Big Media Continues to Drop the Ball, Sucking up to the Establishment Instead of, Like, Reporting Reality

Sunday morning irrelevance:

In a new report by Media Matters for America -- If It's Sunday, It's Still Conservative: How the Right Continues to Dominate the Sunday Talk Shows, we show that the Sunday shows -- Meet the Press, ABC's This Week, CBS' Face the Nation, and Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday -- have consistently given Republicans and conservatives an edge over their Democratic and progressive counterparts in the last two years, the period of the 109th Congress. And, as our analysis shows, the recent shift in power in Washington has yielded mixed results, at best.

OUR KEY FINDINGS:

• Despite previous network claims that a conservative advantage existed on the Sunday shows simply because Republicans controlled Congress and the White House, only one show, ABC's This Week, has been roughly balanced between both sides overall since the congressional majority switched hands in the 2006 midterm elections.

• Since the 2006 midterm elections, NBC's Meet the Press and CBS' Face the Nation have provided less balance between Republican and Democratic officials than Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday despite the fact that Fox News Sunday remains the most unbalanced broadcast overall both before and after the election.

• During the 109th Congress (2005 and 2006), Republicans and conservatives held the advantage on every show, in every category measured. All four shows interviewed more Republicans and conservatives than Democrats and progressives overall, interviewed more Republican elected and administration officials than Democratic officials, hosted more conservative journalists than progressive journalists, held more panels that tilted right than tilted left, and gave more solo interviews to Republicans and conservatives.Now that Congress has switched hands, one would reasonably expect Democrats and progressives to be represented at least as often as Republicans and conservatives on the Sunday shows. Yet our findings for the months since the midterm elections show that the networks have barely changed their practices. Only one show - ABC's This Week - has shown significant improvement, having as many Democrats and progressives as Republicans and conservatives on since the election. On the other three programs, Republicans and conservatives continue to get more airtime and exposure.

In the months ahead, will the networks address the imbalance in their guest lineups? Or will they continue with business as usual?

Link. And the referenced report is here.

And a recent profiler of one enabler, the destroyer of NBC News:

Here is why you need not watch "Meet the Press."

During the trial of Scooter "I. Lewis" Libby, the notes of Cathie Martin were flashed up on a courtroom screen. Martin was an aide to Vice President Darth Vader, I mean Dick Cheney, and her notes concerned ways in which Cheney might combat the notion that the White House had not been honest about Iraq's nuclear capabilities. As option number one, Martin wrote "MTP-VP," meaning either that the Vice President should aim his Death Star at some hapless planet and "massacre their people" or, more likely, that the Vice President should appear on the program you are not going to watch today.

Martin then did a pros and cons notation about this strategy. On the pro side she wrote "control message."

Really? That's the best thing about sending Vice President Cheney on "Meet the Press?" That you can control the message you want to get out? Interesting.

But then there were more notes presented at the trial. These notes were taken by Libby himself about a conversation he had with Cheney adviser Mary Matalin about how to deal with that meddlesome NBC fellow Chris Matthews. "Call Tim. He hates Chris - he needs to know it all," was the advice from Matalin jotted down by Libby.

Hmmm. A Cheney adviser knows that NBC's Russert hates NBC's Matthews and that Russert will be helpful.

A couple of connectable dots involve Matalin's husband, James Carville, and Russert's son, Luke, who together launched a satellite radio sports talk show called "60/20," a reference to their respective age groups, apparently because the title "A Giant Talking Adder and an Unqualified Stripling With a Famous Dad Discuss Big Strong Sweaty Men" was already taken by the Sci-Fi Channel.

Tim Russert and Carville actually promoted the sports show on "Meet the Press" (where Carville and Matalin regularly appear) without revealing that Luke Russert was the second host, as if that somehow removed the taint of hand-in-glove favoritism from this plug.

So Russert gets his kid a fancy gig with a famous and wired guy like Carville. It hardly comes as a surprise to think that Carville's wife feels she has a little inside advantage in playing Russert for Cheney's benefit.

But wait. There's more.

When Russert was first subpoenaed, in 2004, to speak to the grand jury in the Libby case, he and NBC made a great show of fighting to quash that subpoena because, in the words of NBC News president Neil Shapiro, "The American public will be deprived of important information if the government can freely question journalists about their efforts to gather news." This quote appeared in a "story" on the MSNBC website about NBC's brave resistance.

Stirring words. Only one problem. It emerged at trial that Russert spoke freely to an FBI agent about this whole matter the first time he was ever contacted. The whole pageant of refusing to cooperate was kind of a charade. He had already cooperated. I mean, shouldn't the story MSNBC ran about NBC's commitment to the American public have explained that Russert compromised at least some of that commitment the first chance he got?

OK. Just a little more.

In his own trial testimony, Russert explained his own unique approach to the concept of "off the record" conversations with public officials. Russert said public officials do not have to ask to go off the record with him. They are always presumptively off the record. Then, if he wants to get them on the record, he revisits the point and asks them to go public.

This is a wonderful, generous strategy, and the only problem with it is that it represents a complete inversion of the standard operating practices of journalism. Every reporter who works at this newspaper, and pretty much every reporter professionally employed at any other reputable organ of the press has been instructed to do the opposite: assume that every utterance is on the record unless the utterer has explicitly gone off the record before uttering.

People who deal with the press are expected to know that.

You're not even allowed to say, "The U.S. government blew up Pluto in November of last year, but that's off the record," although some reporters will give you the NBA continuation rule if you don't pause for breath anywhere in there.

A gray area would be something like, "The real Zodiac killer was - and this is off the record - Andy Rooney." That's probably a legitimate off the record statement.

But Russert's policy is one of his own invention, and it's the kind of policy you'd have if you prized your cozy relationship with powerful people more highly than you prized your role as a reporter.

I mention all this because, here and there, you read comments about the prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and how much he damaged the First Amendment by sweating a bunch of journalists. Please. It's more like he lanced some kind of infectious boil.

And I mention it because now you don't have to watch "Meet the Press."

I'm sure that if Russert apologizes for pretending to fight a subpoena without telling us he had already sung like a canary or if he renounces his cozy relationships with the powerful, someone will tell you.

Link.