CJR's Ann Cooper: A Real "Kicker"

And fully invested in her own mythology

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Updated 2012.02.06 Fin 10:05 PM EST

I'm sure Ann Cooper is a decent, hard working, and thoroughly capable journalist. Her faculty bio at the Columbia Journalism School gives an impressive list of accomplishments, accolades, and awards – and I have no reason to doubt their probity nor provenance. But her last post to CJR's The Kicker left me wondering how much thought, balance or effort she employed in rendering a dismissively harsh verdict on RT and its coming attraction with Julian Assange.

I felt compelled to comment but then realized – wait-a-minute dumb-ass – I have my own fricken' platform. So, I went back yesterday to see how her piece had been received. Clearly I was not alone in my apprehension and assessment: a ham-fisted denigration of a competing media property – owned as it is by the Kremlin.

Nice to see you countering the Russian impression that all Western journalism covering Russia is anti-Russian biased with this anti-Russian biased piece of journalism covering Russia.

I've watched dozen of hours of RT, and it is no more biased in favor of the hand that feeds it than most any media outlet in the US. More importantly, it's biases are transparent, unlike so much of the Western media. It is certainly not "relentlessly negative" in its coverage of the West. That is simply a lie, a transparent and easily provable lie, and one that clearly demonstrates your bias. ...

#2 Posted by disputo on Thu 26 Jan 2012 at 09:07 PM

and

Assange has exposed the limitations of corporate journalists and they don't like it one bit. But he deserves a Nobel Prize for jacking open the doors of democratic discourse and transparency.

#4 Posted by media consumer on Fri 27 Jan 2012 at 05:18 AM

I'm more than a little ambivalent about the Nobel Prize – given its track record – but these and the other sentiments at the (duplicate) links above track closely with my own. Cooper's post leads me to wonder if self-awareness becomes inversely proportionate to time spent and rewards accumulated within a career, especially one as compromised as American journalism today.

Flyover country @ Wikipedia

Victor Navasky not withstanding, economies and their composite industries exist in an ecosystem where outputs feed back to the source. Ann Cooper has shown how invested she is in the presumed rectitude and primacy of her profession without realizing the inherent mythology at work.

How critical is Chuck Todd of his quarry when he idolizes them, busting his moves 30,000 ft. above flyover country? How subservient are Jim Miklaszewski and Barbara Starr to the Pentagon's psy-ops masquerading as press releases? Some might argue in support of their obsequious discharge, but only to the further detriment of badly atrophied standards and the nation they disserve.

2012.02.06

Mainstream American journalism is a collection of social climbers bound to their ideological and social cliques, all too constrained by the Overton window that frames their purview. While there are still noble and critically astute practitioners of the craft, their reward for faithfully serving the public comes to marginalization and small beer. Those lucky to occupy broader platforms in the vast media wasteland of 21C America, yet refuse to bow to the prevailing stenography so rampant in their ranks, are outliers awaiting expiration at the whim of commercial interest. Dylan Ratigan will lose his access very shortly after he costs General Electric and Comcast more money and trouble than his daily animus to the highly profitable system – in which those corporations thrive – garners eyeballs and ad revenue. It is a simple calculus.

Fully invested in a profession that rewards fealty, not contradiction, Ann Cooper and the extreme majority of her increasingly benighted and blighted industry believe they are speaking truth to power. Unfortunately that self-regard comes up depressingly short for an ever increasing segment of their diminishing audience, those of us that recognize and reject the self imposed confines of reporting bound to corporate interests.

DonkeyHotey

There is a very clear limit to debate within the body politic beyond which power brooks no favor. Critically thinking Americans are therefore forced to find alternatives to the hackneyed and misleading caricatures proffered in the their news, such as the unalloyed critiques of Pepe Escobar, Glenn Greenwald, and Bob Somerby. Where organizations such as RT fit into this mix is less important than the information and points of view they air. The packaging of these deliverables develops from RT's stated mission to "question more", the less overt intent of its Russian state benefactor, and the media ecosystem in which it plies its wares. How much time had Ann Cooper actually spent watching the channel's content before she penned the following?

From the perspective of the principal parties, this should be a win-win relationship. Assange had suddenly brought big international attention to a channel whose main star to date has been a snarky, twenty-something presenter, Alyona Minkovski, born in Russia but raised in California.

Julian Assange’s New Platform: RT

RT's Lauren Lyster

Setting aside the incredible lack of substance revealed in this snipe-cum-critique, Cooper should have relied less on her undergraduates for her sourcing. Had she done more of her own due diligence she might have noticed the impressively iconoclastic work Lauren Lyster churns out on Capital Acount, a nightly round up of economic news covered non-ideologically through the work week. Reporting from Davos, Lyster leveraged her – though credentialed – lack of access into a more critical view of the World Economic Forum than one typically finds in American media – if it's covered at all.

Cooper provides no credible indication that she's seen ANY of RT's programming; her remarks are superfluous to the point of irrelevance and seem designed only to castigate through associative guilt. It seems imminently rational for the Kremlin and the powers that be in Russia to provide some counter point to the demonstrable swill issuing from American media organs. My general rule of thumb when consuming foreign sources of news is to remember that they are paid to lie about THEIR countries – not ours. That's an American prerogative Ann Cooper has proven herself all too comfortably acclimated.

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