Justin's Political Corner

CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson is reportedly ”in talks to leave CBS ahead” of her contract in the midst of disagreements with executives over her “wading dangerously close to advocacy” on Benghazi. Attkisson, who has a history of producing shoddy reporting, is getting support from Fox News personalities, with one calling for the conservative network to hire her as an investigative reporter.

The Washington Post noted this week that Attkisson, like Fox News, has been a “persistent voice of news-media skepticism about the government’s story” on Benghazi. ThePost added:

Conservatives see a crusader and truth-teller. Tim Graham of the conservative Media Research Center calls Attkisson “an outlier” among TV reporters — a hard-nosed investigator of “how our public officials behave and misbehave.” Liberals see a partisan tool. “I think Attkisson has completely given herself over to the right and is very happy to be their champion,” says Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow at the liberal Media Matters for America organization.

Politico reported that CBS News “has grown increasingly frustrated with Attkisson’s Benghazi campaign” and executives “see Attkisson wading dangerously close to advocacy on the issue, network sources have told POLITICO. Attkisson can’t get some of her stories on the air, and is thus left feeling marginalized and underutilized. That, in part, is why Attkisson is in talks to leave CBS ahead of contract.” (The Post wrote of the contract situation: “Despite reports of internal conflicts with her superiors, Attkisson says she has no immediate plans to leave CBS. ‘I am currently under contract,’ she says flatly, declining to say when her agreement lapses or what might follow.”)

If Attkisson does land at Fox News, she’d join several other on-air figures who conservatives believed were mistreated by the media. In recent years, Fox News has hired reporter Doug McKelway, Lou Dobbs, Don Imus, and Judy Miller. 

h/t: MMFA

PPP’s annual poll on TV news finds that there’s only one source more Americans trust than distrust: PBS. 52% of voters say they trust PBS to only 29% who don’t trust it. The other seven outlets we polled on are all distrusted by a plurality of voters.

When it comes to asking Americans which single outlet they trust the most and least out of the ones we polled on, Fox News once again wins both honors. 34% say it’s the one they trust the most, compared to 13% for PBS, 12% for CNN, 11% for ABC, 8% for MSNBC, 6% for CBS, and 5% each for Comedy Central and NBC. Fox News is the choice of 67% of Republicans, while Democrats basically split their allegiances four ways between ABC and CNN, both at 17%, and MSNBC and PBS, both at 16%.

Even more Americans identify Fox News as the outlet they trust the least- 39% give its that designation to 14% for MSNBC, 13% for CNN, 12% for Comedy Central, 5% for ABC and CBS, 3% for NBC, and 1% for PBS. 60% of Democrats give it their lowest marks while Republicans split between MSNBC (24%), CNN (19%), and Comedy Central (14%) on that front.

Full results

H/T: Public Policy Polling

Bob Schieffer announced on Sunday that Condoleezza Rice is joining CBS News as a contributor.

“Everybody knows Condoleezza Rice was President Bush’s Secretary of State but I’m highly pleased to announce she has a new job. As of today, she’s joining CBS News as a contributor,” Schieffer said at the top of the roundtable discussion on “Face the Nation.” Rice was a member of the show’s panel.

h/t: Huffington Post

CBS News has reportedly hired Frank Luntz, the Republican strategist and pollster best known for helping Republicans craft often-deceptive messaging to torpedo liberal policies. In his post announcing the move, Politico media reporter Dylan Byers writes that Luntz will “make a number of appearances across the network between now and Election Day.” Luntz’s hiring comes only a few months after New York Times Magazine contributor Robert Draper reported that Luntz orchestrated a 2009 meeting where prominent Republicans formulated a plan to win back Congress and the White House.

In his book Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives, Draper reported that Luntz “organized a dinner” on Obama’s inauguration night featuring a handful of “the Republican Party’s most energetic thinkers.” The attendees — which included current vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan — reportedly emerged from the nearly four hour dinner “almost giddily” after having agreed on “a way forward.” 

Luntz’s influence in GOP politics isn’t limited to organizing high-level strategy dinners — he’s been credited with coining some of the most infamous lines from conservative media figures and politicians.

Luntz has been a regular fixture on Fox News for years. His appearances have featured him praising dishonest conservative ads and asking focus groups questions about whether Obama is a socialist. During a 2010 appearance on The O’Reilly Factor, Luntz praised the Chamber of Commerce for having “done some of the best advertising across the country” without disclosing that the Chamber was one of his corporate clients.

h/t: Ben Dimiero at MMFA

Mike Wallace, the CBS reporter who became one of the nation’s best-known broadcast journalists as an interrogator of the famous and infamous on “60 Minutes,” died on Saturday. He was 93. 

On its Web site, CBS said Mr. Wallace died at a care facility in New Canaan, Conn., where he had lived in recent years. Mr. Wallace, who was outfitted with a pacemaker more than 20 years ago, had a long history of cardiac care and underwent triple bypass heart surgery in January 2008.

A reporter with the presence of a performer, Mr. Wallace went head to head with chiefs of state, celebrities and con artists for more than 50 years, living for the moment when “you forget the lights, the cameras, everything else, and you’re really talking to each other,” he said in an interview with The New York Times videotaped in July 2006 and released on his death as part of the online feature “The Last Word.”

Mr. Wallace created enough such moments to become a paragon of television journalism in the heyday of network news. As he grilled his subjects, he said, he walked “a fine line between sadism and intellectual curiosity.”

His success often lay in the questions he hurled, not the answers he received.

“Perjury,” he said, in his staccato style, to President Richard M. Nixon’s right-hand man, John D. Ehrlichman, while interviewing him during the Watergate affair. “Plans to audit tax returns for political retaliation. Theft of psychiatric records. Spying by undercover agents. Conspiracy to obstruct justice. All of this by the law-and-order administration of Richard Nixon.”

Mr. Ehrlichman paused and said, “Is there a question in there somewhere?”

No, Mr. Wallace later conceded. But it was riveting television.

Both the style and the substance of his work drew criticism. CBS paid Nixon’s chief of staff H. R. Haldeman $100,000 for an exclusive (if inconclusive) pair of interviews with Mr. Wallace in 1975. Critics called it checkbook journalism, and even Mr. Wallace conceded later that it had been “a bad idea.”

For a 1976 report on Medicaid fraud, the show’s producers set up a phony health clinic in Chicago. Was the use of deceit to expose deceit justified? Hidden cameras and ambush interviews were all part of the game, Mr. Wallace said, though he abandoned those techniques in later years, when they became a cliché and no longer good television.

Some subjects were unfazed by Mr. Wallace’s unblinking stare. When he sat down with the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranian leader, in 1979, he said that President Anwar Sadat of Egypt “calls you, Imam — forgive me, his words, not mine — a lunatic.” The translator blanched, but the Ayatollah responded, calmly calling Sadat a heretic.

He set his sights on CBS News and joined the network as a special correspondent. He was soon anchoring “The CBS Morning News With Mike Wallace” and reporting from Vietnam. Then he caught the eye of Richard Nixon.

Running for president, Nixon offered Mr. Wallace a job as his press secretary shortly before the 1968 primaries began. “I thought very, very seriously about it,” Mr. Wallace told The Times. “I regarded him with great respect. He was savvy, smart, hard working.”

But Mr. Wallace turned Nixon down, saying that putting a happy face on bad news was not his cup of tea.

Only months later “60 Minutes” made its debut. The trademark ticking of the Tag Heuer stopwatch marked the moment.

It was something new on the air: a “newsmagazine,” usually three substantial pieces of about 15 minutes each — a near-eternity on television. Mr. Wallace and Harry Reasoner were the first co-hosts, one fierce, one folksy.

The show was the brainchild of Don Hewitt, a producer who was “in bad odor at CBS News at the time,” Mr. Wallace said in the interview.

“He was unpredictable, difficult to work with, genius notions, a genuine adventurer, if you will, in television news at that time,“ Mr. Wallace said of Mr. Hewitt, who died in 2009.

The show, which moved to Sunday nights at 7 in 1970, was slow to catch on. Creative conflict marked its climb to the top of the television heap in the 1970s. Mr. Wallace fought his fellow correspondents for the best stories and the most airtime.

“There would be blood on the floor,” Mr. Wallace said in the interview. He said he developed the “not necessarily undeserved reputation” of being prickly — he used a stronger word — and “of stealing stories from my colleagues,” who came to include Morley Safer, Ed Bradley, Dan Rather and Diane Sawyer in the 1970s and early 1980s.

“This was just competition,” he said. “Get the story. Get it first.”

Mr. Wallace and his teams of producers — who researched, reported and wrote the stories — took on American Nazis and nuclear power plants along with his patented brand of exposés.

The time was ripe for investigative television journalism. Watergate and its many seamy sideshows had made muckraking a respectable trade. By the late 1970s “60 Minutes” was the top-rated show on Sundays. For five consecutive years it was the No. 1 show on television, a run matched only by “All in the Family” and “The Cosby Show.” Mr. Wallace was rich and famous and a powerful figure in television news when his life took a stressful turn in 1982.

Mr. Wallace officially retired from “60 Minutes” in 2006, after a 38-year run, at the age of 88. A few months later he was back on the program with an exclusive interview with the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Mr. Wallace replied: “What do you think? Is it a good idea to retire?” He won his 21st Emmy award for the interview.

And he kept working. Only weeks before his 2008 bypass surgery, he interviewed the baseball star Roger Clemens as accusations swirled that Mr. Clemens had used performance-enhancing drugs.

Myron Leon Wallace was born in Brookline, Mass., on May 9, 1918, one of four children of Friedan and Zina Wallik, who had come to the United States from a Russian shtetl before the turn of the 20th century. (Friedan became Frank and Wallik became Wallace in the American melting pot.) His father started as a wholesale grocer and became an insurance broker.

Myron came out of Brookline High School with a B-minus average, worked his way through the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and graduated in 1939. (Decades later he was deeply involved in two of the university’s programs for journalists: the Livingston Awards, given to talented reporters under 35, and the Knight-Wallace fellowships, a sabbatical for midcareer reporters; its seminars are held at Wallace House.) 

h/t: Tim Weiner at the New York Times

Five years ago, just off a bout from cancer, Bob Schieffer was set to retire from CBS’s “Face the Nation.” That never stuck, and now he’s doubling his workload.

Starting Sunday, the public affairs program expands to an hour. Vice President Joe Biden, whom Schieffer interviewed Thursday in Milwaukee, is the featured guest. Republican presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul are also booked.

With a presidential campaign under way, it’s an attention-getting time for the Sunday morning shows. The landscape changed already this year when George Stephanopoulos returned to the helm of ABC’s “This Week” in January.

Shortly after Schieffer started as host two decades ago, he said his competitor, the late Tim Russert of “Meet the Press,” went to his NBC bosses to urge that the show be expanded to an hour. Give me three months, Russert said, and if the ratings don’t improve we’ll go back to a half-hour.

They never looked back, and Russert dominated Sunday mornings until his death in 2008.

“Tim was the best of the best,” Schieffer said. “But the fact of the matter is what propelled them to No. 1 is they went to an hour and they were the first to do that. When they did that, it left us in the dust.”

Schieffer repeatedly nagged his bosses to follow suit. He made the same speech when Jeff Fager and David Rhodes took over last year, not expecting much. When they gave the go-ahead, Schieffer said, “I nearly fainted.”

Ratings and election news figured in the timing. “Meet the Press,” now with David Gregory, averaged 3.3 million viewers during the first three months of the year. “Face the Nation” was a close second with 3.09 million, the Nielsen company said. “This Week” had 2.53 million and “Fox News Sunday” averaged 1.15 million. “Face the Nation” is the only broadcast to see its ratings improve over last year.

Betsy Fischer, “Meet the Press” executive producer, said she’s all for more Sunday morning TV time.

“When we went to an hour 20 years ago, I remember the big advantage was that it gave us much more flexibility in programming the show,” Fischer said. “I suspect it will be beneficial to CBS in that respect as well.”

h/t:  St. Louis Post-Dispatch, via AP

Veteran journalists and media ethicists — including a former CBS News Washington bureau chief — are criticizing CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson for accepting an award from Accuracy in Media, a conservative group with a long history of promoting anti-gay views and conspiracy theories.

Attkisson is scheduled to accept the award in person Thursday at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C.

Several longtime news experts contend Attkisson is hurting her own credibility and that of CBS by participating in the event.

“If you go out and you’ve received an award from any organization with an agenda, then any reader of your work or viewer of your work has a right to question your impartiality or your fairness,” Ken Auletta, media writer for The New Yorker, told Media Matters in an interview. “I don’t think journalists should accept awards from either right-wing or left-wing, conservative or liberal organizations, or from any other organized group that has an agenda. We’re not supposed to have an agenda. By accepting those awards or appearing, you are raising questions about your own dispassion. We have enough of those questions already about journalists.”

Ed Fouhy, a former long-time CBS News producer and one-time Washington bureau chief for the network, called Attkisson a “pawn.”

“Sharyl Attkisson is making a mistake in accepting an award from A.I.M. By doing so she becomes just another pawn in the ideological chess games being played with such intensity in Washington,” Fouhy stated. “Her acceptance helps to legitimize A.I.M., a fringe group, whose sole agenda is and has been for many years, to undermine the credibility of the mainstream media, fueled by the donations of millionaire conspiracy theorists.”

Fouhy, also a former CBS News vice president, then noted A.I.M’s past efforts against the network dating back many years:

“Reed Irvine, founder of A.I.M., and his political heirs have long made CBS News a special target in their fevered attempts to propound the myth of the liberal media. Going back to Watergate days, A.I.M. has relentlessly tried to intimidate and harass CBS News journalists. Ms. Attkisson may not be aware of that history but she should know that accepting awards from groups with political agendas, whether of the right or the left, is a bad idea.”

Robert Steele, journalism ethics instructor at The Poynter Institute, calls Attkisson’s move an “integrity risk.”

“While it’s unclear to me as to the specific role Sharyl Attkisson will play as a speaker at the Reed Irvine Awards event, there is an ethical pressure point in her participation in a conference conducted by an organization that reflects political ideology,” he wrote in an e-mail, later adding, “Sharyl Attkisson and CBS News run an integrity risk with her active participation in this awards ceremony and the conference.”

But for some observers, such as Marty Steffens — former San Francisco Examiner editor and a journalism professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism — damage can be done to the CBS brand.

“It does damage the brand to accept an award from a group that seeks to influence the news,” Steffens said in an e-mail. “Many such organizations out there seek to ‘sway’ reporters through contests and awards. Accepting in person … is never a good idea. That is to say, I don’t know the specifics here… but generally speaking is not a good idea.”

Ed Chen, former Bloomberg reporter and past president of the White House Correspondents Association, added:

“A group can dish out all the journalism awards it wants, no matter what its bias. But accepting such awards is another thing.”

Pam Fine, journalism professor at the University of Kansas and former managing editor for The Indianapolis Star, said reporters should choose the awards they acknowledge carefully.

“I believe the best policy for journalists is to accept awards from industry-recognized journalism organizations that are non partisan. These include universities such as Columbia which administers the Pulitzer Prizes, Georgia which administers the Peabody Awards and associations such as the American Society of News Editors and the Radio Television Digital News Association.

“I think journalists who accept awards from partisan groups jeopardize their credibility with folks on the other side of the equation and should think carefully about their own credibility and that of their news organizations before accepting such awards.”

Charles Davis, associate professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, agreed.

“I don’t think that journalists should ever accept awards or any recognition from advocacy groups. At the heart of journalism lies independence,” Davis said. “I’m not going to ever applaud a journalist for accepting an award that essentially recognizes the fact that the advocacy group likes what they reported. There are a lot of advocacy groups that hand these things over and I think that journalists should shy away from them. These are partisan advocates.”

h/t: Media Matters for America

PPP’s 3rd annual TV news trust poll (2011 version here, 2010 version here) finds that Fox News tops the list for both the source Americans trust the most and the one they trust the least.

Fox is the most trusted TV news source for 34% of voters, followed by PBS at 17%, CNN at 12%, ABC News at 11%, CBS News at 8%, MSNBC at 5%, and Comedy Central and NBC each at 4%.

68% of Republicans pick Fox as their most trusted source, with no one else even hitting double digits. Democrats split closely three ways with PBS at 21%, ABC News at 19%, and CNN at 17%. Despite having a reputation for appealing to the left MSNBC actually polls in only 6th place among Democrats at 8%, finishing slightly behind even Fox News’ 9%. Independents split almost evenly between Fox News (29%) and PBS (27%).

Fox is also the least trusted TV news source for 34% of voters, followed by Comedy Central at 16%, MSNBC at 15%, CNN at 11%, ABC News at 7%, CBS News at 5%, PBS at 2%, and NBC News at 1%.

Democrats (53-17 over Comedy Central) and independents (44-13 over Comedy Central) both overwhelmingly say Fox is their least trusted news source. Republicans go for MSNBC by a 28-23 margin over CNN, followed by Comedy Central at 18% and ABC News at 10%.

Some results:

Q1 Do you trust ABC News, or not?

• Trust it
•  37% 
• …………………………………………………….
• Do not trust it
•  40% 
• …………………………………………..
• Not sure 22% 

………………………………………………….

Q2 Do you trust CBS News, or not?

• Trust it
•  40% 
• …………………………………………………….
• Do not trust it
•  42% 
• …………………………………………..
• Not sure 18% 

………………………………………………….

Q3 Do you trust CNN, or not?

• Trust it
•  43% 
• …………………………………………………….
• Do not trust it
•  39% 
• …………………………………………..
• Not sure 18% 
• ………………………………………………….

Q4 Do you trust Comedy Central, or not?

• Trust it
•  28% 
• …………………………………………………….
• Do not trust it
•  46% 
• …………………………………………..
• Not sure 26% 
• ………………………………………………….

Q5 Do you trust Fox News, or not?

• Trust it
•  45% 
• …………………………………………………….
• Do not trust it
•  42% 
• …………………………………………..
• Not sure 13% 
• ………………………………………………….

Q6 Do you trust MSNBC, or not?

• Trust it
•  38% 
• …………………………………………………….
• Do not trust it
•  43% 
• …………………………………………..
• Not sure 19% 
• ………………………………………………….

Q7 Do you trust NBC News, or not?

• Trust it
•  44% 
• …………………………………………………….
• Do not trust it
•  38% 
• …………………………………………..
• Not sure 17% 
• ………………………………………………….

Q8 Do you trust PBS, or not?

• Trust it
•  52% 
• …………………………………………………….
• Do not trust it
•  30% 
• …………………………………………..
• Not sure 17% 
• ………………………………………………….

Q9 Which TV news outlet do you trust the most: 

ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Comedy Central, 

Fox News, MSNBC, NBC News, or PBS?

• ABC News 11% 
• ………………………………………………
• CBS News  8% 
• ………………………………………………
• CNN 12% 
• ……………………………………………………….
• Comedy Central
•   4% 
• ……………………………………….
• Fox News 34% 
• ………………………………………………..
• MSNBC  5% 
• …………………………………………………..
• NBC News  4% 
• ………………………………………………
• PBS 17% 
• ……………………………………………………….
• Someone else/Not sure  4% 
• …………………………….

Q10 Working from the same list of choices, which 

TV news outlet do you trust the least?

• ABC News  7% 
• ………………………………………………
• CBS News  5% 
• ………………………………………………
• CNN 11% 
• ……………………………………………………….
• Comedy Central
•  16% 
• ……………………………………….
• Fox News 34% 
• ………………………………………………..
• MSNBC 15% 
• …………………………………………………..
• NBC News  1% 
• ………………………………………………
• PBS  2% 
• ……………………………………………………….
• Someone else/Not sure  9%

-For the second year in a row PBS easily comes out ahead as the outlet the most people trust, even if it isn’t necessarily the one they trust the most.

-In general trust in television news has been on the rise over the last two years. Trust in NBC News is up 15 points compared to 2010, CBS and ABC News are both up by 12 points, and CNN is up by 6 points. The only outlet in worse shape than it was 2 years ago is Fox News, which is down 9 points. But they’re still headed in the right direction- they’re up 7 points from 2011 after dropping by 16 points between 2010 and 2011.

-Democrats trust everything- except Fox News. NBC does the best with them at +50 (67/17), followed by PBS and CNN at +49 (66/17 and 65/16 respectively), ABC at +38 (57/19), CBS at +35 (58/23), MSNBC at +33 (56/23), and even Comedy Central at +4 (36/32). Fox News comes in at -36 (25/61).

-Republicans meanwhile don’t trust anything except Fox News. PBS comes the closest to breaking even among non-Fox outlets, although not very close, at -30 (26/56).  It’s followed by CNN at -49 (18/67), MSNBC at -51 (18/69), NBC at -52 (17/69), CBS at -54 (17/71), ABC at -56 (14/70), and Comedy Central at -59 (12/71). But Fox News comes in at a stellar 73/17.

Independents are with the Democrats. They trust everything except Fox News. Main takeaway from this poll: tv news has become just as polarizing as the political parties in this country.

Full results here

h/t: PPP.