Category: Journalism

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Whither Journalism? Part I

As evidenced by recent hearings in the House and Senate, the future of journalism is attracting a lot of attention these days.  And why not?  Hardly a week goes by without news of the shutdown, bankruptcy reorganization, or downsizing of a daily newspaper somewhere.  And pretty much everyone seems to agree that newspapers are the “gold standard” among journalism organizations.

Journalists themselves have been dedicating large quantities of ink to the subject.  But like the witnesses at the congressional hearings, the prescriptions of journalists are as notable for what they don’t recommend as for what they do.

Actually, journalists aren’t recommending much of anything.  For the most part they content themselves with finger-wagging diatribes under headlines that read like draft obituaries.  Stories, for instance, like Howard Kurtz’s in the Washington Post (The Death of Print?) in which it’s argued that the blame belongs with the Internet and unimaginative and slow-footed management.  Or Frank Rich in the New York Times (The American Press on Suicide Watch), whose villain is an ungrateful public which “thinks nothing of spending money for texting or pornography” but is unwilling to shell out for … the opinions of Frank Rich?

And then, of course, there are the ideological opportunists, like John Nichols of The Nation (David Simon, Arianna Huffington and the Future of Journalism) who, true to his “class warrior” conceits, sums things up this way: “There will be time for the debate about solutions.  For now, it is not just useful but necessary to be clear about the cause of the crisis in journalism….  It wasn’t the Internet.  It wasn’t the current economic downturn.  It was a lousy ownership model that saw civic and democratic values replaced by the rapacious greed and commercial calculations of big media companies.”

Well, enough of this.  Let’s consider some solutions, and one very bad idea that is being offered up as a solution.

To take the bad idea first, the granting of nonprofit status to newspaper publishers makes no sense from either a journalistic or a business point of view.  Looked at journalistically, such a development would lead inexorably to challenges of these companies’ nonprofit status by governmental or private parties who would allege political partisanship.  Sooner or later these challenges would find traction, either in the courts, Congress, or in media boardrooms, thereby compromising the papers’ very reason for being.

As a business proposition, nonprofit status seems even more bizarre.  After all, the papers that are most notably failing today aren’t the work of mom-and-pop organizations.  They’re the products of the biggest companies in the industry, like Hearst, McClatchy, Gannett, and the Tribune Company — all of which are not only private, for-profit companies, but publicly owned companies (save for Tribune) at that.  How would the shareholders (or creditors) of any of them fare in such an arrangement?

Posted on By Richard T. Kaplar

Blaming the messenger, and why not?

 

A program held at Rockefeller University last week—an Oxford-style debate on the subject of the financial crisis—inspires and dismays. It inspires because it demonstrates how much can be learned when knowledgeable people communicate honestly and intelligently, even where they disagree. It dismays because it contrasts so sharply with the quality of the stuff being served up on the subject by so much of the news media, political reporters in particular.

With funding from the Rosenkranz Foundation, the debate was sponsored by Intelligence Squared US, the stateside companion to a similar program in London, and featured six debaters, three on each side of the motion: “Blame Washington more than Wall Street for the financial crisis.”

Arguing in favor of the motion were Niall Ferguson, of Harvard; John Gordon Steele, of NPR; and Nouiriel Roubini, aka Dr.Doom. Arguing against the motion were Alex Berenson, of The New York Times; Jim Chanos, of Kynikos Associates; and attorney Nell Minow.

Not to put too fine a point on it, it is a better and more enlightening discussion of the “political economics” of our financial crisis than anything I have read in any of the news, Op-Ed, or feature stories produced by the Washington press corps. More than this, mirabile dictu, one comes away from the debate not only feeling better informed, but with a certain measure of affection for all the debaters! But don’t take my word for it, read the transcript here.

In a recent blog I lamented the report that Newsweek magazine was planning to become more of an opinion journal, thereby officially abandoning the journalistic concept of objectivity. For my pains I received an email from the head of a major Washington think tank, who wrote mockingly of the idea that this was something new. His point being that Newsweek had always practiced opinion journalism. In my reply I said that he might be right, but that there was a difference between giving lip service to an ideal, and abandoning it altogether.

I’m reminded of that exchange, and mention it here, because it shines a light on yet another dimension of our journalistic impoverishment. Our financial and economic crises are being poorly reported not just because so many political reporters know nothing about finance or economics, but because, in an age and an industry where opinion trumps fact, they don’t have to. They just have to put on display the right kind of opinions.

 

Posted on By Ashley Messenger, Esq.

Truth Is No Longer Absolute Libel Defense

By guest blogger ASHLEY MESSENGER, Editorial Counsel to U.S. News & World Report, L.P., Washington, D.C.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit recently ruled in Noonan v. Staples, Inc. that truth is not necessarily a defense to a libel claim.  This is a troubling holding, as libel is generally defined as a false, defamatory statement.  

But Massachusetts has a law that allows a true statement to be the basis of a libel claim if the statement is made with “actual malice,” which the First Circuit interpreted as “ill will.”  The ruling appears to be predicated on the fact that the plaintiff, Alan Noonan, is a “private person” and the statement was not a “matter of public concern.”

It is undisputed that Alan Noonan was fired from Staples for violating the company’s expense policies.  A vice president sent an e-mail to Staples employees stating that Noonan was fired for failure to comply with expense policies and reminding employees of the importance of compliance.  The court allowed his claim to go forward to let a jury decide whether the statements were made with “ill will.”

But if a private person can sue for libel when a true statement is made with ill will, the courts will be flooded with victims of petty gossip and spiteful ex’s.  A cheating spouse, for example, would now have a libel claim if the aggrieved spouse vents to friends about the betrayal with “ill will.”

In addition, there is the policy matter of permitting a person to recover damages when their reputation is damaged with good cause.  If a spouse cheats and that true fact is disclosed, his or her reputation may be damaged, but justifiably damaged.  Do we truly want to permit people to be compensated for their own bad behavior?

Finally, there is a problem with the increasingly false distinction between matters of “public concern” and “private” things.  The value of hearing truthful information is the same reason reporters use anecdotes in newspaper stories.  It makes a situation more real when you can associate a name and specific event to an issue rather than relying on vague assertions of what might or might not have happened.  

In fact, if a reporter had used Noonan’s story as anecdotal evidence of why it is important to comply with company policies, it should have been deemed a matter of public concern.  The correct result, whether it’s a company or a reporter, is that all speakers should be protected by the First Amendment.

This post is adapted from a Media Institute  Perspectives issue paper by Ashley Messenger on this topic.  View the full paper here.

Ashley Messenger is Editorial Counsel to U.S. News & World Report, L.P., and an adjunct faculty member at American University School of Communication in Washington, D.C.  The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and not of these institutions.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

What Do Political Reporters Know?

One of the differences between, say, your everyday community organizers on the one hand, and investors on the other, is that while both have opinions, the investors have money.  Not only do they have some money, in a very practical sense they have all the money. 

This is an important thing to know these days because, as measured by the relative value of every asset class — from common stock to collectibles, real estate to commodities — investors of all sorts are making it clear by their actions that they are deeply worried about the future, and growing more so.

Many people, perhaps most, know this already.  They know it because they are among those who have already lost their jobs, or fear they soon will.  Or because they have seen the value of their 401K plans cut by half.  Or because they own houses whose value has declined so much they no longer have any equity in them.

Or perhaps they know it because they are avid consumers of the financial and business press; media outlets like Barron’s, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, the Economist, IBD, CNBC.

If, however, they are among the lucky few who have not been personally wounded by the current crisis, and get their news of the nation not from financial journalists but from political reporters online or off, stories reaching them of investor angst may seem like a kind of nasty and unwelcome rumor, like the warmongering of a distant and unimportant country.

And why wouldn’t it seem that way to someone munching solely on the crudites served up by our political journos?  Instead of digging into the facts of what the markets are saying, they offer up one story after another sourced by a political pollster or partisan strategist.

Rather than write about the substantive aspects of our financial and economic problems, they write about which party or politician is pulling from the gloom the greater number of political points.  In other words, they write about opinions — their own, those of the political class, and those of what are said to be the people.

One of the most durable sayings in the world of finance is that money goes where it’s treated best.  This isn’t a political statement, or an opinion, or a matter of manners and morals.  It’s a physical law, like gravity.

And where is money going right now?  It’s going into gold that costs more than $1,000 per ounce, and into short-term Treasuries that are paying less than inflation.  And what is that telling us?  It’s telling us that investors — professionals and amateurs, Republicans and Democrats — are scared to death and doubt, given what they know now, that our government is pursuing strategies that will help.

But don’t expect political reporters to tell you much about any of this.  They didn’t do so last fall, when the economy might have been carefully examined in the context of the national elections, so why would they do so now?  They’ve got too many opinions to spin to get bogged down with something as dreary as facts.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

And Now for Something Entirely Different…

In Washington, the lingua franca of policy discussions is "lobbyspeak," a form of communication that seeks, among other things, to conceal any hint of personal belief or interest.

The allure of lobbyspeak is that it allows the speaker to say things in a way that inoculates him from the risk that someone might denigrate his arguments as being just his own opinions, as contrasted, say, with positions derived from case law, or precedent, or that runaway favorite, the “public interest.”

Considered in the larger scheme of things, this is not the worst thing in the world.  Among the initiated, after all, it is easily spotted, and in some cases even appreciated — like a risqué double entendre — for its naughty cleverness.  But it can be, and often is, remarkably tiresome.

Which is why I write today to commend a speech given in Washington this week by the president of the Consumer Electronics Association, the people who host the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.  Lobbyspeak it was not.

As reported Tuesday in the headline of a Broadcasting & Cable story, "CEA president Gary Shapiro says media has ‘failed’ the country by poorly analyzing important stories," the speech excoriated the press for their insufficient attention to the substantive aspects of the recently enacted stimulus legislation, and our financial crisis generally.

In a town in which many, association executives particularly, are loathe to say anything that might upset anyone — the press and policymakers especially — Shapiro’s speech before The Media Institute was stunningly different, and frank, and courageous.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Eating Their Seed Corn

From the New York Times comes word this week of big changes looming at one of the country’s oldest newsweeklies.  “Newsweek,” they say, “is planning a redesign and some shifts in content to fashion an opinionated take on events, aimed at a much smaller, and wealthier, readership.”

In truth it doesn’t come as a surprise.  In many ways it isn’t even news.  But it’s disappointing all the same to see one of the country’s mainstream media outlets consciously, and proudly, abandon the time-honored journalistic standard of objectivity.

Nobody’s going to run off and join the circus in consequence of this development because, as seen during last year’s election campaign, virtually all of the mainstream media have demonstrated an ability to abandon objectivity whenever it pleases them.

As mentioned here before, nowhere was this more lamentable than in the coverage of the presidential candidates’ take on economic issues.  When this point was made in an earlier blog, some people took it to be a partisan observation.  But it wasn’t, and isn’t.

Even if the media had done a credible, and objective, job of pressing both candidates on their plans for the economy, Obama would still have won.  Maybe even by a larger margin.  This, because no matter how little Obama may know about economics, John McCain knows even less.

But look how much better off we’d be if the press had challenged Obama to give more than lip service to these kinds of issues.  In addition to a better informed public, we might also have an economic stimulus plan that reflected more of the thinking of the president than of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

The political and societal ramifications aside, there is another downside to the media’s embrace of opinion over objectivity: It’s unlikely to work, online or off.

As evidence consider what one supposes is a model of future Newsweek reportage, a story by Jon Meacham and Evan Thomas.  Provocatively titled “We Are All Socialists Now,” the piece purports to document a profound shift in our collective view of the correct form of government.

What’s striking about the article, however, is that it is about 90 percent opinion, with little or nothing of substance to it.  There’s no there there; nothing that informs, analyzes, or even segues.  Just a kind of fluffy amalgam of the pedestrian and superficial, in which most of the intellectual energy seems to have gone into the title.

A good exercise in times such as these is to ask oneself how much you would  be willing to pay for a thing if you had to pay to receive it.  The question can be asked of all kinds of things.  Were it asked of this Newsweek article, the guess here is that few people would offer to pay anything.

A few months ago a Microsoft executive gave a speech to some online publishers in London in which he said that publishers’ decisions to give their online content away for free had been a disastrous mistake.  And now we have the first, but undoubtedly not the last, of the mainstream media to openly embrace opinion journalism as a model for the future.

The question not yet answered is what – after they have surrendered first their content and then their journalistic patrimony – the media will do if all this fails to halt the slide?

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.