Waiting for CJR and Jay Rosen to do some self-reporting

 Columbia Journalism Review is often a very good overseer over what's what in today's media world.

But, it's not perfect, as I've blogged about more than once. That includes earlier this year noting that it went down a post-truth rabbit hole over COVID, had claimed last year that early-days Voice of America did NOT engage in propaganda, had language non-maven Merrill Perlman commit a paired doozy of etymological-related errors and ... that's not all.

In 2019, I accused it of pulling its punches on Zionism issues. Long ago, I issued a shark-jumping accusation about its bromance for I Fucking Love Science. 

Some of those aren't too bad, but some are. The VOA and Zionism ones in particular are serious.

And, it's getting dinged again, and will further in the future if it doesn't write about its own journalism school's massive grifting at the master's level, and that's per the journalism school's own website, via part of a Slate story on master's-degree grifting in general. Slate, in turn, referenced a Wall Street Journal piece on MFA programs in general.

First, the first degree offered? Laughable, and laughable for even more reasons than Slate lists.

NO master's degree in journalism should be an MS rather than an MA. Journalism ain't a science. Period and end of story.

OK, now, the stuff that Slate did list, starting with that More Shitty degree.

NO "master's degree" should be a nine and one-half month project. Period. But, as Slate notes, there's little regulation for what lipstick you can paint on something and call it a master's degree.

Third, $80K for tuition and "fees" which probably aren't itemized is laughable even with NYC costs of living.

BUT! Per the WSJ piece, if you're running low on money, university president Lee Bollinger will hire you as a dog walker. No, really!

But, it's not just Columbia.

Across town, at NYU, home of media critic Rosen, the WSJ piece notes a master's in publishing had enrolled students with an average debt of $116K and income of $42K. The piece was July 8 and as of 10 days later, bupkis on Rosen's Twitter feed.

And, Rosen, I've kicked you in the past, too, most recently over naivete on ideas for COVID coverage. Long before that, I kicked his ass for kissing Yascha Mounk's tuchis. And, long ago, we had Rosen the paywall hater.

In reality? Rosen and CJR ain't biting the hand that feeds them while impoverishing students. (CJR and the individuals involved in the past have never offered the slightest apology.)

CJR falls into its own post-truth rabbit hole

Michael Schudson, a Columbia journalism prof, no less, and his PhD student, I presume, Jueni Duyen Tran, have an overall good article at Columbia Journalism Review about whether and how much the media should have explicitly called Donald Trump a liar. (Their argument is that because Trump is indeed often detached from reality, "lie/liar" actually shouldn't be used that often.)

But, re Trump and his reaction to the coronavirus, and his many lies and reality field distortions on this, about halfway down the piece we have:

Similarly, in September 2020, as Bob Woodward published his book Rage and along with it recordings of his interviews with Trump, revealing that the president had knowingly downplayed the pandemic throughout the early months of 2020, the L-word was noticeably absent from the Times’ reporting. In several articles, the paper observed that the president “privately understood how deadly the coronavirus really was even as he was telling the public the opposite.” This qualifies as “lying”—even if, as might be argued in this case, there could have been good reason to lie to avoid contributing to a public panic.

WRONG. WRONG. WRONG. 

This is journalistic malpractice, to put it bluntly. Journalism should NEVER co-sign the old Platonic noble lie. And, we have non-Trumpian evidence of that in the past year.

As noted elsewhere, specifically with Fauci, Platonic noble lies almost always get outed. In Fauci's case, it's led wingnuts to quote Fauci against Fauci. 

That said, as per my Merrill Perlman post that's often been the featured post here, this is not the first foul ball from CJR.

CJR claims early-days VOA was not propaganda

That claim was made in the pages of Columbia Journalism Review by Joel Simon of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The Cold War was fought not with weapons, but with information and ideas. In the struggle, the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, American government-funded news outlets, were on the front lines. They were powerful not because they were propaganda, but because they weren’t.

Now, I "get" that Simon was writing a "Trump bad" piece, and on one particular instance of Trump being bad — his politicizing of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe by his appointee, Matthew Pack.

BUT! Two wrongs don't make a right.

And, the reality is that these agencies WERE propaganda from early on.

On the print side of the early CIA front world, the book "Finks" of a few years ago illustrates that with Paris Match and other mags. In the big picture world, Scott Anderson's new "The Quiet Americans" discusses this in passing.

Per my current featured post, and the one I had featured below that about CJR caving to Zionism, this is FAR from the first time it's had a pretty big boo-boo. And, how much do people shell out for J-school degrees from there? So, I've added a CJR tag for further stupidities on its part.

A doozy of an error, or set of errors it turns out, by Merrill Perlman Or is it by the OED and she's just repeating it?

Perlman, CJR's language columnist, had a piece last week talking about the difference, if any, between "autocrat," "dictator," "despot" and "tyrant."

The howler was on "autocrat," which she says began with Catherine the Great.

Actually it's two doozies, though the etymological one caught me first.

Perlman claims the "-crat" back half comes from Russian. No, really.

Catherine the Great was the first to call herself an “autocrat,” in 1762, in her manifestoes that began: “We Catherine II. by the Grace of God, Empress and Autocrat of all the Russias,” the Oxford English Dictionary says. And yes, “auto” is from the Greek for “self, one’s own, by oneself, independently,” though the “crat” comes from Russian.

This classics major laughed in his Greek grammar, knowing that κράτος is the Greek word for "state" or "state power," as in the common everyday English word "democrat."

Then, doing a web search for a piece on its etymology, my second suspicion was also confirmed.

No, Merrill, per this, Catherine wasn't the first to use it. She may have been the first to call HERSELF that, but ... that's nitpicky. The word was around before her in various languages.

Actually, this too isn't nitpicky, but just wrong.

The history minor began wondering as well. And yes, Byzantine emperors used the title (in Greek of course) to translate the Latin "imperator." And, per that link, Catherine wasn't even the first Russian to use it! It was Peter the Great!

I saw the piece last Thursday and Tweeted that I expected a public correctly at CJR, not just a Tweet back. Her actual column only appears about every two weeks. A correction need not wait until then.

On Twitter, I got a response about it the next morning:

Quoting the OED etymology on how it came together, and referring to English usage.

— Merrill Perlman (@meperl) March 6, 2020

Well, then the OED is wrong! (And I'm not paying $90 a year to check on it.)

In addition, I further know it's wrong about "-crat" as a graduate divinity degree holder. Post-Nicaea Eastern Christianity referred to Christ as "Pantocrator," among other things.

We'll see if any correction is in the offing; I have my doubts, given her response, and no response to my response to that. (I told her the OED was wrong.)

A month later, the piece remains uncorrected.

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.

Columbia Journalism Review officially shark-jumps on IFLS

First, CJR senior writer Alexis Sobel Fitts writes a five-webpage cover story about "I Fucking Love Science" and its founder, Elise Andrew.

In doing so, she commits these cardinal errors:
1. Writing the story about herself as much as Andrew.
2. Ignoring Andrew's seeming very deliberate violation of not just journalistic ethics, but ethics in general through not honoring copyright of NUMEROUS science-related photos, including a number by Google+ friend of mine Alex Wild.
3. Not talking to anybody who could and would have told her about this. (Wild is among those commenting on the page.)

In other words, it's shoddy journalism for being:
1. Self-centered
2. Lazy
3. One-sided

And, other trade publications and blogs are weighing in, too. Here's Knight Science Journalism Tracker:

For starters, the profile appeared in a journalistic publication, written in an unjournalistic way, about a person whose work is not journalism. Go ahead and debate what that J-word actually means in the comments, but I’d argue that several of the fundamental tenets of journalism – such as accuracy and unbiased reporting – are missing from the CJR piece (which also happens to be this issue’s cover story).
 Instead of taking a measured, balanced look at the person behind a media phenomenon, the profile came off as an overly sunny PR puff piece. After all, Andrew is not journalism’s first self-made brand. And, oh, by the way, the profile mentions almost as an aside, there is a history of copyright infringement and plagiarism accusations being directed at IFLS.

That's about right. 

Meanwhile, doesn't CJR have a managing editor? Who let this crap be printed? Let alone, who decided this was the magazine version's cover story?

Well, these people let this crap be published:

Editor in Chief & Publisher
Elizabeth Spayd

Deputy Editor in Chief
Brent Cunningham

Associate Editor/Production Editor
Christie Chisholm

Associate Editor Kira Goldenberg

Click here to email them. Or here to suggest this, their own piece as a "dart" under the mag's "Darts and Laurels."

Worse, who made the decision to let Fitts double down on her indefensible writing with a follow-up that's even worse in some ways?

As for the claims that Andrew's not gotten any "boosts" or "helps," one of Fitts' new, additional claims? Uhh, wrong!

From a March announcement by former national late-night talk show host Craig Ferguson:

Science Channel greenlit new series “I F-ing Love Science,” executive produced by CBS’ “Late Late Show” host Craig Ferguson. Ferguson made the announcement via a videotaped message at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas on Saturday.

So, please, that's not even close to being true.

Just stop it.

Fitts is doubling down on being:

1. Self-centered
2. Lazy
3. One-sided

Hence my comment on the follow-up piece:

I'm a journalist who didn't study journalism in college, and I didn't train inside one of "legacy media's great institutions," but I still know ethics, including of attribution. So, Alexis, does Ms. Andrew deserve a "free pass" on ethics? Copyright issues apply across all streams of journalism, and communications beyond journalism, including public relations, non-journalistic book writing and more.

And, if Fitts likes the snarkiness of "new journalism," I added:

Can I copy your mugshot for for-profit use without attribution? How much of your original piece can I copy without attribution? 

So, in addition to that comment, I asked CJR on those pages to fire Fitts.