The Biggest Crock Ted Diadiun ever wrote

And that is really saying something.

Today's column by so-called "reader representative" (management apologist) Ted Diadiun in the Cleveland Plain Dealer would be hilarious if it weren't so pathetic. Most often he restricts himself to picking nits over trivia, like should we have run this picture so large or was the timing of a story right or even ruminating how maybe the paper should be the only one in America not online.

Today he offers his "thoughts" on Keith Olbermann and journalistic "objectivity."

http://www.cleveland.com/readers/index.ssf/2010/11/avoiding_even_a_hint_...

Let's leave aside that the entire Olbermann suspension was absurd and hypocritical given that A. Olbermann is a partisan commentator, not an "objective" reporter, and B. the network applied different standards to him than to its own right-wing commentator Joe Scarborough.

Diadiun says, "The quest for objectivity in news coverage, in practice and particularly in perception gets a lot of our attention at The Plain Dealer -- especially around election time, when so many people are attuned to nuances of bias. So we need to take particular care that the people who bring you this coverage can never be seen as personally participating in a campaign, and we need to make certain that we avoid real or apparent conflicts of interest."

He piously proclaims that editors, reporters, photographers etc at the paper can't run for office, display yard signs or bumper stickers, contribute to or volunteer for campaigns etc. He didn't address whether it's OK for an editor to have friendly lunches with officeholders that they don't have with their opponents and then coverage gets slanted to favor these officeholders.

And he didn't say why it was OK for Mark Naymik, who constantly tries to wear both hats as a reporter and an opinion columnist, to serve as a conduit for specious Lee Fisher campaign attacks against his opponent Jennifer Brunner in the primary, yet, incredibly, be allowed to continue to cover the Senate race.

I especially laughed at his quote from Metro Editor Chris Quinn, who said,
"I can't think of a single time when I've become aware of a conflict and had to call a reporter in and talk about it." Maybe Quinn should have started by talking to a mirror, since he so famously compromised coverage and hung one of his own reporters out to dry to try to provide more favorable spin for prosecutor Bill Mason due to Quinn's alleged friendship with one of Mason's top lieutenants.

http://www.clevelandindependent.com/2010/01/20/the-plain-dealer-tries-to...

At the Plain Dealer, minor political contributions of low-level reporters are taboo but friendships on a higher level that constitute enormous conflicts are winked at.

The one that is a blazing red flag to me is that the PD's publisher sits on numerous civic boards. It's a tradition that needs to be discontinued if the paper wants to have any pretense of objectivity. You can claim until you're blue in the face that the publisher has no input on editorial content, but that's hooey. Coverage and content are clearly servants of specific, often extremely partisan, goals, many of which seem to line up with the interests of the boards publisher Terence Egger sits on. If the paper wants to make holier-than-thou professions of objectivity, Egger needs to resign from these boards.

But Diadiun's most staggering display of duplicity comes in the comments when he responds to the predictably mean-spirited and ignorant Connie Schultz bashing in the comments from angry righties.

He says, "I deliberately didn't mention her in today's column because she is a unique case, and the newspaper is completely transparent about it. She was writing a popular column for The Plain Dealer before she ever met Sherrod Brown. A lot of us are troubled by the obvious conflict, and I don't agree with her usually, but I think we are a more interesting paper with her than without her. Connie writes opinions and has a bias, that is acknowledged for everyone to see whenever she writes about politics. Plain Dealer reporting is not biased, and we go to great lengths to keep it that way. If you think otherwise ... prove it"

Oh, where to start? Let's start with the gratuitous "I don't agree with her usually." Well, Ted, 90% of your readers don't usually agree with Kevin O'Brien and he usually fails to make a coherent case for his viewpoint. So what?

"A lot of us are troubled by the obvious conflict"? Who is "a lot of us"? What exactly are you "troubled" about since she writes about issues of concern to her as an intelligent, educated, thoughtful adult — NOT about what her husband is doing? And doesn't saying this clearly undermine her credibility? Are "a lot of us" also troubled that Regina Brett's husband runs a communications firm that has worked for some of the top corporate interests in town and Brett often writes about issues that directly impact upon these interests? (I should make it clear I am not picking on Regina and I am NOT "troubled" by this — but how exactly is this different than Connie writing about what interests her, whether or not it intersects with her husband's interests?)

Stating that "Connie writes opinions and has a bias" is one more thing that seems designed to throw red meat to her idiot attackers and undermine her credibility as a thoughtful writer. ALL opinion columnists have biases; it's what they're paid for. O'Brien has an absurd bias out of touch with 90% of the people in this county, and as I stated above, he rarely supports his opinions with actual facts. He's a pure rabble-rouser, a print version of Glenn Beck. This doesn't "trouble" you, Ted, especially since you claim in this thread some kind of virtuous journalistic superiority for newspapers over broadcast media? Connie is NOT a counterbalance to O'Brien; hiring a loud-mouthed, flame-throwing college kid who's just discovered Marx and has a poster of Che on his wall would be.

And isn't suggesting that a "popular column" she was writing "before she ever met Sherrod Brown" is now somehow compromised by that and needs a disclaimer incredibly sexist and demeaning? Yes, Ted, it is!

Finally, there's that howler, "Plain Dealer reporting is not biased, and we go to great lengths to keep it that way. If you think otherwise ... prove it."

Plain Dealer reporting IS biased. Everyone knows it and the paper would have more credibility if it dropped the pretense, like we do. We know that the paper goes to great lengths to serve who or what it wants to serve, whether it's kissing up to Steve LaTourette almost constantly, or creating a fantasy Matt Dolan out of thin air to further its goal of Republican takeover of the county, or harping on a $250 donation county executive-elect Ed FitzGerald received while never exploring what Dolan's uncle and father might want in return for their S300,000 donations, or, most egregiously, spinning charter reform — omitting crucial pieces of information and falsely demonizing people who didn't go along in lockstep with their agenda — until virtually no voter had a clue what they were really voting on.

http://www.ohiodailyblog.com/content/how-newspaper-commits-journalistic-...

Prove it? Ted, I'll be glad to give you links. I have been writing about this — and citing specific examples over and over — for two years. I have a folder filled with many more examples from the two-year period (September, 2007-September 2009) when I was monitoring the paper's bias. I HAVE proved it beyond a shadow of doubt.

The most laugh-inducing line Diadiun wrote: "People expect a higher ethical standard from newspapers."

Not in Cleveland they don't. They know better.