If You Read This, Governor Rick Snyder and Fox 2 News Political Pundit Tim Skubick Might Think You’re Stupid

Well, Snyder and Skubick won’t think you’re stupid, exactly. Just dumb. Skubick (pictured left), who most recently prognosticated that the recall effort against Governor Snyder  was “dead as a door nail” just a few days before the Michigan Education Association joined in the battle, recently interviewed Snyder on the hot button subject of, yep, political bloggers. Michigan doesn’t have a lot of them, and one blogger who shall remain anonymous to keep retaliatory posts down to a minimum, recently confided to A2Politico that there aren’t that many good political bloggers at work in Michigan at the moment. Skubick agrees wholeheartedly. In a July 11, 2011 post he wrote: “Clearly there should be a ‘reader beware’ disclaimer on lots of the Internet columns appearing under the heading of freedom of the press and speech. The governor figures in time, the really smart consumers will figure out what is worthy and what is not. But what about the dumb ones?”

The dumb ones? You mean the dumb ones who pay taxes and vote, or the dumb ones who voted for Rick Snyder, and who will now be paying higher taxes? Skubick’s poor sentence construction obfuscates whether it’s just he who is worried about the “dumb ones,” or whether Snyder posed the question.

Fox 2 News political analyst Skubick goes on: “Gov. Rick Snyder, in his first comments ever about Internet ‘political’ writers, says this does pose some ‘interesting challenges in our society.’ Boy. There’s an understatement. The governor states the obvious: ‘There are great bloggers and there are bloggers you wonder why anyone would ever read anything they write.'”

First of all, shouldn’t the quotation marks be around the word writers, as in Internet political “writers?” If you’re going to be a condescending pinprick of a political analyst, get your quotation marks right. Next, Skubick shoots himself in the grammatical foot with, “This does pose some ‘interesting challenges to our society.'” He is referring back to those “political” writers. This political writers does? Is this just me, or can anyone else hear their middle school English teacher screaming about the correct use of this as a pronoun, and the importance of pronoun-verb agreement?

I could tease Tim Skubick about his minor dangling participles ad infinitum (or ad nauseum, if you prefer), but in reality the issue is more profound than just his shocking inability to write clearly and shape a logical argument.

Skubick goes on to write:

Snyder says, “As time passes you’ll find some separation. People over time will naturally find ways to separate what are really worthwhile bloggers vs. things that are just absolutely worthless that are not constructive at all in terms of the dialogue and discussion.”

Perhaps he’s correct but what happens in the interim before the separating separates. The fact is many readers assume, at their own peril, that because it is written down, it therefore must be true.

There is opinion, which everyone has, and then there is informed opinion which does not come with a new P.C. set up in your basement.

This vast access by anyone who wants to write is both good for the Democracy but has it’s dangers, too.

Many of the musings on the world wide web fail to apply one little standard that all “real” journalists practice..double checking your sources to come as close to the truth as possible.

“Real” journalists? Like, say, Jayson Blair, or say, Janet Cooke? Both of whom worked for major U.S. newspapers, and both of whom got caught inventing stories? A2Politico has awarded half a dozen Weekly Whoppers to AnnArbor.com and it’s political reporter Ryan Stanton for not double-checking sources so as to come “as close to the truth as possible.” Heck, Tom Gantert, formerly of the Ann Arbor News, pointed out in a recent Facebook post that there were newspapers using anonymous comments as content. The Flint Journal published a piece titled, “From the Comments: Petition Drive to recall Snyder gets mixed reviews.” There were pithy comments from anonymous posters, all of whom could have been Sue Snyder or Rick’s Mom for all anyone knew, or cared to know.

That’s what Skubick’s “real” journalists pass off as “real” news in Michigan.

Here’s a scoop: Informed opinion comes from informed writers, or writers who are willing to do the research, interviewing and legwork to inform themselves. It doesn’t matter where the PC is set up, because there are “real” journalists out there with PCs set up in “real” offices who are churning out journalistic crap-o-la at the speed of sound. Smart readers who want to be informed don’t just read news sites with which they agree, or the opinions of writers on one end of the political spectrum. The FCC’s recently published report on the state of American media concludes that there is less reporting than ever being offered up by more news sites than ever in the United States. The FCC report, in fact, pins hopes for a rebirth of investigative reporting (what the report calls “accountability journalism”) on independent, entrepreneurial news producers, not on companies such as Gannett, Fox News, or CNN.

Daniel Schorr, in a piece posted to Neiman Reports in 2005 gets to the heart of the matter that Skubick skirts around. Schorr writes:

Opinion polls beginning in the late 1990’s have registered growing public distrust of the increasingly concentrated, profit-driven news media. In 2002, 46 corporations controlled more than 50 percent of the news media—an array that included some 1,800 daily newspapers, 11,000 magazines, 2,000 television stations, and 11,000 radio stations. All of the principal television networks are extensions of large corporations— ABC’s parent company is the Walt Disney Company, NBC’s is General Electric, Viacom owns CBS, and Time Warner, CNN.

Half of the news media in our country is controlled by 46 companies. That, as opposed to some political “writer” who calls the president a dick, is bad for Democracy. Wait, the “dick” comment came from a “real” journalist employed by Time Magazine. Ok. Calling President Obama a vulgar name, while working for one of the 46 companies that controls half of the media in the country is really bad for Democracy (and very embarrassing to one’s mother).

Seriously though, what’s really at the base of Skubick’s rant is fear—his slap at political “writers” is more about a loss of power and control than it is about jack-a-roos who neglect to double-check sources so as to as come “as close to the truth as possible.” Officials at those 46 companies have been accustomed to calling the journalistic shots across the country, having the last word, cutting the political deals, deciding what gets reported on and what doesn’t. Now, there are “political” writers, community journalists and bloggers whose work is a danger to democracy, because people like you may be too dumb to figure out what is worthy and credible and what is not.

In reality, only about 0.4 percent of blogs have a regular audience, according to a 2008 Pew Research Institute survey of Internet users. The country’s 100 A-list blogs get between 15,000-150,000 views per day. (A2P Notes: A2P is among the country’s 2,000 B-list blogs that get between 1,000-2,500 views per day.) There are over 5,000,000 active bloggers in the U.S. whose work is viewed between 0-3 times per day. The number of attention given to daily newspapers is falling, according to research by the Readership Institute. Blog readership, on the other hand, is doubling every three years. What this means is that readers spend just about the same amount of time reading entries on A2Politico as they do reading articles in the A2Journal, and A2Politico entries get significantly more reader attention than the average local newspaper column. A-list blogs get as much reader attention as the average U.S. national newspaper.

A2Politico’s Chris Savage is at work on a piece about Daily Kos, the arch-progressive political blogging site founded in 2002. Daily Kos is Tim Skubick’s worst nightmare. Here’s how the site works, according to Wikipedia:

Founder Markos Moulitsas and a small group of selected editors post entries directly to the front page; other users can post “diaries,” the titles of which appear on the front page in reverse chronological order, with special attention and longer display time for those diaries highly recommended by other users. The other major source of content is the comments posted in response to front page entries and diaries. Comments for popular or controversial diaries or front page articles can run into the thousands.

Front page entries and diaries often take the form of a news story from an outside source interspersed with commentary from the author of the diary or post. Sometimes these stories contain a request for action from other members of the community, such as to get involved with a particular campaign, give money to a candidate or contact an elected official about an issue. Some front page entries are called “open threads,” which encourage people to post comments on any issue. One of the versions of these open threads are “live threads” of commentary on important events happening in real time, such as debates or elections.

The content that Daily Kos aggregates from individual users is not edited or fact-checked. The site’s comments are generally wide-ranging. In May 2011, according to web metric sites, Daily Kos hosted 590,000 individual visitors and AnnArbor.com hosted 279,000 individual visitors. Six weeks after Daily Kos threw its weight behind the recall of Governor Rick Snyder, urging its readers to donate money and to volunteer, metro-Detroit readers learned about it in a July 4, 2011 piece in the Livingston Daily and a July 3, 2011 piece in the Detroit Free Press. Both papers mentioned Daily Kos, because both papers ran the same piece written by the same writer, Dawson Bell.

Conversely, Chris Savage’s Eclectablog broke the news on May 21, 2011.

A2Politico filed FOIAs and discovered Ann Arbor city managers have been rewarding themselves with stays at luxury hotels, spas and resorts, buying meals around town worth thousands of dollars, that city manager desk jockeys have been enjoying car allowances, and managers have spent over $1.1 million on cell phone perks. A reader who regularly posts comments to both A2Politico and AnnArbor.com wrote in response to one of these investigative pieces: “Still not a peep on this from AnnArbor.com. Ryan, Tony and Nate…we know you are reading this. Lol.”

Lol, indeed. The local media outlet funded by deep pockets Advance Publications has decided to stay mum on the subject. Without the FOIAs filed by A2Politico, city manager spending on perks for themselves in the face of deep cuts to police, fire and other services to balance the city’s budget, would have gone unreported.

Skubick ends his piece thusly: “But as some Internet writers opine, don’t let the facts get in the way of a good (and misleading) blog.” Right. I’ll have to keep that in mind. So should you. On June 15, 2011 A2Politico awarded yet another Weekly Whopper to AnnArbor.com and Ryan Stanton for, yep, not letting the facts get in the way of a good (and misleading) blog entry:

On June 14, 2011, AnnArbor.com’s reporter, Ryan Stanton, reported that city officials claimed just 21 miles of roads in Ann Arbor are in poor condition.

Had Stanton checked the archives of his employer’s own web site, he would have come across a November 9, 2009 piece by Amalie Nash (who left AnnArbor.com to work at the Detroit Free Press). In that piece, Nash writes, “Washtenaw County was fourth in the state for miles of poor roads at 977 miles with a poor rating. Among Michigan counties, it was 14th in overall percentage of poor roads at 43% of its total 5,773 miles of federal aid roads. Ann Arbor ranked third out of nearly 1,800 municipalities in the state with 189 miles in poor condition. Overall, 55% of Ann Arbor’s 342 miles of federal-aid qualified roads were deemed poor, the report shows.”

In November 2009, then, AnnArbor.com reported that 189 miles of roads in Ann Arbor were found to be in poor condition. According to Stanton’s June 14, 2011 piece, between 2009 and 2010, Ann Arbor resurfaced 11.5 miles of streets, including both major and local streets. That would, of course, mean that there remain at least 178 miles of roads in poor condition, perhaps more if roads that were in only fair condition deteriorated further. Yet, Ryan Stanton and AnnArbor.com included information from city officials that purports only 21 miles of roads in Ann Arbor are in poor condition.

Newspaper editors and reporters have rarely had to face pointed and public criticism of their editorial content, as well as questions about the veracity and quality of their reporting and editorials. Now, their content is fact-checked, and the work of their reporters mocked by their own online readers.

The assumption was that if it was written down, it was the truth, and the power of the local press was something to be feared.

If Tim Skubick’s rant against “political” writers teaches us anything it is that power, as the saying goes, is never given. Power is taken. The news industry is being rocked by a grass-roots revolution that the owners of those 46 companies can neither squelch nor control. It’s making them queasy and cranky because it’s impacting their revenues and their journalistic prerogative. In response, Baby Boomer writers like Tim Skubick to try to convince people that “real” journalists are double-checking their facts, when they aren’t, and that only dumb people would read sites like this one.

As for Governor Rick Snyder, he’s sure dummkopfs out there will eventually figure out which sites are credible and worth reading. The again, he’s also sure Michigan residents support his education cuts, Emergency Manager law, tax hikes, and $1.7 billion dollar tax break to state businesses. Maybe he needs to spend more time reading Daily Kos, and less time reading The Detroit News and chewing the fat with Fox News.