Analysis

Pinterest is probably the most innocuous corner of the Internet. It’s a social media platform dominated by women who like sharing recipes, cheesy family photos and hairstyle tips.

It’s essentially the last place on Earth you’d go if you had an annoying political opinion you wanted to foist on other angry individuals. It’s a magical place free of shame and judgment.

Or, it was until the hyper partisan Media Matters for America set up an account on the site and brought the never-ending hate it has for radio host Rush Limbaugh and Fox News with it.

Here what the people of Pinterest enjoy sharing on any given day:

• This white puppy in a wicker basket lined with flowers.
• This home decor suggestion that turns a birdcage into a classy wall ornament.
• These paper doily envelopes that a user described as “quite fetching.”

And here’s the type of thing MMFA is posting on its own account:

But MMFA isn’t the only offender here. Its conservative counter part, Media Research Center, is also casting a dark cloud over the innocence that is Pinterest:

FBDC reached out to both publications to ask if either believed their partisan screeds might be jarring in a squishy forum largely devoted to sharing pesto recipes and scrap booking tips. “No,” said the succinct spokeswoman for MMFA.

So far MRC isn’t talking.

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In our ongoing series where we skim through the tweets of D.C. journos, we may have struck gold with Politico’s Jake Sherman. Just when we think we’ve figured him out, he surprises us. One moment he’s tweeting about the intricate details of Congress; the next, he’s tweeting out some kush tunage from his phavorite jam band. Here’s what we’re talking about. On Wednesday, Jake ‘n Bake sends out this tweet on Speaker John Boehner.

Boehner: no matter what happens in the election, the next 2 yrs in washington will be most consequential in the last 50-60 yrs.

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) May 17, 2012

Moments later, Sherman sends out this tweet.

Happy birthday to Phish’s Page McConnell. Here are some fun clips. bit.ly/JVpNSS — Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) May 17, 2012

It’s a happy birthday message to the keyboardist/piano player/multi-instrumentalist/probably great hacky-sacker, Page McConnell from Phish. Don’t worry, Jakester! Summer is right around the corner and all of your favorite bands with be hitting the road for the tours. And when you tweet about them, we’ll be there. (In spirit, of course. You couldn’t PAY us to sit through a Phish concert.)

Today we have another installment of: “Ask Piranhamous Anything.” And we do mean anything. Send your queries to FishbowlDC@mediabistro.com. This isn’t an advice column — Piranhamous doesn’t know what the hell you should do with your life any more than you do — and worse, he doesn’t care. Try to keep your questions short — we want to keep this fun, simple, funny and insightful.

What are you thoughts on the possible plagiarism by TWT Columnist Arnaud de Borchgrave?

The guy is older than dirt (no offense, dirt), so by his age he’s probably written everything humanly possible at least twice. That being said, it’s crappy when someone lifts someone else’s work without noting it. Being original isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do, but being honest is. He wasn’t honest, and it sounds like a lot of people over at the Times knew it and did nothing about it. They’re both problems and both should be dealt with quickly and severely.

Can you please explain to Betsy what a “turn your head and cough” procedure entails………slowly?

Are you trying to get me sued? That being said, how the hell does anyone not know what that entails? I’ll try to put it in the most polite terms possible (after all, this is a family blog).

When a doctor and a patient hate hernias very much, and they’re both (mostly) sober, the doctor touches the person near, not on, their naughty bits and instructs them to turn their head and cough. If the doctor feels the intestines of the patient shooting downward with the cough, the patient can then look forward to being essentially cut in half and sewn back together. If the doctor feels nothing, the patient can look forward to awkwardly pulling up his pants and a long, shame-filled shower. Actually, you know what? I feel dirty writing any more than that. Betsy should just Google it.

 

When POTUS makes a lunch run, Washington pays attention. We got word yesterday that he grabbed grub at a local chain, Taylor Gourmet, for meetings at the White House. We first learned of this “news” from Politico‘s Donovan Slack, who was giving us pool reports throughout the day. We perked up when her dispatch came through at 12:05 p.m. ET with the subject line: “yes, they’re having hoagies.” This immediately began the conversation around Fishbowl Headquarters over whether they’re called “hoagies”, “grinders”, or “subs.” (The issue still isn’t resolved.)

POTUS picked up an “an assortment of sandwiches”, but we were not given the crucial details of what he ordered.  Some 20 minutes later, Slack picked up where she left off by sending her next report with a subject line that made us choke with laughter: “Sandwich Facts.” It’s your one stop shop for all things between two slices of bread. As it turns out, POTUS ordered a sandwich with “roast turkey, prosciutto, roasted red peppers and sharp provolone.”

You’d think that if the leader of the free world made a lunch run, he’d come back with something a LITTLE more impressive than a turkey sub. POTUS paid for the pack of sandwiches at a cost of $62.79.

Here’s the latest installment of “Ask Piranhamous Anything.” And we do mean anything. Send your queries to FishbowlDC@mediabistro.com. This isn’t an advice column — Piranhamous doesn’t know what the hell you should do with your life any more than you do — and worse, he doesn’t care. Try to keep your questions short — we want to keep this fun, simple, funny and insightful.

How do you think the media handled Obama coming out of the closet for gay marriage?

With all the grace you’d expect from an egg thrown against a brick wall. There was so much drooling over what everyone already knew that you’d almost think everyone didn’t already know it. The saddest part, from a journalistic perspective, was how no one did any actual journalism. It changed absolutely nothing, it still keeps the President to the right of former Veep Dick Cheney (which got no mention), and was the subject of a fundraising email by the Obama campaign before ink dried on the first story. I would say the media was played like a fiddle but that would imply they aren’t in the tank already. So everything has changed except nothing has changed if you know what I mean.

What are your thoughts on George Clooney?

He was great in “The Facts of Life” and has been playing a variation of George Burnett ever since. No one has done so much with so little since Leslie Nielsen milked his hand-held fart machine for 20 years of Tonight Show laughs. The dude upgrades twenty-something chicks every couple of years, makes millions being one character and is a bigger “star” than his box office receipts warrant. What’s not to love…or find annoying. He’s Elizabeth Taylor without the diamonds – someone who had a couple of hits (the Ocean’s flicks were money-makers) who is famous more for being famous than anything else. In other words, I, like any guy, would change lives with him in a heartbeat.

Explanation and Clarification: Piranhamous previously answered a question regarding Fox News’ Neil Cavuto‘s voice in this space. It has been brought to our attention that Cavuto has MS. We’re not medical doctors, but we’ve also been told that MS can affect speech. If illness has altered his actual voice, we probably don’t need to be assessing it. We’ve removed the question and answer.

It’s time to check up what Washington publications are publishing in their features sections. Hate ‘em or love ‘em, they’re always worth a look.

The artsy fartsy– What’s more depressing than one person’s bucket list? Thousands of peoples’ bucket lists. WaPo has a feature on this giant chalkboard in Logan Circle on which passersby are encouraged to finish the sentence “before I die…” The board is an art project conceived by Candy Chang who first introduced the mega bucket list board in New Orleans. Naturally, a lot of the wishes on the board deal with becoming important political players, traveling, etc.

The farty farty– The Daily Caller ran a story this week highlighting the theory some scientists have put forward that dinosaur farts helped warm the Earth 150 million years ago. Scientists estimate that dinosaurs produced about 520 million pounds of methane each year.

The malfunctioning– At the time of this post we tried clicking on several features in TWT‘s “Life” section and every story is the same, for some reason: “; charset=utf-8″ />”

The foreign– Politico reported this week that Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) recently claimed dual-citizenship with Switzerland in addition to the United States. It turns out her husband, Marcus, is the son of Swiss immigrants and when he married Michele, she was automatically granted status as a Swiss. “I am proud of my husband, Marcus, the love of my life, and his Swiss heritage,” she said. “Even though I have been a dual citizen since I was married in 1978, I have never exercised any rights of that citizenship. Rather, I have always pledged allegiance to our one nation under God, the United States of America. We live in the greatest nation humankind has ever known and I am proud to be an American.” It’s really just fun to imagine Marcus in Swiss lederhosen.

In the latest backlash over the firing of Naomi Schaefer Riley from the Chronicle of Higher Education, internal emails show that management supported Riley before abruptly canning her.

To recap, Riley, a former WSJ editor and Harvard grad, wrote for the publication’s Brainstorm blog for a year before Editor Liz McMillen (pictured above right alongside Riley) suddenly fired her this week for a post she wrote on Black Studies, saying the program should be eliminated, basing her view on dissertation titles. McMillen had received a petition of online signatures calling for Riley’s firing. In an interview with FishbowlDC she claimed reader reaction did not sway her decision to let Riley go. Instead, she said, Naomi’s post and subsequent response to her critics did not meet their “editorial standards.”

Which is a funny thing to say considering a publication editor guided Naomi through that response every step of the way. (See the exchange of emails after the jump…)

Play by play

After Riley wrote the piece, negative reaction from readers poured her, calling her racist. (Raise your hand if you’re a blogger who gets called racist, sexist, or prejudice in any multitude of ways on a weekly basis?)

What happened next is, at best, suspect. Management asked Riley to write a response to her critics. She was guided in that posting by Deputy Editor of The Chronicle Review magazine Alex Kafka, who couldn’t have been more kind to her in those exchanges, even, at one point, joking about how he ate too much at his 91-year-old father’s birthday party. He even included party pictures. (We sure hope Kafka is no longer bloated from all the crap he ate at the party.)

“I had an email exchange with editor,” Riley told FishbowlDC by phone yesterday. “I said this is what I would say, he said, that would be great. He approved it. They encouraged me to write it, then they approved it.” Riley says the idea that they expected her to write up something specific and that she didn’t follow her orders or write a “strong enough” response as McMillen told Fishbowl, is “quite amazing.”

What’s most infuriating, says Riley, is that in the year she worked there bosses gave her no indication that they were displeased with her work. “They didn’t try to sensor any of my posts,” she said. “I didn’t have some warning. I feel like this whole thing just came out of the blue.”

In an online orientation packet Naomi received before she began blogging, Kafka wrote this astonishing advice: “We urge you to think of them not as forums for polished mini-editorials, but as places to react, thoughtfully but passionately, to breaking news on topics you’re engaged in. … Try to enlighten your readers, but also provoke their thinking by presenting new perspectives you draw in from other sources.”

Important: See the introductory letter Naomi received from Kafka before she began blogging for the magazine…

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Hillary Clinton has been First Lady. She’s been a U.S. Senator. She’s been a formidable candidate for the President of the United States. She’s currently serving as Secretary of State. So, who cares if she goes out in public without makeup and wearing glasses? Lots of people, apparently. In this picture, taken at a press conference in Bangladesh, she is clearly going for the schoolmarm look. The way some people in the media reacted, you’d think she walked outside in the nude. The Drudge Report quickly put the picture on its page. WaPo’s “She the People” page praised Hillary and called the look “refreshing.” She even addressed her new look with CNN on Tuesday saying, ““At some point it’s just not something that deserves a whole lot of time and attention. If others want to worry about it, I’ll let them do the worrying for a change.”

And worry they did. When Politico reported on her comments, their commenters went wild with one of the most polarizing politicos of our time. One commenter, Rachel Wells, says “Hillary get a stylist – and for God sake’s I will send you some lipstick.. As for the ‘ atta girl’ — please if she were a conservative woman you would mock her endlessly.. next thing you know she will lift her hairy underarms to shouts of ‘ women power’.. hush. Brush you hair and put on some mascara.. grow up.” Another, Marge Ilich, says “She’s supposed to represent us and looks like something plucked out of a dump truck. Obviously a sign of no self-respect.” One of Politico’s “Top Commenters”, Ra Williams, takes a homophobic turn, saying “She needs to be happy and come out of the closet. Why isn’t she yet? She would be a hero to many Democrat voters! Is Bill or Barack holding her down from her true feelings on sexuality?”

Hillary also had plenty of defenders. Hector Acuna commented, “You’re a beautiful woman inside and out Hillary.”

In a most unusual editor’s note on the Chronicle of Higher Education website last night, Editor Liz McMillen apologizes profusely for what turned out to be a controversial post written by now fired “Brainstorm” blogger, former WSJ editor and Harvard graduate Naomi Schaefer Riley. Like most anything that goes viral, Riley tells Poynter she didn’t see it coming. The topic: Riley asserted the reasons why she believes Black Studies ought to be eliminated.

And the crowd went wild. Racism. Prejudice. So much for brainstorming.

McMillen, meanwhile, all but embarrassingly opens a vein for readers. She writes, “We’ve heard you, we’ve taken to heart what you’ve said.” She goes on to say that they let Riley go and they will “review” their editorial practices.

“It’s obvious they caved to the pressure,” Riley told FishbowlDC this afternoon.

Were these so-called practices ever thought out or spelled out in the first place? Was Riley ever told what she could or couldn’t write? Or was the outcry of online observers — and there are a lot of them these days with loud, shrill, threatening voices — so great that McMillen collapsed under her own lack of direction and standards that were never conveyed to Riley in the first place?

Last Monday Riley posted her story. On Wednesday night she received an email and on Thursday a call from her editor asking her to respond to critics, which she did. Last Thursday her bosses at least found that acceptable as well as her post, which they did not remove. But by last night, just before McMillen threw herself and Riley to the pack of wolves, she had a conversation with McMillen during which she was fired.

“They claim I didn’t live up to standards, but I’d like to see where these standards are that I didn’t live up to,” Riley said, explaining that her bosses knew she had unconventional views. She thought that’s why they hired her. “I don’t really think the standards are being universally applied, let’s just say that.”

She also said that at any other publication she has ever worked, the behavior of her bosses would never fly.

Riley says she will undoubtedly continue writing. “I’m not some anti-intellectual we should get rid of college tomorrow [type], but I have made critiques,” she said. “This was not my full-time job, I will go on with my writing.”

Brad Phillips, who writes the Mr. Media Training Blog, points a damning finger at The Chronicle of Higher Education, calling it the “worst of both worlds.” He told FBDC, “Although I don’t agree with Naomi Schaefer Riley’s viewpoint, it appears that she’s the victim of an editor who buckled under public pressure. Just a few days ago, the blog’s editor was encouraging vigorous debate about Riley’s article; the editor did an about face when it became clear that her readers were upset. The Chronicle is now in the worst of two worlds – appearing to have stifled a voice with no specific rationale, while simultaneously selling their blog as ‘a range of intellectual and political views.’ The Chronicle of Higher Education looks to have lacked clear guidelines regarding appropriate content, and this incident is yet another reminder that blogs need to maintain clear guidelines for their writers.”

In her note to readers, McMillen talks about a “freedom” that Riley and other bloggers have in that their posts go unedited before they are published. “Ms. Riley’s post was not reviewed until after it published,” she wrote in the publication’s defense.

But it is her concluding line that is most grotesque to herself and the publication: “You told us we can do better, and we agree.”

Perhaps she should have thought about that before firing Riley, instead of after. In most newsrooms editors fiercely protect their reporters. Most editors don’t let strangers in the door and watch as the reporter gets bloodied. Maybe McMillen could be a real editor, hold strong and “improve” their ways instead of essentially letting a wild flash mob determine Riley’s fate.

Here’s to hoping all our editors have stronger backbones that that of Liz McMillen.

Note to readers: We reached out to McMillen through the Chronicle‘s publicist, Amy Alexander, for  comment on why she allowed a petition of strangers to determine the firing of their writer and why it appears there were no clear standards for bloggers in place. “Let me forward your request to Liz and have her get back to you. But that’s how we’re handling these requests at this time,” said Alexander. We’ve emailed her our questions and will report back when and if McMillen responds.

See our questions to McMillen after the jump…

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President Barack Obama is probably pretty busy during his waking hours, what with his day job of being President and running for a second term. But couldn’t he have at least found the time to say a few words on the death of Beastie Boy and national treasure Adam Yauch who died Friday? It would have meant a great deal to TWT‘s Joe Curl.

Over the weekend Curl wrote a column bemoaning “half-white” Obama’s neglect to acknowledge Yauch’s passing:

“[Yauch] was the real deal, groundbreaker, up from his bootstraps, Brooklyn boy made good. Funny the “coolest president ever” doesn’t say a word about the passing of MCA. Weird and kinda sad, actually.”

It’s a race thing. Further in the column, Curl says it’s not fair that Obama’s thoughts on the deaths of Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson (both celebrities that were black, in some form or another) were made public. So why not comment on Yauch, a whitey?

Good question and we’re hoping someone, anyone in the White House press corps. can right this wrong.