The Blog of Record

When the headline fits the photo.

Source.

Death sells, so they make sure they are ready to cash in:

The family of Sen. Edward Kennedy announced his death around 1:20 a.m. Wednesday morning. Within hours, news organizations had posted full-length obituaries complete with quotes from friends, family, and political experts about his life. How far in advance do newspapers prepare obituaries?

It depends on the person. The vast majority of obituaries are written after someone dies, not before. But news organizations prepare so-called “advancers” in one of three situations: The subject is so famous that the paper would be embarrassed not to have an immediate package in the event of an untimely death; the subject is old or sick; or the subject is “at risk”—i.e., he’s a drug addict or a stunt biker. The first category is rarified: world leaders such as Barack Obama or Gordon Brown. The second category includes Sen. Kennedy and other figures over the average life expectancy of 75 or 80. (Even before Kennedy announced that he had brain cancer in May 2008, newspapers were preparing obituary packages.) Likewise, The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer had an obit ready for Pope John Paul II a full two years before his death. Into the third category fall stars like Michael Jackson and Britney Spears. When Jackson died at 50, the Los Angeles Times already had an obituary ready because he had a spotty health record. In 2008, when Spears’ antics were regularly featured in the tabloids, the Associated Press prepared her obituary despite the fact that she was only 26 years old.

The New York Times says it has 1200 obituaries ready and waiting, some of them from the early 1980s. More interesting facts in the linked article.

The new-media crisis of 1949: What the digital media are now doing to newspapers, the music industry and TV is exactly what TV did to network radio 60 years ago. Plus, three lessons from 1949 for today’s old-media executives.

A while ago, The Associated Press discovered the Internet and those pesky people called bloggers, and decided to make them stop citing its content. You can go here to learn more about the AP’s valiant fight against people who send it traffic by linking to its stories after citing a few lines, or you can just look at the image below (click to enlarge).

(Image from Imgur.)

I guess they all were on sick leave when this Walter Cronkite hagiography piece was being published. Here is how it ends:

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 22, 2009
An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 1, 2009
An appraisal on July 18 about Walter Cronkite’s career misstated the name of the ABC evening news broadcast. While the program was called “World News Tonight” when Charles Gibson became anchor in May 2006, it is now “World News With Charles Gibson,” not “World News Tonight With Charles Gibson.”

The newspaper of record, eh? At least they managed to spell “Walter Cronkite” correctly.

(Via Tom McMahon.)

The journo’s name is Carol Rosenberg, from the Miami Herald, and if the claims in the complaint are true, I have no idea how someone like her can be employed as a journalist. Go here for the text of Commander Jeffrey D. Gordon’s letter to Rosenberg’s boss.

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. media aren’t reporting the news:

The government of Hungary voted to cut income taxes Monday to pull itself out of recession, and America’s media for the most part ignored it.

At the same time, German chancellor Angela Merkel is pushing for lower taxes to help her nation’s economy, and our press have similarly been less than enthusiastic about sharing the news.

The news the media suppress tell even more about their agenda than the news they report.

Norway’s oil wealth is keeping it afloat while the world is struggling. So what economic lesson does the New York Times see here? No, it’s not “Drill, drill, drill!” – it’s “Free markets don’t work! Socialism! Socialism!”.

The reporters who ignored one president spring to their feet when another one enters the room. And then they wait for his permission to be seated so they can write their truthful, unbiased reports.

(Via Andrew Bolt.)

Joe Sherlock:

Remember the Butte, Montana plane crash in March that killed seven adults and seven children? It was, of course, a tragedy.

Media reports noted that the victims were “ultrarich.” The Associated Press also reported that Dr. Irving ‘Bud’ Feldkamp (the guy who leased the plane, father of two of the adult victims and grandfather to five of the children who perished) was waiting “at the entrance of the ultra-exclusive resort where he planned to spend the week skiing with his children and grandchildren.” The location was called a “millionaires-only resort” later in the same article.

Despite the apparent focus on wealth, what the media didn’t reveal was the source of the money. Bud Feldkamp is president of Family Planning Associates Medical Group, Inc., a health care organization that is California’s largest for-profit abortion provider. The plane crashed in Holy Cross Cemetery in Butte, not far from The Tomb of the Unborn, a memorial for babies who have died because of abortion.

‘Rich’ is somehow newsworthy; abortion connections are not. Always remember that ‘news’ is often selective.

The Associated Press wants you to hate the rich, not abortionists.

The Associated Press is on a crusade against what it sees as copyright theft, but it may have made a blunder this time:

A country radio station in Tennessee, WTNQ-FM, received a cease-and-desist letter from an A.P. vice president of affiliate relations for posting videos from the A.P.’s official Youtube channel on its Website.

You cannot make this stuff up. Forget for a moment that WTNQ is itself an A.P. affiliate and that the A.P. shouldn’t be harassing its own members. Apparently, nobody told the A.P. executive that the august news organization even has a YouTube channel which the A.P. itself controls, and that someone at the A.P. decided that it is probably a good idea to turn on the video embedding function on so that its videos can spread virally across the Web, along with the ads in the videos.

Rupert Murdoch says they are.

While the Internet is not the only reason why the news industry is dying, Murdoch still has a point: the search-engine news aggregators do profit from other people’s work without paying them a penny. They do send traffic their way, though.

Update-1: Is everything Google’s fault now?

Update-2: The Associated Press wants news aggregators to pay up, or it sues. If you see the name AP in a news article, you can be sure the words “legal action” are somewhere in the same sentence.

Another (here is a previous one) letter to the media from Donald J. Boudreaux, chairman of the department of economics at George Mason University:

Here’s a letter that I sent several days ago to a member of Big Media:

27 March 2009

Editor, The New York Times
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10018

To the Editor:

A headline about New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand reads “As New Lawyer, Senator Defended Big Tobacco” (March 27).  I ask: Are you capable of writing “tobacco” without prefacing it with the word “big”?  Similarly, can you write “oil” without the same ominous preface?

These industries indeed are big, but each is a dwarf compared to Uncle Sam.

So why do you not routinely describe government as “big government”?  The menacing overtones of such a description are especially appropriate for the state because, unlike “big tobacco” and “big oil,” government uses violence against persons who refuse to fund its budget and otherwise do its bidding.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

 Sensational: the New York Times is dishonest:

The journalistic legacy of Walter Duranty, Herbert Matthews and Jayson Blair is alive and well at the New York Times:

A lawyer involved with legal action against Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) told a House Judiciary subcommittee on March 19 The New York Times had killed a story in October that would have shown a close link between ACORN, Project Vote and the Obama campaign because it would have been a “a game changer.”

Heather Heidelbaugh, who represented the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee in the lawsuit against the group, recounted for the committee what she had been told by a former ACORN worker who had worked in the group’s Washington, D.C. office. The former worker, Anita Moncrief, told Ms. Heidelbaugh last October, during the state committee’s litigation against ACORN, she had been a “confidential informant for several months to The New York Times reporter, Stephanie Strom.”

Read the rest, if your digestion can stand it.

So, where’s the sensation? Did you guys really expect the NYT to publish something that could have hurt Obama’s chances? Seriously? They’re the New York Times, for Christ’s sake. Even their Obama-Ayers article was a total whitewash.

Another one bites the dust – actually, another 59:

The company that owns the Chicago Sun-Times and 58 other newspapers and online sites said Tuesday it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The Sun-Times Media Group, Inc. said it would continue to operate its newspapers and Web sites as usual while it improves its cost structure and stabilizes operations.

Tuesday’s announcement comes amid a raft of newspaper closings and cuts that has seen the end of The Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Colorado; The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and The Christian Science Monitor.

The chain that owns the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune is in bankruptcy and other papers are on the brink. And two industry giants, The Washington Post and The New York Times, announced last week they are cutting costs and staff amid tumbling revenue and continued economic decline.

The Sun-Times said similar cost-cutting measures failed to turn around the company’s fortunes.

[T]he company would explore the potential sale of assets or new investment in the company to help it remain viable.

At least 120 newspapers in the United States have shut down since January 2008, according to Paper Cuts, a Web site tracking the newspaper industry. More than 21,000 jobs at 67 newspapers have vaporized in that time, according to the site.

Newspapers have struggled to meet challenges posed by changing reader habits, a shifting advertising market, an anemic economy, and the newspaper industry’s own early strategic errors.

Yeah, strategic errors like a decision to be a press wing of one of the political parties instead of reporting the news. I wonder if there isn’t some kind of connection between this “strategic error” and those ”changing reader habits”.

At least they are dying happy newspapers, knowing they did everything they possibly could to get their guy elected one last time, and that their last desperate effort – even if it cost them the trust of their few remaining readers – was such a huge success. Rest in peace, pillars of democracy – your ultimate sacrifice was not in vain.

A letter to CNN news host Rick Sanchez  from Donald J. Boudreaux, chairman of the department of economics at George Mason University:

Dear Mr. Sanchez:

Re your interview today with economics students at Georgia State University: when a young man said that he is skeptical of government regulation and that he values individual liberty, you derisively accused him of believing that the economy would work well “without any rules.”

The smug assurance of your accusation reveals your gross misunderstanding of the case for free markets.  That case is not that rules are unnecessary.  Rather, it’s that rules written by politicians and enforced by bureaucrats generally work much less well than do rules that emerge decentrally – rules that evolve from the voluntary interactions and successes and mistakes of individuals each pursuing his or her own goals without being herded by a central authority – rules that are enforced by competition and by the exercise of personal responsibility and that, when sufficiently important, become formalized in case law declared by courts.

The distinction between what you think of as rules and the kinds of rules that permeate successful market economies is perhaps subtle.  But it’s also real and important.  You should try to grasp it.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

As they say, it’s not news – it’s CNN.

Are newspapers really essential for democracy? Not to the extent to which they are essential for getting Democrats elected, that’s for sure.

For the media, even praising Michelle Obama seems to be just an opportunity to publish “misstatements” about her predecessor. And sometimes it’s hard to say what is worse – the lies or the compliments.

The general idea of the media’s Obama coverage seems to be that the few things that are right with America don’t date back any further than January 20, 2009.

If you think you’ve seen the worst of the media orgasming over the Obamas, you haven’t read this: “How long has it been since a First Couple seemed to want each other?” 

The most unbelievable thing in this story is the section under which it’s filed, which is clear from the link: http://nymag.com/news/politics/55362/.