backfire

In the wake of last weekend's negative campaign blitz by the McCain Palin campaign, we had a few class discussions -- roughly linked to posts on fairness and objectivity -- regarding how reporters should cover speeches of the "pallin' around with terrorists" variety.

Or if they should cover them at all.

The ultimate conclusion by both introductory and advanced j. students was that, yes, such stump speeches should be covered, no matter how hate-filled, not necessarily for what they reveal about the opponent but for what they reveal about the candidate him/herself. In other words, my students were smart enough to suspect over a week ago that the McCain-Palin attack tactics were likely to backfire.

The latest New York Times/CBS poll found that the kids were all right. The poll found that, among probably voters, Obama held a 14 point lead over McCain, 53 - 39. Among those voters who had changed their opinions, the Times writes:

"Voters who said their opinions of Mr. Obama had changed recently were twice as likely to say they had grown more favorable as to say they had worsened. And voters who said that their views of Mr. McCain had changed were three times more likely to say that they had worsened than to say they had improved.

"The top reasons cited by those who said they thought less of Mr. McCain were his recent attacks and his choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate. (The vast majority said their opinions of Mr. Obama of Illinois, the Democratic nominee, and Mr. McCain of Arizona, the Republican nominee, had remained unchanged in recent weeks.) But in recent days, Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin have scaled back their attacks on Mr. Obama, although Mr. McCain suggested he might aggressively take on Mr. Obama in Wednesday’s debate."

trash posting

Now back to uncharted territory.

Today in class Keegan brought up a microdiscussion about Juicy Campus*, a website that allows anonymous posters to talk trash about their friends, their classmates, their teachers online. One aspect of the discussion involved whether or not the posts on this gossip site constitute speech protected by the first amendment.

But even if the posts weren't protected, who could you sue? Further: Who can be called to task when an anonymous source libels someone online? And for that reason, what constitutes libel online? Does the First Amendments offer blogs the same protection as, say, The New York Times? Should it?

We've addressed these issues previously, here and here, among other places. But more to the case at hand, the following article from CNN might provide if not an answer, at least food for thought. Among other things, the piece reports:

"Juicy Campus and similar Web sites are protected under Communications Decency Act of 1996. The Act aims to shield Web publishers from liability for libelous comments posted by third parties. The section states "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

* the lack of a link to juicy campus is wholly intentional on my part.

kudos

We knew them when.

Jeremy Herb reports that Jack Gillum, former EIC of The Santa Clara and on his way to a new gig at USA Today, won this award for "excellence in news" for a data-driven investigative series on social promotion in schools.

And Jeremy, also a former EIC of The Santa Clara and now a j-student at Columbia, just found out that an investigative series on clergy child sex abuse in the Diocese of Oakland that he worked on for the Fremont Argus last year won this award for public service from the APME. Read the first part of the series here.

Congrats, guys! bk

no news is...

... no newspapers?

Bloomberg (thanks, Kristin) reports today that a number of daily newspapers are cutting their Monday editions in an attempt to economize. Why Mondays?

The main reason is that it's a slow day for advertising, which is why Monday papers are so thin. But could another reason relate to that much-maligned, somewhat tongue-in-cheek definition: news is what newsmakers say it is?

On Sundays, they rest. bk

on balance

My friend Max forwarded a link to a recent speech by John Walcott, Washington bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers, upon his acceptance of the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence from Bob Giles of the Nieman Foundation.

Walcott, then Knight Ridder Washington bureau chief, was the leader of a team of reporters who were among the few to actively question the run-up to the Iraq war. He was honored for his role in questioning the administration and investigating a story that went counter to almost everything in the mainstream media at the time. (Knight Ridder was bought by McClatchy Newspapers in 2006)

You can read the whole speech here. Here's what he had to say about "balance" as a substitute for true objectivity:

That brings me to my last point: Relying on The Times, or McClatchy or any other news source, for all the truth is dumb, but it's infinitely preferable to the pernicious philosophical notions that there is no such thing as truth, that truth is relative, or that, as some journalists seem to believe, it can be found midway between the two opposing poles of any argument.

My father, who's with us today, made his living designing navigational instruments for aircraft, missiles and submarines, and although my mathematical and engineering skills are, shall we say, less evident than his, I learned two important lessons from his work.

The first is that if you want to know where you are, it's helpful to know where you started. The second is a concept that's called "ground truth," which in a nutshell means checking your calculations against information collected on the ground. In other words, reporting.

I know that I'm wading into deep and muddy water here, but I'm doing so in deference, or rather, in reverence, to the fact that I.F. Stone was a scholar as well as a journalist. He taught himself ancient Greek to write about the trial of Socrates, and I still struggle with modern French, but I'll wade in nevertheless.

Does the truth lie halfway between say, slavery and abolition, or between segregation and civil rights, or between communism and democracy? If you quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Winston Churchill, in other words, must you then give equal time and credence to Hitler and Joseph Goebbels? If you write an article that's critical of John McCain, are you then obligated to devote an identical number of words to criticism of Barack Obama, and vice versa?

The idea that truth is merely a social construct, that it's subjective, in other words, first appeared in academia as a corruption of post-modernism, but it’s taken root in our culture without our really realizing it or understanding its implications.

It began with liberal academics arguing, for example, that some Southwestern Indians' belief that humans are descended from a subterranean world of supernatural spirits is, as one archaeologist put it, "just as valid as archaeology." As NYU philosophy professor Paul Boghossian puts it in a wonderful little book, "Fear of Knowledge": " ... the idea that there are many equally valid ways of knowing the world, with science being just one of them, has taken very deep root."

Although this kind of thinking, relativism and constructivism, started on the left, many conservatives now feel empowered by it, too, and some of them have embraced it with a vengeance on issues ranging from global warming and evolution to the war in Iraq.

"Journalists live in the reality-based world," a White House official told Ron Suskind, writing for The New York Times Magazine back in the headier days of 2004. "The world doesn't really work that way any more. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

I respectfully disagree.

The Church was wrong, and Copernicus and Galileo were right.

There is not one truth for Fox News and another for The Nation. Fair is not always balanced, and balanced is not always fair.

No matter how devoutly they may have believed their own propaganda, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were wrong about Enron, and a whole lot of very smart, very rich people were very wrong about mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps.

President Bush was wrong to think that it would be a simple matter to make Iraq the mother of all Mideast democracy.

Or, as the French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau said when he was asked what he thought historians might say about the First World War: "They will not say that Belgium invaded Germany."

I'm not talking here about matters of taste or of partisan politics or, heaven help us, of faith: Whether Monet or Manet was a better painter or whether Jesus was the Messiah, a prophet or a fraud. Those are personal matters, beliefs, opinions and preferences of which we all must learn to be more tolerant.

Harry G. Frankfurt, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Princeton, puts it this way in a marvelous little book called, "On Truth" (which is the sequel to "On Bullshit"): "It seems ever more clear to me that higher levels of civilization must depend even more heavily on a conscientious respect for the importance of honesty and clarity in reporting the facts, and on a stubborn concern for accuracy in determining what the facts are."

That is what I.F. Stone always sought to do, and I think it's what journalists should always strive to do. If, in the short run, doing so seems costly, I think we've all seen, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and now on Wall Street and on Main Street, that the costs of not doing so are far greater.

Photo credit: Michael Temchine / Nieman Foundation

res ipsa loquitur

Mail Goggles: You may not be able to stop yourself from drunk dialing, but this little widget could stop you from drunk emailing.

Seriously.

Yeah, I know. Nothing to do with journalism. But. The thing speaks for itself. Which by the way, is what the title up there means. (For those of you who have been reading it on the mag class syllabus and never did figure it out.) Cheers. bk

onto fairness

There's an old saying in journalism: if you use half the information you've gathered in your finished piece, you haven't done nearly enough reporting.

All of which brings up the issue of selectivity. How do you select what you leave in and what gets left in the deep recesses of your hard drive? That's the kind of question that keeps reporters up at night. Or should. It's a big issue -- whether you're thinking column inches or the short attention spans of online readers. Given the limits of time and space, how do you make sure you are playing fair, giving the readers an adequate representation of the facts at hand?

If you read my post on objectivity yesterday, you can guess where I'm going with this. Sarah Palin was on a money-raising tour of the San Francisco Bay Area yesterday, where her "palling around with terrorists" (actually she changed the plural to singular) has become her new stump speech.

Her speech was covered by both the San Jose Mercury and the San Francisco Chronicle. Good pieces that covered what she said, within the context of what such attacks mean for the campaign. Both included responses from the Obama campaign as well. Balance, right?

But what struck me is what the reporters who covered the speech (or their copy editors) left out. Namely that Bill Ayers, the domestic terrorist to whom Palin refers, is a Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He and Barrack Obama met while working on a project that was a part of a national school reform effort financed by Walter H. Annenberg, the publisher and philanthropist and President Richard M. Nixon’s ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Seems to me, that little add should be included as well for the folks who read what Palin says, but never go any further than that.

Just to be fair. bk

more quick linx

My post on spin-spotter a couple weeks ago spurred Jeremy Herb to give the app a whirl. At best, sub-par. Read what he found out here.

Another former capstoner, Matt Rankin, just forwarded the following link from HuffPo on the role of blogging in a democracy. The post features four spirited speeches delivered by students in the Yale Political Union in a debate on whether blogs help or hinder.

Go here for the latest issue of the neiman narrative digest. One of the "notable narratives" is all about numbers: fivethirtyeight.com -- a blog.

Mediabistro today included links to three articles on citizen journalism, regarding the recent faux post on Steve Job's "heart attack" -- totally untrue -- which sent Apple shares plummeting. Wired suggests that if the poster was trying to manipulate the market, he could end up doing time for it. Tech Crunch notes that because the post was on iReport, it carried a lot more weight than it might have because of the CNN imprimatur. And MarketWatch says "that from this we will see a re-evaluation of the idea of so-called citizen journalists, with a lot of criticism coming their way. My advice: Get over it. We're stuck with what we have." Growing pains, yeah?

And finally, WaPo's Howard Kurtz hits a theme we talk about all the time in class. The essence of reporting: looking under the rug and at the horizon. He looks at why the business press didn't see the Wall Street mess coming. Or if they did, why there was no warning.

That's it, at least for now. bk

object lessons in objectivity

It's about the methods, folks. Not some freakish sense of balance in the finished piece.

In class discussions on objectivity, I often quote something from a piece by Joshuah Bearman I found on alternet a few years back: "Contrary to dogma of J-schools across country, there are not always two sides to a story. Balance is often necessary and indispensable, but there are times when media might have to mediate a bunch of information and make a judgment. And in those instances, presenting contrasting information as if it’s equally important is, in fact, the false representation – more false than saying, 'I’ve gathered a lot of material and vetted it all, and here’s my assessment.'"

Take Sarah Palin's speech in SoCal on Saturday. She was quoted in the LA Times as characterizing Obama as someone who "pals around with terrorists". From the article: "Evidently there's been a lot of interest in what I read lately," she said. "I was reading today a copy of the New York Times. And I was really interested to read in there about Barack Obama's friends from Chicago. Turns out one of his earliest supporters is a man who, according to the New York Times, was a domestic terrorist, that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and the United States Capitol.' "

The LA Times piece balanced her claim thus: "The New York Times article, an investigation published Friday into whether Obama had a relationship with Ayers, concluded that the men were never close and that Obama has denounced Ayers' radical past, which occurred when Obama was a child. The article also said Obama 'has played down his contacts with' Ayers."

And then gave the Obama camp a chance to respond: "Gov. Palin's comments, while offensive, are not surprising, given the McCain campaign's statement this morning that they would be launching Swift Boat-like attacks in hopes of deflecting attention from the nation's economic ills," said spokesman Hari Sevugan.

"In fact, the very newspaper story Gov. Palin cited in hurling her shameless attack made clear that Sen. Obama is not close to Bill Ayers, much less 'pals,' and that he has strongly condemned the despicable acts Ayers committed 40 years ago, when Obama was 8. What's clear is that John McCain and Sarah Palin would rather spend their time tearing down Barack Obama than laying out a plan to build up our economy."

Balanced, right? But objective? You decide. Here's the whole story from the New York Times to which Palin was referring.

One last exasperated riff: Today's "Lies, Half-Truths Outed" chart, a weekly compilation of campaign lies and misrepresentations in the San Francisco Chronicle, focused on Thursday's debate between Biden and Palin. Take a quick look at the chart and it appears as if both candidates lied and/or stretched the truth in equal measure. Really? What a coincidence. bk

...can you think of any?

According to interview guru John Sawatsky, you don't need to be a pit bull named Bruiser to conduct a good interview. In a piece I read so long ago that i can't remember where I put it, he posits that the best interviews, in fact, are about discipline on the part of the reporter, rather than the power differential between interviewer and source. They are about listening, leading the source down the path toward the given goal: staying in control by playing nice.

Which brings up Katie Couric's exchange with Sarah Palin wrt the Supreme Court. Watch how Couric's quiet little follow-up gets the job done:

follow the money...

Business Week's Jon Fine ponders where advertising dollars will end up as more and more local dailies meet their untimely demise. He suggests the first beneficiaries might be local TV and possibly glossy monthlies in affluent cities -- not always bastions of good journalism -- but concludes that as traditional news outlets decline, journalistic energies will migrate to a cyber-ecosystem.

His question: will the ad money follow? My question: if it doesn't, how will we support good journalism?

(There are blogs that make money, according to Slate's Mike Agger, but i don't know if you'd consider many of these good journalism...)


Anyway, back to Fine's piece. He writes:

"The obvious venues for all this displaced journalistic energy are a gazillion new independent online endeavors, be they individual blogs or bigger efforts like MinnPost.com. They will make for fascinating media ecosystems within individual cities, and some will become hits. It is much less certain whether ad dollars will follow. Ultracheap classifieds site craigslist has simply "destroyed revenue," says Dave Morgan, a former newspaper executive who founded behavioral targeting firm Tacoda, and revenue that no longer exists won't shift to new ventures. Others point out that key newspaper advertisers—local auto dealers and realtors, say—already have many outlets for ads online, not least of which are their own Web sites or national sites such as Cars.com that serve up targeted ads."

debatable

Does the fact that Gwen Ifill is writing a book on race and politics that includes material on Barack Obama disqualify her from moderating tomorrow night's vice-presidential debate? Conservative blogs have been buzzing all day, suggesting that her book "The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama," is evidence that she is in the pocket of the Obama campaign. Read Ifill's response in the Huffington Post.

Word of her book has been on the street for a few months, writes Howard Kurtz in the WaPo. You have to wonder why it's become an issue the day before the debate.

Ifill says that she has not yet written the chapter on Obama and is curious as to why people assume it will even be favorable. She tells the Huffington Post: "Do you think they made the same assumptions about Lou Cannon (who is white) when he wrote his book about Reagan?" said Ifill, who is black. Asked if there were racial motives at play, she said, "I don't know what it is. I find it curious."


Photo credit: Associated Press

let them eat cake

Newspapers and magazines are folding right and left. (Latest casualty, the New York Sun) Those that survive are cutting back. The economy is in shambles, with (as of today) no bail-out in sight. And yet.

The Wall Street Journal reports that magazines and websites devoted to food are not only surviving, but thriving. There will be 336 pubs targeted toward foodies this year -- with several new ones ready for launch.

Interesting. Probably says something about the times: When the going gets tough, the tough want to cook? bk

quick riffs

Mayka sent a link to an old article from The Guardian in which Nicholas Carr defines blogs as, well, parasites that rest on the work that other journalists have already done. He says that's a good thing: The blogosphere, he writes, "acts as a kind of global echo chamber. An idea gets swatted around like a ping-pong ball for a few hours until a fresh one takes its place." And while it's bouncing around we all make more sense of it. Or at least pay attention.

In that spirit, a few quick hits:

It will be interesting to watch the reaction to the very conservative Kathleen Parker's column in the uber-right National Review Online, suggesting that Sarah Palin step down for the good of the Republican party. A trial balloon? An echo of intra-party talking points? A way to pre-spin the VP debate by shooting expectations down to negative numbers?

Speaking of spin, the Washington Post's media critic Howard Kurtz takes us for a spin inside the spin-doc tents after Friday night's debate. Pretty ridiculous premise, actually. Let's review: reporters who watched the debate need -- or will listen to -- partisans to tell them what they saw? Really? Hope there was food.

Still on the campaign: The Nation's Eric Alterman questions the pseudo-objectivity of news orgs that will report what politicians say --- but are reluctant to call them on it when they lie. Referencing McCain's accusation that Obama pushed for sex ed for kindergartners, he writes, "... many in the media cling to the belief that it is the calling of a reporter to report a politician's lies without apparent prejudice. In the Washington Post, not only did Jonathan Weisman and Peter Slevin take no position on the truth or falsehood of McCain's dishonest allegations; they waited a full eleven paragraphs before noting that the Obama campaign believed 'all of the accusations against him are a reach, if not fabrications.' "

I riffed about this earlier this month, and again last week. Our job: not stenography.

On another topic entirely, Editor and Publisher columnist Steve Outing outlines his vision for news 2.0 (or possibly news 3.0) as newspapers migrate completely online. Taking the "we are our own editors" concept one step further -- he calls it "The Daily Me 2.0" -- we would all configure our own pages on our daily paper's website, combining content from staff reports, wire services, news from unaffiliated websites, blogs, user-driven forums and even social networking sites. All at our own choosing. Interesting.

And finally: tabloid journalism. Tracing the history of the National Enquirer, Newsweek reports that the tab, which once had a circulation higher than the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal combined, is now, like its respectable cousins, falling victim to the internet, where celebrity gossip is quicker and cheaper. Love it or hate it, its headlines (my daughter once had her bedroom door plastered with them) are always good for a laugh. Like this one, from Newsweek's piece: "FAMILY EATS BARBECUED MEAT—FINDS IT WAS THEIR DOG."

Cheers. bk

mayka makes good

Congrats to Mayka Mei (SCU '06), who is now a featured writer on That Minority Thing, a new web community where minority voices can come together -- as well as a filter for news about issues relating to groups often marginalized by the mainstream press. The site launched last week. You can read her first piece here.

Back at SCU, Mayka Mei was Director of the Multicultural Center her junior year and before and after that, a writer and designer for The Santa Clara. She won an award for a piece on clubbing she did for the paper her senior year. She started her latest blog, theMaykazine -- subtited "overthinking so you don't have to"-- a couple months ago. Below, she talks about how a post on her blog led to her current gig: A good lesson on why you should always practice good blog etiquette.

"A few months ago I started my latest blog. (My oldest blog is old enough to enroll in second grade.) Even though I don't have a singular theme for theMaykazine, I discipline myself in writing about my core interests in culture and intercultural relations at least once a week.

After writing "You can't see me!" in response to John Ridley's Huffington Post article "Are Asians the new invisible man?," I received an invitation from Ridley's publicist to contribute to That Minority Thing. It excited me a lot. I didn't expect to be receiving any messages other than silly press releases, and here was an opportunity to contribute to a new media outlet devoting itself to minority issues and minority voices.

TMT just launched officially last week, but I already love the Featured Writers section, where other socially conscientious bloggers like myself have aggregated to examine current events and ongoing issues.

Advice to aspiring bloggers: Always practice good blog etiquette and hotlink your sources."

everything i know about blogs ...

I learned from blogging. Well, sort of.

Here's how Technorati defines the blogosphere: The ecosystem of interconnected communities of bloggers and readers at the convergence of journalism and conversation.

This came up about a month ago in a conversation about "quick-click journalism" that made our heads hurt. (check the comments) As i wrote then, primordial soup: You gotta wonder if, as the blog world continues to expand and evolve, if various distinct "neighborhoods" will take shape. Will there be boundaries? Should there be? With rules? Will that change the nature of the blogosphere itself? And what about protections? That came up a month ago to, with regard to a post (and comments) about Josh Wolf.

Interesting to watch how this will play out, yeah? Your guess being as good as mind, let me know what you think.

Meanwhile, you can find Technorati's complete State of the Blogosphere/2008 here.

From that report:
"But as the Blogosphere grows in size and influence, the lines between what is a blog and what is a mainstream media site become less clear. Larger blogs are taking on more characteristics of mainstream sites and mainstream sites are incorporating styles and formats from the Blogosphere. In fact, 95% of the top 100 US newspapers have reporter blogs."

jumpin jack flash

Congrats to Jack Gillum!

The former Editor in Chief of The Santa Clara just landed his dream gig at USA Today, where he will be a database editor, overseeing data-driven projects, working on some of his own enterprise projects and coordinating with IT folks on interactive Web apps. He interned there the summer after his sophomore year.

Jack will be leaving for DC as soon as he wraps things up at The Arizona Daily Star, where he has covered cops, business and been part of the computer-assisted-reporting team. er, maybe he WAS the computer-assisted-reporting team. He'll correct me if I'm wrong.

You can check out his work here. I'll post a headshot if he ever sends me one. (update: he just did!) Meanwhile, pretty darn cool for someone barely a year out of j. school, yeah? Should give you all hope. bk

Fact checking sites: more

Mark Glaser just posted an in-depth look at political fact-checking sites at MediaShift. No doubt, fact-check sites may do what media doesn't to hold politicians accountable. But still, so many questions. As I wrote Sunday: still not sure about the answers.

Do these sites increase the perception that we can't trust journalists to get it right? Who are the final arbiters of truth? (if, indeed, there is any such thing. but let's not go there.) And why do we annoint certain sites as more reliable than others? Because they say they are? Because we want/need to believe in them?

And are those reporters who still have jobs too overworked to do the fact-checking themselves?

I also worry that if there is distance between the original report and the subsequent fact-check, folks who don't happen to be computer geeks or news junkies like yours truly might never find the straight story. And even if there is no distance at all, there's still room for the message to get lost.

Anyhow, you'll find me toward the end of Glaser's piece, dancing on...

“Can [fact-check sites and mainstream media] work in tandem? I think they absolutely should,” said Kelley. “But that also can bring problems. There was a Boston Globe piece that referenced Obama talking about McCain’s plan to privatize Social Security and how the recent stock market collapse could have affected current retirees. Then the article quoted FactCheck.org saying Obama was wrong because McCain had proposed this plan only for those born in 1950. The article left it at that — without getting into any of the nuances, so Obama’s statement was dismissed as non-factual, but the point of what he was saying was missed.

“Finally, how many fact-check sites will reporters rely upon? You have to wonder where the sites themselves get their info — do they go back to original transcripts? Multiple sources? And also, which ones will become the arbiters of truth? Will it be like relying only upon the New York Times or AP to tell us what’s going on in Washington or Iraq? I guess what I’m saying is that, like soup kitchens, fact-check sites address crucial problems, but the real issue should be why we need them in the first place.”

to blog or not to blog...

That's the question posed in a post by Mark Glaser on MediaShift, his PBS-sponsored blog that tracks the ways in which the digital media revolution is changing our world.

His post digs into the story of one NYU journalism student who, after blogging about one of her journalism classes, was apparently called to the woodshed by her professor and told not to blog, not to twitter and not to write about the class again. The professor found the student's blog to be an invasion of privacy of the other students in the class.

But then, isn't forbidding students to blog about a class a restriction of free speech?

Interesting post, interesting comments, all multi-layered. On a deeper level, the post illustrates one of the many ways in which evolving technologies are changing the rules and forcing us to reconsider what we thought we knew. (Think l'affaire Mayhill Fowler.)

So join the conversation: So much more fun than learning AP Style. Not that there's anything wrong with that. bk

not just a clever name

You have to wonder if the late Herb Caen, the San Francisco Chronicle's Pullitzer-winning "three-dot" journalist, may have been the original blogger: a bunch of short items, bold-faced names that, had he been on the internet, would certainly have been links, and lots of random connections.

In that spirit, a bunch of short J.linx. Something for everyone.

Possibly an attempt to compete with all the political blogs out there that, ahem, offer a bunch of quick links, the Washington Post has just launched Political Browser, a site that will provide links to what it considers the best political coverage, even by rival news orgs, of the day. According to Editor and Publisher, "the idea behind the Political Browser, expected to start Monday, is to brief political junkies on the top "must reads" of the day, from an article on a scandal to a humorous video making the rounds on Google Inc.'s YouTube." Interesting.

Lots of interesting data in the latest "State of the First Amendment Survey": Among the more, uh, interesting findings, the majority of Americans surveyed strongly disagrees that the news media "tries to report the news without bias." Regarding the presidential campaign, 48 percent of those surveyed found coverage of Obama to be "very fair" while only 30 percent felt the same about McCain's coverage. And just over half (51 percent) of those surveyed strongly agree that it is important for our democracy that the news media act as a watchdog over government. Just over half? Baffling.

Richard Perez-Pena, writing in the New York Times, notes that many reporters covering Wall Street's meltdown used very careful language so as not to add to the panic. He writes: "...in most of the news, stocks have “slid” and markets “gyrated” but not “crashed.” Companies have “tottered” and “struggled” rather than moved toward failure and bankruptcy." Were those writers minimizing the danger? Acting responsibly? Misplacing their loyalties?

For those of you who can't get enough of the campaign -- and are numbers nerd to boot: check out this detailed, continually-updated website on electoral projections and polls.

The American Prospect discusses the demise of yet one more newspaper's Washington bureau, and what that means not only for political coverage but for the newspaper industry itself. I talked about this last year when i played "bad cop" on a panel with a couple of folks from the San Jose Mercury about their attempts to recreate their newspaper: As newspapers constrict and close bureaus to concentrate on "hyperlocal coverage", you are left with a diminishing marketplace of ideas where one or two news orgs controls the agenda -- and the filter -- as well as, in your local paper, a front page full of silly stuff. Like, for example, the day last summer that the front page story in the Merc -- above the fold, complete with graphic, was about the local kid who was poised to win Nathan's hot dog eating contest. Hello?!

And finally, after some office chitchat today about "he said/she said" journalism, my officemate Gordon Young writes the following about a couple of pieces in the NYT.:

Here are links to the NY Times items I mentioned in the discussion of balanced coverage.
Here's the Krugman column:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/opinion/12krugman.html?_r=1&em&oref=slogin

And here's the key section:
"Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well,
they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of
being “balanced” at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician
says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong,
it reports that “some Democrats say” that he’s wrong. Or a grotesque lie
from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other,
conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.

They’re probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race
reporting, so that instead of the story being “McCain campaign lies,” it
becomes “Obama on defensive in face of attacks.”

And here's the news article "McCain Barbs Stirring Outcry as
Distortions"
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/us/politics/13mccain.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

And here is the painful attempt to be balanced by including some of
Obama's "distortions":

Mr. Obama’s hands have not always been clean in this regard. He was
called out earlier for saying, incorrectly, that Mr. McCain supported a
“hundred-year war” in Iraq after Mr. McCain said in January that he
would be fine with a hypothetical 100-year American presence in Iraq, as
long as Americans were not being injured or killed there.

More recently, Mr. Obama has been criticized for advertisements that
have distorted Mr. McCain’s record on schools financing and incorrectly
accused him of not supporting loan guarantees for the auto industry — a
hot topic in Michigan. He has also taken Mr. McCain’s repeated comments
that American economy is “fundamentally sound” out of context, leaving
out the fact that Mr. McCain almost always adds at the same time that he
understands that times are tough and “people are hurting.”

just the links ...

... and nothing but the links.

Make that the facts. Or more specifically, fact-checking, which has moved into prime media real estate this presidential campaign season.

The idea: to provide quick and easy measure of the truthfulness in ads, speeches, blogs and other avenues of campaign rhetoric, all at internet speed.

There's FactCheck.org, run by the Annenburg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. It's goal: "to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases."

There's Politifact.com, which among other things has a "truth-o-meter" to separate fact from fiction when the candidates go on the attack.

There's even a new widget called spin-spotter, which will automatically point out bias in articles you might read online. According to Business Week, "The application's algorithms work off six key tenets of spin and bias, which the company derived from both the guidelines of the Society of Professional Journalists' Code Of Ethics and input from an advisory board composed of journalism luminaries." In addition, spin-spotter will also rely on the wikipedia-like wisdom of the crowds -- which could keep it honest or could also inject a whole new kind of bias.

No question that being able to dispatch the truth at cyberspeed is good for the reader/viewer. But here's what gives me just a bit of the uh-oh feeling: Don't you wonder why we need all these fact-checking sites apart from the newsrooms? After all, isn't separating fact from fiction the reporter's job in the first place? bk

a slow write ...

The next time you spend hours and sweat blood, all in pursuit of that perfect lede -- which eludes you nonetheless-- refer to the work of the late mystery writer James Crumley, often called one of the most influential and revered crime novelists of the post-Vietnam era. He died Tuesday.

From his obit in the Washington Post:

"Mr. Crumley published 11 books, the best-known of which was 'The Last Good Kiss' (1978), whose opening line has been widely called the best in crime fiction: 'When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonora, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.'

"That line, he said, took him eight years to write. ..."

Photo credit: AP Photo/ Bill Wittliff

life continues to follow capstone

Two years ago Kristin Swenson spent hours upon hours reporting and writing a long-form piece on KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) Schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. She hung out in the classrooms, the schoolyards, the cafeterias, talked to students, teachers and principals. And when she was through, she was left with almost as many questions about the program as answers. Clearly, she put a debate on the table.

In today's San Francisco Chronicle, education writer Nanette Asimov comes to many of the same conclusions, and wonders about many of the same issues that Kristin did: teacher burn-out; high drop out rate; disciplinary measures; and whether the program's overwhelming success with the students who stick it out can be replicated in other schools. Like Kristin, she finds that the verdict is still out.

Speaking of Kristin, be sure to read her comment (there are two) on this post. Natalie's too.

And speaking of students, check out Pat Semansky's photo essay on New Orleans post-katrina in the SCU alumni magazine.

More later. Maybe. bk

and again.

It continues to baffle: The idea that when you reduce the quality of a product -- in this case, news -- more people will buy it and you will make more money. To paraphrase the late, great Molly Ivins: "It's not that newspapers are dying that pisses me off. It's that they are committing suicide." Clearly.

McClatchy newspapers just announced it will trim its workforce by 10 percent -- or roughly 1,150 full time positions -- in the face of advertising revenues that had decreased by 17.8 percent this past year.

According to the press release issued by the company: "It is painful to announce these staff reductions, but the continued restructuring of our company is necessary given the relentless economic downturn and its impact on our business," McClatchy Chairman and CEO Gary Pruitt said in a release. "But it is also part of a strategic vision of becoming a hybrid print and online media company. McClatchy is committed to remaining a healthy, profitable company positioned to meet current challenges."

Photo courtesy of Ralph Barrera/Austin American-Statesman, via Associated Press. Molly Ivins in 2006.

on gary smith

For all you Gary Smith fans: The award winning Sports Illustrated feature writer who has just come out with a new book, “Sports Illustrated: Going Deep,” was profiled in the New York Times yesterday.

I got my first dose of Smith's work when Melissa Segura (SCU, '01) brought a copy of her favorite piece to one of the first j. classes she took from me: he was her idol, and his work probably did more than anything else to inspire her to pursue a career in journalism.

Which she did. She is currently a writer-reporter at Sports Illustrated where she often works with Smith, who has become both a mentor and a friend. Segura covers baseball. Like her mentor, Segura looks deeply at the players, not just the games. Here's a link to one of her pieces.

Anyway, Smith's work is now a staple -- and a favorite -- of Magazine Journalism. From the Times article:

"Mr. Smith writes for Sports Illustrated. But his work is only tangentially about games, with great appeal for people who wouldn’t know a nickel defense from a triangle offense. Each year he produces four long, earnest feature articles that probe the psyches of wounded people, some of them famous but most obscure, from Andre Agassi to high school basketball players on an Indian reservation.

"And if the results are sometimes called melodrama, they have more often been praised as the work of perhaps the greatest American magazine writer currently working. He has won four National Magazine Awards — that industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize — for nonfiction writing, more than anyone else. He has been a finalist 10 times, also a record."