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Alyssa

CNN And Fox News’ Evening Shows Get Whiter And More Male, While Sharpton and Hayes Pick Up Slack At MSNBC

By Alyssa Rosenberg on May 15, 2013 at 9:04 am

Over the past couple of days, Media Matters for America has been rolling out an analysis of who gets booked on cable news shows, and comparing it to data from a similar month in 2008. The findings are discouraging. In May 2008, 57 percent of all guests on evening cable news were white men. In April 2013, that number’s risen to 58 percent.

The network-by-network numbers are revealing. At CNN, 55 percent of guests in May 2008 were white men, but in April 2013, 62 percent of the network’s booked guests were white men. On Fox, the percentage of white male guests rose from 56 percent in May 2008 to 60 percent in April 2013, and that rise might have been sharper if Sean Hannity hadn’t booked 22 non-white guests in a single evening to discuss Dr. Ben Carson’s remarks comparing homosexuality and sexual disorders like bestiality and pedophilia and the ensuing controversy over whether he should speak at commencement for the Johns Hopkins school of medicine. MSNBC is the only network where the percentage of guests who were white men declined, from 61 percent in May 2008 to 54 percent in April 2013:

Even on the MSNBC evening news, that increase in diversity is largely driven by two shows, Politics Nation, anchored by Al Sharpton, where 51 percent of the April 2013 guests were non-white or women, and All In, Chris Hayes’ show, which continues his tradition of booking white men in numbers close to their actual representation in the United States, and had a guest roster that was 41 percent white and male. Chris Matthews’ show Hardball had a guest roster that was 66 percent white and male in April 2013—81 percent of them, across both genders, were white, and 79 percent of them, across all races, were male. And 57 percent of Rachel Maddow’s guests in April 2013 were white men—89 percent of them, across both genders, were white, and 63 percent of them, across races, were men.

Hayes has made clear that the key to his success in diversifying his guest roster is relatively simple: a desire to do so, and a willingness to ask for recommendations for guests. If All In does well as it settles in to its slot, MSNBC might consider whether a long-term way to distinguish itself from a flailing CNN and a Fox News retrenching in the wake of the November elections, is to offer up viewers not just hosts with different opinions, but very different participants in the people they’re in conversation with.

Health

WATCH: CNN Anchor Bullies Amanda Knox Over Rumors Of ‘Sexual Deviance’

By Aviva Shen on May 8, 2013 at 4:50 pm

When Amanda Knox was accused of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in 2007, the prosecution and the Italian media helped fuel baseless but titillating rumors that Knox was a sex fiend who killed Kercher for refusing to participate in an orgy. On Tuesday night, Chris Cuomo attempted to bully and shame the 25-year-old with his own theories about her sex life.

Cuomo peppered Knox with invasive questions about her sexual preferences, demanding to know if she was hiding “freaky sexual things”:

CUOMO: Were you into deviant sex? Insensitive question, but hey, we gotta get to what it is. This fuels the doubt. Were you into that kind of experimentation?

KNOX: No.

CUOMO: Did Meredith suspect you were into these types of things and created a barrier between the two of you?

KNOX: No.

CUOMO: And therefore you resented her because she was judging you? None of that?

KNOX: No. Absolutely not. There’s no evidence of that.

CUOMO: That’s the theory. Knox is into some freaky sexual things. She tried to pull in Meredith, who was a staid, buttoned-up Brit, she wasn’t into it, and it went wrong…That was in the discussion of the judges, yes?

KNOX: Absolutely. I was there in the courtroom when they were calling me things like “violent,” “whore,” and “deviant.” And it’s all untrue.

CUOMO: Where are they getting that from? Did you have any type of experimental activities that you’re embarrassed to talk about? That they know about?

KNOX: Well in the book I talk about all my sexual experiences, and I haven’t needed to talk about the details of that because they aren’t deviant. I wasn’t strapping on leather and bearing a whip. I’ve never done that.

CUOMO: No group activities?

KNOX: I’ve never taken part in an orgy, ever.

Watch it:

As Knox became more agitated and appeared to be on the verge of tears, Cuomo continued to insist that someone must have told the prosecution that Knox had a secret kinky sex life, even asserting, “you’re a freak!” Finally, she burst out:

They didn’t get it from me, and they didn’t get it from witnesses. It literally came from the prosecution. And this is what I’ve been up against this entire time. This fact that the prosecution was projecting onto what happened their own theories about young women and women who are…I was sexually active. I was not sexually deviant.

Cuomo’s attempt to use suggestions of sexual deviance to bully Knox follows in a long tradition of public entitlement to scrutinize and judge female sexuality. The recent string of highly publicized sexual assaults has exposed how the media weaves narratives in which “drunk party girls” get what they deserve. Meanwhile, comprehensive sex education is stifled in many conservative states lest children become too comfortable with their sexuality.

However, many women are starting to call out their bullies, from Anne Hathaway’s cold response to questions about a revealing photo to 17-year-old Katelyn Campbell’s protest of an abstinence assembly that told students their mothers would hate them if they used birth control. Most recently, kidnap and rape victim Elizabeth Smart spoke out about the culture of sexual purity that taught her she was worthless after her rape. And Knox, staying composed in response to Cuomo’s probing, firmly refused to equate sexuality with guilt in the public eye.

Alyssa

The 10 Best Jokes From The White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Apr 29, 2013 at 10:33 am

As I predicted back in February when the White House Correspondents’ Association announced that Conan O’Brien would be returning to host their annual dinner, O’Brien’s routine on Saturday was a fairly tame one that took harder aim at the media than at anyone in power. But in between his bit:

and President Barack Obama’s routine:

there were some decent gags. Here are ten of our favorites:
Read more

Alyssa

The Boston Marathon Bombing, The Hunt For Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, And The Desire To Break News First

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Apr 19, 2013 at 3:16 pm

The rush to be the first outlet to break all sorts of news in the wake of the Monday bombing of the Boston Marathon that killed three people and left many others gravely injured has done all sorts of damage to both individuals’ reputations and to our larger community this week. The New York Post reported that a man of Saudi origin was being questioned by law enforcement in a Boston hospital in the wake of the bombing—it turned out he was merely a survivor of the attack who had been tackled by a bystander who was suspicious of him for doing the rather sensible thing of running away from a scene of carnage. The Boston Globe and CNN mistakenly reported that a suspect or suspects in the bombing had been arrested, when, as became clear, no such arrests had taken place. The Post subsequently published on its front page a photo of two men at the marathon with the headline “Bag Men,” suggesting they were wanted in the bombing—it emerged that they were Salah Eddin Barhoum and Yassine Zaime, local teenagers who had hoped to run part of the Marathon route in the wake of the officially-registered runners. And social media sites, included Reddit, suggested that missing Brown student Sunil Tripathi was a suspect in the bombing, a misidentification amplified significantly after his name was overheard on a police scanner during the escalated manhunt for the real suspects last night, and one that conservative media sites who seized on his name have been slow to correct.

These are serious errors, and they’ll bring a range of consequences, from lawsuits to loss of reputation, for the outlets that reported them or that doubled down on them, seemingly having abandoned standards of journalism like having two sources to confirm a piece of information. And reporters like Pete Williams of NBC News, who have been judicious and often first to be correct about developments in the investigation, will hopefully be rewarded for their care and reliability. I’m disgusted by the damage that the Post, in particular, has done to the reputations and potential safety of innocent people. And I think that a general rush to claim scoops and exclusives is counterproductive for journalism in general. It’s possible to develop true scoops through deep, proprietary reporting that genuinely reveals new information to the public that other outlets could not offer up because they haven’t done the same research and interviews. But much of the information claimed as proprietary is nothing of the sort: it’s reproductions of official announcements or information that will shortly become widely available. They’re scoops only in the sense that one reporter has a better wifi connection at a press conference than the competition, or that someone is able to type up a headline faster than other people who have received a press release at the same time. Claiming scoops or exclusives under those circumstances is a cheap way to try to burnish a publication’s credibility that actually does the opposite.
Read more

Politics

Senators’ Impassioned Defense Of Gun Legislation: ‘We Came Here To Do Something’

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Apr 14, 2013 at 10:00 am

On Sunday, the two senators at the helm of the push for stronger gun laws appeared together on CNN’s State Of The Union, where they gave an impassioned call for action on gun laws and brushed off the idea that it was a political risk to focus on gun legislation.

Sens. Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) have proposed a law that would tighten the regulations on firearm sales, requiring that every sale except for private transactions include a criminal background check. While that’s popular among 92 percent of Americans, the National Rifle Association has warned that it’s politically poisonous.

But when host Candy Crowley pointed out the political risks of focusing on gun legislation, citing a Saturday Night Live sketch on the topic, both Manchin and Toomey dismissed the risk, saying that’s not why they are in office:

CROWLEY: Are either one of you worried about any kind of challenge, primary or general?

MANCHIN: Let me just say I know Pat and I have talked, we came here to do something. We came here to make a difference. If you would have met with the families, the strongest people I’ve ever met with, the families of the Newtown victims, they never asked for anybody to take their guns away. They never asked to repeal the second amendment. They said, ‘we’re gun owners and we respect and honor all that.’ We know, and they’ll even say, we know that this bill that you’re working on would not have saved our children. We know that. But it might save somebody else’s child somebody. I mean, if we just had half the courage [the Newtown families] had, Candy, just half the courage. So, yes, I came to do something and I want to do something.

TOOMEY: In 1999 I supported expanding background checks. I just think it makes common sense. And I’ll just let the political chips fall the way they fall.

Watch it:

The Toomey-Manchin proposal made it past an initial filibuster last week, garnering 68 votes (including 16 Republicans) for moving to debate. But not everything that will be included in the bill is yet known, and Senators — particularly Republicans — have been tentative in offering their support for the legislation.

Media

Cable News Obsessively Covers Cuts To White House Tours, Virtually Ignores Cuts To Programs For The Poor

By Aviva Shen and Adam Peck on Mar 14, 2013 at 9:14 am

Thanks to Congressional gridlock, automatic budget cuts took effect 14 days ago, threatening 700,000 jobs and gutting funds for vital programs in housing assistance, early childhood education, disaster relief, and national security. Secret Service staffing was also impacted, prompting the cancellation of White House tours last week. Republicans immediately attacked the decision as a political move designed to turn the public against the sequester and 14 Republican senators signed a letter demanding information.

The media has also latched on to preserve the White House tours, while largely ignoring other much more devastating sequester cuts. As Ari Melber of The Nation pointed out on Wednesday, there are 12,000 news stories concerning White House tours and less than 1,000 about the sequester’s impact on housing assistance programs, which disproportionately affect low-income Americans.

ThinkProgress examined this trend on three major cable news networks — Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC — since March 6. White House tours were mentioned 33 times as often (Fox News had 163 segments, CNN had 59, and MSNBC had 42) as mentions of other sequester impacts hitting the poor. Any discussion of sequestration’s steep cuts to housing assistance, food assistance programs, and Head Start early education was virtually nonexistent on all 3 networks in the same time frame. Fox News mentioned Head Start three times, ignoring housing and food stamps entirely; MSNBC mentioned Head Start 4 times, food stamps once, and did not cover housing assistance cuts at all. CNN stayed completely silent on all three issues:

While covering budget cuts, cable news channels have also largely avoided discussing military tuition assistance programs, which were suspended by the Marine Corps and the Army shortly after sequestration. CNN and MSNBC each mentioned the cuts to tuition assistance once since March 6, while Fox News took the lead with 11 segments.

The media’s silence on the most brutal sequester cuts is well in line with the fourth estate’s normal approach to poverty. During the 2012 presidential campaign, just .2 percent of campaign coverage by major TV, radio, and print outlets addressed poverty in any substantive way. More recently, the media mostly ignored the effects of spending cuts in the so-called “fiscal cliff” at the end of 2012, preferring to discuss tax hikes instead.

In response to the highly publicized backlash over White House tours, Obama is now signalling some tours may resume.

Update

SNAP, the main food stamp program, is actually exempt from sequestration. However, other food assistance programs have taken a hit. Because of cuts to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), 600,000 women and children under 5 will be excluded from nutritional supplements.

Economy

CNN Host Schools Bobby Jindal For Spouting ‘Misleading’ Economic ‘Nonsense’

By Igor Volsky on Feb 25, 2013 at 3:30 pm

CNN business correspondent Ali Velshi slammed Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) for likening the federal budget to family spending and suggesting that the Obama administration should not spend more than the government takes in.

“Every family has to balance their budget, isn’t allowed to spend more than they need, every business is more efficient, tighten their belt. The reality is it can be done,” Jindal said in remarks outside of the White House on Monday, following a meeting between the National Governor’s Association and President Obama. He added that the administration can implement the automatic across-the-borad sequestration cuts that are likely to go into effect on March 1 “without jeopardizing the economy” or “critical services” by focusing on “wasteful spending.”

Velshi rejected Jindal’s comparison as “misleading” “nonsense” and pointed out that businesses and families routinely borrow money to invest in their futures, reasoning that an investment made today in college education or a new equipment can lead to greater returns down the road:

VELSHI: It’s 3% of a small part of the federal budget which makes it a very big part of some major agencies. It’s misleading stuff Bobby Jindal is saying, number one. Number two when he says families understand they have to live within their budget. I don’t know a lot of families who buy a house with cash. Buying a house on a mortgage, is that living within your budget or not living within your budget? You would have to be 80 years old to be able to buy a house with cash. We have an understanding in our society, it may be flawed, that we borrow money based on our future earnings potential. All people do that, companies do that and governments do that. There’s a point at which you can say, we’ve gone too far with that or we’re too much of a risk of not paying back so we’ll end up paying a higher interest rate. When you borrow too much money, your personal interest rate goes up, credit cards go up. But to suggest within your means and balanced budget nonsense is just misleading. That is not how families live. It’s not how businesses conduct themselves. It is certainly not since the history of time the way governments run themselves. Bobby Jindal is a smart guy. He runs a state. He needs to not talk like this and it’s become common to hear this stuff coming out in these press conferences.

Watch it:

The federal economy is fundamentally different from household budgets and economic data and history suggest that the government should be spending more, not less given the current economic circumstances. After all, overall government spending has plateaued under Obama after rising sharply under George W. Bush and the resulting fiscal contraction has resulted in a lower recovery.

Health

How CNN’s ‘Poop Ship’ Coverage Failed To Highlight A Real Global Health Issue

By Hayes Brown on Feb 15, 2013 at 3:05 pm

CNN and other news networks missed an ideal opportunity this week to highlight the actual public health risk that poor sanitation conditions pose to millions of people around the world.

The insane amount of time CNN spent over the last several days capturing footage and breathlessly reporting on the travails of the passengers aboard a disabled cruise ship — over 700 minutes worth — has already been mocked mercilessly. The main focus of the anchors’ concern were the atrocious sanitary conditions that had developed once a fire took out the ship’s engines. At one point described as a “floating petri dish,” the ship was completely unable to process sewage, leading to leaks throughout the halls of the vessel and passengers sleeping above deck to escape the smell.

For all of the laughs the seeming absurdity of the coverage has generated, it belies an actual crisis that people live through every day across the globe. As of 2011, 2.6 billion people around the world lacked access to adequate sanitation globally according to the World Health Organization. That leads to defecation in areas where it can flow into water sources, which in turn opens the door to exposure to water-born diseases like diarrhea, cholera, dysentery, typhoid, and hepatitis A.

One the Millennium Development Goals by the United Nations in 20000 — specifically Goal 7, Target 10 — calls for the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking-water and basic sanitation to be cut in half by 2015. Unfortunately, that goal isn’t close to being achieved, according to a March 2012 report’s warning:

The report highlights, however, that the world is still far from meeting the MDG target for sanitation, and is unlikely to do so by 2015. Only 63% of the world now have improved sanitation access, a figure projected to increase only to 67% by 2015, well below the 75% aim in the MDGs. [...] In rural areas in least developed countries, 97 out of every 100 people do not have piped water and 14% of the population drinks surface water – for example, from rivers, ponds, or lakes.

Bill Gates, through his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has been working to help even those odds. Last year, Gates held what was dubbed the Reinvent the Toilet Fair, soliciting designs for low-cost toilets that don’t require water or a sewage system to function and cost no more than five cents a day to operate. The winning design was solar-powered and generates hydrogen gas and electricity, which the Foundation hopes to have operational in a community by 2015.

For now, though, gallons of raw sewage flow into the Ganges river in India every day and millions of people die on the African continent for lack of sanitation. In choosing to focus on the plight of those people who live through the conditions that those on Carnival “cruise from hell” experienced every day, CNN missed a prime opportunity to reveal to their viewers a set of living conditions they’d never dreamed still existed.

LGBT

Hate Group Spokesman Called Out For Anti-Gay Positions On Live TV

By Zack Ford on Jan 11, 2013 at 2:02 pm

For reasons that remain unclear, cable news networks continue to provide airtime to the Family Research Council, neglecting to recognize that it has been designated as a hate group for its anti-gay views, let alone the fact that it hardly represents mainstream Christianity. Today was no exception, as FRC’s Peter Sprigg was invited on CNN to join the chorus of conservative objections that Pastor Louie Giglio will no longer be participating in President Obama’s Inauguration because of his anti-gay views. Sprigg attempted to claim that Christians are the victims, but fortunately, Truth Wins Out’s Wayne Besen was there to set the record straight:

SPRIGG: The world we live in, unfortunately, is increasingly marked by the enforcement of intolerance in the name of tolerance, exclusion in the name of inclusion, and forced uniformity in the name of diversity. It’s contradictory, it’s downright Orwellian, and yet people actually make these statements, unbelievably, with a straight face. [...]

BESEN: Peter, I find it ironic that you’re embracing diversity. I mean you called for the imprisonment of gay people and said we should export homosexuals out of the United States and suddenly you’re for tolerance? I’m a little confused here.

SPRIGG: [silent laughter] Well this is about Pastor Giglio and President Obama, it’s not about me.

Watch it:

Jeremy Hooper is right to celebrate this as a victory for GLAAD’s Commentator Accountability Project, which seeks to expose the anti-LGBT records of conservative spokespeople whose positions are typically not given proper context by the news outlets that interview them. Sprigg’s presence on CNN is the quintessential example of this whitewashing, because as Besen pointed out, his positions are seemingly even more anti-LGBT than Pastor Giglio’s. Sprigg has proven time and time again that he does not even have the most basic understanding of sexuality but does have a significant antipathy toward the very existence of gays and lesbians. He has no authority to speak about LGBT issues, and CNN should learn from this interview not to provide a pedestal for his bigoted point of view again.

Climate Progress

CNN Veteran Dykstra Slams Network For Climate Special Lacking ‘A Single Mention Of What Causes Climate Change’

By Joe Romm on Jan 7, 2013 at 12:29 pm

“It was very well done for showing climate impacts, but doing an hour documentary on climate change and not mentioning fossil fuels is like doing an hour on sexually-transmitted diseases and not mentioning sex.”

That is Peter Dykstra critiquing CNN’s new one-hour prime-time documentary, “The Coming Storms.”

Dykstra — an Emmy and Peabody winner — is one of the best climate journalists around. He is currently Publisher of the Daily Climate (which CP often resposts), and ”During a 17-year career at CNN, Peter Dykstra was executive producer for science, environment, weather and technology coverage.”

The good news is that, as the CNN promo explains, the show discussed how “Global warming continues to wreak havoc on weather systems around the globe.” The bad news is that the show never examines the cause of global warming or how to slow it down (see transcript here).

Here is more from Dykstra, in an email he sent to CNN staff and several reporters/bloggers:

I thought the individual reporting and storytelling on these pieces was strong, and makes a good case for what’s at stake for the future of climate change. I didn’t see a single factual flaw, which is unique and commendable, and the science within the pieces was well done.   I also thought that the resistance to the traditional model of giving equal time to outliers who question the vailidity of climate science was good, and sadly, a little bit brave in the current media climate.  The science is overwhelming, and the on-the-ground evidence is quickly catching up, as your hour demonstrated.

But the sum of the hour focuses on adaptation, implying that society is resigned to dealing with climate change.  I didn’t hear a single mention of what causes climate change, or what can still be done to limit its impacts.   If I ran a TV network that raked in millions of dollars in misleading ads from the oil, coal and gas industries, it would trouble me to go into utter silence about mentioning fossil fuels. Not the fault of the reporters, but you may want to take this up with the Home Office.

The polling makes clear that the (non-Fox-News-watching) public understands the climate is changing and that weather is getting more extreme. What’s needed now are more explanations of why the climate is changing and what we can do about it. CNN can do better!

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