Category: Journalism

Posted on By Barbara Cochran

A Refreshing Start (With a Hiccup)

By guest blogger BARBARA COCHRAN, president, Radio-Television News Directors Association, Washington, D.C.

Supporters of open government could hardly have asked for a better beginning to the Obama administration, when, as one of his first acts, the new president declared “the beginning of a new era of openness in our country” and signed documents reversing the secrecy policies that had been a hallmark of the Bush administration.

“Transparency and the rule of law will be touchstones of this presidency,” President Obama said at a meeting with his senior staff on his first full day in the White House.

Unfortunately, that promising start was marred within hours when still and video photographers were left out of the news media pool that was hastily summoned to cover Obama’s second taking of the oath of office.  The repeat performance was necessitated after Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts misspoke the words of the oath, which are prescribed in the Constitution, while administering the oath on Jan. 20.

The Radio-Television News Directors Association has joined with other media organizations and advocates of open government to seek more transparency from the new administration.  Obama signaled his intentions in his Inaugural Address when he called on those in government to “do our business in the light of day – because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”

In the Presidential Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government and the Presidential Memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act, the president ordered all government agencies to operate under principles of openness and to release information to citizens whenever possible.

This directly counters the policy initiated by Bush’s first attorney general, John Ashcroft, who encouraged agencies to withhold information if there were any plausible reason and offered the full backing of the Justice Department to resist information requests.  After 9/11, the Bush administration created new categories of information that could be withheld and removed thousands of pages of government records from Internet access.

Obama also moved to free up information about his presidency or past presidencies by issuing the Executive Order on Presidential Records, which allows no one but the president to assert executive privilege to withhold documents.  He said he would consult legal counsel before any final decision to withhold information.

“Information will not be withheld just because I say so,” Obama said.  “It will be withheld because a separate authority believes it is well founded in the Constitution.”    

Nor has this been the only piece of encouraging news as the new administration takes shape.  In testimony during his confirmation hearing, Attorney General-designate Eric Holder breathed new life into hopes for a federal reporters’ shield law to protect journalists from being forced to disclose their confidential sources.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) asked Holder about his position on the shield bill, which was opposed by the Bush Justice Department.  Holder said he favors “the concept of a shield law” and would support “a carefully crafted law” that gives the Justice Department “the capacity to protect national security and to prosecute any leaks in intelligence that may occur.”

Holder’s comments were not a full-throated endorsement, but at least he left the door open to working on new legislation.  The last efforts failed when the bill never came to the Senate floor in the 2007-2008 session of Congress.

The previous bill included protections for national security concerns.  Now media groups, including RTNDA, want a law that will cover unpublished information, such as video outtakes, and protect bloggers who regularly gather news and report to the public. 

High-profile subpoenas in the Valerie Plame, Wen Ho Lee, and Stephen Hatfill cases have highlighted how often reporters are being threatened with fines or jail sentences in federal cases if they refuse to disclose their sources.  No one knows for sure how many subpoenas have been issued, but the Justice Department informed the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press that the attorney general had approved 65 subpoenas between 2001 and 2006.

The Obama administration is in its infancy and much remains to be fleshed out about its policies in a host of areas that affect media interests.  The incident with the media pool and the oath is troubling but may just be a hiccup as the new White House Press Office learns the ropes.  But, so far, it’s refreshing to see an administration that wants to let the sunshine into government activities and that understands the importance of protecting journalists’ ability to report on critical issues that depend on information from confidential sources.

Posted on By Richard T. Kaplar

Digital Technology: Double-Edged Sword

Two items in the Washington Post in the past three days point up how the relentless march of technology will affect news in the months to come – both how it is generated by the White House, and how it is reported by at least one local TV station.

President-Elect Barack Obama sees new technology as a means “to reinvigorate our democracy,” according to senior adviser David Axelrod.  And, as Chris Cillizza reported on Dec. 14, Obama is starting with the Saturday morning radio broadcast begun by Ronald Reagan in 1982.  

“The speech is still beamed out to radio stations nationwide on Saturday mornings, but now it is also recorded for digital video and audio downloads from YouTube, iTunes and the like, so people can access it whenever and wherever they want,” Cillizza reports.

It’s part of a “broader revolution” in how the Obama White House will communicate, according to Doug Sosnik, a senior aide in the Clinton Administration. "The mainframe for this White House will be the Internet, not TV," he told Cillizza.

Only two days earlier (Dec. 12.), Paul Farhi reported that WUSA-TV, Channel 9 in Washington, D.C., had reached a new labor agreement that would scrap the traditional two-person news crew of reporter and photographer.  Under the new pact, an individual “multimedia journalist” will report, shoot, and edit stories alone using digital tools.  Reporters will double as their own camera crew.  Camera operators will take on reporting tasks as well.

In the case of WUSA, however, the impetus is economic. The one-person operatives are part of a broad budget-cutting scheme under which these “multimedia journalists” will actually be paid less than current reporters.

It’s encouraging that Obama embraces digital technology and plans to use it extensively.  At the same time, it’s ironic that digital technology has siphoned viewers from broadcast television and weakened some local news operations to the point where they can only be saved by changes in news-gathering built around … digital technology.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

The Media and the Economy

Virtually everyone who’s taken an objective look at the subject agrees that media coverage of the presidential race was tilted in favor of president-elect Obama. The latest to make the claim is Time magazine’s Mark Halperin, who last week characterized “extreme pro-Obama coverage” as “the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war.”

Late last month, a study by the Pew Research Center found that by a margin of 70%-9% (including over 60% of Democrats and Independents), Americans said journalists wanted to see Obama win on November 4. Even the Washington Post’s ombudsman, Deborah Howell, corroborated the charge. “Readers,” she said, “have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama. My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts.”

So for 70% of the people of this country, the media’s performance was noted. And for 46%– those who voted for McCain– it was noted and resented, thereby further alienating a large part of the audience of the foundering newspaper and broadcasting industries, a woeful aspect of contemporary journalism that’s been mentioned here before.

But there’s another feature of the media’s campaign coverage that is the subject of this note, also mentioned here before: the failure of political reporters generally to focus their coverage on the issue which mattered most– the extraordinary financial and economic crisis, and what, if anything, the candidates knew, or proposed to do, about it.

An item reported on Bloomberg shapes the problem nicely: “Obama’s program will be far larger than the $175 billion package of tax cuts and stepped-up government spending he proposed just a month ago. Some of his advisers, and Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York, have suggested a figure of $700 billion.”

In a country in which trial lawyers routinely work their will on juries comprised of people who have no conception of the difference between, say, a million and a billion, the difference between what Obama was saying then and what his aides are saying now may seem to many like no big deal.

But as people come to understand, however imperfectly, that this is a piper they’ll have to pay, they may look upon the matter differently, especially if the effects of the stimulus and bailout plans don’t come in time or in numbers sufficient to save their jobs, or homes, or life savings.

There is no suggestion here that substantial and intelligent media coverage of the economy would have changed the election results. For that to have been the case, even in theory, would have required an opponent with a far stronger grasp of economic issues than John McCain, about whom it may fairly be said that no presidential candidate in recent history was more inarticulate or unpersuasive.

But by their neglect of the economic issue, political reporters disserved the nation as a whole, and left the people utterly unprepared to vet the candidates’ economic proposals, then or now. That they did this while also clearly favoring Obama just adds journalistic insult to civic injury.
 

Posted on By Patrick Maines

The Financial Crisis and Horse Race Journalism

In 2001, the events of 9/11 were covered by the news media in a way that reassured and unified an angry and fearful country.  In 2008, a financial crisis that in its own way is as dire as 9/11 is being covered in ways that are divisive and infuriating.

At the root of the problem is the colossal failure of reporters to report the crisis, in the context of the presidential campaign, objectively and in a way that challenges the major party candidates to address the issue with the seriousness it demands.

Before it is over our financial and economic distress will almost certainly take the life savings and the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of people, and perhaps many more.  But by the evidence to date, reporters don’t get it.  So taken are they with the “horse race” conventions of political reporting that they have reduced even this, the worst economic portents since the Great Depression, to the familiar banalities of their stock in trade: who’s up, who’s down, and polls galore.

This, plus of course, their own political spin on things.  Thus are we told that the financial mess works to  Barack Obama’s political advantage …  and not much more.

Whether reporters perform this way because they are biased in favor of the Democratic Party and Democratic policies, or because they are themselves clueless about all things economic, or because they are, perforce, tethered to the inadequacies of the politicians they cover (with the correct answer being all of the above), makes not the tiniest bit of difference.

The stark fact is that the national news media have underreported and misreported virtually every important aspect of our national nightmare: how we got into it, how we can prevent it from happening again, and, most importantly, how we can escape its worst effects now — and how our national leaders can help us.  

Here at The Media Institute, which receives all of its financial support from media companies, we spend most of our time promoting the Speech Clause of the First Amendment.  This means that we promote those laws and regulations that maximize freedom of speech and of the press — something we will continue to do whatever the media’s journalistic shortcomings.

But at a time when all of the legacy media are in grave jeopardy — first from the competitive effects of the Internet, and now from the struggling economy — they are not making it any easier for themselves or for us.  If worse comes to worst, the people of this country are unlikely to forget or forgive the role the media have played at this crucial hour.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Fact and Opinion

Name a national news organization that commands the respect both of Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. Can’t do it? Neither can I, but as the head of The Media Institute, and as a citizen, I wish I could.

At a time when there is no governmental institution in America—and scarcely any institution of any kind– that is not the subject of contempt or contention, the news media have a rare opportunity right now to play a meaningful and unifying role, and in the process to do wonders for their own flagging fortunes. But it’s not happening.

The United States today is fairly seething with fear and anger. It is no overstatement to say that many people in this country, left and right, literally hate some of their fellow Americans– a state of mind that will only be exacerbated as the presidential campaign yields a winner, and as the financial crisis takes its inevitable toll. A few years ago I used to say jokingly that I didn’t think the country was up for any more foreign wars, but that I thought there might be an appetite for a good civil war. I don’t think it’s funny anymore.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong, and a lot that is right, with opinion journalism. But when, as now, people in large numbers are fearful about the future and questioning what’s best for themselves and for the country, it is as ominous as it is lamentable that we don’t have at least a few national news organizations that are trusted, for their rigorous commitment to thoroughness and objectivity, by people of different political persuasions.

There is no need to define objectivity with mathematical precision; two parts of this to two parts of that. Neither is there any suggestion that objectivity means pleasing everyone, even some of the time. There are, after all, some people–like Marxists on the left and fascists on the right– whose views can’t be reconciled with any strain of objectivity.

But the larger point survives, and is all the more dolorous for those of us whose careers are linked with these organizations, by the fact that this glaring void exists at the same time that the news media are facing a difficult present and a parlous future.

At what better time, and in what better way, could the legacy media demonstrate their continuing and essential value to this country than by recommitting themselves, at this very moment, to a journalistic standard that strictly adheres to objectivity in the gathering and reporting of the news?

 

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Political Reporters, the Economy, and the Presidential Race

In 1991, the Greek-owned cruise ship Oceanos sank off South Africa’s eastern coast. All of the crew, including the captain, abandoned ship before many of the passengers got off, leaving them to the safekeeping of the shipboard entertainers.

Watching the presidential candidates mumble and fumble their way around the country’s financial mess, it’s hard not to feel as those passengers must have felt—abandoned and alone, and every man for himself.

In fact, though, the more astute will have felt that way for some time. This, because though you wouldn’t know it from the stories filed by this country’s political reporters, the nation’s financial agony isn’t something that just sneaked up on us in the last few weeks.

From the extraordinarily high price of commodities like oil and gold, to the drying up of business and consumer credit, to the collapse of the housing market, to the sinking value of the dollar against foreign currencies, to the erratic and downward spiraling action in the equity markets, the U.S. economy has been sending out SOS signals for at least a year.

Like the presidential candidates, though, political reporters have been serving up economic mush, when they haven’t ignored the economy altogether in favor of “horse race” stories.

It’s in this environment that John Harris and Jim Vanderhei, co-founders of Politico, accuse Obama and McCain of putting on a bad show. “Tuesday’s debate,” they say “was a look through the wrong end of the telescope. Men with fascinating biographies seemed conventional.”

No argument with that assessment here. But then they come up with this: “Both Obama and McCain were once cult-of-personality candidates, running on their inspirational personal biographies and reformist profiles more than on their policy records.” D’ya think?

In my lifetime there have never been two candidates more uncritically acclaimed by the media. No Republican politician has ever gotten the kind of press coverage that (prior to this campaign) McCain received. And as for the press coverage of Obama, well, to say it’s been fawning is like saying that an eon lasts awhile.

So as the country’s staggering economic problems cast a giant shadow across the land–and in the process reduce the two presidential candidates to dwarflike proportions—it seems kind of late in the day for political reporters to blame the candidates for their lack of substance, much less because they no longer seem “inspirational.”

Journalists have had innumerable chances, over a long period of time and in an eerily declining economy, to explicate and challenge the presidential candidates’ economic policy views. Why haven’t they?

Pining for the candidates lost allure, Harris and Vanderhei close their article with this: “Obama and McCain are men with large life stories, asking to lead the country at a large moment. With one more debate to go, could someone turn the telescope around?”

Perhaps a better question would be when political reporters are going to turn that telescope on themselves.

 

Posted on By Patrick Maines

The Good and the Bad of It

Because, as they say on TV news promos, "you need to know," herewith some thumbnail opinions of certain journalists and media outlets:

Daily Kos—Not since the Ku Klux Klan started wearing sheets has anonymity been put to a more malevolent use. If you worry only about the right, spend a little time reading the anonymous posts here and see if you still feel that way.

Drudge Report—If anyone had told you, back in the day, that Matt Drudge and his Drudge Report were destined to become the news leader in American journalism, would you have believed it? Well, you should have, because these days that is not only the fact, it’s the acknowledged fact. News organizations from the great to the obscure fall all over themselves trying to get a link to one of their stories on the Drudge Report. As Drudge himself says, “they kiss the ring.”

Christopher Hitchens—The scourge of all things politically correct, and a very entertaining writer. Wrong about a number of things, but who cares?

Charles Krauthammer—Smart, clever, serious.

Mainstream media (generally speaking)—In immediate and urgent need of more (and more prominently displayed) economic reporters. Looking back on the financial crisis gripping the country at this time, historians will marvel at the shallowness of the media coverage of it. In significant part this is owing to the fact that the media have too many political reporters covering economics and not enough economic reporters covering politics (or economics).

Keith Olbermann—If he’s not deliberately channeling Howard Beale he gives a good impression of it.

Politico—Though its coverage of politics is devoid of anything even remotely artful and features an overabundance of “horse-race” analyses, this relatively new journal is already the best in class. The online version is updated frequently, including on weekends, and taken as a whole its political slant is neither pronounced nor off-putting.

RealClearPolitics—One of the best of the political news aggregators, though they provide too many links to the same few (and politically predictable) sources. The greater value is found in their links to less familiar outlets, including blog sites, and in their own contributors like Jay Cost.

Robert Samuelson—Though he writes impressively about many things, Samuelson’s greatest strength is his understanding of economics. His pieces last month and this about the financial crisis are far and away the best things written on that subject by anyone at the Washington Post.

Tom Shales—In the way that some people are said to have a perfect ear, Shales has a perfect eye. His take on everything from speeches to TV shows is almost always spot on, and the class of the field. Unfortunate, therefore, that he occasionally wanders into matters of politics and policy. Note to Tom: Don’t do it. You’re not good at it, and it diminishes you even to make the effort.

Slate—Not perfect but a serious place for serious people, and marked by terrific writing. If the Washington Post, which owns Slate, were more like it, it would be a fresher and more widely admired newspaper.

George Will—The best of the commentariat. Made his journalistic bones, so to speak, during the Nixon regime where, second perhaps only to Woodward and Bernstein, he was the leading critic of that Administration. Though a conservative Republican, not averse to taking on conservatives and Republicans, as seen in his recent scathing criticism of John McCain (McCain Loses His Head). One of the very few journalists (Robert Samuelson being another) with a broad understanding of the speech clause of the First Amendment.

 

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Journalists, and the future of the media. Part II

From Johannes Gutenberg to the dawn of the Internet, the press (or the media as we now call it) has been characterized by two things: It has been one-way, and it has flowed from the few to the many.  Comes now the Internet, where everyone’s a publisher/broadcaster, and all that has changed.

As we’re seeing already, tomorrow’s media will be two-way and many to the many.  (And a generation from now, when Virtual Reality is prevalent, many to the few as well.)

A change so fundamental poses real challenges to professional journalists, because in the age of user-generated content — whether in the form of blogs, or social networking sites, or YouTubian video creations, or who knows what — many of the “stars” are likely to be what we used to think of as the audience.

In this tumultuous new world, professional journalists will not only have to share the stage with amateurs, they will have to put up with their slings and arrows, and even to defer to them in those instances, which will be legion, where some amateur’s expertise or diligence on a given subject is greater than that of the professional journalist.

And there is one other thing.  As we see even now, all of the amateurs will have opinions, and some will be able to express them very well.

Given all of this, one might ask who will want to be a professional journalist, and what, exactly, will be the role of one?  Though no one knows for sure, the answer to that last question may lie in the advantages available to the professionals.

Because they have financial resources, whole departments of reporters, vast networks of contacts, and the best equipment, professional journalists have now, and will continue to have, something the amateurs don’t — the ability to engage in the practice of gathering and reporting the news.

It follows from this that the media of the future may put a greater emphasis on thoroughness and objectivity, not necessarily out of high-mindedness or J-schoolish exhortations, but because this kind of reportage, unlike opinion and analysis, is something only they can do.

If this is in fact the future of journalism, it will mark a return to a journalistic standard that’s lately  been honored more in the breach than the observance, and it will be another example of how great societal benefits often derive from the pursuit of self-interest.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Journalists, and the future of the media. Part I

“Ladies and gentlemen, The Network News Hour with Sybil the Soothsayer … Jim Levitt and his Almost Truth Department … Ms. Madahare and her Skeletons in the Closet…. Tonight, another segment of Vox Populi….  And starring the mad prophet of the airwaves: Howard Beale!”  (From the movie “Network,” 1976)

Everyone of a certain age remembers the story of the unhinged anchorman, Howard (“I’m mad as hell and I won’t take it any more”) Beale.  Examples abound that playwright Paddy Chayefsky was onto something.  Keith Olbermann comes to mind – and all the more so after MSNBC took the highly unusual step of removing him from his anchor post for being too far over the top.  Where journalism is untethered to standards of professionalism, and ratings are all, journalism suffers.

But the sullying effect of entertainment values on journalism is well understood.  The thing that’s less well understood, and a much more intractable problem, is the role of journalists in the decline of journalism.

From their tiny and parochial grasp of the speech clause of the First Amendment, to their growing embrace of opinion rather than objectivity, to their response to all things Internet, the performance of much of the national press corps these days seems – to borrow a phrase from Malcolm Muggeridge – like the antics of an exhausted stock.

Journalists’ knowledge of and support for the First Amendment can be measured by the things they promote and the things they do not. They favor access to government information, the right not to have to reveal their sources, and weak libel laws.  And leaving room for a little quibbling around the edges, all of these are good things.  But note the parochialism.  Journalists want access to information in the same way, and for the same reason, that fishermen want access to nets.  The point being that, whatever the intrinsic public good, and it’s manifest, access to information is a practical need of journalists.

But what about the speech needs of people who are not journalists?  Like the commercial speech of advertisers of legal products?  Or the speech of college students, circumscribed by campus speech codes?  Or the political speech of groups or individuals who, close to the date of federal elections, wish to make political arguments through issue ads?  Or, even within the industry, of the right of media companies not to have to yield to onerous and government-mandated “public interest” obligations?

On these and other First Amendment issues, far too many journalists are silent if, as with campaign finance reform, they aren’t actually on the other side.

Controversy over media coverage of this year’s extraordinary presidential election campaign opens a window on another journalistic sore spot, the twinned issues of objectivity and media bias.  In an article dated 9/3, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post observed, without a hint of irony, that “denouncing the news media as biased plays well with many Republican voters.”

A similar observation was made the next day in an article in the New York Times. “If there is one mission Mr. McCain wants to accomplish at his convention,” it says, “it is to galvanize conservative voters who have shown signs of depression this year.  Traditionally, one surefire way to do that has been to attack the ‘elitist’ mainstream news media.”

But whether we’re talking about conservatives, who represent maybe one-third of the country, or Republicans who, at least at election time, represent half, the obvious question is why do they feel this way?  Why is it that attacking the media is a “surefire” way to galvanize Republicans and conservatives?  In all the years that I’ve been watching presidential campaigns, I don’t ever recall reading a similar line about Democrats, or about liberals for that matter.

It’s true, of course, that there are people to the left of liberals who are critical of the media.  But the great divide in American political life isn’t between Republicans and conservatives on the one hand, and Marxists and leftists on the other. It’s between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals.  And thus, when journalists suggest, as they have for decades, that the existence of critics on the left as well as the right proves that their efforts are balanced, they miss the pregnant truth by a mile and persuade no one.

At what may be a tipping point for all of the professional media, isn’t this a problem that the industry should redress?  Is there any other industry that, upon hearing that half of their market feels they’re being dissed, wouldn’t move to correct, or at least ameliorate, that problem?

Of course the media are different from other industries in another way too.  Owing to the “firewall” erected over time between the journalistic “product” and the management of the companies that own that product, the news industry is the only one in which corporate management exercises little control over what its writers, reporters, and editors produce – little control, in other words, over their very products.

So with management hamstrung by the firewall convention, who is willing and able to mind the store, so to speak?  Certainly not those institutions that exist to fund, study, promote, and chronicle contemporary journalism.

Of the handful of foundations – like the Knight Foundation – that routinely provide funding for journalism-related programs at universities and nonprofit organizations, all share a mindset, whatever their funding priorities, that can be characterized as Old Newspaper.  As such, they cling to journalistic notions that are outdated, uninformed, and fundamentally irrelevant.  And what is true of the foundations is true, and then some, of the rest of the journalism infrastructure: TV critics, media reporters, ombudsmen, and the journalism reviews.

If, as they say, war is too important to be left to generals, perhaps it’s not too much of a reach to say that journalism is too important to be left to journalists.

Next: The Internet and its growing impact on journalism.

Posted on By Richard T. Kaplar

Is China Big Enough for Free Speech?

The Olympics are now in full swing in Beijing after a spectacular opening ceremony that displayed many of the Chinese people’s finest attributes.  The Chinese government and free speech, however, are another matter.

Our friend Kurt Wimmer has written an excellent piece for us on this topic titled “The Beijing Olympiad: A Fleeting Opportunity for a Freer China.”  Kurt notes that by July, Chinese officials had imprisoned almost 50 Chinese writers whose opinions the government found subversive or threatening.  And the clampdown was not limited to native Chinese.
 
Western journalists were ordered out of the ravaged Sichuan province following the earthquakes there, and at least 10 foreign journalists covering Tibet have had their lives threatened since March.  Meanwhile, the “Great Firewall of China” blocks access to Internet content that criticizes the government, lest Chinese citizens hear anything untoward about their leaders.

The drumbeat continued in the days just prior to the games with stories about journalists denied access, activists deported, and even the U.S. press corps plane being delayed for a baggage search.  Subtlety is not in the playbook of Chinese censors, from all indications.

Still, Kurt finds a glimmer of hope in all of this.  If the United States and other nations can bring enough media pressure to bear, perhaps the will of the Chinese people can prevail and usher in a new era of greater transparency, he says. 

It’s a big “if,” as Kurt acknowledges.  There are no guarantees that free speech will take root just because the Chinese are hosting the Olympics.  But as the Games focus the world’s attention on China, they do provide an opportunity – however fleeting – to begin a process that could just lead to greater freedom of speech and press.