Tucker Carlson, the formerly bow-tied conservative wunderkind of talking heads, started a website January 11, 2010, that would ostensibly prioritize original reporting and newsgathering. Named The Daily Caller, it was formed both as an antidote to the often-cited liberal bias of investigative media and as a reaction to the nature of conservative journalism, which tends to mainly take the form of opinion and invective. So far, so good.
Last week, The DC published a story about Michele Bachmann’s migraines. This was the headline: “Stress-related condition ‘incapacitates’ Bachmann; heavy pill use alleged.” Anyone drawn in by this salacious headline, expecting stories of Bachmann’s snorting crushed Oxy or popping Valium with her afternoon coffee–you know, what most normal humans would consider “heavy pill use”—will be disappointed; the only pills are mundane migraine meds. Oh, and “incapacitates” might also be a bit of a stretch.
I don’t need to dwell on this particular story too long: Alex Pareene at Salon destroys it so thoroughly there’s not much else to say, and New York Magazine‘s Daily Intel makes a convincing case that it’s also possibly sexist. No matter how much of a wingnut Michele Bachmann undeniably is—and make no mistake, she’s like something Groucho Marx and Joseph Heller would’ve come up with at a hungover breakfast—nobody deserves to be the subject of a story where the headline and presentation is this skewed.
As Joel Meares’ excellent profile of Carlson in the most recent Columbia Journalism Review shows, this isn’t an isolated incident. Especially with their misleading-to–incorrect coverage of Journolist, the defunct listserv of left-leaning political journalists, The Daily Caller has made its rep on pageviews hooked by misleading, hysterical headlines and dishonest quotation. Meares writes:
The series may have lost Carlson the trust of Beltway types. “I’ve never dealt with someone who was quite so opportunistically mendacious as Carlson was here,” says [Ezra] Klein. But it may have strengthened Carlson’s connection with another audience: the Tea Party types who applaud the site’s anti-establishment tone. “The establishment never gave us any help,” vamps Carlson, who, alongside Cheney’s former senior aide, built the Caller with support from that big-time GOP donor. “I’ve never been all that pro-establishment in any context really.”
Rather than creating a conservative version of The New York Times, as was his aim, Meares writes that Carlson seems more to have created a right-leaning Huffington Post.
I’ve long closed my ears to the hemming and hawing of those who say the web is Death, come to take journalism to an early grave; this view has been proven ignorant and pathetically nostalgic. For a start, check out Daily Intel’s list of 21 young web-journalism innovators to get a glimpse of what I’m talking about. At the same time, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t sites and people out there exploiting the nature of the Internet, which often relies on a hook one place to get people to go another—something that newspapers never had to worry about with their headlines. HuffPo has proven that hyperlinks can be a shady business. The Daily Caller seems no better, and it’s unfortunate, because the web could really use a responsible conservative voice that actually prizes information over ideological fireworks.
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