Showing posts sorted by date for query reinhard. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query reinhard. Sort by relevance Show all posts

Thursday, June 2, 2016

That curious news re pro #Jeb, pro #amnesty, anti #Trump Miami TV host Helen Aguirre Ferré getting hired by the RNC sounds very, well, Dolphins-like. And when has that been good for fans or anyone since 2000?

That curious news re pro #Jeb, pro #amnesty, anti #Trump Miami TV host Helen Aguirre Ferré getting hired by the RNC sounds very, well, Dolphins-like. And when has that been good for fans or anyone since 2000?
Wow! Where to even start with this bit of curious news I could have never predicted.


















So, pro #Jeb, pro #amnesty, anti-Donald Trump Miami TV host Helen Aguirre Ferré's 
longstanding public criticism of Trump counts for little with the powers-that-be at the RNC these days, as they've now hired her for a task that she seems particularly ill-prepared for, and even worse, will make a bad situation worse, if possible.
It's like hiring a run-oriented head football coach when you have a young, healthy Dan Marino as your QB. A #disconnect.

 The story has gottten lots of traction in the national press, but so far, has stirred little public notice or critical commentary in South Florida where Ferré and her frequently condescending attitudes were not just tolerated but embraced, in large part because her Conventional Wisdom attitudes almost always were 100% in sync with those of the Miami Herald Editorial Board & the perpetually misfiring Downtown Miami Biz community's. :-(

That's why despite a mountain of self-evident facts that would show objective readers how true my criticism of Ferré and her style is, it's hardly surprising that Ferré, thus far, has received almost complete kid gloves treatment from many in the community and press who know better, including former Miami Herald reporter Beth Reinhard, now of the Wall Street Journal.
Reinhard is someone whom I have long criticized on this blog over the years for some very sound reasons about basic fairness, bias, clarity, context and accuracy, as anyone taking the time to check the blog's archives for past posts on Reinhard can discover for themselves.

See all the tweets about Helen Aguirre Ferré's hiring here, inc. the Reinhard tweet

Honestly, over the past dozen years, Helen Aguirre Ferré may've been the single most-over-rated and over-praised woman in all of South Florida, in or out of public policy. 
And for a TV show on a PBS affilate in Miami like WPBT-TV that 
a.) hardly anyone watches, including even me, and that 
b.) has often seemed more like a not-so-funny sketch comedy parody of a TV chat show, because of how often she and her guests are in almost complete agreement, regardless of the issue.

If Helen Aguirre Ferré was doing a good job, wouldn't I have mentioned the show more than once in the past nine years of doing this blog?
It's not been a show to take unpopular positions or inform and enlighten the South Florida electorate so much as it has often seemed to exist merely to hearten true-believers in whatever line the South Florida Establishment's status quo had taken, so Ferre could echo it like a cheerleader.
Usually against meaningful government or political reform of the sort that the South Florida Establishment was afraid of, regardless of party affiliation, geography, race or nationality. 
And forget about Ferré talking out-loud in detail about how truly awful the caliber of the South Florida media has become the past dozen years in simply covering local govt./issues/politics fairly and accurately, and why that was so. 
No, a truth-to-power, straight-talker Helen Aguirre Ferré is NOT.

That's why to me, her show has always seemed so terribly underwhelming, frustrating and disappointing, especially compared to what it could have been -and should have been for the part of the South Florida populace that actually wants to be well-informed, which to be sure, has never been a majority.

Ferré's hiring by the RNC seems destined to just draw more more media attention to her own personal track record in the public eye and her condescendning political attitudes, instead of the task at hand, which was not an easy one.
That is surely NOT what the RNC needs the next five months going into November's election.

Frankly, Ferré's hiring by the RNC has the feel of any of a hundred awful personnel moves the woebegone Miami Dolphins have made the past 15 years, to their fans' dismay. :-(

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Monday, April 18, 2016

South Florida Journalism in 2016: The ever-expanding gulf between what the South Florida press corps offers up and the quality, local-centric news coverage the South Florida public craves, has never been as large as now; Margaret Sullivan gives as good as she gets in her final NY Times Public Editor column that hits out against elite/institutional bias

South Florida Journalism in 2016: The ever-expanding gulf between what the South Florida press corps offers up and the quality, local-centric news coverage the South Florida public craves, has never been as large as now; Margaret Sullivan gives as good as she gets in her final NY Times Public Editor column that hits out against elite/institutional bias
Revised April 21, 2016 at 3:15 p.m.

 As most of you longtime readers of Hallandale Beach Blog know well by now -but which you newer readers don't, especially those of you who have only discovered me the past two years via my tweets @hbbtruth- I started this blog in 2007, largely out of a fit of frustration and anger at the self-evident failure and lack of individual/collective effort I saw on a daily basis by the South Florida news media. Specifically, its collective failure to evolve from what it once was -home to nationally-respected who were in some cases some of the best and most-dogged investigative news sleuths in the country.
It's why so many of them eventually wound up at the then-three national U.S. TV networks and the fledgling CNN when that cablenet debuted.

 My complaint, summed-up, was that the South Florida's press corps' failed to build upon this track record, and failed to expand its level of news coverage of public policy and local government in ways that readers/viewers clearly wanted to see and rather expected.

Though I was born in San Antonio, Texas a few years before, my family arrived in Miami from Memphis when I was seven years old in the Summer of 1968, the day after Miami Dolphins #1 Draft pick Larry Csonka of Syracuse signed with the Dolphins.
As everyone who knows me then or now can tell you, I have been a devout news, sports and public affairs junkie ever since then.
But the difference between then and now is that when I was growing-up in South Florida in the '70's, there was an All-News AM radio station, WINZ AM 940 that was a CBS News affiliate and provided lots of news reportes to new York, especially those covering weather, immigration and the Sapce Shuttle.

That has NOT been the case in several decades, nor has there been even one attempt by anyone to lay the groundwork for a Local News Cable channel of the sort that has existed in many media markets throughout thsi country, including some smaller than South Florida's.

Why has COMCAST, long the dominant cable provider in South Florida, utterly failed to deliver on that potential? Well, you know who never asks?
The South Florida news media themselves, including the Miami Herald and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
If you want to waste an hour, try going thru their newspaper archives and try to find a single story about the subject in the past 20 years.
That's the sort of media area South Florida is.

That's made worse because with my crazy accurate memory, I've been able to recall  at the drop of a hat the names of individual reporters and anchors at local TV/radio stations and reporters and editors at the Miami Herald and the late Miami News -that I spent so much time at as a High School student- and the individual beats their reporters covered and owned .
And the important news stories they broke or gave much-needed historical context to when it really mattered to residents of South Florida, NOT after-the-fact months later in some investigative piece clearly designed to win journalism awards, NOT keep South Florida properly informed.

I still have an institutional memory of what those people were able to do with much less in the way of resources and technology than the current crew of South Florida journalists have and take for granted, for whatever reasons.
That doesn't just rankle, it makes me cringe, because so much of what I regularly consume from local South Florida media isn't just parochial but even shallower than the above ground swimming pools that once seemed to dominate South Florida and North Miami Beach in the 1970's.

 And that means that getting to the heart of some of the endemic and unique problems of South Florida, much less their possible solutions, are one day farther away than they need to be for our community's long-term sake.

 Over the past nine years that I have been writing this blog, a recurring theme here has been the cleavage between what the South Florida news media believes is perfectly acceptable in terms of effort and end product for news consumers, and what the public wants and expects from them. 
A graph where X never meets Y.

Over the years, the insufficient level of individual and collective effort expended by the South Florida press corps and the dominant English-language news outlets has only gnawed away at me and other well-informed observers I know and trust, as we are continually see both individual reporter bias, institutional lack of historical knowledge and lack of torpedo every well-intentioned effort to make local South Florida residents better informed about their community and the state that is now the third-largest in the country.

We see the growing gap between what the public expects from print/TV reporters and columnists and TV Assignment Editors and News Directors, in the form of interesting and compelling ways to cover local news, and what is actually presented to us as readers and viewers, as the very seeds for our area's growing technology and information gap.
A growing class and income chasm that won't be made smaller by simply pretending that it doesn't exist.

These same national trends are regularly and correctly decried in Washington as harmful to the nation's future and economic vitality when presented calmly as facts by politicians of varying political persuasions and august public interest groups with demonstrated track records for being non-partisan, but somehow, closer to home, these same problems are largely ignored when they are pointed out by people like myself and other public observers in South Florida who want this community to be MUCH BETTER than it is,.
Even when we use self-evident facts and the news media's own track record as our opening and closing arguments.

It's not exactly a secret that compared to the rest of the country, South Florida's relative youth historically -the City of Miami not being founded until 1897- and large and ever-growing population of Northeastern and Midwestern transplants whose history and allegiances remain elsewhere years after they've moved here, has always worked against the long-term interests of South Florida institutions, civic groups and foundations, even ones who profess laudable societal goals and do try to show some spirit and verve.

 But this also means these groups are NOT front-of-mind and front-and-center when it comes to focusing the community's attention on problems the way similar groups are elsewhere in the country.
It's not an excuse, merely a reflection of history and common knowledge, borne of experience living in and growing-up in South Florida.
But at some point, these same groups current unwillingness to point out the problems at hand and suggesting tangible solutions, has to be called out, and I will be doing just that in a future post with some energy and enthusiasm that I know will surprise and anger many with its ferocity and focus.

 So be it!
My blog has never been interested in carrying the water for South Florida's elites or well-off.
#disrupt

But as it concerns today's theme of journalistic lack of effort in South Florida, it's hard to shake the notion that many of these civic groups ansd foundations, so dependent upon the South Florida news media for positive attention and charity dollars when they can get it, seem to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy denying self-evident problem in large part  because of whose oxen may well need to be gored. (Or is it a case of being afraid to bite the hand that feeds them?) 
The South Florida news media's.

To me and many of the people I regularly speak with and confide in here in South Florida and throughout the Sunshine State -even many reporters, editors, columnists and TV anchors whose names are known instantly to many of you- the gulf in South Florida between what is possible in local journalism because of advances in technology that make it easier than ever to report accurately and in real-time, has, unfortunately, never seemed so large as at it does at present.

 This is made all the worse by what takes place everyday with the two largest South Florida-based daily newspapers, McClatchy's Miami Herald and the Tribune Company's South Florida Sun-Sentinel, both of whom are and have been going in the wrong direction from readers desires for far too many years.

Since the majority of my focus on this blog, despite my 1,001 other interests and passions, has always been what is happening in South Florida -for good or for bad and why- I write to day to share some much-needed wisdom from a trusted source I have long depended upon, even while never mentioning her previously: Margaret Sullivan, the departing New York Times Public Editor.
At the end of her term as the the Reader's Ombudsman, just as was true throughout when she never hesitated to challenge long-established Times icons and the Times' often counter-intuitive ways of thinking about the larger public interest, Margaret Sullivan gives as good as she gets.

As I have remarked here many times in the past with fact-filled blog post and copies of letters to the Miami Herald's management, the Herald never replaced their Ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos, after he left for NPR. And they consciously ignored many of the common sense suggestions he made about journalists.
That includes his April 25, 2010 column, Reporter-columnists tread fine line with readers' trust about the need for journalists to publicly come out to readers as one one thing or the other, i.e. not being both reporter AND columnist, because of the damage that such dual roles can cause to perceived bias and credibility with readers.

 The Herald ignored that advice when it came to dealing with both Beth Reinhard and later, Marc Caputo. If you want a copy of that column, just write me and ask for a copy.
It's not been available at the Herald's website for many years.

To see how indifferent the Herald's management was to reader perceptions of bias or unfairness, take a poke at my blog post from May 21 of 2012 titled, 
"What's going on at the Miami Herald? More than a year after the last one fled, the Herald still lacks an Ombudsman -and shows no sign of getting one- to represent readers deep concerns about bias, misrepresentation and flackery on behalf of South Florida's powerful & privileged at the Herald. And that's just one of many unresolved problems there..." 

 See also, among many others to choose from:
11/12/10 - A day in the life of McClatchy's Miami Herald, as viewed by a reader who's largely given up on them fixing their problems, or surviving long-term
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/day-in-life-of-mcclatchys-miami-herald.html

12/21/11- 
For another consistently lousy year of journalism at the Miami Herald, esp. covering Broward County, more lumps of coal in the Christmas stocking of One Herald Plaza -Part 1

8/13/13 - Former Miami Herald Ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos -whose position at the Herald remains unfilled 27 months later by McClatchy execs- as NPR's Ombudsman, lays the wood into NPR's Laura Sullivan & Amy Walters for a 2011 investigation re foster care in South Dakota, which officials there took umbrage with, and for good reason it seems. “My finding is that the series was deeply flawed and should not have been aired as it was”

 I hasten to add that this was also during the McClatchy era when the Herald ran a multi-weeks old story about Donald Trump in the "Breaking News" section of the Herald's Broward homepage on Monday December 19th, 2011 at 11:21 p.m.
And there it stayed for days...
Really. :-(

Margaret Sullivan's final column from last Friday is a column of pure gold, for it has much that the South Florida press corps could and SHOULD learn from in the way of perceived reporter/editorial/institutional bias, attention to accuracy and willingness to publicly admit mistakes.

 I highly commend it to you and ask you to consider sharing it with others you know in South Florida and throughout the Sunshine State who think as I (we) do -that South Florida and the rest of the state would be much better off with a fully-engaged and curious press corps year-round, not the one we have had for years that habitually takes a Summer slumber or vacation come mid-June, never to be seen again until after Labor Day, no matter how important the story.

New study by "the American Press Institute - almost no one trusts the media. The report found that just six percent of Americans have a great amount of confidence in the press.  To put that into perspective, the API ‘s study showed that Americans trust only Congress less than the media. Other organizations that the public has more confidence in than journalists: banks, organized religion, the Supreme Court, and the military.  The number one reason people mistrust the media is that they found reports one-sided or biased. Following closely behind was that readers found something factually inaccurate. Interestingly, respondents to the API report said that how a media outlet responds to inaccurate reports is extremely important.  “Several focus group participants said they do not expect news sources to be perfect and how a source reacts to errors can actually build trust,” stated the report. “Several people said that owning up to mistakes and drawing attention to errors or mistakes can show consumers that a source is accountable and dedicated to getting it right in the long term.” 
On the heels of this not-at-all surprising survey comes this great rear-view column from Sullivan, soon-to-be the Washington Post's new media columnist.




New York Times
The Public Editor's Journal - Margaret Sullivan  
Five Things I Won’t Miss at The Times — and Seven I Will  By Margaret Sullivan 
April 15, 2016 10:00 am 
April 15, 2016 10:00 am
While preparing to leave the public editor’s office and move to Washington, I’ve been getting together in recent weeks with some people I’ve met while living in New York. One was Ben Smith, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed, who asked me over lunch what columns I planned to do before I left. I tossed it back to him, asking what he would like to read, and he suggested I take up “what I love and what I hate about The New York Times.”
This guy’s definitely got a future as an editor! I decided to tweak his idea, with a nod to Nora Ephron’s list from her book, “I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections.” (Of all the people I wish I had been able to meet in New York, she tops the list.)
Read the rest of her great post at:
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/04/15/five-things-i-wont-miss-at-the-times-and-seven-i-will/?module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Opinion&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs&region=Body&_r=1
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Friday, February 15, 2013

re Marco Rubio: Oh dear! Another predictable Beth Reinhard paint-by-numbers piece on Rubio in The National Journal, full of the usual resume/personality recitals. I'll bet I can guess what Reinhard will say about him before reading it. Yes, and so can you! That's the whole problem -Reinhard writes about Rubio by rote; Where's the plan for positive changes at McClatchy's Miami Herald -still missing!

U.S. Senate longshot candidate Marco Rubio in Hallandale Beach, FL at Southeast Broward Republican Club. June 23, 2009 photo by South Beach Hoosier. © 2013 Hallandale Beach Blog, All Rights Reserved

The National Journal
POLITICS
Can Marco Rubio Live Up to the Hype?
He's the GOP's Barack Obama, a fresh-faced politician with an immigrant name, a playlist full of rap, and a collection of fawning press clips. The challenge: He's selling the same old party message.
By Beth Reinhard
Updated: February 14, 2013 | 8:50 p.m. 
February 14, 2013 | 8:20 p.m.
The freshman senator from Florida had joined four veteran colleagues to unveil a proposal for the first major overhaul of immigration law in a quarter-century. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., introduced “my friend, Senator [Marco] Rubio, who obviously is a new but incredibly important voice in this whole issue of immigration reform.”
Two weeks earlier, Rubio had laid out a similar set of principles in an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal under the headline, “Marco Rubio: Riding to the Immigration Rescue.” The article came as a surprise to McCain and other members of the bipartisan group of senators who had been sketching out an immigration plan with and without Rubio for weeks. The blueprint was inspired by legislation that McCain first spearheaded in 2005.
The dig was subtle, but Rubio didn’t let it go.

Oh dear! Another predictable Beth Reinhard paint-by-numbers piece on Marco Rubio in The National Journal, full of the usual resume/personality recitals.
Bet I can guess what Beth Reinhard will say about Marco Rubio. 
Yes, and so can you! 

That's the problem -Reinhard writes about Rubio by rote.
Just like her last piece on him.

Even the new anecdotes she drops throughout the column sound just like the old ones she used, since they are almost always cobbled together to create the same old product: Marco the Magnificent.

It would be far better if she spoke to veteran analysts like Charlie Cook, also of the National Journal and someone whose every word I read religiously for meaning and portent, as mentioned many times here in the past, which is why I've linked to so many of his columns here over the years.

Specifically, speak to Cook about the dangers of over-exposure, which he is getting closer to everyday, and the graveyard of presidential candidates that peaked early and never made it to Election Day because they prematurely annoyed or bored America silly, or flat out didn't have the sort of practical experience needed or the ability to articulate a cogent, distinct message that resonated with the public and which could grow even larger with hard work.
Bill Bradley for instance.

Even though I was an early and very confident Senate supporter of Rubio's in 2009, when the entire Florida GOP and business establishment, along with Florida's sycophantic Mainstream Media, plus the East Coast drive-by MSM, practically handed the 2010 Republican Senate nomination to then-Governor Charlie Crist, in my opinion, Rubio needs to actually accomplish a lot more of substance sooner -and be seen LESS in a pop-culture prism- otherwise, everyone in America may be bored silly by the sight of him within two years as the new car smell wears off, just as he's campaigning for House and Senate candidates throughout the country, and actually getting most of the questions, not the candidates he's with.

Yes, just like a once interesting new TV commercial that you have now grown to cringe at within a milli-second of seeing on TV and reach for the remote.

And if and when that happens, the only thing that will be written about him will be the hit pieces by the usual suspects, especially among liberal reporters and columnists in the West, who have no secret of the fact that they resent the collective power of Cubans in the political process compared to Mexicans, who vastly outnumber them.

And Univision, of course, in their creepy stalker-like relationship with Rubio, where they are always looking to see if he's spending too much time with someone else.
Y
es, Univision, the Spanish-language channel that the Miami Herald is always kissing the butt of and overplaying the significance of, but who will, not so curiously, not mention in print that they didn't air President Obama's State of the the Union address, which is why they won Tuesday night in the TV ratings.

Nope, no mention, as you can see for yourself. 

I thought they were the new "It"?
Qué pasa, Herald?

Yes, Univision, the politically-biased TV network that makes it very clear in their so-called news coverage that the only reasonable side of the immigration debate is pro-amnesty, otherwise, you are a racist. 

 Oh yeah -and the supposed news network whose employees loves to take public whacks at 
Rubio.

That is, if they, too, aren't already bored silly by Rubio and tired of pointing-out the same deficiencies they saw/see in him, over-and-over.

On the other hand, it's good to remember that Rubio eventually got so bored/irritated with Reinhard asking him the same ol' leading questions over-and-over during his long Senate campaign, that as I wrote here at the time, towards the end, he eventually started freezing her out because he simply couldn't take the routine anymore

You might recall that was back when the Herald's then-Ombudsman took Beth Reinhard (and the Herald) to task in his once-in-a-while Sunday column for having one person perform both reporter and columnist duties, saying that it was a conflict of interest.

The Ombudsman was right, of course, and Reinhard proved why that was true by being whiny publicly in her columns about being frozen out by Rubio, which not only made her less attractive to Rubio as a person to speak with, but for voters and newspaper readers, made her 'articles' about him not at all reliable, since you already knew that she was mad at him enough to say so publicly.
But I guess I'm the only one who remembers that, huh?

Alas, the Herald's then-Ombudsman left in April of 2011 and has never been replaced, with rather predictable results from my perspective: more bias than ever in articles as well as more missing facts and context.

 As many of you regular readers know, I've directly asked the Herald's top management why there's been no replacement and no mention made in the paper of what their plan is, if any, for an eventual replacement.
And, what their plan for improvement in print and online was to keep the faith of readers.
That's been met with stony silence. 
Followed by more silence.

A smart and fair-minded person representing the interests of Herald readers and ethics is not in the cards there.

Folks, it's time to face the fact that publisher David Landsberg has no actual plan for the Herald's future that positive for news consumers, because if he did, he'd have already made them public months before they went to a pay wall, and only added the pay wall AFTER getting rid of the problem step-children, adding new and curious columnists and reporters who don't take things for granted -one of the worst daily offenses there!-  and completely re-do the website from top-to-bottom, so the same stories don't appear in three separate places there, as happens now, which is acutely embarrassing for everyone, most of all, them.

That's why in my opinion, with the same people in charge, the Herald's problems are only going to get worse over time.

 But if someone with some smarts and money bought the Sun-Sentinel, fired all the dead wood and made it more like some of the Swedish newspapers that I've become increasingly  used to, and read daily while I was in Stockholm last month, newspapers which are very popular, well then, you could well see will see a very interesting dynamic take place here
in South Florida.
But not right now.

Now, each newspaper and its management seem locked in a battle of lethargy to do the least amount of original enterprise reporting possible.
  
------
TheWrap
Ratings: Univision Wins Night By Skipping State of the Union
By Tim Kenneally
Published: February 13, 2013 @ 10:03 am

November 1, 2010
Hallandale Beach Blog endorses Beth Reinhard & Charlie Crist's departure - asks they get escort to airport so they don't miss their flights out of FL

September 3, 2010

Addition by subtraction: Beth Reinhard leaving Miami Herald, heading to D.C. and The National Journal. Herald readers finally win one!


-----
Univision staffer attacks Sen. Marco Rubio on Facebook

No doubt after the Castro Brothers finally go adios for good, many of the Univision employees will try to move to Cuba and try to suddenly reinvent themselves as real journalists, after years of being celebrity hand-holdres, political suck-ups and amateur political science professors based in LA, NYC and Miami, forever intent on lecturing us on how important Latin America is, despite the fact that we mostly don't care about it for perfectly valid reasons, no matter how much they insist it's important.



But it's not, even with changing demographics and population changes, Americans aren't going to suddenly care about Honduras or Uruguay or Brazil if they never did before, and they can't let on that the whole thing has been a journalistic con for years to fleece advertising dollars.

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Saturday, November 3, 2012

Déjà vu opinions from a new perch: National Journal's Beth Reinhard may've left the Miami Herald behind, but she STILL makes the same tired and unpersuasive arguments as before. You'll never guess who she writes will be the key to 2012 vote. Surprise -Hispanics! She's wrong -it's actually Catholics in the Midwest and PA


Déjà vu opinions from a new perch: National Journal's Beth Reinhard may've left the Miami Herald behind, but she STILL makes the same tired and unpersuasive arguments as before. You'll never guess who she writes will be the key to 2012 vote. Surprise -Hispanics! 
She's wrong -it's actually Catholics in the Midwest and PA

If you think that former Miami Herald political reporter and columnist Beth Reinhard can go even three sentences in this story WITHOUT mentioning the I-4 Puerto Rican voters that we've all been reading about for at least 18 months, you LOSE.

Lose, just like Herald readers did for so many years when they opened the paper and thought that if only out of randomness, perhaps that would be one of the few times in the year when they might see something original under her byline, and yet inevitably, what would follow was almost always the same banal and predictable words and "observations" about subjects that we'd all already seen.
Already seen and better-described and analyzed by other reporters and columnists MANY MONTHS before.

Yes, she even comes up with some of the predictable italicized names (for Hispanic food) to show that she's in touch.
Que Dios!

The National Journal
The Story of the Hispanic Vote Is the Story of the 2012 Campaign
Cuban-Americans aren’t the only Latinos candidates need to woo in Florida. Puerto Ricans also command attention.
By Beth Reinhard
Updated: November 1, 2012 | 9:39 p.m. 
November 1, 2012 | 2:00 p.m.

My favorite part?
Where after NOT explaining why Spanish-surnamed voters in the near-future will politically be more like Puerto Ricans than Cubans or Mexicans or Central Americans, and thereby curtail Cubans' relative power and favored role in Florida and the U.S., at the beginning of the fifth pargraph. 
Just saying it doesn't make it so.

There, she lays this gem on the table:
"Regardless of the outcome, the Hispanic vote will be one of the most important markers of the parties’ futures...'"
Sounds like backsliding and equivocating to me.
  
It's not for nothing that I once justifiably titled a blog post here -on September 3rd, 2010-
Addition by subtraction: Beth Reinhard leaving Miami Herald, heading to D.C. and The National Journal. Herald readers finally win one!, http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/addition-by-subtraction-beth-reinhard.html

 What time zone is she in? And year?
More past posts that mentioned Reinhard are here:
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/search?q=reinhard

The only saving grace -and I do mean ONLY- is that Reinhard doesn't make the obligatory butt-kissing reference to some Univision TV personality flacking a book like Jorge Ramos, did in 2004, complete with grandiose and self-serving reference to the power of people with tildes in their last name, something that Reinhard surely would have seen fit to do if she were still at the Herald.

 What's that?
You say that you don't you recall the name of the Ramos book from 2004?
It was "The Latino Wave: How Hispanics Will Choose the Next President"
Hmm... not so much.

 But because he's one of their favorites, America's Mainstream Media just pretends that boast and the book behind it never existed, and it's like Ramos never got an at-bat and struck-out.

 At One Herald Plaza, right on Biscayne Bay, there still seem to be far too many people, even in the year 2012, who haven't caught on to the fact that their constant sycophantic need to make Hispanic media or Hispanic-oriented advertising executives -especially the ones in Miami whom the Herald wants to sell advertising space to or partner with, with all its attendant log-rolling- the ones quoted so extensively and so over-the-top in articles about Spanish-language media the past few years, sound like young Jones Salks, instead of car salesmen or Hi-Fi salesmen of the mid-1970's that they are, reeks of desperation.
Would you like that new stereo with "Quad" sound, sir?

The people they've quoted so promiscuously were nothing more than salesmen trying to sell something -a product or service.
That's fine, but there's nothing lofty or high-minded about selling toilet paper and air freshener and cookie and beer, so stop acting like there is.
It's sales!
That's all it is.
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Saturday, April 30, 2011

MSM mess that disserves voters -Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic on "How to Fix Our Flawed Election Coverage"; Phil Bronstein muses on WH PR flacks





Obama protest at DNC fundraiser http://bcove.me/mq3c122l
Related story in San Francisco Chronicle is at bottom.

Friday afternoon, while pondering the Miami Dolphins' NFL draft strategy -is there one?- I sent the link to this prescient Conor Friedersdorf story below around to my circle of Usual Suspects, and got a pretty favorable response, though some reporter friends who work in The Beltway actually thought it was, if anything, a little "too gentle" in their criticism of the American Mainstream Media.

They are constantly dumbfounded at the sheer number of people around them who 'play' journalist, but who are actually not emotionally or ethically grounded enough, or even talented enough, to be one.

If anything, they find many of their colleagues consistently unprofessional and nothing but either Washington press secretary wannabes or political consultant in-waiting.
Yes, everyone wants to be like David Axelrod -but not actually him.
Reporter first, then campaign consultant.

And however much they may talk and vent to me from time-to-time, they genuinely believe that the American public has no earthly idea how much many more conscientious reporters and columnists with more old-fashioned ideas about the ethos and the lines you don't cross, genuinely loathe many popular media stars, esp. those with a connection to TV.


The Atlantic
How to Fix Our Flawed Election Coverage
By Conor Friedersdorf
April 29, 2011, 12:52 PM ET

In presidential contests, the press regularly elevates candidates for all the wrong reasons

My colleague James Fallows is understandably dismayed by the American media's coverage of Donald Trump, the entrepreneur, reality TV star and occasional bankrupt who may or may not run for president. "Perhaps the media types who have been paying attention to Trump and his braying will stop to think about what they've actually been doing," he writes. "Conceivably there will be a moment of recoil about the unworthy, irrational indignity of this stage of national life. But I'm not holding my breath."

It is bizarre that an opportunistic publicity hound is shaping the national discourse. But is a "moment of recoil" among journalists the needed remedy? For the most part, Trump's enablers are either utterly shameless, or else they're already disgusted by the pathologies of their profession but feel powerless to change them...

Read the rest of the post at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/04/how-to-fix-our-flawed-election-coverage/238039/

Also on Friday, I saw San Francisco Chronicle Executive Vice President Phil Bronstein's always interesting Bronstein at Large blog on the recent dust-up involving the Chronicle's Carla Marinucci and other Hearst folks running afoul of what White House preferences (ground-rules) were for reporting stories that had nothing to do with the reason President Obama was there.

Chron headline: San Francisco Chronicle: Obama Administration punishes reporter for using multimedia

Later: Update: Chronicle responds after Obama Administration punishes reporter for using multimedia, then claims they didn't

It's quite insightful, too, and shows how childish so many of the professional, taxpayer-paid PR handlers for elected officials, even The White House, can be when it comes to wanting to short-circuit enterprising reporters or putting the kibosh on alternative narratives of a story, things the American public wants but usually don't hear about until much later in a book.
Better that we know about such ham-handed efforts when they happen, then later!

I really wish we had about four dozen Phil Bronstein disciples or clones manning South Florida's myriad media machines so that citizens, readers and viewers could be MUCH better served than they are by the current crew that constantly sleeps, sleepwalks and doesn't show-up, and is risk-averse to boot.
IF only...

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Conor Friedersdorf is not just 100% correct, he is even more spot-on than he thinks, in that his sound criticism of the Mainstream Media's predictable reach for the low-hanging fruit and 'herd' mentality coverage of the presidential primaries could, in far too many instances, also be applied to local newspaper and TV station's coverage of open congressional seats.
I have a perfect example of it.


The above-the-fold headline of the Miami Herald on Wednesday the 27th was, and I quote, "GOP in search of a rock star" and the article was written by Adam Smith, a very good reporter at the St. Pete Times, someone whose articles and blog posts I've read since returning to the Sunshine State.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/04/26/2186913/in-florida-and-nationally-republicans.html

Still... that might well be a fine story in a newspaper's Sunday Op-Ed section in about 5-6 months, but really, in late April of 2011?
Not so much.

It actually seems to me that the news media in Florida, all-too-conscious of how important the state of Florida will be next year in the presidential campaign for both parties -especially with the Republican National Convention scheduled to be in the Tampa/St. Pete area starting August 27th, 2012- actually covet someone to play leader-of-the-pack so they can all know whom they're supposed to analyze to a fair-thee-well, killing with kindness in laudatory pieces for weeks or months before someone decides to get the knives out, rather than have to go out and do intel recon by themselves, and possibly saying something that goes against the MSM's extant CW.

Especially at a time when even in a large state like Florida -particularly for a large state like Florida, the fourth-largest state in the country- few of the potential candidates have actually visited the state for formal organized purposes.

Part of that is not just due to lack of time and money or opportunity, but also the sane realization by the candidate and his top staff that with the media in its current myopic state, any small slip-up of a completely inconsequential nature, is likely to be given extraordinary coverage for the simple fact that the media not only personally prefers to write about the horse-race, NOT the issues, but that in the absence of real tangible news, silly news will more than do.

That it becomes voter's first impression of the candidate is not the concern of the reporter, but should it?

Do you really think more than a handful of people in South Florida can really talk with any objective knowledge about what Tim Pawlenty did or did not do while governor of Minnesota?
http://www.timpawlenty.com/

Guess what, none of that handful are reporters, columnists or editors, but what they can do is re-write and finesse prior stories on Pawlenty to make it seem that they know what they're talking about; they already have
Given that dynamic and reality, why would any reasonable candidate considering the presidency subject himself to needless scrutiny when you don't have to?

Why should you change your long-term plan merely to assuage certain media markets, even in a key state like Florida, when any small slip-up will be over-played and toyed with like a cat and a ball of yarn?

As to the same bad, superficial press coverage template being used on open congressional seats. living in one, I'm more than able to describe what we dealt with and how that also highlights the Miami Herald's downward spiral in quality and sense of purpose, a much-discussed topic on this blog since it was created four years ago, in part because of that very problem.
Last year, to the surprise of nobody, FL-17's Kendrick Meek ran for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate to replace the retired Mel Martinez, whose seat was filled by George LeMieux in the interim.

Since voters and political observers knew well since the summer of 2009 that South Florida's FL-17 would have a brand new face for the first time since the current geographical configuration existed, a great opportunity presented itself to South Florida's much-maligned news media -to show local readers and viewers what's really required to win a Congressional seat in a multi-ethnic area (that stretches across two counties) with very different sort of voters, starting first with who runs for a seat for which you are NOT the candidate for whom it was carved-up for -Carrie Meek- or the heir.

To do the sort of solid fact-filled congressional election stories that CQ (Congressional Quarterly) and National Journal have been doing forever and that you sometimes see reflected in a few serious quality newspapers, where smart reporters and resourceful editors take you deep inside the campaign and give you some tangible insight into the candidates and their way of thinking things through.
In the end, of course, at least for me, the most important thing you vote about -their judgment.

But instead of seizing the opportunity, voters in FL-17 were given nothing but day-old leftovers. Not turkey leftovers the day after Thanksgiving, which can still be tasty, but more like the mashed potatoes and green peas five days later when the container they were in in the fridge has come off and everything had dried out and become less palatable.

The first "story" in the Herald on FL-17, by Beth Reinhard, circa pre-Christmas 2009, consisted of five sentences, one of which was a list of candidates names.
Talk about underwhelming, and it never got any better!

Nope, all the energy at the newspaper -never very great to begin with the past few years!- seemed to be focused almost entirely on the U.S. Senate race, not that there was much that was very original or compelling from Dec. 2009-July 2010 from the Miami side of the Times/Herald combine with the St. Pete Times.
Just lots of low-hanging fruit, much of it repeating what was first reported elsewhere.

It wasn't until mid-August, two weeks before the actual primary election between about 8-10 Democratic candidates, that what would normally be considered a genuine election campaign story on FL-17 ever actually appeared in the Miami Herald, and that one, naturally, made some obvious mistakes in describing what the exact boundaries of the CD were.
Yes, even though THAT should be the one thing the reporter -frequent HBB bête noire Patricia Mazzei- gets right. (Not that a correction was ever made!)

One legitimate news story in eight long months about an open congressional seat that nobody knew in advance who would win?
Really?
Yes!

That's the paradox of the American news media we have now.
Far too many print and TV reporters/editors/producers shrink from opportunities to do something original or bold, preferring the easy to write/produce stories about dubious polls and calling political consultants whose faces we recognize on TV before they say word one.

To me, political consultants as the go-to interview, is among the most troubling trends of the past fifteen years in journalism.
It's the lazy reporter's crutch.
They're asked what they think, instead of reporters proactively arranging to meet with large number of well-informed voters TO LISTEN.

Unfortunately, South Florida in the year 2011 is grossly over-represented by reporters, editors and producers who favor political campaign consultants as voices of reality to the very citizen voters themselves.

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http://www.nationaljournal.com/

Phil Bronstein's Bronstein at Large blog at the San Francisco Chronicle:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/bronstein/index
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