NBC is the only network news program that’s not losing gobs of money, and that’s only because it has a 24/7 cable news outlet (MSNBC) to recoup its investment.   ABC and CBS are continuing to cut staff to pare costs but have no plan to actually make money, aside from hoping CNN will agree to merge with them for no apparent reason.

If any of this is news to you, NYT goes into this in some detail.

So what?

Network news divisions have historically been family jewels for their parent corporations, lending prestige and an aura of public service — as well as a shield against government intrusion. Mr. Heyward called the network evening newscasts a “bastion of serious news coverage at a time when so much of television has become tabloid and trivial.”

[...]

A survey by the Pew Research Center last year reported that three-quarters of respondents thought the cancellation of the evening newscasts would be an “important loss” to the country. Mr. Rosenstiel said, “None of these news division presidents wants to be the first guy to kill an evening newscast.”

Look, I think it’s important to be in good shape, too, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to quit sitting on the couch drinking beer.  People are theoretically in favor of a lot of things that are supposed to be good for them — broccoli, C-SPAN, classical music, exercise — but that doesn’t mean they’re actually going to choose them over more hedonistic alternatives.

Network news shows used to compete against other network news shows and maybe “Leave it to Beaver” reruns on UHF.  Now, most of us have 200 other choices from sports to sitcoms to home repair.  That’s cut into the network news monopoly.

Furthermore, those of us who are news junkies have plenty of choices, too.  If I really wanted to watch someone read me the news, I’d pick Jim Lehrer.  Since I don’t, I choose the internets.
Still, the networks persist in trying to save a loss leader that few really want:

Mr. Westin said ABC News could no longer afford to support a worldwide staff of about 1,500, with bureaus in cities foreign and domestic, most with traditional TV news work forces: camera operators, sound engineers, tape editors, assignment editors and, of course, correspondents, many with substantial salaries.

More journalists will become jacks-of-all-trades, wielding cameras, microphones and lights, as well as lists of interview questions. More production work will be conducted out of New York. “The ones who fear the most from the cuts are the ones that have a single function,” one ABC staff member said.

Mr. Westin said high-priced and purely cosmetic talent would become an increasingly endangered species. “There have been people in television news — very successful people — who do not write,” he said. “We are going to definitely require more of our journalists.”

Mr. Westin said he did not think the cuts would compromise ABC’s journalism, but not everyone shares his confidence. One veteran ABC News executive said, “Clearly the signal is: It’s not important to create anything new. We simply have to figure out a way to manage it cheaply.”

Or, how about this:  Cancel the show.  That’s what you’d do with any other show whose ratings were flagging and whose production costs exceeded the ability to sell advertising over a long period.

Oh, but nightly newscasts bring prestige!  Really?  Does Katie Couric really have the same gravitas that Walter Cronkite — or even Dan Rather — carried?  Ditto whoever’s currently doing the news for ABC and NBC vs. David Brinkley and John Chancellor?  No.   And it’s not that the new gang isn’t talented and competent.   Or even that they haven’t come up as war correspondents.   No, it’s simply that they’re not in our living rooms every night and therefore don’t have the cultural impact that their antecedents of even twenty years ago did.

And they never will again.

So, get over it.  Focus instead on, oh, entertaining programming.  Because you’re about to be obsolete in that department, too, with USA, SyFy, and HBO making the best shows on television.

Walter Cronkite has passed:

Walter Cronkite, the premier TV anchorman of the networks’ golden age who reported a tumultuous time with reassuring authority and came to be called “the most trusted man in America,” died Friday. He was 92. Cronkite’s longtime chief of staff, Marlene Adler, said Cronkite died at 7:42 p.m. at his Manhattan home surrounded by family. She said the cause of death was cerebral vascular disease.

Adler said, “I have to go now” before breaking down into what sounded like a sob. She said she had no further comment.

Cronkite was the face of the “CBS Evening News” from 1962 to 1981, when stories ranged from the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to racial and anti-war riots, Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis.

It was Cronkite who read the bulletins coming from Dallas when Kennedy was shot Nov. 22, 1963, interrupting a live CBS-TV broadcast of the soap opera “As the World Turns.”

Cronkite was the broadcaster to whom the title “anchorman” was first applied, and he came so identified in that role that eventually his own name became the term for the job in other languages. (Swedish anchors are known as Kronkiters; In Holland, they are Cronkiters.)

“He was a great broadcaster and a gentleman whose experience, honesty, professionalism and style defined the role of anchor and commentator,” CBS Corp. chief executive Leslie Moonves said in a statement.

CBS has scheduled a prime-time special, “That’s the Way it Was: Remembering Walter Cronkite,” for 7 p.m. Sunday.

His 1968 editorial declaring the United States was “mired in stalemate” in Vietnam was seen by some as a turning point in U.S. opinion of the war. He also helped broker the 1977 invitation that took Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem, the breakthrough to Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel.

He followed the 1960s space race with open fascination, anchoring marathon broadcasts of major flights from the first suborbital shot to the first moon landing, exclaiming, “Look at those pictures, wow!” as Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon’s surface in 1969. In 1998, for CNN, he went back to Cape Canaveral to cover John Glenn’s return to space after 36 years.

“It is impossible to imagine CBS News, journalism or indeed America without Walter Cronkite,” CBS News president Sean McManus said in a statement. “More than just the best and most trusted anchor in history, he guided America through our crises, tragedies and also our victories and greatest moments.”

Cronkite lived to a ripe old age and his health had been failing, so this is hardly a shock.    I wasn’t old enough during Vietnam for his controversial remarks to cloud my judgment of his career, which mostly came in the last five or so years of his time as anchor and then as elder statesman.

It’s often said that there will never be another like someone who has just passed on.  In Cronkite’s case, it’s not hyperbole.  He was universally respected but shuffled out the door far too early, just toward the end of the period when people were simply expected to go away when the reached a certain age.  At roughly the time same, David Brinkley, Harry Reasoner, and John Chancellor were moved along, too, with then-youngsters Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw brought in to fill their chairs.  All of them did so with distinction but they never occupied the same central role that the previous generation had.  And none will be anywhere near as powerful as even they were.   Katie Couric could well be the last anchor at CBS News; in any event, no one will much care.

And that’s the way it was, Friday, July 17, 2009.

Richard Florida passes along this snippet from The illustrated History of Canada:

American draft dodgers in Canada were far outnumbered by the young Canadians who joined U.S. forces to fight in Vietnam.

This factoid may be in that category Stephen Colbert would call “truthy” and Dan Rather would call “false but true.”

Canada did not participate in the Vietnam War for a variety of reasons.  Still, “about 30,000″ Canadian citizens volunteered to fight with U.S. and other Western forces and 110 of them were killed in action and have their names on the Vietnam Memorial. According to Wikipedia, “Canadian immigration statistics show that 20,000 to 30,000 draft-eligible American men came to Canada as immigrants during the Vietnam era; estimates of the total number of American citizens who moved to Canada due to their opposition to the war range from 50,000 to 125,000.”

Regardless, the fact remains that a huge number of Canadian citizens volunteered to fight in a controversial war and a not insignificant number died there.  They, along with others in the Anglosphere (sorry, Québécois) have long been America’s most stalwart wartime allies, willing to pick up a rifle when others would not.

Kirsten Powers has an amusing piece in the NY Post headlined “BIDEN’S BUNGLES: A BLATANT BIAS.”  It echoes sentiments I’ve been seeing in the comments section:

Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden as his running mate prompted a small wave of warnings about Biden’s propensity for gaffes. But no one imagined even in a worse-case scenario such a spectacular bomb as telling donors Sunday to “gird your loins” because a young president Obama will be tested by an international crisis just like young President John Kennedy was.

Scary? You betcha! But somehow, not front-page news.

Again the media showed their incredible bias by giving scattered coverage of Biden’s statements.

There were a few exceptions. On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” co-host Mika Brzezinski flipped incredulously through the papers, expressing shock at the lack of coverage of Biden’s remarks. Guest Dan Rather admitted that if Palin had said it, the media would be going nuts.

So what gives?

The stock answer is: “It’s just Biden being Biden.” We all know how smart he is about foreign policy, so it’s not the same as when Sarah Palin says something that seems off.

Yet, when Biden asserted incorrectly in the vice-presidential debate that the United States “drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon,” nobody in the US media shrieked. (It was, however, covered with derision in the Middle East.) Or when he confused his history by claiming FDR calmed the nation during the Depression by going on TV, the press didn’t take it as evidence that he’s clueless.

So, the liberal media is covering up Biden’s gaffes while falling all over themselves to make Sarah Palin look like an airhead, right?  Well, sort of.

Powers essentially gives the answer:  Biden is a known quantity.  He’s been around Washington more than three decades and earned a reputation as a bright guy in command of the issues, especially foreign policy, but with a tendency to say dumb things from time to time because he never shuts up.

Sarah Palin arrived on the scene, by contrast, to the sound of Who in the hell is she? This set off a frantic round of investigative reporting but allowed her first significant public impression to be her convention acceptance speech, which she hit out of the park.  She was more popular in the polls than any of the other three people on the two tickets.  But, then, she went into hiding, refusing to give press interviews — apparently a campaign decision — and emerged to give two really bad ones to Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson.

It should be noted, too, that Biden’s not the only gaffe-prone, seasoned foreign policy expert to be given a pass this cycle.  The lefty blogs were livid all summer that McCain’s various statements confusing countries, religious sects, and otherwise seeming to call into doubt his expertise were being “covered up.” (Interestingly, as with Biden, we somehow all know about the gaffes even though the media haven’t reported them.  Very odd, that.)  But, as I noted at the time, you get a certain benefit of doubt when you’ve been around the block a few times.

Palin and Barack Obama didn’t have a bank of credibility to draw from.  They basically had to step out into the spotlight and survive.  I thought for months that Obama would wither under the intense light being reflected through the media magnifying glass, precisely because of the big leap from and essentially uncontested Senate race to a presidential contest.  Obviously, he didn’t.   By comparison, Palin has.

In all four cases, the press is guilty of bias.  Confirmation bias.  Once they’ve got a narrative, it’s very hard to change it.

Stilgherrian has attended one too many Future of Media conferences and he has a long tirade for Old Media journalists whining about bloggers and professional standards.

What’s tiring about this false dichotomy is that it compares the highest ideal of journalism with the lowest grade of personal blogging about what the cat did yesterday and — lo and behold! — they’re not the same. Gosh.

How much everyday journalism actually conforms to the high ideal? Not much. For every Walkley-nominated episode of Four Corners there’s a hundred tawdry yarns about miracle fat cures or shonky builders with a camera shoved in their face. For every investigative scoop there’s a thousand mundane little 5-paragraph yarns that merely quote what someone said at a press conference, and then quote their opponent. Or recycle a media release, putting the journo’s byline where the PR firm’s logo used to be. Or misappropriate statistics to beat up some shock-horror non-existent “crime wave”. Or either fawn or tut-tut over some “celebrity” and their antics — more often than not because that same celebrity is appearing in a TV show or movie that’s completely coincidentally owned by the journalist’s employer.

[...]

The shape of your craft and the form of your stories was determined by the technology used to deliver those stories. Newspapers, for instance, worked to their daily cycles, and stories had the length and structure they did, because of the physical and operational constraints of putting ink onto paper. Some bloke called McLuhan said something about this, ages back — but I wouldn’t know for sure, because I’m not a proper journalist. Still, it strikes me that the very industrial scale of printing a metropolitan daily or producing a 6pm TV bulletin also shapes the way you go about making your stories: all that mechanism between you the journalist and your audience.

[...]

There’s still a role for Real Journalism, of course, with your research and storytelling skills and, yes, with your Code of Ethics too. No-one’s saying there won’t be. And you know what? You too can use all these wonderful new tools to create wonderful new forms of Journalism — if only you’d stop whinging about how your world’s falling apart and actually learn to use them. A hint: You don’t have to wait for your grumpy old chain-smoking editor to show you, either, because he’s a dinosaur and will soon be dead.

I’ve left out most of the good bits of the rant — click the link for entertainment value — but that’s the essence of the argument itself.  And he’s right, of course.

The need for professional, full-time journalists isn’t going away.  But we no longer need them simply to spread easily-obtained information; there are just too many faster, less filtered ways of doing that nowadays.  Nor do we need them anymore as opinion shapers; there are simply too many outstanding pundits out there to read them all, so people can pick and choose based on their interests and tastes.

We do, however, need pros to do longer form journalism.  Sure, there are blogs and bloggers who do that (Josh Marshall and TPM are an obvious example) but they’re simply independent professional journalists. The beauty is that this is precisely the kind of work that most journalists worth their salt want to do.  The trick now is to persuade their editors, producers, and publishers that letting them do that is the future of their business.

Story via Duncan Riley. Cartoon via  Dana Blankenhorn.

Yesterday’s exchange with Thers over the state of conservatism reflects a major defect in the blogging medium. For the most part, we write blogs in serial fashion, as a conversation with our readers, and presume that recent posts on the same subject have been read. Most blog readers, on the other hand, parachute into posts based on links from elsewhere and fill in the blanks based on pre-existing biases.

When I saw a post entitled “The Autumn of Wingnuttia” atop the page at memeorandum, with firedoglake as the venue, I expected the worst. Encountering an insult and expletive laden post*, I was not disappointed. I responded with “Conservatism’s Safety Net,” arguing that such hubris and contempt coming from the progressive camp would ultimately ensure a conservative comeback.

Thers responded with “Lose Its Appeal Over Years,” which noted that his first post was “not especially intended to please a ‘conservative’ ear” and explains that, while taking glee in the problems of the conservative Republican coalition, he’s under no illusion that the Democrats won’t make the same sort of mistakes. Instead, his “Wingnuttia” post was about Movement Conservatism.

In turn, Thers makes a reasonable but false set of assumptions about what I think based on my residing in the conservative camp. Obviously, I must fundamentally disagree with George Packer’s “The Fall of Conservatism — Have the Republicans run out of ideas?” the essay that started this round of discussions. And of course I blame the bad things that the GOP does on heretical leaders who have strayed from the One True Path, not on the movement itself. Two posts from last week, “Rebuilding the Republican Brand” and “Going to War with the Ideology You Have,” address those concerns.

What we’re left with, then, is one fundamental disagreement which I have with Packer and Thers: the motivation of the founders of Movement Conservatism.

Movement conservatism started off as a racket. Movement conservatism has always been about exacerbating and then profiting from existing cultural, social, and economic resentments. There was never any fall from an original ideological Eden. The corruption was there from the start. Packer is quite right to emphasize how the political and popular success of movement conservatism owes everything to its legitimization of a politics of resentment that arose in the 1960s. Movement conservatism has nothing without Hatred of the Liberal, a point reinforced not least by the image with which Joyner chooses to adorn his post.

[...]

[T]he brute fact is that without accusations like, say, that Barack Obama is an un-American socialist, well, the GOP might as well just concede the election immediately. And everyone knows it. The right just cannot win if it renounces the politics of resentment, and that’s all there is to it.

The adornment was an illustration of the hubris and contempt for the opposition that was at the core of the post, not a commentary.

Yes, there is a sizable contingent on the Right who think those on the Left are, as many warbloggers put it, “Not anti-war, just on the other side.” And, yes, there’s a strong element of resentment at work in conservatism. But, as I wrote in response to Packer’s statement that “[The Nixon] Administration adopted an undercover strategy for building a Republican majority, working to create the impression that there were two Americas: the quiet, ordinary, patriotic, religious, law-abiding Many, and the noisy, élitist, amoral, disorderly, condescending Few,” “A more charitable characterization would be that the overwhelming majority of Americans saw their culture under assault from an urban elite and a sympathetic Supreme Court” and Nixon’s campaign responded to that.

Frankly, there’s plenty of resentment to go around. After all, it’s not just conservatives who exploit the divide between “Real Americans” and an undeserving Other. John Edwards used Packer’s phrase, “two Americas,” to exploit the resentment of lower middle class voters for those higher on the economic ladder. Hillary Clinton is currently touting her success among “working Americans” in an attempt to exploit the same resentments.

Liberal Democrats try to win by pretty much the same tactics as conservative Republicans: exploiting class resentments; recalling a vision of the past that never existed; and just generally spreading fear, doubt, and uncertainty. It’s just a different set of resentments being stoked. Republicans hate people of color and want to see old people starve. They don’t want your kids to be educated. All they care about is the rich! It’s all nonsense. But let’s not confuse the divide-and-conquer tactics by which campaigns are run with political movements. Conservatism isn’t “the Southern Strategy” any more than liberalism is “triangulation.” Much of politics is about exploiting fear and “Who gets what, when and how.” But, to the extent that people vote ideologically, it’s about more than that.

In the American context, there’s a remarkable consensus on politics combined with heated rhetoric. We’re essentially all descendants of Enlightenment Liberalism and the disagreements are on the margins. We pretty much agree on the goals; the disagreement is about how to get there and in which direction trade-offs should go. Conservatives prioritize military power, liberals emphasize diplomacy. Liberals push for diversity and change while conservatives fight for the protection of cherished cultural institutions. Conservatives emphasize private property rights while liberals emphasize fairness and community.

The campaign rhetoric used by the two parties, however, is about putting together a 50 percent plus one coalition to achieve power. Campaigns are usually about whipping the ideological base into a frenzy to increase turnout and trying to persuade the non-ideological mass that it’s too risky to vote for the other side. None of that has much to do with a “movement,” on the Left or the Right.

“Intellectual movements” that end up unable to cope with empirical scientific data (global warming), that end up making excuses for torture, that depend upon self-flattering fantasies such as a belief in a partisan “liberal media,” that delight in the sort of race-baiting nonsense we’ve already seen in this election season, have nowhere to go. It is eminently reasonable to draw the conclusion that there is just nothing to “movement conservatism” except a dead end. “Conservatism” as it is currently embodied just cannot handle the truth. It can’t afford to.

I’d note that most of the “race-baiting nonsense we’ve already seen in this election season” has come from the Democrats. Bill and Hillary Clinton have been positively hamhanded on the subject and the Obama camp has been masterful in crying “racism” even where none exists, essentially casting any vote by a white person against him as only explainable by bigotry.

Yes, a large number of conservatives are skeptics of global warming and especially the proposed solutions. They see environmentalists as an elite who are willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of jobs and economic progress to save some fish they’ve never heard of, so they’re naturally suspicious. Then again, John McCain made doing something about global warming a major plank of his campaign and got the Republican nomination.

A sizable number of us have opposed the administration on torture. Again, McCain has been among us. But we’ve been largely overruled by a mass, bipartisan consensus that we have to use any means necessary to protect ourselves against the terrorist barbarians. The liberal stalwart Alan Derschowitz has been leading that charge for years and the popularity of “24″ and its protagonist Jack Bauer isn’t owing to some conservative fringe. It’s the basic human instinct for self-protection kicking in.

The “liberal media” trope is overblown but its origin is hardly a fantasy. A generation ago, when the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS were the entirety of the national media, there was a legitimate sense that a liberal, urban elite set the agenda and skewed the conversation. This was especially the case on the hot button social issues, where reporters and commentators with a metropolitan perspective simply couldn’t understand how anyone could disagree with them on so many issues. Why, they’d never even met anyone who’d voted for Richard Nixon.

The view was furthered by Watergate and its new culture of sensational “investigative journalism” and “speaking truth to power.” That the advent of this took place under a Republican administration and the culture spread during a period of GOP dominance of the presidency didn’t help, because it always seemed that the press was taking the liberal/Democratic side. It became rather obvious during Bill Clinton’s tenure, though, that the bias was toward “gotcha” rather than against conservatives.

And, of course, the spread of multiple media outlets rendered much of this moot. While Peter Jennings and Sam Donaldson and Dan Rather and Katie Couric still had a lot of power, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and other outlets were now available to conservatives to get news and commentary from people who shared their perspective. But old resentments die slowly.

In any given election cycle, one or both parties will be using an old playbook. The Democrats were still fighting the battles of the 1960s in 1988 and the Republicans are still far too reliant on Ronald Reagan’s script from 1980. Meanwhile, the issues are either overtaken by events or co-opted by the other party.

Interestingly, Barack Obama and John McCain are both genuinely trying to change themes and forge new coalitions. That’s fairly rare. Bill Clinton pulled it off in 1992, running as a “New Democrat,” and Ronald Reagan did it in 1980, putting an optimistic, forward-looking face on conservatism. If the race doesn’t turn into a blowout, though, we’ll likely see quite a bit of the standard, divisive language.

_______________

*As an aside, I mostly disagree with Rick Moran’s contention that prolific use of the F-word and the spewing of insults renders the author a half-crazed ignoramus. Thanks to my Army training, I can employ colorful language with the best of them and do so more often than I should in oral communication. I choose not to do that at OTB for a variety of reasons, though, not least of which is that it makes conversation with those not already disposed to agree with you much more difficult.

Dan Rather Sues CBS for $70 million.

For “intentional mishandling” of the “aftermath” his “discredited story about President Bush’s National Guard service.”

Social Media is the wave of the future. You don’t have to be a blogger or a blog follower or even a blog agnostic to recognize that the cool kids are hanging out at places like Facebook, or MySpace. Have you heard about Twitter – the pseudo instant conversation maker that mashes up web, IM and SMS into something that has become the tool of instant conversation and marketing? Twitter is heavily used by the tech web community, a typically left-of-center political demographic, and last month took the SXSW Interactive conference by storm, tripling the number of daily users from 20k to 60k in 3 days. (By the way, Dan Rather keynoted and everyone adored him like he was a god – if that gives you a good idea of the political slant of attendees).

Some people see these services as cool websites that kids and young adults play at. Smart people see them as the key to the presidency. Folks like Presidential hopeful Barack Obama have serious social media allies such as Bluestate Digital who created social media tools like My.BarackObama.com. Mitt Romney’s actions have led to a close tie with the conservative side of social media, bloggers, etc.

I’m about to make a bold statement – one that I will probably be criticized for. At the end of the day, the race for President is not going to come down to who looks tallest or who has the right message on the issues. Obviously that will play a part in securing support. However, the message to the candidates is that if you expect to win, you must embrace social media. Some might argue that all the candidates at this point are doing that, but I would say that the candidates who truly understand the grassroots movements at places like MySpace and Facebook, have an advantage over the candidates who simply look at the landscape and say, “We need to tackle that group over there” without embracing and fully endorsing that culture.

Social media is a generational thing, and the vote cannot be secured simply by speeches. Netizens probably won’t pay a lot of attention. However, Giuliani might just notice that there are over 1500 members in the Facebook group America’s Mayor, “America’s President. Giuliani 2008″ and that there are 57K+ members plus in the “Anti-Hillary Clinton for President ‘08″ group.

James asked me to blog while he was gone because he felt like the areas where I write on Technosailor – the areas of technology and new media – intersect in an important way with politics. I think he’s on to something, though you might want me to go back home. Regardless, my postings over the next few days (which won’t be nearly as prolific as James’) will hopefully bring some of the discussions in my area of interest to bear in the political and cultural world to the forefront.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on my topics. I have pretty tough skin so feel free to attack my views or topics. I can take it. ;)

Jay Rosen has a long homage to those who blogged the Scooter Libby trial, most notably the Firedoglake gang.

As a critic who follows the fortunes of the American press, and writes about its collapse under Bush, I found it extremely painful to sit on the sidelines for this event. But as compensation I had the pleasure of watching Firedoglake, a group blog, emerge as the best site for primary, tell-me-what-happened-today coverage of the trial.

The political press supplemented FDL quite well, I thought.

If I had time, I went to Memeorandum and sampled all of it. If I didn’t have time, I read Firedoglake and the Washington Post’s team of Amy Goldstein and Carol D. Leonnig. It wasn’t a secret. Maybe 200,000 readers knew. If you wanted to keep up with the trial, and needed something approaching a live transcript, with analytical nuance, legal expertise, courthouse color, and recognizably human voices, Firedoglake was your best bet.

Now, if you wanted neutral reporting, FDL wasn’t for you. Then again, neither were any of the blogs. On balance, though, Marcy Wheeler, Christy Hardin Smith, and the others on the FDL team simultaneously provided a great public service and demonstrated what bloggers can add to news coverage.

Thanks to Robert Cox’s efforts, several of us from the Media Bloggers Association provided coverage and analysis of the trial. On balance, I think, we added something worthwhile: real-time commentary, different points of view, and some good old fashioned snark.

Rosen is right, though, that the FDL gang provided something unique. Wheeler and Smith, especially, provided in-depth expertise about the trial. Wheeler wrote a book about the case and Hardin is a former attorney and prosecutor, so she knows more about the legal end of this than almost any journalist or blogger. Further, there was probably no website or media organization more obsessed with the Valerie Plame affair than FDL, which meant they brought an encyclopedic knowledge of the trivia of the case to bear.

When the blogosphere broke open RatherGate, it was through a combination of two things that the mainstream press seldom has: obsession and expertise. There are people out there who simply care more about things like Dan Rather, Scooter Libby, Valerie Plame, or just about any other topic that you can think up than anyone working for any press venue. Similarly, there are people out there who know a whole lot more about the nuances of 1960s era typefaces, perjury law, FISA, or what have you than any working journalist could possibly be expected to know. The combination of these things give citizen journalists a powerful advantage.

Because bloggers don’t have to even pretend to be unbiased or interested in “all the news that’s fit to print,” I wouldn’t want to rely on any one blog for my news, or even my commentary. Collectively, though, blogs add an enormous amount of information and insight to the process.

John Harris observes in a front page “Analysis” piece in today’s WaPo that the emergence of blogs and other Web based media is changing the dynamic of political scandals.

At first glance, three uproars that buffeted American politics in recent weeks have little in common.

Former congressman Mark Foley (R-Fla.) ended his political career over sexually charged e-mails to former House pages. Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) stumbled over his puzzling use of the word “macaca” and his clumsy response to revelations about his Jewish ancestry. Former president Bill Clinton had a televised temper fit when an interviewer challenged his terrorism record.

All three episodes, however, were in their own ways signs of the unruly new age in American politics. Each featured an arresting personal angle. Each originally percolated in the world of new media — Web sites and news outlets that did not exist a generation ago — before charging into the traditional world of newspapers and television networks. In each case, the accusations quickly pivoted into a debate about the motivations and alleged biases of the accusers.

Cumulatively, the stories highlight a new brand of politics in which nearly any revelation in the news becomes a weapon or shield in the daily partisan wars, and the aim of candidates and their operatives is not so much to win an argument as to brand opponents as fundamentally unfit.

Certainly, that tactic predates the Web, let alone blogs. Still, the proliferation of media voices and the incredible amount of competition for scoops and attention that has ensued has undeniably sped up the news cycle. And Mickey Kaus’ Feiler Faster Thesis is one result.

Jeff Jarvis notes, too, that the television end of this occured a decade ago.

FoxNews is 10 years old this week. This year, Al Jazeera turns 10. So did The Daily Show. All that the three have in common, besides birthdays, is that they brought new voices to TV news: no longer the allegedly objective, cold, institutional tone that journalism took on when it became a monopoly, once-size-fits-all business in this country, thanks to the impact of broadcast on the media marketplace. These fraternal triplets each brought perspective to news, a distinct and clearly apparent worldview, and a passion about serving a public that each believed was underserved.

What enabled this to happen? Simple: Choice. Bandwidth. The ability to broadcast off the broadcast tower and its strait-jacket frequencies. Cable made it possible, and satellite. That’s the frequency, Kenneth (which, by the way, was said to Dan Rather a decade before, when the remote control started revolutionizing American media). And now, a decade after the cable age we are in the thick of the internet age, which allows us to not only hear new voices but also to speak with our own.

Obviously, talk radio and the Internet, especially the blogs and the Drudge clone tabloids, have contributed as well for similar reasons.

While the old line media still have to at least make a show of balance, the new media are unabashedly branded. Fox News claims merely to be “Fair and Balanced” but they wear their viewpoint in red,white, and blue on their lapels. Judging by the decline in the ratings of the Big 3 networks and the rise of Fox, a substantial percentage of the populace wants their news from people with whom they share a set of basic assumptions. Blogs and talk radio would seem to indicate they like their opinion journalism the same way.

That these media can be exploited to play the old game of “gotcha” politics is a simple fact of life. The new media are part of the communications process now, so it’s hardly a surprise.

The Walk a Mile for a Camel Edition OTB Caption Contest^TM is now over.

(CBS NEWS 60 MINUTES/Handout/Reuters)

Winners:

First: Greg Tinti – I didn’t realize you were that close with Mel Gibson…

Second: charles austin – Mike Wallace calms a jittery President Ahmadenijad by telling him that the ticking sound he hears is just the introduction to his news program.

Third: spacemonkey – “You had me at ‘Wipe Israel off the map’”

Honorable Mention:

SgtFluffy – Wallace: Man I love your work Yakov

Matt – Greetings from the Great Satan

Maggie – You must know, I’ve never met a dictator I didn’t adore!

yetanotherjohn – Guy in the back: “I swear if that infidel doesn’t keep his hands to himself, I’ll kill him no matter what Ahmadinejad says about useful dupes.”

charles austin – “Oh no, no, no, no. I assure you that I have more contempt for America than you President Ahmadenijad.”

Truth in Advertising Award

charles austin – (CBS NEWS 60 MINUTES/Handout/Reuters) — Well, that really says it all now, doesn’t it?

Rodney’s Bottom of The Barrel

“You must remember your secret Iranian name Mike, Mustaf Herod Apyur Poupr”

“No, no, Dan Rather is the one with the frequency”

I do not think “bend over and bleat” is a proper greeting.

Wallace: “So you want me to deliver two tubes of Camel Lube to your cousin Aful furees La’am, but it must be mixed before I land in the US, for ultimate freshness? No problem.”

Wallace: “I swear its true. The birthmark on my tuckus looks just like the prophet mohammad.”

The Thursday contest is visiting with Hogzillah.

Reuters has removed all 920 photos taken by Adnan Hajj from its archives:

Reuters withdrew all 920 photographs by a freelance Lebanese photographer from its database on Monday after an urgent review of his work showed he had altered two images from the conflict between Israel and the armed group Hizbollah.

Global Picture Editor Tom Szlukovenyi called the measure precautionary but said the fact that two of the images by photographer Adnan Hajj had been manipulated undermined trust in his entire body of work. “There is no graver breach of Reuters standards for our photographers than the deliberate manipulation of an image,” Szlukovenyi said in a statement. “Reuters has zero tolerance for any doctoring of pictures and constantly reminds its photographers, both staff and freelance, of this strict and unalterable policy.”

There have been several such photos from Hajj documented in the blogosphere, so this is probably best. Of course, it has the side benefit of making it more difficult for anyone outside Reuters to go back and investigate how many other Hajj forgeries have accompanied Reuters stories.

Regardless of how one feels about Reuter’s “standards” at this point, one has to give credit where credit is due: They didn’t do a Dan Rather on this one. Once the forgery was made known, they moved quickly to admit error and distance themselves from the incident. Considering that this broke on the blogs Friday night, that the first mea culpa was issued Saturday morning, the stringer was “fired” Sunday evening, and the entire database purged by Monday morning is blazingly fast even by the standards of the digital age.

UPDATE: AllahPundit notes, “The photos are still available on the wires, of course. They’ll just no longer be offered for sale by Reuters.” Interesting.

A little gossip for your Friday:

Is CBS trying to wipe out all traces of Dan Rather’s history at the network? In a glowing story about Katie Couric’s “Eye on America” tour’s going to the Twin Cities, the CBS News Web site crows that the perky newsgal, who takes over Rather’s seat in September, “will be the first female solo anchor of a network weekday newscast, following such esteemed journalists as Douglas Edwards, Walter Cronkite and, most recently, Bob Schieffer.” There is absolutely no mention of Rather, who was unceremoniously dumped after 44 years with CBS following his notorious report on President Bush’s military record, which turned out to be based on fake memos. The glaring omission has prompted some observers to liken it to the Soviet Union’s erasing Josef Stalin from its history books. A network spokeswoman says it’s nothing as nefarious as that and fingers as the culprit its Minneapolis affiliate WCCO, which wrote the promo. But she could not explain why the station cut Rather out. “Dan is a valued part of CBS News tradition,” she insisted. Rather did not return calls.

Via Page Six.

Michael Berlin, a former U.N. correspondent for the New York Post and The Washington Post, has an interesting piece in today’s Washington Post on the media and–obviously–a secret they kept. The story itself [of six American officials who managed to escape being captured by Iranian militants during the seizure of the U.S. embassy in November 1979 - JHJ] is incredible; however, Berlin concludes by predictably connecting it to today’s situation with the press and argues rather illogically that it, “proves that reporters and news organizations can be trusted, en masse, to make the right call on security information they uncover.” Berlin then wonders:

Do I think that a thousand reporters could be trusted today to make the same call that we did in 1979? I wonder. Even back then, there was the fear that some rogue reporter would ignore the pleas and go with the story. In today’s journalism world, I fear that some blogger or counterculture ideologue using journalism as a political tool rather than as a mechanism for dispensing straight information, would make the wrong call. I hope I’m wrong about that.

With all due respect to Berlin, every example of journalism being used as a political tool that I can think of has been by journalists rather than bloggers (or “counterculture ideologues”). At this point, I am more worried about the Dan Rathers and New York Times of the world allowing their own biases to slip into their reporting and defining what is in the “public interest” despite warnings from the government.

Although, that being said, Berlin does raise some interesting questions about the ethics of bloggers in regard to the publication of information that could be potentially harmful. Currently, I’d say that it’s largely a non-issue because only a handful bloggers have the wherewithal of the average journalist and/or sources privy to that type of information. But this is something that is changing and the question is whether bloggers will be able to show the proper restraint when it comes to the publication of harmful information rather than go for the scoop.

In less than seven minutes, here’s a video summary of Larry King’s interview last night with Dan Rather. Rather talks about CBS, Memogate, and, well, Rather. Lots of Rather. But hey, I took one for the team and watched the whole thing so you didn’t have to.

Enjoy…

And by the way, I swear I didn’t fool around with the audio either.

***

A full transcipt of the interview can be viewed here.

Stephen Sprueill of NRO’s Media Blog notes Rather’s paranoid delusions.