Newspaper

One thing that we all agree on quite strongly here at CultureKitchen is that most of what we read and hear from the various mainstream news media sources is bogus to some extent -- incomplete, inaccurate, in many cases biased.

How can we tell when we're being told the truth and when we're being misled or lied to? How do we know who we can count on to tell us the truth and who we can safely assume is blowing smoke at us? How can we tell the difference between good journalism and bad?

It's difficult to separate the news wheat from the spin chaff, because every time we look at a new article or listen to a new story we have to keep asking ourselves the same questions time after time:

Is this a good story?
Is it informative?
Is it fair?
Is it well-sourced?
Does it show the "big picture"?
Can we trust the publisher of this story?

That's a time-consuming set of mental hoops to jump to every time we see a headline or hear a lead-in to another piece of news. If the answer to all or most of those questions is "yes", then we don't want to miss out on exploring and learning from the story in question. If the answer to all or most of those questions is "no", then we don't want to waste our time or bandwidth wading through it at all.

How do you know that Team Hillary is definitely planning a run for 2008? When James Carville starts writing Op-Eds that make the threadbare case that she can be elected.

Carville's case is essentially this: Hillary got elected in 2000 to the Senate despite objections from the naysayers; some of her polling numbers are not catastrophic; she has a net positive rating of 54%-42%; having been through the right-wing slime treatment for over a decade, nothing they can say, supposedly, will stick; and besides, those people who like her really, really like her.

Wake up, James (if I may call you that). It ain't so.

Hillary got elected in 2000 because of four factors: her willingness to work very hard for it, her own glamour as First Lady, her luck in having a weak opponent, and because New York is a blue state, at the time a blue state still angry over impeachment. For a sitting First Lady, especially this one, to get elected against a completely unknown junior Congressman in this state is not illustrative of anything. Whatever naysayers there were, not that I can really recall any, were at best marginal; after all, Rangel and Moynihan recruited her.

Matt Bai's article on YearlyKos, Can Bloggers Get Real?, has some on the lefty blogosphere atwitter.

Susie Madrak, Jeralynn Merritt commented favorably about it; but it's comments by bloggers not affiliated with DailyKos like George Nemeth and Jill Miller Zimon that I find particularly important. Especially when read before Barbara O'Brien's reality check. I also liked that John Holbo picked on the same quote as I did but for purely onotological reasons.

The quote in question follows :

The Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly, recently profiled a 23-year-old law student who writes on Daily Kos’s front page under the pseudonym Georgia10, positing that she may well be the most-read political writer in the city, even though few people know her real name. (For the record, it’s Georgia Logothetis, and she lives with her parents.) In this way, Daily Kos and other blogs resemble a political version of those escapist online games where anyone with a modem can disappear into an alternate society, reinventing himself among neighbors and colleagues who exist only in a virtual realm.

The plot thickens people.

I have yet to hear from anybody over at The New York Times or from their most notorious consultant, the blog 'evangelizer' and publisher of Buzzmachine, Jeff Jarvis. Jeff is the same guy that led campaign against Dell for, of all things, ignoring his comments and criticisms about the company.

Irony works in mysterious ways.

The news of my wandering around their blog has been reviewed, newsed, gawked, slated and wired, to say the least. Here's the current list :

Daily News | Daily Politics
The Times uninvited new blogger

Lisa Stone
Surfette: Remember "Step 1: No more rookie maneuvers"? Here's how NYTD can avoid delivering Exhibit C.

Online Journal Review
NY Times leaves backdoor open on new politics blog?

Doc Searls
The Doc Searls Weblog : Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Life Of Rubin
Wednesday Morning Link-a-thon

Gawker
Remainders : Toos is a virgin who can't drive

Slate
Fast and sloppy rules

Wired
All The News That Anyone Can Log In and Print

Metroblogging NYC
Security Blooper at NYT political blog in development

Jossip
NYT political blog needs better homeland security
**Best. Title. Ever.**

Bloggy
New York Times Working on a NY politics blog

Room Eight
New to blogging?

Editor and Publisher
Blogger Gets Sneak Peak at New 'NY Times' Politics Blog

I want to do a follow-up experiment. I would like people to submit the story to Boing Boing. And I want to wait and see what happens.

BoingBoing is now managed by a company called Federated Media. Federated Media got an initial round of funding from ...

wait for it ...

wait for it ...

The Carnival of the Feminists is up at I See Invisible People | Carnival of Feminists XIII. Lorraine submitted her article, I am failing my race.

First off, I think carnivals are a great way to condense every months what's happening around the different blogospheres that are popping like corn all over the web. But by the way they have been developed, I have never felt they actually are that effective after the carnival is done.

Here's my reasons why :

MaryScott O'Connor had a relatively good profile done about her at The Left, Online and Outraged. I say relatively because, for such a beautiful woman, the picture they chose to run makes her look totally hideous.

We met online through DailyKos and face to face during last years's Washington DC United for Peace and Justice march. We spent some quality time while marching and bunking in her hotel room (she has a cute little snore I've blogged about somewhere at DailyKos).

Maryscott, like many of us in the left blogosphere, does this not out of looking for a job as a political consultant or becausse she want to get rich and famous doing punditry online. As I have said before, to fastest way to get rich and famous online is to do pornography.

No, she and I an many others do this because we are optimists. People sometimes don't get that under Maryscott's rants, Rude Pundit's profanities, Jesus General's sarcasm and this here blogger's blunt political pronouncements against people both on the left and right, lie the likes of dreamers who wake up in the morning eager to find something that will give us another reason and another day to believe in the goodness of Humanity. I think this is what is lost in the Washington Post article.

Still, I am glad my blog sister is there. She deserves it. Nobody does outrage and gets results like Maryscott O'Connor.

SHERMAN OAKS, Calif. -- In the angry life of Maryscott O'Connor, the rage begins as soon as she opens her eyes and realizes that her president is still George W. Bush. The sun has yet to rise and her family is asleep, but no matter; as soon as the realization kicks in, O'Connor, 37, is out of bed and heading toward her computer.

Out there, awaiting her building fury: the Angry Left, where O'Connor's reputation is as one of the angriest of all. "One long, sustained scream" is how she describes the writing she does for various Web logs, as she wonders what she should scream about this day.

She smokes a cigarette. Should it be about Bush, whom she considers "malevolent," a "sociopath" and "the Antichrist"? She smokes another cigarette. Should it be about Vice President Cheney, whom she thinks of as "Satan," or about Karl Rove, "the devil"? Should it be about the "evil" Republican Party, or the "weaselly, capitulating, self-aggrandizing, self-serving" Democrats, or the Catholic Church, for which she says "I have a special place in my heart . . . a burning, sizzling, putrescent place where the guilty suffer the tortures of the damned"?

Darfur, she finally decides.

I refuse to give The New York Times the hard earned Google juice and page rank I have earned with my blogs. When I checked out their new design I noticed their "Most blogged" box linking to .... no blogs. Excuse me? How can you know it is most blogged if you don't show who is blogging to you in the first place?

Well, I'm glad I am not the only one who noticed.

[via New York Times faux "most blogged" list -- what a bunch of leeches. - The Jason Calacanis Weblog]:

Just when you think the NYT is starting to get it they create a "Most Blogged" list *without* the back up data of who's blogging the stories!!!

Come on NYT... would it kill you to link to a blog!??!?!?!

Let me get this straight: you'll mine the data from the blogosphere to make your list, but you won't reward the blogosphere by linking back?!?!?!

That makes you a bunch of leeches--you take but you give nothing.

You see, the more we link to them, the not only the more traffic the get, but the higher in Google ranking they will be. And that is worth money. A. LOT. OF. MONEY. Jason Calacanis knows this. That's why he calls them leeches.

So boo to them.

Washington Post, on the other hand ... Thanks to Technorati, they get my heart-felt, "Yeah!"

Sure, they effed up royally with Ben Domenech, but at least they acknowledge the existence of blogs ... most importantly my blogs.

Other blog friendly publications?