Newshoggers.com

Time for a Blogger's Ethics Panel

By Fester:

Time for a blogger ethics panel as there is no invinsible wall between editorial and business functions at this and many other blogs. The Newshoggers recently received a paid advertisment from the ACLU that advocates Twittering Against Torture. Once BlogAds takes their cut, we may be able to afford a pint of good Kentucky whiskey to split amongst everyone. The ACLU advertised on the 'Hog because they consider the writers and by implications our audience to be a receptive audience to their message that torture is an inherent bad and should not be condoned. Our opinions as writers made us notable and potentially valuable to an advertiser. Time for an ethics panel...

If this Politico Report is to believed, the Washington Post really needs a Bloggers' Ethics Panel:

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few" — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors....

 

"Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate," says the one-page flier. "Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth. ... Bring your organization’s CEO or executive director literally to the table. Interact with key Obama administration and congressional leaders …

 

“Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No. The relaxed setting in the home of Katharine Weymouth assures it. What is guaranteed is a collegial evening, with Obama administration officials, Congress members, business leaders, advocacy leaders and other select minds typically on the guest list of 20 or less. …

 

“Offered at $25,000 per sponsor, per Salon. Maximum of two sponsors per Salon. Underwriters’ CEO or Executive Director participates in the discussion....

 

Hosts and Discussion Leaders ... Health-care reporting and editorial staff members of The Washington Post ..

Of course we know it is the job of the national print media to star-fuck.  Why would that raise any ethical concerns at all.  And why would this raise any credibility concerns when it is so difficult to get decent steaks with an appetizer, desert and a pair of drinks for two for less than $20,000, they barely are making any money on this at all.  There is nothing suspicious here.  Nothing at all besides the complete confirmation of the malleability of the Washington Post’s editorial stances for deep pockets. 

But there is no need for an ethics panel as Tom in Comments at Balloon Juice wins quote of the week on this story with this line:

So we have now come to the point where a health care lobbyist is more ethical than the Washington Post.

Wow!

The Thong Of The Dick Whisperer

By Steve Hynd

Mr Smoking Jacket, Dana Milbank, apparently called Nico Pitney a dick during their appearance on Reliable Sources yesterday.

And in an indication of which of the two Blogtopia (ysydctp) thinks has more integrity...

Over at CafePress, you can now buy all manner of clothing, accessories, and gadgets commemorating You’reSuchADickGate. For sale are T-shirts, sweatshirts, polo shirts, hoodies, onesies, baby bibs, coffee mugs, messenger bags, mousepads, water bottles, pet bowls, wall clocks, aprons, boxers, and, of course, “the classic thong” (Made in the USA!)—all printed with a photo of Dana Milbank and emblazoned with the line “THE DICK WHISPERER.” Again: what a proud, proud moment.

Here's a guy everyone will miss!

Commentary By Ron Beasley

There were times it seemed you couldn't turn on the TV without seeing Billy Mays pitching something.  Well He went to sleep last night but never woke up.

Television pitchman Billy Mays — who built his fame by appearing on commercials and infomercials promoting household products and gadgets — died Sunday.

Mays, 50, was found unresponsive by his wife inside his Tampa, Fla., home at 7:45 a.m. on Sunday, according to the Tampa Police Department.

Police said there were no signs of forced entry to Mays' residence and foul play is not suspected. Authorities said an autopsy should be complete by Monday afternoon.

And it gets real strange:

Mays was on board a US Airways flight that blew out its front tires as it landed at a Tampa airport on Saturday, MyFOXTampa.com reported.

In an interview after the flight he reported that he had been hit in the head by an object when the plan landed. 

Tabloid Journalism or a Tabloid Population?

Commentary By Ron Beasley

The US and the World face a number of real and potential problems.  In case you forgot the US is supposed to be leaving the cities in Iraq in spite of an uptick in violence.  Things are not getting any better in Afghanistan either,  The US and World economies are still teetering on the edge of a depression.  But the entire media is once again morphed into the National Enquirer.  The tabloid journalism revolved around  another oversexed hypocritical Republican, Mark Sanford, until the death of Michael Jackson.  My initial reaction would be to criticize the media but that would be wrong I think.  The profit and viewer driven media is giving the the tabloid population what they want - news that looks like a reality show.  When our civilization finally collapses it won't be the result of the tabloid journalism but because tabloid journalism is what the people wanted.

So I've been quiet this week because I don't give a rat's ass about Mark Sanford or Michael Jackson.

Froomkin's Last Washington Post

By Steve Hynd

Dan Froomkin's last column for the WaPo is here. Go read, give him your best wishes and so forth. Froomkin's one of the good guys and the WaPo will be far, far poorer for his going. But whover gets him next will be far, far richer.

Froomkin found his voice in watching the Bush White House lie about everything. But he's also been essential for following the Obama administration's wrongdoings. For this last WaPo post, he identifies some of the areas Obama needs to be watched carefully on.

Now, a little over five months after Bush left office, Barack Obama's presidency is shaping up to be in large part about coming to terms with the Bush era, and fixing all the things that were broken. In most cases, Obama is approaching this task enthusiastically – although in some cases, he is doing so only under great pressure, and in a few cases, not at all . I think part of Obama's abiding popularity with the public stems from what a contrast he is from his predecessor -- and in particular his willingness to take on problems. But he certainly has a lot of balls in the air at one time. And I predict that his growing penchant for secrecy – especially but not only when it comes to the Bush legacy of torture and lawbreaking – will end up serving him poorly, unless he renounces it soon.

Obama is nowhere in Bush's league when it comes to issues of credibility, but his every action nevertheless needs to be carefully scrutinized by the media, and he must be held accountable. We should be holding him to the highest standards – and there are plenty of places where we should be pushing back. Just for starters, there are a lot of hugely important but unanswered questions about his Afghanistan policy, his financial rescue plans, and his turnaround on transparency.

And remember, Froomkin is still writing for Nieman Watchdog.

Michael Calderone, Your Black Helicopter Is Waiting

By Steve Hynd

Nico Pitney of Huffington Post has been far and away one of the best blogging sources on the Iran elections. Like FDL owned the Scooter Libby trial or TPM owned the AG firings, Nico. alongside Robert Mackay at The Lede, has been there first and mostest with news and views, often from Iranians as well as Western sources, as the Iranian election protests and crackdown have unfolded.

So, Obama's staff noticed Nico's coverage and contacted him to say they'd like for him to maybe ask a question of the President at today's presser. He was duly called, and didn't ask a softball question.

“Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad, and if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn't that a betrayal of the — of what the demonstrators there are working towards?”

Obama replied:

Well look, we didn't have international observers on the ground, we can't say definitively what exactly happened at polling places throughout the country. What we know is that a sizeable percentage of the Iranian people themselves, spanning Iranian society, considered this election illegitimate. It's not an isolated instance, a little grumbling here or there. There [are] significant questions about the legitimacy of the election. And so ultimately, the most important thing for the Iranian government to consider is legitimacy in the eyes of its own people, not in the eyes of the United States. And that's why I've been very clear, ultimately this is up to the Iranian people to decide who their leadership is going to be and the structure of their government. What we can do is to say unequivocally that there are sets of international norms and principles about violence, about dealing with peaceful dissent, that spans cultures, spans borders, and what we've been seeing over the Internet and what we've been seeing in news reports, violates those norms and violates those principles. I think it is not too late for the Iranian government to recognize that there is a peaceful path that will lead to stability and legitimacy and prosperity for the Iranian people. We hope they take it.

Good for Nico. Kudos! I wish there were many more, just like him, working for mainstream outlets. But...

Cue a bunch of puffed up drunken popinjays with their veinous noses out of joint (you don't get nose vein breakout like that from Diet Coke, folks) because the White House didn't follow the established order of things and called upon an unwashed blogger type before the guy from Reuters.

Cue Michael Calderone at Politico, who manages to get not one but two posts out of the ridiculous premise that Nico and the WH "coordinated" their exchange so that Obama knew what question was coming.

And Cue a slew of slavering rightwing conpiracy believers jumping on Calderone's black helicopter for a ride.

Ridiculous. "Gotcha" kindergarten games of the lowest level.

Update: Dana Milbank of the WaPo gets in line for that helicopter too, in a really dishonest bit of reporting. At no point does he actually quote Nico's question, simply writing that:

Pitney asked his arranged question. Reporters looked at one another in amazement at the stagecraft they were witnessing. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel grinned at the surprised TV correspondents in the first row.

Then adding:

As if to compensate for the prepackaged Huffington Post question, Obama went quickly to Fox News for a predictably hostile question from Major Garrett. "In your opening remarks, sir, you said about Iran that you were appalled and outraged," Garrett said. "What took you so long?

"I don't think that's accurate," Obama volleyed testily, calling his toughening statements on Iran "entirely consistent."

Thus giving the impression that Nico's question was a tough one without actually quoting it so that his readers could decide for themselves if asking about a possible betrayal of the demonstrators was a softball for Obama.

D-day already posted this You-Tube today in a post that wasn't about this snit in a teacup:

And writes:

I don't think you can find a more perfect summation of the traditional media inside Washington than this - Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza dressed like fops in bowties and smoking jackets - or more likely, dressed like their own mental projection of themselves - smugly discoursing, with CHAMBER MUSIC in the background, about Beltway gossip.

...I think at this point, we can stop asking "If only the media would cover such-and-such story in THIS way..." For that to be successful, we would have to get such a story covered by someone like these two. That's just not going to happen.

Who does Dana Milbank think he is? This guy?

Andy McCarthy Loses It

By Steve Hynd

Wow. Andrew McCarthy at National Review is hearing black helicopters stuffed full of Islamic Communists coming to hide under his bed. And President Obama is the pilot!

The key to understanding Obama, on Iran as on other matters, is that he is a power-politician of the hard Left : He is steeped in Leftist ideology, fueled in anger and resentment ... It would have been political suicide to issue a statement supportive of the mullahs, so Obama's instinct was to do the next best thing: to say nothing supportive of the freedom fighters.

...Obama has a preferred outcome here, one that is more in line with his worldview, and it is not victory for the freedom fighters. He is hanging as tough as political pragmatism allows, and by doing so he is making his preferred outcome more likely.  That's not weakness, it's strength — and strength of the sort that ought to frighten us.

All this from a man who has previously argued that locking people up forever, without trial, without habeas rights but with torture, is as essential to preserving our freedoms as the right of (Republican) presidents to assert state secret privileges over anything they care to. Who's the real totalitarian hiding his true inclinations under a thin veneer of political pragmatism here?

Kevin Drum writes:

to his credit, [Rich] Lowry does respond to McCarthy here.  Remarkably (or not, perhaps), McCarthy then digs himself in even deeper here.  "I detect in your post a sense that I'm this close to the fringe," he says.  Well, there's no need to sense what I'm saying in my post, Andy.  You are batshit crazy.

Chris Orr at TNR has a post worth quoting in full for it's delicious snark in the service of Logic 101:

What I find most hilarious about the Andy McCarthy post Jason linked to is that, rather than try to situate Obama somewhere on the spectrum between fanatical ideologue and bloodless pragmatist, McCarthy simply asserts that the president resides at one extreme--except when he resides at the other. Though nonsensical, this description is, in its clumsy way, unfalsifiable: Any data point that conflicts with Obama's presumed "hard leftism" is evidence of his craven pragmatism, and vice versa.

I just wish that, as long as McCarthy was offering such a pointless analysis, he'd been a little more creative with his opposing categories. Something on the order of, "The key to understanding Obama is that he is a hybrid of delicate, magic unicorn and ravenous zombie. He will frolic in the woodlands, spreading pixie dust and joy, until his hunger for human brains begins to rise..."

It's definitely time that Lowry, National Review's editor, asked McCarthy to take a leave of absence and maybe get some therapy - or failing that to go join WorldNetDaily instead.

Is The Weekly Standard About To Get Even Crazier?

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Now that Rupert Murdoch has The Wall Street Journal does he really need the moronic rantings of William Kristol and Fred Barnes?  Maybe not:

News Corp. in talks to unload Weekly Standard to Anschutz

News Corp. is near a deal to sell its right-wing political magazine, the Weekly Standard, to conservative media mogul Philip Anschutz, according to people familiar with the situation.

Launched in 1995 and edited by William Kristol and Fred Barnes, the Weekly Standard has been a pet political project for News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch. While its circulation, according to the magazine's website is only 83,000 (it hasn't been audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulation since 1996), it reaches the upper echelon of Capitol Hill insiders and gave the media mogul cache among the Washington elite.

Now that Murdoch owns the Wall Street Journal, however, whose conservative editorial page wields a much bigger political stick, he may no longer really need the Weekly Standard, which preaches much the same message, but to a considerably smaller audience. Murdoch's own political views seem to have swung more toward the center over the last few years, and that, too, might be a factor in his decision to sell.

Or, to be blunt, News Corp., as the prospects for print media shrink, may be reviewing all its assets and deciding what stays and what goes. Using that rationale, holding on to what we suspect is a money-losing magazine doesn't make much sense.

So just who is Philip Anschutz?  Via Sully, not just a conservative but an ultra right wing Christian conservative.

The possible buyer is a far right Christianist, Philip Anschutz, whose campaigns include keeping gay people marginalized (he funded Colorado's Amendment 2), discouraging the teaching of evolution (he founded the Discovery Institute), and the Pass It On organization, the Foundation For A Better Life.

Now Fred Barnes will feel right at home with Mr Anschutz.  He is a self described orthodox Anglican who supported the move by his church to leave the Episcopalian denomination over the issue of gays.

William Kristol may feel less at home.

That's just the deal, you understand—supporting a crusade for moral values is just the price we have to pay for a foreign policy that we can defend as a whole.

Will Kristol and Barnes get to hold onto their soap boxes on the FOX "all stars"?

007 In Kabul?

By Steve Hynd

It's as good a plan as any Obama has.

Speculation that at least some of the next Bond adventure will be set in the volatile southern province of Afghanistan has been running high since a member of the Foreign Office's drug-busting team in the country began acting as a consultant for the Bond franchise last summer.

The official involved, who has since left the Foreign Office and Afghanistan, is believed to have signed a confidentiality agreement with the filmmakers preventing any discussion of the project.

UK diplomats have long joked about the need for a Bond figure to turn round the situation in Helmand, where thousands of British troops have struggled against a resilient, drug-funded insurgency.

None of them, however, expect the film to faithfully portray the realities of daily life for British officials stationed in Lashkar Gah, the dusty capital of Helmand, where diplomats live in fortress-like conditions and are only allowed out with teams of bodyguards and bomb-proof vehicles.

Buttloads of money on a fantasy that ignores grim real life in favor of wishful thinking that looks great if you suspend disbelief. Loose cannon special agents with licenses to kill. Expensive gadgets and guns instead of clean water and viable cash crops. Collateral damage galore in glorious technicolor. Are we sure this isn't Obama's plan?

Is Global Post Stiffing The Little Guys?

By Steve Hynd

Back in January, the news website Global Post launched to great fanfare. In fact, there had been a goodly deal of media hype about the new internet news platform throughout last year too. It looked almost too good to be true: a new multi-media website devoted exclusively to international news at a time when mainstream news organizations were downsizing their foreign news personnel drastically.

However, there were always worries about Global Post's business modeland whether it could generate enough revenue to sustain foreign reporting where mainstream organizations couldn't. Gawker predicted a "gaping black money hole " because "International news, see, is the only sort of content less attractive to advertisers than politics". Global Post's plan to charge $199 a year for Passport membership, which would include conference calls with journalists and the ability to "suggest article ideas" was also potentially problematic. Some were uncertain whether that was enough meat for the money to entice sufficient premium subscribers. However, syndication deals with the likes of Huffington Post, CBS Radio News, The Daily News and The Boise Weekly of Idaho lent more promise of a stable revenue stream.

But the business model was never going to work without enough readers of the website - and that's where bloggers like us come in. When Global Post launched, it contacted many political bloggers who dealt with foreign affairs offering a headline widget for their blogs in return for a small payment.

In some cases, the money came up front with an understanding of more to come on a monthly payment. For smaller blogs, like Newshoggers, the offer was to have the blog run the widget for a 30 day trial period, after which a small payment would be forthcoming monthly if there was enough incoming traffic to make it worth Global Post's while. We'd originally suggested they run their widget as an advert, and suggested a rate based on our BlogAds rate. Global Post's Beth Tucker responded that our rate sounded "very reasonable" but that they "like to test run the widget for a month" to see "what kind of response we might get from your community." All well and good and we went ahead on that basis. 

Newshoggers was, I believe, one of the first smaller bloggers contacted and certainly one of the first to host the Global Post sidebar widget. Our own Ron Beasley even helped them with formatting problems before they passed the widget on to other bloggers.

That was a couple of months ago. With the 30 day trial period over, we tried to contact Global Post to see what they wanted to do next - and kept the widget up in good faith while we did so. We've had absolutely no response. Since then, I've discovered that a Top 500 blogger, a friend with a blog getting in excess of 25,000 hits a day, had also made a deal with Global Post to host their widget and was having problems with it. "They paid up front for the first month, didn't cancel, and when I asked for payment after the second month was over said that they weren't getting enough clickthroughs and weren't paying." Other bloggers appear to be having similar problems.

Is this a sign that Global Post's business model is in trouble and they're cost cutting by stiffing the little guys, or perhaps a cynical calculation that bloggers individually don't have clout to be worth dealing fairly with? If Global Post would simply respond to our emails, we'd ask them on the record. In the meantime, though, their widget will disappear from this blog as from tomorrow.

Update 9 June: a Global Post spokesperson has responded:

The widget placements are not representative of how well GlobalPost's business model is doing. Rather, it was an experiment to try to connect with a very select group of blogs (of different sizes) that we thought had interesting things to say, were important, and would connect with a similar audience to ours (like newshoggers). This was a very targeted effort, and was not in any way a part of GlobalPost's business models. There was certainly no intention of stiffing anyone here. We feel that the mission of bringing international news to the forefront is very important, and our hope was that getting our headlines out on relevant sites would help in the overall effort to get the news out...There were no negative intentions here, and I feel that your post was really not based on the truth of the situation. GlobalPost is doing well, we are growing quickly, and are moving forward strongly in achieving our mission of bringing international news to the forefront.

And around 8.30 pm last night I received a phone call from Rick Byrne, Global Post's Director of Marketing. After a long call in which he again stressed that Global Post didn't intend stiffing anyone, that their business model is in no danger of failing and that the widget-placement marketing campaign was not essential to that model, we came to a resolution of the issue satisfactory to Newshoggers and, I trust, Global Post.

What appears to me to have gone wrong is that we bloggers mistakenly believed dealing with Global Post would be like dealing with BlogAds, who are scrupulous about renewals and payments, while Global Post mistakenly believed bloggers would have the billing and diary systems of large companies. However, it is certainly the case that the widget placement campaign was always designed to be a test and that the buys would be short term – in most cases a month; in some cases a quarter, according to Rick Byrne. He also confirmed that Global Post always intended that after that time period, the agreements ended.

So bloggers, if you've still got the Global Post widget up and you've gone past the agreed date, you're providing it for free and no-one to blame but yourself. Perhaps if Global Post decide to use this method of generating incoming traffic to their site on a more permanent basis they'll opt to use the BlogAds networks to ease administration at both ends, as I originally recommended to them.