The following news items and summary may explain why Bush and Putin are so friendly and so much alike:
February 28, 2005
From Russia With Love
While [Russian President] Putin travels with a contingent of reporters just as Bush does, the Kremlin press pool is a handpicked group of reporters, most of whom work for the state . . .
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
February 25, 2005
The Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same.
USA Today
Education Dept. paid commentator to promote law
January 7, 2005
. . . and the rest selected for their fidelity to the Kremlin's rules of the game.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
"It was very specifically said [that] we need to be fairer to the Bush Administration or to the Republicans than anybody else in the media would be. But that was always understood there as a sort of a code for “lay off.”
Former Fox News reporter
interviewed in the documentary Outfoxed
2004
Helpful questions are often planted.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
Gannon: In your denunciations of the Abu Ghraib photos, you've used words like 'sickening,' 'disgusting' and 'reprehensible.' Will you have any adjectives left to adequately describe the pictures from Saddam's rape rooms and torture chambers? And will Americans ever see those images?
McClellan: I'm glad you brought that up, Jeff, because the President talks about that often.
White House press conference
May 10, 2004
Unwelcome questions are not allowed.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
During his trip to Germany on Wednesday, the main highlight of George W. Bush's trip was meant to be a "town hall"-style meeting with average Germans. But with the German government unwilling to permit a scripted event with questions approved in advance, the White House has quietly put the event on ice.
Der Speigel
With a Hush and a Whisper, Bush Drops
Town Hall Meeting with Germans
February 23, 2005
And anyone who gets out of line can get out of the pool.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
During last year's election campaign Bush avoided interviews with leading newspapers, such as the Washington Post, but frequently invited reporters from smaller swing state publications to speak with him on Air Force One. Vice-president Dick Cheney took the strategy one step further and banned New York Times reporters from travelling with him.
The Observer
The mole, the US media and a White House coup
February 20, 2005
Television channels air newscasts with fancy graphics but follow scripts approved by the Kremlin.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
The [Education] Department already has paid Ketchum . . . to produce a video release on the law that was used by some television stations as if it were real news. Other government agencies -- including the Census Bureau and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- also have distributed such prepackaged videos, a practice that congressional auditors have described as illegal in some cases.
Washington Post
Administration Paid Commentator
January 8, 2005
The general manager installed at NTV after the Kremlin takeover was later fired when his coverage of the Moscow theater siege in 2002 angered Putin.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
CNN's top news executive, Eason Jordan, resigned after a web-fed controversy over comments he made at a conference last month in Davos, Switzerland . . . Jordan drew the ire of mostly right-wing bloggers after he allegedly said that U.S. forces in Iraq targeted journalists on several occasions.
NewsHour
Bloggers and Journalists
February 14, 2005
NTV's most independent remaining hosts, Leonid Parfyonov and Savik Shuster, were taken off the air after the government bristled at their talk shows. Shuster's show was called "Freedom of Speech."
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
ABC is canceling Bill Maher's late-night topical talk show, "Politically Incorrect," [which] has been on thin ice since just after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when host Maher was quoted as referring to past United States military actions as "cowardly."
CNN
Maher canceled
May 14, 2002
[MSNBC host Phil Donahue's show] was cancelled despite having the best ratings on the network; this occurred, according to published reports, after a study commissioned by NBC described Donahue as "a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace" who would be a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war."
Fair and Accuracy in Reporting
MSNBC's Double Standard on Free Speech
March 7, 2003
"People do get fired in American press. They don't get fired by government, however. They get fired by their editors or they get fired by their producers, or they get fired by the owners of a particular outlet or network."
George W. Bush
Joint Press Conference with President Putin
February 24, 2005
Newspaper editors at the Texas City (Texas) Sun and the Daily Courier in Grants Pass, Ore., apologized for opinion pieces critical of Bush's leadership in the aftermath of the [9/11] attacks, then fired the writers. "Criticism of our chief executive and those around him needs to be responsible and appropriate," wrote Daily Courier editor Dennis Roler in an editorial.
USA Today
The post-Sept. 11 world is potentially confusing
October 8, 2001
If Bush does not trust the Russian press to get the story of yesterday's news conference right, he can at least go to the Kremlin's own Web site. On it was posted a transcript of the joint news conference. Only all of Bush's statements and answers were deleted.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
The list of names of countries supporting the U.S.-led military action in Iraq has been removed from the White House Web site. [Also] gone are links to the audio and video of President Bush's statement that "I'm not that concerned" about Osama bin Laden . . .
Washington Post
Those White House Links to Nothing
October 25, 2004
The Kremlin press pool is like so many institutions in Russia that have the trappings of a Western-style pluralistic society but operate under a different set of understandings, part of what analyst Lilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Moscow Center calls "the illusion of democracy."
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
When conservatives talk of George W. Bush’s “transformational” role in American politics, they are referring to a fundamental change they seek in the U.S. system of government in which the Republican Party will dominate for years to come and power will not really be up for grabs in general elections . . .
This concept also might be called the “Putin-izing” of American politics, where one side’s dominance of media, financial resources and the ability to intimidate opponents is overwhelming – as now exists in Russia under President Vladimir Putin
Robert Parry
Bush & the Rise of 'Managed Democracy'
February 12, 2005
__________________________________
"I've just had a very important and constructive dialogue with my friend . . . We have had, over the past four years, very constructive relations, and that's the way I'm going to keep it for the next four years, as well."
George W. Bush
Joint Press Conference with President Putin
February 24, 2005
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
Monday, February 28, 2005
'I've gotta get my elephant tusks back'
Amid the guns, drugs and enormous expenses claims, Hunter S Thompson created a new style of writing - gonzo - and a generation of followers. Jon Ronson explains why he became one of them
Tuesday February 22, 2005
The Guardian
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Wednesday February 23 2005
In this article, we mistakenly attributed to Richard Nixon the view that Thompson represented "that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character". On the contrary, it was what Thompson said of Nixon.
It is the morning after Hunter S Thompson's suicide, and I am reading loaded magazine's recent interview with Iggy Pop. It begins: "Iggy Pop! Shit man. I'm alone in a hotel room thinking I've overdosed on coke. Sweating. Thinking what the hell am I going to ask Iggy tomorrow afternoon. Two valium and 14 hours later I am sitting in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont ..."
And so on.
A great number of feature journalists, when starting out, want to be Hunter S Thompson. Unfortunately, many tend to want to be him in the wrong way. Reading loaded's over-Thompson-inspired prose reminds me of the scene in Crimes and Misdemeanours when Woody Allen confesses to Mia Farrow that his love letter to her was plagiarised from James Joyce. "You probably wondered why all the references to Dublin," he says.
Thompson's brilliant invention was not the drug-addled journalist, although he did play the role wonderfully, fictionalising himself (and it did begin as a fiction, or at least an exaggeration, although it doesn't seem to have ended quite that way) as a frothing madman in the midst of some gigantic President Nixon-inspired bad trip.
"Nixon's face filled the screen," he writes in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "but his speech was hopelessly garbled. The only word I could make out was 'sacrifice'. Over and over again: 'Sacrifice ... sacrifice ... sacrifice.'
"I could hear myself breathing heavily. My attorney seemed to notice. 'Don't try to fight it or you'll start getting brain bubbles ...'"
His was such an enticing persona that thousands of budding young writers have subsequently taken it at face value, got stoned, and attempted to create mayhem at London Fashion Week, or a Conservative party conference, or a Brits award, or wherever. But unlike many of his copyists, Thompson had a very good, pragmatic reason to put his unhinged self in the midst of his story. The policemen at the Las Vegas drugs convention are just as crazed as he is, the only thing to do is take more and more ether, and the whole thing makes for a powerfully nightmarish metaphor for the anchor of sanity being lost in Nixon's America.
That's the great, breathless thing about the best of his writing. There is no everyman, no sane anchor to hold onto, just ever-burgeoning madness, bulging out of the prose and out of Ralph Steadman's superbly grotesque illustrations.
Nixon once famously said Thompson represented "that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character". When you think about it, this doesn't sound like an insult. Nixon wasn't claiming that Thompson had defamed the American character. It sounded more like Nixon admitting that when Thompson held up his surreal, hallucinatory mirror, the president recognised an aspect of himself in there.
Thompson's great legacy was not the drugs. It was his realisation, as he wrote in The Great Shark Hunt, that "the writer must be a participant in the scene ... like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character".
He was the first journalist to really spot that a story becomes truer when the reporter honestly chronicles his or her own idiosyncrasies, and admits that those foibles act as a prism between real life and the page. This realisation of his has changed the face of journalism, giving generations of writers licence to put themselves into their stories. Take - for instance - Lynn Barber's beautifully hassled, sardonic battiness. Ostensibly, it couldn't be less gonzo-like, but it was (she has written) greatly inspired by Thompson and the new journalism he helped create.
I always assumed that Thompson was far more in control of himself than people imagined. He never seemed hopelessly in love with the drugs.
"There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge," he once wrote. "You can turn your back on a person but never turn your back on a drug."
His method of writing, I have heard, was to get stoned, have some adventure, sober up, and then get out the typewriter. His best writing has, beneath the apparently frenzied stream-of-consciousness surface, a very precise construction. You can't write that well on drugs, and you can't be that funny either. People only think they're funny on drugs. But a few years ago I met PJ O'Rourke, and he told me a sad tale. He said he and Thompson were on Rolling Stone assignments in London at the same time. Thompson had been commissioned to write "Fear and Loathing at Buckingham Palace". O'Rourke phoned him at his hotel for a joke and said, "The royal family are onto you! They've got their people on the roof and they're going to break into your window and get you!"
Thompson apparently screamed, hung up the phone, locked himself in his hotel room, and didn't come out until it was time for him to fly back to America.
"He's in a terrible shape," said O'Rourke. He seemed surprised. (Apparently, though, Thompson was still coherent enough to put in a large expenses claim.)
Somewhere along the line, it seems, Thompson became tired. His work got repetitive, it sometimes descended into self-parody, and he admitted that he no longer enjoyed it.
"I suspect writing is a bit like fucking," he wrote, "which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling."
He ended up living ostensibly like one of his own nightmare creations, inside a heavily armed compound, waving guns at young journalists on hopeful homages to his corner of Aspen. He was recently roused to fly to Cannes to protest against some perceived injustice contained within Terry Gilliam's dramatisation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He cancelled his protest trip at the last minute when he was told that it was no longer possible to have a smoking seat on a long-haul flight.
As I write this, on the afternoon after his suicide, I have no idea what made him do it. But I have a guess. I bet he wasn't on some crazed drugs binge, nor was he out of his mind with paranoia. Beneath the mad surface, and the odd flights into nuttiness, Thompson was basically a conservative, sensible, working journalist. My guess is that his suicide was pragmatic: maybe he was terminally ill, with something unglamorous like lung cancer, and he just wanted to take control of things.
I need to stop writing now. Suddenly my office seems full of huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around my laptop. I haven't taken drugs. I think I've been staring at my screen for too long.
Amid the guns, drugs and enormous expenses claims, Hunter S Thompson created a new style of writing - gonzo - and a generation of followers. Jon Ronson explains why he became one of them
Tuesday February 22, 2005
The Guardian
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Wednesday February 23 2005
In this article, we mistakenly attributed to Richard Nixon the view that Thompson represented "that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character". On the contrary, it was what Thompson said of Nixon.
It is the morning after Hunter S Thompson's suicide, and I am reading loaded magazine's recent interview with Iggy Pop. It begins: "Iggy Pop! Shit man. I'm alone in a hotel room thinking I've overdosed on coke. Sweating. Thinking what the hell am I going to ask Iggy tomorrow afternoon. Two valium and 14 hours later I am sitting in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont ..."
And so on.
A great number of feature journalists, when starting out, want to be Hunter S Thompson. Unfortunately, many tend to want to be him in the wrong way. Reading loaded's over-Thompson-inspired prose reminds me of the scene in Crimes and Misdemeanours when Woody Allen confesses to Mia Farrow that his love letter to her was plagiarised from James Joyce. "You probably wondered why all the references to Dublin," he says.
Thompson's brilliant invention was not the drug-addled journalist, although he did play the role wonderfully, fictionalising himself (and it did begin as a fiction, or at least an exaggeration, although it doesn't seem to have ended quite that way) as a frothing madman in the midst of some gigantic President Nixon-inspired bad trip.
"Nixon's face filled the screen," he writes in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "but his speech was hopelessly garbled. The only word I could make out was 'sacrifice'. Over and over again: 'Sacrifice ... sacrifice ... sacrifice.'
"I could hear myself breathing heavily. My attorney seemed to notice. 'Don't try to fight it or you'll start getting brain bubbles ...'"
His was such an enticing persona that thousands of budding young writers have subsequently taken it at face value, got stoned, and attempted to create mayhem at London Fashion Week, or a Conservative party conference, or a Brits award, or wherever. But unlike many of his copyists, Thompson had a very good, pragmatic reason to put his unhinged self in the midst of his story. The policemen at the Las Vegas drugs convention are just as crazed as he is, the only thing to do is take more and more ether, and the whole thing makes for a powerfully nightmarish metaphor for the anchor of sanity being lost in Nixon's America.
That's the great, breathless thing about the best of his writing. There is no everyman, no sane anchor to hold onto, just ever-burgeoning madness, bulging out of the prose and out of Ralph Steadman's superbly grotesque illustrations.
Nixon once famously said Thompson represented "that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character". When you think about it, this doesn't sound like an insult. Nixon wasn't claiming that Thompson had defamed the American character. It sounded more like Nixon admitting that when Thompson held up his surreal, hallucinatory mirror, the president recognised an aspect of himself in there.
Thompson's great legacy was not the drugs. It was his realisation, as he wrote in The Great Shark Hunt, that "the writer must be a participant in the scene ... like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character".
He was the first journalist to really spot that a story becomes truer when the reporter honestly chronicles his or her own idiosyncrasies, and admits that those foibles act as a prism between real life and the page. This realisation of his has changed the face of journalism, giving generations of writers licence to put themselves into their stories. Take - for instance - Lynn Barber's beautifully hassled, sardonic battiness. Ostensibly, it couldn't be less gonzo-like, but it was (she has written) greatly inspired by Thompson and the new journalism he helped create.
I always assumed that Thompson was far more in control of himself than people imagined. He never seemed hopelessly in love with the drugs.
"There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge," he once wrote. "You can turn your back on a person but never turn your back on a drug."
His method of writing, I have heard, was to get stoned, have some adventure, sober up, and then get out the typewriter. His best writing has, beneath the apparently frenzied stream-of-consciousness surface, a very precise construction. You can't write that well on drugs, and you can't be that funny either. People only think they're funny on drugs. But a few years ago I met PJ O'Rourke, and he told me a sad tale. He said he and Thompson were on Rolling Stone assignments in London at the same time. Thompson had been commissioned to write "Fear and Loathing at Buckingham Palace". O'Rourke phoned him at his hotel for a joke and said, "The royal family are onto you! They've got their people on the roof and they're going to break into your window and get you!"
Thompson apparently screamed, hung up the phone, locked himself in his hotel room, and didn't come out until it was time for him to fly back to America.
"He's in a terrible shape," said O'Rourke. He seemed surprised. (Apparently, though, Thompson was still coherent enough to put in a large expenses claim.)
Somewhere along the line, it seems, Thompson became tired. His work got repetitive, it sometimes descended into self-parody, and he admitted that he no longer enjoyed it.
"I suspect writing is a bit like fucking," he wrote, "which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling."
He ended up living ostensibly like one of his own nightmare creations, inside a heavily armed compound, waving guns at young journalists on hopeful homages to his corner of Aspen. He was recently roused to fly to Cannes to protest against some perceived injustice contained within Terry Gilliam's dramatisation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He cancelled his protest trip at the last minute when he was told that it was no longer possible to have a smoking seat on a long-haul flight.
As I write this, on the afternoon after his suicide, I have no idea what made him do it. But I have a guess. I bet he wasn't on some crazed drugs binge, nor was he out of his mind with paranoia. Beneath the mad surface, and the odd flights into nuttiness, Thompson was basically a conservative, sensible, working journalist. My guess is that his suicide was pragmatic: maybe he was terminally ill, with something unglamorous like lung cancer, and he just wanted to take control of things.
I need to stop writing now. Suddenly my office seems full of huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around my laptop. I haven't taken drugs. I think I've been staring at my screen for too long.
Thursday, February 24, 2005
Here are a few more thoughts from Hunter. He was not always right....but then he was only seldom wrong:
Hunter S Thompson on work ..."Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism." "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." "Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they're attached to dollar signs - unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times." "I have no taste for either poverty or honest labour, so writing is the only recourse left for me." "I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like f**king, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling." "I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.... on drugs ...You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.I have always loved marijuana. It has been a source of joy and comfort to me for many years. And I still think of it as a basic staple of life, along with beer and ice and grapefruits - and millions of Americans agree with me.There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge." Good mescaline comes on slow. The first hour is all waiting, then about halfway through the second hour you start cursing the creep who burned you, because nothing is happening...and then ZANG! I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.
America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws. We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world - bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are whores for power and oil with hate and fear in our hearts... lifestyle advice ...Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole lifestyle a crime-in-progress is not a happy prospect. The person who doesn't scatter the morning dew will not comb grey hairs. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master. Anytime there's a big sporting event, go to either the winning or losing town; there'll be riots in both of them. Riots are fun. Avoid being seized by the police. The cops are not your friends. Don't tell them anything. Have an objective to give your bender a theme. For instance, stalking and killing a wild pig with a bowie knife. Register at a hotel under a pseudonym, and then rent two convertibles - a Porsche and a green Cadillac - so you can switch cars when things start to go bad. Be sure to launch one of these cars off a steep hill. Don't have sex in the lobby - it's usually awkward. Call on God, but row away from the rocks. ... and finally ...The Edge ... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled. A word to the wise is infuriating. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Some may never live, but the crazy never die.
Hunter S Thompson on work ..."Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism." "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." "Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they're attached to dollar signs - unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times." "I have no taste for either poverty or honest labour, so writing is the only recourse left for me." "I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like f**king, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling." "I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.... on drugs ...You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.I have always loved marijuana. It has been a source of joy and comfort to me for many years. And I still think of it as a basic staple of life, along with beer and ice and grapefruits - and millions of Americans agree with me.There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge." Good mescaline comes on slow. The first hour is all waiting, then about halfway through the second hour you start cursing the creep who burned you, because nothing is happening...and then ZANG! I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.
America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws. We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world - bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are whores for power and oil with hate and fear in our hearts... lifestyle advice ...Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole lifestyle a crime-in-progress is not a happy prospect. The person who doesn't scatter the morning dew will not comb grey hairs. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master. Anytime there's a big sporting event, go to either the winning or losing town; there'll be riots in both of them. Riots are fun. Avoid being seized by the police. The cops are not your friends. Don't tell them anything. Have an objective to give your bender a theme. For instance, stalking and killing a wild pig with a bowie knife. Register at a hotel under a pseudonym, and then rent two convertibles - a Porsche and a green Cadillac - so you can switch cars when things start to go bad. Be sure to launch one of these cars off a steep hill. Don't have sex in the lobby - it's usually awkward. Call on God, but row away from the rocks. ... and finally ...The Edge ... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled. A word to the wise is infuriating. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Some may never live, but the crazy never die.
ADS EMBEDDED IN NEWS STORIES RAISE CONCERNS
In the never-ending pursuit of profits, online sites are generating
new revenues by selling advertisements that appear when users click on
certain keywords, but when the practice is extended to words in news
articles, critics say it could create the impression that advertisers are
influencing the reporting. Business news articles in yesterday's online New
York Post included words highlighted and underlined in green, which, when a
mouse was rolled over them, produced a box with a link to the "sponsor's"
Web site. Aly Colón, who teaches journalistic ethics at the Poynter
Institute, says the biggest risk may be alienating readers: "If we want to
be taken seriously for the work that we do as journalists, we should try to
devise a way of presenting our material so that the users, the readers,
know that we are first and foremost about the news." A Nielsen/NetRatings
analyst says news organizations' recent experimentation with embedded
advertising reflects a dearth of online advertising opportunities: "There
is definitely a shortage of supply [of online content]. That leads to this
kind of experimentation." (New York Times 24 Feb 2005)
In the never-ending pursuit of profits, online sites are generating
new revenues by selling advertisements that appear when users click on
certain keywords, but when the practice is extended to words in news
articles, critics say it could create the impression that advertisers are
influencing the reporting. Business news articles in yesterday's online New
York Post included words highlighted and underlined in green, which, when a
mouse was rolled over them, produced a box with a link to the "sponsor's"
Web site. Aly Colón, who teaches journalistic ethics at the Poynter
Institute, says the biggest risk may be alienating readers: "If we want to
be taken seriously for the work that we do as journalists, we should try to
devise a way of presenting our material so that the users, the readers,
know that we are first and foremost about the news." A Nielsen/NetRatings
analyst says news organizations' recent experimentation with embedded
advertising reflects a dearth of online advertising opportunities: "There
is definitely a shortage of supply [of online content]. That leads to this
kind of experimentation." (New York Times 24 Feb 2005)
Bill Berkowitz writes that the Center for Media and Democracy's
"sleuths of spin John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton have exposed how
corporate shills and government spokespersons manipulate the media
and undermine democracy for more than a decade," and are now
"setting about an ambitious - yet necessary - undertaking:
reinventing journalism." Berkowitz interviews Center founder Stauber
about recent media scandals involving PR, payola, and fake
journalists. They also discuss SourceWatch, "an information source
that is truly 'of, by and for the people,'" and other ways the
Center works to further media democracy.
SOURCE: Alternet, February 22, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3300
"sleuths of spin John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton have exposed how
corporate shills and government spokespersons manipulate the media
and undermine democracy for more than a decade," and are now
"setting about an ambitious - yet necessary - undertaking:
reinventing journalism." Berkowitz interviews Center founder Stauber
about recent media scandals involving PR, payola, and fake
journalists. They also discuss SourceWatch, "an information source
that is truly 'of, by and for the people,'" and other ways the
Center works to further media democracy.
SOURCE: Alternet, February 22, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3300
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
The Gonzo has died. We watched part of the film Fear and Loathing in Los Vagas last term - which is part of the story of a man who changed journalism in our times.
Here is the obituary from his home town paper:
Flamboyant Thompson was 'promise unfulfilled'
Littwin: Thompson true to caricature he created
Ripples spread far from writer's work
Thompson dissected the illness of a nation going out of control
By Duane Davis, Special to the News
February 22, 2005
I first came across Hunter Thompson's writing just before I got out of the Army in 1967.
I was just starting to get curious about beatniks and hippies and, having already read Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs, was easily taken in by a book with the lurid (and alluring) title, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs.
It was a good book, but not a great one. The main problem seemed to be that the writing didn't quite measure up to the material, that the author was not equal to his subject.
What I wanted were words as wild and dangerous as the ideas, people and events being described. I wanted sentences and paragraphs that whipped off the page and assaulted what I knew already, what I'd been taught about the way things are.
What I wanted from Thompson, it turned out, was still a few years away, but when it came, it descended like the whirlwind on Job. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971), was just what I was looking for.
The '60s were dead and gone. The Age of Aquarius had started to shift into moral malaise and counterculture collapse. Hippies were poised to become businessmen: dealing drugs or enlightenment or some weird combination of the two. The Silent Majority had roused from its slumbers and was looking for payback.
It had been crazy. It was about to get crazier. And just when it seemed like it might be a good time to cash out, Hunter Thompson came into his own.
In the '70s, reading Thompson was a rite of passage. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was quickly followed by Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Taken together, the books were fever charts of an America gone bad in the head and sick in the heart. Thompson was onto something: power, drugs, and madness; paranoia, megalomania and an arrogance not seen since the last days of the Roman Empire. He knew the names of the beast: Amerika, Vietnam, Watts, Newark, Columbia, Watergate, the Chicago Seven, SDS, the Black Panthers.
Thompson's writing was a mirror held up to our own faces contorted in the paroxysms of what we expected to be the end of the world. Thompson wrote it all down, and no matter how weird he got, it was never weird enough: Real life always sneaked past and waited around the corner with something even crazier, sicker, more dangerous. So we read Thompson as a form of self-diagnosis. While we were taking his pulse, we were checking our own.
Thompson wasn't the first. He wasn't even particularly the best. But he was the craziest.
If you wanted Edge, real edge, you read the Good Doctor.
We survived the '70s. So did Thompson. He continued to write and eventually the shelf came to hold a number of books: Four volumes of the Gonzo Papers: The Great Shark Hunt, Generation of Swine, Songs of the Doomed, and Better Than Sex; two collections of letters: The Proud Highway and Fear and Loathing in America; and, in the last couple of years, Kingdom of Fear and Hey Rube.
For a few years, Thompson had been carefully defining himself as a writer rather than reporter. Some said this was a way for him to avoid being to taken to task for a career of sloppy journalism and made-up "news" stories.
My take is a little kinder. The Good Doctor knew that "journalism" is what goes into newspapers: read in an hour and tossed aside. What he wrote, especially the two Fear And Loathing books and the first two collections in the Gonzo Papers, attempt literature.
He was a Jeremiah for our time, a crazed, coked-up, gun-totin' prophet. He shouted, I think, in order to make us hear. And now that the Good Doctor has left the office, you better believe that, wherever he has gone, they're going to need to lay in a good supply of earplugs. He went out shouting - and there are a lot of us left behind who can still hear him, raging into that good night.
Duane Davis is co-owner of Wax Trax Records and a News book critic. He reviewed Thompson's "Kingdom of Fear" in 2002.
Hunter S. Thompson dies
Last Updated Mon, 21 Feb 2005 17:31:24 EST
CBC Arts
ASPEN, COLO. - Hunter S. Thompson, the U.S. writer who pioneered the super-subjective form of journalism known as "gonzo," has killed himself, his son said.
In a statement released to the Aspen Daily News, Juan Thompson said his father shot himself to death in his home in Aspen, Colo., on Sunday night. He was 67.
Hunter Thompson, centre, with Benicio Del Toro, left, and Johnny Depp at a New York premiere for the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)
"Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family," his son said in the statement.
The newspaper said the Pitkin County police confirmed the suicide.
Thompson is credited with pioneering "gonzo journalism," a highly subjective and over-the-top style that makes writers – and their opinions – essential parts of the narrative.
He first vaulted to fame with his non-fiction book Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966) – after riding with the bikers for a year to gather material.
But he's most famous for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972) – which purported to be a work of fiction, but was a thinly disguised, gonzo compilation of two road trips that Hunter made to Las Vegas with a friend.
In their trunk, according to the book: "Two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers. ...A quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls" – all of which they manage to consume on the short trip.
A gifted chronicler of depravity in American Life, some of Thompson's other works included Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1973) – about the 1972 presidential election campaign between Richard Nixon and George McGovern – and Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s (1989).
Thompson was born in 1937 in Louisville, Ky.
He served in the U.S. Air Force for a short time as a young man, then began working as a freelance journalist.
He seemed to have rubbed shoulders with almost every famous counterculture figure in the 1960s, from beat poet Allen Ginsberg to New Journalist Tom Wolfe to Ken Kesey (including hanging out with the Merry Pranksters and participating in Kesey's first LSD tests).
He inspired a number of films, including Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) with Bill Murray playing Thompson and British director Terry Gilliam's take on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), starring Johnny Depp as the Thompson character, Raoul Duke.
He was also the model for the character "Duke" in Garry Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury.
Thompson's most recent book was Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness (2004).
Here is the obituary from his home town paper:
Flamboyant Thompson was 'promise unfulfilled'
Littwin: Thompson true to caricature he created
Ripples spread far from writer's work
Thompson dissected the illness of a nation going out of control
By Duane Davis, Special to the News
February 22, 2005
I first came across Hunter Thompson's writing just before I got out of the Army in 1967.
I was just starting to get curious about beatniks and hippies and, having already read Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs, was easily taken in by a book with the lurid (and alluring) title, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs.
It was a good book, but not a great one. The main problem seemed to be that the writing didn't quite measure up to the material, that the author was not equal to his subject.
What I wanted were words as wild and dangerous as the ideas, people and events being described. I wanted sentences and paragraphs that whipped off the page and assaulted what I knew already, what I'd been taught about the way things are.
What I wanted from Thompson, it turned out, was still a few years away, but when it came, it descended like the whirlwind on Job. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971), was just what I was looking for.
The '60s were dead and gone. The Age of Aquarius had started to shift into moral malaise and counterculture collapse. Hippies were poised to become businessmen: dealing drugs or enlightenment or some weird combination of the two. The Silent Majority had roused from its slumbers and was looking for payback.
It had been crazy. It was about to get crazier. And just when it seemed like it might be a good time to cash out, Hunter Thompson came into his own.
In the '70s, reading Thompson was a rite of passage. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was quickly followed by Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Taken together, the books were fever charts of an America gone bad in the head and sick in the heart. Thompson was onto something: power, drugs, and madness; paranoia, megalomania and an arrogance not seen since the last days of the Roman Empire. He knew the names of the beast: Amerika, Vietnam, Watts, Newark, Columbia, Watergate, the Chicago Seven, SDS, the Black Panthers.
Thompson's writing was a mirror held up to our own faces contorted in the paroxysms of what we expected to be the end of the world. Thompson wrote it all down, and no matter how weird he got, it was never weird enough: Real life always sneaked past and waited around the corner with something even crazier, sicker, more dangerous. So we read Thompson as a form of self-diagnosis. While we were taking his pulse, we were checking our own.
Thompson wasn't the first. He wasn't even particularly the best. But he was the craziest.
If you wanted Edge, real edge, you read the Good Doctor.
We survived the '70s. So did Thompson. He continued to write and eventually the shelf came to hold a number of books: Four volumes of the Gonzo Papers: The Great Shark Hunt, Generation of Swine, Songs of the Doomed, and Better Than Sex; two collections of letters: The Proud Highway and Fear and Loathing in America; and, in the last couple of years, Kingdom of Fear and Hey Rube.
For a few years, Thompson had been carefully defining himself as a writer rather than reporter. Some said this was a way for him to avoid being to taken to task for a career of sloppy journalism and made-up "news" stories.
My take is a little kinder. The Good Doctor knew that "journalism" is what goes into newspapers: read in an hour and tossed aside. What he wrote, especially the two Fear And Loathing books and the first two collections in the Gonzo Papers, attempt literature.
He was a Jeremiah for our time, a crazed, coked-up, gun-totin' prophet. He shouted, I think, in order to make us hear. And now that the Good Doctor has left the office, you better believe that, wherever he has gone, they're going to need to lay in a good supply of earplugs. He went out shouting - and there are a lot of us left behind who can still hear him, raging into that good night.
Duane Davis is co-owner of Wax Trax Records and a News book critic. He reviewed Thompson's "Kingdom of Fear" in 2002.
Hunter S. Thompson dies
Last Updated Mon, 21 Feb 2005 17:31:24 EST
CBC Arts
ASPEN, COLO. - Hunter S. Thompson, the U.S. writer who pioneered the super-subjective form of journalism known as "gonzo," has killed himself, his son said.
In a statement released to the Aspen Daily News, Juan Thompson said his father shot himself to death in his home in Aspen, Colo., on Sunday night. He was 67.
Hunter Thompson, centre, with Benicio Del Toro, left, and Johnny Depp at a New York premiere for the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)
"Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family," his son said in the statement.
The newspaper said the Pitkin County police confirmed the suicide.
Thompson is credited with pioneering "gonzo journalism," a highly subjective and over-the-top style that makes writers – and their opinions – essential parts of the narrative.
He first vaulted to fame with his non-fiction book Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966) – after riding with the bikers for a year to gather material.
But he's most famous for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972) – which purported to be a work of fiction, but was a thinly disguised, gonzo compilation of two road trips that Hunter made to Las Vegas with a friend.
In their trunk, according to the book: "Two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers. ...A quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls" – all of which they manage to consume on the short trip.
A gifted chronicler of depravity in American Life, some of Thompson's other works included Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1973) – about the 1972 presidential election campaign between Richard Nixon and George McGovern – and Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s (1989).
Thompson was born in 1937 in Louisville, Ky.
He served in the U.S. Air Force for a short time as a young man, then began working as a freelance journalist.
He seemed to have rubbed shoulders with almost every famous counterculture figure in the 1960s, from beat poet Allen Ginsberg to New Journalist Tom Wolfe to Ken Kesey (including hanging out with the Merry Pranksters and participating in Kesey's first LSD tests).
He inspired a number of films, including Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) with Bill Murray playing Thompson and British director Terry Gilliam's take on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), starring Johnny Depp as the Thompson character, Raoul Duke.
He was also the model for the character "Duke" in Garry Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury.
Thompson's most recent book was Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness (2004).
Friday, February 18, 2005
Have you read your electronic news today?
NEWSPAPERS TO CYBERJOURNALISTS: SHALL WE DANCE?
CNet editor Jeff Pelline says when he quit a steady newspaper job
nine years ago to launch CNet's News.com site, his friends and coworkers
thought he was nuts, but it turns out he was just ahead of the curve. "Now
the print media giants are changing their tune -- albeit more from a
defensive than offensive posture. Stuck with stagnant growth and under
pressure from Wall Street, these companies are taking their biggest plunge
yet into the Internet pool," says Pelline. He cites Thursday's announcement
by the New York Times that it's acquiring information portal About.com for
$410 million from Primedia and the Washington Post's December deal to
purchase online magazine Slate from Microsoft as harbingers of a new
détente between old and new media. "This year will no doubt go down as a
time when Internet and print media companies danced like never before,"
says Pelline. "For star-struck Internet companies, it may be a reality
check to have to dance with old timers. But the old timers sure don't mind:
It puts more dance in their step than a new pair of wingtip shoes." (CNet
News.com 18 Feb 2005)
NEWSPAPERS TO CYBERJOURNALISTS: SHALL WE DANCE?
CNet editor Jeff Pelline says when he quit a steady newspaper job
nine years ago to launch CNet's News.com site, his friends and coworkers
thought he was nuts, but it turns out he was just ahead of the curve. "Now
the print media giants are changing their tune -- albeit more from a
defensive than offensive posture. Stuck with stagnant growth and under
pressure from Wall Street, these companies are taking their biggest plunge
yet into the Internet pool," says Pelline. He cites Thursday's announcement
by the New York Times that it's acquiring information portal About.com for
$410 million from Primedia and the Washington Post's December deal to
purchase online magazine Slate from Microsoft as harbingers of a new
détente between old and new media. "This year will no doubt go down as a
time when Internet and print media companies danced like never before,"
says Pelline. "For star-struck Internet companies, it may be a reality
check to have to dance with old timers. But the old timers sure don't mind:
It puts more dance in their step than a new pair of wingtip shoes." (CNet
News.com 18 Feb 2005)
Thursday, February 17, 2005
What the mouth says and the body does are often different and a journalist should remind her readers of this fact.
NOT WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-cameroon14feb14,0,2420523.story?coll=la-home-headlines
When Paul Biya, "the strongman who has ruled the West African
country of Cameroon for more than 20 years swept to another election
victory last fall, a number of observers quickly questioned the
process." But not the U.S. Association of Former Members of
Congress, who said, "This is what democracy is about." Their
delegation was organized by "a lobbyist for Biya's government," who
"served as the mission's chief staffer and billed Cameroon for his
work. Biya's government also picked up the $80,000 tab for the
Americans' visit. And a month after the group left, one of the six
observers signed his own lobbying contract with Cameroon."
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, February 14, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3276
NOT WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-cameroon14feb14,0,2420523.story?coll=la-home-headlines
When Paul Biya, "the strongman who has ruled the West African
country of Cameroon for more than 20 years swept to another election
victory last fall, a number of observers quickly questioned the
process." But not the U.S. Association of Former Members of
Congress, who said, "This is what democracy is about." Their
delegation was organized by "a lobbyist for Biya's government," who
"served as the mission's chief staffer and billed Cameroon for his
work. Biya's government also picked up the $80,000 tab for the
Americans' visit. And a month after the group left, one of the six
observers signed his own lobbying contract with Cameroon."
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, February 14, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3276
Monday, February 07, 2005
New Radio for everyone?
HERE COME THE PODCASTERS
It's called "podcasting," and it has the potential of changing the
dynamics of broadcasting the same way blogs have changed the dynamics of
print and TV journalism. Podcasting allows anyone with a PC to become a
broadcaster -- at virtually no cost. Programs distributed with this
technology can be received anywhere, anytime (without requiring the listener
to be near a PC), and they can be paused, rewound or fast-forwarded. The
number of regular podcasts is now more than 800, with many focusing on
gadgets, technology, new bands and music, or developments in politics,
movies and sports. One podcaster says, "It would be great if I made a
fortune doing it, but I don't see how that could possibly happen. I'm not
really trying for it, either. I'm hoping to meet some interesting people and
establish some good communications with people on weird topics." (AP/USA
Today 7 Feb 2005)
HERE COME THE PODCASTERS
It's called "podcasting," and it has the potential of changing the
dynamics of broadcasting the same way blogs have changed the dynamics of
print and TV journalism. Podcasting allows anyone with a PC to become a
broadcaster -- at virtually no cost. Programs distributed with this
technology can be received anywhere, anytime (without requiring the listener
to be near a PC), and they can be paused, rewound or fast-forwarded. The
number of regular podcasts is now more than 800, with many focusing on
gadgets, technology, new bands and music, or developments in politics,
movies and sports. One podcaster says, "It would be great if I made a
fortune doing it, but I don't see how that could possibly happen. I'm not
really trying for it, either. I'm hoping to meet some interesting people and
establish some good communications with people on weird topics." (AP/USA
Today 7 Feb 2005)
Saturday, February 05, 2005
Here are to articles, one on a challenge to the definition of what is it to be a journalist and the second about manipulated photos:WHO GETS TO DECIDE WHAT JOURNALISM IS?
A California court will soon decide whether bloggers have the same
legal protections as journalists under "shield" laws that protect reporters
from revealing their sources. Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Kurt
Opsahl, who represents two bloggers targeted by Apple for leaking
information about new company products, maintains that if the bloggers are
forced to give up their sources "the public will lose out on a vital outlet
for independent news, analysis, and commentary." An opposing view is offered
by University of Iowa law professor Randall Bezanson, who says that simply
expressing opinions to a tiny audience isn't journalism -- because if it
were "then I'm a journalist when I write a letter to my mother reporting on
what I'm doing. I don't think the free-press clause [of the U.S.
Constitution] was intended to extend its protections to letters to mothers
from sons." (USA Today 2 Feb 2005)
YOUR LYING EYES IN THE PHOTOSHOP AGE
Have the ethics of photojournalism been changed in some way by such
software as Adobe Photoshop, which allows easy manipulation of digital
photos? The National Press Photographers Association says it's wrong to
alter the content of a photograph "in any way that deceives the public," and
the director of photography at the Los Angeles Times director of photography
says, "If our readers can't count on honesty from us, I don't know what we
have left." Dartmouth computer science professor Hany Farid is working to
solve the problem of dishonest photographs by developing computer algorithms
that can detect when an image has been altered. But Farid says, "It's a bit
of an arms race. It's tamper and tamper protection, and we can already
predict who's going to win. We simply make it harder" for the average person
with the average amount of skill to get away with photographic deceptions.
(CSM/USA Today 2 Feb 2005)
A California court will soon decide whether bloggers have the same
legal protections as journalists under "shield" laws that protect reporters
from revealing their sources. Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Kurt
Opsahl, who represents two bloggers targeted by Apple for leaking
information about new company products, maintains that if the bloggers are
forced to give up their sources "the public will lose out on a vital outlet
for independent news, analysis, and commentary." An opposing view is offered
by University of Iowa law professor Randall Bezanson, who says that simply
expressing opinions to a tiny audience isn't journalism -- because if it
were "then I'm a journalist when I write a letter to my mother reporting on
what I'm doing. I don't think the free-press clause [of the U.S.
Constitution] was intended to extend its protections to letters to mothers
from sons." (USA Today 2 Feb 2005)
YOUR LYING EYES IN THE PHOTOSHOP AGE
Have the ethics of photojournalism been changed in some way by such
software as Adobe Photoshop, which allows easy manipulation of digital
photos? The National Press Photographers Association says it's wrong to
alter the content of a photograph "in any way that deceives the public," and
the director of photography at the Los Angeles Times director of photography
says, "If our readers can't count on honesty from us, I don't know what we
have left." Dartmouth computer science professor Hany Farid is working to
solve the problem of dishonest photographs by developing computer algorithms
that can detect when an image has been altered. But Farid says, "It's a bit
of an arms race. It's tamper and tamper protection, and we can already
predict who's going to win. We simply make it harder" for the average person
with the average amount of skill to get away with photographic deceptions.
(CSM/USA Today 2 Feb 2005)
Sunday, January 30, 2005
What kind of life and sacrifice does a journalist have to make? What mistakes can she make and still keep her job? What mistakes can she make and still be a normal person? What kind of mistakes can she make and still be human? Well evey story is different but here is one of them:
14 Years Later, My Hollywood Ending
By BERNARD WEINRAUB
Published: January 30, 2005
LOS ANGELES
I CAME to Hollywood in 1991 thinking I knew quite a lot about the world and its ways. As a young reporter, I had been to Vietnam. Later, I covered Northern Ireland, several political campaigns and the White House under President Ronald Reagan and the elder President George Bush. On arriving, I was fresh from a sudden assignment in India after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. But only in my 14 years here - most of it spent covering the movie industry, the rest covering television and music - did I come face to face with some of the more startling, and not always pleasant, truths about human behavior, my own included
On retiring (officially, this is my final week at The Times), it seems best to sort through this Hollywood tour. It began in a string of modest, even shabby, apartments - one of them, on Martel Avenue in West Hollywood, best remembered for the cluster of police cars, drug dealers and prostitutes on the corner. Along the way I married a studio chief, Amy Pascal, now chairwoman of Sony Pictures. For both of us, the liaison opened a rare two-way window on the inner workings of two worlds, moviedom and the press, that have long been locked in a messy but symbiotic struggle. But our marriage also changed the game. I won't speak for my wife and her own way of coping with career complications born of an alliance with a reporter, but I can say that our wedding, in August 1997, brought to the fore some of my own shortcomings. Clearly, I stayed too long on my beat, clinging to a notion that I could sidestep conflicts of interest by avoiding direct coverage of Sony, and learning too late why wiser heads counsel against even the appearance of conflict. But my marriage, and some of the events that tumbled out of it, also taught me something about the ferocity of a culture in which the players can be best friends one day and savage you the next.
When I finally asked to be taken off the movie beat in 2000, I laughed and said I felt like the Duke of Windsor. But I quickly caught a lesson in how chilly life as a former movie correspondent could be. In the past, I'd written about Jeffrey Katzenberg, then president of the Walt Disney Company. He returned every call quickly and often phoned me; he dished over pasta at Locanda Veneta about all the studios in town and became such a pal that I once showed him off-the-record comments made about him by Michael Eisner. That was wrong and foolish, and years later I still regret it. As soon as I stopped covering movies, Mr. Katzenberg stopped responding to phone calls. I was surprised but shouldn't have been.
Not every Hollywood moment involved operators like Mr. Katzenberg, nor were they all somehow tied up with my marriage. Fellow journalists contributed their share. In one remarkable episode about two years ago, Robert J. Dowling, the publisher and editor in chief of The Hollywood Reporter, threatened to punch me during a charity event. He was upset by an article I had written about two years earlier dealing with staff resignations after his newspaper failed to print an article about an inquiry by the Screen Actors Guild into whether the Reporter columnist George Christy had received pension and health benefits to which he was not entitled. Mr. Christy's column was soon suspended. (Peter Bart, the editor of Variety and a former Times Hollywood correspondent, went beyond Mr. Dowling: he sought to get me removed from the job because of an article I wrote saying that The Hollywood Reporter was catching up with Variety.)
The Hollywood Reporter scandal was, in fairness, pathetic and hardly on the level of Watergate or Iran-contra. And it wasn't akin to the unfortunate way even more serious journalists are co-opted by the overtures of a Michael Ovitz or the charm of a Joe Roth. Mr. Roth, a top Hollywood player, seems available at any time and is willing to schmooze with eager reporters as if he had all the time in the world.
Mr. Ovitz went a step or two further. Shortly after I arrived in Hollywood and met him, when he was at his zenith as chairman of the Creative Artists Agency, he offered to help if my children needed to attend private school or if I needed to find a hospital. I never took him up on the offers.
MY first day here, as I recall it, was in early September 1991. Having just come back from India, I was struck almost immediately by the prevalence of money, and the crazy economic gap between journalists and the people they covered. It was like dropping into Marie Antoinette's France. In Washington, reporters often lived next door to the people they covered. Whatever the income gap between a reporter and a lawyer or lobbyist - and it's considerable - your lives intersected. In the neighborhood. On the subway. At private schools. At parties.
Scott Gries/Getty Images
The press stands behind its velvet rope.
Journalists in Washington do not feel diminished by their lower salaries. In Hollywood, many do. I did. Waiting for a valet at the Bel-Air Hotel to bring my company-leased Ford, I once stood beside a journalist turned producer who said, "I used to drive a car like that." Though I'm ashamed to say it, I was soon hunting for parking spots near Orso or the Peninsula Hotel to avoid the discomfort of having a valet drive up my leased two-year-old Buick in front of some luncheon companion with a Mercedes.
For many of us on the press side, the money gap leads to resentment and envy, compounded by a conviction that studio executives and producers are no better or smarter than the journalists who cover them. Initially, I was simply amazed. My first real Hollywood acquaintance was Dawn Steel, a producer and onetime studio chief, and one of the more dynamic figures in town. (Ms. Steel died of a malignant brain tumor in 1997 at the age of 51). Before leaving New York, I was in the office of Warren Hoge, then the editor of the Times Magazine, who said Ms. Steel would open the gates of the movie world for me. He called her on her car cellphone, which was still uncommon enough that I was dazzled. She insisted that I see her as soon as I arrived. I did so. Her house off Coldwater Canyon, behind gates and atop a winding road, was a sprawling, ranch-style home with panoramic views of the city on a huge plot of land. I had never seen a home like this.
What made it strange was that Ms. Steel was a girl from Long Island - smart, funny, neurotic. She had no airs. She and so many others in Hollywood seemed like people I knew. I grew up with them. And yet they earned bizarre amounts of money that lifted them into a different universe.
My first reaction was to write about that difference. Early on, for instance, I wrote about movie stars and executives trooping into a specially designed soundstage at Sony for the Hollywood Hunger project to benefit Oxfam America. Instead of simply writing checks, the celebrities sought what the caterer, Ruth Hedges, told me was "the actual experience of being poor and hungry."
So the likes of Danny Glover, Jackson Browne, Daryl Hannah, Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Sarandon, David Byrne and Graham Nash drew lots: 15 percent represented high-income countries and dined at fancy tables on stuffed breast of chicken, sun-dried tomatoes and radicchio, and salad with shrimp; 25 percent represented middle-income countries and sat on benches at wooden tables to eat rice and beans and tortillas off paper plates; and the majority, sat on the floor on a mat and had rice and water, as many people in the world do.
Almost as shocking (at least for me) were the gala events to raise money for ecological causes in the early 1990's. At one such event, 700 of the town's elite (Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford, Ted Danson, Jane Fonda) showed up at a soundstage in Mercedeses, BMW's, stretch limos and other gas guzzlers to celebrate Hollywood's commitment to the environment. The invitations said, "In the spirit of the event, we urge you to car-pool." It didn't appear that anyone did.
Detachment from the real, I soon learned, was closely bound up in the culture of stardom, and star behavior, alas, has a way of rubbing off on those of us who come in contact. At first, as I now hate to admit, I was fascinated by the idea of meeting movie stars. (After meeting a few, the fascination ended.) Maureen Dowd in Washington made me promise I'd interview Michelle Pfeiffer soon after arriving. As it turned out, she was my first star interview. She was promoting the film "Frankie and Johnny," in which, bizarrely, she was playing a frumpy waitress.
I met Ms. Pfeiffer at her office in Century City. I was tongue-tied. She talked about her character's loneliness and how she identified with the waitress. I nodded at whatever Ms. Pfeiffer said. She told me it was a fantasy that beautiful people couldn't look unattractive or weren't lonely or hurt. "It doesn't matter what you look like or how old you are," she said. "That's not relevant." Right. For a moment, I believed it.
At another point, at the Toronto Film Festival, I rushed through an interview with Billy Bob Thornton and Bill Paxton about their film "A Simple Plan." It was important for the two actors to promote their offbeat film and get an article in The Times. I cut short the interview and said, "Look, I've got to interview Cameron Diaz." The pair were dumbfounded. She was prettier and a rising star. She was more important. The fact that I had hurt the actors and embarrassed myself still rankles. Not a high point but perhaps the beginning of real understanding about a world that obsessively chases what's young, what's new, what has heat.
My most embarrassing moment in Hollywood was an interview with Jim Carrey that at least absolved me of star fever. The comedian, in a suite at Ma Maison Sofitel, was promoting his film "The Mask." I had taken medicine for a bad cold. The interview began. I was settled into an easy chair, facing Mr. Carrey with my feet crossed in front of me. As he began answering questions, I fell asleep. The next thing I knew, I was feeling somebody kick the bottom of my shoe with his foot. I woke up, mortified. Years later, I met his manager Jimmy Miller. I told Mr. Miller I had a confession: that I fell asleep while interviewing Mr. Carrey. Mr. Miller exclaimed: "So you're the guy! He talks all the time about a reporter who once fell asleep on him."
IN 1996, I met Amy Pascal for a business breakfast at the Peninsula Hotel. She had just been named president of Turner Pictures, a new company founded by Ted Turner.
Not even 18 months later, the company was folded into Time Warner.
As we began dating, I rationalized that I could avoid any hint of a conflict of interest by avoiding any coverage of Turner Pictures. By the time we were married, the next year, my wife had been appointed chairman of Columbia Pictures. I should have left the movie beat right then, if not sooner.
But with the agreement of my editors, who were confident I could deal with the issue, I felt I could continue covering the movie business, avoiding coverage of Columbia and its parent company, Sony, and leaving that to a colleague. It was a delicate balancing act that seemed to work for a while. But I underestimated how closely I would be watched, or how quickly Hollywood would jump on my marriage as way to get an edge in coverage by The New York Times.
Warner Brothers, once a high-flying studio, was at that time beset by a string of expensive movie flops and its parent company's music operation had a weak track record. With a colleague, Geraldine Fabrikant, I covered the failures at Warner, whose co-chairmen were Robert A. Daly and Terry S. Semel. The two eventually resigned.
Mr. Daly was furious and told friends and others that I should not write such articles because of my marriage, a view I came to share, though I remain convinced that the coverage was accurate and fair. Soon enough, an article appeared in Brill's Content, a magazine covering the news media, by Lorne Manly (now a reporter for The Times). It said that "two Hollywood sources" said Warner had offered my wife a production deal instead of "the high-ranking job she sought," and that "instead she headed to Sony." As I read it, the implication was that The Times's articles were written because I was personally peeved at Warner and not because the studio was experiencing failures like "The Postman" and "Sphere."
I wrote to Bill Kovach, the ombudsman for Brill's Content and a former Times Washington bureau chief for whom I had once worked, to complain about what I called the cheap and inept journalism at his magazine, which was itself financed by Barry Diller, George Soros and others. Would the magazine ever write about Mr. Diller or Mr. Soros? I asked in an angry note. Mr. Kovach responded with equal anger. In retrospect, the nastiness of journalists toward The New York Times - and me - should have been a warning that this was a losing battle.
Mr. Ovitz, who began complaining to The Times about my coverage shortly after I arrived, was soon trying to use my marriage as a lever to oust me. He visited The Times after I had written about his troubled management company, which he formed after his dismissal from the Walt Disney Company. At the time Mr. Ovitz was also facing problems because of a failed Broadway investment and a vain effort to start a football franchise.
"What does The New York Times have against me? Mr. Ovitz asked Joseph Lelyveld, then the executive editor, according to New York magazine. "Your football writer hates me, your theater writer hates me and Bernie Weinraub just killed me."
Mr. Lelyveld said: "What are you talking about? If I got all three writers in a room they wouldn't even know each other."
True.
In a later phone conversation, Mr. Ovitz urged The Times to dismiss me and finally shrieked at Mr. Lelyveld: "You don't know anything about our business! I can't talk to you!"
In mid-1999, Mr. Lelyveld came to Los Angeles. I began our lunch by saying that I wanted off the movie beat. Not because I was tired of it, but because it was being used as an excuse to attack me and the newspaper I loved. Mr. Lelyveld was visibly relieved. I had saved him from saying it was getting difficult for the newspaper. I asked about covering television and other entertainment. He agreed.
IN December 2001, less than three years later, I received a call from Julia Phillips, the once-hot producer of films like "Taxi Driver" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," who had drifted from center stage in Hollywood long before she wrote her classic tell-all, "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again." To my regret, I asked her to hold on one minute while I finished on another line. As soon as I returned, Ms. Phillips said: "I'm dying. And I want an obituary in The New York Times."
Shortly after arriving in Hollywood, I had met Ms. Phillips late one chilly afternoon at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I wanted to write about her as the author of a slash-and-burn chronicle that detailed the selfishness, duplicity, nastiness and greed of the Hollywood stars and executives she knew in the 1970's and 1980's. The book also revealed her own plunge into cocaine addiction.
Ms. Phillips said she was a pariah in town. "I saw these people for what they were," she said. In the years that followed I became friendly with her: she would call me periodically to either congratulate me on an article or criticize me, saying I was naïve or had been duped. At dinner at Orso, her favorite restaurant, she was brutally honest about herself and about the Hollywood crowd. "Don't trust these people," she warned me numerous times. "Don't trust anyone here."
I laughed and didn't really believe her. But with time I came to realize that she, more than Dawn Steel, had become my most reliable guide to the ways of what insiders still like to call "the town."
Responding to her call, I immediately drove to see her in her apartment looking out onto West Hollywood and, on a clear day, downtown. I said I wanted to tape-record some interviews for an obituary. And I asked if she wanted anything else. Ms. Phillips said she adored George Clooney and would love to see his latest film, "Ocean's Eleven." (Warner Brothers, which had tapes of the film, sent her a copy the next day.) I spent several days visiting and interviewing her.
Because of her book, Ms. Phillips was an outcast among Hollywood's elite. "At first it bothered me because I really didn't expect that kind of reaction," she said. "I thought people had a sense of humor. I really did.
"Understand, I wasn't a pariah because I was a drug-addicted, alcoholic, rotten person and not a good mother," she said. "I was a pariah because I lit them with a harsh fluorescent light and rendered them as contemptible as they really are."
Ms. Phillips died of cancer in the early days of 2002. I went to her funeral service on the rooftop of her apartment building and thought of what she said while dying. Was it an overstatement? I wonder. I'm part of the Hollywood world now. I can't deny it. I drive a Range Rover. I live in Brentwood. Not everyone is contemptible. Perhaps Julia Phillips was wrong. I hope she is.
14 Years Later, My Hollywood Ending
By BERNARD WEINRAUB
Published: January 30, 2005
LOS ANGELES
I CAME to Hollywood in 1991 thinking I knew quite a lot about the world and its ways. As a young reporter, I had been to Vietnam. Later, I covered Northern Ireland, several political campaigns and the White House under President Ronald Reagan and the elder President George Bush. On arriving, I was fresh from a sudden assignment in India after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. But only in my 14 years here - most of it spent covering the movie industry, the rest covering television and music - did I come face to face with some of the more startling, and not always pleasant, truths about human behavior, my own included
On retiring (officially, this is my final week at The Times), it seems best to sort through this Hollywood tour. It began in a string of modest, even shabby, apartments - one of them, on Martel Avenue in West Hollywood, best remembered for the cluster of police cars, drug dealers and prostitutes on the corner. Along the way I married a studio chief, Amy Pascal, now chairwoman of Sony Pictures. For both of us, the liaison opened a rare two-way window on the inner workings of two worlds, moviedom and the press, that have long been locked in a messy but symbiotic struggle. But our marriage also changed the game. I won't speak for my wife and her own way of coping with career complications born of an alliance with a reporter, but I can say that our wedding, in August 1997, brought to the fore some of my own shortcomings. Clearly, I stayed too long on my beat, clinging to a notion that I could sidestep conflicts of interest by avoiding direct coverage of Sony, and learning too late why wiser heads counsel against even the appearance of conflict. But my marriage, and some of the events that tumbled out of it, also taught me something about the ferocity of a culture in which the players can be best friends one day and savage you the next.
When I finally asked to be taken off the movie beat in 2000, I laughed and said I felt like the Duke of Windsor. But I quickly caught a lesson in how chilly life as a former movie correspondent could be. In the past, I'd written about Jeffrey Katzenberg, then president of the Walt Disney Company. He returned every call quickly and often phoned me; he dished over pasta at Locanda Veneta about all the studios in town and became such a pal that I once showed him off-the-record comments made about him by Michael Eisner. That was wrong and foolish, and years later I still regret it. As soon as I stopped covering movies, Mr. Katzenberg stopped responding to phone calls. I was surprised but shouldn't have been.
Not every Hollywood moment involved operators like Mr. Katzenberg, nor were they all somehow tied up with my marriage. Fellow journalists contributed their share. In one remarkable episode about two years ago, Robert J. Dowling, the publisher and editor in chief of The Hollywood Reporter, threatened to punch me during a charity event. He was upset by an article I had written about two years earlier dealing with staff resignations after his newspaper failed to print an article about an inquiry by the Screen Actors Guild into whether the Reporter columnist George Christy had received pension and health benefits to which he was not entitled. Mr. Christy's column was soon suspended. (Peter Bart, the editor of Variety and a former Times Hollywood correspondent, went beyond Mr. Dowling: he sought to get me removed from the job because of an article I wrote saying that The Hollywood Reporter was catching up with Variety.)
The Hollywood Reporter scandal was, in fairness, pathetic and hardly on the level of Watergate or Iran-contra. And it wasn't akin to the unfortunate way even more serious journalists are co-opted by the overtures of a Michael Ovitz or the charm of a Joe Roth. Mr. Roth, a top Hollywood player, seems available at any time and is willing to schmooze with eager reporters as if he had all the time in the world.
Mr. Ovitz went a step or two further. Shortly after I arrived in Hollywood and met him, when he was at his zenith as chairman of the Creative Artists Agency, he offered to help if my children needed to attend private school or if I needed to find a hospital. I never took him up on the offers.
MY first day here, as I recall it, was in early September 1991. Having just come back from India, I was struck almost immediately by the prevalence of money, and the crazy economic gap between journalists and the people they covered. It was like dropping into Marie Antoinette's France. In Washington, reporters often lived next door to the people they covered. Whatever the income gap between a reporter and a lawyer or lobbyist - and it's considerable - your lives intersected. In the neighborhood. On the subway. At private schools. At parties.
Scott Gries/Getty Images
The press stands behind its velvet rope.
Journalists in Washington do not feel diminished by their lower salaries. In Hollywood, many do. I did. Waiting for a valet at the Bel-Air Hotel to bring my company-leased Ford, I once stood beside a journalist turned producer who said, "I used to drive a car like that." Though I'm ashamed to say it, I was soon hunting for parking spots near Orso or the Peninsula Hotel to avoid the discomfort of having a valet drive up my leased two-year-old Buick in front of some luncheon companion with a Mercedes.
For many of us on the press side, the money gap leads to resentment and envy, compounded by a conviction that studio executives and producers are no better or smarter than the journalists who cover them. Initially, I was simply amazed. My first real Hollywood acquaintance was Dawn Steel, a producer and onetime studio chief, and one of the more dynamic figures in town. (Ms. Steel died of a malignant brain tumor in 1997 at the age of 51). Before leaving New York, I was in the office of Warren Hoge, then the editor of the Times Magazine, who said Ms. Steel would open the gates of the movie world for me. He called her on her car cellphone, which was still uncommon enough that I was dazzled. She insisted that I see her as soon as I arrived. I did so. Her house off Coldwater Canyon, behind gates and atop a winding road, was a sprawling, ranch-style home with panoramic views of the city on a huge plot of land. I had never seen a home like this.
What made it strange was that Ms. Steel was a girl from Long Island - smart, funny, neurotic. She had no airs. She and so many others in Hollywood seemed like people I knew. I grew up with them. And yet they earned bizarre amounts of money that lifted them into a different universe.
My first reaction was to write about that difference. Early on, for instance, I wrote about movie stars and executives trooping into a specially designed soundstage at Sony for the Hollywood Hunger project to benefit Oxfam America. Instead of simply writing checks, the celebrities sought what the caterer, Ruth Hedges, told me was "the actual experience of being poor and hungry."
So the likes of Danny Glover, Jackson Browne, Daryl Hannah, Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Sarandon, David Byrne and Graham Nash drew lots: 15 percent represented high-income countries and dined at fancy tables on stuffed breast of chicken, sun-dried tomatoes and radicchio, and salad with shrimp; 25 percent represented middle-income countries and sat on benches at wooden tables to eat rice and beans and tortillas off paper plates; and the majority, sat on the floor on a mat and had rice and water, as many people in the world do.
Almost as shocking (at least for me) were the gala events to raise money for ecological causes in the early 1990's. At one such event, 700 of the town's elite (Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford, Ted Danson, Jane Fonda) showed up at a soundstage in Mercedeses, BMW's, stretch limos and other gas guzzlers to celebrate Hollywood's commitment to the environment. The invitations said, "In the spirit of the event, we urge you to car-pool." It didn't appear that anyone did.
Detachment from the real, I soon learned, was closely bound up in the culture of stardom, and star behavior, alas, has a way of rubbing off on those of us who come in contact. At first, as I now hate to admit, I was fascinated by the idea of meeting movie stars. (After meeting a few, the fascination ended.) Maureen Dowd in Washington made me promise I'd interview Michelle Pfeiffer soon after arriving. As it turned out, she was my first star interview. She was promoting the film "Frankie and Johnny," in which, bizarrely, she was playing a frumpy waitress.
I met Ms. Pfeiffer at her office in Century City. I was tongue-tied. She talked about her character's loneliness and how she identified with the waitress. I nodded at whatever Ms. Pfeiffer said. She told me it was a fantasy that beautiful people couldn't look unattractive or weren't lonely or hurt. "It doesn't matter what you look like or how old you are," she said. "That's not relevant." Right. For a moment, I believed it.
At another point, at the Toronto Film Festival, I rushed through an interview with Billy Bob Thornton and Bill Paxton about their film "A Simple Plan." It was important for the two actors to promote their offbeat film and get an article in The Times. I cut short the interview and said, "Look, I've got to interview Cameron Diaz." The pair were dumbfounded. She was prettier and a rising star. She was more important. The fact that I had hurt the actors and embarrassed myself still rankles. Not a high point but perhaps the beginning of real understanding about a world that obsessively chases what's young, what's new, what has heat.
My most embarrassing moment in Hollywood was an interview with Jim Carrey that at least absolved me of star fever. The comedian, in a suite at Ma Maison Sofitel, was promoting his film "The Mask." I had taken medicine for a bad cold. The interview began. I was settled into an easy chair, facing Mr. Carrey with my feet crossed in front of me. As he began answering questions, I fell asleep. The next thing I knew, I was feeling somebody kick the bottom of my shoe with his foot. I woke up, mortified. Years later, I met his manager Jimmy Miller. I told Mr. Miller I had a confession: that I fell asleep while interviewing Mr. Carrey. Mr. Miller exclaimed: "So you're the guy! He talks all the time about a reporter who once fell asleep on him."
IN 1996, I met Amy Pascal for a business breakfast at the Peninsula Hotel. She had just been named president of Turner Pictures, a new company founded by Ted Turner.
Not even 18 months later, the company was folded into Time Warner.
As we began dating, I rationalized that I could avoid any hint of a conflict of interest by avoiding any coverage of Turner Pictures. By the time we were married, the next year, my wife had been appointed chairman of Columbia Pictures. I should have left the movie beat right then, if not sooner.
But with the agreement of my editors, who were confident I could deal with the issue, I felt I could continue covering the movie business, avoiding coverage of Columbia and its parent company, Sony, and leaving that to a colleague. It was a delicate balancing act that seemed to work for a while. But I underestimated how closely I would be watched, or how quickly Hollywood would jump on my marriage as way to get an edge in coverage by The New York Times.
Warner Brothers, once a high-flying studio, was at that time beset by a string of expensive movie flops and its parent company's music operation had a weak track record. With a colleague, Geraldine Fabrikant, I covered the failures at Warner, whose co-chairmen were Robert A. Daly and Terry S. Semel. The two eventually resigned.
Mr. Daly was furious and told friends and others that I should not write such articles because of my marriage, a view I came to share, though I remain convinced that the coverage was accurate and fair. Soon enough, an article appeared in Brill's Content, a magazine covering the news media, by Lorne Manly (now a reporter for The Times). It said that "two Hollywood sources" said Warner had offered my wife a production deal instead of "the high-ranking job she sought," and that "instead she headed to Sony." As I read it, the implication was that The Times's articles were written because I was personally peeved at Warner and not because the studio was experiencing failures like "The Postman" and "Sphere."
I wrote to Bill Kovach, the ombudsman for Brill's Content and a former Times Washington bureau chief for whom I had once worked, to complain about what I called the cheap and inept journalism at his magazine, which was itself financed by Barry Diller, George Soros and others. Would the magazine ever write about Mr. Diller or Mr. Soros? I asked in an angry note. Mr. Kovach responded with equal anger. In retrospect, the nastiness of journalists toward The New York Times - and me - should have been a warning that this was a losing battle.
Mr. Ovitz, who began complaining to The Times about my coverage shortly after I arrived, was soon trying to use my marriage as a lever to oust me. He visited The Times after I had written about his troubled management company, which he formed after his dismissal from the Walt Disney Company. At the time Mr. Ovitz was also facing problems because of a failed Broadway investment and a vain effort to start a football franchise.
"What does The New York Times have against me? Mr. Ovitz asked Joseph Lelyveld, then the executive editor, according to New York magazine. "Your football writer hates me, your theater writer hates me and Bernie Weinraub just killed me."
Mr. Lelyveld said: "What are you talking about? If I got all three writers in a room they wouldn't even know each other."
True.
In a later phone conversation, Mr. Ovitz urged The Times to dismiss me and finally shrieked at Mr. Lelyveld: "You don't know anything about our business! I can't talk to you!"
In mid-1999, Mr. Lelyveld came to Los Angeles. I began our lunch by saying that I wanted off the movie beat. Not because I was tired of it, but because it was being used as an excuse to attack me and the newspaper I loved. Mr. Lelyveld was visibly relieved. I had saved him from saying it was getting difficult for the newspaper. I asked about covering television and other entertainment. He agreed.
IN December 2001, less than three years later, I received a call from Julia Phillips, the once-hot producer of films like "Taxi Driver" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," who had drifted from center stage in Hollywood long before she wrote her classic tell-all, "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again." To my regret, I asked her to hold on one minute while I finished on another line. As soon as I returned, Ms. Phillips said: "I'm dying. And I want an obituary in The New York Times."
Shortly after arriving in Hollywood, I had met Ms. Phillips late one chilly afternoon at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I wanted to write about her as the author of a slash-and-burn chronicle that detailed the selfishness, duplicity, nastiness and greed of the Hollywood stars and executives she knew in the 1970's and 1980's. The book also revealed her own plunge into cocaine addiction.
Ms. Phillips said she was a pariah in town. "I saw these people for what they were," she said. In the years that followed I became friendly with her: she would call me periodically to either congratulate me on an article or criticize me, saying I was naïve or had been duped. At dinner at Orso, her favorite restaurant, she was brutally honest about herself and about the Hollywood crowd. "Don't trust these people," she warned me numerous times. "Don't trust anyone here."
I laughed and didn't really believe her. But with time I came to realize that she, more than Dawn Steel, had become my most reliable guide to the ways of what insiders still like to call "the town."
Responding to her call, I immediately drove to see her in her apartment looking out onto West Hollywood and, on a clear day, downtown. I said I wanted to tape-record some interviews for an obituary. And I asked if she wanted anything else. Ms. Phillips said she adored George Clooney and would love to see his latest film, "Ocean's Eleven." (Warner Brothers, which had tapes of the film, sent her a copy the next day.) I spent several days visiting and interviewing her.
Because of her book, Ms. Phillips was an outcast among Hollywood's elite. "At first it bothered me because I really didn't expect that kind of reaction," she said. "I thought people had a sense of humor. I really did.
"Understand, I wasn't a pariah because I was a drug-addicted, alcoholic, rotten person and not a good mother," she said. "I was a pariah because I lit them with a harsh fluorescent light and rendered them as contemptible as they really are."
Ms. Phillips died of cancer in the early days of 2002. I went to her funeral service on the rooftop of her apartment building and thought of what she said while dying. Was it an overstatement? I wonder. I'm part of the Hollywood world now. I can't deny it. I drive a Range Rover. I live in Brentwood. Not everyone is contemptible. Perhaps Julia Phillips was wrong. I hope she is.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
The dilemma of death-reporters are now targeted in war zones.
. A TRYING-NOT-TO-BE-CAPTIVE AUDIENCE
http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/showcase/la-fg-reporting23jan23.story
"Most Western reporters have determined that their only option is to
turn to the U.S. and British embassies for transportation help,"
writes the Los Angeles Times' Alissa Rubin from Iraq. "The
embassies, with the power to commandeer military helicopters, armed
with gunners and personal security details, allow journalists to
leapfrog the ring of danger around Baghdad and visit the rest of the
country. ... But with the mobility come some hindrances. Western
government officials exert control over the journalists'
itineraries, set up interviews, and decide who and what will be
seen." The Independent's Robert Fisk recently decried "hotel
journalism," writing, "Rarely, if ever, has a war been covered by
reporters in so distant and restricted a way."
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3206
. A TRYING-NOT-TO-BE-CAPTIVE AUDIENCE
http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/showcase/la-fg-reporting23jan23.story
"Most Western reporters have determined that their only option is to
turn to the U.S. and British embassies for transportation help,"
writes the Los Angeles Times' Alissa Rubin from Iraq. "The
embassies, with the power to commandeer military helicopters, armed
with gunners and personal security details, allow journalists to
leapfrog the ring of danger around Baghdad and visit the rest of the
country. ... But with the mobility come some hindrances. Western
government officials exert control over the journalists'
itineraries, set up interviews, and decide who and what will be
seen." The Independent's Robert Fisk recently decried "hotel
journalism," writing, "Rarely, if ever, has a war been covered by
reporters in so distant and restricted a way."
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3206
Saturday, January 22, 2005
Hey how do you like this for a good idea?: Experience three months in a newsroom with some of Canada's finest journalists. The CBC News: Canada Now internship program is open to BC students enrolled in, or recently graduated from, a journalism program. The program aims to strengthen BC-based talent and to open doors for a diversity of voices.
This is a story worth watching!:
THE TERMINAL
Enviros gear up for international battle over Siberian oil pipeline
Russia's 2,565-mile, $15.5 billion trans-Siberian oil pipeline -- currently under construction -- is at the center of a major emerging international environmental brouhaha. At issue is the Pacific terminal site. Recently, the terminus was abruptly moved from Vostochny, Russia's main Pacific industrial port, to Perevoznaya, a pristine bay and popular tourist destination that is home to some of the world's last Amur leopards. The bay can only be reached through a narrow channel that is home to Russia's sole maritime nature reserve, a collection of 11 islands valued for their rich biodiversity. The area is home to strong currents that enviros say could carry an oil spill quickly over large distances. Russian and international environmental organizations are mounting an international outcry, which poses an awkward problem for Japan, as it is financing 80 percent of the pricey project but would prefer to present a green image on the global stage.
straight to the source: The New York Times, James Brooke, 21 Jan 2005
THE TERMINAL
Enviros gear up for international battle over Siberian oil pipeline
Russia's 2,565-mile, $15.5 billion trans-Siberian oil pipeline -- currently under construction -- is at the center of a major emerging international environmental brouhaha. At issue is the Pacific terminal site. Recently, the terminus was abruptly moved from Vostochny, Russia's main Pacific industrial port, to Perevoznaya, a pristine bay and popular tourist destination that is home to some of the world's last Amur leopards. The bay can only be reached through a narrow channel that is home to Russia's sole maritime nature reserve, a collection of 11 islands valued for their rich biodiversity. The area is home to strong currents that enviros say could carry an oil spill quickly over large distances. Russian and international environmental organizations are mounting an international outcry, which poses an awkward problem for Japan, as it is financing 80 percent of the pricey project but would prefer to present a green image on the global stage.
straight to the source: The New York Times, James Brooke, 21 Jan 2005
Friday, January 21, 2005
Well I hope some of you are still checking this out as the following is and will continue to be a very good story to watch and it is one that concerns Japan as well as everyone else with concerns about the welfare of the planet:
4.
THE TERMINAL
Enviros gear up for international battle over Siberian oil pipeline
Russia's 2,565-mile, $15.5 billion trans-Siberian oil pipeline -- currently under construction -- is at the center of a major emerging international environmental brouhaha. At issue is the Pacific terminal site. Recently, the terminus was abruptly moved from Vostochny, Russia's main Pacific industrial port, to Perevoznaya, a pristine bay and popular tourist destination that is home to some of the world's last Amur leopards. The bay can only be reached through a narrow channel that is home to Russia's sole maritime nature reserve, a collection of 11 islands valued for their rich biodiversity. The area is home to strong currents that enviros say could carry an oil spill quickly over large distances. Russian and international environmental organizations are mounting an international outcry, which poses an awkward problem for Japan, as it is financing 80 percent of the pricey project but would prefer to present a green image on the global stage.
straight to the source: The New York Times, James Brooke, 21 Jan 2005
4.
THE TERMINAL
Enviros gear up for international battle over Siberian oil pipeline
Russia's 2,565-mile, $15.5 billion trans-Siberian oil pipeline -- currently under construction -- is at the center of a major emerging international environmental brouhaha. At issue is the Pacific terminal site. Recently, the terminus was abruptly moved from Vostochny, Russia's main Pacific industrial port, to Perevoznaya, a pristine bay and popular tourist destination that is home to some of the world's last Amur leopards. The bay can only be reached through a narrow channel that is home to Russia's sole maritime nature reserve, a collection of 11 islands valued for their rich biodiversity. The area is home to strong currents that enviros say could carry an oil spill quickly over large distances. Russian and international environmental organizations are mounting an international outcry, which poses an awkward problem for Japan, as it is financing 80 percent of the pricey project but would prefer to present a green image on the global stage.
straight to the source: The New York Times, James Brooke, 21 Jan 2005
Well I hope some of you are still checking this out as the following is and will continue to be a very good story to watch and it is one that concerns Japan as well as everyone else with concerns about the welfare of the planet:
4.
THE TERMINAL
Enviros gear up for international battle over Siberian oil pipeline
Russia's 2,565-mile, $15.5 billion trans-Siberian oil pipeline -- currently under construction -- is at the center of a major emerging international environmental brouhaha. At issue is the Pacific terminal site. Recently, the terminus was abruptly moved from Vostochny, Russia's main Pacific industrial port, to Perevoznaya, a pristine bay and popular tourist destination that is home to some of the world's last Amur leopards. The bay can only be reached through a narrow channel that is home to Russia's sole maritime nature reserve, a collection of 11 islands valued for their rich biodiversity. The area is home to strong currents that enviros say could carry an oil spill quickly over large distances. Russian and international environmental organizations are mounting an international outcry, which poses an awkward problem for Japan, as it is financing 80 percent of the pricey project but would prefer to present a green image on the global stage.
straight to the source: The New York Times, James Brooke, 21 Jan 2005
4.
THE TERMINAL
Enviros gear up for international battle over Siberian oil pipeline
Russia's 2,565-mile, $15.5 billion trans-Siberian oil pipeline -- currently under construction -- is at the center of a major emerging international environmental brouhaha. At issue is the Pacific terminal site. Recently, the terminus was abruptly moved from Vostochny, Russia's main Pacific industrial port, to Perevoznaya, a pristine bay and popular tourist destination that is home to some of the world's last Amur leopards. The bay can only be reached through a narrow channel that is home to Russia's sole maritime nature reserve, a collection of 11 islands valued for their rich biodiversity. The area is home to strong currents that enviros say could carry an oil spill quickly over large distances. Russian and international environmental organizations are mounting an international outcry, which poses an awkward problem for Japan, as it is financing 80 percent of the pricey project but would prefer to present a green image on the global stage.
straight to the source: The New York Times, James Brooke, 21 Jan 2005
Thursday, January 06, 2005
Two items which give a very negative view of the 'press'. What do you think about these:
FLASH CARD
"I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel
myself infinitely the happier for it." (Thomas Jefferson)
WORTH THINKING ABOUT: WHAT HAPPENED AT THE TIMES?
In a book highly critical of the way the New York Times has evolved in
recent years, attorney Bob Kohn examines the issue of opinion and bias in
news reporting:
"Today, it seems, newspapers are in the business of identifying
solutions to society's problems and influencing public opinion to agree with
those solutions. News gathering and reporting are no longer the ends of the
newspaper; they have become merely a means to an end.
"Over the course of the past fifty years, the line between the
editorial opinion and the news article has become increasingly blurred.
Today, the two are nearly indistinguishable. Though maintaining some
stylistic differences, the editorial opinion and the news article have the
same purpose and often work in tandem to maximize the newspaper publisher's
influence over public opinion.
"The profession has become very open about these changes. In 1975, when
the American Society of Newspaper Editors assembled to rewrite the code of
ethics that served them for nearly fifty years, they took their original
canon -- 'News reports should be free from opinion or bias of any kind' --
and turned it on its ear with the following: 'Distinguish between advocacy
and news reporting. Analysis and commentary should be labeled and not
misrepresent fact or context.'
"No longer did the society stress that news be free from opinion or
bias of any kind. The focus shifted away from how news reports should be
written to how 'analysis and commentary' should be labeled. The
straightforward canon established in the 1920s was replaced with the rather
vague, 'Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting.'
"Those in the profession -- whose day-to-day tools of trade are words
and their meaning -- fully understood the future they were forging. The
message they sent to their fellow editors and reporters was now clear:
straight news articles need no longer be 'free from opinion or bias of any
kind.' And while the new ethics code elsewhere demands that the deliberate
distortion of facts is 'never permissible,' it merely recommends that
analysis and commentary 'should be labeled.'"
***
[To purchase a copy of Bob Kohn's "Journalistic Fraud: How The New YorkTimes
Distorts the News and Why It Can No Longer Be Trusted," go to <
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0785261044/newsscancom/ref=nos
im>
FLASH CARD
"I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel
myself infinitely the happier for it." (Thomas Jefferson)
WORTH THINKING ABOUT: WHAT HAPPENED AT THE TIMES?
In a book highly critical of the way the New York Times has evolved in
recent years, attorney Bob Kohn examines the issue of opinion and bias in
news reporting:
"Today, it seems, newspapers are in the business of identifying
solutions to society's problems and influencing public opinion to agree with
those solutions. News gathering and reporting are no longer the ends of the
newspaper; they have become merely a means to an end.
"Over the course of the past fifty years, the line between the
editorial opinion and the news article has become increasingly blurred.
Today, the two are nearly indistinguishable. Though maintaining some
stylistic differences, the editorial opinion and the news article have the
same purpose and often work in tandem to maximize the newspaper publisher's
influence over public opinion.
"The profession has become very open about these changes. In 1975, when
the American Society of Newspaper Editors assembled to rewrite the code of
ethics that served them for nearly fifty years, they took their original
canon -- 'News reports should be free from opinion or bias of any kind' --
and turned it on its ear with the following: 'Distinguish between advocacy
and news reporting. Analysis and commentary should be labeled and not
misrepresent fact or context.'
"No longer did the society stress that news be free from opinion or
bias of any kind. The focus shifted away from how news reports should be
written to how 'analysis and commentary' should be labeled. The
straightforward canon established in the 1920s was replaced with the rather
vague, 'Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting.'
"Those in the profession -- whose day-to-day tools of trade are words
and their meaning -- fully understood the future they were forging. The
message they sent to their fellow editors and reporters was now clear:
straight news articles need no longer be 'free from opinion or bias of any
kind.' And while the new ethics code elsewhere demands that the deliberate
distortion of facts is 'never permissible,' it merely recommends that
analysis and commentary 'should be labeled.'"
***
[To purchase a copy of Bob Kohn's "Journalistic Fraud: How The New YorkTimes
Distorts the News and Why It Can No Longer Be Trusted," go to <
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0785261044/newsscancom/ref=nos
im>
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Well it's not just the Japanese government that keeps secrets that it shouldn't:. LET THE SUN SHINE IN
http://prweek.com/news/news_story.cfm?ID=231598&site=3
The American Society of Newspaper Editors and other media
organizations are organizing "Sunshine Week" in mid-March, to
encourage print, broadcast and online media outlets "to address the
issue of a more open government through news coverage, editorials,
commentaries, and editorial cartoons." The organizations are
"alarmed by a trend toward secrecy at all levels of government." A
similar effort, OpenTheGovernment.org, has been launched by dozens
of organizations "to advance the public's right to know and to
reduce secrecy in the government." The managing director of the PR
Consulting Group, which is promoting OpenTheGovernment.org, said,
"As Americans concerned about the erosion of our constitutionally
protected freedoms, this is a very important client for us."
SOURCE: PR Week (reg. req'd.), January 3, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3165
http://prweek.com/news/news_story.cfm?ID=231598&site=3
The American Society of Newspaper Editors and other media
organizations are organizing "Sunshine Week" in mid-March, to
encourage print, broadcast and online media outlets "to address the
issue of a more open government through news coverage, editorials,
commentaries, and editorial cartoons." The organizations are
"alarmed by a trend toward secrecy at all levels of government." A
similar effort, OpenTheGovernment.org, has been launched by dozens
of organizations "to advance the public's right to know and to
reduce secrecy in the government." The managing director of the PR
Consulting Group, which is promoting OpenTheGovernment.org, said,
"As Americans concerned about the erosion of our constitutionally
protected freedoms, this is a very important client for us."
SOURCE: PR Week (reg. req'd.), January 3, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3165
Monday, December 27, 2004
Here is another good one from the Colubia School of Journalism:
State of the Beat
Blinded By Science
How ‘Balanced’ Coverage Lets the Scientific Fringe Hijack Reality
By Chris Mooney
On May 22, 2003, the Los Angeles Times printed a front-page story by Scott Gold, its respected Houston bureau chief, about the passage of a law in Texas requiring abortion doctors to warn women that the procedure might cause breast cancer. Virtually no mainstream scientist believes that the so-called ABC link actually exists — only anti-abortion activists do. Accordingly, Gold’s article noted right off the bat that the American Cancer Society discounts the “alleged link” and that anti-abortionists have pushed for “so-called counseling” laws only after failing in their attempts to have abortion banned. Gold also reported that the National Cancer Institute had convened “more than a hundred of the world’s experts” to assess the ABC theory, which they rejected. In comparison to these scientists, Gold noted, the author of the Texas counseling bill — who called the ABC issue “still disputed” — had “a professional background in property management.”
Gold’s piece was hard-hitting but accurate. The scientific consensus is quite firm that abortion does not cause breast cancer. If reporters want to take science and its conclusions seriously, their reporting should reflect this reality — no matter what anti-abortionists say.
But what happened next illustrates one reason journalists have such a hard time calling it like they see it on science issues. In an internal memo exposed by the Web site LAobserved.com, the Times’s editor, John Carroll, singled out Gold’s story for harsh criticism, claiming it vindicated critics who accuse the paper of liberal bias. Carroll specifically criticized Gold’s “so-called counseling” line (“a phrase that is loaded with derision”) and his “professional background in property management” quip (“seldom will you read a cheaper shot than this”). “The story makes a strong case that the link between abortion and breast cancer is widely discounted among researchers,” Carroll wrote, “but I wondered as I read it whether somewhere there might exist some credible scientist who believes in it . . . . Apparently the scientific argument for the anti-abortion side is so absurd that we don’t need to waste our readers’ time with it.”
Gold declined to comment specifically on Carroll’s memo, except to say that it prompted “a sound and good discussion of the standards that we all take very seriously.” For his part, Carroll — now editing his third newspaper — is hardly so naïve as to think journalistic “balance” is synonymous with accuracy. In an interview, he nevertheless defended the memo, observing that “reporters have to make judgments about the validity of ideas” but that “a reporter has to be broad-minded in being open to ideas that aren’t necessarily shared by the crowd he or she happens to be hanging around with.” Carroll adds that in his view, Gold needed to find a credible scientist to defend the ABC claim, rather than merely quoting a legislator and then exposing that individual’s lack of scientific background. “You have an obligation to find a scientist, and if the scientist has something to say, then you can subject the scientist’s views to rigorous examination,” Carroll says.
The trouble is, the leading proponent of the idea that abortions cause breast cancer, Dr. Joel Brind of Baruch College at the City University of New York, underwent a pro-life religious conversion that left him feeling “compelled to use science for its noblest, life-saving purpose,” as he put it in Physician, a magazine published by a conservative religious group called Focus on the Family. Brind’s dedication to the ABC theory has flown in the face of repeated negative critiques of that theory by his scientific peers. When the National Cancer Institute convened the world’s experts to assess the question in February 2003, Brind was the only dissenter from the group’s conclusions.
Nevertheless, a later article by Gold suggests he may have taken Carroll’s lesson to heart (though Gold says the piece “certainly wasn’t a direct response, or an attempt to change anything or compensate” following Carroll’s memo). On November 6, 2003, Gold reported on a push in Texas to revise the way biology textbooks teach the scientific theory of evolution, which some religious conservatives don’t accept. Gold opened with a glowing profile of one William Dembski, described as a “scientist by trade” but “an evangelical Christian at heart who is convinced that some biological mechanisms are too complex to have been created without divine guidance.” But according to his Web site, Dembski is a philosopher and mathematician, not a biologist. Moreover, he’s a leader of the new “intelligent design” crusade against Darwin’s theory, an updated form of creationism that evolutionary biologists have broadly denounced. (He recently took a job running the Center for Science and Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.) The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest scientific society and publisher of Science, the highest-circulation general scientific journal, has firmly stated that proponents have “failed to offer credible scientific evidence to support their claim” that the intelligent design theory “undermines the current scientifically accepted theory of evolution.”
Scott Gold had it exactly right on abortion and breast cancer. Then he produced an article on “intelligent design” so artificially “balanced” it was downright inaccurate and misleading.
The basic notion that journalists should go beyond mere “balance” in search of the actual truth hardly represents a novel insight. This magazine, along with its political Web site, Campaign Desk, has been part of a rising chorus against a prevalent but lazy form of journalism that makes no attempt to dig beneath competing claims. But for journalists raised on objectivity and tempered by accusations of bias, knowing that phony balance can create distortion is one thing and taking steps to fix the reporting is another.
Political reporting hardly presents the only challenge for journalists seeking to go beyond he said/she said accounts, or even the most difficult one. Instead, that distinction may be reserved for media coverage of contested scientific issues, many of them with major policy ramifications, such as global climate change. After all, the journalistic norm of balance has no corollary in the world of science. On the contrary, scientific theories and interpretations survive or perish depending upon whether they’re published in highly competitive journals that practice strict quality control, whether the results upon which they’re based can be replicated by other scientists, and ultimately whether they win over scientific peers. When consensus builds, it is based on repeated testing and retesting of an idea.
Journalists face a number of pressures that can prevent them from accurately depicting competing scientific claims in terms of their credibility within the scientific community as a whole. First, reporters must often deal with editors who reflexively cry out for “balance.” Meanwhile, determining how much weight to give different sides in a scientific debate requires considerable expertise on the issue at hand. Few journalists have real scientific knowledge, and even beat reporters who know a great deal about certain scientific issues may know little about other ones they’re suddenly asked to cover.
Moreover, the question of how to substitute accuracy for mere “balance” in science reporting has become ever more pointed as journalists have struggled to cover the Bush administration, which scientists have widely accused of scientific distortions. As the Union of Concerned Scientists, an alliance of citizens and scientists, and other critics have noted, Bush administration statements and actions have often given privileged status to a fringe scientific view over a well-documented, extremely robust mainstream conclusion. Journalists have thus had to decide whether to report on a he said/she said battle between scientists and the White House — which has had very few scientific defenders — or get to the bottom of each case of alleged distortion and report on who’s actually right.
No wonder scientists have often denounced the press for giving credibility to fringe scientific viewpoints. And without a doubt, the topic on which scientists have most vehemently decried both the media and the Bush administration is global warming. While some scientific uncertainty remains in the climate field, the most rigorous peer-reviewed assessments — produced roughly every five years by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — have cemented a consensus view that human greenhouse gas emissions are probably (i.e., the conclusion has a fairly high degree of scientific certainty) helping to fuel the greenhouse effect and explain the observed planetary warming of the past fifty years. Yet the Bush administration has consistently sought to undermine this position by hyping lingering uncertainties and seeking to revise government scientific reports. It has also relied upon energy interests and a small cadre of dissenting scientists (some of whom are funded, in part, by industry) in formulating climate policy.
The centrality of the climate change issue to the scientific critique of the press does not arise by accident. Climate change has mind-bogglingly massive ramifications, not only for the future of our carbon-based economy but for the planet itself. Energy interests wishing to stave off action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have a documented history of supporting the small group of scientists who question the human role in causing climate change — as well as consciously strategizing about how to sow confusion on the issue and sway journalists.
In 1998, for instance, John H. Cushman, Jr., of The New York Times exposed an internal American Petroleum Institute memo outlining a strategy to invest millions to “maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours with Congress, the media and other key audiences.” Perhaps most startling, the memo cited a need to “recruit and train” scientists “who do not have a long history of visibility and/or participation in the climate change debate” to participate in media outreach and counter the mainstream scientific view. This seems to signal an awareness that after a while, journalists catch on to the connections between contrarian scientists and industry. But in the meantime, a window of opportunity apparently exists when reporters can be duped by fresh faces.
"There’s a very small set of people” who question the consensus, says Science’s executive editor-in-chief, Donald Kennedy. “And there are a great many thoughtful reporters in the media who believe that in order to produce a balanced story, you’ve got to pick one commentator from side A and one commentator from side B. I call it the two-card Rolodex problem.”
The Stanford climatologist Stephen Schneider echoes this concern. A scientist whose interactions with the media on the subject of climate change span decades, Schneider has reflected at length on the subject, especially in his 1989 book Global Warming. Schneider’s climate-change Web site also devotes a section to what he calls “Mediarology,” where he notes that in science debates “there are rarely just two polar opposite sides, but rather a spectrum of potential outcomes, oftentimes accompanied by a considerable history of scientific assessment of the relative credibility of these many possibilities. A climate scientist faced with a reporter locked into the ‘get both sides’ mindset risks getting his or her views stuffed into one of two boxed storylines: ‘we’re worried’ or ‘it will all be okay.’ And sometimes, these two ‘boxes’ are misrepresentative; a mainstream, well-established consensus may be ‘balanced’ against the opposing views of a few extremists, and to the uninformed, each position seems equally credible.”
Academics have studied media coverage of climate change, and the results confirm climate scientists’ longstanding complaints. In a recent paper published in the journal Global Environmental Change, the scholars Maxwell T. Boykoff and Jules M. Boykoff analyzed coverage of the issue in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times between 1988 and 2002. During this fourteen-year period, climate scientists successfully forged a powerful consensus on human-caused climate change. But reporting in these four major papers did not at all reflect this consensus.
The Boykoffs analyzed a random sample of 636 articles. They found that a majority — 52.7 percent — gave “roughly equal attention” to the scientific consensus view that humans contribute to climate change and to the energy-industry-supported view that natural fluctuations suffice to explain the observed warming. By comparison, just 35.3 percent of articles emphasized the scientific consensus view while still presenting the other side in a subordinate fashion. Finally, 6.2 percent emphasized the industry-supported view, and a mere 5.9 percent focused on the consensus view without bothering to provide the industry/skeptic counterpoint.
Most intriguing, the Boykoffs’ study found a shift in coverage between 1988 — when climate change first garnered wide media coverage — and 1990. During that period, journalists broadly moved from focusing on scientists’ views of climate change to providing “balanced” accounts. During this same period, the Boykoffs noted, climate change became highly politicized and a “small group of influential spokespeople and scientists emerged in the news” to question the mainstream view that industrial emissions are warming the planet. The authors conclude that the U.S. “prestige-press” has produced “informationally biased coverage of global warming . . . hidden behind the veil of journalistic balance.”
In a rich irony, a UPI report on August 30, 2004, about the Boykoffs’ study covered it in — that’s right — a thoroughly “balanced” fashion. The article gave considerable space to the viewpoint of Frank Maisano, a former spokesman for the industry-sponsored Global Climate Coalition and a professional media consultant, who called the Boykoffs’ contentions “absolutely outrageous” and proceeded to reiterate many of the dubious criticisms of mainstream climate science for which the “skeptic” camp is so notorious. In the process, the UPI piece epitomized all the pathologies of U.S. coverage of climate change — pathologies that aren’t generally recapitulated abroad. Media research suggests that U.S. journalists cover climate change very differently from their European counterparts, often lending much more credence to the viewpoints of “skeptics” like Maisano.
In an interview, Maxwell Boykoff — an environmental studies Ph.D. candidate at the University of California at Santa Cruz — noted that if there’s one American journalist who cuts against the grain in covering the climate issue, it’s Andrew C. Revkin of The New York Times. That’s revealing, because Revkin happens to be the only reporter at any of the major newspapers studied who covers “global environmental change” as his exclusive beat, which Revkin says means writing about climate change “close to half” of the time. Revkin has also been covering global warming since 1988 and has written a book on the topic. (This fall he began teaching environmental reporting as an adjunct at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.)
Revkin agrees with the basic thrust of the Boykoff study, but he also notes that the analysis focuses only on the quantitative aspect of climate-change coverage, rather than more subtle qualitative questions such as how reporters “characterize the voices” of the people they quote.
After all, the issue isn’t just how many column inches journalists give to the perspective of climate-change “skeptics” versus the mainstream view. It’s also how they identify these contrarian figures, many of whom have industry ties. Take a January 8, 2004, article by The Washington Post’s Guy Gugliotta, reporting on a study in the journal Nature finding that global warming could “drive 15 to 37 percent of living species toward extinction by mid-century.” Gugliotta’s story hardly suffered from phony balance. But when it did include a “skeptic” perspective — in a thoroughly subordinate fashion in the ninth paragraph — the skeptic’s industry ties went unmentioned:
One skeptic, William O’Keefe, president of the George C. Marshall Institute, a conservative science policy organization, criticized the Nature study, saying that the research ‘ignored species’ ability to adapt to higher temperatures’ and assumed that technologies will not arise to reduce emissions.
What Gugliotta didn’t say is this: the Marshall Institute receives substantial support from oil giant ExxonMobil, a leading funder of think tanks, frequently conservative in orientation, that question the scientific consensus on climate change. Moreover, O’Keefe himself has chaired the anti-Kyoto Protocol Global Climate Coalition, and served as executive vice president and chief operating officer of the American Petroleum Institute. Senate documents from 2001 through 2003 also list him as a registered lobbyist for ExxonMobil. (To be fair, when I discussed this matter with O’Keefe while working on a previous article, he said that he registers as a lobbyist “out of an abundance of caution” and keeps his ExxonMobil and Marshall Institute work “separate.”)
Asked about all of this, Gugliotta said he simply didn’t know of O’Keefe’s industry connections at the time. He said he considered O’Keefe a “reasoned skeptic” who provided a measured perspective from the other side of the issue. Fair enough. His industry ties don’t necessarily detract from that, but readers still should know about them. The point isn’t to single out Gugliotta — any number of other examples could be found. And such omissions don’t merely occur on the news pages. Some major op-ed pages also appear to think that to fulfill their duty of providing a range of views, they should publish dubious contrarian opinion pieces on climate change even when those pieces are written by nonscientists. For instance, on July 7, 2003, The Washington Post published a revisionist op-ed on climate science by James Schlesinger, a former secretary of both energy and defense, and a former director of Central Intelligence. “In recent years the inclination has been to attribute the warming we have lately experienced to a single dominant cause — the increase in greenhouse gases,” wrote Schlesinger. “Yet climate has always been changing — and sometimes the swings have been rapid.” The clear implication was that scientists don’t know enough about the causes of climate change to justify strong pollution controls.
That’s not how most climatologists feel, but then Schlesinger is an economist by training, not a climatologist. Moreover, his Washington Post byline failed to note that he sits on the board of directors of Peabody Energy, the largest coal company in the world, and has since 2001. Peabody has resisted the push for mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions, such as those that would be required by the Kyoto Protocol. In a 2001 speech, the Peabody executive John Wootten argued that “there remains great uncertainty in the scientific understanding of climate,” and that “imposition of immediate constraints on emissions from fossil-fuel use is not warranted.” Funny, that’s pretty much what Schlesinger argued.
For another group of scientists, the grievances with the press have emerged more recently, but arguably with far greater force. That’s because on an issue of great concern to these scientists — the various uses and abuses of somatic cell nuclear transfer, or cloning — journalists have swallowed the claims of the scientific fringe hook, line, and sinker.
Consider the great 2002 cloning hoax. In the media lull following Christmas, one Brigitte Boisselier — the “scientific director” of Clonaid, a company linked to the UFO-obsessed Raelian sect, and already a semi-celebrity who had been profiled in The New York Times Magazine — announced the birth of the world’s first cloned baby. At her press conference, covered live by CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, Boisselier could not even produce a picture of the alleged child — “Eve” — much less independent scientific verification of her claims. She instead promised proof within eight or nine days. Needless to say, the whole affair should have made the press wary.
Nevertheless, a media frenzy ensued, with journalists occasionally mocking and questioning the Raelians while allowing their claims to drive the coverage. CNN’s medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, provided a case in point. When he interviewed Boisselier following her press conference, Gupta called Clonaid a group with “the capacity to clone” and told Boisselier, credulously, “We are certainly going to be anxiously awaiting to see some of the proof from these independent scientists next week.”
Perhaps most outspoken in criticizing the press during the Clonaid fiasco was Arthur Caplan, the University of Pennsylvania biomedical ethicist. As one of the nation’s most quoted bioethicists, Caplan had the advantage of actual access to the media during the feeding frenzy. Yet that familiarity made little difference. As Caplan complained in an MSNBC.com column following the Raelians’ announcement, no one wanted to listen to his skepticism because that would have required dropping the story: “As soon as I heard about the Raelians’ cloning claim, I knew it was nonsense,” wrote Caplan. “The media have shown themselves incapable of covering the key social and intellectual phenomena of the 21st century, namely the revolution in genetics and biology.”
Caplan observed that Clonaid had no scientific peer-reviewed publications to prove its techniques were up to snuff, and that cloning had barely worked in live animal species, and then only after countless initial failures. Nevertheless, Clonaid had implausibly claimed a stunning success rate — five pregnancies in ten attempts — in its experiments.
The Clonaid fiasco shows the media at their absolute worst in covering scientific issues. Reviewing the coverage two years later is a painful exercise. As even Gupta later admitted, “I think if we had known . . . that there was going to be no proof at this press conference, I think that we probably would have pulled the plug.” Later on, even the Raelians themselves reportedly laughed at how easy it was to get free publicity.
But this wasn’t just fun and games. The political consequences of the press’s cloning coverage were considerable. Widespread fear of human cloning inevitably lends strength to sweeping legislation that would ban all forms of cloning, despite the fact that many scientists think the cloning of embryos for research purposes holds significant medical promise; it would allow for the creation of embryonic-stem-cell lines genetically matched to individual patients. Thus, on an issue where one side of the debate thrives on fear, the media delivered exactly what these cloning-ban advocates desired. Where the press’s unjustifiable addiction to “balance” on climate change produces a political stalemate on a pressing issue of global consequence, its addiction to cloning cranks provided a potent political weapon to the enemies of crucial research.
None of those examples of poorly “balanced” science reporting arise from precisely the same set of journalistic shortcomings. In Scott Gold’s case at the Los Angeles Times, he appears to have known the scientific issues perfectly well. That gave his writing an authority that set off warning bells in an editor wary of bias. That’s very different from the Clonaid example, where sheer credulousness among members of the media — combined with sensationalism and a slow news period — were the problem. And that’s different still from the problem of false balance in the media coverage of climate change in the U.S., which has been chronic for more than a decade.
Yet in each case, the basic journalistic remedy would probably be the same. As a general rule, journalists should treat fringe scientific claims with considerable skepticism, and find out what major peer-reviewed papers or assessments have to say about them. Moreover, they should adhere to the principle that the more outlandish or dramatic the claim, the more skepticism it warrants. The Los Angeles Times’s Carroll observes that “every good journalist has a bit of a contrarian in his soul,” but it is precisely this impulse that can lead reporters astray. The fact is, nonscientist journalists can all too easily fall for scientific-sounding claims that they can’t adequately evaluate on their own.
That doesn’t mean that scientific consensus is right in every instance. There are famous examples, in fact, of when it was proved wrong: Galileo comes to mind, as does a lowly patent clerk named Einstein. In the vast majority of modern cases, however, scientific consensus can be expected to hold up under scrutiny precisely because it was reached through a lengthy and rigorous process of professional skepticism and criticism. At the very least, journalists covering science-based policy debates should familiarize themselves with this professional proving ground, learn what it says about the relative merits of competing claims, and “balance” their reports accordingly.
State of the Beat
Blinded By Science
How ‘Balanced’ Coverage Lets the Scientific Fringe Hijack Reality
By Chris Mooney
On May 22, 2003, the Los Angeles Times printed a front-page story by Scott Gold, its respected Houston bureau chief, about the passage of a law in Texas requiring abortion doctors to warn women that the procedure might cause breast cancer. Virtually no mainstream scientist believes that the so-called ABC link actually exists — only anti-abortion activists do. Accordingly, Gold’s article noted right off the bat that the American Cancer Society discounts the “alleged link” and that anti-abortionists have pushed for “so-called counseling” laws only after failing in their attempts to have abortion banned. Gold also reported that the National Cancer Institute had convened “more than a hundred of the world’s experts” to assess the ABC theory, which they rejected. In comparison to these scientists, Gold noted, the author of the Texas counseling bill — who called the ABC issue “still disputed” — had “a professional background in property management.”
Gold’s piece was hard-hitting but accurate. The scientific consensus is quite firm that abortion does not cause breast cancer. If reporters want to take science and its conclusions seriously, their reporting should reflect this reality — no matter what anti-abortionists say.
But what happened next illustrates one reason journalists have such a hard time calling it like they see it on science issues. In an internal memo exposed by the Web site LAobserved.com, the Times’s editor, John Carroll, singled out Gold’s story for harsh criticism, claiming it vindicated critics who accuse the paper of liberal bias. Carroll specifically criticized Gold’s “so-called counseling” line (“a phrase that is loaded with derision”) and his “professional background in property management” quip (“seldom will you read a cheaper shot than this”). “The story makes a strong case that the link between abortion and breast cancer is widely discounted among researchers,” Carroll wrote, “but I wondered as I read it whether somewhere there might exist some credible scientist who believes in it . . . . Apparently the scientific argument for the anti-abortion side is so absurd that we don’t need to waste our readers’ time with it.”
Gold declined to comment specifically on Carroll’s memo, except to say that it prompted “a sound and good discussion of the standards that we all take very seriously.” For his part, Carroll — now editing his third newspaper — is hardly so naïve as to think journalistic “balance” is synonymous with accuracy. In an interview, he nevertheless defended the memo, observing that “reporters have to make judgments about the validity of ideas” but that “a reporter has to be broad-minded in being open to ideas that aren’t necessarily shared by the crowd he or she happens to be hanging around with.” Carroll adds that in his view, Gold needed to find a credible scientist to defend the ABC claim, rather than merely quoting a legislator and then exposing that individual’s lack of scientific background. “You have an obligation to find a scientist, and if the scientist has something to say, then you can subject the scientist’s views to rigorous examination,” Carroll says.
The trouble is, the leading proponent of the idea that abortions cause breast cancer, Dr. Joel Brind of Baruch College at the City University of New York, underwent a pro-life religious conversion that left him feeling “compelled to use science for its noblest, life-saving purpose,” as he put it in Physician, a magazine published by a conservative religious group called Focus on the Family. Brind’s dedication to the ABC theory has flown in the face of repeated negative critiques of that theory by his scientific peers. When the National Cancer Institute convened the world’s experts to assess the question in February 2003, Brind was the only dissenter from the group’s conclusions.
Nevertheless, a later article by Gold suggests he may have taken Carroll’s lesson to heart (though Gold says the piece “certainly wasn’t a direct response, or an attempt to change anything or compensate” following Carroll’s memo). On November 6, 2003, Gold reported on a push in Texas to revise the way biology textbooks teach the scientific theory of evolution, which some religious conservatives don’t accept. Gold opened with a glowing profile of one William Dembski, described as a “scientist by trade” but “an evangelical Christian at heart who is convinced that some biological mechanisms are too complex to have been created without divine guidance.” But according to his Web site, Dembski is a philosopher and mathematician, not a biologist. Moreover, he’s a leader of the new “intelligent design” crusade against Darwin’s theory, an updated form of creationism that evolutionary biologists have broadly denounced. (He recently took a job running the Center for Science and Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.) The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest scientific society and publisher of Science, the highest-circulation general scientific journal, has firmly stated that proponents have “failed to offer credible scientific evidence to support their claim” that the intelligent design theory “undermines the current scientifically accepted theory of evolution.”
Scott Gold had it exactly right on abortion and breast cancer. Then he produced an article on “intelligent design” so artificially “balanced” it was downright inaccurate and misleading.
The basic notion that journalists should go beyond mere “balance” in search of the actual truth hardly represents a novel insight. This magazine, along with its political Web site, Campaign Desk, has been part of a rising chorus against a prevalent but lazy form of journalism that makes no attempt to dig beneath competing claims. But for journalists raised on objectivity and tempered by accusations of bias, knowing that phony balance can create distortion is one thing and taking steps to fix the reporting is another.
Political reporting hardly presents the only challenge for journalists seeking to go beyond he said/she said accounts, or even the most difficult one. Instead, that distinction may be reserved for media coverage of contested scientific issues, many of them with major policy ramifications, such as global climate change. After all, the journalistic norm of balance has no corollary in the world of science. On the contrary, scientific theories and interpretations survive or perish depending upon whether they’re published in highly competitive journals that practice strict quality control, whether the results upon which they’re based can be replicated by other scientists, and ultimately whether they win over scientific peers. When consensus builds, it is based on repeated testing and retesting of an idea.
Journalists face a number of pressures that can prevent them from accurately depicting competing scientific claims in terms of their credibility within the scientific community as a whole. First, reporters must often deal with editors who reflexively cry out for “balance.” Meanwhile, determining how much weight to give different sides in a scientific debate requires considerable expertise on the issue at hand. Few journalists have real scientific knowledge, and even beat reporters who know a great deal about certain scientific issues may know little about other ones they’re suddenly asked to cover.
Moreover, the question of how to substitute accuracy for mere “balance” in science reporting has become ever more pointed as journalists have struggled to cover the Bush administration, which scientists have widely accused of scientific distortions. As the Union of Concerned Scientists, an alliance of citizens and scientists, and other critics have noted, Bush administration statements and actions have often given privileged status to a fringe scientific view over a well-documented, extremely robust mainstream conclusion. Journalists have thus had to decide whether to report on a he said/she said battle between scientists and the White House — which has had very few scientific defenders — or get to the bottom of each case of alleged distortion and report on who’s actually right.
No wonder scientists have often denounced the press for giving credibility to fringe scientific viewpoints. And without a doubt, the topic on which scientists have most vehemently decried both the media and the Bush administration is global warming. While some scientific uncertainty remains in the climate field, the most rigorous peer-reviewed assessments — produced roughly every five years by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — have cemented a consensus view that human greenhouse gas emissions are probably (i.e., the conclusion has a fairly high degree of scientific certainty) helping to fuel the greenhouse effect and explain the observed planetary warming of the past fifty years. Yet the Bush administration has consistently sought to undermine this position by hyping lingering uncertainties and seeking to revise government scientific reports. It has also relied upon energy interests and a small cadre of dissenting scientists (some of whom are funded, in part, by industry) in formulating climate policy.
The centrality of the climate change issue to the scientific critique of the press does not arise by accident. Climate change has mind-bogglingly massive ramifications, not only for the future of our carbon-based economy but for the planet itself. Energy interests wishing to stave off action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have a documented history of supporting the small group of scientists who question the human role in causing climate change — as well as consciously strategizing about how to sow confusion on the issue and sway journalists.
In 1998, for instance, John H. Cushman, Jr., of The New York Times exposed an internal American Petroleum Institute memo outlining a strategy to invest millions to “maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours with Congress, the media and other key audiences.” Perhaps most startling, the memo cited a need to “recruit and train” scientists “who do not have a long history of visibility and/or participation in the climate change debate” to participate in media outreach and counter the mainstream scientific view. This seems to signal an awareness that after a while, journalists catch on to the connections between contrarian scientists and industry. But in the meantime, a window of opportunity apparently exists when reporters can be duped by fresh faces.
"There’s a very small set of people” who question the consensus, says Science’s executive editor-in-chief, Donald Kennedy. “And there are a great many thoughtful reporters in the media who believe that in order to produce a balanced story, you’ve got to pick one commentator from side A and one commentator from side B. I call it the two-card Rolodex problem.”
The Stanford climatologist Stephen Schneider echoes this concern. A scientist whose interactions with the media on the subject of climate change span decades, Schneider has reflected at length on the subject, especially in his 1989 book Global Warming. Schneider’s climate-change Web site also devotes a section to what he calls “Mediarology,” where he notes that in science debates “there are rarely just two polar opposite sides, but rather a spectrum of potential outcomes, oftentimes accompanied by a considerable history of scientific assessment of the relative credibility of these many possibilities. A climate scientist faced with a reporter locked into the ‘get both sides’ mindset risks getting his or her views stuffed into one of two boxed storylines: ‘we’re worried’ or ‘it will all be okay.’ And sometimes, these two ‘boxes’ are misrepresentative; a mainstream, well-established consensus may be ‘balanced’ against the opposing views of a few extremists, and to the uninformed, each position seems equally credible.”
Academics have studied media coverage of climate change, and the results confirm climate scientists’ longstanding complaints. In a recent paper published in the journal Global Environmental Change, the scholars Maxwell T. Boykoff and Jules M. Boykoff analyzed coverage of the issue in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times between 1988 and 2002. During this fourteen-year period, climate scientists successfully forged a powerful consensus on human-caused climate change. But reporting in these four major papers did not at all reflect this consensus.
The Boykoffs analyzed a random sample of 636 articles. They found that a majority — 52.7 percent — gave “roughly equal attention” to the scientific consensus view that humans contribute to climate change and to the energy-industry-supported view that natural fluctuations suffice to explain the observed warming. By comparison, just 35.3 percent of articles emphasized the scientific consensus view while still presenting the other side in a subordinate fashion. Finally, 6.2 percent emphasized the industry-supported view, and a mere 5.9 percent focused on the consensus view without bothering to provide the industry/skeptic counterpoint.
Most intriguing, the Boykoffs’ study found a shift in coverage between 1988 — when climate change first garnered wide media coverage — and 1990. During that period, journalists broadly moved from focusing on scientists’ views of climate change to providing “balanced” accounts. During this same period, the Boykoffs noted, climate change became highly politicized and a “small group of influential spokespeople and scientists emerged in the news” to question the mainstream view that industrial emissions are warming the planet. The authors conclude that the U.S. “prestige-press” has produced “informationally biased coverage of global warming . . . hidden behind the veil of journalistic balance.”
In a rich irony, a UPI report on August 30, 2004, about the Boykoffs’ study covered it in — that’s right — a thoroughly “balanced” fashion. The article gave considerable space to the viewpoint of Frank Maisano, a former spokesman for the industry-sponsored Global Climate Coalition and a professional media consultant, who called the Boykoffs’ contentions “absolutely outrageous” and proceeded to reiterate many of the dubious criticisms of mainstream climate science for which the “skeptic” camp is so notorious. In the process, the UPI piece epitomized all the pathologies of U.S. coverage of climate change — pathologies that aren’t generally recapitulated abroad. Media research suggests that U.S. journalists cover climate change very differently from their European counterparts, often lending much more credence to the viewpoints of “skeptics” like Maisano.
In an interview, Maxwell Boykoff — an environmental studies Ph.D. candidate at the University of California at Santa Cruz — noted that if there’s one American journalist who cuts against the grain in covering the climate issue, it’s Andrew C. Revkin of The New York Times. That’s revealing, because Revkin happens to be the only reporter at any of the major newspapers studied who covers “global environmental change” as his exclusive beat, which Revkin says means writing about climate change “close to half” of the time. Revkin has also been covering global warming since 1988 and has written a book on the topic. (This fall he began teaching environmental reporting as an adjunct at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.)
Revkin agrees with the basic thrust of the Boykoff study, but he also notes that the analysis focuses only on the quantitative aspect of climate-change coverage, rather than more subtle qualitative questions such as how reporters “characterize the voices” of the people they quote.
After all, the issue isn’t just how many column inches journalists give to the perspective of climate-change “skeptics” versus the mainstream view. It’s also how they identify these contrarian figures, many of whom have industry ties. Take a January 8, 2004, article by The Washington Post’s Guy Gugliotta, reporting on a study in the journal Nature finding that global warming could “drive 15 to 37 percent of living species toward extinction by mid-century.” Gugliotta’s story hardly suffered from phony balance. But when it did include a “skeptic” perspective — in a thoroughly subordinate fashion in the ninth paragraph — the skeptic’s industry ties went unmentioned:
One skeptic, William O’Keefe, president of the George C. Marshall Institute, a conservative science policy organization, criticized the Nature study, saying that the research ‘ignored species’ ability to adapt to higher temperatures’ and assumed that technologies will not arise to reduce emissions.
What Gugliotta didn’t say is this: the Marshall Institute receives substantial support from oil giant ExxonMobil, a leading funder of think tanks, frequently conservative in orientation, that question the scientific consensus on climate change. Moreover, O’Keefe himself has chaired the anti-Kyoto Protocol Global Climate Coalition, and served as executive vice president and chief operating officer of the American Petroleum Institute. Senate documents from 2001 through 2003 also list him as a registered lobbyist for ExxonMobil. (To be fair, when I discussed this matter with O’Keefe while working on a previous article, he said that he registers as a lobbyist “out of an abundance of caution” and keeps his ExxonMobil and Marshall Institute work “separate.”)
Asked about all of this, Gugliotta said he simply didn’t know of O’Keefe’s industry connections at the time. He said he considered O’Keefe a “reasoned skeptic” who provided a measured perspective from the other side of the issue. Fair enough. His industry ties don’t necessarily detract from that, but readers still should know about them. The point isn’t to single out Gugliotta — any number of other examples could be found. And such omissions don’t merely occur on the news pages. Some major op-ed pages also appear to think that to fulfill their duty of providing a range of views, they should publish dubious contrarian opinion pieces on climate change even when those pieces are written by nonscientists. For instance, on July 7, 2003, The Washington Post published a revisionist op-ed on climate science by James Schlesinger, a former secretary of both energy and defense, and a former director of Central Intelligence. “In recent years the inclination has been to attribute the warming we have lately experienced to a single dominant cause — the increase in greenhouse gases,” wrote Schlesinger. “Yet climate has always been changing — and sometimes the swings have been rapid.” The clear implication was that scientists don’t know enough about the causes of climate change to justify strong pollution controls.
That’s not how most climatologists feel, but then Schlesinger is an economist by training, not a climatologist. Moreover, his Washington Post byline failed to note that he sits on the board of directors of Peabody Energy, the largest coal company in the world, and has since 2001. Peabody has resisted the push for mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions, such as those that would be required by the Kyoto Protocol. In a 2001 speech, the Peabody executive John Wootten argued that “there remains great uncertainty in the scientific understanding of climate,” and that “imposition of immediate constraints on emissions from fossil-fuel use is not warranted.” Funny, that’s pretty much what Schlesinger argued.
For another group of scientists, the grievances with the press have emerged more recently, but arguably with far greater force. That’s because on an issue of great concern to these scientists — the various uses and abuses of somatic cell nuclear transfer, or cloning — journalists have swallowed the claims of the scientific fringe hook, line, and sinker.
Consider the great 2002 cloning hoax. In the media lull following Christmas, one Brigitte Boisselier — the “scientific director” of Clonaid, a company linked to the UFO-obsessed Raelian sect, and already a semi-celebrity who had been profiled in The New York Times Magazine — announced the birth of the world’s first cloned baby. At her press conference, covered live by CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, Boisselier could not even produce a picture of the alleged child — “Eve” — much less independent scientific verification of her claims. She instead promised proof within eight or nine days. Needless to say, the whole affair should have made the press wary.
Nevertheless, a media frenzy ensued, with journalists occasionally mocking and questioning the Raelians while allowing their claims to drive the coverage. CNN’s medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, provided a case in point. When he interviewed Boisselier following her press conference, Gupta called Clonaid a group with “the capacity to clone” and told Boisselier, credulously, “We are certainly going to be anxiously awaiting to see some of the proof from these independent scientists next week.”
Perhaps most outspoken in criticizing the press during the Clonaid fiasco was Arthur Caplan, the University of Pennsylvania biomedical ethicist. As one of the nation’s most quoted bioethicists, Caplan had the advantage of actual access to the media during the feeding frenzy. Yet that familiarity made little difference. As Caplan complained in an MSNBC.com column following the Raelians’ announcement, no one wanted to listen to his skepticism because that would have required dropping the story: “As soon as I heard about the Raelians’ cloning claim, I knew it was nonsense,” wrote Caplan. “The media have shown themselves incapable of covering the key social and intellectual phenomena of the 21st century, namely the revolution in genetics and biology.”
Caplan observed that Clonaid had no scientific peer-reviewed publications to prove its techniques were up to snuff, and that cloning had barely worked in live animal species, and then only after countless initial failures. Nevertheless, Clonaid had implausibly claimed a stunning success rate — five pregnancies in ten attempts — in its experiments.
The Clonaid fiasco shows the media at their absolute worst in covering scientific issues. Reviewing the coverage two years later is a painful exercise. As even Gupta later admitted, “I think if we had known . . . that there was going to be no proof at this press conference, I think that we probably would have pulled the plug.” Later on, even the Raelians themselves reportedly laughed at how easy it was to get free publicity.
But this wasn’t just fun and games. The political consequences of the press’s cloning coverage were considerable. Widespread fear of human cloning inevitably lends strength to sweeping legislation that would ban all forms of cloning, despite the fact that many scientists think the cloning of embryos for research purposes holds significant medical promise; it would allow for the creation of embryonic-stem-cell lines genetically matched to individual patients. Thus, on an issue where one side of the debate thrives on fear, the media delivered exactly what these cloning-ban advocates desired. Where the press’s unjustifiable addiction to “balance” on climate change produces a political stalemate on a pressing issue of global consequence, its addiction to cloning cranks provided a potent political weapon to the enemies of crucial research.
None of those examples of poorly “balanced” science reporting arise from precisely the same set of journalistic shortcomings. In Scott Gold’s case at the Los Angeles Times, he appears to have known the scientific issues perfectly well. That gave his writing an authority that set off warning bells in an editor wary of bias. That’s very different from the Clonaid example, where sheer credulousness among members of the media — combined with sensationalism and a slow news period — were the problem. And that’s different still from the problem of false balance in the media coverage of climate change in the U.S., which has been chronic for more than a decade.
Yet in each case, the basic journalistic remedy would probably be the same. As a general rule, journalists should treat fringe scientific claims with considerable skepticism, and find out what major peer-reviewed papers or assessments have to say about them. Moreover, they should adhere to the principle that the more outlandish or dramatic the claim, the more skepticism it warrants. The Los Angeles Times’s Carroll observes that “every good journalist has a bit of a contrarian in his soul,” but it is precisely this impulse that can lead reporters astray. The fact is, nonscientist journalists can all too easily fall for scientific-sounding claims that they can’t adequately evaluate on their own.
That doesn’t mean that scientific consensus is right in every instance. There are famous examples, in fact, of when it was proved wrong: Galileo comes to mind, as does a lowly patent clerk named Einstein. In the vast majority of modern cases, however, scientific consensus can be expected to hold up under scrutiny precisely because it was reached through a lengthy and rigorous process of professional skepticism and criticism. At the very least, journalists covering science-based policy debates should familiarize themselves with this professional proving ground, learn what it says about the relative merits of competing claims, and “balance” their reports accordingly.
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