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Balloon Juice: Quote of the Day
Political Animal: Obama in Asia
Grasping Reality with a Ten-Foot-Long Flexible Trunk: James Fallows Is Really Shrill! (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Edition)
Reactions
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http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/11/manufactured_failure_2_the_pre.php 12/7/2009 |
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"Everything is through prism of short-term political calculation as opposed to thinking seriously about stuff." - http://tinyurl.com/yccsf53 11/23/2009 |
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Manufactured failure #2: the press, Obama, Asia (James Fallows) http://bit.ly/4Mg7g6 11/23/2009 |
Quote of the Day
Balloon Juice —
“Even through a veil of censorship and propaganda, the Chinese people managed a clearer view of Obama’s visit than the US media did.”- Tish Durkin
(via James Fallows)
Obama in Asia
Political Animal —
... , referring to the Chinese president and premier. "I've got to say some of the reporting I saw afterward was off the mark. I saw sweeping comments about things that apparently weren't talked about, when they were discussed in great detail in the meetings." James Fallows noted this morning: Two colleagues with different perspectives -- from each other's, and sometimes from my own -- marvel at how badly the mainstream American press distorted the picture of what happened during Barack Obama's just-ended tour of Asia. [...] We're all familiar with one "crisis of the press," the ...
James Fallows Is Really Shrill! (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Edition)
Grasping Reality with a Ten-Foot-Long Flexible Trunk —
... Manufactured failure #2: the press, Obama, Asia: I wasn't in touch with Howard French or Tish Durkin (to say nothing of Amb. Jon Huntsman) before we all expressed the same amazed and negative reaction at the way our colleagues had missed the main point of what just happened in America's relations with a very important part of the world. We're all familiar with one "crisis of the press," the business collapse. This is a different kind of crisis, though it makes the business crisis worse: the distortion of reality by compressing every complex issue into the narrative of the ...
The Rot In American Journalism
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan —
... Jim Fallows is deeply depressed by the moronic horse-race coverage of Obama's recent trip to Asia. He is not the only person staggered that the cable-news 24-hour spin-cycle is now the main prism through which to analyze complex long-term diplomacy. Money quote: ...
Midday open thread
Daily Kos —
... James Fallows, in a post entitled Manufactured Failure, hits the Washington press hard on how purely awful its coverage was of President Obama's trip to Asia, how uniformly negative it was compared with the actual reporting in China. ...
How the Liberal Media Behaves With Abject Obsequiousness to Barack Obama
The Mahablog —
... , who lived and worked in China and Japan for many years: “Barack Obama’s recent swing through Asia was a relative success, and certainly nothing like the disaster that most U.S. coverage implied.” And in a more recent post, Fallows says the press corps is guilty of distorting reality by “compressing every complex issue into the narrative of the DC-based ‘horse race.’” ...
links for 2009-11-22
Grasping Reality with a Ten-Foot-Long Flexible Trunk —
... America's Crazy Right Wing at Prayer
James Fallows: U.S. Press Corps Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch
I wasn't in touch with Howard French or Tish ...
Gimme a Break
Balloon Juice —
... defending himself from charges he won’t disclose.
At any rate, on to his whinge. He is mad at something someone wrote somewhere about the media coverage of the Asian trip, brushing off the criticism as just partisan bile from bloggers who aren’t capable of critical thinking. Of course, it wasn’t just bloggers, it was established journalists who were pointing out the failure of the media. James Fallows has had a multiple part series going (part 1, part 2, and part 3) in which he offered up the following assessment: ...
Fallows faults WH press corps on China
Michael Calderone's Blog —
The Atlantic’s James Fallows, who recently spent three years in China, has written five posts on his blog in the past three days—1, 2, 3, 4, 5—about press coverage of Obama’s stop in the country. (Fallows also weighed in on the topic during this weekend's “On the Media”).
Fallows argues that that coverage has focused primarily on the negative, and doesn’t buy the narrative that Obama couldn’t get much accomplished or be assertive with the Chinese because of how much the U.S. is in ...
Manufactured Outrage: The "Crazy" Human Rights Community
Weekly Standard Blog —
... for the Atlantic who has recently returned stateside. His six -- count 'em, six -- long posts in the past week on the topic of how the media got Obama's trip to Asia wrong have been fascinating reading. Entitled "Manufactured Failure," the series of posts explain how the media were led astray by their (take your pick) unrealistic expectations, ignorance, biases, excessive attention to score-keeping, and various other defects in their coverage. For example, Fallows and company chastise the press for covering Obama's Asian trip as if it were a campaign ...
Seeing the Asia trip in a new light
Political Animal —
... by the media's spin, insisting that the trip would pay dividends. The Atlantic 's James Fallows has been a leading critic of American outlets' coverage of the diplomatic efforts. Yesterday, Fallows followed up, noting more " ...
Obama in China - An Example of Village Group-Think, In Stark Relief
Library Grape —
... Remember all the pantswetting in the respectable establishment media about how Obama's trip to China was embarrassing and how Obama didn't seem to be getting much from the Chinese? All of this which is borne of their obsession with real-time, blow-by-blow, horse-race-style "analysis" that casts everything in the model of "How should this be viewed in terms of its optics today?". ...
Chuck Todd's Goatee
Rising Hegemon —
... Seriously, when does an official part of the chattering class -- one of the weekend talkers, someone from the leading newspapers -- look back on these past two weeks in journalism's effort to represent reality and ask how the dominant narrative could have been so wrong, and wrong in a way that was easily noticeable at the time? Just curious. The guiding motto for the inquiry should be the deathless subhead on Tish Durkin's ...
What Obama Gained In Asia
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan —
You won't find the results or analysis in the MSM which is why we have Jim Fallows at the Atlantic. If you did not read his brilliant dismemberment of lazy MSM reporting during the Asian tour, you can reprise the best here, here, here, here, here and here. If you haven't come away from this series of posts without a deeper and much better understanding of what Obma moved forward on this trip, then by all means return to watching cable news. But let's just look at the more recent headlines: Item One: ...
