ataxiwardance

21st century ziggurat. #DEMF #Detroit #Michigan

jayrosen:

Actually Governor Romney, what you just said is completely incorrect… This is NPR.

NPR has a new ethics handbook, which came out February 24th. Here’s the key part:

We report for our readers and listeners, not our sources. So our primary consideration when presenting the news is that we are fair to the truth. If our sources try to mislead us or put a false spin on the information they give us, we tell our audience. If the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side, we acknowledge it in our reports.

Fair to the truth. Pretty cool. It’s already started to have an effect. This is from an NPR report on Feb. 27th about auto bailouts and the Republican candidates.

NPR REPORTER: Mitt Romney, son of former American Motors CEO George Romney, criticized President Barack Obama’s handling of the bailout.

MITT ROMNEY: Instead of going through the normal managed bankruptcy process, he made sure the bankruptcy process ended up with the UAW taking the lion’s share of the equity in the business.

NPR REPORTER: Actually, the U.S. Treasury got most of GM’s equity. 

Such a simple word: “Actually….” And now it has a chance to become standard practice at NPR.

For more on this, see my post: NPR Tries to Get its Pressthink Right

(Photo by Matthew Reichbach. Creative Commons License.)

SOME PEOPLE SAY this is a welcome reversion to objective and useful journalism.

Miss you Ann Arbor.

Michigan’s Hostile Takeover

(Mother Jones) —By Paul Abowd | Wed Feb. 15, 2012 3:00 AM PST

“We haven’t seen anything this severe anywhere else in the country,” says Charles Monaco, a spokesman for the Progressive States Network, a New York-based advocacy group. “There’s been nothing in other states where a budget measure overturns the democratic vote.” Williams says emergency managers are able to enact draconian policies that would cost most city officials their jobs: “They couldn’t get elected if they tried.”

…
With an indefinite term and a city salary of $150,000, Schimmel doesn’t answer to anyone but the governor, at whose pleasure he serves. The city council can no longer make decisions but still calls meetings, which are routinely packed with angry residents. Asked by radio station WJR if the emergency-manager law hands power over to a “dictator,” Schimmel sighed, “I guess I’m the tyrant in Pontiac, then, if that’s the way it is.”
…
Pontiac is not Schimmel’s first clean-up job. In 2000, he was named the emergency manager of Hamtramck, where he served for six years. In 1986, a judge appointed him to oversee Ecorse’s finances after the city landed in state receivership; he stepped in and privatized city services. Today, the city is back in debt, and back under state management. Schimmel concedes that the privatization strategy can backfire, but he blames inept local government. “If you don’t have an overseer of the contractor, privatization can be much more expensive than in-house services,” he explains.

Hello Wolverine State / Amtrak train route!

Bye home!