Tag: Newsweek
Stat's Sharon Begley dies at 64
On January 18, 2021 By Dan KennedyIn Media
Boston loses another first-rate journalist: Sharon Begley of Stat News dies at 64. I remember reading her in Newsweek back when it was a great magazine. She had a long, impressive career.
MSNBC slings it in full-page ad for "Morning Joe"
On January 1, 2012 By Dan KennedyIn Media12 Comments
"Weird"! "Completely unnecessary"!
We can assume any advertisement that quotes selectively from what people have said about the product being touted is going to be at least somewhat deceptive. But I was so taken aback by one quote in a full-page ad for MSNBC's "Morning Joe" in today's New York Times that I thought I ought to do some digging. The ad, titled "The Most Influential Political Show in America," appears on the back page of the Sunday Review.
I can't say I've seen a lot of "Morning Joe," as I've never been someone who turns on the TV set in the morning, even when I'm home. I caught a bit of it when I was recuperating from elbow surgery last year, and was put off by the smug, insidery tone. The participation of tired, predictable pundits like Mike Barnicle and Mark Halperin, Salon's Hack of the Year (and the co-author of a book that used anonymous sources to slime the terminally ill Elizabeth Edwards), doesn't exactly lure me in any deeper.
The quote in the Times ad that caught my eye, "the best morning talk going," is from Tom Brokaw, which is innocuous enough — except that Brokaw is, well, a regular on "Morning Joe," as well as a longtime member of the NBC family. Perhaps that's not quite as bad as quoting Scarborough as saying that "Joe Scarborough is the sharpest political analyst on television," but it's close. So let's keep going, shall we?
Politico, the ad tells us, wants us to know that "Morning Joe's team has become the insider's insider." I cannot find that particular quote anywhere. What I can find, though, is a 2010 story from the Associated Press informing me that Politico and "Morning Joe" are business partners.
That same AP story is the source of yet another blurb from the ad: "An important wake-up call for political and media leaders." The full quote doesn't quite contradict that, but nevertheless places it in a rather different context: "An affiliation with Politico that began about six months ago helped cement the program's status as an important wake-up call for political and media leaders."
Speaking of different contexts, the ad also blurbs the phrase "appallingly entertaining," taken from the New Yorker. I looked that one up, and here's what Nancy Franklin wrote in 2008: "It's a weird, completely unnecessary show, and it's appallingly entertaining." OK, not a 180-degree contradiction of "appallingly entertaining," but you will note that MSNBC did not grab "completely unnecessary" for the ad.
Moving right along, the ad cites Forbes as referring to "Morning Joe" as "the hottest morning show." I tracked that one down to a column written for Forbes.com by veteran journalist James Brady in 2008 — who sounded none too pleased with that development. Bear with me, because this one needs a little air to breathe:
Is the media now really the story? Are journalists now the stars? Is all this incestuous, or is it clever reporting? Just consider these recent examples, a few weighty, some trivial, others clearly absurd:
"Morning Joe," a couple of hours of political dish on MSNBC hosted by a glib onetime congressman, is the hottest morning show around. Tina Fey of Saturday Night Live for a time was getting more ink than the candidates with her wickedly spot-on devastation of Gov. Palin. Rupert Murdoch's New York Post backs McCain and blasts Obama while Rupert himself calls Obama "a rock star." Larry King gets interviewed and reveals to columnist Cindy Adams that his own first great interview was with Eleanor Roosevelt when her husband was still president. Since FDR died in April of 1945, we learn the precocious Mr. King interviewed the First Lady when he was 12.
It doesn't seem to me that Brady is describing "Morning Joe" as must-see TV.
In 2009, Newsweek described "Morning Joe" as "a serious-minded evening show still wearing its bathrobe and its slippers." The ad, naturally, does not tell us — as Media Bistro does — that the writer, Colter Walls, had previously worked for MSNBC; that Newsweek and MSNBC were content partners; and that the then-editor of Newsweek, Jon Meacham, was a regular on "Morning Joe." The conflict-of-interest trifecta!
Some of the blurbs are legit. The New York Times and the American Journalism Review really did give "Morning Joe" a thumb's up. And some of them are too wonderfully strange for me to want to check. For instance, when you see a quote from Parade imitator USA Weekend calling something "the thinking viewer's choice," you just want it to be true.
My bottom line: "'Morning Joe' is a … show about politics."
Photo (cc) by Dave Winer and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
Meet the new Big Three weekly news magazines
On May 5, 2010 By Dan KennedyIn Media5 Comments
With the Washington Post Co. having put money-losing Newsweek up for sale, you're going to hear a lot about how we've gone from three weekly news magazines to one (Time) if Newsweek isn't rescued. (U.S. News & World Report lives, but it hasn't been a weekly for years.) Cue the dirge.
Except that it's not true. If Newsweek goes down, we'll simply have a new Big Three: Time, The Economist and The Week. And unlike the Time/Newsweek/U.S. News trio, which at their peak were all more or less clones of each other, the three survivors have distinctly different missions. The Economist offers a smart, analytical take on the news. The Week is a digest. And Time is — well, who knows these days? Politics, pop culture and lists of stuff, I guess.
You'll often hear people say that Newsweek and U.S. News were the victims of larger forces, and that the weekly news-magazine genre is no longer relevant. But if that were true, why were they overtaken by competitors within that genre?
And yes, I recognize that The Economist and especially The Week are bare-bones operations compared to the American news magazines in their prime. The fact is, they're here — and they're thriving. Newsweek and U.S. News were not done in by cable TV and blogs. They were done in by leaner, smarter competitors who had a better idea of what a weekly news magazine should be.
After all, their various owners never figured out how to overtake Time, either.
Right complaint, wrong picture
On November 19, 2009 By Dan KennedyIn Media, Politics26 Comments
A number of critics, including Sarah Palin herself, are going after Newsweek for running a cover shot of her in a sexy running outfit. Palin calls it "sexist."
I can't get too worked up about it. Palin, after all, posed for the shot, which was originally intended for Runner's World. (At Beat the Press, Ralph Ranalli writes that Newsweek may have violated Runner's World's exclusivity deal with the freelance photographer.)
But Palin and other critics have a legitimate complaint about Newsweek's inside photos. I haven't picked up a Newsweek in many months, but Media Matters has the pictures — a back-to image of Palin's shapely legs, something she most definitely did not pose for; and a photo of what Media Matters accurately describes as a "Sarah Palin-as-a-slutty-schoolgirl doll." The latter was used to illustrate a piece by Christopher Hitchens, who is almost as overexposed as Palin herself.
The treatment is further evidence of Newsweek's plunge into irrelevance. The New York Times this week described the magazine as repositioning itself for a smaller, more intelligent news audience.
But with garbage like this, and with recent cover headlines like "Is Your Baby Racist?", the only thing editor Jon Meacham seems to be repositioning his magazine for is rack space next to People and Us.