Jon Stewart was on 60 minutes tonight... Hopefully this will hit the web. CBS will sell a tape for $30, but not until November... He also appeared recently on cspan... This seems to be a clearing house for information:

http://www.jonstewart.net/news.html

[ I TiVo'd it, but didn't watch... I'll update when I do, as I anticipate it'll be good. -k]

CBS News | Jon Stewart Roasts Real News

STEWART: You know, the interesting thing I have is, you have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably.

CARLSON: You need to get a job at a journalism school, I think.

STEWART: You need to go to one. The thing that I want to say is, when you have people on for just knee-jerk, reactionary talk...

CARLSON: Wait. I thought you were going to be funny. Come on. Be funny.

STEWART: No. No. I'm not going to be your monkey.

(LAUGHTER)

BEGALA: Go ahead. Go ahead.

STEWART: I watch your show every day. And it kills me.

CARLSON: I can tell you love it.

STEWART: It's so -- oh, it's so painful to watch.

(LAUGHTER)

STEWART: You know, because we need what you do. This is such a great opportunity you have here to actually get politicians off of their marketing and strategy.

CARLSON: Is this really Jon Stewart? What is this, anyway?

[ This is absolutely fucking must-see. Stewart completely flays Begala and Carlson. Jon is one of our finest public figures. -k]

IFILM: John Stewart vs. CNN Crossfire

] Unless we have a climate that will allow more independent
] media companies to survive, a dangerously high percentage
] of what we see--and what we don't see--will be shaped by
] the profit motives and political interests of large,
] publicly traded conglomerates. The economy will suffer,
] and so will the quality of our public life. Let me be
] clear: As a business proposition, consolidation makes
] sense. The moguls behind the mergers are acting in their
] corporate interests and playing by the rules. We just
] shouldn't have those rules. They make sense for a
] corporation. But for a society, it's like over-fishing
] the oceans. When the independent businesses are gone,
] where will the new ideas come from? We have to do more
] than keep media giants from growing larger; they're
] already too big. We need a new set of rules that will
] break these huge companies to pieces.

[ This is a really good read from Mr. Turner, a figure worthy of some resepect, if not admiration. I think it will fall on many sympathetic ears around here. Blogs can't democratize the information landscape all by themselves, though i'm convinced they play a part. Big Media remains a truly enormous hurdle. -k]

'My Beef With Big Media' by Ted Turner

The better question is, Who will emerge from the sandbox ready to fight lies, not with polar opposite lies, but with the hard work of sound, moral and well-reasoned arguments -- in a word: truth?

Michael Moore and the Media's Job

Give the people tools to make the news, We the Media asserts, and they will. The book casts light on the future of journalism and invites us all to be part of it.

We the Media

The heart of his argument is that Americans fundamentally misunderstand what is unusual about their communications media, and why.

[ Interesting looking book... -k]

The Creation of the Media (Review)

It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news; on the contrary, it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.

[ That's very very cool... this stuff is getting so damn interesting! -k]

newsmap

] I sniped at the NYT's Adam Nagourney last night, but this
] very day he achieves a significant breakthrough,
] pioneering a solution to a problem that has plagued
] American journalism for decades. The dilemma is this:
] What do you do when you have a strong opinion about your
] subject? You can't just say what you think--not within
] the strictures of "objective" reporting, anyway.
]
]
] The traditional response to find someone--an "expert"--to
] spout what you think back to you. Then you can quote this
] expert, citing their expert credentials (while ignoring
] other experts you disagree with).

[ This struck me today, particularly in the context of everyone's new obsession with poliblogs. I think I've said before that one of the main draws that blogs have is that they are subjective -- completely, unabashedly, and by design.

The people who run them and post on them have obvious agendas and far from undermining their utility, it makes it easier to sort through the nonsense. It undermines the notion of absolute "expertise" which, as the above indicates, can be, and is, manipulated by the reporters of "trusted" news sources.

An article on Memestreams a few months back talked about how the lack of implicit credibility or authority on the web will increasingly force people to view almost everything through a lens of skepticism, forcing them to look for corroboration or refutation, on their own.

I could probably say a fair bit about the self-reinforcing that goes on throughout the blogs... there are lots of circular references and cross-citations among blogs of similar bent. But the balance still favors them in my opinion. All in all, I think people will continue to move towards news sources which don't publicly deny their opinions under a pre-supposed veil of objectivity while conveying their very real, and quite legitimate, attitudes through indirect means. If you can't be objective, then just be honest. -k]

Don't Editorialize. Clymerize! - Nagourney's breakthrough. By Mickey Kaus

] A few months before I went to the Congo, I'd had a
] discussion here on Slate with Luc Sante, during which I
] argued that American news venues had not just the right
] but the duty to publish photographs of atrocities. At the
] time I had, of course, seen those sorts of pictures, but
] I'd never taken them. Now that I have, I'm not so sure.
] It's not that the public deserves to be spared such
] things, because they don't. It's just that I no longer
] think that what happens when horrifying pictures are
] published has anything to do with journalism.

[ italics mine

This is a fantastic article from Slate, which I encourage everyone to read. It treats a meme that's been floating around at various levels of conciousness for a while now, but which has new currency in the context of the Falujah desecrations and the probable increase of violence in the Iraqi resistance. This meme has also shared DNA with the controversy about The Passion and the graphic nature of the film... where is the line between intense storytelling and pornography? This is a definite keeper. -k]

Front Page Horror - Should newspapers show us violent images from Iraq? By Jim Lewis

] Journalists have long understood confidentiality to exist
] solely between a source and a reporter. If someone speaks
] "on background," the only ethical way in which a reporter
] can divulge the person's name would be if the source
] changed his mind and decided to go on the record.
]
]
] Yesterday, however, the Bush administration gave Fox News
] Channel permission to broadcast remarks from a background
] briefing by former Bush counterterrorism adviser Richard
] Clarke that were originally made on the condition Clarke
] not be identified.
] ...
] Journalists should be reluctant to go off the record. But
] once they do so, the agreement between reporter and
] source must hold. Thus Fox News's choice to broadcast the
] remarks represents an odious concession of journalistic
] authority. By violating Clarke's confidentiality, Fox
] News allowed the administration to effectively recast the
] confidentiality arrangement to be one that exists not
] between source and reporter but between the source's
] employer and the reporter's news organization.

[ As the article goes on to point out, the white house officials who leaked Valerie Plame to Novak did so under the same condition as Clarke. So, what's stopping the White House, in it's thourough investigation of the Plame Affair, from using these same tactics?

I'd say that it's Novak's ethically strong refusal to give up the names, but honestly his journalistic integrity is pretty suspect. I don't believe a person of integrity can say "It's totally ok to out a covert operative based on anonymous information." So there must be another reason he won't release those names... hmmm...

File this one under: "SPINELESS-MEDIA-CONCESSIONS-TO-THE-WHITE-HOUSE." and cross list under "SHHH-WE'RE-NOT-HYPOCRITES,-SERIOUSLY.-W."

Awful, bad precedent. Bad, bad FoxNews. FauxNews. -k]

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