Monday Morning Media Quarterback

The news cycle has come and gone, but it’s remarkable how little outrage there was over the fake press conference the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) threw during the Southern California fires. 

The agency, widely reviled for its horrendous performance during Katrina, gave 15 minutes notice of an upcoming press conference.  When reporters couldn’t attend with such little notice, they had FEMA staffers play the part.

Keith Olbermann treats it as a joke .  I don’t agree, but because the Bush administration has already credentialed a fake but syncophantic reporter, “Jeff Gannon“, better known for gay porn than any journalistic credentials, you could say a fake press conference is par for the course.

The staffers asked predictably lame questions, like “What kind of commodities are you shipping to California?”  Then there was the more ominious ‘obey Homeland Security/blame-the-victim’; “There are reports that people were not heeding evacuation orders.  Can you comment?” 

Parts of the ‘news conference’ were carried live on MSNBC, Fox and other outlets,  according to the Washington Post, which noted,

“FEMA press secretary Aaron Walker interrupted at one point to caution he’d allow just “two more questions.” Later, he called for a “last question.”

“Are you happy with FEMA’s response so far?” a (fake) reporter asked. Another asked about “lessons learned from Katrina.”

“I’m very happy with FEMA’s response so far,” Johnson said, hailing “a very smoothly, very efficiently performing team.”

Dana Perino, the White House Press Secretary, was compelled to go to call it “an error in judgement.”  Michael Chertoff, head of Home Security, which includes FEMA, said  “I think it was one of the dumbest and most inappropriate things I’ve seen since I’ve been in government.”

But is all the contrition only because they were caught by one of those vanishing ‘real journalists’?

Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson, the agency’s deputy director.

I’m hearing a little about the Fox Business Channel, but not very much.  A large part of that is because of the traditional reluctance of the broadcast media to comment on anything that occurs on another network/channel, while feverishly promoting its own entries.  (Why is it “news” on the KABC 11PM news what happens on Dancing with the Stars? One guess which network it’s on.)

The mainstream media criticism of Fox Business is predictable.

“At a time when the bull market seems to be breaking down, when investment banks are beginning to cope with the aftermath of a credit orgy, at a time in which income inequality has surged to levels not seen since the 1920s, and when even rich people are abandoning the Republican Party—you have to wonder whether this is the most auspicious time to launch a new TV network that combines GOP talking points and simplistic market updates.”

Or this:

Fox News’s bread and butter is the culture war, and it’s forever inventing new campaigns to boil viewers’ blood in the dead space between celebrity scandals. But how do you translate that to business? Where’s the us-versus-them? The obvious answer would be to embrace O’Reilly-style ostentatious populism: the forgotten little guy against the sinister corporate interests.

But that’s not the biggest problem.  The true test of a business channel is whether you can watch it for 20 minutes straight, which I reluctantly admit I can do with CNBC.  (And not because of my secret love for the ‘money honeys’.) 

Can Fox Business meet that test?  I don’t know–because when I tuned it in, Time Warner’s (yes, a competitor) channel 223 said “Fox Business is not available; call your cable operator.”  

Did you know President Bush spoke to a key economic summit at the Australian Opera House in Sydney yesterday?  Did you know he launched a few of his ?

: “He’d only reached the third sentence of Friday’s speech to business leaders, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, when he committed his first gaffe.

“Thank you for being such a fine host for the OPEC summit,” Bush said to Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

Oops. That would be APEC, the annual meeting of leaders from 21 Pacific Rim nations, not OPEC, the cartel of 12 major oil producers.

Bush quickly corrected himself. “APEC summit,” he said forcefully, joking that Howard had invited him to the OPEC summit next year (for the record, an impossibility, since neither Australia nor the U.S. are OPEC members).

The president’s next goof went uncorrected — by him anyway. Talking about Howard’s visit to Iraq last year to thank his country’s soldiers serving there, Bush called them “Austrian troops.”

You wouldn’t have learned this from CNN.COM, FOXNEWS.COM, or MSNBC.COM,  who are mostly concerned with the mother of a British 3-year old questioned in the girl’s disappearance,  an upcoming ’happy anniversary of September 11′ message from a newly-dyed (and undead) Osama Bin Ladin (hat tip to Andrew Sullivan), and nude pictures of someone named Vanessa Hudgins from High School Musical appearing on the Web.  (To their credit, ABCNEWS did run something on Bush’s confrontation with a Korean leader.)

Bush fatigue is palpable–but our media is doing a pathetic job of covering the President of the United States.

The editorial staff of the Wall Street Journal, plus sundry other journalists, are running around like chickens with their heads cut off.  Their fear?  That Rupert Murdoch, publisher and destroyer of worlds, will take over the Journal with his stained hands.

 They bleat he’ll dumb it down and change its editorial mission.  Which is what–to make the world safe for capitalism?  Then the Journal should be applauding Murdoch’s $60 a share offer.

Murdoch has a history, they say, of using his media empire to advance his own causes and line his pocket.

No shit, Sherlock!  What does a publisher do?  Yellow journalism was Joseph Pulitzer, who got a prize named after him, and William Randolph Hearst, who got an empire, battling in a gutter war for circulation–and to see who could get the U.S. into the Spanish American war first.

Murdoch focuses his chirpy Fox News, smarmy New York Post and the rest on sensationalism and celebrities.  He likes to sell papers and make money. 

As they say, the new Golden Rule is the one who has the gold, makes the rules.  The Wall Street Journal may not like it–but hey, that’s capitalism.

So give me–and Rupert–a break.

Bloggers often criticize the MSM, or mainstream media, for what gets covered and how.  Certainly there’s a lot to critize–but not necessarily along the political barricades bloggers typically man.

For example, FoxNews is often criticized as the Orwellian opposite to its “fair and balanced” slogan, generally promoting the Republican/conservative line. 

But what’s more interesting in terms of the news that doesn’t get covered by Fox (and other Fox-owned news outlets like SkyTV and the NY Post) are issues of democracy, religious liberty, human rights, forced sterilization under the one-child policy and anything else touchy on China. 

As the world’s largest Communist country, China, like North Korea and Venezuela, would be a natural target of Fox commentators, but according to reporters at the equally conserative Wall Street Journal, “News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch has a well-documented history of making editorial decisions in order to advance his business interests in China and, indeed, of sacrificing journalistic integrity to satisfy personal or political aims.” Fox has been conducting a China news blackout for years.

On the other side of the political divide, the Los Angeles Times is typically seen as a liberal publication.  Yet respected reporter Nancy Cleeland is leaving the publication in frustration at the Times’ lack of labor coverage.  Money quote:

“The Los Angeles region is defined by gaping income disparities and an enormous pool of low-wage immigrant workers, many of whom are pulled north by lousy, unstable jobs.  It’s also home to one of the most active and creative labor federations in the country.  But you wouldn’t know any of that from reading a typical issue of the L.A. Times, in print or online.  Increasingly anti-union in its editorial policy, and celebrity — and crime-focused in its news coverage, it ignores the economic discontent that is clearly reflected in ethnic publications such as La Opinion.”

Of course, she’s leaving with 55 other editorial staffers, a cutback  in the face of structural change and dire revenue loss . But things haven’t changed much in the 30 years since my father, a teacher’s union chapter chairman, told me that you’ll never see fair labor coverage in a newspaper because they’re employers themselves.

Whether a media outlet is left or right-leaning, commercial considerations always always influence editorial direction.