dammit the link you posted required registration. Fuck that.

washingtonpost.com

Osama Who? When No News Is 'Bad News'

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 24, 2005; Page C01

In late 1996, veteran CBS foreign correspondent Tom Fenton pitched his network on a plan to use Saudi connections to land an interview with Osama bin Laden.

"Our bosses saw him as an obscure Arab of no interest to our viewers," Fenton says. "More concerned with saving dollars than pursuing the story, they killed the project."

Months later, Fenton says, he sat down with an Arab journalist who had interviewed bin Laden and described his violent designs on America, but "our navel-gazing executives" left that part of the piece "on the cutting-room floor." He says CBS executives asked that all references to bin Laden be cut because the story had "too many foreign names."

In his forthcoming book "Bad News," Fenton, who retired last month, uses tales like these to castigate network news for failing to adequately cover the rest of the world. It is a stinging indictment that gains force from his quarter-century of service in CBS's London bureau.

Fenton blames "corporate greed" for the decline, saying he was "beaten down by the corporate bean counters" and had "so many of my stories rejected" in the decade before 9/11. CBS's London bureau, he writes, "doesn't do much reporting any more. What it does is called packaging," assembling video and facts gathered by outside organizations.

Likening the practice to Dan Rather's use of what Fenton calls "phony" memos in the discredited story on President Bush's National Guard service, Fenton says the networks "take it on trust. Don't shoot it, don't report it -- just wrap it up and slap the CBS eye on it."

Rather tells Fenton that CBS News may not have made a "strong enough" case to rebuild its foreign coverage after the 2001 terror attacks, "and I include myself in that."

But the top story on the "CBS Evening News" last year was the Iraq war and reconstruction, according to the Tyndall Report newsletter, which found that the program provided more coverage than its rivals. CBS executives say the company has provided additional millions of dollars to cover the aftermath of the war in Iraq, where Rather will anchor this week. "All you have to do is look at any of our broadcasts to see the commitment we have to international news," says Senior Vice President Marcy McGinnis. "It's huge."

The book argues that media inattention contributed to America's isolation and false sense of security: "Foreign correspondents like myself came to be regarded as alarmists, waving our arms from remote places like Rwanda or Yugoslavia, trying in vain to attract attention."

Fenton still has a copy of his 1978 script that CBS would not air after his reporting in Iran convinced him the shah was in trouble. But his New York producers had read more "upbeat" accounts "and did not believe" him. The shah was toppled less than three months later.

In a 1988 report on Saddam Hussein's poison gas attacks in northern Iraq, Fenton says CBS asked him to delete the fact that thousands of victims were Kurdish because "no one knows who the Kurds are." He also rips "jingoistic" Fox News for sending Geraldo Rivera and "an array of intrepid, inexperienced blondes" to cover the war in Afghanistan.

Fenton seems to pine for the days when roving correspondents were Murrow-like stars. He admits the networks spent too much on Learjets and other luxuries when he arrived at CBS's three-person Rome bureau in 1970.

CBS now has 10 full-time foreign correspondents in London, Rome, Tel Aviv and Tokyo -- no one, for example, in China or Russia. "You don't have to live in Moscow to be able to go cover Moscow" from a city like London, says McGinnis, adding that critics who say foreign news requires the big and "inefficient" bureaus of the 1970s and '80s "are wrong." But Fenton notes that in the first 10 months of 2004, the "CBS Evening News" ran four stories from China, two of them about pandas.

The book's instant headlines will probably come from "60 Minutes" commentator Andy Rooney, who tells Fenton there is "no question" the media are liberal and takes a swipe at Rather: "I think Dan has been -- I don't know why; he may not be as smart as they think -- but he has been so blatantly one-sided. . . . He uses little words that are absolute clues, giveaways to his political opinions. Like saying 'Bush,' instead of 'President Bush' or 'Mr. Bush.' . . . A couple of years ago I heard him refer to 'Bush's cronies.' Well, Jesus, 'cronies' -- oh dear!"

Longtime "60 Minutes" producer Don Hewitt (who says he once offered to give back one-sixth of his $6 million salary if it were spent on news but was told that wouldn't happen) has lost interest in the "CBS Evening News," saying such broadcasts have become "wallpaper" in a world of 24-hour information. And Walter Cronkite says he does not regularly watch the newscast he once headed because "there's nothing there but crime and sob sister material . . . tabloid stuff."

Fenton's solution is to expand the evening broadcasts to an hour, which Rather says he has pushed to no avail. Had NBC done that, says Tom Brokaw, he would not have abandoned the anchor chair.

shit

Publisher: Rolling Stone Nixed Bible Ad

Thursday, January 20, 2005

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Rolling Stone magazine declined to run an advertisement for a new translation of the Bible aimed at young people, the nation's largest Bible publisher said Wednesday.

Zondervan (search), a division of HarperCollins Publishers, bought space in the magazine months ago as part of an ad campaign for Today's New International Version (search), said Doug Lockhart, Zondervan's executive vice president of marketing.

"Last week, we were surprised and certainly disappointed that Rolling Stone had changed their mind and rejected our ad," he said.

A telephone message seeking comment was left Wednesday at the New York headquarters of Wenner Media LLC (search), publisher of Rolling Stone.

Lockhart said Zondervan, based in Grand Rapids, paid Wenner Media last July to run the ad in February, when the Bible is due on bookshelves.

On Tuesday, USA Today quoted Kent Brownridge, general manager of Wenner Media, as saying his staff first saw the ad copy last week, and "we are not in the business of publishing advertising for religious messages."

Lockhart said the ad features the face of a contemplative-looking young man and includes this copy:

"In a world of almost endless media noise and political spin, you wonder where you can find real truth. Well, now there's a source that's accurate, clear and reliable. It's the TNIV — Today's New International Version of the Bible. It's written in today's language, for today's times — and it makes more sense than ever."

Media outlets that agreed to carry the ad include Modern Bride, The Onion, MTV.com and AOL, Lockhart said.

Zondervan and HarperCollins Publishers are both units of News Corporation, which also owns FOXNews.com.

I see your Rolling Stone and raise you NBC and CBS.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200412010005

Also, learn to love bugmenot.com -- from a straight-up copyright perspective, I might have to cut out the article text from those comments. While I'm not a fan of current copyright law, that doesn't mean I'm willing to just ignore it.

What's your point on the Fenton thing, exactly? Obviously, it doesn't paint a flattering picture of CBS news, but dumbing down the news (i.e., noone knowing who the Kurds are, too many "foreign names" to make the broadcast) is not a left/right issue. At all. Dan Rather? Yeah, but that's sort of a secondary point in the article.

the point?

you posted about the media, FCC and PTC and raised some kind of question about "what's important".

my point was, if you're looking at the media and concerned about what's important, the media's flaws as revealed in Fenton's work are more important than the FCC's problem with bad words.

get it?

it wasn't a response to your bringing up the left/right thing.

but, now that you have mentioned it, the left's undue media influence has been fucking this country over pretty badly.

right media bias- forces us to listen to shitty ClearChannel music

left media bias- distorts reality to twist minds against anything resembling Republican politics, no matter what the cost to credibility or ignoring real problems that actually matter, and falsely promotes Democratic politics in the guise of fake sincrerity under the umbrella of phony "journalism"

look at the backlash against the Columbia article from the other link, for example.

People are tired of the bullshit.

And most of the bullshit in the media is from those whose politics are more left than right.

People just want truthful information. Instead, CBS and other media outlets spew crap that generates revenue, cuts costs, or promotes a political agenda.

CBS blames right-wing bloggers for criticizing Dan Rather's memogate. But it's not a left/right problem, it's a truth problem.

But, by the same token, everyone also knows that you won't find distortions of this sort or magnitude coming from the right.

But, again, regardless of the left/right problems, the IMPORTANT problem is that the media is simply not doing its job in delivering good journalism.

Okay, I mostly agree with you, then. I may quibble on the idea that the right isn't as egregious -- particularly when you preface it with "everybody knows," but that's not going to yield any sort of useful conversation, I think. The point is that the machine is really, really broken.

As for people being tired of this bullshit from both sides -- the truth problem, as you put it, I wish that were the case, but I'm pessimistic.

Importance, to me and to this site, is a pretty ephemeral concept, so don't take it to heart that I say something's important and ignore other stuff. There's a certain "ooh, something shiny" method to it that eschews intellectual rigor. I just don't have the time, and in many cases, other people do a better job.

At any rate, I appreciate the feedback.