June 25, 2010

Bring me the head of David Weigel

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At first, I couldn’t quite understand why David Weigel, the Washington Post politics blogger who just resigned, would merit his own feeding frenzy. He’s not Helen Thomas: he hasn’t been around for 60-plus years, nor does he have a front-row seat in the White House briefing room, nor has he uttered on-camera statements that many people consider offensive or outside the bounds of political discourse.

Instead, one of his offenses was … dancing, maybe a little strangely, at a wedding. This was truly a feeding frenzy worthy of a Seinfeld episode.

Seriously, Weigel is a talented journalist who added a fresh perspective to the Washington Post. He should not have been booted out for what he did. Why was he? The Weigel Incident does illustrate some of the biggest fault lines and flaws of Washington journalism. Here are a few: (more…)

 

December 21, 2009

Has Matt Taibbi failed journalism, or has journalism failed Matt Taibbi?

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Goldman Sachs Capital Partners

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I’m late to this, but it’s not going away, so here’s my question: Is Matt Taibbi merely a journalistic scourge, or also a scourge on journalism itself? The question isn’t just about Taibbi, but about the state of journalism and America right now, post-bubble, post Iraq war, post-Bush.

You probably know the background: Taibbi has written a couple of searing cover stories for Rolling Stone on the financial shenanigans of Goldman Sachs over the past century and on the Obama administration’s close ties to Goldman and Wall Street and its halting attempts to reform the banking system.

These pieces are, unlike most stories that contain the word “Geithner,” actually fun to read and make a simple and compelling point: historically, and now, there is a tight nexus between the elite banks and uppermost reaches of the federal government – whether it’s run by Republicans or Democrats. This has proven to be catastrophic. Its persistence after the disaster of 2008 is a significant structural problem for the American economy – and, by extension, the global economy. Obama’s diffidence on the matter is one of the great mysteries of his presidency, given the both the substantive problem and the political advantages to taking on the bankers, which would theoretically appeal both to liberals and the tea party crowd.

Taibbi indicts not just Goldman, but the system. And that system is, well, highly indictable. But on the way, he overreaches. He imbues his villains with more agency than they deserve. He makes mistakes. (more…)

 

October 9, 2009

The era of objectivity is over

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The ongoing debate about journalism, bias and objectivity erupted recently with the Washington Post’s release of new rules for social media. The rules themselves were mostly commonsensical, but the way they were written and promulgated suggested that Washington Post journalists employ social media such as Twitter and Facebook at their own peril – exactly the wrong message to be sending. If I were employed by the Post, how could I possibly be reassured by the prospect of “many, many discussions” with top editors about what I could and couldn’t say?

“Neutrality” of the kind sought by traditional media outlets such as the Post is supposed to emulate the scientific method – a cool elucidation of facts from a messy reality.

Here’s how the “neutral” stance theoretically works: There’s a political process between competing interests in society; journalists play an important role in that by explaining what’s happening, exposing wrongdoing, hypocrisy, etc.  So far so good. The foundation of this approach is the civics-book idea that on some level, we’ll remember that we’re all in this crazy democratic experiment together, we share the same values, and thus will look for honest brokers – journalists – to help us understand what’s happening.

But it’s been clear for a while that this goal is illusory. The era of the media-as-honest broker is over. The Washington Post and other establishment organs just haven’t realized it yet.

To be an honest broker, people must view you as trustworthy. But the traditional media long ago lost the trust of large swaths of the public. Why? Well, that’s a whole Ph.D. thesis. But look at some of the events of the past 40 years – Watergate, Vietnam, 9/11, Katrina. Political institutions lost public trust. The media were and are part of the political ecosystem and played a role in that loss. They enabled massive screwups and trafficked in cynicism (see the runup to the Iraq war and all political coverage from 1988 on). Moreover, Tom Edsall argues in CJR that the increasingly educated and liberal demographics of media employees skewed coverage away from, and at times against, the concerns of conservative, working class Americans. And Steve Buttry writes about how the elevation of neutrality came at the expense of other important journalistic values.

Unlike the political system, which kicks people and parties out of office from time to time, the media didn’t self-correct. It doubled down on neutrality – not just as a journalism methodology but as a cocoon: we stand outside and above what’s going on, and thus don’t have to seriously examine our role in it.

Without trust, an honest broker is just a broker, with no privileged claim on the truth.

But this is actually a good thing. It means you have to compete in a vast, ever-growing marketplace with a lot of other “truths” – some of them lies. Contending in that marketplace is one of the basic functions of journalism. If media outlets insist on trying to be neutral arbiters between political interests – without examining who and what those interests represent or if their arguments are credible – they’ll continue to inch toward irrelevance.

But what does a post-neutral world look like? Edsall’s solution – “We’re liberal – but objective!” – doesn’t sound promising. Nor do I buy the “slippery slope” argument: that all journalists end up wearing their opinions on their sleeves, that their work devolves into advocacy, that we all end up screaming at each other (that is, more than we do already).

There is room for all kinds of journalism. Talking Points Memo seems to do well enough combining smart reporting with a liberal perspective. That said, I don’t think the Washington Post or New York Times should become TPM – or, to cite a more apt example, the Guardian. Such an abrupt change would be jarring and out of character.

Rather, it would help simply to back off and see what happens. You know, evolve. Stop loudly proclaiming and enforcing neutrality and let the work speak for itself. Allow more, not less, flexibility in how journalists can express themselves. As a journalist, I don’t think my opinions about political issues are particularly interesting – unless I have knowledge or have done research about a topic and actually have something material to say about it. In that case, being able to comment on it and engage the public makes for better journalism. And good journalism that asks and answers important questions should be able to withstand partisan or ideological criticism.

 

September 9, 2009

Why is the NYT trying to out an anonymous blogger?

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Yesterday’s now-disappeared New York Times Media Decoder blog post outing the wrong person as the writer of the NYT Picker blog “raises questions,” as the NYT itself might say.

The NYT Picker covers the New York Times, making ample use of sources on the inside. It’s interesting and entertaining. No doubt many at the NYT would love to know who’s behind it. But except as the topic of a New York media gossip parlor game, we don’t need to know, and we probably benefit more from not knowing. Attempting to out the author(s) serves no journalistic purpose.

In the blogosphere, you don’t out an anonyous blogger just because you don’t like him. In June, NRO’s Ed Whelan outed Publius, who blogs on Obsidian Wings, because of a heated ideological disagreement over the Supreme Court. He thought better of it and apologized. The NYT’s Opinionator blog handily summarized what happened and explored the issues of anonymous and pseudonymous blogging. Personally, I prefer transparency wherever possible. But bloggers can have many reasons to shield their identities – personal, professional. If the blogging itself is good, and anonymity not used as a vehicle for scurrilous attacks, clearly the benefits outweigh the costs.

Is it now NYT policy that if you’re blogging anonymously, it’s fair game for Times journalists to try to ferret out your identity? There’s apparently not much sympathy for anonymity in the NYT ranks. Randy Cohen, the Times’s “Ethicist” writer, recently argued that the online environment has become so toxic that anonymity should be discouraged. And referencing the NYT Picker issue, Times social media chief Jen Preston tweeted that “Reporters embarrassed by their work remove their bylines and hide: cowards.”

The NYT owes us an explanation of what happened here (the Media Decoder’s flippant response – “What will NYTPick.com say about using anonymous sources to out anonymous bloggers? We may find out” – won’t cut it). Especially: is outing anonymous bloggers a legitimate journalistic pursuit, and if so, why?

 

June 4, 2009

On newspapers and paywalls

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The other day, I got into a discussion on Facebook over whether newspapers should charge for content on the web. My interlocutors were newspaper types, and they were enthusiastic about charging. To them, it was self-evident that if newspapers spent money generating valuable and socially relevant content, readers (and Google, and aggregators such as the Huffington Post) ought to pony up. Speaking from personal interest, I disagree. As a journalist I want to maximize the number of eyes on, and discussion of, my work. Put a paywall around it and you can pretty much say goodbye to those goals. No chance of “going viral.” As Gawker’s Nick Denton said the other day, “We are egomaniacs. We like to get out in the public eye.” So I found it kind of odd that newspaper journalists seemed so intent on making people pay – setting aside the question of what business model might work, if you’re a reporter, what difference does it make to you if your work is subsidized by advertising or a paywall?

Then I read the American Press Institute‘s Newspaper Economic Action Plan. It’s the same point of view I ran into on Facebook, only systematized and turned into a business strategy. The problem with this “we produce something of value and should be paid for it” attitude, though, is that it is just an attitude, one shaped by a sense of grievance and a gut feeling about what is – must be – right and just. This is a terrible way to formulate any kind of complex strategy – George W. Bush made decisions the same way. In this case, the API ignores the real world conditions of journalism, the Internet and e-commerce. Thus this strategy, if pursued, is unlikely to turn out well. I’m a former newspaper reporter – I want newspapers & journalism to survive and thrive. And I’m not against charging for some content if it’s done right. But even I can see this is crazy.

Start with the API’s first recommendation: “Establish a true value for news content online by charging for it.” This is a strange formulation. In a market, prices are set by supply and demand, not dictated by producers. The declaration has an anachronistic, command-and-control, almost Marxist feel to it: we control the means of production, we will set the prices. It assumes a kind of monopolistic position that newspapers no longer hold, as much as they might want to. If your starting point is the assumption your product has “value,” you’d be wise to take a hard look at exactly what that value is on the open market. But the API evidently has not conducted that kind of clear-eyed self-assessment. It sees the economic value of newspaper content as self-evident, of a piece with its perceived social value, and something that must be preserved first, improved upon later.

But the truth is that newspaper journalism has a relatively low market value and its social relevance is in decline. It’s still important – we need eyes on government at all levels, investigations, a space for local and national community discussions to play out. But the form of the newspaper story is stale, and the package it comes in – the selection of the day’s news, calendar, arts, classifieds, etc. – is something many people no longer really need because they can get most of it elsewhere. Meanwhile the relative social importance of newspaper stories – as a forum for political debates, say – has also declined due to ever-fragmenting attention, competition, and a loss of credibility that’s partly self-inflicted.

The API’s answer to this is to double down on existing, loyal newspaper fans: “The real value to newspapers comes from serving … ‘core loyalists,’ the group of heavy users who visit a news site about 18 days a month, two to three times a day. They contribute 85 percent of the page views and user sessions.” But surely this base is already in decline, unlikely to replaced by younger readers.

These problems are severe. The obvious solution to them is to make a better product – leverage the advantages you have, innovate, create something people really want, and thus make yourself important again – and figure out how to sell it. The marketplace of the open web is the ideal forum to test this out. (I acknowledge that many or most such tests will result in failure.) The API report makes some gestures toward innovation – but only after enumerating ways to monetize content. Its basic approach is, we’ve already got a golden goose here, people are stealing our eggs, and we want them back.

That’s the other principal problem – the report urges a crackdown on the cribbing of content by Google, aggregators and others: they should pay or cease and desist. There is plenty of abuse of “fair use,” and original content is endlessly atomized. Perhaps there are ways to police the egregious cases better and/or generate revenue from “republishing” if all are amenable. But is this really a wise foundation for a future-of-newspapers strategy? Here’s how the report envisions the politics:

Many citizens and policy makers regard newspapers as an essential part of the American democracy as evidenced by a recent congressional hearing and a spate of conferences. The sustainability of journalism is important to Americans, and thus, there is a public imperative to ensure, and monetize, the survival of professional news organizations in some form.

You can read this two ways. Either the newspaper industry has civic obligation to charge for content, or society itself must recognize the importance of newspaper content and compel politicians to protect it. The first idea is tendentious, the second naive. The public isn’t particularly sympathetic to tougher copyright enforcement. The lobbying clout of newspaper publishers and media companies is declining with their corporate valuations. Google has lots of money to spend on its own lobbyists. And the current copyright regime is outdated. When it’s reformed, who knows what will happen?

It’s not like the API report contains no good ideas. No doubt there are ways to charge for premium content as it suggests, for example. But your average small or medium-sized paper doesn’t have much (or any) of that, nor does the API give any examples of it. And if your strategy is shaped by an inflexible set of beliefs and an attitude of entitlement, it’s not a recipe for innovation or success. After reading this, I’m more pessimistic than ever about the future of newspapers.

 

May 12, 2009

The Philadelphia Inquirer and John Yoo

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The Philadelphia Inquirer’s decision to give a monthly column to John Yoo – author of several “torture memos” offering legal rationales for the Bush administration’s abusive interrogations – is (pick your term): Tone-deaf? Crazy? Morally dubious? Newspapers have made a lot of questionable decisions in recent years, some perhaps unavoidable, some true whoppers. But this is just flat-out wrong.

Many newspapers and other traditional media outlets, fearful of the “liberal bias” charge and watching their audience disappear, have spent the past decade trying to build their credibility with conservatives. There’s nothing wrong with that per se –  they are run mostly by liberals, and we need conservative voices in the political debate. But those efforts went awry during the Bush administration. Confronted by an White House that was wildly overreaching on presidential power, surveillance, torture and the politicization of basic governance, most media lost their bearings. They treated these things as normal, if controversial, activities of government.

Fortunately, the political system self-corrected. But the media’s problems remain. Here is part of of editorial page editor Harold Jackson’s explanation for Yoo’s hiring:

He’s a Philadelphian, and very knowledgeable about the legal subjects he discusses in his commentaries. Our readers have been able to get directly from Mr. Yoo his thoughts on a number of subjects concerning law and the courts, including measures taken by the White House post-9/11. That has promoted further discourse, which is the objective of newspaper commentary.

But other providing a valuable forum for self-justification, I don’t understand what the op-ed page gains with Yoo. There are plenty of talented conservative writers out there. Yoo’s debut column is undistinguished conservative boilerplate.

The only reason Yoo is prominent enough to write a column in the Inquirer is because of his work in the White House Office of Legal Counsel. Hiring him is thus is an implicit endorsement of the legitimacy the legal opinions he crafted there. But those opinions are legally suspect and morally repugnant. Yoo is an advocate of a questionable legal theory of nearly unlimited presidential power, and his memos were instrumental in providing legal cover for techniques that were, by any commonsense interpretation of the word, torture.

Yoo might be a war criminal. At the very least, Inquirer editors should engage that issue directly. Simply hiring him says: we don’t think so. This is an assent to the dangerous notion that if the U.S. government did it, no matter how reprehensible it might be, it must have some legitimacy. That’s sad – and not part of the American journalistic tradition I know.

Update: Wednesday’s New York Times story on this quotes Harold Jackson confirming that Yoo’s hiring was indeed an attempt to address the liberal bias perception: “‘There was a conscious effort on our part to counter some of the criticism of The Inquirer as being a knee-jerk liberal publication,’ Mr. Jackson said. ‘We made a conscious effort to add some conservative voices to our mix.’”

 

April 29, 2009

100 news cycles later

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During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama made clear his distaste of the news cycle and its trivial obsessions. Skeptics said this would hurt his chances: that to win, a candidate must dominate the news day-by-day, minute-by-minute, with attacks that keep the opposition off-balance. Yet the Obama campaign managed to win by emphasizing a longer-term strategy over the hair-trigger approach.

But on Jan. 20, for all intents and purposes President Obama became the news cycle. His ambitions for toning down Washington’s nasty partisan warfare – and with that, creating better prospects for his agenda – depend on his ability to nudge the news cycle away from the cable network- and Drudge-driven obsession with transient panics and cultural outrages. (An obsession that the Bush administration, with its focus on divisive electoral politics, actively cultivated.) On that front, he’s been only partially successful so far. But far more so than most of us would have thought going in.

The media love nothing more than scandal, failure and disaster. But so far Obama has declined to provide them. The White House’s frenzy of activity during the first 100 days – much of it politically and substantively successful, with the opposition in disarray – more or less requires that news about him focus on relaying facts. It’s hard to stick with “who’s up, who’s down” when there’s only one player on the field.

And as Dan Kennedy notes, Obama has been a boon to the media business. It’s more fun and better for ratings to cover a glamorous new president than an unpopular old one. The camera loves Obama, his family, even his dog. His professorial cool is a stark contrast to the at-sea press conference performances of his predecessor. We’re also facing various alarming crises, so for various reasons – information, reassurance – people want to hear what Obama has to say: his prime time press conferences draw an impressive number of viewers. Robert Gibbs’s White House press office, meanwhile, has been strategically smart. It has sat Obama down with conservative and liberal columnists and bloggers, and had the president give non-traditional media (including the Huffington Post) a turn at press conferences. Not surprisingly, these are explicit choices to bypass the insular White House press corps in the shaping of public opinion.

Obama has lagged on the transparency front — the creation of a friendly interface that will allow journalists, bloggers – and everyone else – full access to information and data from the White House and rest of the government.. But the technical obstacles are formidable, so this will take time.

Where is all this going? We probably won’t know until Obama makes his first big stumble and has to fend off the wolves. But a Lewinksy or Rovian gambit seems unlikely from this White House, so that’s progress in itself.

 

March 16, 2009

The revolution is real

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Printing press ca. 1811

Printing press ca. 1811

Human beings are afflicted with a certain bias about the world: we don’t expect it to change, at least not radically. When things are going well, this bias is amplified. Blessed with prosperity and stability in America over the past couple of generations, we’ve trained ourselves to expect a certain level of technological progress. We expect that living standards will gradually rise over time. We don’t expect revolutions. (And even when they occur in the political world, things often settle back down to a semblance of how they were before. Meet the new boss, et al.)

But complete revolutionary transformations do occur with some regularity in history. And when they do, we’re gobsmacked.

Old structures – the way people organize their lives – are swept away. Something very different emerges and consolidates over decades or centuries. Think: the invention of agriculture. The Industrial Revolution. The printing press. It’s this final example that Clay Shirky focuses on in this cogent essay. The invention of the printing press and the emergence of printed books altered reading habits, literacy, politics, religion, the whole shape of society. They were used to things being one way. That way was dissolving around them. The “new way” had not yet taken shape. So people couldn’t really comprehend what was going on:

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

Indeed, “what’s the new business model for news?” is almost always a conversation stopper, not a starter. It’s usually meant as a bitter rejoinder from old-school journalists to innovators and dreamers touting unproven, and probably not profitable, news technologies. But let’s face it: “unproven and probably not profitable” is far better than “disastrously unworkable,” which is the state of the newspaper model today. As Shirky notes, nobody knows what’s going to “work” ultimately. We are not going to “replace newspapers.” Instead, we’re going to keep doing journalism using the increasingly powerful, proliferating tools at our disposal and see what happens. That’s all we can do. And we live in a vital, freewheeling democracy. Something will happen.

I also like the ecosystem metaphor Steven Johnson employs in this SXSW speech (indeed, I’ve used something similar myself). Newspapers used to be culturally important because they filled an information void. Now that void has been filled to overflowing. It is true that traditional, dead-tree investigative and foreign reporting are both needed and uniquely difficult to replace. But nothing so far has stopped the relentless effusion of rich content in (as Johnson notes) technology and politics. That trend is likely to spread and unlikely to simply, or ever, stop.

 

January 23, 2009

Managing the media

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Kevin Drum responds to my previous post with an interesting suggestion for President Obama:

So how does he work to change things? McQuaid warns that tightly controlling media access the way George Bush did isn’t the answer, and I agree. Instead, I’d say that he should send a consistent message about the value of serious journalism by providing the best access to the most serious journalists. Not the ones who are the most famous, or have the biggest audiences, or who agree with him the most often, but the ones who have written or aired the sharpest, liveliest, most substantive, most penetrating critiques of what he and his administration are doing. He should spar with them, he should engage with them, he should take their ideas seriously. Eventually, others will start to get the message: if you want to get presidential attention, you need to say something smart. It’s too late to for this to have any effect on media buffoons like Maureen Dowd or Chris Matthews, but you never know. It might encourage a few of the others to grow up. It’s worth a try, anyway.

I’d love to see Obama set up regular bull sessions with insightful journalists. It would offer a window on his thinking and also just be interesting and fun to watch. But since the problem exists in the broader media culture, not just Washington salons, this probably wouldn’t help all that much.

But two things offer hope on this front. First, the country faces grave crises, so serious news tends to crowd out trivial, character-driven stories. If Tim Geithner had been nominated during the Clinton administration, he likely would not have survived TurboTaxgate. (How many attorney general nominees did Clinton go through before settling on scandal-free Janet Reno?) But because we need competent, skilled leadership to forestall a second Great Depression, Geithner’s confirmation has never been in doubt. Of course, we have always needed competent, skilled leadership; too bad it takes terrible news to keep the psuedo-scandals at bay.

Second, Obama himself is good at breaking the rhythm of a feeding frenzy, either by starving it or by reframing the entire discussion. Last spring, for example, as damaging revelations about Rev. Jeremiah Wright poured forth, talking heads were urging Obama to publicly repudiate his former pastor — to take part in a crass, familiar ritual to appease and silence the media gods. He rejected that premise and instead gave his excellent speech on race, which both gobsmacked and impressed the establishment media.

The White House press corps is not going to stop asking gotcha questions. Talking heads are going to keep spouting speculative nonsense. But between the doom and gloom, major structural changes in government and a president who will occasionally talk substance, the media may be forced to set aside some of its trivial obsessions.

 

January 22, 2009

Obama and the media

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Barack Obama deserves kudos for his newly-announced policies on the Freedom of Information Act and other transparency-related issues. Of course, it will take some time for presidential directives to work their way down through the vast government bureaucracy, where they will encounter resistance due to habit, laziness, and limited resources. But Obama has clearly broken with the past — in the only way that makes any sense in the information age. The question now is: what are we, the people, going to do with all this information our government is making available?

But it’s interesting that, at least on the surface, Obama’s approach to the establishment media – the TV and radio networks, wire services, newspapers and magazines that still cover the White House – doesn’t differ all that much from George W. Bush’s. As in, their correspondents are not getting much access. They are tightly managed. The White House press office doesn’t say very much, and what it says isn’t very revealing. What’s more, it’s signaling that past press rituals will not necessarily be observed. The Obama team declined to give the New York Times a pre-inauguration interview. Yesterday, the White House didn’t even let press photographers in to get some shots of Obama working in the Oval Office, provoking an AP announcement that it would not distribute what amounted to “visual press releases.”

Bush and Cheney viewed themselves in a manichean struggle with the forces arrayed against them, a list that includes not jihadists but the federal bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, reality itself! — and the media. As Jay Rosen has pointed out, they attempted to “de-certify” the media by strangling its access to information and using a variety of alternative, propagandistic avenues to get its message across. This proved disastrous.

Like Bush, Obama appears to view the media agenda in fundamental conflict with his own. But now, the perceived difference isn’t ideological. It’s programmatic. Obama (correctly, I think) sees the press representing two things that are clear obstacles to his ambitious plans: official Washington and a trivia-obsessed media culture.

First, the official Washington view: There’s a certain, Broderesque way of doing things. Be centrist, bipartisan – especially if you’re a Democratic president. Listen to the conservative talking heads who dominate Sunday talk shows, who will advise you to be … conservative. This world, shaped by the rise of conservative media since the Reagan era, remains several steps behind where the country is, or is ready to be, on politics and policy.

Second, the media culture: The cable maw must be fed with transient panics. Feeding frenzies and micro-scandals dominate. They fuel the chat shows, opinion columns and blogs. These faux crises and dramas, which usually pass with little consequence, can knock a presidential agenda off-stride or even destroy it.

These phenomena reflect the growing insularity of the establishment press over the past generation. They are obstacles both to good journalism and to the kind of bold political reforms Obama is pursuing.  He is right to be wary of them. But this doesn’t diminish the importance of openness. As a journalist and a citizen, I’d like to see more give-and-take between reporters and the president – and I expect we will see that. And I want insights on what’s happening in the West Wing and OEOB from experienced journalists. What we ultimately get depends not just on Obama’s willingness to engage, but on the media’s ability to break free of its own outmoded habits and prejudices.

 

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