Morton Mintz: Reporting on Shock-Talk and Other Smut
Posted at 9:11 am, May 7th, 2007
Cheers to the New York Times for assigning a 13-person team to screen nearly 250 hours of broadcasting of what it politely called “shock-talk radio,” but what could instead fairly be labeled broadcasting by hate-breeding motor-mouths who give vileness a bad name.
I won’t recycle here the repugnancies the team found by listening five weekdays in a row “to a dozen prominent shows on so-called terrestrial radio.” If you want to see them, click on “Shock “Radio Shrugs at Imus’s Fall and Roughs Up the Usual Victims.”
Rather, two points deserve emphasis:
First, the Times did additional praiseworthy Journalism 101 of a kind that’s rarely done by asking Talk Radio Network and CBS Radio, two companies that syndicate the First Amendment-abusers, about the “appropriateness” of their remarks. The Times also inquired of advertisers whether they were aware of what they were sponsoring. No matter that the responses were predictable; the important thing is that the questions were asked and that the syndicators and advertisers knew that the questions, responses and non-responses would see print in the Times.
Second, leading news organizations should long ago have done Journalism-101 fact-checking for news articles on Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and others of their ilk, as I argued in a talk in 2005.
“It is because the scoundrels exert vast power that mainstream news organizations are duty-bound to monitor what they say and do,” I said. “To be sure, the scoundrels do get occasional hits: Think Frank Rich in the Times. In my view, however, commentary, no matter how much supplemented by Media Matters, bloggers, and others, is neither a sufficient response nor a good excuse for the enduring failure of the Times, Post, and others to do in-depth, fair-minded, and sustained journalism about this gang. I’m talking about reporting, not invective. I have in mind, for example, careful journalism comparing actual facts with what are alleged to be facts in the torrential outpourings of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, and Ann Coulter, among many others.”
Just look at the gold struck by three Indiana University scholars when they did a “content analysis” of O’Reilly’s trademark “Talking Points Memo,” the opener on “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News.
“[T]hey punctiliously compare O’Reilly’s rhetoric to that used by 1930s radio broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin, whose pro-fascist rants made him infamous,” Rosa Brooks wrote in the Los Angeles Times on May 4 (“Sweet Jesus I love Bill O’Reilly!“)
“But O’Reilly leaves Coughlin in the shade. When it comes to ‘name-calling,’ for instance (which the study helpfully defines as giving ‘a person or idea a bad label to make the audience reject them without examining the evidence’), Coughlin’s radio broadcasts averaged 3.42 incidents per minute, while O’Reilly managed an impressive 8.88 name-calling incidents per minute – an insult every 6.8 seconds!”
Now for the fact-check, reported by Media Matters on May 2: The study’s finding that O’Reilly is “‘quick to resort to name-calling’…directly contradicts O’Reilly’s Feb. 23, 2006, claim that he doesn’t ‘do personal attacks’ on his show–a claim that Media Matters has repeatedly debunked.”
Shouldn’t the mainstream press have done the kind of debunking done by the Indiana University scholars and Media Matters?
May 7th, 2007 at 3:32 pm |
Intersting opinion article. I would be more interested in a study looking at the accuracy of the mainstream media.
Remember, O’Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh, Stewart, etc. are all opinion shows and not news shows. There is no expectation of an unbiased source as there should be with a newspaper or news channel. Is it any wonder that the main media outlets are losing viewers and readers are record pace? Media reform should start at home and get back to the days of reporting the news instead of creating news and telling us what we should think.
May 7th, 2007 at 8:45 pm |
Funny how you want to shut down speech you disagree with. We call that fascism
May 7th, 2007 at 11:49 pm |
“I came to speak as a journalist, not as a partisan, and that is what I will do.” This line was followed by some of the most bitter, partisan rhetoric I have read in recent times. I have to laugh at someone who, having made a career as a journalist, has the audacity to refer to people with whom he disagrees (be it in tone, subject or content) as “First Amendment-abusers.” If this is what passes for journalism at Harvard, then true journalism is dead.
The First Amendment applies to all Americans, not merely you and your sanctimonious brethren in the ivory towers of Cambridge, sir. What you smugly refer to as abuse, the rest of us call, the free exercise thereof.
May 8th, 2007 at 1:40 am |
Well, Morton, if the mainstream media actually reported all the news fairly, maybe so-called right wing radio would have far fewer listeners. I listen because I know longer trust the mainstream media. They are all shills for Dems. The left controls our schools and colleges, our major newspapers, and the network news. You think free speech is fine — as long as you approve. You and you pals are what is wrong, Morton.
May 8th, 2007 at 1:43 am |
Had it not been for talk radio and the internet, we may have never known that Bill Clinton raped Juanita Broaddrick. I’ll bet not many of you know that Hillary, Bill, and may others in the Dem hierarchy will be under oath this year in the massive business fraud case in Los Angeles — Paul v Clinton. You probably didn’t read that Hillary has filed four false FEC reports and the FEC ruled in Dec. 2005 that her treasurer deliberately hid 721K. Our documentary will be out in a few months. It is a shame that Morton’s pals have not done their jobs as investigative reporters.
May 8th, 2007 at 7:53 am |
You sir are a disgrace! “To encourage probing journalism, one commentary at a time?” What a joke! You want everyone else to report down the middle but you should be the only one with the right to comment? Talk radio does EXACTLY what your motto would suggest; it is the talk hosts who are giving the commentary. There is a place for journalism, news programs, newspapers etc… The problem is, that THEY (the pseudo-journalists) are the ones giving commentary instead of unbiased news. Talk radio hosts are the ones who are honestly doing their craft, giving their opinions. Shame on you for attempting to confuse the issue. However, thanks to talk radio, phony intellectuals like you, no longer have the power they once had. Thanks to talk radio, we have figured you and your ilk out; we will no longer be held ransom to your constant underlying demands for power!
May 8th, 2007 at 11:41 pm |
I’d be impressed if we could get the “mainstream press” to stop employing charlatans like Keith Olbermann. Heck, Olbermann is worse than any of those you mentioned, and he’s supposedly in the news business, not in opinion or entertainment. (It is a bit sad that a former sports reporter has come to be in such a position in any case.)
May 9th, 2007 at 3:27 pm |
You commend the old york times? ? ha ha, what a joke, Pinchy has run that crappy paper into the ground. it now represents what is wrong with journalism.
just like a liberal take something away from everybody, and keep it for yourself