David Spett

I mean, seriously. Yet another display of my alma mater’s incompetence:

This ad ran beside today’s NYT story on the future of j-school.

See also: Badly-written Facebook ad

Every now and then, I wonder if the decline of newspapers could actually be good for democracy. Today was one of those days, with two pretty disturbing items in the Washington Post.

First, a superficial, uncritical front-page profile of Ben Bernanke. Dean Baker has a pretty good summary of what this misses (in a nutshell: even a passing mention of the possibility that Bernanke and his ideology might have some responsibility for the economic crisis). One passage particularly stood out:

[Bernanke's leadership] strategy has paid dividends. At the December meeting, Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher didn’t want to cut rates and initially dissented from the decision, sources said. At the last minute, in the spirit of public unanimity, he changed his vote.

Disturbingly, the writer implies dissent is bad, while Bernanke’s “strategy” must be the reason the Fed governors were unified. Like so many other stories in the MSM, this one’s littered with superficial, uncriticial (hate to use those adjectives again, but I really think they’re the best) assumptions mired in conventional wisdom.

The second concern from today’s paper: A response about halfway down in this online chat with WaPo congressional correspondent Paul Kane.

The anonymous questioner asks, “Care to defend yourself against this criticism from Media Matters” suggesting you didn’t provide proper context when quoting GOP Sen. Olympia Snowe criticizing Democrats?

Kane reacted strongly: “Someone tell Media Matters to get over themselves and their overblown ego of righteousness.” (Sensitive much, Paul?)

The real problem comes later. “We reported what Olympia Snowe said. That’s what she said. That’s what Republicans are saying. I really don’t know what you want of us,” Kane writes.

Unintended sexual innuendo aside, that response is ethically bankrupt. Have reporters no responsibility to provide some context and point out that these very senators criticizing Democrats for circumventing the filibuster, themselves circumvented the filibuster when they held a majority… and criticized minority Dems who disagreed? (To be fair, the doubletalk applies to both parties, but that’s not the point.)

If you’re just going to copy down what senators say, I might as well watch C-SPAN, and I see no reason to lament the loss of your job or the death of your industry.