Have a NACAF Summer

Blog of the UTS Journalism Summer course in News and Current Affairs

Creating Neutral Experts

January 3, 2006 by · 1 Comment · journalist sources, objectivity paradigm

The Revealer has a good critique of newspaper sourcing practices when quoting “experts” from think tanks. The NYT acknowledge in a story today that they were caught out in their earlier reporting of The Lincoln Group’s activities in Iraq. The Lincoln Group a PR outfit with ten million dollars worth of contracts in Iraq has been under investigation for paying to get pro-US stories in local Iraqi media and most recently paying Sunni clerics for their support.

Last month when the story broke, and again this morning, the NYT quotes “Michael Rubin, a Middle East scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington research organization” as an outside expert. They acknowledge this morning that Rubin may not be just a disinterested scholar:

Mr. Rubin was quoted last month in The New York Times about Lincoln’s work for the Pentagon placing articles in Iraqi publications: “I’m not surprised this goes on,” he said, without disclosing his work for Lincoln. “Especially in an atmosphere where terrorists and insurgents – replete with oil boom cash – do the same. We need an even playing field, but cannot fight with both hands tied behind our backs.”

However The Revealer’s Jeff Sharlet makes the more pertinent point:

This obscures the fact that Rubin is not a “scholar” in the traditional sense of the term, but a committed neoconservative activist, a former official of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and, according to two reliable reporters in the liberal magazine Mother Jones, one of Wolfowitz’s cheerleaders in the early stages of the war.

This doesn’t mean Rubin shouldn’t be quoted in the paper, but it does mean that he should be identified as more than a “Middle East scholar.” Rubin’s an apparatchik.

And a loony one, to boot. The Times‘ ideology-erasure policy not only recasts conservatives (and in other cases, leftists) as centrists, it also gives its talking heads the appearance of reasonable detachment. You be the judge. (More about Rubin here, from the leftist International Relations Center.)

…Perspectives of people such as Rubin should be in the news — after all, he helped make the events under discussion happen — but they should not be categorized as outside “experts.” That’s like quoting a naked PETA activist as a neutral observer in an article about fur.

Answering back

January 2, 2006 by · Comments Off · blogging

Great article in the NYT by Katherine Seelye on the way the internet is changing the relationships between sources and journalists, between the writers and those being written about. It is a great article because it does what good journalism does, it provides a range of points of view while still being pointed in its analysis. It begins with a fairly bland analysis of the phenomenon:

Unhappy subjects discovered a decade ago that they could use their Web sites to correct the record or deconstruct articles to expose what they perceived as a journalist’s bias or wrongheaded narration.

But now they are going a step further. Subjects of newspaper articles and news broadcasts now fight back with the same methods reporters use to generate articles and broadcasts – taping interviews, gathering e-mail exchanges, taking notes on phone conversations – and publish them on their own Web sites. This new weapon in the media wars is shifting the center of gravity in the way that news is gathered and presented, and it carries implications for the future of journalism.

Too many journalists would have left it at that and this would have been one of the many articles that concentrate on the mechanistic ways blogs and the internet are influencing journalism. But Seelye goes further:

The printing of transcripts, e-mail messages and conversations, and the ability to pull up information from search engines like Google, have empowered those whom Jay Rosen, a blogger and journalism professor at New York University, calls “the people formerly known as the audience.”

“In this new world, the audience and sources are publishers,” Mr. Rosen said. “They are now saying to journalists, ‘We are producers, too. So the interview lies midpoint between us. You produce things from it, and we do, too.’ From now on, in a potentially hostile interview situation, this will be the norm.”

These processes are changing both journalism paradigms and journalism practices.

Journalists now realise that they have to be extra careful in their transactions with sources and some programs are posting their own full transcripts. It is also changing formal public relations practices with businesses incorporating blogs into their publicity strategies. But the revenge of the source is not just a utopic story about reform and empowerment.

Danny Schechter, executive editor of MediaChannel.org and a former producer at ABC News and CNN, said that while the active participation by so many readers was healthy for democracy and journalism, it had allowed partisanship to mask itself as media criticism and had given rise to a new level of vitriol.

“It’s now O.K. to demonize the messenger,” he said. “This has led to a very uncivil discourse in which it seems to be O.K. to shout down, discredit, delegitimize and denigrate the people who are reporting stories and to pick at their methodology and ascribe motives to them that are often unfair.”

Seelye gives one example where a creationist group used these techniques to dispute a Nightline piece on intelligent design.

Ultimately this process is part of the broader push towards “transparency” in news media:

Reporters say that these developments are forcing them to change how they do their jobs; some are asking themselves if they can justify how they are filtering information. “We’ve got to be more transparent about the news-gathering process,” said Craig Crawford, a columnist for Congressional Quarterly and author of “Attack the Messenger: How Politicians Turn You Against the Media.” “We’ve pretended to be like priests turning water to wine, like it’s a secret process. Those days are gone.”

Some news outlets are posting transcripts of their interviews with newsmakers, and some reporters are posting their own material. Stephen Baker, a senior writer at BusinessWeek, has posted not only transcripts from his interviews but also his own notes on his Web site, saying he likes to involve his readers in the journalistic process.

“Sometimes I say to my readers, Here’s my interview. What story would you have written?” said Mr. Baker, who writes about technology. Journalism, he added, used to be a clear-cut “before and after process,” much like making a meal; the cooking was done privately in the kitchen and then the meal was served. Now, he said, “every aspect of it is scrutinized.”

One of the difficulties with this is that it is forcing a simultaneous public and professional reevaluation of news gathering processes. But it is difficult and confusing to suddenly have a public conversation about news when so much of what journalists take for granted as routine story formation is seen as a quasi alchemical process by much of the public. We have sold the myth of objectivity for so long that it has become common wisdom: whereas once upon a time this provided a protective shield it is now being used as a weapon against us.

It’s classic blowback.

Blogging at the Washington Post

December 24, 2005 by · Comments Off · blogging

Harry Jaffe reports on new blogging developments at the Washington Post:

Chris Cillizza is the first person hired by Washingtonpost.com—based in Virginia—to spend most of his time in the downtown newsroom, accordin g to political editor John Harris. The Post may have found the crossover reporter to bridge the gap between its print newspaper and Internet site…..

He doesn’t mind being called a blogger: “Blogs can be news- and information-driven without opinion. I see it as real-time reporting with the ability for people to comment.” ….

In time, Cillizza’s brand of crossover reporting might be the norm at the Post. Says Harris: “Chris does represent a bridge between the Web newsroom in Arlington and the one here in DC. I have no doubt that the two operations will merge. It’s inevitable.”

Five years ago, Harris says, there was trepidation among reporters about the emergence of Washingtonpost.com: “Everybody’s gone through the stages of grief—from denial to acceptance to now when they’re competing for better play on the Web site.”

The debate here is still centered on “objectivity” with Cillizza noting he dosen’t vote and he wants to be “as objective as humanly possible.” As Jaffe comments: ” He’s got a politically monastic streak that must warm the heart of executive editor Len Downie”.

The welcome Cillizza has been given is in sharp contrast to the recent strife over web based Dan Froomkin’s White House briefing blog. WP Obudsman Deborah Howell ignited a controversy earlier this month when she wrote of “the two Washington Posts” – the paper and the web site:

Political reporters at The Post don’t like WPNI columnist Dan Froomkin’s “White House Briefing,” which is highly opinionated and liberal. They’re afraid that some readers think that Froomkin is a Post White House reporter.

John Harris, national political editor at the print Post, said, “The title invites confusion. It dilutes our only asset — our credibility” as objective news reporters. Froomkin writes the kind of column “that we would never allow a White House reporter to write. I wish it could be done with a different title and display.”

Harris is right; some readers do think Froomkin is a White House reporter. But Froomkin works only for the Web site and is very popular — and Brady is not going to fool with that, though he is considering changing the column title and supplementing it with a conservative blogger.

This is partly a territorial dispute, partly about new technology and partly about the nature of journalism. As Editor and Publisher reported WP politics editor John Harris and Froomkin have diferent interpretations of what is going on. Froomkin:

“My agenda, such as it is, is accountability and
transparency,” Froomkin wrote. “I believe that the president of the
United States, no matter what his party, should be subject to the most
intense journalistic scrutiny imaginable. And he should be able to
easily withstand that scrutiny. I was prepared to take the same
approach with John Kerry, had he become president.”

Froomkin, who does some original reporting himself, is
like a blogger in the way he points to other sources of news, offers
context to the day’s political reporting and points out themes in the
mainstream media’s reporting. “Regular readers know that my column is
first and foremost a daily anthology of works by other journalists and
bloggers,” Froomkin wrote on post.blog. “The omnipresent links make it
easy for readers to assess my credibility.

And Harris:

“The first issue is whether many readers believe
Dan’s column is written by one of the Washington Post’s three White
House reporters,” he wrote. “It seems to me–based on many, many
examples–beyond any doubt that a large share of readers do believe
that. No doubt there are some who enjoy the column for precisely this
reason. If I worked outside the paper, I might presume myself that a
feature titled ‘White House Briefing’ was written by one of the
newspaper’s White House reporters.

“Given that there is such confusion, the question is
whether this is a problem. For me it is a problem. I perceive a good
bit of his commentary on the news as coming through a liberal prism–or
at least not trying very hard to avoid such perceptions. Dan, as I
understand his position, says that his commentary is not ideologically
based, but he acknowledges it is written with a certain irreverence and
adversarial purpose. Dan does not address the main question in his
comments. He should. If he were a White House reporter for a major news
organization, would it be okay for him to write in the fashion he does?

“If the answer is yes, we have a legitimate
disagreement. If the answer is no, there is not really a debate:
washingtonpost.com should change the name of his column to more
accurately present the fact that this is Dan Froomkin’s take on the
news, not the observations of someone who is assigned by the paper to
cover the news.

The choice of words is interesting. Froomkin frames his work not in terms of objectivity but in terms of transparency – the term that Dan Gilmour suggest is a better contemporary motif for journalistic ideals.

Spin City

December 23, 2005 by · Comments Off · spin

This sums it all up. From a Washington Post profile on White House press sec Scott McLellan:

On the Thursday morning after his reelection in November 2004, President Bush bounded unexpectedly into the Roosevelt Room of the White House, where about 15 members of his communications team were celebrating. He just wanted to thank everyone for their hard work on the campaign, he said, before singling someone out.

“Is Scotty here? Where’s Scotty?” Bush asked, half-grinning, according to two people who were in the meeting but asked not to be quoted by name because they were discussing a private event. Bush scanned the room for Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary.

“I want to especially thank Scotty,” the president said, looking at his aide. “I want to thank Scotty for saying” — and he paused for effect. . . .

” Nothing .”

At which point everyone laughed and the president left the room.

This is one of those quips that distill a certain essence of the game. In this era of on-message orthodoxy, the republic has evolved to where the leader of the free world can praise his most visible spokesman for saying nothing.

C.J. he aint!

Bigger than Jesus

December 21, 2005 by · 2 Comments · blogging

Any article that begins: “How big are blogs? Bigger than Jesus. Bigger than sex” sounds like it’s going to be yet another blogsploitation spiel. However Daniel Rubin’s article in the Philadelphia Inquirer is a pretty good summary of major blogging trends.

If 2004 was the year blogs entered the language (so says Merriam-Webster), then 2005 was the year they found their voice. Mainstream media embraced blogs, corporations embraced blogs, spammers embraced blogs.

It was a time of great convergence, with indie blogs joining together to capture audience and advertising, as brand-name media shed their institutional voices to go unfiltered where the readers were.

I think it is this friction between the institutional adoption of blogs and their original independent impulse that is one of the most interesting things about the current evolution of the blogsphere. Lee Rainie, director of the Pew internet project makes the point that we are in a key transitional moment:

“The mainstream media opened its arms to bloggers in crisis moments in all sorts of ways,” Rainie says. “We have entered this melding stage of thinking… . We’ve been through anger and fighting. Now we are in the wary-embrace stage. At some point, it will be wholesale endorsement.”

The question becomes will it be endorsement of the form or endorsement of the ethos of the blogsphere.

The Sydney Morning Herald produced one of the earliest mainstream experiments with Margo Kingston’s webdiary. It was a genuine evolving space with a commitment to diversity and discussion that became a community for negotiated discussion not just a bullitedn board. For reasons that still remain unclear Kingston was shafted and had to go independent. She has now retired from the blogsphere, even though others have continued her project.

The Herald has replaced her with The Contrarian which like many mainstream media blogs is a traditional column with a comments facility

The real change will come when mainstream media realise that blogging is a new way of relating to content not just a new way of disseminating it.

Not racist?

December 20, 2005 by · Comments Off · oz media

First the PM, and now Peter Costello and Maurice Iemma, they all say that “Australia is not a racist country.” It is as if repeating the refrain will somehow transform our current grim reality.

Costello’s other claim is that the media – including Alan Jones – didn’t “whip” anything up.

“I think racism can be easily whipped up in Australia,” Mr Costello said.

“I don’t think there’s racism on the street, no, I think we’re a very accepting country,” he told ABC Radio.

Sydney talkback radio personalities, including Macquarie Radio’s Alan Jones, have been accused of fuelling racial tensions in the wake of the recent Cronulla riot.

Asked if he thought Jones “went too far”, Mr Costello said he did not.

“That’s not what I mean by whipping up,” Mr Costello said.

“I think it can be fanned if gangs of youths come into a neighbourhood and try and take it over. That can fan racism.

“If people, say, get down and launch an attack, a counter-attack on gangs of youths, they can whip it up. It can be whipped up from both sides.”

So racism can “easily” be whipped up. But we are not a racist country. Racism is “fanned” if gangs of youth come into a neighbourhood and try “to take it over”. It is an example of the strange political double speak that is reported constantly in the media without comment.

Apart from his claims of gangs trying to “take over” neighbourhoods, Costello’s metaphor is telling. You fan a fire only if there are simmering coals. On a day to day basis much of Australia is indeed an accepting kind of place but there are always those simmering coals waiting to be fanned by someone who doesn’t belong stepping into the wrong neighbourhood.

It seems like the public is not being hoodwinked. A poll indicates that large number agree with the PM’s statement that the recent events in Cronulla don’t reflect a racist reality in this country.

The Herald Poll reveals deep concerns about the long-term impact of the riots: 59 per cent of respondents believe the violence at Cronulla and other Sydney beaches would damage Australia’s international reputation. Only 38 per cent think Australia’s image has not been tarnished.

The results are in stark contrast to John Howard’s statement following the Cronulla riots: “I do not accept there is underlying racism in this country.”

According to the poll, 75 per cent of respondents disagree with Mr Howard’s statement and 22 per cent agree.

The proportion of people who believe there is an undercurrent of racism was highest among minor party and independent voters (84 per cent) and Labor voters (76 per cent). However, more than two-thirds of Coalition voters – 68 per cent – also disagreed with Mr Howard.

The poll found people were more comfortable with immigration levels than they were immediately after the Tampa crisis. Only 33 per cent polled over the weekend by ACNielsen considered the current intake “too high” compared with 41 per cent in September 2001.

The number of people who thought immigration levels were too low climbed by one point to 11 per cent.

The poll revealed 81 per cent backing for multiculturalism.

By the way this is what Alan Jones said when he wasn’t either whipping up or fanning. He urged a local show of force:

“A rally, a street march, call it what you will. A community show of force,” he told listeners, at one point even going so far as to push for locals at Cronulla to get Pacific Islanders involved because “they don’t take any nonsense”.

Indeed it’s time for all of us to show that we wont be taking any nonsense.

It takes a riot

December 18, 2005 by · Comments Off · oz media

It takes a riot to get Australian news into the world media.

This week we even made SF Gate’s World Views with the unflattering headline: “Australia’s Leb Bashings” the other piece in the column this week was on the international reaction to the US torture policy – fine comapnion pieces:

War, bombings and torture in other places are the routine stuff of headlines, but this past weekend, sun worshippers at Cronulla Beach in Sydney, Australia, got a taste of a different kind of violence — the homemade kind. Reportedly provoked by assaults about a week ago on two lifeguards at the beach by youths described as being of “Middle Eastern appearance,” Sunday’s race riots involved what papers called “thousands of drunken youths.” (BBC/Daily Telegraph/Courier-Mail)

A number of commentators have compared the situation in Cronulla with the recent riots outside Paris. But Gary Sauer-Thompson makes a key distinction:

The race riots at Cronulla on the weekend bring the Australian Right into the foreground. The riots can be connected to what recently happened in France. I agree with Andrew Norton over at Catallaxy that the Cronulla violence is similar to the most recent Sydney riots at Macquarie Fields and Redfern. In both the French and Sydney cases the base economic issues are clear: poorly educated young people fuelled by anger, dispossession and booze/drugs, low incomes and poor job prospects, turning tribal.

However,what happened Cronulla is also different from the events in France. Cronulla turned tribal and became racist, without the police or the political authorities fueling racism, which is what happened in France.

The other key distinction is that the media in both countries have behaved very differently as the Australian Media section reported on Thursday:

French media had a rather novel ethical approach to covering the recent Paris race riots after the images reached saturation point: they simply stopped showing them.

Incensed critics have labelled the move censorship, accusing the French media of political biases and an over-inflated sense of power. Yet others have seen the move as an indication that the media — a powerful social force — could also possess a social conscience.

“We have a unique situation in France at the moment. Because events have been continuing for some weeks, we have the time to consider the impact of our reporting,” says Antonin Lhote, chief editor at Canal Plus, one of France’s privately owned television stations.

“Often when we film something, we are unaware of its impact until later. Our job is simply to witness.

“But here we have the unique opportunity to consider what the images mean and whether they should be shown.”

The difference, Lhote says, is that the station has decided not to show the images it obtains for fear of spreading what he calls a contagion through the thoughtless dissemination of the images.

“It’s not about the violence,” he says. “Iraq, Tel Aviv, Pakistan … these are all much more violent images. But they are news. This is not news; it is a show. We know there can be a perverse relationship between young men and the media, and they are giving us beautiful pictures … things burning, people running around in the night, it looks wonderful. But what we want to do is draw the distinction between spectaculars and news.”

Nifty new tool

December 11, 2005 by · Comments Off · social software

Some of you may remember that I mentioned that blogs could be written and edited from a blog editor such as ecto. This means:

  • you can do it anywhere you have net access,
  • it overcomes any browser/platform compatibility issues and
  • gives you added functionality such as a spell checker.

I am writing this post from a new tool called Writely. It is basically an online word processor that allows you to

  • edit and format documents
  • save them as word, pdf or html format
  • post to your blog
  • collaborate on a document with others

One of its nifty functions is that more than one person can access and edit the document at the same time and the edits are synched every few seconds. If any of you feel like trying it out to collaborate on the Judith Miller exercise that would be exactly the sort of thing it is designed to facilitate

This is yet an other example of “social software” that I have been talking about – of the movement from web based publication to web based collaboration.

NYT joins the blogsphere

December 11, 2005 by · 1 Comment · blogging, celebrity

The New York Times has finally got on the blog wagon. Deputy managing editor Jon Landman promised further blogs but noted that blogs “make some newspaper people nuts”:

In an memo to staff on Wednesday (first posted at LAObseved), Jon Landman, the paper’s deputy managing editor, promised a real estate blog by Damon Darlin in a few days and said more blogs were in the works. Even more “are at the idea stage,” he said. Noting that the paper has “come late to blogging” (trailing the Washington Post at a great distance, for example), he nevertheless declared, “Nothing is more important to the future of our web ambitions than to engage our sophisticated readers. Blogs are one way to do it.”

Still, he added, they “make some newspaper people nuts; they’re partisan, the thinking goes, and unfair and mean-spirited and sloppy about facts. Newspapers make some bloggers nuts; they think we’re dull and slow and pompous and jealous guardians of unearned ‘authority.’”

The new blog is Carpetbagger and it’s a temporary affair:

The Carpetbagger is a daily blog designed to run the length of the Oscar season. The gesture is one of a bulletin board about Oscar coverage and will not be in the handicapping business, in part because you would be well advised to listen closely to any of my predictions and then go the other way as fast as possible. (If no one knows anything in Hollywood, that must mean I know less.) The Academy Awards are preceded by a campaign that everyone pretends is not a campaign: screenings, mentions, and minor awards are all major elements of an ineffable process that can lead to over-the-top speeches and riches beyond imagination, or at least enough legs for robust DVD sales. The Carpetbagger is designed to examine those glitzy folkways as they unfurl, and to have some laughs along the way.

It seems pretty light and breezy but does manage a bit of investigation of its own from time to time. On Spielberg’s Munich exclusive with Time:

Pesky cynics have suggested that director Steven Spielberg granted Time the one and only interview in what has been a stealth campaign on behalf of the movie in return for cover placement and some editorial love. The Carpetbagger reached Time magazine managing editor Jim Kelly in Dubai – don’t ask; well okay, we sent him an email, but still – and he said it went like this: “I’d been hearing great buzz, but I hear great buzz about a lot of films. In this case, I had great interest in the topic, and was very curious how Spielberg would handle it,” he wrote. “We pushed to see it early, and the folks who saw it thought it was terrific, so I decided we should make it the cover.” The lavish licking of Mr. Spielberg’s legacy (alliteration is the crutch of the uninspired writer) could bring plenty of normal human beings in those middle places into the theater, but that is not what puts one’s grasping hands around the base of a golden artifact. However, many folks in the Academy in Los Angeles saw “Munich” this weekend at dedicated screenings, and there were second-hand reports of weeping, which is always a hopeful sign when it comes to statues.

Of course the problem with a mainstream newspaper blogger covering a topic like this is their willingness or ability to link to other mainstream competitors. I haven’t read it all but on a quick once over there are few links to TV show sites but I didn’t noticed any to the LA TImes or Washington Post! It’s early days.

Technorati Tags: blogging and journalism

Celebrity, Politics and Culture

December 9, 2005 by · Comments Off · celebrity, politics & pop culture

A couple of today’s stories feed into our next topic about news and popular culture.

First up are the reports that Mel Gibson may be the new favorite for replacing Arnie as governor of California. The Age reports that conservative Republicans are disappointed with Schwarzenegger’s move to the center and are hoping for a more gung-ho approach from Gibson. The story was sparked by the establishment of a Mel for Governor web site.

This is a made for media story: Terminator versus Mad Max. But there is probably not a lot to it with Gibson’s spokesperson pretty much dismissing the rumors. It does give way to this entertaining take in the LA Times:

I want ‘em both to run. I want a bruising Schwarzenegger versus Gibson primary. Even though I’m sick of Schwarzenegger’s script-twist speechifyings, how could I — how could anyone — resist the gladiatorial pas de deux of The Terminator versus The Patriot?

• Schwarzenegger wows Latino voters with his “Hasta la vista”; Gibson goes pre-Columbian — some lines in his new movie “Apocalypto” are in Mayan.

• No one chooses his father, but Schwarzenegger’s was a Nazi brownshirt, a storm trooper. Gibson’s is a renegade Catholic, part of a fringe splinter ideology that doesn’t believe the Holocaust happened and that no pope has been legally chosen in the last 40 years. And Gibson’s hugely successful “The Passion of the Christ” dipped into the old-time-religion poisoned well for its “Jews killed Christ” theology…

• When it comes to the death penalty, Schwarzenegger seems to be OK with lethal injection; I wonder whether Gibson would try to bring back the rack.

• Schwarzenegger has seven Mr. Olympia trophies. Gibson has two Oscars. Both are statues of naked guys, but Schwarzenegger’s are anatomically correct, and how.

• Schwarzenegger still owns Hummers, as far as I know; I saw “Road Warrior” — Gibson knows how to survive a gas crisis.

In other news a fascinating feature about the possibility of a Hillary versus Condi 2008 US Presidential race. This has been discussed before but is the subject of renewed speculation with the publication of a book on the subject by Dick Morris a former key Bill Clinton political adviser. One of the interesting aspects of the story is the way Hillary is deliberately building her presidential “brand”

Hillary Clinton has always wanted to be the first woman president of the US. Shortly after her husband’s election in 1992 the couple’s closest advisers discussed plans for her eventual succession after Bill’s second term. Things didn’t turn out quite that way, but her election to the Senate in 2000 gave her the national platform she needed to launch her new image – the “Hillary Brand” – and begin her long march back to the White House.

While this is another example of the clebrification of politics and the hyping of political news, the underlying possibilities of this story are wide reaching. If this race occurs, and it seems that it is becoming a more likely possibility, no matter who is the ultimate victor, the race itself would change the nature of American politics. The symbolic significance of two women – one of them black – running for the White House would shift the cultural center of politics. This is an example of how real issues of political importance – gender and diversity – can be negotiated even through a staged popular culture performance. We can’t just bemoan the lack of seriousness in current reporting, we have to also look at the new possibilities that are opened up by new styles of public culture.