Every month or two, another series of tabloid covers confronts me at the grocery store declaring the megacouple is on the verge of a breakup, and this time it’s totally for real! The “source” for most of these stories is Jolie’s brother, with whom she is close and through whom she spins marvelous stories about her personal life onto the cover of those magazines. Her permanent state of scandal is a PR masterpiece, never failing to keep her celebrity status elevated above the lesser mortals of Hollywood.

Meanwhile, she seems to be happy with her enormous family and strapping buck husband, despite the scintillating headlines.

Jolie is not the first movie star to turn the gossip media into their own personal stovepipe, though to be sure she is today the very best at this game. The system is really quite simple:

Leak an outrageous story to eager reporters.

Watch the tabloids outdo each other.

Give an exclusive interview in which you complain about the coverage, citing the tabloid covers.

Call the studio and tell them you want ten million for the sequel to Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Now consider the Dick Cheney method:

Leak an outrageous story to Judith Miller.

Watch the press erupt.

Wave the New York Times headline on a Sunday talk show.

Invade Iraq.

And now you know how the mainstream media works for the powerful and famous instead of informing you.

The reporting we saw on TV and on the Internet that day was the work not of journalists, but of political hit men. The snippets about Sotomayor had been circulating on conservative Web sites and shown on some TV channels for weeks. They were new only to the vast majority of us who have better things to do than vet the record of every person on Obama’s list. But this is precisely what activists and bloggers on both sides of the political spectrum do, and what a conservative organization like the Judicial Confirmation Network exists to promote. The JCN had gathered an attack dossier on each of the prospective Supreme Court nominees, and had fed them all to the networks in advance. (Emphasis mine)

Bowden focuses on the rise of web-based partisan journalism and the MSM’s new habit of stovepiping propaganda, but what I find interesting is his identification of the 24-7 news cycle as “post journalistic. It sees democracy, by definition, as perpetual political battle.” He’s talking about the permanent campaign:

enormously helpful to the Bush Administration as it provided a giant distraction from the colossal crimes they committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. If their energies had been directed in a positive way, there’s a good chance Bush would have been impeached and Dick Cheney thrown in jail.

Within minutes of the post, Ben started getting angry emails from truthers. He’s reprinted a couple at his website. Writers question his motives and intelligence:

Dear Sir: Are you really uniformed about the facts or part of a criminal element? …Or maybe you believe in some higher purpose for lying, pesonally (sic) I don’t really care. You are either a fool for talking about something you know nothing about or are a traitor to the human race. (Emphasis mine)

As always, those who speak out against conspiracy theory face accusations of being part of the conspiracy; but the comments on Cohen’s work mostly take umbrage at his mention of the truther-birther nexus.

They learned to do this from arch-tinfoil hatter Alex Jones, who picked up the 9/11 conspiracy thread the day after the attacks and immediately worked it into his narrative about a vast global conspiracy for world domination.

Jones has been spreading this special blend of Crazy™ far and wide ever since. Even when thoroughly and systematically debunked, Jones never loses because he can just lump the debunkers into his insane narrative as “enemies of truth.”

Here’s how Jones introduces himself in a video titled “The Road to Tyranny:”

Hello, I’m Alex Jones, a syndicated radio and television host based in Austin, TX and for many years I have been exposing the criminal activities of the global elite also known as the “New World Order.” And this collection of power-mad megalomaniacs has been using a successive string of terrorist events to usher in their corrupt world government. A world government where populations, their own documents show, will be herded into compact cities; will be issued national ID cards, and yes — even implantable microchips. (Emphasis mine)

Jones offers a detailed fantasy-revision of world history in which every significant event traces to the single ulterior purpose of global domination and mind-control. His “evidence” is conjecture. Occam’s Razor is nowhere to be seen.

Nowadays, Jones is pushing birther nonsense and extolling the “virtues” of legal challanges to the Obama presidency. Phil Berg, filer of the original birther-lawsuit, has been a frequent guest on Jones’s show for many years. Berg is a longtime propagator of 9/11 conspiracy theory.

The connection is irrefutable. Moreover, it’s only the tip of Teh Crazy™ iceberg.

Another Jones guest is David Icke, a British conspiracy nut best-known for his belief that alien reptiles rule the world from ancient, secret underground facilities and hide among us by shape-shifting into human form. Yes, it’s a plot right out of bad 80s television that even includes the British Royal Family.

Like Jones, Icke describes the New World Order as part of this fantasy universe. Jones used to rail against Icke’s reptile theories as harmful to the “cause” of truth — until that magical day when Icke became Jones’ guest:

Has anyone seen it? Why shouldn’t the record be in the public domain for presidential candidates?

It’s a real winner of an argument, isn’t it? “Why not show his birth certificate?” Of course, this is never a problem for white men named John. Malkin winds up with this gem:

Lest the Obama campaign start whining about this issue being an unfair “distraction,” John McCain underwent intense scrutiny of his citizenship status because of his birth in the Panama Canal zone, leading the Senate to declare him a natural-born citizen in April.

Sure they did, in April…of 2008. But the date doesn’t fit the narrative, does it? And as for narratives, here’s the one she prefers:

Rumor Three: His mother did not want to name him after his father, and his birth certificate says “Barry.” Perhaps the most plausible of the rumors, as Obama was known by that name through much of his childhood and young adulthood. If true, this would spur a new round of “When Barry Became Barack” stories – a minor headache for the campaign, but hardly a major scandal.

In other words, she admits there’s no mystery to this at all. And includes the link.

Wingnuts are smart! With history!

Left you a message. Wanted you to hear directly from me that I want to have the Gov on Sunday on Meet The Press. I think it’s exactly the right forum to answer the questions about his trip as well as giving him a platform to discuss the economy/stimulus and the future of the party. You know he will get a fair shake from me and coming on MTP puts all of this to rest.

[...]

…So coming on Meet The Press allows you to frame the conversation how you really want to…and then move on. You can see (sic) you have done your interview and then move on. Consider it.

[...]

Look, you guys have a lot of pitches .. I get it and I know this is a tough situation … Let me just say this is the place to have a wider conversation with some context about not just the personal but also the future for him and the party … This situation only exacerbates the issue of how the GOP recovers when another national leader suffers a setback like this. So coming on Meet The Press allows you to frame the conversation how you really want to…and then move on. You can see you have done your interview and then move on. Consider it. (Emphasis mine)

Gregory is not the only reporter with embarrassing emails. Jessica Gibadlo of MSNBC actually gave them an idea for positive spin on the story:

(T)he tone in the news room is that Mark could spin this favorably if he talks it up as the outdoors man in the woods etc. For all we know he’s contemplating the last year of his term and thinking through his priorities before he goes on his family vacation. (Emphasis mine)

Many more reporters are quoted online at HuffPo; they make illuminating reading. But let’s step back a couple of news cycles and remember this:

It’s time for David Gregory to go before he kills a show that’s more important than he is. It’s also time for Big Media to admit it has a serious credibility problem with the 99% of Americans who don’t live in the beltway village.

In a blog post titled “The Cost of Controlling the Press,” K. Daniel Glover complains that the Obama White House is spending too much on new media, even comparing it unfavorably to the less interested more fiscally-prudent Bush administration:

Barack Obama’s White House is spending more than $80,000 a week to staff its old and new media offices. Add the price of speechwriters and the White House communications tab reaches nearly $100,000 a week, or nearly $5 million a year-and that is for salaries alone.

[...]

Although other staffers undoubtedly did work on the White House website and other Internet projects, Bush’s dedicated new media team appears to have consisted of two people-a specialty media director who earned $84,000 a year and a website assistant who earned $34,000.

[...]

Overall, Obama is spending about 12 percent more for his communications operation than Bush-$4.97 million compared with $4.44 million.

Oh, the humanity! A president elected by savvy netroots campaigning has increased the budget for netroots governance! And upped the White House communications budget by twelve percent!

The end of freedom is nigh!

I do not exaggerate Teh Crazy™ at work here. Glover has been a consistent alarmist about the role of new media in politics:

You might think that with the kind of rhetoric bloggers regularly muster against politicians, they would never work for them. But you would be wrong.

[...]

But this year, candidates across the country found plenty of outsiders ready and willing to move inside their campaigns. Candidates hired some bloggers to blog and paid others consulting fees for Internet strategy advice or more traditional campaign tasks like opposition research.

Horrors! Politicians turning to the web-savvy to staff their web-campaigns! What’s next? Hiring licensed plumbers to work on their pipes?

Hypocrisy! Progressive bloggers working for progressive candidates? Why, at this rate it won’t be long before they start working for elected progressives! Oh, wait…

Glover is actually one of the saner voices at Accuracy in Media (AIM), an organization whose motto — “For Fairness, Balance And Accuracy in News Reporting” — is a clue to its agenda. Paid contributors regularly confuse the sort of hateful, conspiracy-laden ravings you expect from a John Birch Society newsletter with actual media criticism.

During the 1990s, AIM popularized Clinton conspiracies, including the Vince Foster smear. The group’s founder was so far to the right, he actually charged Kenneth Starr with covering up for Clinton. These days, AIM spreads antiglobalist nonsense, homophobia, Obama smears, and maintains a quaint obsession with communism.

AIM editor Cliff Kincaid has accused George Soros of engineering the global financial collapse to elect Barack Obama. He’s also a regular guest on G. Gordon Liddy’s radio program. And he issued a gem of a press release Monday:

“The so-called ‘military coup’ in Honduras was a successful effort by Honduran patriots to preserve their constitutional system of government from an international alliance of communists and socialists backed by Iran.“

But Glover did allow an unintentional glimmer of the White House Press Corps’s pettiness into his post:

The White House irritated the press corps earlier this year when it prevented reporters from covering the President’s photo op with the national championship women’s basketball team from the University of Connecticut. Instead, Obama’s own media team produced a professional-style video report and released it several days after the event.

ABC News White House reporter Jake Tapper wondered, “Do Obama White House officials think their media coverage isn’t flattering enough?”

I can’t think of a less-worthy use of Jake Tapper’s time than to cover a glam event like that one. Glover includes it as proof that Obama is “controlling” the press corps, but instead it tells you a lot about the egos of village reporters.

Newswire services and newspapers are at war with Google and other websites that aggregate and link to their content. The chief of the Associated Press wants to cut them off, the editor of The Wall Street Journal calls them “parasites in the intestines of the Internet,” and at least one legal scholar says the copyright laws should change. The argument goes that few, if any, readers will click to read the original article once they’ve read the headline and the digest.

But Simon Owens over at Bloggasm has some interesting evidence to the contrary. After one of his blog posts was linked that way at Huffington Post,

For the first three hours I received approximately 4,000 unique visitors an hour to just that one article. Traffic for the rest of the day remained strong, not once dipping below 2,000 uniques an hour as the link began traveling down the front page. By midnight that night, Huffington Post had sent approximately 30,000 unique visitors to that one article.

[...]

All together, I’ve received a grand total of 37,739 unique visitors from a prominent link on the Huffington Post over a three day period, and even now I’m still seeing relatively strong traffic from there.

That’s mighty strong results from a single link for a mere blog. Multiply that by tens of thousands of links to The New York Times website on any given day from around the internet, and you’ll see the problem isn’t that we aren’t reading their content. The University of Southern California’s Annenberg School studied the problem and determined that plenty of Americans are reading newspapers online.

Newspapers simply haven’t capitalized on the changing way we read them.

Columbia Journalism professor Daniel Sinker catalogues their lack of innovation, comparing it to the many new business ventures launched by Google:

What have newspapers done in that same timeframe? A few hamfisted redesigns? A couple relaunches of websites? A few bad acquisitions? And layoff after layoff after layoff.

[...]

Newspaper execs talk with exasperation, as if they’ve tried everything they can. But they define “everything” so narrowly that it renders the word almost meaningless. In reality, as they watch their massive river of money slowly shrink away, they’ve tried almost nothing. They had a couple hundred year head start on Google, and yet they collapse in a heap here at the dawn of a new age.

Former newsman Jeff Jarvis is even more scathing:

You had a generation to reinvent the business but you did too little. I by all means include myself in that indictment because I spent my career in our industry: Guilty. I didn’t raise loud enough alarms (it felt as if they were too loud already) or accomplish enough change (not nearly enough). I blew it, too. But no last-minute hail-Mary passes will make up for our failings. Having not taken advantage of the last two decades to reinvent the news business, you’re not going to manage a rescue in two months, before the creditors come calling. That was your worst hail Mary: stoking up on debt and hoping to milk these cows for years to come. Mad cash-cow disease, that’s what too many of you had. Your other desperate moves: suddenly fantasizing that you can fix everything by going behind a wall (to hell with Google and its billions of readers!) and charging us because you think we “should” pay. Since when is a business plan built on “should?” I haven’t seen a sensible P&L justifying this dream from any of you.

Indeed, there was a time when newspapers could have owned the internet:

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