What Mike Allen is reading

A link in Mike Allen's Playbook column on Politico.com has Simon Owens wondering what exactly it is that he's reading. Allen obviously copied the wrong link into the story, which takes you to this site. It's not as weird as it might first appear, though. Assuming he reads Japanese, Allen apparently is thinking about taking a trip to Japan.

Entrapment journalizm

Simon Owens at Bloggasm attempts to dispell the silly notion that conservative political activists with cameras are doing the hard work of uncovering corruption that the lamestream media chooses to ignore. Instead, he argues, the likes of James O'Keefe and Jason Mattera are seeking attention - and YouTube hits - for their political views.

A link to Owens' column is here.

The ambush method, as described by Owens, seems to borrow from the work of the Daily Show and even the old Howard Stern radio program. Except that instead of being funny, and possibly satirical, the right-wing videos seethe with a raw, impotent anger that makes the whole enterprise humorless.

O'Keefe doesn't like being investigated

James O'Keefe, the conservative activist who embarrassed ACORN with his pimp videos and who was arrested last week for allegedly trying to tamper with Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu's phones, is pushing back against media reports that suggest he's got extremist views. Simon Owens at Bloggasm reports being on the receiving end when he linked to a Salon story that said he had a "race problem."

How unoriginal

If the Huffington Post is the future of journalism, then it should be producing a great deal of original reporting with its stable of unpaid writers. Simon Owens at Bloggasm set out to find just how much, so he combed through a single day's work to find any stories that required some form of contact between the writer and a human source:

...if a blogger called a source, emailed a source, sat on a conference call, published a news tip, attended an event in person, or found any information that wasn’t easily available through a Google search, reading another news source, or watching television, I marked it as original reporting.

Owens looked at 77 front-page stories. He found four were links to news on other sites, 13 were wire copy stories, and 55 were opinion and/or summaries of someone else's work (as this post is).

Five stories met the definition of original reporting - that's six percent.

What would Google name it?

Blogger and change-opportunist Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine is writing a book about how knowledge and abundance will remake all that we've known before and he wants you to help him come up with a title. (via Simon Owens on Twitter)

Citizen scientists

Science blogger Peter Lipson and others have launched a campaign to debunk many of the claims made in health-related articles posted in Huffington Post's "Living" section. The website's "wellness" editor Patricia Fitzgerald also comes under critcism for exaggerting her medical qualifications, as well as the qualifications of others who post there. Simon Owens at Bloggasm has the story:

“Part of it is a misrepresentation of qualifications,” Lipson told me in a phone conversation. “They started putting the word ‘Dr’ in front of everyone’s name — more or less for anyone who has a doctorate in something or other — and Patricia Fitzgerald claims to have a doctorate in homeopathy, whatever that is. Homeopathy is a completely discredited fantasy. When you give that kind of credibility — I mean first you invite them to a well-known mainstream outlet, you let them call themselves a doctor when they’re not really qualified, and then you let them interview other people and present them as professionals — it just layers on and layers on.”

It would be different if they admitted up front that these stories were all editorial in nature, the internist said, and presented them as such. He compared the method of fact checking in the health section of HuffPo to that of the Gray Lady. “They need to exercise some kind of journalistic integrity,” Lipson said. “When you read the New York Times, whether you agree with what they do or not — people can argue about the quality having gone down — but when you read the editorial pages and you read the news, you know there’s some editing going on. You know they don’t just say, ‘write whatever you want and we’ll throw our name above it.’ They have real editors.”

A blog, or not a blog?

Is Huffington Post a blog? Simon Owens argues that it's not, and in doing so indirectly raises a larger issue: The need to hack through the euphemisms that pretend to describe rather ordinary activities as something extraordinary because it happens on the Web.

I suggest we start by dropping the "new media" mantle when referring to our Internet-savvy hired guns and start describing more precisely what they actually do. Some things news organizations are doing online are new - and many things aren't. Defining which is which will not only save money by making us more efficient, it will save jobs.

What bad decision-making looks like

The blogger "Libertarian Conservative" at Political Byline has posted an angry and racially charged attack ad aimed at Barack Obama. And when I say angry and racially charged, I mean the ad pictures the black Democratic candidate alongside a noose with the words "asphyxiation" and "The Fucking Solution."

See the ad here.

The 36-year-old blogger (he lives in Detroit and suffers from ADD - read his "about me" page) claims he put up the ad as a frustrated response to nasty attacks leveled against Sarah Palin by "Anti-American, God Hating, Baby Killing, Fascist bastards" - a taste of their own medicine, in other words.

He has this to say to any liberals who doesn't get his point:

It seems that a few Liberals have spotted this posting and one even wants to organize to get my ads pulled. Good luck with that! Anyhow, any liberal who doesn’t get it, is just terminally stupid.

(Hat tip to Simon Owens at Bloggasm for pointing me to the site.)

Deep thoughts

Simon Owens, who blogs at Bloggasm and writes for PBS MediaShift, interviewed me and a few other writers a couple weeks ago about the challenges of publishing a private blog while working as a professional journalist. My answers were a bit rambling but the story turned out well.

I'd be interested to hear what my cadre of readers think on the subject. Comment section is thirsting for your wisdom.

Incidentally, I am not of the opinion that objective journalism is some false notion that we should do away with in the name of honesty.