It's Hard To Get The News From The News
larrycheng.com
larrycheng.com
They all seem about the same to me: It was a friendly crowd. At one point the President specifically sought tough questions. What's the beef?
What is it about the Huff Post that makes it seem the "most accurate" portrayal? Especially since neither of us were there.
If I were writing a story, I definitely would have included that people chanted "Yes we can!". Sure, it's a bit anecdotal and may not be representative of everyone or the rest of the event, but it's such a stark contrast to recent Congressional town halls and such a vivid image. That's what struck me watching it on TV.
The NYT's description sounds like a good, thoughtful debate, the Fox News description sounds like a staged PR event. The others fall somewhere in between.
It's about the image you draw in your head of the meeting while reading each passage, and while they report basically the same facts, each article emphasizes said facts differently, creating quite different pictures of how the meeting went down.
They're not all the same, but they're all basically true.
If you were to assign five writers to cover a totally non-political event, you are still going to get five different characterizations of people at the event. I don't think this is evidence of anything evil.
It's a bit like complaining about different movie reviewers with conflicting accounts of the same movie.
I'm not denying that news outlets have institutional biases that sometimes comes out in the writing, but this seems like an especially mild case.
1, the event doesn't even seem like it should be newsworthy. isn't there more important stuff happening?
2, even for the most unimportant of events, it seems the different outlets' bias shows. As usual, Fox portrays Obama in a negative light and the Times makes him seem heroic.
At least that's what i took away from it. I mean, it's nothing Earth-shattering and we all knew this already.
"I have been honored to work with Kathleen Manning Hall on the New England Finance and Steering Committee for Barack Obama for over a year. She has raised money, slogged through the snow in New Hampshire and has devoted every minute of her time toward electing Barack Obama President of the United States. She has not only talked the talk, but walked the walk. Please elect her as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention to vote for Barack Obama.” Rep. David Linsky (D-Natick)"
http://www.bluemassgroup.com/diary/11161/
David Axelrod was one of the world's great masters of corporate astroturfing before he joined Obama's campaign. Most of his work was for companies who wanted blogs to mention there products in a "spontaneous" groundswell of support.
AFAIK, he is the first president to demand that the media submit all of its questions to his press secretary the day before the press conferences so he can select only the ones he wants.
It's the same reason why SCOTUS nominations are so contentious now. Previously the Supremes had both less power relative to the other two branches and far, far less power to actually impact the lives of regular folks.
As was argued to me (though I'm not sure I agree it's the case with this healthcare bill but I digress), a healthcare system with more universal coverage might make it easier for some people to quit their jobs to create new businesses. Privacy concerns and government recordkeeping also seem to be of definite interest.
This particular submission deals with the difficulty in getting the facts through mainstream news networks while at the same time we also see a lot of popular submissions about the death of mainstream news (not sure if you define these as political)... there just might be a relationship there.
One touched its leg and said that it was a tree.
One touched its side and said that it was a wall.
One touched its trunk and said that is was a snake.
We need journalists with "vision" now more than ever.
An underpaid and overworked journalists is sent to report on this new "Elephant" animal that's been the discovered.
Being overworked and underpaid all the journalist can muster is a quick look at the back side of the animal over the shoulders of the crowd. Then the journalist quickly has to get back to writing his story, because he gets paid by the word and the deadline is looming.
Having glanced the elephant's back side, the reporter knows it's sort of like a giant gray pig. But he also knows that's not interesting enough and he thinks his readers are a lot stupider then him. So he writes the story about a giant gray man eating pig.
And that's Journalism!