Category Archives: The Media

Mike Allen is a journalist rich in education and experience:

• Served a Time magazine's White House correspondent
• Six years at The Washington Post, where he covered President Bush's first term, Capitol Hill, campaign finance, and the Bush, Gore and Bradley campaigns of 2000.
• Stints at the Richmond (VA) Times-Dispatch, The Free Lance-Star (VA)
• Richmond and Alexandria bureaus of The Washington Post.
• Covered parts of Connecticut for The New York Times.
• B.A. from Washington and Lee University, where he majored in politics and journalism.

He has a c.v. as good or better than most in the business.

So how have we come to a place where a guy with this much experience can do something as stupid and evil — or is it just lazy and ignorant? — as this?

Update: Could it be petty, personal pique?

In a budget notable for cutting hospitals for the poor and indigent while not raising taxes for billionaires, the Bush budget proposal contains the familiar assault on domestic public TV and radio. The foreign broadcasting arm, long a home for a strange mix of dedicated professionals and far-right propagandists, is slated for a hefty increase. (See MediaCitizen: Bush Calls for Propaganda Surge, Slashes PBS.)

Here's my modest proposal: given how generally lousy so much of foreign propaganda is, why not outsource the job to the BBC World Service, which, despite its effectiveness, continues to suffer the death of a thousand cuts.

This announcement from the Washington Post is interesting on several levels.

High School Newspapers on washingtonpost.com: washingtonpost.com and the Washington Post Young Journalists Development Program are now enabling local high school journalists to put their school newspapers online, free of charge.

Our goal is to create a thriving virtual community for high school journalists and their peers, a place where students and other washingtonpost.com readers can see what schools are writing and comment on their work.

High-schoolers, with the aid of faculty advisors, use easily accessible blog software to publish articles and photos to a washingtonpost.com server. The blogs can be updated from any computer at any time, allowing student journalists the freedom to post stories outside of their traditional publication schedule.

We are launching the new feature in collaboration with three local high schools – located in D.C., Maryland and Virginia, respectively – and are actively recruiting more participants. The program is open to public and private high schools in The Post's circulation area.

While it appears that the newspaper faculty advisors will have some role, I wonder how that will work in practice. The Post says that “The blogs can be updated from any computer at any time, allowing student journalists the freedom to post stories outside of their traditional publication schedule.” Does that mean true freedom from the school's control? In other words, will the faculty advisors have to sign off on every posting, or just initially authenticate the students (and perhaps pull credentials)? There's a real potential here for this resource to become a liberating back-channel around the censoring grip of high school principals. Can that really be what the somewhat conservative Post has in mind?

And how about the comment sections? Presumably these will be moderated like the Post's own comment sections, but by whom? Will these become real independent forums for kids (and parents?) to talk about school issues? That would be a potentially transformative political resource as so much of family life is organized around schools.

Then there's the revenue issue. Will the Post run ads in these sections? Will it kick back any of the money to the students? Will they be recruited to sell ads for their sections and given commissions?

Done right, this could be the start of something big.

I believe that there is only one thing that can stop a Democrat — any likely Democrat — from being elected President in 2008: the propensity of the mainstream press to make stuff up.

In the course of recounting some media stupidity so dumb I don't even want to write about it, The Carpetbagger Report asks,

I can’t help but notice that Stephen Colbert’s over-the-top parodies of right-wing blowhards is looking less and less like a parody all the time. As Kevin Drum put it, “Parody is going to become a lost art if the blowhard brigade keeps trying to top itself with stuff like this. I mean, what could I possibly write that was any more ridiculous than the thing itself?”

I think I've got the answer: O'Reilly, Colbert to trade appearances.