Category: Media

Misquoted or badly edited?

John Quiggin18 Comments

As anyone who’s dealt with the mainstream media knows, any time you’re directly involved in a story, you’re likely to see that it’s been misreported.

I was interviewed recently about the economic problems facing the new government and said, several times, that we would be better off if both parties had not committed themselves to large tax cuts on the basis of optimistic projections but that, having made the commitment, the Rudd government should honour it. This is how it came out in the news.com story

Some economists believe the promised $31 billion tax cuts should be abandoned.

“The country would be much better if we hadn’t had these tax-cut promises from both sides in the election campaign,” University of Queensland professor John Quiggin said.

“It was irresponsible to promise such large tax cuts where the fiscal situation needed more flexibility than that allowed.”

But Mr Swan insisted the tax cuts would be delivered.

You could argue that the report is accurate. Some economists do believe the tax cuts should be abandoned and I did make the remarks quoted. Perhaps the reporter submitted a story in which these two facts weren’t run together as they have been here, and it was cut in a way that produced this misleading impression. Or maybe the original report was wrong.

Either way, it confirms negative impressions about the mainstream media. Of course, bloggers make plenty of mistakes too, but it would be nice to think the professionals could do better.

Update I got a phone call this morning from news.com.au and I’m happy to say the story has been rewritten with my views reported correctly. Blogging gets results!

Background noise

John Quiggin12 Comments

So I thought I’d watch Catalyst as they had a story on fuel cells, but it was unwatchable because of the silly and obtrusive background music. My wife alerted me to this trend a while ago. Background music has escaped from the establishing shots where it’s long been standard, and now continues throughout the program, even when people are speaking. The effect is that any added information from the visuals is more than offset by the added noise of background music, leaving TV providing less than radio, not to mention plain text.

One endless Rathergate

John Quiggin32 Comments

The rightwing blogosphere, with assistance from the usual MSM types like Howard Kurtz has spent the last week or two trying to discredit a soldier, Scott Beauchamp, who wrote a “Baghdad Diary” for The New Republic, which included various examples of casually callous behavior on the part of US soldiers (nothing on the scale of Abu Ghraib or other proven cases).

For the wingers, this is a continuous pattern. Before this, there was a flap about a report that failures by contractors were resulting in troops in the field not getting adequate food. Before that, it was the Jamil Hussein case, a months-long brawl with AP arising from a report by a stringer about attacks on mosques. Before that, it was reports from Lebanon of ambulances being hit by Israeli fire. And so on.[1] There’s too much of this to try and give comprehensive coverage, and I’m not interested in debating the details, but a search on Instapundit will usually get you started.

The Beauchamp case fits the general pattern pretty well. First, the wingers claimed that the Diary was a fabrication and that “Scott Thomas” was the creation of a writer who’d never been near Iraq. Then, when it became evident he was a real person, they rolled out the slime machine to discredit him. Then they engaged in amateur forensics to discredit particular items in his account (acres of screen space have been devoted to the question of whether the driver of a Bradley fighting vehicle can run over a dog). Then they got to the central point – true or false, material like this is bad for the cause and shouldn’t be printed.

All of this, of course, is an attempt to replicate the one undoubted triumph of the blogospheric right, Rathergate. For those who somehow missed it, Dan Rather and CBS fooled by a bogus memo purportedly from Bush’s National Guard commander, and Rather eventually lost his job as a result.

As I said, I’m not interested in, and won’t debate, the details of these stories. The main question is: How anyone could imagine that this kind of exercise can have any value?
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Meltdown at the Oz, Part II

John Quiggin6 Comments

Following the bizarre attack on Clive Hamilton a few weeks ago, the Oz editorial page gives a full length response to the various online sources (mostly not named, but Peter Brent at Mumble cops the most flak, and Crikey is obviously an intended target) who bagged Tuesday’s silly beatup of a no-news opinion poll. Not only that, it seems that a post at Tim Dunlop’s blogocracy, commenting on the editorial, has been removed. Naturally, the blogosphere has gone to town on this. LP has commentary and heaps of links, many pointing out the absurdity of relying on the “preferred PM” question, not that you need a blog on this point

But the silliest thing doesn’t come until the end, where the editorial says

It reflects how out of touch with ordinary views so many on-line commentators are. They claim to understand the mainstream but in reality represent a clique that believes what it considers to be the evils of the Howard Government position on Iraq, climate change, and Work Choices to be self-evident truths. They despair that Mr Howard has not suffered the same collapse in public support as US President George W Bush and Newspoll makes it clear Mr Howard still enjoys very strong support in the electorate.

Say what? There’s ample opinion poll evidence to show that on Iraq, Workchoices and climate change, it’s the Oz and the government who are hopelessly out of touch with ordinary views.

As for saying that “Newspoll makes it clear Mr Howard still enjoys very strong support in the electorate”, this is a piece of question-begging even more absurd than the original article. I think it’s safe to say that the main emotion felt on the left, when reading the results of Newspoll and its competitors, is not despair but fear that they are too good to be true.

If a blogger was writing pieces like this in response to relatively restrained criticism of a silly post, I’d anticipate reading a “Farewell” post in the near future, or possibly just finding the site taken down. I don’t know exactly what the mainstream media equivalent would be, but clearly the Oz knows it is in big trouble.

Stealth correction at the journal of record

John Quiggin1 Comment

Glen Greenwald took a few bites out the latest NYTimes transcription, by White House stenographer Michael Gordon, of Administration/military talking points in the campaign for war against Iran, made by Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner, now US military spokesman in Iraq and previously, (not reported) Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Iraq. So somebody at the Gray Lady apparently decided that the piece might be improved by a mininal amount of actual reporting, such as the fact that the claims in question have been repeatedly denied by the Iranian government (with backing, although this is not mentioned, from a large number of independent analysts).

What’s interesting to me is that these changes are not noted. But if the journal of record had attributed the remarks to the wrong general or mis-stated the spokesman’s position, the error would surely have been noted with a correction. A blogger who made a change like this in response to justified criticism would get accused, rightly, of a stealth correction. Shouldn’t the New York Times be held to at least as high a standard?

Women in Art

John Quiggin6 Comments

I once doubted that user-produced video would amount to much. This beautiful montage is one of many on YouTube that prove me wrong. (Via Jeff Weintraub, via Norm Geras)

On the other hand, it remains to be seen whether I can make the necessary code work. In the meantime, go here