Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Hard News: Who Guards the Guardian?, in reply to Don Christie,
Craig, credible track record is important. Greenwald, Rusbridger, Wikileaks, and the Guardian have it in spades. The personality issue is a side show.
OK, Don, it's an irrelevant side show that has nothing to do with journalism. Just like the "personality" of Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, who's still defending running a hit-job on Ed Miliband's father so vile even hardcore Tory politicians and pundits are openly musing whether he's a couple of scones short of a full Devonshire tea. (BTW, Darce is still chairman of the Press Complaints Commission's external Editors' Code of Practice Committee. Just fills one with confidence in industry self-regulation doesn't it?)
And frankly, you're being spectacularly naive if you think The Guardian's credibility is an excuse for being careless and cutting corners, rather than the strongest incentive to do the exact opposite no matter how hard the likes of GG stamp their feet and threaten to flounce out of the building. That credibility is easier to lose than to build up. Just ask the New York Times and New Republic what single pathological fantasy writers with weak editorial oversight did to standing that had taken decades to accrue.
There's a reason why editors edit, and sources don't get to dictate the timing and placement of stories. And despite what you may see in the movies or on television, not every cautious editor is a spineless whore of the media-industrial complex, just as not every plucky "speaker of truth to power" is a paragon of virtue.
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Hard News: Who Guards the Guardian?, in reply to Don Christie,
This time Greenwald. In doing so you turn this (as you did with the Wikileaks saga) into a story of personalities over content.
FFS, Don... Unless Rushbridger is a big fat liar, the 'personalities' are relevant here when an editor of a major newspaper went to press with a story he was far from entirely comfortable with. And one Russell wasn't actually alone in raising his eyebrows at, given that it wasn't as solid as is the norm on AR's watch.
Can't speak for Russell, but I'm sick of the way any critique of Greenwald's actions (however mild or heavily nuanced) gets re-framed as some kind of personal attack that only gives aid and comfort to THE ENEMY. Are we really going down the road where you get a free pass as long as you're righteously "one of us"? Really?
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Meanwhile, lovely history lesson from Rachel Maddow. What did right-wing saint Ronald Reagan do when the Senate Majority leader threatened to hold the debt ceiling hostage? You may be surprised...
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Hard News: The Crazy Gang Nation, in reply to Russell Brown,
I prefer Andrew Sullivan's take: We're seeing the radical right has turned the GOP into The Nullification Party.
[T]hey simply do not accept the legitimacy of a President and Congress of the opposing party. The GOP does not regard the president as merely wrong – but as illegitimate. Not misguided – illegitimate. This is not about ending Obamacare as such (although that is a preliminary scalp); it is about nullifying this presidency, the way the GOP attempted to nullify the last Democratic presidency by impeachment.
[...]Obama has played punctiliously by the constitutional rules – two elections, one court case – while the GOP has decided that the rules are for dummies and suckers, and throws over the board game as soon as it looks as if it is going to lose by the rules as they have always applied.
And now, it's perfectly clear they've escalated to the decision that the full faith and credit of the Government of the world's largest economy is for suckers too. No matter what the cost.
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Hard News: Squatting in the Square, in reply to Russell Brown,
I was grumpy about that, but that ended up being the night that Fiona walked back into my life. So it really worked out pretty well, all up.
What you lost on the hipster party swings, you exponentially made up on the relationship roundabout. You're still enjoying the ride, aren't you? :)
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Hard News: Who Guards the Guardian?, in reply to Aidan,
At least they’re asking someone the hard questions…
(Before you ask: No, you're not stoned. No, I don't know what the fuck I just saw. No, you can't have cookies for breakfast.)
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Hard News: Who Guards the Guardian?, in reply to Barnaby Nicholls,
You can always argue that more time spent on a story would produce a tighter story, but I think the Guardian was right to publish so quickly – drawing public attention to the issue before it could be suppressed keeps them off the defensive.
Here's my problem with "tighter stories" being treated as nice to have but not really essential (h/t The Hon. William English). One reason Rushbridger had this reputation long before Glenn Greenwald blew into town is that he invests the time in getting complex stories right rather than going for the quick scoop. Sorry for the marketing speak, but I thought the Guardian's brand was precisely that it has slightly higher editorial standards than the Daily Mail.
At the risk of sounding rather bitchy, you don't get to have it both ways. Either we hold The Guardian to the kind of standards we all claim to care about, even when it's ideologically uncongenial or politically inconvenient, or it's time to ask whether we really care about them at all.
And here's a little real world reality check. I suspect Rushbridger and his chief political editor, Patrick Wintour, have politicians and Whitehall mandarins trying to monster them every day of the week. That's part of the job if you're doing it properly, not a reason to start getting sloppy.
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Hard News: Squatting in the Square, in reply to Hebe,
And I found, to my amazement, I was put in the “colonial” box.
Shouldn't be that big a surprise. I've got an expat friend who was faintly shocked to find, on meeting his Guardian-reading, Labour-voting upper-middle class in-laws for the first time and getting interrogated like he was applying for a job at Buck House. Even better, apparently, it was a mutually bewildering experience because all the status markers he accrued in New Zealand don't mean a lot on the other side of the world.
He wisely decided to keep to himself that, at the time, he was working as an accountant in an obscure outpost of the Demon Rupert Murdoch's Evil Empire. Liberal tolerance only goes so far. :)
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Hard News: The Crazy Gang Nation, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Yeah, but you'd think the very people screaming about government spending on steroids would be casting a gimlet eye over the $788 billion that went to the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security in fiscal 2011, no? Don't be silly...
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Cracker: Lundy and Me., in reply to Jackie Clark,
I’m of the opinion that we have a history of convicting people of crimes because they just aren’t likeable at all, or are seen as strange in some way.
Lindy Chamberlain, anyone? No matter what the evidence was around the disappearance, the court of public opinion strung her up for being a... well, rather dowdy 7th Day Adventist who didn't dissolve into hysterics on cue for the TV cameras.
And personally, I don't think the media's relentless demands for a quick result are particularly useful either. Remember the Kahui Twins case, and day after day of "still no arrest, what are the Police doing?" stories. Of course, the ongoing investigation was a perfectly legit news story; but it's more than a little naive to think bizarre levels of media pressure to instantly clap someone in irons couldn't possible lead to corners being cut.
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