AP makes

Selwyn Duke at American Thinker points out that a revived Fairness Doctrine only punished communicators who are honest about their beliefs. After all, who’s to label the various sides of the debate if not the participants themselves? If you don’t label yourself as biased, you need no antidote.

The dirty little secret behind the Fairness Doctrine is that it punishes the honest. Think about it: Radio hosts are the talkers; they wear their banners openly as they proclaim who and what they are. Sure, they may be brash and hyperbolic, loud and oft-sardonic, but there is no pretense, little guile, and you know what they want you to believe. You know what they’re sellin’ and if you’re buyin’.

The mainstream media, however, is a shill. Oh, not shills working with talk radio, of course, as their talkers are entities such as MoveOn.org and Media Matters, but they are shills nonetheless. They masquerade as impartial purveyors of information, almost-automatons who, like Joe Friday, are just interested in the facts, ma’am. They flutter their eyes and read their Teleprompters, and we are to believe God graced them with a singular ability to render facts uncolored by personal perspective.

Hugh Hewitt defends the journalistic legitimacy of blogs against a young skeptic from the Wall Street Journal, who had tried to dismiss the blogosphere as foolish and irrelevant.

The editor of the Washington Post says blogs and online readers are driving a new audience to his paper and his reporters benefit from the criticism and fact checking that bloggers provide.

Reporters love newsroom blogs, said Downie, because they put writers in better touch with their readers: “Everyone in our newsroom wants to be a blogger.”

And the blogs that pick apart every article that the Post produces are a good thing, said Downie, because they “keep the paper honest” and, even if their commentary isn’t positive, bring people to the site.

“Blogs are not competitors and not problems,” he said. “Instead we have a very interesting symbiotic relationship. Our largest driver of traffic is Matt Drudge.”

In the early stages of another big-media fakery scandal, Ed Driscoll provides a fine comentary on how the power of ideas rather than authority is giving the blogs a more believable voice than the MSM. He includes this commentary from Glen Reynolds from 2004:

While arguments from authority are hard on the Internet, substantiating arguments is easy, thanks to the miracle of hyperlinks. And, where things aren’t linkable, you can post actual images. You can spell out your thinking, and you can back it up with lots of facts, which people then (thanks to Google, et al.) find it easy to check. And the links mean that you can do that without cluttering up your narrative too much, usually, something that’s impossible on TV and nearly so in a newspaper.

Here’s a good example of how a citizen with camera and a blog can correct a misleading and biased MSM message.

Hat tip: Powerline

Reuters reports that bloggers are providing an important alternative to traditional media coverage of the disaster.

More and more, bloggers, who frequently post short messages on Internet Web Sites, are becoming an information source, particularly for fast developing stories in remote areas. Blogs gained prominence during the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, when conservative and liberal writers became regulars on the campaign trail.

The audience for the narratives is growing. According to comScore Media Metrix, more than 1.7 million online searches were conducted on August 29 containing the words “Hurricane” and/or “Katrina,” a more-than-tenfold increase over the daily average during the five days ending August 26.

“Bloggers outside the area are doing their best to amplify the first-hand accounts,” said Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at New York University.

Hat tip: Instapundit

The NY Times and Washington Post have been giving each other advance notice of their front pages for the last 10 years.

If this were happening in another industry, the media would not stand for it. According to Mark Tapscott,

In any other industry, this would be called “collusion” and the Times and Post editorial pages would be in high dungeon, demanding anti-trust investigations by the Department of Justice. Go here for the full E & P report.Can you imagine what the outrage would be if it were Microsoft and Apple exchanging their product plans every day? Or GM and Ford? Hertz and Avis?

Hat tip: Instapundit

Two of the major networks face decisions that stand to change the look and function of evening network news.

As the fall television season arrives with its larger audiences and advertising budgets, CBS and ABC need to find formats that will at least maintain what have been falling audiences.

Jennings, Rather and Brokaw no longer come into our homes every night. Brian Williams is network TV’s only permanent anchor; Bob Schieffer is temporary at CBS, and Charlie Gibson and Elizabeth Vargas at ABC are filling in while their network decides what to do. And those questions become even more pressing, not only because of the lower viewership for the evening newscasts over the summer but because the numbers have dropped so much over the past 25 years.

A two-week blogstorm about a scandal at the liberal Air America finally crosses into the MSM today.

A Washington Post staffer takes an opportunity to critique his newspaper to tell newspapers to calm down on critiques and redesigns, and to start to act and look like big, bad newspapers again.

I think we’ve overlistened to people who never read the paper, and yet insist it include more about their neighborhoods, lives, and concerns. A newspaper is filled with criminals, celebrities and fools and I for one am happy when it doesn’t include my life or neighborhood in theirs.

Then again, no one is interested in my new slogan for The Post: “News Flash: Everything’s Not Always About You.”

Hat tip: NRO

Volokh offers a few insights into the motives of blog writers and their audience.

From The Volokh Conspiracy: The BBC is now using the T word to describe the London bombings, though it had previously not seen fit to similarly describe Jerusalem bombings.

The article.

The analysis.

A selected highlight:

With Republicans holding power the White House and Congress, conservatives see the Supreme Court as the final obstacle to control of all branches of the federal government.

Sounds like the writer had just come from watching Star Wars. Bush is two thirds of the way to creating his evil empire.

Besides, I’ve never met or heard of a conservative who thinks they have control of the first two branches of government. The White House has increased government spending in a very nonconservative way, and the Senate takes more than four years to confirm judicial nominations.

In light of the FEC’s suggestion that it might consider blogs as campaign contributions, which would allow the FEC to restrict their speech, some bloggers are starting to market themselves as regular exempt media.

For example, BillHobbs.com has announced that his site will henceforth not be a blog, but an “online magazine” instead, similar–nay, identical–in every respect to his old blog.

I didn’t want to stop being a blogger, but the FEC’s moves to regulate political speech have made it necessary - as a growing number of other former bloggers have realized. And so, as of midnight tonight, I will cease blogging and become, merely, an online citizen journalist.

Hat tip: Instapundit

Any guesses about who might have asked AP to take this photo down? The link points to a Google archive.

Hat tip: NRO

Howard Dean says he won’t comment on stories that are reported on Fox News:

“My view is that Fox News is a propaganda outlet for the Republican Party and I don’t comment on Fox News.”

This is the identical approach used by Clinton and Kerry who painted Matt Drudge as a right-wing propagandist to duck answering questions about stories carried or linked to from the Drudge Report.

Richard Durbin blames ‘right wing’ for making too much of Howard Dean’s daily insanities:

The No. 2 Democrat in the Senate yesterday blamed “the right wing” and elements of the press “in service to it” for repeating Howard Dean’s remarks about Republicans and inflating them out of proportion.

“I think we all understand what’s happening with you all,” said Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin, in remarks echoing Hillary Rodham Clinton’s blaming a “vast right-wing conspiracy” for her husband’s legal-ethical woes.

“The right wing has got the agenda moving. Fox [News Channel] and everybody’s got the agenda. It’s all about Howard Dean. You’ve bought into it,” Mr. Durbin said.

Hat tip: NRO.

In 1974 Edward Jay Epstein foreshadowed today’s criticism of Woodwood and Bernstein’s investigative work as being relatively weak in light of being handed all the information by the FBI leaker.

From 1974:

A sustaining myth of journalism holds that every great government scandal is revealed through the work of enterprising reporters who by one means or another pierce the official veil of secrecy. The role that government institutions themselves play in exposing official misconduct and corruption therefore tends to be seriously neglected, if not wholly ignored, in the press. This view of journalistic revelation is propagated by the press even in cases where journalists have had palpably little to do with the discovery of corruption.

And note this overlooked insight:

But who was “Deep Throat” and what was his motivation for disclosing information to Woodward and Bernstein? The prosecutors at the Department of Justice now believe that the mysterious source was probably Mark W. Felt, Jr., who was then a deputy associate director of the FBI, because one statement the reporters attribute to “Deep Throat” could only have been made by Felt. (I personally suspect that in the best traditions of the New Journalism, “Deep Throat” is a composite character.) Whether or not the prosecutors are correct, it is clear that the arduous and time-consuming investigation by Woodward and Bernstein of Segretti was heavily based on FBI “302” reports, which must ultimately have been made available by someone in the FBI.

Howard Kurtz of WaPo looks at some of the damage that Deep Throat has done to journalism.

The revelation also serves as a reminder that sources may have complicated motives for whispering to the press. Felt may have worried about the FBI’s integrity but he also may have been resentful, as the bureau’s No. 2 official, at being passed over for the top job, and according to Woodward he came to detest the Nixon White House. Inside sources rarely have clean hands.Three decades later, the use and abuse of unnamed sources is rampant, especially in Washington, and the media all too often protect those with partisan agendas. It’s a long road from Felt telling Woodward to “follow the money” to a Bush adviser telling the New York Times that John Kerry “looks French.” But such potshots have become routine in daily reporting.