Link Banana

Passport has put together a list of 20. Jack Shafer has ten more.

And, somewhat related, Kevin Drum is sick of the lies about Ms. Palin and the Bridge to Nowhere and thinks the fact that the McCain campaign is still able to talk about it is an indictment of the press.

Jack Shafer dares thinking the unthinkable: Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal may actually be getting better.

Jack Shafer says that Michael Chrichton’s rather infamous prediction about the demise of mass media wasn’t wrong, just early.

As we pass his prediction’s 15-year anniversary, I’ve got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It’s gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren’t going extinct tomorrow, Crichton’s original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.

He also talks at length with the author about the topic and more.

I love when Slate’s media critic Jack Shafer offers a necessary bit of curmudgeonry. 

Why doesn’t every newspaper Web site routinely link directly to the competition’s work? If a competitor’s story is good enough to cite in the copy, it’s good enough to link to. Examples: A recent Washingtonpost.com story cited an Nytimes.com story but linked to a generic page about the Times. The Nytimes.com does no better, citing a news-breaking Washington Post story in a recent article but not linking to it. (I can’t even locate a landing page for theWashington Post on Nytimes.com. Subtle slap or oversight?)

For a while, Slate’s media critic Jack Shafer has been saying that “pharm parties” — parties where teens throw a bunch of prescription drugs into a bowl and take them by the handful — are a myth made for newspapers. Now he’s also found their historical predecessor: “fruit salad parties.”

The March 30, 1966, Lowell Sun was the earliest clip I located, and it is a classic of the genre. In a general piece about drug use, the Sun’s reporter confided:

In Medford, several months ago, a group of teen-agers had a “fruit salad party.” Each person brought three pills. The pills were mixed together in a bowl, and each person took three. Most of the takers were hospitalized, and one is still in serious condition, in a coma.

Observe the journalistic rigor practiced by the Sun. No sources. No names. No mention of specific drugs. How do you gauge the truth value of such a paragraph?

A few weeks ago, This American Life (the radio version) played an excellent story (TAL episode/original) that Malcolm Gladwell performed at The Moth. At the end, Ira Glass says that The Moth is a place where “people come to tell both true stories and occasional tall tales.” If you’re like me, after hearing it you desperately wanted to know how much truth was in Gladwell’s story.

Jack Shafer decided to find out, and make himself into something of a grinch along the way:

A storyteller can’t have it both ways, instructing listeners to “look it up” while stretching the yarn beyond the breaking point or claiming that smuggling the “baffling” phrase into Post copy became “literally” an “obsession.” Gladwell’s method, and his decision to let This American Life air his tale, raises … well, new and troubling questions about his attitude toward his audience.

Jack Shafer tears into a Wall Street Journal columnist. It’s not that interesting, but I did very much enjoyed the first paragraph:

Desperate newspaper columnists can always grind out a quick piece by purchasing a large burlap bag and stuffing “The Press” and several pounds of broken glass inside it. Drag to a steep, long staircase, give it a shove, and the column almost writes itself.

Jack Shafer says what most visitors to the sites have known for a while:

In their craven pursuit of clicks, the editors at CNN.com, MSNBC.com, and Foxnews.com turn their sites into virtual tabloids by peppering their home pages with the most sordid and bizarre stories that can be culled from the world’s news wires.

Or so says Slate’s Jack Shafer. He goes onto assert that everyone — both the public and journalists — should stop pretending that that’s not true.

Consider the fullness of the metaphor: A bunch of perfectly groomed and tended politicians gather at the starting gate. They all have track records and somebody has placed a bet on them. When the gun sounds, they run like Seabiscuit, frothing and jostling. Some pull up lame before the race concludes. The event, which seems to go on forever, can be a blowout or end in a photo finish. The winner takes a victory bow as the losers regroup for the next heat or depart for the glue factory.

During an actual horse race, nobody wants to hear the announcer drone on about the ponies’ dietary regimes. They want to know who’s winning, who’s gaining, who’s in the thick of it, and who can be written off. Are the front-runners burning themselves out and letting a back marker take the prize?

Slate’s Jack Shafer has some — unfairly? — harsh words for citizens and journalists who’ve become fans of the “post-partisanship” of Obama, Bloomberg, and Schwarzenegger.

It sounds heavenly to imagine the banishment of partisanship, gridlock, division, anger, bitterness, pettiness, catcalls, and smears from politics. But once you do that, you’ve basically ended politics, and contrary to Obama, you’ve done nothing noble. We throw dead cats and insults at one another because we have philosophical disagreements that separate us, and all the smooth talk from political pulpits occupied by Obama and Bloomberg can’t change that for long. […]

If you embrace compromise for the sake of compromise and ban division for the sake of political unity, you’re left with parties and candidates that don’t stand for anything. At that point, why should anybody want to vote for a smooth bipartisanist like Barack Obama?

The appointment of the fiercely-conservative William Kristol to the New York Times’s Op-Ed page raised a lot of heckles in the “progressive” blogosphere. But it’s actually a very good thing, says Slate’s Jack Shafer:

Times readers who expect the paper’s columnists to mirror their views may not like the idea of an alleged war criminal like Kristol infesting its pages any more than they liked the idea of Nixon’s pal Safire setting up a squat there. But they’re the same people who’d boycott a restaurant just because it starts serving an entrée they hate.