Beyond the Marathon media mess: Is worse to come?

Posted on May 15, 2013 | Leave a comment

On the warm, clear morning of 9/11, with the towers still ablaze, a workmate and I set out on foot from our office in Midtown Manhattan toward what later became known as Ground Zero. This was years before smart phones. With electricity out in much of the downtown, people we passed had turned to a decades-old news source: They huddled around the open doors of parked cars and listened to the radios.

It was a different era, a full generation before the ferocious media firestorm ignited by the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings was even thinkable.

With this terrorism incident, whole new constellations of digital age channels were commandeered by thousands of independent originators of comment, speculation, factual reports, pictures, and sounds. Their cascades of reporting reached audiences directly, and engulfed even the most powerful news media in a tidal flood of urgent raw news that gatekeepers had no choice but to sift, reject, ignore, pursue, or publish.

The result, judged by customary standards of care and veracity, was a mess.  Legacy media, desperate to keep current with trending online reports, got the number of Boston victims wrong, fingered innocent people as suspects (including a missing college student who, it turned out, had been dead for weeks), relayed falsehoods, reported arrests when there hadn’t been any and a third bombing that never happened, and, for a time, stoked a rancid climate of fear and foreboding well beyond what a measured appraisal of the facts would warrant.

Not good.

So what lessons might we draw? Here are a few.

First, covering breaking news is one thing; reporting in real time is something else entirely. Continue reading →

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Peephole journalism: What are the limits?

Posted on April 22, 2013 | Leave a comment

Just how private is the closed-door talk of the powerful? And if the unguarded comments of politicians who assume they’re speaking in confidence are captured on tape, is it OK to make those tapes public?

That question came up during the 2012 campaign. GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney told a roomful of Florida donors that 47 percent of their compatriots would never vote Republican because they were, essentially, parasitic layabouts who had been bought off by government stipends.

A recording of his talk to a private gathering was made by a bartender and made public by Mother Jones magazine. It confirmed the image of Romney that the Democrats had been peddling, as an arrogant, aloof plutocrat who looked down his nose at the working class voters his electoral success depended on.

Did that disclosure intrude on the privacy that Romney and his listeners assumed? Unquestionably.

But was that intrusion justified? Did it give voters a unique chance to hear a candidate who, apparently speaking his mind, uncorked a foul brew of contempt and condescension for nearly half of his fellow countrymen?

I thought so, and although I found the privacy invasion regrettable, I was convinced what it revealed, and what might not have been heard otherwise, made the intrusion justified. Mother Jones and reporter David Corn performed a public service.

I’m not so convinced by the most recent controversy that Corn and the magazine have stirred up with secret recordings of another big league politician.

Earlier this month, Mother Jones reported that the Senate minority leader,  Mitch McConnell, had huddled with campaign aides in Louisville, Ky., to plot his  2014 re-election strategy. According to a clandestine video of their Feb. 2 meeting , the politicos were feasting on the candidacy of film star Ashley Judd, Continue reading →

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Two cheers for the news ombudsman

Posted on April 9, 2013 | 1 Comment

Word that The Washington Post was doing away with the job of ombudsman after 43 years was greeted, by and large, with a shrug and a yawn by news habitués.

As Reuters’ redoubtable press critic Jack Shafer observed: “If there has been any protest — organized or piecemeal — against The Post for retiring the ombudsman position, I’ve missed it. I’ve witnessed greater reader noise after the cancellation of a comic strip from the Post.”

It’s no surprise that news ombudsmen, whose job is to investigate reader complaints and share their findings publicly, have never been beloved by publishers or, for that matter, by journalists. Companies don’t normally pay to be embarrassed, and few professionals welcome being pilloried publicly for their mistakes. Ombudsmen do both.

But it’s a little surprising that the public cares so little that a major news organization is killing off its marquee contribution to the closest thing this country has to media self-regulation. After all, when they’re doing their job—as the Post’s ombudsmen often have—these are people who make a serious, Continue reading →

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So who’s paying all those unpaid journalists?

Posted on March 26, 2013 | 5 Comments

 

 

People who make their living by writing for publication had good reason to follow the recent hoo-hah over publishers who think paying writers for their work is optional.

What happened was that The Atlantic Magazine, a marquee name in the world of words, approached a well-established freelancer named Nate Thayer and asked him about “repurposing” work he’d done for an online site, NKNews.org. The Atlantic was interested in a 1,200-word rendering of a longer article of Thayer’s pegged to ex-basketball star Dennis Rodman’s bizarre visit to North Korea.

When Thayer asked about terms, the magazine indicated it wasn’t proposing to actually pay him, at least not in cash money, but noted that its website reached 13 million readers per month, suggesting that exposure on that scale is worth a lot.

Thayer wasn’t persuaded. He replied: “I am a professional journalist who has made my living by writing for 25 years and am not in the habit of giving my services for free to for profit media outlets so they can make money by using my work and efforts by removing my ability to pay my bills and feed my children.”

Word of the affair zipped around the Internet, triggering a flood of comment. The Atlantic apologized “if we offended him”—the way institutions apologize without contrition—and in the aftermath, dozens of other journalists chipped in their own tales of the wretched treatment and soup-kitchen pay they get, even from flourishing websites.

(It’s not much consolation to point out that for the most part, they still get something, unlike say professors. The latest indignity from publishers of academic journals, it seems, is to make writers pay them to have articles posted online. For junior college faculty—who need not only to publish but to be cited by other scholars in order to qualify for advancement—the threat of being kept offline is like having their careers held for ransom. And incidentally, they get no money from print publication either. Not a dime.)

Getting back to the Thayer affair, the arguments over rights and wrongs pivoted on fairness, on the demise of professionalism, on the benefits of a higher profile, on the long-term consequences of underpayment on the volume and quality of significant journalism.

But I want to drag another consideration into the foreground: If the publications aren’t paying for the journalism they publish, who is?

I mean, all labor incurs costs. Somewhere in our marvelous market system, those costs are being covered. Somebody’s paying to feed Nate Thayer’s kids, even if The Atlantic won’t.

So we meet, once again, the insidious problem of hidden subsidy, one of the most perplexing ethical problems of journalism in the Internet age. Continue reading →

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Media heroism turned on its head: The real Manning scandal

Posted on March 19, 2013 | 4 Comments

In media mythology, the years from the mid-‘60s to the mid-’70s were the classical age, a heroic time of moral clarity.

Mainstream journalism marinated in adversarialism. Little Southern newspapers infuriated their own readers by staring down segregation. Foreign correspondents forced upon an unwilling public the realities of a brutal war. Network news ignored official disdain and showed the bottomless suffering the war inflicted on the innocents it was supposed to save. With the Pentagon Papers, newspapers defied secrecy rules to expose government lies. With Watergate, reporters forced out a corrupt president.

True, that retelling is a bit of myth-spinning; the media never were quite that gutsy. But myths illuminate. They remind us of values and aspirations. What we’d like to think was true then reflects what we hope might still be true now.

And over the past decade or so, it’s as if that classical formula of defiance and struggle has been turned upside down. Instead of halting war, the news media helped lead the charge into battle, stoking jingoism and spreading half-truths. Instead of unmasking civilian suffering, the media have kept the thousands of innocent Iraqi and Afghan war dead off-screen, pandering to the idea that the only victims worth compassion wear U.S. uniforms.

Even Watergate is upended, with Bob Woodward, one of the two Washington Post reporters who exposed the scandal, now the target of scathing revisionism because of a trivial dustup with a thin-skinned White House.

And looming above those breathtaking role reversals is the media’s disgraceful abandonment of the boldest news source of his generation, Pvt. Bradley Manning, a soldier who in 2010 defied secrecy restrictions to feed the most influential media in the world with leaks they gratefully published, which exposed corruption and duplicity, identified torturers, energized the Arab spring, and embarrassed officialdom worldwide.

The ferocity of the Obama administration attack on Manning and on Wikileaks, the online Continue reading →

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Hidden dangers of the Bush email hacking

Posted on February 25, 2013 | Leave a comment

Media throughout the country carried news recently that a half-dozen email accounts belonging to ex-President George W. Bush and several of his friends and relatives had been hacked.  The words and images that were pilfered weren’t all that interesting, so all in all it wasn’t a huge story.

But to me, a fan of the vanishing right to privacy, this was still a reasonably big deal. I was struck by the way the former president’s right to chat with intimates, free of eavesdroppers, was barely acknowledged. Comments he had made privately and paintings he had kept from public view were exposed worldwide as if the propriety of doing so was beyond question.

And I think that’s worth considering more carefully.

We’ll leave to the FBI and Secret Service the question of whether the hacking warrants legal reprisal. My interest is in what sort of respect Bush’s privacy deserves from the media that received the hacked materials.

The first report of the hacking came in a Feb. 7 posting on The Smoking Gun, a website owned by Time-Warner that tilts toward what was once called tabloid journalism (Among recent headlines: “Man stabbed as ménage a trois goes wrong,” or “Mom charged for letting son, 3, pump gasoline.”)

The Smoking Gun handled the material well, I thought, by foregrounding its invasiveness.  The hack “exposed personal photos and sensitive correspondence from members of the Bush family…” The site said it had obtained confidential material—including home addresses, cell phone numbers, email addresses for Bush family members—but didn’t republish any of it.

In fact, most of the media I saw seemed aware that this material was pretty personal.

But they then turned around and squeezed every bit of even marginally interesting detail from it: Family concern about the declining health of the Continue reading →

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Fox News offers another candidate for high office

Posted on February 22, 2013 | 1 Comment

Originally published Feb. 11, 2013

The spectacle of TV personality Geraldo Rivera using his soapbox with Fox News to test-market a possible run for the U.S. Senate has, not surprisingly, caused some real journalists to cough up hairballs.

“If an on-air person makes any pretense about being a journalist, then obviously he should not be using his station or network to promote his candidacy,” Marvin Kalb, former NBC News stalwart and a founder of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, told Media Matters. “He should immediately pull himself/herself off the air, then announce his candidacy, and run.”

Or, as Sonny Albarado, president of the Society of Professional Journalists, put it: “Running for public office and being a journalist are incompatible.”

Now, I may be doing Geraldo a disservice, but to me he has always been a vaguely clownish self-promoter, and it’s hard for me to condemn him for betraying journalistic principle when I never thought he was a journalist. He can hardly have corrupted a professionalism he didn’t profess, and in that respect there’s no point in defrocking him, since he was never ordained.

That doesn’t, however, mean what he’s doing now is OK. But to me the sin isn’t his, it’s Fox News’.  Here I agree with David Zurawik, the Baltimore Sun’s TV critic, who said it’s “really wrong that Fox allows itself to play this political role.”

The wrongdoing doesn’t have to do with Geraldo’s personal failure to uphold some kind of journalistic neutrality. It lies in Fox News’ institutional failure to accept some responsibility for encouraging fairness in the political system. Continue reading →

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