In which Mediaite’s taken down by a hurricane and mocked for it. But where will we go for our snarky comments about random cable news clips? :/
EDIT: OH GOD NO BUZZFEED IS DOWN TOO. AND GAWKER. AND HUFFPO.
Fareed Zakaria and Bruno Mars look a lot alike, according to Mediaite’s list of cable news doppelgangers. Among the major differences we see: One can write an article about the dangers of using grenades in war zones, and the other would catch a grenade for ya.
The truth of the matter is, I was blackballed within the industry, that people… hiring managers see Fox News on your resumé and say, ‘This guy’s a conservative. This guy’s a nut. We don’t want him in our organization.’ I was completely blackballed within the cable news industry.“Fox News Mole” Joe Muto • Discussing, with CNN’s Howard Kurtz, part of the reason why he publicly decided to take $5,000 from Gawker to spill the beans on his former employer. Mediaite takes exception to this comment, noting a few examples of Fox News workers jumping ship. That said, Muto had some fair points: For example, Kurtz seemed unaware of the heavy criticism Fox News’ sister site, Fox Nation, has gotten, offering pushback to Muto’s criticisms and giving the impression Kurtz has never visited the site. But Muto wasn’t fully negative about his experience, saying he worked with some great people. Anyway, we highly recommend you watch the interview — though Muto is clearly rough around the edges, it’s fascinating.
freedomreigns asks: Have you been able to find the original Mediaite article anywhere? I'd love to read it. I've been looking, and I can't find a cached version or anything of the sort.
» SFB says: Google didn’t have a cached version, but Bing did. Here you go. Glad we were able to find it. — Ernie @ SFB
In which Mediaite publishes an article around an out-of-context tweet by journalist and commentator Toure (in which he’s not defending Chris Brown but criticizing the pop star’s defenders, in the span of numerous other tweets), gets called out by John Legend, and is forced to apologize. Sounds like someone had a busy morning. Lesson: If you’re going to shape a story around a tweet, be sure to at least do your homework when posting it. (Edit: Here’s the cached story, which shows how out of context the tweet is.)
Apparently Mediaite’s best-known writer, Tommy Christopher, doesn’t use his real name when reporting. At least that’s what The Daily Caller says. Meanwhile, Fishbowl DC smells chum in the water and jumps in. Tommy defends himself to Ed Morrissey, because clearly this was a big enough deal that someone had to interview him about it. Meanwhile, nobody cares. Isn’t there an election happening? Aren’t there better, headier things to deal with? This is not within shouting distance of Stephen Glass or Jayson Blair on a slow news day when the mainstream media is reading Google News while wearing beer goggles. Instead of all this infighting between mid-range media sites with offices, let’s all agree to focus on the real issue here: Why Michelle Obama is eating a taco.
From a Mediaite article:
One of the biggest legislative battles heading into next year is undeniably going to be the Stop Online Piracy Act, a bill backed by Hollywood that takes a rather strong stance on policing the internet for copyrighted material. Hundreds of companies from 3M to American Apparel are throwing their support behind the bill, including the domain registration service GoDaddy.com. GoDaddy initially published an op-ed heartily supporting the anti-pirating legislation after it was first announced. The site evenissued a statement to the House committee taking up the legislation to proudly show its support.
Now, let’s step back a second here. Why would American Apparel support SOPA? Their customers are likely way more tech-savvy than the average clothing company’s, and they’d have a lot to lose. But … wait a second, let’s take a look at the list of companies that support SOPA that’s been floating around the internet:
… Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers
Alliance of Visual Artists (AVA)
Altria Client Services
American Apparel and Footwear Association
American Association of Independent Music (A2IM)
American Board of Internal Medicine
American Federation of Musicians …
Now, here’s the Web site for the American Apparel and Footwear Association, better known as the AAFA. A quick search shows that American Apparel is in fact a member of this organization … along with thousands of other companies. (If the Chamber of Commerce is of any guide, not every member of an industry group supports what the industry group does.) But either way it’s not by any means as direct as the citation would make it seem. American Apparel has made no direct statement for or against SOPA. To put it simply, be careful with allegations, all.
seldo says: It is one of the weirdest things about America that “communist” is automatically considered an insult rather than a description of a political position. Communism != evil.
» SFB says: No disagreement here; the problem is that the word was clearly meant to evoke bias from the reader due to the way it was used. — Ernie @ SFB
What the heck, Mediaite? Why do you just let your writer just drop an ad-hominem attack on the subject of an article, unchecked? It’s one thing to disagree with Michael Moore; plenty of people do this already. Frances Martel took it a step further by calling Michael Moore a communist in the VERY FIRST SENTENCE of a story, then drawing reference to it at the very end of said story. Uncalled-for.
As notable as that is, the fact of the matter is, that was still him in the photos and chatlogs. However, the evidence proves that the sources involved in this Mediaite story lied and provided fake identification. Here’s Mediaite’s take on the information. This “girl,” a fan of the long-canceled teen drama “The O.C.,” was also in touch with Gennette Cordova (who received the rogue tweet) and Ginger Lee (the former porn star who said she lied for Weiner), long before the story broke. What does all this mean? Basically, these fake lesbians might have a new friend.
In 2007, I was...
I started tumblr when I was at one of the lowest points of...
Exclusive: How the Syrian Electronic Army hacked the...
soon
Yahumblr.
Google found the...
We love Mediaite (they did a great interview with us a while back), but man oh man do we agree with Gawker. No single news source has owned Weinergate like Mediaite. Maybe now’s the time to take a breather? Possibly?
So, a guy who has been building exactly this narrative for months turns out to be the one and only unique retweet of the picture in question? Just as Rep. Weiner’s cryptic hashtag about the Seattle time zone is reason to raise reasonable flag of suspicion, so too is this.Mediaite’s Colby Hall • Who noticed the same trend we did with the Rep. Anthony Weiner saga yesterday — that the guy who retweeted the Weiner thing (which took place nearly half an hour before the BigGovernment post first went up) appeared to be going out of his way to build up a narrative that suggested a saga like the one that actually happened weeks before it actually did. The person who was targeted by the rogue tweet wrote an exclusive statement for the New York Daily News where she noted the same thing — that this specific Twitter user harassed her. We think that this evidence suggests strongly that Weiner’s Twitter account was hacked, rather than Weiner sending the rogue tweet himself. The user’s tweets are suddenly protected, but not before a number of people noticed the trend.
(Source: mediaite.com)
Some nice attention for everyone’s favorite short form news reader: Check out Jaclyn Schiff’s interview with Ernie Smith, editor of the Short Form Blog on Tumblr. Nice shout out to SFB writers Seth and Chris on Page 2 (and a couple of other shoutouts for Pantsless Progressive, Kateoplis, Newsflick, Soupsoup and a couple of other great news and political Tumblrs).
This is great.
This was a great interview. Unfortunately for me, it came out just as I was leaving for Ireland, so I couldn’t really point it out as much as I wanted to. Jaclyn Schiff did a great job on it, and I just love ranting on and on about myself so it was a good match.
(Source: matthewkeys)
Thanks to Jaclyn Schiff for the interview.
Copyright 2009-2013 Ernie Smith • Ask us stuff! • E-mail us • Follow us on Twitter • Follow us on Facebook
