Los Angeles Times

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 9:42am on Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Elisabeth Murdoch Chastises TV Execs for Myopia

The Los Angeles Times reported on January 28, 2010:

"Like father, like daughter.

Elisabeth Murdoch, chief executive of British TV program producer Shine Group, delivered tough talk in a keynote address to a gathering of television executives Wednesday in Las Vegas, sounding a lot like her father, News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, when it comes to leveling charges of intransigence and myopia at the TV industry.

Although she acknowledged that the economy has been hard on the media industry, Murdoch said she was worried that "we all act more like a victim support group than a gathering of dynamic industry leaders."

Conferences such as that being held by the National Assn. of Television Program Executives, which she was addressing, "are rapidly dominated by worries about falling advertising revenues, of the difficulties of recapturing the mass audience of yesteryear, or the fear that new entrants like Google and Facebook now control the agenda," she said.

Murdoch warned that the industry had to come to terms with the fact that "no matter when the rain clouds clear, we are not going to find ourselves back in Kansas; there is no way home from Oz."

The full story:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-murdoch28-2010jan28,0,6009758.story

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 2:12pm on Friday, January 22nd, 2010

In Haiti, false media depictions of victims as criminals hinder relief efforts. Are you listening Los Angeles Times?

Salon reported on January 21, 2010:

"Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs with captions that kept deploying the word "looting." One was of a man lying face down on the ground with this caption: "A Haitian police officer ties up a suspected looter who was carrying a bag of evaporated milk." The man's sweaty face looks up at the camera, beseeching, anguished.

Another photo was labeled: "Looting continued in Haiti on the third day after the earthquake, although there were more police in downtown Port-au-Prince." It showed a somber crowd wandering amid shattered piles of concrete in a landscape where, visibly, there could be little worth taking anyway.

A third image was captioned: "A looter makes off with rolls of fabric from an earthquake-wrecked store." Yet another: "The body of a police officer lies in a Port-au-Prince street. He was accidentally shot by fellow police who mistook him for a looter.

The "looter" in the first photo might well have been taking that milk to starving children and babies, but for the news media that wasn't the most urgent problem. The "looter" stooped under the weight of two big bolts of fabric might well have been bringing it to now homeless people trying to shelter from a fierce tropical sun under improvised tents.

The pictures do convey desperation, but they don't convey crime. Except perhaps for that shooting of a fellow police officer -- his colleagues were so focused on property that they were reckless when it came to human life, and a man died for no good reason in a landscape already saturated with death.

In recent days, there have been scattered accounts of confrontations involving weapons, and these may be a different matter. But the man with the powdered milk? Is he really a criminal? There may be more to know, but with what I've seen I'm not convinced."

The full story:
http://www.salon.com/news/haiti/index.html?story=/opinion/feature/2010/01/21/rebecca_solnit_haiti_open2010

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 5:16pm on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Reporters are feeling jilted by President Obama, James Rainey opined in The Los Angeles Times on January 20, 2010:

"It's an age-old dance -- reporters push for information, even some they know they'll never receive. Politicians push back -- with descriptions of how much they've done and all the reasons they can't do more.

Tension between the press and the Obama administration has peaked in part because of the candidate's bold promises about being more open.

As the president's popularity has declined, some reporters have sensed the already reserved leader pulling back even more.

Obama hasn't held a full-fledged news conference in half a year. One press-freedom advocate -- saying Obama has been more talk than action -- gave the president a C-plus on freedom of information issues.

"The judge of a true leader," wrote David Cuillier, chairman of the Society of Professional Journalists committee on public information, "is one who can stand the heat and be transparent even when the information is politically meddlesome."

The full story:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-onthemedia20-2010jan20,0,4508409,full.column

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 11:03am on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

Most Original News Reporting Comes from Traditional Sources

The Los Angeles Times reported on January 11, 2010:

"A study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism that surveyed news gathering in Baltimore as an example of nationwide trends found that 95% of stories with fresh information came from "old media," and the vast majority of that from newspapers.

"The expanding universe of new media, including blogs, Twitter and local websites -- at least in Baltimore -- played only a limited role: mainly an alert system and a way to disseminate stories from other places," the study's authors write."

The full story:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-newspapers11-2010jan11,0,2396176.story