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The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20110818175901/http://www.politico.com:80/blogs/onmedia/
Earlier this month, Washington Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli told an audience at the Asian American Journalists Association convention in Detroit that the paper wouldn’t be erecting a paywall anytime soon because “we are quite content being the largest free premium newspaper online.”
That was true, through June. But according to the latest comScore data, the Post actually lost the spot that it has occupied for the last year to the Los Angeles Times in July.
Here’s the top five newspaper websites in the country, in monthly unique visits for July, from comScore:
New York Times: 32,394
Los Angeles Times: 16,720
Washington Post:16,282
USA Today: 15,397
Wall Street Journal: 14,132
Nieman Journalism Lab took a look at what’s going on at the Los Angeles Times’s website, noting that it was one of the few to see gains in unique visits, year-on-year, in June (up 5.4 percent), compared to declines of 9 percent at the Washington Post, 18.8 percent at the New York Times, and 20.5 percent at the Wall Street Journal, according to Nielsen and comScore data. Nieman chalks up a lot of the growth to a “full embrace of blogging,” including its breaking Washington and political blog, Politics Now.
The New York Observer’s Daniel D’Addario caught up with Christine O’Donnell at the Women’s National Republican Club just after she bailed on her interview with Piers Morgan. She seemed “incredulous” that the walk-out was a news story, and explained it this way.
“We were late for this, and he wasn’t ending, and we were going, ‘Wrap up, wrap up!’ He was late and he wasn’t ending. He’s looking for ratings. He’s looking for ratings. He was being rude, and I said, ‘Piers, I gotta go!’ You know, I’m late already! He’s looking for ratings, and trying to stir up a controversy.”
“But it was fun!” said an aide.
“It was fun,” concurred Ms. O’Donnell.
Morgan, who has been tweeting furiously about the walk-out, responded to the ratings charge: “Well…yes…duh.”
Anderson Cooper tries, and fails, to make it through a script of pee puns during a “Ridiculist” segment on Gerard Depardieu’s getting thrown off a plane for allegedly urinating on the floor.
"Sorry, this has actually never happened to me," he said, wiping tears of helpless laughter from his eyes.
Christine O’Donnell walked out of an interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan Wednesday evening after he pressed the former Delaware Senate candidate on her views on gay marriage.
“You’re borderline being a bit rude,” O’Donnell said during the interview, which was released before Morgan’s 9 p.m. show aired. “I obviously want to talk about the issue that I choose to talk about in the book.”
O’Donnell was on the show to promote her new book, “Troublemaker," and the interview began amicably if uncomfortably after Morgan caught O'Donnell giving the Sign of the Cross as she sat down for the segment, to which Morgan joked that he expected some “devil worshiping" instead, a reference to O'Donnell's infamous "I am not a witch" advertisement that aired during her 2010 campaign. Still, the two discussed her thoughts on the missteps made during that campaign, as well as her views on the tea party and the debt ceiling, without issue.
But the back-and-forth began to sour when Morgan latched onto the topic of sex and asked if she still supported abstinence before marriage and whether she still believed masturbation constituted "lust in your heart." She then questioned if Morgan was the “pro-masturbation talk show host” and began referring questions to her book, and explaining her answers could be found in "Troublemaker."
That's when Morgan pressed O’Donnell on her position on gay marriage, and he seemed to have a difficult time keeping a straight face as she repeatedly deflected his questions on the issue.
Morgan asked O’Donnell about her position on gay marriage no fewer than seven times, though her deflections appeared only to invigorate him.
“Why are you being so weird about this?” he asked.
“I’m not being weird about this Piers. I’m not running for office, I’m not promoting a legislative agenda. I’m promoting the policies that I lay out in the book that are mostly fiscal that are mostly constitutional. That’s why I agreed to come on your show. That’s what I want to talk about. I’m not being weird you’re being a little rude,” said O’Donnell, who though smiling throughout the interview, also looked pained at times.
“I think I’m rather being charming and respectful,” Morgan rebutted.
O’Donnell said she should be able to dictate the topic of discussion, but Morgan disagreed. She then looked off camera and said, “yeah, OK, I’m being pulled away. We turned down another interview for this.”
“Where are you going? You’re leaving?” Morgan asked, almost breaking into laughter but holding himself to a single chuckle. “It would appear that the interview has just been ended. Because I had the audacity to ask questions based on stuff that’s in this book. Anyway, it’s a good book, it’s called ‘Troublemaker.’ I think we know now why it’s called ‘Troublemaker.’”
After he aired the full interview during "Piers Morgan Live," Morgan invited O'Donnell to his Thursday night broadcast to discuss why she walked off his show. Though he promised he "won’t be remotely rude" if she agrees to come back on his show, O'Donnell may not be having it. She sent out a message about 9 p.m. that alluded to his alleged connections with the U.K. phone hacking scandal, which he has denied forcefully.
"I only agreed to go on the Piers Morgan Show because he promised not to hack my cell phone," she tweeted.
Ben Smith's lead story on POLITICO this evening examines the sometimes rough relationship between GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann and the media members that cover her.
Of particular note is the hostile treatment that reporters say her staff has employed on the campaign trail:
In less than two months since entering the 2012 race, Bachmann’s campaign staff has become embroiled in at least five unusually hostile encounters with the traveling media marked by pushing, shoving and, in one instance, the allegation of a threat of violence to a reporter.
Some of it has unfolded in full public view: Bachmann aides’ tussles with the press have twice turned into news stories, once when veteran ABC News reporter Brian Ross was shoved and pushed by Bachmann staffers in South Carolina and on a second occasion when Bachmann’s husband and two staffers pushed CNN’s Don Lemon into a cart, producing a furious on-air complaint.
In another incident that did not make the air, a camera captured Fox News correspondent Steve Brown telling a bodyguard in Iowa, “Do not put your hands on me. Don’t ever do it again.”
The Lemon-Bachmann rift seemed to be a thing of the past, at least earlier today. Lemon told POLITICO's Smith that Bachmann's campaign manager Ed Rollins “acknowledged a problem" and "promised to correct. Apology accepted.” A CNN spokesperson told TVNewser the same: “Don and a member of Bachmann’s team have spoken, and all is fine.” But Alice Stewart, Bachmann's campaign spokesperson, told Smith that Rollins wasn't apologizing for the campaign's crowd control techniques.
“He wasn’t apologizing for what we did,” she said of Rollins. “He said, ‘I apologize if you were offended by it.’ He stands by 100 percent the actions of our security team.”
On the home page, POLITICO editor Marty Kady offers a rare behind-the-scenes look into the reporting behind the high-profile story about Vice President Joe Biden's remarks that compared the tea party to "terrorists."
That story was a popular one and resulted in 31,000 Facebook "likes" and more than 2,700 comments as well as denials from Biden and President Barack Obama, who on Monday backed Biden's assurances that the vice president never made that comparison.
The defense of POLITICO's reporting came after the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler concluded that he was "dubious that Biden actually said this" and that "secondhand reports about comments made in private — which are then denied by the speaker — should be ignored as unverified tittle-tattle unworthy of public discourse." As a rebuttal, Kady offered a blow-by-blow look at how the story developed and announced that POLITICO stands behind the story:
Like many stories, it started with a tip from a source who was inside the tense Aug. 1 Democratic meeting with Biden as the debt negotiations reached a critical point. This is how much of the reporting works on Capitol Hill — reporters stand outside closed conference rooms, emailing people inside those meetings while waiting to pigeonhole lawmakers as they leave. The best reporters have sources who reveal what goes on in these meetings, and we protect these sources.
After hearing from the first source, the two POLITICO reporters on the story, Jonathan Allen and John Bresnahan, quickly confirmed Biden’s words with three other sources who were in the same room. They also contacted a fifth source, who confirmed the basic reporting. The original tip came in about 1 p.m. on Aug. 1, and POLITICO spent the next few hours in contact with the vice president’s office, which was aware of what the story was going to say and had been given several hours to respond by the time the story posted at 4 p.m.
“We sought a response from the vice president’s office and after our interaction with Biden’s office we were confident our story was accurate,” Allen says.
The original story was also clear about the context of Biden’s remarks, noting that he was responding to someone else. According to our reporting, Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) said “we have negotiated with terrorists,” and the story quotes Biden agreeing, saying: “They have acted like terrorists.”
Albrect Muth, who was arrested on Tuesday in the murder of his 91-year-old wife, was unusually engaged with the media -- both during the lead-up to his being charged with second-degree murder and in previous claims to reporters and defense officials attesting that he is a general in the Iraqi military.
Muth, 47, was known to walk around in his neighborhood in military regalia, and he contacted staffers at the Washington Post, claiming that he had insider information on the Iraq War due to his status as a member of the country’s military, a claim the Iraqi embassy disputed forcefully.
“We are deeply troubled by Mr. Muth’s claim of his service in the Iraqi military. He is not currently and has never been a member of the Iraqi Army. He does not represent the Embassy, its attachés, the government of Iraq, or any government institution in any fashion. In the past, the Embassy was aware of the claims made by Mr. Muth and made it clear to all concerned that they were false and demanded that they must cease,” the embassy said in a statement.
In email exchanges with Post reporters Tuesday before his arrest in connection to the murder of Georgetown resident Viola Drath, Muth brushed off the embassy’s statement and maintained that he is indeed an Iraqi general. A journalist who had dealt with Muth told the Post that Muth “told a good fable” and an Iraq expert told the publication that he had cautioned those at the White House against believing Muth’s claims. Muth also emailed the Post an obituary shortly after his wife’s death that claimed Drath died from injuries sustained during a fall.
Kris Van Cleave, a reporter who works for WJLA -- a TV station under the same Allbritton ownership as POLITICO, caught up with Muth on Tuesday about 20 minutes before his arrest, as Muth walked seemingly aimlessly through Georgetown. Muth refused to be interviewed on camera, though he exchanged numerous emails with Van Cleave earlier Tuesday, denying his involvement in his wife’s death.
Van Cleave shared with POLITICO some of the emails that he exchanged Tuesday with Muth, who Van Cleave said was “lucid” in some of his response’s to the reporter’s inquiries about the death of his wife, but also cced and forwarded Van Cleave emails that were seemingly in the persona of the Iraqi general and were directed to mysterious email lists.
Staffers at ABC News had been contacted by Muth in the past on the subject of the Iraq war and provided Van Cleave with Muth’s email address. Van Cleave emailed Muth “on a whim” Monday, and described the resulting torrent of messages that followed on Tuesday as “highly unusual.”
His “emails were all over the place” and Muth’s messages gave him “low credibility,” said Van Cleave, who doubted Muth was attempting to “work” reporters because before his arrest he confirmed to Van Cleave that he was a suspect, writing "I am the first to look to, even though I do not benefit from her death in any form.”
“He lost me at the ‘I’m an Iraqi general’ part,” Van Cleave said of Muth, noting that Muth’s German upbringing made his claims of Iraqi military service appear even on the surface to be false.
A class-action suit against Bloomberg L.P. alleging the media company discriminated against women who took maternity leaves has been dismissed, the New York Times reports.
A judge in U.S. District Court in Manhattan ruled that the plaintiffs had failed to provide enough evidence to prove that the alleged discrimination was “standard operating procedure, even if there were several isolated instances of individual discrimination.”
Michael Bloomberg was not named in the suit, as the alleged discrimination happened after he left to run for mayor. But he was called to testify for it, in a performance that made some news for its thick sarcasm.
In one point in the testimony, which happened two years ago but was not made public until this past spring, Bloomberg mocked the idea of telecommuting, saying, “Could we continue this via phone conference so that I can be back in my office, or do you believe that is not acceptable?”
At another point, when asked whether he felt that working from home “made good business sense,” Bloomberg said it didn’t, adding, “I’m sure we made exceptions if somebody had a physical problem or there was a snowstorm and they couldn’t get to work or something like that.”
Bloomberg, of course, was roundly criticized by the residents of New York after the Times reported he had been in Bermuda during the snowstorm that crippled the city last winter.
Samer Allawi, the Kabul bureau chief for Al Jazeera’s Arabic channel, has been arrested by Israeli authorities and accused of being a member of Hamas, the AP reports.
He has denied the accusation through his lawyer.
Allawi, a Palestinian who carries a Jordanian passport, was in the West Bank vacationing with his family, his lawyer said. He was arrested at the West Bank border with Jordan last week as he tried to return to work, he said. His brother told the Committee to Protect Journalists he had crossed the same border three weeks earlier without incident.
At a military court Tuesday, prosecutors said they suspected Allawi belonged to Hamas. His lawyer said he was accused of transferring unspecified items from Afghanistan to the West Bank and having contact with Hamas militants, and that Israeli investigators tried to pressure Allawi to act as an informant, threatening that if he refused, he would be imprisoned.
The Committee to Protect Journalists put out a statement earlier this week calling on Israel to clarify the legal basis for holding Allawi.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry on Monday says he sees a “big black cloud that hangs over America” – a remark that MSNBC host Ed Schultz quickly interpreted as being about President Barack Obama, which in turn prompted charges of race-baiting and deceptive editing by conservative blogs.
On Tuesday, Schultz addressed the criticism created by his incomplete quoting of Perry’s remarks in Iowa and said he regrets the error, but maintained that other controversial remarks this week by Perry reveal his true nature.
“We did not present the full context of those statements and we should have,” Schultz said, then replaying the full Perry quote that made it clear the “big black cloud” Perry was referring to is the U.S. debt, and not Obama, as Schultz maintained Monday. “No doubt about it, it was a mistake and we regret the error … we should not have included it in our coverage.”
At the top of his show Schultz also aired the Perry criticisms of Karl Rove, who said Perry’s remarks about Ben Bernanke were not presidential, as well as remarks by Perry that suggested Obama was not patriotic. Those quotes, Schultz said, show “who he is and what he stands for.”
On Monday Perry, campaigning in Iowa, spoke about the debt hanging over the United States and how he would confront it.
“I am a pro-business governor. I don’t make any apologies about it and I will be a pro-business president. Getting America back to work is the most important issue facing this country. Being able to pay off 14-and-a-half, or 16 trillion dollars worth of debt. That big black cloud that hangs over America, that debt that is so monstrous. There’s only one way to get rid of it that’s practical, that makes sense. And that is to free up America,” Perry said.
On Monday's “The Ed Show,” Schultz played the first portion of Perry’s remarks about the debt but cut after “that big black cloud that hangs over America.” He then concluded “that big black cloud Perry is talking about is President Barack Obama.” Earlier in the segment, Schultz said, “Perry comes from the radical country club that loves to remind white America that President Obama is other: not like you.”
BreitbartTV, no stranger to selective editing charges, seized on Schultz’s segment immediately and posted the whole video clip (which Mediaite also picked up) against what ran on Schultz’s show and concluded that MSNBC used a “deceptive edit to portray Gov. Rick Perry as racist.”
Red State blogger Caleb Howe called the incident “one of the most blatant, race-baiting moments in recent memory” and also accused ABC News of using an incomplete quote, though ABC has since updated in its story to frame Perry’s remarks as being about the national debt.
Fox Business placed advertisements to run on CNBC channels carried by Time Warner Cable, disparaging CNBC and claiming the network had “gone fishin’” during the aftermath of Standard & Poor’s downgrade of the U.S. credit rating on Aug. 5.
“In an unpredictable market, Fox Business Network was there, moving faster, working harder. Where was CNBC? (Crickets) During a historic debt downgrade, Fox Business was on air, getting the facts first. CNBC? (More crickets) When economic turmoil struck, only one network was there. The competition? Gone fishin’,” reads a voiceover during the commercial.
The ad was bought by Fox Business in Time Warner’s local ad slots on CNBC to run for a week, according to the New York Daily News, but were pulled on Monday by Time Warner, which said it wasn't asked to pull the ads but did so because of "inappropriate content."
Twice in recent weeks CNBC stuck with previously scheduled programming -- when President Obama announced a historic deal to raise the debt ceiling and when S&P announced the credit downgrade -- while Bloomberg and Fox Business went to live coverage. Fox Business ran a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal on July 31 emphasizing its debt ceiling coverage and disparaging CNBC’s decision to stay with a program called “How I Made Millions.”
Though all three business networks have benefitted ratings-wise from the recent financial turmoil, CNBC has shown the largest rating gains, the New York Times reported Sunday.
A CNBC representative was not immediately available for comment, but spokesman Brian Steel told AP last week after the credit downgrade that "CNBC is always working on-air and online and that's why hours before S&P made their official announcement, CNBC had already broken and analyzed the downgrade news.”
The Media Research Center has a revelatory study out this morning on the vast discrepancy between the way the news networks use the “conservative” and “liberal” labels for candidates.
In the first half of this year, NBC, ABC and CBS morning and evening news shows put attached the term “conservative” to a presidential contender 62 times, while during the same period in the presidential race in 2007, “liberal” came up only three times.
Former News of the World royals reporter Clive Goodman -- aka the “rogue reporter” -- wrote a letter four years ago alleging that phone hacking was “widely discussed” at editorial meetings and that the company offered to let him keep his job if he kept quiet about it.
The letter was part of a trove of often jaw-dropping phone-hacking documents released by a British parliamentary committee this morning, as my colleague Reid Epstein reports.
Goodman’s letter, as well as documents by the law firm Harbottle & Lewis, cast serious doubts on the testimony that Rupert and James Murdoch gave before the committee last month, and mean it is likely that James, in particular, will be invited back. The Guardian reports that they may be joined by Les Hinton, the CEO of News International at the time of the hacking who stepped down as publisher of Dow Jones last month amid the scandal. In his farewell statement, Hinton maintained his ignorance of the extent of the phone hacking, but The Guardian explains why this position may be hard to defend:
Goodman's claims also raise serious questions about Rupert Murdoch's close friend and adviser, Les Hinton, who was sent a copy of the letter but failed to pass it to police and who then led a cast of senior Murdoch personnel in telling parliament that they believed [then-News of the World Editor] Coulson knew nothing about the interception of the voice mail of public figures and that Goodman was the only journalist involved.
On the homepage, my colleague Keach Hagey writes about the developing perception of media neglect toward Ron Paul after his strong second-place showing in the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa failed to translate into increased coverage of the candidate:
With the exception of The New York Times and the Des Moines Register, most major newspaper headlines didn’t even mention his name in their reports of Saturday’s contest. Nor was he anywhere to be found on the Sunday morning talk shows. By Monday’s second-day stories, Paul had disappeared from the prevailing narrative of the Republican primary race altogether, as consensus coalesced around the dynamics between Bachmann, newcomer Rick Perry and front-runner Mitt Romney.
“We are certainly disappointed, and we think that people are missing a very big story here,” said Jesse Benton, Paul’s campaign manager. “You look at ’07, and Mike Huckabee was able to turn what was a very weak second place — Mitt Romney had 4,516 votes and Huckabee had 2,587 — into a huge national story.”
The Texas congressman’s campaign and supporters blame the curious lack of coverage on the mainstream media’s bias. Though some charge this bias is of the typical liberal variety, most complain it is more of a bias against anyone the media considers an “unelectable” candidate.
Thousands of highly motivated, very wired Paul supporters have been letting the media know their displeasure in no uncertain terms — sending emails to reporters, filling comments sections below columns and even leaving messages on the voice mails of experts quoted in stories they don’t like.
POLITICO columnist Roger Simon also wrote Monday about the scant media coverage. The Texas representative told Simon he was not surprised to find himself left out of the "top-tier" made up of candidates Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann andRomney in press accounts:
“It did disturb me, but it was not a total surprise,” he replied. “The result at Ames was significant; it might well have propelled us to the top tier. The media cannot change that.”
Though the media, of course, can change that since we get to determine who the top tier is.
“It is hard for them to accept,” Paul said of his showing at Ames. “I had one interview scheduled for this morning, a national program, but they canceled. It is shocking to be told nobody wants you.”
President Barack Obama sounded a little wistful for the days of yore in his remarks at a town-hall style event in Iowa Monday, as he suggested the polarization of media has contributed to Americans' inability to compromise.
President Obama complains a bit about Republicans "worried about a Republican primary" who won't compromise with him. That's a problem, he says, and so is "the way our media's evolved."
Instead of watching Walter Cronkite, Americans are on "their own little blog or their own separate news form," Obama says.
"If you're a Democrat, you're reading The New York Times," he says. "If you're a Republican, you're watching Fox News."
He adds, "People don't listen to each other as much."
A contest asking readers to design a logo for the Huffington Post Politics section is generating negative feedback from readers and AIGA, a professional association for designers, which claimed Monday the publication is commissioning free labor.
On Aug. 4, the Huffington Post asked Photoshop-savvy readers to submit their ideas for a fresh icon to be used to represent the publication’s politics coverage. The contest, now closed to submissions, offered the winning designer credit for the logo but no money.
The competition violates two basic standards of the design world, wrote AIGA President Ric Grefe in a comment on the contest’s article page.
“Speculative-design competitions or processes result in a superficial assessment of the project,” Grefe wrote. “Requesting work for free demonstrat¬es a lack of respect for the designer and the design process as well as the time of the profession¬als who are asked to provide it.”
Huffington Post spokesman Mario Ruiz told Poynter the idea behind the competition is that “this would be a lighthearted way to encourage HuffPost Politics users to express another side of their talents,” and the contest page has been updated with a similar statement, stressing the site’s mission of interactivity with readers. But Grefe’s comment and dozens of others left on the contest page echo similar concerns to those filed by bloggers in a lawsuit that contends writers created valuable content for the Huffington Post and were never delivered compensation.
Though the comments on the icon design article are overwhelmingly negative, readers with a sense of humor designed several logos mocking the Huffington Post’s contest, with one deriding HuffPo as being “HuffPoor.” An anti-speculative-labor website created a page denouncing the contest, which includes a form that could be easily tweeted. AntiSpec concluded “there’s a prize for the winner; they get credit for creating it… WOW. The ‘losers’ get absolutely nothing. The Huffington Post however gets hundreds, if not thousands, of completely free design hours.”
Ruiz told Poynter that the competition “was in no way an attempt to solicit unpaid design services."
Washington Examiner columnist Byron York received hearty boos from the crowd and negative press for asking Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann whether she would be submissive to her husband, Marcus, if she were elected president. But York also believes his controversial question delivered “by far the most human moment” of her performance in last week’s Iowa debate.
In a Monday column, York stood by his query and explained his belief that her remarks in the past about wives needing to be “submissive” to their husbands will become a familiar topic, especially because he doesn’t think she entirely answered the question. York also dinged the media for truncating his query in critical pieces, thereby losing much of the context. So York reconstructed the entire exchange, beginning with his question in full:
Representative Bachmann, in 2006, when you were running for Congress, you described a moment in your life when your husband said you should study for a degree in tax law. You said you hated the idea. And then you explained, "But the Lord said, 'Be submissive. Wives, you are to be submissive to your husbands." As president, would you be submissive to your husband?
Bachmann’s answer:
Marcus and I will be married for 33 years this Sept. 10. I'm in love with him. I'm so proud of him. And both he and I -- what submission means to us, if that's what your question is, it means respect. I respect my husband. He's a wonderful, godly man, and a great father. And he respects me as his wife. That's how we operate our marriage. We respect each other. We love each other. And I've been so grateful that we've been able to build a home together. We have five wonderful children and 23 foster children. We've built a business together and a life together, and I'm very proud of him.
Inquiries into Bachmann’s -- and all other Republican candidates’ -- past statements will only intensify as the Republican race heats up, and York believes the Minnesota congresswoman’s submission-equals-respect answer “will likely ensure that she is asked the question again in the future.” And while York’s question earned him plenty of criticism, others, such as Slate’s Dave Weigel, believe the line of questioning was “perfectly legitimate.”
“The advice given to Christians in Peter's letter to the [Colossians] is not at all controversial; you hear it at plenty of weddings. But you don't hear it in the political context. Bachmann brought it up when running for office,” Weigel wrote Monday in an item titled "Byron York is Right."
