Real reporting, no he said, she said, stilll happens: mainstream media hits a homer on antivaxxerism

A lot of media critics, including yours truly, likes to critique and criticize much of the main stream media for false equivalence reporting. Until fairly recently, a lot of this was done on climate change, for example.

But, if you thought reporters and editors would get flamed by wingers for not giving climate change denialism a pass, what about not giving antivaxxers a pass?

Nonetheless, a pair of NBC News reporters did some REAL reporting.

And, on something tough within antivaxxerism — parents of deceased infants and toddlers mourning their dead children, then grasping at antivaxxer straws for balm. Brandy Zadrozny and Aliza Nadi talked to the medical examiner who looked at Evee Clobes' death and noted he disagreed with Catelin Clobes. Then then looked at an antivaxxer friendly doctor who does inquests for hire; he claimed he hadn't talked to Clobes and otherwise refused to talk to the reporters. Ms. Clobes definitely didn't.

But Zadrozny and Nadi didn't stop there.

They instead looked at how some antivaxxer advocates go shopping for parents of SIDS-death children to recruit them for the cause. Per Mark Twain, it would be an insult to vultures to call these people vultures.

Anyway, it takes a LOT of assurance to do this. Maybe being female helped.

In any case, it's a great story. I saw it via Orac, who has more background on the vultures.

More reasons not to trust Politifact

All the fact-checking agencies have problems from time to time. With many of them, part of their problem is that they have a target audience of the gamut from Never Trumper Republicans to mainstream Democrats — ie, the sweet spot within the duopoly.

Or, to put it in terms of bipartisan foreign policy establishment and inside the Beltway stenos, that's their target audience.

But, per a Politifact scoring of Rachel Maddow's "guns" question to Bernie Sanders, there are other reasons to question Politifact, as I explained there.

What Politifact is doing the scoring? Politifact National or a state Politifact?

What? There's more than one Politifact?

Damn straight, and Poynter doesn't explain why it uses just one media outlet in state-level Politifacts where it does that, rather than a university's journalism department, which it does elsewhere. And in those states, it doesn't explain why it uses just that university J-school.

Is there some "branding" involved? Behind that, some financial consideration?

Wouldn't surprise me.

Beyond that, though he's writing about the Washington Post's fact checkers, and about them versus Sanders as being too radical, Jeet Heer's cautions can be extended beyond that. Politically weaponizing fact checking is a dangerous proposition. In this particular case, he says it can give Trump an opening to questioning the whole enterprise.

Tis true both ways, Jeet. Spin-doctoring fact checking in Bernie's favor, as I have just pointed out, does the same thing.

And, some of this then goes to Beltway media using fact checkers as part of horse-race coverage of political campaigns.

"They're up to 113 Pinocchios in the last six months!"

It still doesn't address Poynter's lack of transparency. Or other issues with Poynter beyond, but including, Politifact.

And this is not the first time I've blogged about problems with Politifact.

No, local TV folks, you're still not doing OK

Several months ago, I blogged about how TV stations face their own newspaper-like problems and issues, just on a more-delayed timeframe. That was after a local programmer on the TV side said "we're doing fine."

I cited a number of links to show that, even if his individual station is doing fine (he may have been extrapolating from just it, but didn't explicitly say so) his industry is not.

And, a snafu on the Trump campaign express illustrates. In two ways.

Per Joe Monahan, now independent, but former media, and a dean of New Mexico political consultants and analysts, talks about Trump's visit to New Mexico this week.

KOB, long one of the two biggies in Albuquerque, went dark just as Air Force One touched down. Bugs in a new graphics system did it.

First, that really shouldn't happen. Second, it shouldn't have long-lasting effect. But it did. Monahan quotes an unnamed source at the station:

Joe, the station just went to a new graphics system. It had a bug in it and took the entire system down, We could not get any remote camera coverage from KAFB or the Santa Ana center or the studio. Obviously, it could not have happened at a worse time. Of course, everything is done on a shoestring budget around here these days. 

KOAT, the other biggie, was live and lapped up. Why?

KRQE didn't even bother. That's NBC, ABC and CBS in order.

Fox? Don't have a station in Albuquerque on a main channel, per Wiki. KRQE runs them as a second channel at 13.2. In one sense, that doesn't matter in today's digital TV age. But, in another sense, it's interesting that a top-50 TV media market doesn't have four fully independent stations.

As for why KRQE didn't show? Joe knows:

While the early going was a disaster for KOB it hardly registered with much of the public (especially those younger) who long ago abandoned TV news for social media and/or alternate video streams. 

The TV news audience is much smaller than it was back in 2000 when another disaster befell local media. That's when the Los Alamos fires broke out.

So, no, TV guy, you're not doing so well. It's OK to join newspaper folks and stop whistling in the dark.

For security reasons, there probably wasn't much private video of the Air Force One touchdown. But the Trump rally? People were surely Facebook Living that all over the place off their smartphones.

Why does the Cal Legislature hate newspapers?

A new bill that has just passed the California Legislature and been sent to Gov. Gavin Newsom for (let us hope not) his signature attempts to rein in the worst of the "gig economy."

With a blunderbuss sized gun firing indiscriminately.

It would be a killer to the non-daily and small daily "community" newspaper industry. Namely, it would require any paper that gets more than 35 submissions a year from a freelancer to make that person a regular employee. It would also require route delivery drivers to be made paid employees on similar terms.

That said, THAT one I don't object to.

Community newspapers could, instead, go back to using people like me 45 years ago — kids delivering the newspaper when they couldn't work yet at a "regular" job, and making a few bucks, and by doing the monthly "collect" calls on subscribers for money, learning a little responsibility, too.

The end of a newspaper era

It looks like Today Newspapers, a group of south suburban Dallas newspapers, and my employer for most the last 9 and 1/2 years, less an eight-month hiatus, is now history.

Editor's note: This blog was a "draft" that I saw in my "drafts" section. I saw it there, and figured I may well have published another version, at the time. But, with it being the 10-year anniversary, and change, of Today Newspapers closing, it was good to actually publish this, even if it's "again."

Causes? Many.

The recession and the newspaper economy in general.

Others in particular? South suburban Dallas is tough. The Dallas Morning News never even tried to run a free-standing paper here, other than their (subsidized?) freebie tabs they do now in different parts of the Metroplex.

At the same time, in a Tar Baby style dysfunctional relationship, many civic leaders in the “Best Southwest” suburbs have, for years, done what I call “whoring after the Morning News,” riffing on the Old Testament prophets’ comments about Israel “whoring after the Ba’als.”

Schadenfreude, in a large glass says, Fine, now you have the News, or either a small daily paper with unaudited circulation which doesn’t run school lunch menus, honor rolls and more, to cover your area.

And, some of the problems were peculiar to our staff. Without going into details, or throwing people too far under the bus, we never did get much in the way of online ad sales from our staff, who never seemed that interested in learning more about doing online sales, sales techniques for online ads, etc. (Of course, one of our ad reps claimed she could always get a job up at the News, which wasn’t likely even before all of its cuts.)

I do feel sorry for people in our area who will miss us and know what they’re missing. As for the rest, no.

Beyond that, I’ve been wanting out of newspaper journalism more and more. If I have to stay in it shorter-term, fine. But, I know there are other things that better fit my skills and acumen, even if I didn’t go to the right Ivy League or other school.

Unfortunately (perhaps) this part was sadly wrong, even as I have not only not gotten out of the papers biz, but once for sure (IMO) have faced age discrimination within it.

ADDENDUM a decade later: One other cause? Marlon Hanson's Focus Daily News. When you have your pressmen (almost all of whom, if not every one, a decade ago, probably lacking green cards and not being citizens) also do your delivery driving at a five-day daily while you own the press and its old and crappy but you don't care because you want to be a daily so you can exploit your old Dallas Times Herald national ad contacts, even while you lie about your circulation which was never audited, even with the massive loopholes it had, by the old ABC before it changed names and then went out of the circulation audit business, it's hard to compete with that. (Hanson claimed a higher circ than, by my guesstimates, the Snooze had in the Best Southwest; part of it, in my guesstimate and by what I saw on many lawns, was that he was doing a Total Market Circulation/shopper type angle, but rather than total saturation every week, was doing a rotated selective saturation. I know this because two years later, I interviewed at the Rio Rancho Observer and its owner explicitly said he did that, dividing Rio Rancho into four quadrants for his weekly and doing one quadrant each week on a TMC free throw.)

A strange way to write a headline at the Snooze

Attention, Dallas Morning News copy editors/page designers:

Cars don’t kill people, car drivers do, unless an unattended car has its “Park” lock shear off or something.

And, it takes two people to byline a story that short? Is this make-work before the next layoff ax?

Is CJR pulling punches in the face of Zionism?

Columbia Journalism Review recently had a good piece about how, within the precariat that is modern journalism, editorial cartoonists have become a precariat squared.

The main thrust of the piece is that cheapskate owners in general, and wingnut owners in particular using finances as an excuse, have accelerated the die-off, killing off cartoonists who won't toe a MAGA line.

However, the piece was sadly spoiled in the middle by this:

In April, after the Times international edition published an antisemitic cartoon, James Bennet, the opinion editor, who oversaw cartoons, disciplined the production editor responsible and dumped the syndication service that had provided the offensive image. Two months later, Bennet vowed to never publish a cartoon in the international edition again. Patrick Chappatte and Heng Kim Song, the international edition’s two in-house cartoonists, who had nothing to do with the image in question, lost their jobs. Joel Pett, a Pulitzer-winning cartoonist, called the move “chickenshit.” 

Well, that's probably not the most chickenshit thing.

CJR showed several anti-Trump cartoons, but not this one. It wouldn't even link to a site that showed it. 

I'll do both.

Here's the cartoon as it appears in Haaretz:

Why did I go there?

Because Haaretz has it in an opinion piece which says, in essence, the cartoon isn't antisemitic and that it's run worse itself.

As much of the mainstream media (and apparently the media that analyzes the mainstream media) still kowtows to Zionist stances, it's important to call it out. Many journalists know the truth about these issues — that American newspapers still self-censor a lot on Zionism issue and self-censor a lot more than Israeli papers do.

Shame on CJR (and Sam Thielman as author) for being too cowardly or craven to not even run a link, let alone the actual cartoon.

After all, it ran pictures of multiple allegedly anti-Islamic Charlie Hebdo cartoons.

Editor and Publisher sold

Interesting. Well, it's no longer owned by a boating magazines company.

No wonder terms weren't disclosed. They were probably dirt cheap.

We'll see how well the new ownership's goal of diving (back) more into the editorial side of journalism plays out. Yeah, E and P once did that, but that was what, 20 years ago? Maybe 12-15 if I'm charitable?

And, old and new owners are jointly holding a print copy of the mag? I didn't even know it still had a print version. That's even as E and P's own website has a new piece about the all-digital world getting closer.