Permanent link to MTA daily media news

White House sends out Christmas-themed Hanukkah invitations. (Think Progress)
President and First Lady Bush recently sent Jewish community leaders invitations to a Hanukkah reception at the White House next month. But as the New York Post reports, the invitations “raised more than a few eyebrows” because the image on them was that of a “Clydesdale horse hauling a Christmas fir along the snow-dappled drive to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave”:

Joe Klein’s extreme revisionism (by Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory, Salon)
Joe Klein, this week’s Time Magazine, on George Bush’s legacy: “…I’ve been searching for valedictory encomiums… [like] the bracing moment of Bush with the bullhorn in the ruins of the World Trade Center, but that was neutered in my memory by his ridiculous, preening appearance in a flight suit on the deck of the aircraft carrier beneath the ‘Mission Accomplished’ sign…” Joe Klein, Face the Nation, May 4, 2003, with Bob Schieffer — 3 days after Bush’s Mission Accomplished speech: “…[T]hat was probably the coolest presidential image since Bill Pullman played the jet fighter pilot in the movie Independence Day.”…  As bad as this absence of remorse is, it is simply intolerable to watch those who cheered on many of the worst excesses try now to pretend that they were skeptical, adversarial critics all along.  Journalists with influential platforms have responsibilities, the primary one of which is to be accountable for what they say and do.

Commentary: Presidential campaign was awash in paradox (by J. Peder Zane, Raleigh News & Observer)
The 2008 presidential campaign offered a study in contrasts.
It revolutionized the political process by harnessing the power of the Internet to forge new relationships between the candidates and voters.
It was also a deeply traditional campaign decided by economic fears and get-out-the-vote efforts.
It was fueled by the raw power of bottom-up, grass-roots efforts.
It was also one of the most tightly scripted, top-down contests in recent history.
It provided voters with more information than ever before.
It also generated so much misinformation that it was harder than ever to separate fact from fiction.
Those were some of the paradoxical observations that four political reporters shared at a Duke University panel on media coverage of the 2008 election.

Obama: Change ‘comes from me,’ not his appointees (McClatchy)
WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama essentially said Wednesday that he is the change, striving to assure Americans that he’ll shake up Washington despite filling his administration with old hands from the Clinton administration and the capital’s corridors of power.
I guess he’s the Decider.

290,000 Resumes So Far (Political Wire)
“So far, the transition team has received 290,000 applications for jobs in the Obama administration through its website — www.change.gov — and officials believe they could wind up with 1 million job-seekers by the time Obama is sworn into office on Jan. 20,” the Los Angeles Times reports. “By comparison, before President Bush took office in 2001, he received just 44,000 requests for political jobs. As former President Clinton assumed the White House in 1993, he had received 125,000 applications for jobs.” The problem: There are only about 8,000 non-career service positions are available.
Oh, heck!  I forgot to send mine.

Want to sell something? Put Obama’s face on it (McClatchy)
WASHINGTON — As the federal government tries to revive the nation’s ailing economy, President-Elect Barack Obama is proving to be a one-man stimulus package.

I’d like reconciliation, too. Could we set up a commission? (by lambert at Corrente)
Paul Rosenberg asks: “…Why can’t Obama–and all of us–ask, ‘Why not the truth?’  He wants bipartisanship?  Fine. But why must bipartisanship require lies?  And not just individual ones, but the whole Orwellian package that makes truth-telling virtually impossible?…” A great deal, if the Village is like Murder on the Orient Express, and they’re all in on the crime.

Turley: By Refusing To Pardon Torture Officials, Bush Is Allowing Democrats To Repair His Legacy (Think Progress)
[Tuesday] night on MSNBC Rachel Maddow highlighted a report from the Wall Street Journal that said that President Bush is unlikely to pardon any officials involved in engineering or executing the Bush administration’s torture program. According to the Wall Street Journal report, the White House believes that the Justice Department’s torture memos give the officials all the legal cover they need. Maddow’s guest, constitutional legal scholar Jonathan Turley, said that he also believes that Bush is unlikely to pardon his torture officials, but for reasons that have little to do with the torture memos: “…They know that the Democratic leadership will not allow criminal investigations or indictments.” Turley explained that without the pardons, Bush is clearing the way for Democrats to repair the president’s torture legacy. Bush will be “able to say there’s nothing stopping indictments or prosecutions but a Democratic Congress and a Democratic White House didn’t think there was any basis for it,” Turley said.
Click through to watch the video.  It’s just like always—Democrats help repair the Republican brand while Republicans wage war against them.

Gates is fine, Hillary not-so-much (by vastleft at Corrente)
Bob Gates is a good soldier, but that Clinton woman, well…. [From Cernig at Crooks and Liars:] “Clinton, if anything, is more problematic than Gates and potentially the most trouble of all simply because there’s little doubt that Gates knows how to subordinate himself to his President’s overall direction while still keeping his own end of policy debates respectfully strenuous. Hillary…well, we’ll see.” She’s a threat to… what? Tear her party apart? Give the pres the Vince Foster/RFK treatment? Periodically when she’s feeling down, launches nuclear attacks on Iran?… No matter that. CDS, like a diamond, is forever.

Slate plays dumb about the Clinton Foundation (County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Slate just published a 900-word piece in which writer Christopher Beam insists Clinton close down his foundation because of the “inevitable” financial scandals that will emerge in coming years, and how it would distract from his  wife’s work as SoS. The tsk-tsking article mentions “foundation” 21 times. But for some reason it only mentions  “charity” once… Interestingly, the piece never actually explains to readers what the Clinton Foundation does. Answer: It helps poor people around the world. Why does Slate purposely play dumb about what the Clinton Foundation is? Why does Slate carefully avoid mentioning the Clinton Foundation battles the HIV/AIDS pandemic and fights hunger in Africa? My guess is that makes it easier for Slate to make the cavalier demand that, in order to please Beltway nay-sayers, the foundation must be shut down; that “the Clinton Foundation effectively has to close shop.”

Convicted fundraiser Rezko wants sentencing date (AP)
Attorneys have filed a motion requesting the “earliest possible” sentencing date for convicted political fixer Tony Rezko. The motion filed Wednesday in federal court says Rezko has been in solitary confinement at Chicago’s Metropolitan Correctional Center since June 4 and “can no longer agree to delay sentencing.”… Rezko’s since been seen in U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s office. There hasn’t been official confirmation that he’s cooperating with federal prosecutors, but both sides say they’re in discussions that could affect sentencing.

Obama Will Speak to Governors (Political Wire)
President-elect Obama and Vice President-elect Biden will meet with governors from both parties in Philadelphia next week to discuss the state of the economy, the Wall Street Journal reports. Also in attendance: Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who has never met Obama before.

Fox News shut out at Obama press conferences. (Think Progress)
Fishbowl DC notes that Fox News has not been allowed to ask a question at any of the four press conferences that Barack Obama has held since winning the election.

“Every White House is more controlling than the one before”
McClatchy Washington bureau chief John Walcott isn’t expecting Barack Obama’s administration to set a new standard for transparency. “My impression is that the campaign had expressed a certain amount of control.” Steven Thomma, also with McClatchy, adds: “There is probably a false assumption that he is accessible. I did not see a lot of interviews.”

The Next Host of Meet the Press? (Political Wire)
NBC executives “are closing in on a decision about who will take over Meet the Press, its venerable Sunday morning political talk show, with the announcement coming possibly on Dec. 7,” the Los Angeles Times reports. “According to network sources, that may be Tom Brokaw’s last day on the air as interim moderator of the program, a post he assumed after the sudden death of longtime host Tim Russert in June.” The reported short list: David Gregory, Gwen Ifill, Andrea Mitchell and Chuck Todd.

Did Koppel quit the Discovery channel to become “Meet the Press” host?
Ted Koppel is leaving the Discovery channel six months before the end of his contract by mutual agreement. “Given the timing, one can’t help but wonder if he might soon be announced as the new host of NBC’s legendary Sunday morning public affairs show, ‘Meet the Press,’” writes David Zurawik.

Does Hannity have the guts to partner with a ‘big-league liberal?’ (Think Progress)
Earlier this week, Alan Colmes announced that he would be relinquishing his role as co-host of Hannity & Colmes at the end of the year. The Chicago Tribune’s Eric Zorn observes, “Hannity is quicker, louder, angrier, funnier and more confrontational and self-assured than the comparatively mild, cerebral Colmes, therefore he’s the dominant and more compelling half of the team.” Asking the question, “Does Sean Hannity have the guts to partner with a big-league liberal?” Zorn suggests that Ed Schultz, Mike Malloy, Randi Rhodes, and Al Franken (if he loses) would be good replacement candidates to spar with Hannity on his show.

Edward Wasserman, please read County Fair (County Fair, Media Matters for America)
The Miami Herald’s Wasserman has a good column about Dan Rather’s ongoing detective work regarding Memogate and how his former employer, CBS, stacked the deck when forming its “independent” panel to answer the network’s right-wing critics. Wasserman notes how little coverage Rather’s revelations have received… But just for the record, let’s note that [we have] been all over the story.

Board keeps faulty ballots from Minn. Senate count
ST. PAUL, Minn. - In a blow to Democrat Al Franken, a state board ruled Wednesday that absentee ballots that were rejected by poll workers won’t be included in Minnesota’s Senate recount.

Washington State justice says he taunted Mukasey at speech (McClatchy)
Washington State Supreme Court Justice Richard Sanders acknowledged Tuesday that he shouted “Tyrant! You are a tyrant!” during a speech by the nation’s attorney general last week.
That was the speech where Mukasey fainted.

Portfolio: Anybody Home? by Elinore Longobardi, Columbia Journalism Review)
A Double Debit to Conde Nast Portfolio for offering us an extended portrait of luxury homebuilder Bob Toll as a gutsy CEO who is down but not out, and then following that unfortunate puff piece with another one on how a reporter’s choice to rent a $13,000-a-month mansion he couldn’t afford is emblematic of the housing crisis. Each article has problems of its own, but together they look even worse, and make Portfolio seem embarrassingly out of touch with the realities of the current financial situation.

Commentary: So much for letting the free market rule (by Joseph L. Galloway, McClatchy Newspapers)
Hear that humming sound? That’s the printing presses at the United States Treasury running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, churning out an ocean of green paper to bail out the billionaire bankers, brokers and assorted brigands who are responsible for the economic disaster that’s befallen us… What we have here is capitalism without consequences; a free market whose downside can’t be tolerated… To quote the illustrious Pogo: We have met the enemy and he is us.

The Moral Stage of Wall Street (by George Packer, The New Yorker, thanks to Economist’s View)
Swiss bankers are not known as paragons of transparency and moral accountability, so it’s a nice surprise to read that the top officials of UBS, the foundering financial institution recently bailed out by the Swiss government, will forgo twenty-seven million dollars in compensation and bonuses. It appears that these Swiss bankers have a faint pulse of shame. It has not gone remarked upon enough that their American counterparts apparently have none. Having brought the American and global economy to its knees through their reckless, short-sighted, downright stupid investments, and then looked to the government for a very expensive lifeline.

Still looting (by lambert at Corrente)
“AIG Gives ‘Retention’ Pay After Scrapping Bonuses”

CEOs thankful for wealth redistribution (by lambert at Corrente)
Wonkroom…: “The ILO found that between 1995 and 2007, real wage growth in the United States was essentially 0 percent, and in 2009 wages will ‘decline by 0.5 percent in industrial countries and grow by no more than 1.1 per cent globally.’… This stagnation — which occurred at the same time that CEO pay steadily increased — has led to severe income inequality…” And, of course, there are social consequences, outside Versailles, at least: “There are also many economic costs associated with higher inequality, such as higher crime rates, higher expenditures on private and public security, worse public health outcomes and lower average educational achievements.” It would be nice if Obama could manage to get cardcheck passed, eh? Add that to our metrics for Obama’s success.

Medicare for All Would be best (by DCblogger at Corrente)
Yes: Government-financed, privately delivered care would work “While 30 cents of every dollar of health costs pays for overhead, Medicare costs 3 cents on the dollar. Today, rising health-care costs cause one-half of all personal bankruptcies, three-fourths of whom have insurance.”

Washington Post Misinforms on Employee Free Choice Act (by Dean Baker)
The Washington Post described the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) as a”law offering a card checkoff as an alternative to secret-ballot elections for union representation.” Actually, workers can already organize through card check rather an election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board. However, at present the manner through which the certification occurs is left in the hands of the employer. The ECFA would let the workers decide which route they wanted to follow.

Auto Bailout Designed as Rebates for Buyers? (by Mary at The Left Coaster)
Steve Benen talked about a proposal written up in the Washington Monthly which says instead of bailing out the auto makers, provide rebates for the buyers… But as Steve notes: “Reading the piece, I had a couple of concerns about rewarding a flawed Detroit business model, and adding millions of cars to the road that aren’t exactly efficient, environmentally-friendly vehicles.” So how about making it a green program?… We could have a program that [targets] the worst mileage cars with cleaner, more efficient cars by a subsidy that was calibrated to the income of the buyer. The less well off with a really bad car could get a much better car and that would go a long way to making their overall costs go down while cleaning the air and helping prop up the auto industry.

Lest We Forget (by Paul Krugman)
The crises of the 1990s and the early years of this decade should have been seen as dire omens, as intimations of still worse troubles to come. But everyone was too busy celebrating our success in getting through those crises to notice… [T]he experience of the last decade suggests that we should be worrying about financial reform, above all regulating the “shadow banking system” at the heart of the current mess, sooner rather than later… So here’s my plea: even though the incoming administration’s agenda is already very full, it should not put off financial reform. The time to start preventing the next crisis is now.

Washington Post and Larry Summers, Both Wrong on Fannie and Freddie (by Dean Baker)
Fannie and Freddie did not go down because they were quasi public institutions protected from effective regulation. They went down because, like their counterparts in fully private institutions, their management was either too dumb too recognize the housing bubble, or sufficiently greedy that they were prepared to let companies go bankrupt so that they could earn high fees and bonuses until the bubble burst… [A]rguing that they had some special protection because of their quasi public status — as though they would not have delved deep into the junk if they had been completely private — is one of the most ridiculous claims ever to appear in a Washington Post editorial.

Tom Toles

NYT Has Good Piece on Drug Trials (by Dean Baker)
The NYT reported on a study showing that cheap diuretics were more effective than expensive patent protected drugs in combating hypertension. The article reports on the drug industry’s efforts to limit the impact of the study.

Media Matters for America headlines

• Fox News repeatedly echoes only opponents of Employee Free Choice Act

• Conservative media react to talk of Obama-led economic recovery by attacking FDR and New Deal

When witnesses take over the news (by Jeff Jarvis)
I’m writing a Media Guardian column on the news after Mumbai: When witnesses take over the news, the impact on our experience of news, the impact on the news event itself, on the role of journalists, on what new we need in news (organization), on what comes next (live video, of course, and assigning witnesses)…
: Wonderful observation about the absurdity of joining pundits on American TV to talk about news from Amit Varma, who found safety in a hotel hard on one of the attacks…
: Amy Gahran tries to track down the rumor - and that’s what it is; an unconfirmed and unsourced reprort - that Mumbai police asked tweeters to stop.

Mumbai Attacks: A Video Timeline (Mashable)
The horrendous attacks in Mumbai, while covered extensively by mainstream news outlets, have also been credited as another landmark moment for social media sites like Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. CNN called the Mumbai attacks Twitter’s “coming of age“, while one Flickr photoset has received in excess of 70,000 views.

Bloggers, Writers, Web World Go Vertical (by Anthony Tjan, CEO of Cue Ball Group, a venture and growth equity firm based in Boston and Vice Chairman of Parthenon, a leading strategic advisory firm)
[From his recent Harvard Business Review article: If] you are a writer, blogger, or Web site owner, the strategic lesson here is focus, focus, focus. Become known as an expert for something. To paraphrase Richard Branson, “Being the best is a decent business model.” With the wealth of knowledge and talent as well as publishers and advertisers who use mediabistro.com as a knowledge resource — the case is made in point there. mediabistro.com is well-defined by its community of users who find it more relevant because there is a sense of understanding, affiliation, and expertise for those in the media industry. Users of this site are as or more likely to check out new job postings here as they are their local newspaper directory, Monster, HotJobs, or any other more horizontal player out there. So onward, forward and vertical!

5 prosecuted for violating Egypt reporting ban
CAIRO, Egypt - Egypt’s state-owned news agency says two editors and three journalists will be tried for violating a gag rule on the trial of a Egyptian tycoon accused of ordering the murder of a Lebanese pop star.

Conviction on lesser charges in MySpace case
A Missouri mother on trial in a landmark cyberbullying case was convicted Wednesday of only three minor offenses for her role in a mean-spirited Internet hoax that apparently drove a 13-year-old girl to suicide.

Guilty Verdict in Cyberbullying Case Provokes Many Questions Over Online Identity
The verdict Wednesday in the MySpace cyberbullying case raised a variety of questions about the terms that users agree to when they log on to Web sites.

Dine-and-dash gang nabbed via Facebook
An restaurateur left holding a hefty unpaid bill when five young diners bolted used the popular social networking Web site Facebook to track them down — and they got their just desserts.

Yes, It is Bad: Newspapers’ Online Ad Revenues Down For Q3 As Well (Paid Content)
No point in sugarcoating it: even the online ad revenues for the newspapers are in a bad shape: For the Q308 numbers released by Newspaper Association of America (via Robert MacMillan): total online ad revenues came in at about $749 million, down 3 percent from the previous quarter figures of $776.5 million in the previous quarter. This is the second straight quarter of online ad revenue decline for U.S. newspapers. Print, not surprisingly, is down a more brutal 20 percent.

Sun-Times Media Group Will Fight Hedge Fund’s Board Nominees
CHICAGO The proxy war for control of Sun-Times Media Group’s board of directors is on.

Star Tribune to pay over $300,000 to settle sexual harassment suit
The Minneapolis paper was accused of creating a sexually hostile work environment against women in one of its mail rooms. Strib exec Ben Taylor says the paper continues to disagree with the allegations but “a settlement at this early stage allows the Star Tribune to avoid the expense, time commitment, disruption, and uncertainty of litigating a case that would likely last for years and cost more to defend than the settlement.”

Time Magazine To Consolidate Global Editions, European Edition To Be Edited In New York (Paid Content)
Following Time Inc’s announcement of 600 redundancies, Time magazine is reshuffling its global editions, a move that will take the editing of the EMEA edition from the magazine’s London bureau to its New York HQ, reports Keith Kelly of the New York Post. Time told staff last week it was cutting 20 jobs, or two-thirds of its London-based Time Europe team, though the company says it will continue to have an editorial presence in London. And it’s not just Europe: Time’s Sydney bureau chief Steve Waterson tells The Daily Telegraph in Sydney that nine journalists’ jobs are to be cut and the Sydney editorial bureau shut down, though a 30-strong sales team will remain. The South Pacific Time was put together there, but readers in that region will now get content from Time’s Asian edition

MTV Returning to Washington
Youth Activism Inspires ‘Be the Change Inaugural Ball’

U2, Coldplay, Killers help launch digital magazine
NEW YORK (Billboard) - Some of the biggest names in music are contributing exclusive songs to RED(WIRE), a digital music magazine that launches on World AIDS Day (December 1).

Icahn Increases Yahoo Holdings By Nearly 7 Million Shares
Apparently no one told Carl Icahn this was supposed to be a slow news day … the Yahoo director added nearly 7 million shares to his holdings in the company this week at an almost bargain-basement cost of roughly $67 million… Icahn agitated his way onto Yahoo’s board in July along with two representatives after he acquired a nearly 5 percent stake. In return, he promised to retain at least 30 million shares and not to disparage Yahoo. 

Sling gets into video-streaming realm
Sling Media, which makes the Slingbox device that lets you watch your home TV remotely, has rolled out a “beta” version of its own video-streaming site, Sling.com.

The Blockbuster Set-top Box Has Arrived
Blockbuster has officially entered the “battle of the boxes” with the launch of its new set-top box yesterday. The box will serve movies to TVs over the Internet and is going against Netflix’s set-top box solutions (Xbox, Roku, and Tivo). Blockbuster’s MediaPoint box allows users to watch thousands of movies without the need of a monthly subscription.

Grandma’s on the Computer Screen
The Web cam adventures of the nursery school set and their grandparents offer a glimpse at what can be gained — and what may be lost — by almost-being there.

Public safety airwave auction faces next test
A renewed effort by U.S. regulators to auction part of the airwaves to a commercial entity that must share the spectrum with firefighters, police, and other emergency workers, faces its next test within weeks.