Permanent link to MTA daily media news

Media: Pelosi’s Syria Diplomacy = ‘Foolish’; Bush’s Syria Diplomacy = ‘Victory’
When Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi traveled to Syria to visit President Bashar al-Assad last spring, the right wing immediately excoriated her diplomatic efforts… Now that the Bush administration has come to its senses and invited Syria to become part of the solution in the Middle East, the media has missed the administration’s reversal, instead praising Bush’s “victory” in securing Syria’s attendance.

Media Lavishes Attention On Bogus Internet Poll Showing Hillary Losing To Repubs — And Ignores Reputable Poll Finding Opposite (by Greg Sargent at TPM Horse’s Mouth)
[Monday] two polling firms — Zogby and Gallup — released surveys of the presidential race that offered strikingly different conclusions. The Zogby poll found that Hillary is trailing five leading GOP candidates in general election matchups. The Gallup Poll, by contrast, found that Hillary, and to a lesser degree Obama, has a slight to sizable lead over the top GOP contenders… I don’t need to tell you which poll got all the media attention. Do I?

Right-Wing Magazine: Veco Oil Scandal Contributed To Lott’s Resignation
[T]he right-wing American Spectator magazine speculates that brewing corruption scandals may have contributed to [Sen. Trent] Lott’s decision [to leave the Senate]: “…Lott, Stevens, as well as Rep. Dennis Hastert all have ties to Bill Allen, a larger than life Alaskan businessman who owned Veco, an oil-field services company, and who was a huge benefactor of Republican politicians.” Allen has pleaded guilty to bribing Alaska legislators.

Fox Business’s so-called ‘online shopper’ unmasked.
In honor of Cyber Monday, Fox Business did a segment yesterday on online shopping. A Fox reporter went to ESPN Zone in Washington, DC and interviewed Peter Perweiler, who was identified only as an “online shopper.” Perweiler told Fox Business that he is planning to shop on Cyber Monday and is looking at “big-ticket items this year.”… It’s no surprise that Perweiler was boosting online shopping. As Silicon Alley Insider uncovered, Perweiler is actually the marketing manager at the National Retail Federation. The NRF has blamed Fox Business’s sloppy reporting for the incident.
Click through to watch the video of the Fox interview with Perweiler.

O’Reilly ‘Bitches’ And ‘Whines’ For Military Charity To Send Dr. Laura To Meet With U.S. Troops
[Monday] night on his show, O’Reilly hosted USO CEO and President Edward Powell, sharply criticizing him for not sending more high-caliber celebrities — the “big guns” — to Afghanistan… O’Reilly told Powell that “Dr. Laura wants to go, you get her butt over there, sir.”… In May 2007, before appearing at Fort Douglas in Utah, Schlessinger disparaged “lonely” military wives, saying that they were “bitching” and “whining”…It’s not all together surprising that the USO may not be too enthusiastic about bringing such a divisive public personality to entertain the troops.
Click through to watch the Monday night interview.

Today’s Tweety Moment (by digby )
“Matthews: Let’s go back to women with needs. Women with needs are Hillary’s great strength. Women who don’t have a college degree, women who don’t have a lot of things going for them. May not have a husband, may have kids, have all kinds of needs with day care, education, minimum wage.”… “Women with Needs” doesn’t have quite the same ring as “Welfare Queens” but it does the trick.

Holt turns up the heat on Klein.
Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) sets the record straight, after Time magazine columnist Joe Klein ignorantly claimed the Democrats’ FISA reform legislation “would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans.” Holt explains the Restore Act “explicitly states that no court order is required to listen to the conversations of foreigners that happen to pass through the U.S. telecommunications system. It does not grant Constitutional rights to foreign terrorists.”

Boehlert: ABC’s Nightline walks away from Iraq
As for the daily or weekly events of the war itself, for 18 straight weeks (or one-third of the calendar year), Nightline effectively walked away from Iraq. What took its place? Lots of Nightline reports on pets and pop music.

Hide The Bunnies (by digby)
[Washington socialite and wife of former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee Sally Quinn:] “Since Hillary has been here in the Senate for the last eight years, I think I’ve seen her twice. Otherwise, she is at fund-raisers. She entertains constantly, but it is all political. It is people who work for her or raise money for her.” Sally doesn’t like being ignored… DC is America, through and through — America, ca. 1690. The Reverend Broder sentences the heretics to the stake while Sally Goodwyfe runs around screaming “burn them, burn them!”

FACT CHECK: U.S. Health Care Resources Not Burdened By Undocumented Immigrants (by Dave de Give, guest posting at Think Progress, Center for American Progress)
Not only are undocumented immigrants not a burden on the U.S. health care system, but as Alexander N. Ortega, an associate professor at UCLA’s School of Public Health and the study’s lead author points out, they “seem to be underutilizing the system, given their health needs.”
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Media Matters for America headlines

CNN’s Moos ridiculed proposed GOP YouTube debate questions, but ignored “diamonds or pearls” question CNN chose for Dem debate

Buchanan: “America [is] committing suicide” while “Asian, African, and Latin American children come to inherit the estate”

O’Reilly accused NY Times of “rooting for a recession”

CNN’s King reported that Giuliani “supports the constitutional right” to abortion without noting that he said “[i]t would be OK to repeal” Roe v. Wade

CNN suggested Dems’ support for writers’ strike compromised by media moguls’ money

CNN pledges no Dem “gotchas” in Republican YouTube debate — so why did CNN allow partisan “gotchas” in Dem debate?

Carlson: If Al Gore were president, “[w]e’d … be living in yurts in the dark”

Contrary to researchers’ views, Hume touted stem-cell breakthrough as “virtually eliminat[ing]” debate

On Tucker, Bob Franken resurrected false stories about childhoods of Bush, Gore

APer’s crime was taking photos US didn’t want citizens to see
That’s what Associated Press chief Tom Curley believes. The US military has sent out a flurry of ever-changing claims against photographer Bilal Hussein, he says, but “every claim we’ve checked out has proved to be false, overblown or microscopic in significance.”

Cable Wins Compromise on F.C.C. Plans
The F.C.C. chief’s decision to scale back a plan to more tightly regulate cable television was a significant, though not total, victory for the industry.

Minorities and females shut out of media ownership.
FCC chair Kevin Martin is currently pushing to allowing a media company to own both a television and a radio station in the same city… One of the most troubling consequences of lifting the ban is that it would likely crowd out local and minority voices in the media. A new report by Free Press highlights the disparity: – “Women comprise 51 percent of the entire U.S. population, but own a total of only 80 stations, or 5.87 percent of all full power commercial television stations.” – “Minorities comprise 34 percent of the entire U.S. population, but own a total of 43 stations, or 3.15 percent of all full-power commercial television stations.” That percentage decreased between Oct. 2006 and Oct. 2007.
Click through for more highlights, and for a link to the study.

NBC host Carson Daly to defy writers strike
NBC’s after-hours star Carson Daly is poised to become the first U.S. late-night television talk show host to cross the picket lines of striking Hollywood writers… “He wanted to go back to support his staffers,” [a] network spokeswoman said. The General Electric Co.-owned network had informed the non-writing staff of Daly’s show, as well as “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” and “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” that they face layoffs at the end of this week unless they returned to the airwaves.
Way to go, GE!  Use threats to get those suckers back to work.

Net Neutrality Coming to Congress (by Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins at Mashable)
Instead of enacting more laws, Congress should work to rid the broadband and network operator world of its gross and counter-productive subsidies. This will in turn allow more competition, solving naturally the problem of net neutrality without costing taxpayers.

US Media Owners Substituting ‘Pennies for Dollars’ Online? (paidContent.org)
Are new online business models just substituting “pennies for dollars” for media owners? That was the woeful conclusion of Mort Zuckerman, publisher of the New York Daily News and US News and World Report, according to the detailed minutes of a recent inquiry into media ownership by the UK House of Lord’s Communications Committee released Friday.

As many as 60% of online newspaper visitors are “fly-bys”
Those are people who use the site briefly and irregularly. The news industry’s continuing challenge is to turn “visitors into residents,” says washingtonpost.com editor Jim Brady. Some of the declines at newspaper sites may be due to increased competition from local TV stations, says Harvard’s Thomas E. Patterson. “A lot of papers are close to maxing out their local audiences. It’s hard to know where more readers will come from… They have to figure out how to deal with a pretty difficult future.”

An Important Lesson About Grassroots Media (by Steve Outing at Editor & Publisher)
I learned — the hard way — some truths about grassroots content and online community. This is my attempt at preventing you from going through similar business heartache… As destination sites, I don’t think that Backfence or YourHub work. My company’s sites didn’t work, which is why in hindsight I realize that a much higher level of professional content needed to be added into the mix. Quality matters… [M]y message is that you need to leverage citizen content appropriately.

Storming the News Gatekeepers
Mitchell Stephens, who teaches media history at New York University, says citizen journalism harks back to the days of spoken news, when communities gathered in open-air markets and town squares. It can be traced to Thomas Paine and the pamphleteers of the 18th century, and to the antiwar, counterculture alternative press that prospered in the 1960s… “The publishing tools — digital cameras, blogging software — are at the people’s disposal,” Gillmor continues. “And for a lot of them, the underlying motivation is frustration with the traditional media.”

Newspaper sites still in the figure-it-out stage with videos
In the past 12 to 18 months, news video has grown from a significant trend into a near stampede. Much of the video on newspaper websites is disappointing, says Charles Layton, “but a small proportion is excellent by any standard.” Chet Rhodes of washingtonpost.com tells him: “How to tell really powerful stories on the Web, nobody knows how to do that yet in what I would call a sustainable way. To do that every day is really hard. It’s going to be awesome, though.”

News Corp Acquiring LinkedIn: Rumors Confirmed? (by Kristen Nicole at Mashable)
The rumors of News Corp’s possible acquisition of LinkedIn appear to be substantiated. The two companies have been in serious talks about a deal. Further, Venturebeat speaks of reports also hinting at how News Corp. may be looking to integrate LinkedIn into its larger company–it may be fit in somehow with other online publications such as the Wall Street Journal, for both regaining (and retaining) users, and working out some sort of advertising revenue as well.

Google Maps Gets Wiki With It (by Kristen Nicole at Mashable)
Google maps has updated its My Maps tool to incorporate some wiki-like functionality. Collaborative mapping, if you will… Do maps need wikis, though? Considering the amount of love geeks out there have for their maps, mapping tools, map mashups, geo-tagging, and real time activity shown on a map, of course maps need wikis. It’s only natural. Everything is being wikified these days. Music collaboration, slide show collaboration, website collaboration, office work collaboration, podcasting collaboration, book collaboration… and now maps too.

Kevin Rose: Mobile Web Is The Next Big Thing (by Stan Schroeder at Mashable)
In an interview with SiliconRepublic, Kevin claims that although devices like the iPhone take a lot of the credit for the upcoming mobile web expansion, one need not forget the impact of search, RSS, blogs, and social networks, which are acting as catalysts. Of course, in Kevin’s mind, Digg is the way to sift through the overabundance of information.