News Networks Stay On Journalist Gala Instead Of Covering Unrest In Baltimore

The annual White House Correspondents' Dinner is always an obnoxious event that provides further visual evidence of an out of touch and aloof mainstream media compromising its integrity for access to power, but this year was particularly gross. While so-called journalists were toasting champagne and laughing at inside Beltway jokes a unrest raged in Baltimore over the killing of 25 year-old Freddie Gray who died in police custody. The police responded to the unrest, in part, by locking in 40,000 people watching a baseball game at Camden Yards.

The news networks decided to stay on the dinner and left it to social media to report on the news. One of CNN's talking heads apparently even suggested it was acceptable to not cover the Freddie Gray protests as the public could learn about the event on Twitter. Instead the "news" network would cover a self-congratulatory dinner for people who spend their days rewriting government press releases and endlessly searching for any information fragment about a missing plane.

The failure of the mainstream media to comprehend what is and is not news was so epic and breathtaking that some are wondering aloud whether Saturday's White House Correspondents' Dinner actually marked the end of The News?

To call what happened on Saturday night a slow-motion train wreck would be to attribute too much momentum to the thing -- it was more like a guy slowly walking 500 paces into a brick wall and breaking his nose. It was clear that TV planning for the big event, the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, featuring President Obama, had been in the work for months. Once upon a time, this WHCA dinner (which annually also stars a comedian; last night it was Cecily Strong of SNL) was an okay idea -- schlubby journalists and the officials they cover getting dressed up for one night, drinking a lot of wine, sharing some bawdy jokes and raising a few dollars for scholarships... 

CNN and their rival networks have been known to cut away from regular programming to show planes with stuck landing gear circling a runway, or random police chases of random suspects in a random city. But now a city telling 40,000 people not to leave a baseball game because of social unrest, albeit briefly, wasn't news? Are you kidding me? More important was the broader stakes, that the citizens of a great American city, stripped of its factories and caught between high crime and appalling levels of police brutality, were trying to make a statement, that their lives mattered. But to the Beltway revelers...they just didn't.

Do we really need the mainstream media anyway? It has long been argued that it does more harm than good, but it increasingly seems like it does no good at all.

Perhaps it would be better to let the media conglomerates out of their agreements to provide news programming, then at least people will not be under the false impression that they have been informed about the most important stories of a given day. People might learn there is not any real information in infotainment and understand that if they want to be informed they are going to have to do some thinking and researching for themselves.

Rolling Stone Retracts UVA Rape Story Condemned As 'Journalistic Failure'

Rolling Stone magazine has formally retracted its story "A Rape On Campus." The story, published in 2014, alleged that a University of Virginia student named "Jackie" had been brutally sexually assaulted on campus by multiple assailants at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house. The allegations sparked a national outcry and high lighted the problem of sexual assault on college campuses across the country.

It now appears as though most if not all of Jackie's account is untrue and the story's authors and editors failed to do basic diligence to confirm key events in the story before publication. A police investigation found no evidence to support the claims in the story and a review by the Columbia School of Journalism called the article a "journalistic failure."

The reporter, Sabrina Erdely, and her editor on the story, Sean Woods, will not be terminated nor will managing editor Will Dana according to Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner.

From the CSJ review:

Rolling Stone's repudiation of the main narrative in "A Rape on Campus" is a story of journalistic failure that was avoidable. The failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking. The magazine set aside or rationalized as unnecessary essential practices of reporting that, if pursued, would likely have led the magazine's editors to reconsider publishing Jackie's narrative so prominently, if at all. The published story glossed over the gaps in the magazine's reporting by using pseudonyms and by failing to state where important information had come from. 

In late March, after a four-month investigation, the Charlottesville, Va., police department said that it had "exhausted all investigative leads" and had concluded, "There is no substantive basis to support the account alleged in the Rolling Stone article."

The complete collapse of the story could have the opposite effect the story was intended to have. Erdely said she was looking for a single story to crystallize the problem of sexual assault on campus in order for the problem to be taken more seriously. Unfortunately, the CSJ review warned that the blown story "may have spread the idea that many women invent rape allegations."

So while the staff at Rolling Stone has not suffered any substantive consequences, women who have been sexually assaulted on a college campus may have even more trouble getting their allegations taken seriously. Epic fail.

US Media Dropping The Ball On Ukraine 'Volunteers'

It is no secret that the US corporate or "mainstream" media is not particularly good at journalism. A majority of the American people do not trust what they report and recent stories about fabrications from star anchors have likely only dimmed an already low lit view. In truth, the mainstream media mostly just uncritically reports what the US government claims and the distrust of the government by the public is rightly mirrored in a distrust in its stenographers.

So it should be no surprise that as the US government has ramped up its rhetoric on a crisis it helped create in Ukraine the US mainstream media has followed suit, uncritically. Part of the US government's official communications strategy is to pretend that the well known neofascist militias fighting on behalf of Kiev do not exist. The US corporate media has downplayed if not omitted the presence of the neofascist militias in the debate even as respected international news organizations such as the BBC and Guardian have given detailed reports of their activities - activities that Amnesty International has labeled as human rights abuses.

Now Director of National Intelligence and Congressional Perjurer James Clapper has called for sending weapons to Ukraine where they are almost certainly going to end up in the hands of neofascist militias often called "volunteers." Where is the US mainstream media to note the dangers of this idea?

From Glenn Greenwald:

Whatever else is true, this is yet another case of the U.S. government – followed as always by its media – fabricating a Manichean morality narrative to justify U.S. involvement and militarism. Just as the U.S. spent years funding and arming the precise extremist elements it claims it wants to combat – in Libya, in Syria, and long before that in Afghanistan – arming Ukrainian forces would empower a monstrous crew of fascists and outright Nazi sympathizers. The coup itself, which the U.S. government supported, almost certainly did exactly that.

One can debate whether empowering such thugs is a feature or a bug: it’s hardly rare for the U.S. knowingly to arm and prop up fascists and other assorted tyrants which it believes will promote its interests (see this morning’s David Ignatius column arguing that Egyptian dictator Gen. Abdel Fata Sisi is as bad as Mubarak when it comes human rights abuses, but the U.S. must continue steadfastly to support him so that he preserves “stability”). But at least when the U.S. is in bed with regimes such as the Saudis or Egyptians, most people understand the kind of allies it has embraced. In the case of Ukraine, those facts have been almost entirely excluded from mainstream discourse. Now that Obama’s leading national security official is expressly calling for the arming of those forces, it is vital that the true nature of America’s allies in this conflict be understood.

There are (at least) two sides to the Ukraine story. It is time to stop this cartoonish narrative where everyone fighting the separatists has noble intentions. Neo-Nazism is not even a new phenomenon in Ukraine, a large faction of Ukrainians fought with the Nazis against the Soviet Union during World War II and they and their descendants still celebrate those allied with the Nazis today - notably Stepan Bandera. Bandera's legacy became a political football in Ukraine being both officially honored then having that honor withdrawn by President Yanukovich.

How long can the US corporate media ignore neofascisim in Ukraine?

The James Risen Workaround

With the refusal by SCOTUS to take James Risen's case it now stands that reporters can not really protect their sources under the law using the First Amendment and the seemingly clear implication of it - that anonymous sources require protection.

So if the sources are known to the reporter they can not, under the law, protect them. But what if the source of the information isn't known? What if the reporter has no clue who slipped them the information?

Herein lies the James Risen work around. Sources should now simply drop information anonymously to reporters and reporters should merely act as verifiers of the information not the source.

This is not a new practice but it is, apparently, the only legal one. And thanks to the late Aaron Swartz the technology already exists to make this workaround work. Of course there are other ways to get information to a reporter anonymously in cyber and meat space (manila folder in the mailbox).

So this is the new system, like reverse engineering one group or person (Team A) gets the information then another group or person (Team B) verifies and publishes it.

Though something is certainly lost by not knowing a source, this system still allows stories to be written using anonymous sources and creates constructive ignorance for both the journalist and source.