Rooting out the "undermedia"

Media watchers have produced one-week-after reflections on the two Big Stories that surfaced out of the conservative's activist media: Andrew Breitbart's take down of a USDA employee on a bogus charge of reverse racism and Tucker Carlson's attempt to expose a liberal media cabal by publishing the musing of self-identified liberal commentators.

David Carr describes the stories as "provocateur" journalism, a radicalized form of the advocacy journalism practiced by more traditional media:

As content providers increasingly hack their own route to an audience, it’s becoming clear that many are less interested in covering the game than tilting the field.

Carr's colleague at the New York Times, Brian Stelter, writes about an "undermedia" (a Breitbart term) that pushes stories meant to reinforce and amplify a set of beliefs, or fears, rather than to test conventional wisdom. Thus, Breitbart runs a false story because he sees his job as constructing a conservative narrative, not chasing down facts.

Breitbart told Stelter:

"It’s my business model to craft strategies to make sure that the mainstream media is forced to reckon with stories that it would love to ignore because it doesn’t fit their narrative."

Breitbart and Carlson desperately want us to treat news as a series of competing partisan narratives. It is an effective way of neutering facts that contradict one's own views and emboldens like-minded thinkers to ignore any argument that support the other side. It tells readers that they have a choice of ideologies, and that they must identify with one or the other, and in doing so deprives them of the facts they need to evaluate these partisan narratives for what they are: the tools of the entrenched to manipulate votes. Breitbart's folly, a result of giddy over-eagerness, hopefully pulls back the curtain.

How to create talking points for right-wing media critics

The moment then-American Spectator writer Ezra Klein created the semi-private Journolist listserv for liberal journalists and thinkers, a ticking political time bomb was created. No matter what the rationale for this closed online discussion group, no matter that contributors were mostly columnists and bloggers who self-identified as liberal commentators, the contents were bound to become fodder for those who claim the mainstream media holds a liberal bias. And so it came to pass, when the Daily Caller, an online outfit started by conservative-pundit Tucker Carlson, began publishing comments made to the list during the 2008 presidential campaign. The fact that liberal opinion-makers expressed liberal opinions doesn't seem all that newsworthy, but to those news operations that wish to blend opinion and news, this incident should serve as a cautionary tale.

On that note, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that today's Daily Caller post mentions KCRW. Since I work for the station, I'll hand it off to LA Observed to lay out what happened, which you can read here.

Tucker's immodest proposal

Conservative pundit and bow tie aficionado Tucker Carlson plans to launch a right-leaning website, called TheDailyCaller.com, to cover the policy decisions of the Obama administration. Carlson wants to combine the advocacy-approach of Huffington Post with the pay-per-click model of Gawker to create a site that simultaneously drives the news, beats Drudge Report to the punch and upholds basic journalism standards.

From The Hill:

"We are a general-interest newspaper-format style site," Carlson told conservative bloggers at the Heritage Foundation on Tuesday. "There just aren't enough people covering this administration and telling the people what's going on." ...

Carlson said that the site's reporters would share in the profits based on how much traffic is drawn in by their work. He said the site would seek to "drive" the news, similar to the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post, the New York Times, and other major news outlets. (The site's motto, Carlson said, is "every seven minutes," and seeks to be "even faster than Drudge.")