September 10, 2009

Correcting the record on Katrina

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I’m a bit slow on the uptake this week: on Sunday, the New York Times Book Review corrected (scroll to the bottom) those factual errors in Timothy Egan’s review of “Zeitoun” by Dave Eggers. Instead of incorrectly stating the New Orleans levees were “overtopped,” the review now plainly says that the day after the storm hits, “the levees have failed.” Because of – I’ll say it one more time – the sloppy work of the Army Corps of Engineers.

It took a while, but the record has been set straight – at least in this little corner of the media universe. Props to Egan and his editors.

 

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?

 

August 16, 2009

The Katrina flood was a man-made disaster, part XXIII

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Today’s New York Times Book Review cover piece by Timothy Egan is on Dave Eggers’s new book Zeitoun, a nonfiction narrative of one family’s experience of Hurricane Katrina. So far so good. I haven’t read it yet, but the Eggers book sounds like a fantastic addition to the corpus of Katrina books.

But the review contains a couple of errors. It says the storm hit on Sunday, Aug. 28; actually it made landfall the morning of Aug. 29. Maybe this isn’t a mistake as such – the wind was already blowing pretty hard on Aug. 28. But the second error is significant: “Day 2, the world changes. Zeitoun wakes to a sea of water, after the levees have been overtopped. He’s neck-deep in a city of a thousand acts of desperation.”

As any New Orleans resident will tell you, the levees around central New Orleans, including the area where Zeitoun lives, were never overtopped. Rather, badly-designed floodwalls collapsed and breached in several places before Katrina’s storm surge got anywhere near the top. There was some overtopping in more-exposed areas to the east, but the vast majority of the flooding was caused by those breaches – in other words, human error by the Corps of Engineers.

This is not a minor semantic point. The responsibility for most of the damage to New Orleans and the awful events immediately following the storm lies with the Corps – that is, the federal government. This is not in dispute; three distinct investigations have laid the blame on the Corps, including the Corps’s own study. In any assessment of what happened – scientific, political, historical – this is crux of what went wrong, a terrible failure American know-how whose broader implications are alarming and remain mostly unexamined. New Orleanians and Louisiana politicians and media types do their best to remind the powers that be of these scandalous facts. Harry Shearer has been tireless in making this point. To his credit, Brad Pitt made it on Bill Maher’s HBO show Friday night.

But for some reason, this never quite sunk in with many in the media world, or for that matter the nation as a whole. The shorthand of “New Orleans levees overtopped” – with its underlying associations of “natural disaster swamps city below sea level – what the heck are those people doing living down there?” seems to have been dropped into the review without much thought. I’m assuming that Egan – whose work I like and respect – made the error and not Eggers; but even if it was Eggers, it was up to Egan and his editors not to repeat it in the NYT.

 

May 18, 2009

Say it ain’t so, MoDo

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Did Maureen Dowd commit a firing offense by, she says, inadvertently lifting a paragraph from Talking Points Memo? I don’t think so, but what happens hardly reflects well on Dowd or her column.

To recap: Dowd’s Sunday column on the debate over torture contained a paragraph taken nearly word-for-word from a post by Josh Marshall. When a TPMCafe blogger pointed this out, Dowd quickly admitted error and properly attributed the relevant paragraph. The Times ran a correction.

End of story? Surely that’s what the Times and Dowd want, and in all probability their quick response – far superior to the grudging, circle-the-wagons responses to similar problems in the past – will be effective.

But the response raised more questions than it answers. Critics are focusing on the fact of Marshall’s words showing up in Dowd’s column. But in some sense that’s irrelevant. If she had known that paragraph came from TPM, it’s unlikely she would have reprinted it without attribution. (On Imus today, Frank Rich cited this as a reason in her defense.)

But assuming her explanation is true, and she’s soliciting input from friends and cutting-and-pasting it into columns, that’s worse in some ways than cribbing from published work. It meets the dictionary definition of plagiarism: “a piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work.” It’s also lazy, shoddy journalism. And it’s virtually undetectable.

Last year Dowd got into hot water for not attributing the reporting work of her assistant. Sunday’s incident gives us an additional window on the slapdash way a MoDo column is assembled. Dowd could be using the vast resources and reach of the Times and her substantial writer’s gifts to produce a great column. That’s the whole idea, right? Instead, it’s like the faux-juice drinks your kids are drinking – perhaps 50% real Maureen Dowd, 50% other ingredients.

 

April 26, 2009

Enhanced, harsh, brutal

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The staff of the New York Times has done some great reporting on the Bush administration’s torture policies. But there is something absurd about the paper’s internal debate over how to describe what the U.S. did to Abu Zubaydah and other prisoners. Public editor Clark Hoyt recounts the discussions that led to the chosen word of the moment, “brutal”:

The word had appeared a few times before in this context, most recently on April 10, when the Central Intelligence Agency said it was closing the network of secret overseas prisons where interrogations took place. Scott Shane, who covers national security, said he and his editor in the Washington bureau, Douglas Jehl, negotiated over the wording of the first paragraph. Shane wrote that methods used in the prisons were “widely denounced as illegal torture.” Jehl changed that to the “harshest interrogation methods” since the Sept. 11 attacks. Shane said he felt that with more information coming to light, including a leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the words harsh and even harshest no longer sufficed. He proposed brutal, and Jehl agreed.

A week later, Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, came to her own conclusion that the facts supported a stronger word than harsh after she read just-released memos from the Bush-era Justice Department spelling out the interrogation methods in detail and declaring them legal. The memos were repudiated by President Obama.

“Harsh sounded like the way I talked to my kids when they were teenagers and told them I was going to take the car keys away,” said Abramson, who consulted with several legal experts and talked it over with Dean Baquet, the Washington bureau chief. Abramson and Baquet agreed that “brutal” was a better word.

These discussions presume there is a public debate over whether waterboarding is harsh or brutal or torture. But there isn’t a genuine debate at all: it’s obvious that it’s all of those things. The reason the wording is in dispute is classic Orwell: Dick Cheney and others claim that torture is useful in defending American interests and lives, but U.S. and international law ban torture. So the U.S. must torture but call it something else. So we don’t torture. By failing to call torture by its true name, the Times and other media outlets lend legitimacy to a rhetorical scam.

This is an interesting journalism question. A group of public officials – whose record of honesty and credibility on national security matters is already in considerable doubt – insists that torture is not torture but something else. Even if they’re sincere in their assertions that “enhanced interrogation” is key to defeating terrorism, self interest is also key motivation for this stance: they don’t want to be prosecuted for war crimes and don’t want their legacy tarnished. Yet the media establishment feels it must avoid weighing the context and motivations behind these improbable linguistic acrobatics, and so cannot make a rather straightforward judgment.

I can see the reasoning, and Hoyt spells it out: if you start calling torture torture, a lot of people will get mad at you and accuse you of liberal bias. You’re also strongly implying someone has committed a crime, which will stir up even more outrage and perhaps have legal implications. Still, I think these problems have to be weighed against a paper’s basic obligation to tell its readers the truth, and not filter information with euphemisms coined to obscure the truth. By dancing endlessly around the question of whether “brutal” = “torture,” media outlets are only damaging their own credibility.

 

March 19, 2009

All Kristol, all the time?

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Katha Pollitt is wrong-headed on the composition of the columnist lineup at the New York Times:

So who would I like to see in the Kristol slot? Actually, Kristol. I was livid when they gave him the job, but he was perfect: a dull, complacent apparatchik who set forth the Bush line in all its fact-free glory. His columns were like press releases–you could hardly remember them two minutes after reading them. But his presence on the page reminded readers that David Brooks is not really what Republicanism is all about. Frankly, though, I don’t see why there must be two conservatives on the page. Does the Wall Street Journal, the Times’s national competition, have two liberals? That the Times, the closest thing we have to a liberal paper, cedes so much turf to the opposition, as progressive bloggers applaud, shows the truth of Robert Frost’s quip that a liberal is someone so open-minded he won’t take his own side in an argument.

I agree with Pollitt that Ross Douthat has some eccentric positions, some of them based on faith at the expense of logic. But he’s about 100 times more interesting than Bill Kristol, and being interesting is what column writing is all about. And one virtue of liberalism – one that modern conservatism seems to have lost, to its detriment – is that it does hear and weigh what the other side is saying, and engage it, and sometimes borrow or co-opt it. You don’t win the argument by showcasing the other side’s stupidity (though it sometimes helps, obviously!). If the Times editorial page were to become like the Wall Street Journal’s (and, let’s face it, the masthead editorials themselves are already just as predictable) it wouldn’t help the cause of liberalism a whit. It would only confirm the lame-brained “fair and balanced” rationale behind Fox News and the Conservopedia, the notion that the only way to make sense of the world is to ideologically bifurcate it. Via The American Scene.

 

January 15, 2009

The media ecosphere & the government

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Once, the media could unilaterally shape the political debate – a legacy of the (short-lived) postwar political consensus and the media’s monolithic dominance of airwaves, newsprint, etc. Jay Rosen has mapped out the arbitrary ways this consensus-generating machine worked, and why it’s now breaking down:

Now we can see why blogging and the Net matter so greatly in political journalism. In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized— meaning they were connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. But today one of the biggest factors changing our world is the falling cost for like-minded people to locate each other, share information, trade impressions and realize their number. Among the first things they may do is establish that the “sphere of legitimate debate” as defined by journalists doesn’t match up with their own definition.

It’s good to have a million voices calling BS on big media’s persistent, strange, Reagan-era take on American politics. I wonder, though, what effects the combination of declining cultural relevance and the implosion of the media business will have on the relationship between media and government. One virtue of having big media institutions is that, sometimes, their clout and claim to represent a consensus view could be brought to bear on serious government transgressions – the classic examples being Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, and more recently, the New York Times’s exposure of the Bush warrantless eavesdropping program.

Obviously, you can’t turn back the clock. You can’t leverage authority that no longer exists. A new configuration of old/new media is still taking shape. So: will a vastly more diverse but also more diffuse media ecosystem still have the ability (via individual media outlet, or via a swarm) to bring pressure to bear on the upper levels of government?

 

January 8, 2009

New York Times as HuffPost

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Michael Hirschorn is getting hammered for his speculation in the Atlantic that the New York Times could be out of business in a few months. Obviously, that’s unlikely. But his overall thrust – that the Times print edition will likely fade away and be supplanted by something that resembles the Huffington Post, a combination of aggregator and original journalism – is probably correct. The Times is, of course, the best newspaper in America, and the breadth of what it covers is remarkable. But let’s face it, with the huge smorgasbord of news sources available online, it’s far less remarkable than it used to be. The basic function of the daily newspaper’s print edition – to tell you all you need to know about your community (or in the case of the NYT, the world) in a single package – is no longer essential. The NYT’s relative, walled isolation online (its initial stab at aggregating notwithstanding), modeled on the daily paper experience, isn’t adapted to the way people imbibe news today.

I don’t know that the NYT-as-HuffPost outcome – which includes a fraction of the original journalism the Times does today – is inevitable, though. The Times brand has power and in may be worth more online than we think.

The paper has managed to make its business model work up to now by turning itself into a tastemaker for the boho class, embedding serious journalism amid lots and lots of lifestyle sections. People still want to be told what to wear, what to eat, and where to vacation by an (allegedly) unimpeachable cultural authority. That’s one advantage that may translate to the web (provided its purveyors actually understand the web) even as tastes fragment and diversify.

 

December 22, 2008

Bush and the (housing) bubble

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Once again, the New York Times promises a bit more than it delivers with Sunday’s White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire. It is true that, as part of Karl Rove’s grand design to bring minority voters into the Republican fold, Bush promoted various questionable schemes to facilitate low-income homeownership. It’s also true, as the story spells out, that Bush did the finance industry plenty of favors, treated whistle-blowers capriciously, appointed incompetents to key positions, and (as many others did) ignored the potential dangers lurking in the mortgage markets.

But the headline implies some kind of grand unifying idea behind it all, and there just isn’t any. Making it easier for low-income earners to get mortgages isn’t a philosophy, it’s (in the absence of other meaningful economic policies aimed at this group) using government resources to buy political support. Doing favors for the big players in the financial system isn’t a philosophy either, it’s just patronage. Reading the article, you’re struck by just how incoherent the whole White House economic policy was; there was little guidance from the top (other than: do this group or that business a favor), and none from the Treasury Department (until Paulson arrived and demanded some authority as a condition for taking the job – and then he was slow to grasp how bad things had gotten). As a result, a lot of bad actors were free to do what they wanted; people with more responsible views were ignored.

The one time that ideology did determine decision-making it foreclosed the outcome that Bush wanted – the president opposed a viable House version of a Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac reform bill in favor of a tougher, less viable Senate version. It failed.

Again contra the headline, the article also makes clear that Bush’s “philosophy” didn’t cause our current predicament. The White House, like many other institutions, did contribute to the bubble mentality; but mainly, it sought to tap the housing market bubble for its own purposes.

 

November 30, 2008

The New York Times vs. Barry McCaffrey

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Perhaps I’ve been in Washington too long, but I thought that David Barstow’s Sunday New York Times investigation of Barry McCaffrey’s one-man “military-industrial-media complex” didn’t offer much in the way of scandal. Oh, it’s a fascinating read, an exploration of an influential subculture of retired military men who leverage their Pentagon connections with media exposure and lucrative defense consulting. It’s a follow-up to the excellent investigation earlier this year that showed how the Pentagon had incorporated these guys into a sophisticated messaging effort on the Iraq war. The earlier piece had some problems, but it laid out the TV networks’ complicity in – and willful blindness toward – an egregious government propaganda program.

When the New York Times pulls the trigger on something like this, we expect journalistic shock and awe, and the piece promises to take us through “a deeply opaque world, a place of privileged access to senior government officials, where war commentary can fit hand in glove with undisclosed commercial interests and network executives are sometimes oblivious to possible conflicts of interest.”

But the reality is mundane: McCaffrey appears frequently on TV as a supposedly unbiased commentator on military affairs; he has close ties to various Defense Department officials, who seek to influence what he says on TV; he makes a lot of money from military contractors, who prize his influence with DOD. These kinds of relationships are unsurprising; this is the way Washington works. People have experience, expertise and connections, and if they can, they turn themselves into consultants and TV “analysts” or “strategists” and use the exposure to sell their experience, expertise and connections. Moreover, the piece offers no smoking gun, no clear ethical transgression. It notes McCaffrey sometimes followed the Pentagon line. Except when he didn’t. It says he advocated policies on TV that benefited his clients – but policies that benefit a few contractors no doubt benefited hundreds of others too.

It all sounds a bit unsavory. But the Times is unable to put its finger on exactly why, or what should be done about it, if anything.

The piece seems to want to hang its outrage factor on NBC’s failure to disclose McCaffrey’s corporate connections to viewers. NBC should do so, and its blithe denials are laughable. But this is pretty weak tea: some of the statements of a blustery TV talking head should not be taken at face value. Network news is not the pristine redoubt of journalistic values it pretends to be. Great Caesar’s Ghost!

 

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