Losing Faith in the Mainstream Media

I just read Jo Mannies article about the UMSL incident that completely fails to point out that Breitbart's videos were maliciously edited and amazingly fails to even provide readers a link where they can see the fuller videos. Just like the Post-Dispatch and KMOX, she doesn't inform her readers of the relevant facts despite having every opportunity to do so.

I can't even describe how depressing it's been in this case to see how badly the St. Louis media has covered the story. Though I've always been critical of the media, I used to think that they'd get the story right if they were just given easy access to the correct information. In this case, they were given easy access to the correct information; they did not get the story right. I used to think that the media could get the story right if it was demonstrated just how systematically dishonest Andrew Breitbart is. He has been shown to intentionally distort video over and over, yet they did not get the story right. I used to think that maybe reporters could get the story right if you gave them a personal phone call and talked about the issues rather than just sending them a link to the information on a blog. I gave reporters a personal phone call on this issue; they failed to get the story right. I used to think that maybe reporters preferred Breitbart's side of the story because they were always presented with video, a more digestible medium than the written word. In this case, there was video available that clearly showed Breitbart's bloggers were lying; the media ignored it and did not get the story right.

In this case, Jo Mannies, Kevin Killeen, and Tim Barker were given every opportunity to get the story right, yet they still failed miserably, in a way that should be embarrassing for any St. Louisan who cares about having a competent mainstream media. Compare this to the Kansas City Star, who from the very beginning rhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifecognized this as a dishonest hit job from a known con man. I keep trying to make excuses to believe that maybe the state of the media in St. Louis isn't as bad as others say, but I'm not sure I have any left.

Update: Jo Mannies at the Beacon has now updated her post with a link to the Media Matters analysis and KMOX put out a new story that got it right. Now it's up to the Post-Dispatch to make it 3 for 3!

Wagman Doesn't Bother With Getting Quotes

Jake Wagman regurgitated a story yesterday suggesting that Senator McCaskill wants to get rid of the individual mandate component of health care reform. The story had been reported by The Hill and by WillyK at Show Me Progress the day before. Despite possessing the title of "reporter," Wagman apparently did not bother to actually get a quote from the McCaskill campaign about the statement.

On the other hand, Jo Mannies at the Beacon did get a quote about McCaskill's position on mandates, and it was pretty interesting:

McCaskill press secretary Maria Speiser said Thursday that the senator's MSNBC comments, in their entirety, "are not significantly different from what she has said in the past."...

Overall, said Speiser, "Claire believes the bottom line is that the mandate is unpopular, and if there are other ways to stop insurance companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions, it’s worth considering."

Mannies also presented the full quotation from McCaskill that sparked the recent controversy:

I think they don't like the mandate and by a wide margin they voted that way (a reference to Proposition C, which passed handily in Missouri on Aug. 3). I do think we have to look at it to see if there's a different way to make sure to get more people in the pool. What the most popular part of the bill (is, barring) pre-existing conditions, allowing people who have had the nerve to be sick before, allowing them to get insurance, that's the most popular part. That really is what drove the desire for a mandate because you've got to get everybody in the pool. Can you imagine if you could go get car insurance after you had a wreck? Who is going to buy insurance until after they're sick. Maybe there's other ways to get people in a pool other than a mandate -– I hope -– and we need to look at that.

Seems like a pretty interesting facts that add flavor and context to the story, no?

Wagman "Has To Try To Be That Bad"

Jake Wagman continues to embarrass the actual journalists at the Post-Dispatch. A day after Wagman's new-low-for-journalism-at-the-Post-Dispatch blog post (which, I am told, made it into today's print edition under the guidance of tea party-coached Political Editor Christopher Ave), I received an email pointing to his latest and observing that Wagman "had to be trying to be this bad." And, as I looked at his most recent article about Carnahan, I couldn't help but agree. Yesterday, as featured on ForwardSTL and the Beacon, Russ Carnhan wrote an op-ed to The Hill saying that we need to shift our focus in Afghanistan from war to peace:

It’s time to get smarter about how we approach this phase of our operation, to think creatively about how we integrate security, diplomacy and development.

We have fought the war against the Taliban and the extremists. Now we must fight for peace – a lasting peace that is every bit as vital to our global and domestic security.

Let us end this war in Afghanistan.

Yet, if you were one of the poor souls who exclusively relies on the Post-Dispatch for their news, you wouldn't know anything about this. All you would know is that Russ Carnahan lauded U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who recently passed away, in part of his column. In Wagman's entire post about the op-ed, he never even mentions the central point of a post titled, "End This War." It is a truly remarkable achievement in bad journalism and, as my emailer pointed out, must have taken some effort.

Compare this post to that of an actual journalist, Jo Mannies, in her post titled Carnahan calls for more attention on peace in Afghanistan:

Shortly before giving up his House oversight post over Afghanistan, U.S. Rep. Russ Carnahan is laying out his view that the United States needs to shift its focus from war to peace.

"It’s time to get smarter about how we approach this phase of our operation, to think creatively about how we integrate security, diplomacy and development," Carnahan, D-St. Louis, said in an op-ed piece published Thursday on the Washington-based publication The Hill's "Congress Blog."

"We have fought the war against the Taliban and the extremists. Now we must fight for peace -– a lasting peace that is every bit as vital to our global and domestic security. Let us end this war in Afghanistan."

So, just to review, at a time where discussions of changing the course in Afghanistan are a relatively taboo subject in Congress, Carnahan went out on a limb to make a pretty courageous statement about the need to change our focus. Yet, a day after turning a mindless Ed Martin tweet about a Craigslist advertisement into a story for the Post-Dispatch, Jake Wagman amazingly manages to either miss or deliberately avoid the entire point of the column. Ed Martin could not ask for a better lapdog.

I guess that somehow, even at a time of crises for newspapers, the Post-Dispatch is complacent about their political coverage of St. Louis. But this will be a huge mistake in the long run. Just like a small stream of water can carve through rock over time, as enough people compare the garbage Wagman puts out on a daily basis with researched and meaningful pieces at other outlets like the Star, the Beacon or a number of blogs, they will slowly but surely begin to realize that relying on the Post-Dispatch for news about anything on Wagman's beat is a giant mistake. As long as they continue to allow Wagman to drop the ball on their political coverage, the Post-Dispatch will be hemorrhaging credibility. And credibility is all that a journalistic institution has.

Tea Party Denies Running Ads for Ed Martin

Jo Mannies had an article that asked the tea party about potential violations of their 501(c)(4) status. Unfortunately, Mannies did not provide a link to my research nor ask any tough follow ups, so readers at the Beacon don't really have any way of evaluating the suggestion (note: Mannies updated the post with further information, so the previous sentence is no longer true). However, she did say the following about the tea party:

Evans and Ennenbach dismiss the assertions of some Democrats and progressive bloggers that the St. Louis Tea Party ran afoul of its tax-exempt status by endorsing Martin. The St. Louis Tea Party is a 501C4, meaning that politics can't be its primary activity, and that endorsements can't be communicated to the general public.

Both say the St. Louis Tea Party was careful not to run ads in favor of Martin, and defend a billboard that featured pictures of Martin and Carnahan and the question, ""Who deserves to serve?"

Of course, the billboard itself is not what's at issue. What is at issue is the tea party's running of multiple online ads that link directly to endorsements of Ed Martin. First, there was a "Who Deserves to Serve" advertisement on Reboot Congress that clearly stated "Paid for by the St. Louis Tea Party Coalition." Clicking on that ad takes readers directly to a page on the St. Louis Tea Party website that says that "Ed Martin deserves to serve instead of Russ Carnahan," and says that Ed Martin "deserves your vote." This was documented with both screen shots and a shot of the html that shows the direct link. The St. Louis Tea Party also ran a google ad that said "Paid For by the St. Louis Tea Party Coalition" that linked directly to a page featuring a video from Bill Hennessy where Hennessy say:

I'm going to ask you to take one hour, just one hour, Monday or Tuesday, to come to the St. Louis Tea Party Headquarters at 4512 Hampton Avenue in St. Louis Hills, just south of Hampton Village, and give one hour to phone calls or knocking on doors asking your friends and neighbors, your fellow citizens to go to the polls on Tuesday and vote for Ed Martin and the tea party candidates across the ballot.

The St. Louis tea party also had their name on Taxpayers for Ed Martin yard signs.

So once again, we have reporters providing free publicity to the tea party without bothering to dig into questions or forcing them to actually respond to specifics. And while Mannies makes a vague reference to "progressive bloggers," she won't even provide a link that would allow readers to evaluate the evidence themselves. I'm just not sure how the press thinks that this model of journalism actually leaves people adequately informed.

What if Prop A Had Failed?

No, I'm not talking about the fact that Metro would have been forced to cut services or that people across the region would not be able to get to work. Rather, I'm asking about what the political narrative would have been if Proposition A had failed, even by only a few hundred votes. I think we all know what the narrative would have been. It would have been a complete, unadulterated, nonstop freak-out by the local media about what a "political force" the St. Louis Tea Party is, and how Democrats better watch out or they're going to be slaughtered in November. The groundwork for this narrative was already laid in Jo Mannies article explaining that the Tea Party saw Prop A as a test of their organizing ability, and there's not much doubt in my mind that the media would have been sure to have given the tea party credit for the win whether or not they demonstrated any ability to actually organize (BTW, they didn't).

So if the tea party would have gotten credit for a Prop A defeat, isn't it natural to think that they should also be criticized when Prop A was successful despite their opposition? Maybe you could argue that Prop A had institutional advantages, and so would have been favored to win. Fine. But Prop A didn't just win: it won in a massive landslide. 63 % of St. Louis County Voters voted in favor of a sales tax increase, and only 37% voted against. There is no realistic scenario in which the tea party could have done a worse job in influencing the vote. Nevertheless, our local media still refuses to state the obvious.

Consider Jo Mannies' recent piece, which joins Jake Wagman in largely providing cover for the loss. I had emailed Jo mentioning that the tea party was only able to raise $750 in their campaign to raise $10,000, which is indicative of zero ability to organize in a way that can influence local elections. I have no idea if she read my message, but I know the way in which she reported the money was spun in a way as positive as possible for the Tea Party. As she has done in several articles, she allows Gina Loudon to define the narrative:

Another month and $10,000, said Loudon, the St. Louis Tea Party might have had a good chance of defeating Proposition A. "But not with only $900 against their $1.5 million," she added.

No mention from Mannies of the point that the reason the tea party only had $900 is because they were unable to raise more than $900, despite having access to local blogs, local radio, and national blogs, which they repeatedly used to ask for money. No one gives congressional candidates any breaks for not being able to raise money, so why should the tea party be allowed off the hook when it was precisely because of their own failures that they didn't have money?

This, unfortunately, is not the only place in which Mannies gives Gina Loudon free reign to define the narrative. Consider this passage:

Gina Loudon (right), one of the local Tea Party's leaders, believes that critics are focusing on that defeat for a reason. "We are so well aware that people are trying to divide us," she said. "They wouldn't be pointing a finger at us if they didn't fear us."

Nice. Framing the debate in a way that dismisses all criticism as 'fear." This would be fine if it was their opinion balanced against a critic, but there were no quotes from critics: just a long article that gave Loudon, Carl Bearden, and Bill Hennessy a platform to spin the events however they want.

As I've said in related contexts, I think the inherent unwillingness of the local media to move away from their pre-established narratives not only does a disservice to readers but also creates an atmosphere of zero accountability for the tea party. They can say "this next election is a test of our ability" on absolutely everything because they know that the local media will report favorably if they win, and give them a pass if they lose. Is it because the local media are all secretly tea party sympathizers? I don't think so: I think the reasons are much more complicated than that and have a lot to do with personal relationships. But whatever the reasons are, the local media is failing to fairly report on local events. If the tea party is taking credit for an election, they should be held to their word. If Prop A had failed, they would have been given credit. But Prop A won in a landslide, and their role in that should also be acknowledged.

BTW, I'm raising money for a good cause to showcase the local media's hype of the completely unimpressive efforts from the tea party Prop A opposition. Please click here to pitch in, or here to read more.