Category: Media Watch

Richard Engel, NBC’s savvy, chief foreign correspondent, had some pointed comments the other day in the wake of the Nuseum’s controversial decision to not honor two cameramen–working for Hamas-run Al Aqsa TV–who were killed in the line of Middle East “duty.” It’s a microcosm of the increasingly controvertible issue of activists as journalists.  Basically, who’s a “journalist” these days? And we’re not even talking free-lancing bloggers.

Said Engel: “Just because you carry a camera and a notebook doesn’t make you a journalist. A journalist has the responsibility to seek the truth no matter what it is, even if the story hurts your cause. Journalists shouldn’t have causes. They should have principles and beliefs.”

News gatherers/disseminators in the field, however, have typically been accorded the benefit of the doubt, even if they’re obviously not all Ernie Pyles.

The journalistic hybrid that we are most familiar with, however, is the one much closer to home: the studio-side punditocracy. It’s a reminder–thanks, again, Fox and MSNBC–that it’s no longer journalism when you’re taking sides, even if you’re a former journalist such as Chris Matthews. (The Glenn Becks, Sean Hannitys and Bill O’Reilly’s, of course, never even trafficked in the fact-finding field in the first place.) It’s advocacy; it’s propaganda; it’s, well, show business. When you’re dependent on ratings and advertising, your first priority is ideologically varnished truth. Next is the sort of over-the-top-personality and conflict that appeals to viewers looking to be entertained and validated. Nothing else matters.

Now it’s a slippery partisan slope, a political pop-culture staple that is arguably beyond redemption. As for the Richard Engels reporting from harm’s way, it’s still more of an old-school slog. For now.

This column periodically highlights juxtaposed differences–whether a function of priorities or proactive hustle–in local media coverage and occasionally points out prominent proof-reading oversights in print. The inevitable theme of the latter: While mistakes, of course, have always happened in deadlined media, it’s never been like this. As newspapers struggle to compete, chronic down-staffing and overall dumbing-down hardly help.

*I’m a hockey fan, so when I picked up Saturday’s morning Tampa Tribune, I checked the tease for Stanley Cup playoff results. There it was on page 1 of Sports: “Rangers beat Capitals in overtime to take over momentum with victory in Game 5 of Eastern Conference series.” See page 2 for details. I did. Page 2: “Capitals Defeat Rangers in OT.” Indeed, it’s all in the details.

* Saturday’s Tampa Bay Times trumpeted the bullrushing Dow 30 Industrials hitting another record high: “15,1184.40.” Hey, what’s an extra digit? It’s still a record.

*Saturday’s leading editorial in the Times railed against a lack of transparency in what hospitals charge. In fact, “the ‘stack is decked’ against the working poor” it underscored. In reality, it’s even worse: The deck is actually stacked against those who can’t afford insurance.

*A lot of political glitterati turned out for the Hillsborough County Democratic Party’s Kennedy-King fundraiser in Tampa last Saturday night. The keynote speaker was former Gov. Charlie Crist. The Sunday Times accorded it page-one coverage with a prominent, two-photo spread on the page-5 jump. The cutlines on both photos identified Crist greeting and then dining with former state Education Commissioner Betty Castor. Oops, it was actually former Tampa Mayor Sandy Freedman. Separated at birth?

Thematic ads around Mother’s Day are nothing new. In fact, the Trib worked in three female-oriented ones on the same page last Saturday. Let’s see, there was one stressing breast-cancer ultrasound screening, one addressing ovarian cancer awareness and one promoting a Shooters World special: “Mom shoots free on Mother’s Day.” You can’t make this up; let it go at that.

* “Syria is Iraq’s twin: an artificial state that was also born after World War I inside lines drawn by imperial powers. Like Iraq, Syria’s constituent communities–Sunnis, Alawite/Shiites, Kurds, Druze, Christians–never volunteered to live together under agreed rules. So, like Iraq, Syria has been ruled for much of its modern history by either a colonial power or an iron-fisted autocrat.”–Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times.

* “We just had an election. And this isn’t Mr. Romney’s Cabinet, or Mr. Rick Perry’s Cabinet. This is Barack Obama’s Cabinet.”–Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., on the deep resistance President Obama’s latest Cabinet nominees are running into from Republican senators.

* “I just don’t buy that this was a couple of rogue IRS employees. After all, groups with ‘progressive’ in their names were not targeted similarly.”–Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, on the Internal Revenue Service’s heightened scrutiny of conservative political groups.

* “Let’s face it, democracy is still a work in progress in this country. Recall: Al Gore’s loss, recent voter-suppression efforts and the inability of 60 senators to agree with 90% of Americans on gun control. To expect ‘democracy’ out of the Muddled East is to misread reality. Stability without brutalizing dictatorship is as high as the bar goes.” —Joe O’Neill, La Gaceta.

* “Investors deserve to know at long last: Are the companies they trust with their hard-earned cash investing it in research and development (R&D) or wasting it to support the two major political parties (R’s and D’s)?”–Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, assistant professor of law at Stetson University College of Law.

* “There’s very little transparency out there about what doctors and hospitals are charging for services.”–Robert Zirkelbach, spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, the nation’s largest association of health insurers.

* “The trick is to make a Gatsby movie that couldn’t have been made by Gatsby–an unglossy portrait of gloss.”–Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic.

* “Surprise, shock, disbelief.”–Reaction to the jury’s verdict in the Casey Anthony case by presiding Judge Belvin Perry.

* “We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER–you can use caps.”–Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder.

* “We believe the number of crashes involving cell phone use is much greater than what is being reported.”–Janet Froetscher, president of the National Safety Council.

* “Florida is the center of the U.S. travel and tourism industry. This move enables us to be closer to leisure and business customers.”–Mark P. Frissora, chairman and CEO of Hertz, which will move its headquarters from New Jersey to (Estero) Florida.

* “I’ve always been up front about the type of leader I wanted to be: an inclusive reformer.”–Speaker of the Florida House Will Weatherford.

* “In Washington, everyone’s taking notice of his strong stand on the Medicaid expansion issue. … He’s building a reputation as a solid conservative who you can rely on.”–American Conservative Union chairman Al Cardenas referring to Will Weatherford.

* “I have no plans to run (for governor). I have no intention to run. … I’m enjoying being senator. But I must say I’m frustrated. I’m very frustrated. I mean the extremists around here. You can’t get anything done. The filibuster is really being abused.”–Florida Sen. Bill Nelson.

* “No matter how you might color it, amnesty is amnesty.”–U.S. Rep. C.W. Bill Young, R-Fla.

* “Media gimmick.”–Term used by State Sen. Joe Negron, R-Stuart, in describing TaxWatch’s annual list of budget “turkeys.”

* “We live here. This is not our last project here. We need this to be a trophy project for us and for the city of Tampa. This is a labor of love. … We are going to be focused on making Channelside the epicenter of downtown Tampa.”–Punit Shah, one of the partners of Liberty Channelside, the joint venture that has signed an agreement to purchase the Channelside Bay Plaza lease.

* “This is a case of be careful what you wish for.”–Straz Center president Judy Lisi in urging restraint over the ambitious, 36-story, residential tower proposed near the Straz by developers Greg Minder and Phillip Smith.

* “Tampa has been a better franchise and city because of Ronde’s presence.”–Former Buccaneers–and current Atlanta Falcons–general manager Rich McKay on the retirement of the Bucs’ Ronde Barber.

* “We should be lucid: a country that depends almost entirely on the international community for the salaries of its soldiers and policemen, for most of its investments and partly on it for its current civil expenditure, cannot be really independent.”–Bernard Bajolet, departing French ambassador to Afghanistan.

* “We’ve all suspected it. But for President Karzai to admit it out loud brings us into a bizarro world.”–Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, on the admission by Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai that he has taken bags of cash from the CIA for a decade.

* “There are limits to what outsiders can do with military force; local realities trump global abstractions. It is not enough to want to do good; goals must also be achievable at a cost in line with interests. We ignore these truisms at our peril.”–Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

* “It’s not sustainable–the notion that we’re going to keep100 individuals in no man’s land in perpetuity.”–President Barack Obama in saying he would recommit himself to closing the Guantanamo Bay prison.

* “I sit here all day long trying to persuade people to do things they ought to have sense enough to do without my persuading them … That’s all the power of the president amounts to.”–The late President Harry Truman.

* “Suddenly, out of nowhere, the world seems to be awash in hydrocarbons.”–Michael Greenstone, environmental economics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

* “If two people think they’re the smartest in the room, one of them must be wrong, I think. Must be why I continue to be fascinated by the charlatans who inhabit politics.”–Leo Morris, The Fort Wayne News-Sentinel.

* “It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn’t done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day.”–Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor reflecting on Bush vs. Gore, which ended the Florida recount and decided the 2000 presidential election.

* “They (gun control advocates) use tragedy to try to blame us, to shame us into compromising our freedom for their political agenda. No matter what it takes, we will never give up or compromise our constitutional freedom, not one single inch.”–NRA Executive VP Wayne LaPierre.

* “In this country, you are better off being rich and guilty than poor and innocent.”–Yale Law School Professor Stephen Bright.

* “If you do not do Medicaid expansion, or something similar to that, there is a very real penalty imposed upon the employers of the state of Florida.”–Sen. David Simmons, R-Altamonte Springs.

* “This was a great (legislative) session.”–Gov. Rick Scott.

* “The key to meaningfully growing the Florida economy is not its tax structure. It’s been more than competitive for years. The critical elements remain manifestly obvious: infrastructure and education.”–Joe O’Neill, La Gaceta.

* “This is probably as aggressive time as we have had in the past five to seven years. With the ongoing discussion of what may be going on in the Channelside area, all of a sudden you are not hearing any new development strategy without a hotel being included.”–Bob Morrison, executive director of the Hillsborough County Hotel & Motel Association.

* “He’ll be a good friend to the mayors around the country, which is good.”–Mayor Bob Buckhorn on the nomination of Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx as U.S. Transportation Secretary.

* “If how we looked the last 15 games is how we look the first15 games (next season), we’re in trouble.”–Tampa Bay Lightning coach Jon Cooper.

*In our continuous-loop, blogosphered, Twitterized communications universe, we have been reminded by the Boston bombings that there remains a vital role for serious journalism. CNN, of course, has become Exhibit A for all that’s wrong with a get-it-first, hope-it’s right modus operandi. And the New York Post remains a tabloid sham. This is more than a teachable moment for J-Schools. It’s a societal reminder that speculation is not a synonym for news and retraction is not an acceptable backup plan–unless, or course, misinformation and libel scenarios no longer matter.

But let’s do give it up for serious newspapers doing what they do best: real journalism. As in assigning a team, chasing leads, cross-checking sources, exercising judgment, unearthing details, providing fact-checkers and then editing responsibly. Most notably: The Boston Globe and The New York Times. The Tampa Bay Times liberally used their copy and was the better for it. As were its readers.

* Here’s the good news. The Tribune Company, whose newspaper ownership includes The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Hartford Courant, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sun and The Sun Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, has a viable buyer prospect, someone capable of the kind of capital infusion necessary for these prime-time dailies to stay competitive.

Here’s the bad news. That prospective buyer is Koch Industries, the domain of the billionaire Koch Brothers, Charles and David, the hard-core, Rick Scott-befriending libertarians who underwrite the right-wing Cato Institute and Tea Party-supporting PACS.

* So much for that plaintive plea of Jill Kelley for the media to please back off and respect her privacy. Tampa’s most notorious “socialite” made the rounds–publicist in tow–at last weekend’s media-embedded, pre-White House Correspondents’ Dinner cocktail party at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington.

* Speaking of the Correspondents’ Dinner, isn’t President Barack Obama, who has more important things on his agenda than quipping for A-Listers and practicing his comedic-timing skills, the best one on the dais at this event? As for the various professional-comic hosts, I’ll take Seth Myers who worked last year’s. All too often the host is both topically funny and wince-ably offensive. Stephen Colbert, although he was lionized by many Democrats, was the worst. At some point you show respect for the office of the presidency even if it’s inhabited by the unlikely likes of “W.”

By the way, the president’s best line–after “Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?”–was his response to the Republican Party’s ostensible minority-outreach plans. “Think of me as a trial run.” Good stuff.

* Ironically, the social media flurry that followed the Boston bombings underscored a factor not unrelated to issues, including threats, involving America. A number of social-media-commenting Americans had confused Chechnya, a part of the Russian Federation, with the Czech Republic, a Central European country. Understandably, it didn’t go over well with the Czech ambassador to the United States, who found it necessary to differentiate the two on his embassy’s website. He was diplomatic by calling it “a most unfortunate misunderstanding.” Most Czechs weighing in on Twitter were far more critical.

Actually, the geographic faux pas is symptomatic. By and large, Americans don’t know history and geography–including their own, much less others’.  And the embarrassing deficit only grows worse, which is scary. We live in a world that, like it or not, is increasingly a global village. The less we know of religious-ethnic zealots and geopolitical sovereigns–from the generically repressive and ideologically driven to comfort-zone democracies–the more we disadvantage ourselves. Whether it’s Chechnya and the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Swaziland or Sierra Leone and Mama Leone’s, we risk imperiling ourselves–from trade to foreign policy–with what we don’t know about the rest of the world.

* “Cuba has taken some modest steps towards opening up. Easing up on travel restrictions has been one key area. Cuban authorities can say that it is easier now for Cubans to travel to the U.S. than for U.S. citizens to travel to Cuba.”–Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based policy analysis center.

* “We must ask a question only Muslims can answer: What is going on in your community that a critical number of your youth believes that every American military action in the Middle East is intolerable and justifies a violent response, and everything Muslim extremists do to other Muslims is ignorable and calls for mostly silence?”–Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times.

* “For the moment I’m in favor of maintaining celibacy, with its pros and cons, because there have been 10 centuries of good experiences rather than failures. It’s a question of discipline, not of faith. It could change.”–Pre-Pope opinion of then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

* “There was a time in my life when I wasn’t likely to be found in a library, much less found one.”–Former President George W. Bush at the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

* “It’s a great country. There are a lot of great families, and it’s not just four families or whatever. There are other people out there that are very qualified, and we’ve had enough Bushes.”–Barbara Bush commenting on the possibility of son Jeb running for president.

* “The president has kept every promise he’s made. I think he’s done a good job. He kept his word.”–New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on President Obama helping his state recover from Superstorm Sandy.

* “A nation has more in common than geography. It is also common values, a common way of looking at the world–not that everyone agrees on everything always, but that we are at least tethered by similar understanding of who we are and what that means. It is that test this country fails now with regularity.”–Leonard Pitts, Miami Herald.

* “Reporters doing TV news in real time are an oxymoron: You can’t gather news and present it at the same time. Part of news gathering is the gathering part. … Continuous real-time broadcast news is a failed experiment.”–Author James Gleick, New York magazine.

* “Everybody is continuously connected to everybody else on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Reddit, emailing, texting, faster and faster, with the flood of information jeopardizing meaning. Everybody’s talking at once in a hypnotic, hyper din: the cocktail party from hell.”–Maureen Dowd, New York Times.

* “If your religion embraces ‘jihad,’ references ‘infidels’ and provides the wherewithal to cherry pick context for both, your faith doesn’t deserve a ‘religion-of-peace’ designation.”–Joe O’Neill, La Gaceta.

* “You are a coward, Sen. Rubio. You are afraid to stand up to the gun lobby and to stand up for your constituents.”–Pinecrest (Miami-Dade County) Mayor Cindy Lerner.

* “The U.S. tax code is 74,000 pages long. This is seven times longer than the Bible and double the length of Encyclopedia Britannica.”–U.S. Rep. Dennis Ross, R-Lakeland.

* “We could market the Tampa Bay region as the aquarium capital of the world.”–David Yates, Clearwater Marine Aquarium CEO.

* “If we are truly going to be an international destination, then we’ve got to go get the business.”–Mayor Bob Buckhorn on traveling to Germany and Switzerland with a delegation of business recruiters.

* “That economy is hot, they’re buying products, and we’re going to be taking a whole delegation of businesspeople.”–Rick Homans, president and CEO of the Tampa Hillsborough Economic Development Corp., on this fall’s trade mission to Brazil.

* “When you make your bets, you make them for the long-term. I happen to think Tampa is a great bet for the long-term.–Bob Abberger, managing director of Trammell Crow Co., the developer of the delayed SouthGate office tower in downtown Tampa.

* “They’re very discriminating, highly-educated, with high disposable income. Those are the ones we think live in the downtown and Channel area that we want to utilize Channelside.”–Punit Shah, one of the Liberty Channelside LLC partners, on why the joint venture signed an agreement to purchase Channelside Bay Plaza’s lease.

We now know Al Neuharth, the USA Today founder who died last Friday at 89, was a visionary. He addressed the commuter niche and, ironically, anticipated diminished attention spans. But he certainly wasn’t greeted as a visionary by the newspaper establishment in 1982. That was the debut year of his mold-breaking national product, with its eye-catching color and graphics as well as its emphasis on sports, entertainment, state-by-state roundups and brevity. Above all, brevity. Indeed, very few articles jumped to another page. It was, accordingly, lampooned by journalists and media chroniclers as a lightweight, fast-food for thought “McPaper.”

In fact, I remember the following year (1983) I was attending a week-long series of business-writer seminars at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. There were probably 30 of us–from the Tampa Bay Business Journal to the Associated Press to Forbes magazine to, yes, USA Today. It was about this time of the year and coincided with the awarding of the Pulitzers.

I was at lunch one day and the buzz among the dozen or so of us at a long table was about those Pulitzers and the domination by the usual suspects: the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. It was lively, insider stuff.  Among those weighing in was the guy from USA Today, who was also taking his share of professional razzing. Amid the banter, the representative of the Philadelphia Inquirer got everybody’s attention by saying he wanted to formally congratulate the USA Today writer–on his publication’s Pulitzer. We were momentarily stunned. Was this a joke? Was the joke on us? Then came the punch line: “for best investigative paragraph.” Ouch.

Good-natured, but ouch. Even 30 years later.

* “The best thing we as militaries can do is to … get back to peace, so that diplomacy can work.”–Adm. Samuel Locklear, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific.

* “Please help us to do something before our tragedy becomes your tragedy.”–Francine Wheeler, mother of a child murdered in Newtown.

* “A pretty shameful day for Washington.”–President Barack Obama after the Senate rejected a measure to require more gun buyers to go through background checks.

* “Why doesn’t 90 percent of America equal 60 senators?”–Maureen Dowd, New York Times.

* “Americans refuse to be terrorized. Ultimately, that’s what we’ll remember from this week.”–President Barack Obama in the aftermath of the Boston bombings.

* “I fear we have permanently entered the Age of the Retraction. … The rush to be first has so thoroughly swallowed up the principle of being right and first that it seems a little egg on the face is now deemed worth the risk.”–Judy Muller, former network news correspondent and current journalism instructor at the University of Southern California, on the early–and often erroneous–media coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings.

* “We have a media culture that emphasizes opinion in order to fill the 24-hour news cycle and occupy the infinite reaches of broadband. But when it mattered most in Boston, only actual journalism mattered.”–Michael Gerson, Washington Post.

* “This will not be the last oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico or elsewhere. This is a ticking time bomb.”–Steve Murawski, a biologist with the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.

* “There’s going to be merit pay as a part of funding for teachers.”–Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford.

* “You have no idea how comfortable it is to be a Democrat.”–Former Republican Gov. Charlie Crist.

* “He’s the only person that can raise the money to compete, and that is just a fact of life. Unless Bill Nelson decided to get into the race.”–Attorney John Morgan’s assessment of Charlie Crist’s gubernatorial chances against incumbent Rick Scott.

* “The U.S. tax code is 74,000 pages long. This is seven times longer than the Bible and double the length of Encyclopedia Britannica.”–U.S. Rep. Dennis Ross, R-Lakeland.

* “If we’re using a computer for (FCAT) testing, then we’re not using it for instruction. We don’t have enough to do both.”–Peggy Jones, Pasco County director of accountability, research and measurement.

* “We could market the Tampa Bay region as the aquarium capital of the world.”–David Yates, Clearwater Marine Aquarium CEO.

* “If we are truly going to be an international destination, then we’ve got to go get the business.”–Mayor Bob Buckhorn on traveling to Germany and Switzerland with a delegation of business recruiters.

* “When you make your bets, you make them for the long-term. I happen to think Tampa is a great bet for the long-term.”–Bob Abberger, managing director of Trammell Crow Co, the developer of the delayed SouthGate office tower in downtown Tampa.

* “Tampa is an excellent environment for businesses to grow and thrive, and it has proven to be the right choice for us.”–Eric Miller, head of Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. Tampa, which is adding 255 positions at its New Tampa campus.