Friday Reads: The Medium isn’t the Message
Posted: February 27, 2015 Filed under: morning reads, the blogosphere, the internet, The Media SUCKS | Tags: Bill O'Reilly, blogging, integrity, journalism, writing 41 Comments
Good Morning!
I’ve been looking at media stories this week. That includes both traditional and nontraditional forms. The internet continues to influence the release of news and how news is made and reported. Several topics really caught my eye. The first is the ease with which we’re seeing documentation of Bill O’Reilly’s exaggerations on places he’s been and news stories he covered. It seems like one exaggeration/lie after another is popping up from all kinds of places since David Corn of Mother Jones found out that O’Reilly was never near a battlefield during the Falklands War despite the stories O’Reilly tells. Here’s some of the latest on the life and times of the blustery, on line person who really is a serial liar.
Former colleagues of Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News host whose tales of past reporting exploits are facing renewed scrutiny, have disputed his account of surviving a bombardment of bricks and rocks while covering the 1992 riots in Los Angeles.
Six people who covered the riots with O’Reilly in California for Inside Edition told the Guardian they did not recall an incident in which, as O’Reilly has claimed, “concrete was raining down on us” and “we were attacked by protesters”.
Several members of the team suggested that O’Reilly may instead be overstating a fracas involving one disgruntled Los Angeles resident, who smashed one of their cameras with a piece of rubble.
Two of the team said the man was angered specifically by O’Reilly behaving disrespectfully after arriving at the smoking remains of his neighbourhood in a limousine, whose driver at one point began polishing the vehicle. O’Reilly is said to have shouted at the man and asked him: “Don’t you know who I am?”
O’Reilly, 65, is one of the most influential figures in American broadcasting and publishing. He is paid a reported $20m a year to host his show, the O’Reilly Factor, which consistently ranks among the most-watched current affairs programs in US cable TV. He has also authored several bestselling books and memoirs.
He has for several days been defending himself against accusations that he inflated his recollections of reporting from Argentina at the end of the Falklands war as a young correspondent for CBS News. The Guardian found he had told differing versions of an apparent encounter at gunpoint with Argentinian forces.
He has also been accused of lying in one of his books about being present at the scene when a CIA source, who had allegedly been linked to the assassination of President John F Kennedy, killed himself in 1977.
Fox News and Holt–publisher of O’Reilly’s book on Kennedy–have stood firmly by their man. O’Reilly’s show has never much been about facts any way as delivering anger to a key republican base. This would seem hard to ignore. Additionally, O’Reilly has actually threatened reporters. Every one expected the name calling but it’s gone way beyond that now. How can Fox stand behind an on air personality that lies and threatens journalists?
As the controversy surrounding Bill O’Reilly and his war reporting experiences continues to heat up, with more allegations coming out each day, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow wonders how much longer Fox News can stand by the host.
On Wednesday evening, Maddow spoke with Mother Jones author David Corn, one of the journalists who wrote the original report revealing the inaccuracies in O’Reilly’s story. O’Reilly subsequently called Corn “a liar” and said that he deserves to be put in “the kill zone.” On Tuesday, the Fox News host threatened a New York Times reporter covering the scandal: “I am coming after you with everything I have,” O’Reilly said.
“Apparently, they [Fox News] think it’s proper for one journalist to call another one names,” Corn told Maddow. “Not that it scares me off the story, but I have family and I have friends who are concerned about me now.”
Corn called the threats “highly inappropriate” and noted that O’Reilly still has not disproven “a single fact” from his piece.
Maddow said that after his threats to Corn and the Times’ reporter, it is “untenable” for Fox News to stand by him.
“They employ a lot of journalists, including those who work in risky situations,” she said. “Fox is a good place to work for journalists.”
Maddow made a similar point on her show one night earlier, questioning what O’Reilly’s behavior will do to Fox News’ “work environment” and to the “real reporters” that work there
Why on earth do news personalities like O’Reilly and Brian Williams lie when their jobs should be all about integrity? 
Do they all yearn to be seen as Walter Cronkite? Do their memories and egos just run amok?
News in America has increasingly become infotainment—half factual information about the world’s events, half dazzling production and splashy narratives. Simultaneously, fewer and fewer Americans have ever seen battle; most of us only know war from what we see in film and television. So war itself becomes difficult to distinguish from entertainment. American Sniper, with its ambiguous moral commitments, is now the highest grossing American war film of all time, adjusted for inflation. Unlike popular war films about battles long past, American Sniper is set during the Iraq war, the effects of which are only beginning to ripple across our culture. Moreover, its story allegedly reflects the true-life story of its central character, sniper Chris Kyle. It’s somewhat true, like the news, but with a better script and pretty actors.
Which makes it hard for the news to keep up, even when you’re as handsome as Brian Williams. Unlike most cinematic retellings of wars, actual wars are multifaceted, complicated, anti-climactic, and grim. When war is already a successful subject in mainstream cinema, news purveyors whose professions have become increasingly akin to entertainment are shrewd to play up war stories in relaying the narrative of the day. The trouble is that shrewdness, for some news professionals, has morphed into a calculated consideration of the entertainment value of war stories, regardless of their factuality.
Maybe Williams and O’Reilly are merely victims of the fallible human brain. Or maybe that hunger to entertain—and, perhaps, for a touch of glory—overwhelmed their professional duty to the facts. What, after all, is more exciting than a war story in which you’re the star.
The other story I’ve followed has been yet another installment of “Is blogging dead?” These are articles that I’ve seen a lot of since around three years ago. I guess the collapse of the Andrew Sullivan experiment has brought on another deluge. The link explores the musings of bloggers from “The Golden Age” which seems an odd way to describe a period of maybe 5 years. Any way, there are a few bloggers with opinions both ways. I’ve followed a few of the links including this one from fellow economist/blogger Noah Smith.
In a nutshell, what is dying is the idea of the blog as a news source. In the old days, as a reader, you would have a favorite blogger, who would write many frequent posts throughout the day. That would be your main news source, your portal to current events. Often the post would have a slight bit of commentary or reaction. Basically, you got to hear the world narrated through the voice of someone you liked. For me, those narrators were University of California, Berkeley, economist Brad DeLong and Matt Yglesias, now at Vox. For many, it was Sullivan.
Twitter has basically killed that. With a Twitter feed you can integrate a bunch of different narrators into a single, flowing newsreel. It turns out that most of the micro-commentary that used to accompany a blog post can be squeezed into one or two tweets.
But the thing about micro-blogging is that, well, it’s micro. If you look at the blogs that Klein lists as the future (and there are many, many more), you will see that they all do posts that are about the length of a news article. That’s something Twitter complements, but can’t replicate.
However, that doesn’t mean that blog posts are now just news articles freed from the tyranny of professional editors. With blogs, you can do something that news can’t easily do — you can carry on a conversation.
I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about those declaring blogging to be the refuge of 40 year olds with kids or that nothing relevant happens on blogs these days. Maybe it’s because many of my friends are bloggers. But, I would like to point out that Lamar White–a blogging law student–broke two huge stories in the last year. The first was the shoddy situation with moonlight Congressman–now Senator–Double Bill Cassiday. The LSU med center just audited whitewashed its findings and Lamar is still on top of it. His second piece connecting Congressman Steve Scalise to the local white supremacists and David Duke nearly cost Scalise a leadership position. Indeed, bloggers can frequently do good local investigations which is something local and national media rarely fund any more.
I would agree that blogging is changing but then so are all forms of written communication as well as broadcast media. Chris Cilliza has another notion.
The idea inherent in all of the death knells for blogging is that blogging is any one thing. It’s not. As I explain to anyone who will listen to me — an ever-shrinking populace — a “blog” is simply a publishing medium. It’s a way to put content on the Internet — usually a fast and, relatively, user-friendly way. But, the conflating a publishing medium with a sort of online writing — opinionated, snarky — that tends to be the preferred approach of many of its users is a mistake.
Well, we’re still standing–or sitting as the case may be–while sharing information with each other. We’ve all come a long way since we were booted from various communities for being loyal to Hillary back in 2008. I think there will always be a place for alternative voices. I say this as a former writer of an underground “newspaper”–The Aardvark–from way back in the day. The medium evolves. The writer’s voice and need to write carries on.
So, what’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
ecocatwoman
grayslady
mablue2
NW Luna
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
You asked: “why on earth do news personalities…lie?” I do believe they think what they are saying is true, or at least their ‘magical’ thinking has created the memory they wished for themseles
Seems that one. Maybe it’s one upmanship.
Oops, (didn’t finish my thought) but of course Dr. BB can better address that than I.
Great post Dak. I need to share this link because it cause a huge stir at my house last night.
http://www.salon.com/2015/02/27/what_color_is_this_dress_the_internets_curiously_civil_war_between_perception_and_fact/
My Daughter and my son’s girlfriend and I saw black and blue. My son and mom saw white and gold. My husband saw gray and lavender.
Another link. Is blogging dead?
http://m.ajc.com/news/news/alpharetta-blogger-hacked-to-death-in-bangladesh/nkKmy/
I see blue and brown.
I must be weird because the only thing I see is the true color of the thing.
Which is?
Lightish blue and gold
Nope. According to the people at the wedding, the dress was dark blue and black. The dress is for sale on Amazon UK here:
Me, too.
WTF is the big deal about? They are all right. It all depends on the monitor, the lighting, one’s definition of a color, and one’s particular color perception. Of course there are differences.
Differences ranging from white to dark blue while two people are looking at it on the same computer screen? I’ve never experienced that before. What about the people who saw it as white and gold and then were able to switch to seeing it as dark blue and gold?
The people who thought it was light blue and gold–it looked more like tan to me–were a tiny minority.
According to cognitive scientists quoted in the NYT, it could have to do with individual differences in brain structure, probably something to do with the number of blue cones a person has. One psychologist who is an expert in visual illusions said the image posted on Tumblr appeared to be a type of reversible image, like a Necker cubel, which explains why some people could switch their experience of the colors back and forth. Read more at the link.
I saw pictures of that dress along side the other. I always saw blue and black in that shot. There are like 4 shots of the thing out there now and many have been doctored so I’m confused now.
We saw this dress shit on our phones so I don’t know if the screen is different or not.
I saw this breakdown of the colors within the picture at Wired. I see the same colors as the boxes where they pulled the color points out of the picture that’s causing the controversy. Those are basically the colors I see.
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/science-one-agrees-color-dress/
And I saw the same colors you did. But if it’s just the photograph, why are all those scientists also confused by the phenomenon? Frankly, I thought the whole thing was silly until I realized the the majority of people weren’t seeing the light blue color at all. When I realized it was visual illusion I became intrigued.
Did you read the NYT article I posted? And from your Wired link:
He agrees with what I wrote above, extracting from the NYT article and my own knowledge of color vision.
Yes. I read it. I just liked the wired article because of the color squares, etc.
My hair is silver/white, but when I get my license renewed, I’m a blonde.
Not a good look.
Interesting topic this morning. I have been thinking about making my communications with others clearer. Then I thought about the fugly GOP, and the way they communicate, take Shock Walker comparing his ability to deal with protestors to dealing with Isis. This whole fucking thing of being clear when speaking has gotten to the lowest point I’ve seen. Believe me, since I’ve had the stroke, I am always trying to deal with communications/words. You know me. Now put that together with colors, seems not to help when you are muddling through the language. Here’s what Rachel said, and if you review her video you can adjust the settings, color, tone, etc. etc.
http://on.msnbc.com/1FqRTPJ
There doesn’t seem to be much retribution for lack of integrity and lying. This is especially true on Fox News (sic). They’re chasing ratings and acolytes.
Great post Dak……..bye the by, I really think Lamar White is brilliant, and started following him since your introduction.
Yes, and we are still here for Hillary. As a follow up to Patricia Arquette, she said, “she’s right it’s time to have wage equality ONCE AND FOR ALL.” Now that the message she shouted out to the world.
Now, Visualize Carly Fiorina’s message, “Please name an accomplish you have made Hillary Clinton”. Here’s the woman that John McCain hired to be his Economic adviser during his campaign. Here’s the Hewlett Packard CEO, who was fired for poor management, who laid off thousands of workers, who moved thousands of workers overseas, and decided that she was qualified to take on Barbara Boxer’s job, and lost her ass off in California. The only thing Carly cares about is Carly, and the 21 million she received as severance pay when she was fired as CEO. She’s out saying that the Clinton Foundation is a problem and a conflict of interest. Are you kidding me, the foundation is a charitable organization, that gives to millions of people around the globe. And that includes HIV, and other medical needs, like water, housing, and food, it’s for the poorest of the poor. That includes creating jobs for other countries too. Carly has never created a fucking job for anyone but herself. She is not and will never be in the same league as Hillary Clinton.
Here’s the message folks, are you going to vote for a republican who refuses to give women equal pay, or vote the woman, Hillary Clinton who believes in the Equal Pay Act, who wrote the Ledbetter bill. It’s very simple, get the message out.
More about the messaging and visual takes on messages, the dems better get focused on clear communications, they had better admit that they learned from the last election, when they didn’t stand with Pres. Obama, and decided to back away. Don’t back away, put on your damn supershero shirt, and get with the message.
Lamar is going to go to get his doctorate in Journalism at LSU and study with Bob Mann. I’m pretty excited to see that combo.
That’s great news.
Leonard Nimoy has died.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/27/entertainment/feat-obit-leonard-nimoy-spock/
One of his last tweets
Evocative.
That’s sad. I didn’t realize he was 83. I really thought he was about 70. But I haven’t seen him for a long time.
I’ve got hundreds of friends on facebook and that’s all they are posting today. We seem to have the common thread of being very impacted by ST.
Apparently, he was not only a terrific actor; he was a really good man.
Live long and prosper.
Don’t live too long, or you won’t prosper–not in this country.
As I recall, Al Franken collected a massive number of O’Reilly lies in his book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
Here’s a classic confrontation between Franken and O’Reilly.
I have that book. I’ll have to go look at the O’Reilly chapter.
I could be wrong. I haven’t read it in a long time. I don’t know if he covered the Falklands stories or not.
I looked in the book. Franken didn’t cover the Falklands, etc., but he did discover that O’Reilly lied about where he was born because he wanted to people to think he came from poverty. He didn’t. He claimed he had never heard of a reporter who interviewed him on tape. He lied about being a registered Independent when he had long been a registered Republican. And other lies.
Excellent post, Dak. Your O’Reilly links are great, and I’m working through them.
I don’t think blogging is dead at all. All Sullivan’s failure did was show that when shut out everyone who can’t pay to read you, you lose a hell of a lot of readers and people don’t hear that much about you anymore.
The same thing happened to Howard Stern when he went to Sirius radio. He makes lots of money but hardly anyone listens to him and he doesn’t get as much publicity as he used to. I think the NYT is doing the same thing to itself.
Yes, I think paywalls tend to limit your audience immediately. It’s noble to not want to take ads but seriously, how many people want to commit to monthly fees when you don’t read but an article or two. At least some places have a limited amount of free access.
My local paper just instituted a paywall behind their text-only (no-ad) web version. As far as I can tell, they don’t even have the low-graphic, no-ad version even if you subscribe.
I would be far more likely to pay a reasonable monthly/annual fee if I didn’t have to deal with all the annoying ads, but they don’t offer that option.
I don’t think there’s any comparison between the lies of Bill O’Reilly and the exaggerations of Brian Williams. Williams actually did serious reporting in dangerous places. He just stretched the truth in the retelling. O’Reilly has been telling out and out lies for decades and getting away with it, because Fox News doesn’t care about lying. All their hosts lie.
CNN:
Boris Nemtsov, outspoken Putin critic, shot dead in Moscow
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/27/europe/russian-politician-killed/
Smells like CIA.