CNN’s Jake Tapper has managed to get his hands on the critical White House email suggested as the proof that the White House was more interested in removing references to possible terrorist attacks in the now infamous Benghazi talking points then they were in telling the truth to the American public.
The actual email, written in the days following the Benghazi attack, reveals something else entirely. We now know that whoever leaked the contents of the email to various media outlets last week seriously misquoted the document, choosing to paraphrase the content in a way that made it appear that the White House was focused on protecting the State Department’s back and covering up information.
And the plot thickens…
This is not a ritual for me where you just come on camera and say you’re sorry and hope to move on. I’m truly sorry about what happened. I believe deeply in good journalism and fair journalism and I am determined to learn from this episode and minimize the chances of anything like this happening again.CNN “Reliable Sources” host Howard Kurtz • Apologizing, at extreme length, for his erroneous reporting about the Jason Collins story as well as his sloppy overall reporting in recent years. Kurtz, who left his job at The Daily Beast last week, said that his departure from the publication was amicable and mutual, and already in the works before the Collins situation broke. Kurtz, who also faced conflict-of-interest questions over his ties to a small-scale site called The Daily Download, spent a full fifteen minutes atoning for his journalistic sins this morning, according to Politico.
I admire their commitment to cover all sides of the story just in case one of them happens to be accurate.
That’s what Obama said about CNN at last night’s White House Correspondents Association dinner.
Let me explain why that is such a great line. CNN sees itself as “in the middle” between left and right, MSNBC and Fox. Just recently, in fact, CNN president Jeff Zucker praised the middle as the place to be. But CNN also sees itself as a great newsgathering organization that is all about truthtelling rather than ideology. “Keeping them honest,” as Anderson Cooper, face of the brand, likes to say.
Put them together and what do you have? Keep ‘em honest, but stay in the middle. Which doesn’t work. For what happens when one side is BS-ing us more than the other? What happens when independent and honest reporting shows that these people on this side are mostly right in what they’re saying, and those people on that side are distorting the case?
CNN wants to believe, tries to believe and I think does believe that this problem does not exist. Therefore we have to remind them about it, because it does exist. And that’s what Obama did: “cover all sides of the story just in case one of them happens to be accurate” is saying to CNN: Accuracy and truthtelling will be sacrificed to your ideology— the middle, no matter what it takes.
(via jayrosen)
The sad part is, they had all these problems before they hired Jeff Zucker. And then they hired Jeff Zucker, a man whose entire recent career has been built on tone-deaf failures to understand his network’s audience, whatever that network might have been.
Anderson Cooper, “Today” show host? Nope, he shot the offer down.
Total minutes devoted to yesterday’s Prop 8 coverage on cable news.
Simple, effective, shareable.
I covered the Clinton administration for seven years. I don’t remember ever seen details of how much it costs to spend a night or two in Paris or London or any other place for that matter.CNN anchor Wolf Blizter • Discussing his surprise at a recent report detailing the costs of Vice President Joe Biden’s recent trip to Europe. The price tag was hefty — in Paris, for example, he spent nearly $500,000 on a single-night hotel stay. According to the State Department, the costs are actually normal, largely because, for security reasons, the administration often has to book out full hotels for the vice president to stay in. While the costs struck Bush Administration officials as high, they said they understood why they might fly so sky-high. source
James Carville and Mary Matalin are leaving CNN. (So is Erick Erickson, who is likely moving to Fox News.) Here’s a photo of the ideologically-opposed couple in an era where a “Mad About You”-style NBC sitcom was probably an option for them.
The Daily Show investigates investigative reporters
Holy shit. This is the most biting and scathing thing I’ve seen in some time. Wow. Everyone in a journalism school needs to see this. The news industry is awful. This is depressing. Watch this.
Spot-on satire. Too spot-on, unfortunately.
Watch: PCB gets a visual shout out on GMA’s Yahoo/Tumblr...
Wrote a thing.
Hat tip to this headline writer.
Congrats Tumblr!
Don’t screw this up Yahoo.
In 2007, I was...
I started tumblr when I was at one of the lowest points of...
Looks like Piers Morgan found found a voice louder than his: Morgan had Alex Jones on his show because Jones was one of the loonies behind that petition to get Piers deported for using his First Amendment rights to criticize the Second Amendment. (The White House responded last night, by the way.) Say what you will about Alex Jones, but I would watch this every single night, CNN, just because it’s so craaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazy. How crazy? Well, at the airport, he wouldn’t take his shoes off.
![Congratulations are in order for one Mr. Jake Tapper, former senior White House Correspondent for ABC News, who was just hired as the newest anchor and Chief Washington Correspondent for CNN. There’s no mention of the show that Tapper will presumably helm, but CNN did say the network “[looks] forward to developing a program that takes advantage of all of his strengths, his passion and his knowledge of national issues and events.” (Photo via ABC News) source](http://25.media.tumblr.com/ec18aff423ee44304d67e64cc0e89099/tumblr_mfcnubRKuV1qas8z9o1_500.jpg)
Congratulations are in order for one Mr. Jake Tapper, former senior White House Correspondent for ABC News, who was just hired as the newest anchor and Chief Washington Correspondent for CNN. There’s no mention of the show that Tapper will presumably helm, but CNN did say the network “[looks] forward to developing a program that takes advantage of all of his strengths, his passion and his knowledge of national issues and events.” (Photo via ABC News) source
CNN is proud of being nonpartisan, and makes a point that it doesn’t take sides like Fox or MSNBC. Problem is, you can’t define a strong network just by what it isn’t. And too often that’s been CNN’s approach: it still has great reach and strong reporting when it matters. But day to day it seems too driven by being the network that doesn’t bother anyone. There’s too much smileyness in its daytime programming, too much reflexive blandness on shows like Wolf Blitzer’s The Situation Room. CNN’s nonverbal message, too often, is “please don’t get mad at us.CNN Picks a New Boss: Will It Be Saved, or Has it Been Zuckered? | TIME.com (via markcoatney)
Throughout a four-month search process for the person to succeed Jim Walton, the departing president, attention has centered on Jeffrey Zucker, the former chief executive of NBCUniversal, who was replaced when Comcast took over the company last year. Mr. Zucker currently produces Katie Couric’s daytime talk show.
Several news executives close to Mr. Zucker said this week that they believed he had been chosen to run CNN and expected the appointment to be announced soon. People close to the Time Warner chief executive, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, also identified Mr. Zucker. A Time Warner spokesman declined to comment.
Did they run out of names in the phone book? Or is this a comedy hiring? The only network that did worse than NBC in the period that Jeff Zucker was in charge was … uh, CNN. So maybe they deserve one another.
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kindofagiant:
Sure, let’s try a substantive critique. The woman on the left is talking to Nancy Grace, a major CNN Networks personality who once berated a woman on television just a few days before that woman committed suicide, then was forced to settle for $200,000 in a wrongful death suit. When asked if she felt sorry for what happened, she said of Melinda Duckett in the immediate wake of the news, “If anything, I would suggest that guilt made her commit suicide.” Despite this, Nancy Grace is still on the air seven years later, talking in the same parking lot as Ashleigh Banfield. If you had a job where you did that and had to settle over it, would you still be working there? Probably not. But Nancy Grace is still at HLN.
The problem with CNN is that they have lowered their standards significantly, thinking that a broad but unbiased approach will bring the ratings. (It hasn’t.) Moments like Howard Kurtz’s 15-minute mea culpa are so rare on the network these days that you have to cherish them as signs that a network that’s lost its way might find it again. It’s like they realized recently, hey, Twitter is faster than we are, and so maybe this breaking news thing isn’t quite as fun anymore. Let’s do another “lighter side of life” segment.
They don’t have a rudder anymore. For the first twenty years of their existence, they had a pretty good one: Covering news, being the first news outlet to report on a story, keeping the level of the conversation high. But sometime between 9/11 and now, something changed. They got sloppy. They blew two major stories within a year—first healthcare, then the Boston marathon suspect. For some reason, Fox News scared them a lot. And instead of deciding their mission was hard-hitting journalism, they decided they were more comfortable with “background visuals for airport terminals.” Their rudder could be BBC, American version. But instead it’s, The Weather Channel, but for news.
You may think that this is a stupid thing to make fun of, funny ha ha, oh they’re on split screens like this. But really, the reason this is coming up is because CNN has become so much about the spectacle—holograms, giant touch screens, never-ending cruise line sagas—that you can’t take them seriously, and moments like this bus moving by two anchors at the same time overshadow the news actually happening.
I snarked that this was “CNN’s problems, in animated GIF form,” and I stand by it. They were already seen as lightweight, but then they hired the fluffmeister himself. They’re so concerned with looking like a serious news outlet that they’d rather look the part by having split screens than actually focus on the kind of in-depth stuff that Al Jazeera English actually does. Do you think AJE’s producers are like “we must get our reporter on a split screen to make it look like we’re on the scene”? No. They’re at the big kids’ table, reporting the news.
That’s why this GIF represents CNN’s problems. Because while they were busy putting Nancy Grace on a split screen, they could have gotten someone other than Nancy Grace to talk about this story.