports fans who don't follow politics closely (aka "independents".) That's creepy, and it explains a lot.
I had the privilege of living in Boston during the Celtics vs Lakers (and Doug Flutie BC) and I've never been in a more sports-mad town. Combined with Coakley's Curt Schilling gaffe, if the sports guys also transferred their Brady mancrush onto Brown, it undoubtedly had an impact.
Not that media critic Howie Kurtz was interested in that at all. Why would he be? He's too busy fending off criticism of the Washington Post's leftist editorial page.
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