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Read about Jay Rosen's book, What Are Journalists For?

Excerpt from Chapter One of What Are Journalists For? "As Democracy Goes, So Goes the Press."

Essay in Columbia Journalism Review on the changing terms of authority in the press, brought on in part by the blog's individual--and interactive--style of journalism. It argues that, after Jayson Blair, authority is not the same at the New York Times, either.

"Web Users Open the Gates." My take on ten years of Internet journalism, at Washingtonpost.com

Read: Q & As

Jay Rosen, interviewed about his work and ideas by journalist Richard Poynder

Achtung! Interview in German with a leading German newspaper about the future of newspapers and the Net.

Audio: Have a Listen

Listen to an audio interview with Jay Rosen conducted by journalist Christopher Lydon, October 2003. It's about the transformation of the journalism world by the Web.

Five years later, Chris Lydon interviews Jay Rosen again on "the transformation." (March 2008, 71 minutes.)

Interview with host Brooke Gladstone on NPR's "On the Media." (Dec. 2003) Listen here.

Presentation to the Berkman Center at Harvard University on open source journalism and NewAssignment.Net. Downloadable mp3, 70 minutes, with Q and A. Nov. 2006.

Video: Have A Look

Half hour video interview with Robert Mills of the American Microphone series. On blogging, journalism, NewAssignment.Net and distributed reporting.

Jay Rosen explains the Web's "ethic of the link" in this four-minute YouTube clip.

"The Web is people." Jay Rosen speaking on the origins of the World Wide Web. (2:38)

One hour video Q & A on why the press is "between business models" (June 2008)

Recommended by PressThink:

Town square for press critics, industry observers, and participants in the news machine: Romenesko, published by the Poynter Institute.

Town square for weblogs: InstaPundit from Glenn Reynolds, who is an original. Very busy. Very good. To the Right, but not in all things. A good place to find voices in diaolgue with each other and the news.

Town square for the online Left. The Daily Kos. Huge traffic. The comments section can be highly informative. One of the most successful communities on the Net.

Rants, links, blog news, and breaking wisdom from Jeff Jarvis, former editor, magazine launcher, TV critic, now a J-professor at CUNY. Always on top of new media things. Prolific, fast, frequently dead on, and a pal of mine.

Eschaton by Atrios (pen name of Duncan B;ack) is one of the most well established political weblogs, with big traffic and very active comment threads. Left-liberal.

Terry Teachout is a cultural critic coming from the Right at his weblog, About Last Night. Elegantly written and designed. Plus he has lots to say about art and culture today.

Dave Winer is the software wiz who wrote the program that created the modern weblog. He's also one of the best practicioners of the form. Scripting News is said to be the oldest living weblog. Read it over time and find out why it's one of the best.

If someone were to ask me, "what's the right way to do a weblog?" I would point them to Doc Searls, a tech writer and sage who has been doing it right for a long time.

Ed Cone writes one of the most useful weblogs by a journalist. He keeps track of the Internet's influence on politics, as well developments in his native North Carolina. Always on top of things.

Rebecca's Pocket by Rebecca Blood is a weblog by an exemplary practitioner of the form, who has also written some critically important essays on its history and development, and a handbook on how to blog.

Dan Gillmor used to be the tech columnist and blogger for the San Jose Mercury News. He now heads a center for citizen media. This is his blog about it.

A former senior editor at Pantheon, Tom Englehardt solicits and edits commentary pieces that he publishes in blog form at TomDispatches. High-quality political writing and cultural analysis.

Chris Nolan's Spot On is political writing at a high level from Nolan and her band of left-to-right contributors. Her notion of blogger as a "stand alone journalist" is a key concept; and Nolan is an exemplar of it.

Barista of Bloomfield Avenue is journalist Debbie Galant's nifty experiment in hyper-local blogging in several New Jersey towns. Hers is one to watch if there's to be a future for the weblog as news medium.

The Editor's Log, by John Robinson, is the only real life honest-to-goodness weblog by a newspaper's top editor. Robinson is the blogging boss of the Greensboro News-Record and he knows what he's doing.

Fishbowl DC is about the world of Washington journalism. Gossip, controversies, rituals, personalities-- and criticism. Good way to keep track of the press tribe in DC

PJ Net Today is written by Leonard Witt and colleagues. It's the weblog of the Public Journalisn Network (I am a founding member of that group) and it follows developments in citizen-centered journalism.

Here's Simon Waldman's blog. He's the Director of Digital Publishing for The Guardian in the UK, the world's most Web-savvy newspaper. What he says counts.

Novelist, columnist, NPR commentator, Iraq War vet, Colonel in the Army Reserve, with a PhD in literature. How many bloggers are there like that? One: Austin Bay.

Betsy Newmark's weblog she describes as "comments and Links from a history and civics teacher in Raleigh, NC." An intelligent and newsy guide to blogs on the Right side of the sphere. I go there to get links and comment, like the teacher said.

Rhetoric is language working to persuade. Professor Andrew Cline's Rhetorica shows what a good lens this is on politics and the press.

Davos Newbies is a "year-round Davos of the mind," written from London by Lance Knobel. He has a cosmopolitan sensibility and a sharp eye for things on the Web that are just... interesting. This is the hardest kind of weblog to do well. Knobel does it well.

Susan Crawford, a law professor, writes about democracy, technology, intellectual property and the law. She has an elegant weblog about those themes.

Kevin Roderick's LA Observed is everything a weblog about the local scene should be. And there's a lot to observe in Los Angeles.

Joe Gandelman's The Moderate Voice is by a political independent with an irrevant style and great journalistic instincts. A link-filled and consistently interesting group blog.

Ryan Sholin's Invisible Inkling is about the future of newspapers, online news and journalism education. He's the founder of WiredJournalists.com and a self-taught Web developer and designer.

H20town by Lisa Williams is about the life and times of Watertown, Massachusetts, and it covers that town better than any local newspaper. Williams is funny, she has style, and she loves her town.

Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing at washingtonpost.com is a daily review of the best reporting and commentary on the presidency. Read it daily and you'll be extremely well informed.

Rebecca MacKinnon, former correspondent for CNN, has immersed herself in the world of new media and she's seen the light (great linker too.)

Micro Persuasion is Steve Rubel's weblog. It's about how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the business of persuasion. Rubel always has the latest study or article.

Susan Mernit's blog is "writing and news about digital media, ecommerce, social networks, blogs, search, online classifieds, publishing and pop culture from a consultant, writer, and sometime entrepeneur." Connected.

Group Blogs

CJR Daily is Columbia Journalism Review's weblog about the press and its problems, edited by Steve Lovelady, formerly of the Philadelpia Inquirer.

Lost Remote is a very newsy weblog about television and its future, founded by Cory Bergman, executive producer at KING-TV in Seattle. Truly on top of things, with many short posts a day that take an inside look at the industry.

Editors Weblog is from the World Editors Fourm, an international group of newspaper editors. It's about trends and challenges facing editors worldwide.

Journalism.co.uk keeps track of developments from the British side of the Atlantic. Very strong on online journalism.

Digests & Round-ups:

Memeorandum: Single best way I know of to keep track of both the news and the political blogosphere. Top news stories and posts that people are blogging about, automatically updated.

Daily Briefing: A categorized digest of press news from the Project on Excellence in Journalism.

Press Notes is a round-up of today's top press stories from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Richard Prince does a link-rich thrice-weekly digest called "Journalisms" (plural), sponsored by the Maynard Institute, which believes in pluralism in the press.

Newsblog is a daily digest from Online Journalism Review.

E-Media Tidbits from the Poynter Institute is group blog by some of the sharper writers about online journalism and publishing. A good way to keep up

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June 4, 2004

He Said, She Said, We Said

That's what's being urged upon the press this year by some. But this is a different system of authority in political reporting, and it has consequences. If the press is now re-voicing itself for the Net era, that means a major shift. Once there was protection in he said, she said. Such refuge may be gone.

There is a world of difference between an article ten days ago by Jim Rutenberg in the New York Times, “Campaign Ads Are Under Fire for Inaccuracy,” and a second article four days ago (on the same subject) by Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei in the Washington Post, “From Bush, Unprecedented Negativity.”

This is a post about that world. The difference I’m talking about is in these passages. First, from Rutenberg of the Times:

A record year for political advertising has brought with it a hail of televised exaggerations, omissions and mischaracterizations that pollsters say seem to be leaving voters with mistaken impressions of Senator John Kerry and President Bush. The degree to which the advertisements push the facts, or go beyond them, varies by commercial. While Mr. Bush’s campaign has been singled out as going particularly far with some of its claims, Mr. Kerry’s campaign has also been criticized as frequently going beyond the bounds of truth.

Which clearly asserts: both sides do it. This makes Rutenberg a chronicler of the will to deceive in politics, presented as part of the reality of politics— and as a bigger factor this year. Some say bigger than ever. Now here’s Milbank and VandeHei, agreeing up to a point:

Kerry, too, has made his own misleading statements and exaggerations. For example, he said in a speech last week about Iraq: “They have gone it alone when they should have assembled a whole team.” That is not true. There are about 25,000 allied troops from several nations, particularly Britain, in Iraq. Likewise, Kerry said several times last week that Bush has spent $80 million on negative and misleading ads — a significant overstatement. Kerry also suggested several times last week that Bush opposed increasing spending on several homeland defense programs; in fact, Bush has proposed big increases in homeland security but opposed some Democratic attempts to increase spending even more in some areas.

Got that? Kerry does it too, and not on trivial issues, but on important issues. “Kerry’s rhetoric at rallies is also often much harsher and more personal than Bush’s,” they add.

But Bush has outdone Kerry in the number of untruths, in part because Bush has leveled so many specific charges (and Kerry has such a lengthy voting record), but also because Kerry has learned from the troubles caused by Al Gore’s misstatements in 2000. “The balance of misleading claims tips to Bush,” Jamieson said, “in part because the Kerry team has been more careful.”

Which clearly asserts that while both sides do it, the Bush campaign is more likely to engage in distortion of the factual record by projecting “untruths” about Kerry. In taking that step, Milbank and VandeHei become chroniclers of a particular politician’s greater will to deceive and destroy, which is a very different message from: nasty campaign, both sides are playing loose with the truth, voters are affected. Thus the Post’s grabby headline: “From Bush, Unprecedented Negativity.”

What I called the “world of difference” begins with similarities. Both articles are about the increased volume of negative attacks and worrisome levels of distortion in 2004, especially in paid ads. Both quote academics who study political campaigns and media tactics. Both talk about and to a degree rely on outside monitoring groups like factcheck.org. They also focus on some of the same disputes— for instance, the Bush’s campaign’s claim that John Kerry’s plans would raise taxes by at least $900 billion during his first 100 days in office.

“Mr. Kerry has no such plan,” wrote Rutenberg. “Kerry has said no such thing,” wrote Milbank and VandeHei. Telling essentially the same story, the two pieces diverge in the practices they permit to news reporters, and in the press think behind those practices. At stake going forward is what kind of truthteller a political reporter is permitted to be in the mainstream press, a different question from: is that reporter telling the truth?

In the case at hand, Times to Post, the difference is not only the stronger conclusion in the Post (Bush misleads more) but a willingness to openly draw conclusions when participants in a conflict hotly contest each other’s claims. Reporters in the maintream press generally don’t do that. They do not openly conclude in a news account that one side is being more truthful than the other, especially in the heat of an election year struggle.

Part of the reason to avoid conclusions like that is to avoid appearing biased, of course. The ritual called “he said, she said” is like an advertisement with that theme: both sides had their say, no bias here, trust the news you get from us. But it’s slowly dawning on some in the press that it almost works the opposite way today.

When journalists avoid drawing open conclusions, they are more vulnerable to charges of covert bias, of having a concealed agenda, of not being up front about their perspective, of unfairly building a case (for, against) while pretending only to report “what happened.” From this angle, avoiding summary judgment doesn’t necessarily build confidence in your reporting; it may encourage them to attack you for tilting the boards, for denying you have a perpsective on things, for bias.

“The traditional sources of news in America are losing influence and have not yet recognized it,” wrote Vaughn Ververs of the National Journal, just today. This loss of influence is concealed because it involves a gravitational shift to the Internet, where every news organization has a website that appears to say: our own shift is underway. It’s an illusion.

The projection is: “See, we’re on the cutting edge. We can do the Net.” But a glance at the content of those Web sites reveals that they rarely go beyond wire-type updates of major news and chats with their own reporters.

The same forces driving the press to the Web have radically altered the flow of information. “Because the mainstream media have lost the gatekeeper role, their position of importance has fallen.” But they can re-gain some of that lost standing by building up greater authority as truthtellers, which might replace their diminished power as gatekeepers. (Gone and not coming back.) For decision-makers in the mainstream press, this is a puzzle that

goes far beyond their current Web sites, beyond color pictures in the paper, beyond embedded reporters in the field or fancy redesigns. These organizations need to take a bigger step forward and establish themselves as the places that validate the news. Don’t just report the “news”; define the accuracy of it.

“Define the accuracy of it” means, I think, drawing conclusions about truthfulness, like the Post did: “The [Bush] charges were all tough, serious — and wrong, or at least highly misleading.” Ververs argues for this kind of journalism as Big Media’s niche, and he suggests a new mantra: “Find the truth, report the truth, and explain why your organization believes it’s the truth.”

He said, she said is nowhere near enough, and every time things are left that way the press loses influence. Advertising that you’re unbiased is also not enough. The press should go further. It should draw defensible conclusions, and make its way forward by defending, explaining—publicly justifying—those conclusions. “A great many pros may find themselves surprised at how warmly that approach would be received,” Ververs wrote, ending with that thought.

The National Journal is a weekly read by the political class. Ververs is a columnist there and also editor of Hotline, an insider’s tipsheet followed by political journalists. He’s obviously talking to them. A similar line of argument has been advanced this year by Campaign Desk, a project of Columbia Journalism Review, which is itself a project of Columbia University.

“Given the amount of spin this election year, the old rules don’t apply any more,” wrote Susan Q. Stranahan on May 27. “Campaign Desk herewith proposes a new ground rule: ‘He said/she said/we said.’” There’s no excuse for avoiding “we said,” Stranahan said. “With a variety of Internet research tools readily at hand, it has never been easier for reporters to draw an independent assessment on any given day of who is right, who is wrong, and in what way.”

Doing that should be a basic task, says the Desk. But sadly it isn’t the norm, “at a time when so many reporters just regurgitate talking points from both the Republican and Democratic camps.” Those are the words of Steve Lovelady, managing editor of the operation, and formerly an editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Wall Street Journal and Time, among other stops.

In its commentary on the Times article, written by Zachary Roth (May 25), the Desk gives Rutenberg extra points for “exposing some of the most glaring distortions being pushed by both sides.” But this only highlights how rarely it’s done in day-to-day reporting. And so there is day-to-day lying by the campaigns, or what amounts to such:

The only way to stop the campaigns from continuing to grossly distort the truth is for the entire press corps — not just the Times and the Washington Post, but USA Today, the Associated Press, and the TV networks, which are the source of news for many more voters—to point out these distortions, immediately and unequivocatingly, using their own reportorial (as opposed to editorial) voice.

Their own reportorial voice… what’s involved in that? Here we are closer to the heart of it. For this is ultimately not a question of reporting technique, or a writer’s boldness in stating conclusions. It’s bigger: what authority ultimately grounds those conclusions, and gives weight to the reportorial voice?

“From Bush, Unprecedented Negativity” sounds like the Post coming to its own judgment. But look at the subhead: “Scholars Say Campaign Is Making History With Often-Misleading Attacks.” There’s the Post stating flatly, “Bush has outdone Kerry in the number of untruths.” But right after it the words of Penn professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson, one of the most relied-upon experts around on the subject of political advertising. “The balance of misleading claims tips to Bush, in part because the Kerry team has been more careful.”

Jamieson is also Director of Penn’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, and oversees the research at factcheck.org. Fact checking is an editorial step in journalism. Officially, factcheck.org is a “nonpartisan, nonprofit, ‘consumer advocate’ for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics.” It may be intended for voters, but Jamieson, who understands the press very well, knew that a really good fact-checking site launched during campaign 2004 would have some of its biggest effects in journalism.

Reporters seeking independent authority (safe harbor) for statements about who’s wrong and who’s right can rely on studies from Jamieson’s shop. That’s what the Post reporters did. In many ways, the site is a journalism operation located outside the press, on the Internet, and at a university. Authority—also called reputational capital— comes from two different sources: professional standards in journalism, social science research at an Ivy League university.

“Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding,” says FactCheck at an about us page. The operation is headed by Brooks Jackson, a journalist who covered national politics for 32 years at the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal and CNN, where he helped create the “adwatch” and “factcheck” features for the network.

Campaign Desk is built on similar reputational ground. It’s watchdog reporting, from a top-ranked school of journalism at a world class university, run by a career journalist, Steve Lovelady, overseen by Nick Lemann, press writer for the New Yorker and dean of the J-school. Vaughn Ververs said the traditional press is losing influence because journalism isn’t confined to just journalists anymore. The gates are open. It’s also true that “the press” (including the campaign press) isn’t confined within news organizations. Universities (Columbia, Penn, USC) have a piece of it, as they have for a long time in book publishing.

Cable Newser, a weblog, is part of the press. With 3,500 readers a day, many from within the industry, and with insiders e-mailing its author tips and quotes, it’s become rather like Hotline for the cable news biz. Except that it’s free and written by Brian Stelter, an 18 year-old sophomore at Towson State University in Maryland. It costs him $11 a month to run, he says. (See this from the Baltimore Sun: “Writing beyond his years.”)

Authority in journalism is up grabs today; credentials matter less, but they still matter. Reputational capital still counts too. That’s why Campaign Desk is parked at Columbia. That’s why Dana Milbank went from the New Republic to the Washington Post. But having good information matters more, relative to an “established” reputation, because people will find what’s good—on the Internet, they can find what’s good—even if it’s not in the Washington Post, even if it’s the editorial product of a sophomore at Towson State.

When the gates swing open, the gatekeepers may have to find other work.

Now check this out… The Baltimore Sun article on Brian Stelter contained not a single link to his weblog, even though it was entirely about his weblog. Instead, there are two links to unrelated Sun articles on Towson State. This is a disservice to Web readers. It is also company policy (keep ‘em in the domain.) And it’s an example of why, though there is a lot of mainstream journalism on the Web, so little of it is of the Web.

The reason can’t be ignorance of how the Web works, for any 18 year-old can tell the Baltimore Sun why its policy is lame and nonsensical. That you link to Cable Newser when you are writing about Cable Newser is self-evident to any competent user of the Web. On this point—linking policy—your typical newspaper site is actually an incompetent use of the Internet platform. For how long can a situation like that endure?

Today there are many clashing authority systems in mainstream journalism; and the Web, though not the source of all of them, is the place where they all play out. Wanna see?

  • From Campaign Desk: “Notice how NBC relied on two outside ‘experts,’ Jackson and Goldstein, to critique the ads, rather than simply doing it themselves. Call us crazy, but we thought it was the job of the news media itself to help viewers make sense of campaign rhetoric. By getting outsiders to do it for them, NBC distances itself from the criticism, suggesting the network isn’t entirely comfortable with questioning the campaigns’ veracity so flatly.” (In other words, say it on your own authority; be critical and call it news.)
  • From Paul Waldman, The Gadflyer, in March: “There is one thing, and one thing only, that will dissuade a campaign from airing false ads: if reporters make them pay a price. A rebuttal from the opposing candidate won’t do it. Reporters need to come out and say—not in a quote from a partisan, but in the reporter’s own voice—that one side is telling the truth and the other side isn’t. Every failure to do so is an object lesson for the campaigns, telling them how far they can go and what the consequences are.” (In other words, say it on your own authority and it may make ‘em stop.)
  • From the Daily Howler: “Rutenberg never seems up to the task of dealing with this difficult subject. Today’s campaigns are very slick. Their disinformation is skillfully packaged, and it’s therefore hard to critique. If he’s really trying his best, Rutenberg seems to be over his head with this important subject.” (In other words, they’re gaming the system, and you need a better system or you will be gamed.)
  • From ReadingA1 on the Rutenberg and Milbank/VandeHei treatments: “Want to see the difference between lazy, by-the-numbers, pseudo-objective reporting and reporting that regards objectivity as something more than just a rhetorical stance?” (In other words, accuracy and objectivity, rightly understood, may require a press that is more willing to draw conclusions, and take the heat.)
  • From Josh Marshall: “So the Kerry campaign is watching its back because the Washington press corps swallowed the GOP’s anti-Gore, ‘invented the Internet’ mau-mauing hook, line and sinker. And the Bush campaign lies with impunity because even in the rare instance when caught red-handed in a front page piece in the Post, they can still be confident that the blow will be cushioned by plenty of paraphrastic padding, such as the Post’s description of the Bush campaign’s lies as ‘wrong, or at least highly misleading’ or the ‘liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts.’ In other words, ‘working the refs’ pays off.” (Or: they’re gaming the system.)
  • From Byron York, National Review: “Bush campaign officials say a front-page Washington Post story which claimed that the president’s ‘ferocious assault’ of negative campaigning has been ‘extraordinary, both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts,’ was itself inaccurate.,,, According to one campaign official, the story was “literally, point-by-point, factually wrong.” (In other words, you say black, I say white, and what in the end are you going to do about it?)
  • From PowerLine: “The Washington Post features a page 1 story by its staunchest anti-Bush Democrat, Dana Milbank. The real source of the view that Bush is making history with misleading attacks is not ‘scholars’ but Milbank himself.” (In other words, when are you going to come clean and admit it?)
  • From the Bush/Cheney campaign’s, 6,500-word rebuttal to the Posts 2,639-word story, alleging ten wrong conclusions and factual misstatements: “Kerry’s Health Care Plan Was Originally Scored At $895 Billion Over 10 Years By Former Clinton Appointee Kenneth Thorpe. According to Kenneth Thorpe, a health care economics professor at Emory University and former Clinton administration official: ‘Federal costs under the Kerry plans would be $895 billion over ten years to extend insurance to 26.7 million uninsured [of 43.6 million total uninsured]. This includes approximately $230 billion in federal spending for the reinsurance pool that targets those with health insurance and $665 billion for programs targeting the uninsured.’” (In other words, you can say our claims are baseless partisanship, but they are not. In fact, your criticisms are baseless, and here’s why.)
  • From Online Journalism Review, Columnist Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post recommending blogs to the mainstream press: “Online, journalists should not conceal their fascination for the topics they cover. They should not hide behind the traditional bland construction of news stories. They should still be fair, of course, but they should also have voice and passion — and sometimes even outrage. There is a risk here that the line between news and opinion may get blurry, but so be it. We should be turning our online journalists into personalities — even celebrities — rather than encouraging them to be as faceless as their print colleagues. The Internet demands voice. (In other words, he said, she said… and I said.)

American journalists underwent a de-voicing when they professionalized themselves in the twentieth century. If they are now to begin re-voicing themselves, that would be a change of major consequence. Reputational capital had been necessary to play in the news game. If you can be a player with almost no capital, that too is a major change, even if, like Brian Stelter, you are a small player on whom bigger players rely. Conclusion-avoiding and offloading judgment to experts and partisans became a craft norm in political journalism— the gods of credibility had decreed it. If there is now more credibility in coming to judgment (when you have the goods) that is a big change, as well. It means new gods are rumbling under the press room.

There is a world of difference between the journalism of the mid-70s, when Watergate entered the imaginary of the press, and the predicament of the professional journalist today. Part of that predicament is how to re-ground journalism after its gravitational shift. This involves the kind of truthtelling authority you decide to seek. Every day another journalist recognizes it. Last week, it was Dan Froomis: “The Internet demands voice.” Today it was Vaughn Ververs, who said his colleagues in the press have not recognized how different the world is for them, and how little they have actually changed.



After Matter: Notes, reactions & links….

Hmmm. PressCourt bills itself as the people’s voice in news coverage. It takes on cases:

Structured like a moderated discussion board with limited posting ability, PressCourt offers those who view, listen or read the news [a chance] to report those who publish for having slanted, twisted or otherwise corrupted the news.

It does not matter if the slant is left, right or backwards. Slanting news stories at all is opinion and opinion has no place in news reporting.

PressCourt will not process complaints for opinion programming. Op-Ed pieces,
opinion shows, debate programs or those that offer opinion are not approved.

News stories that are not intended to be opinion will be processed.

A court…. certainly a new stage in the bias wars. “Freedom of The Press Requires Responsibility. Either Report The News And Not Your Own Agenda, Or You Will Wind Up In Press Court: Where The People Judge.”

Nick Confessore @ the American Prospect’s Tapped comments on this post: “Rosen and Stranahan say—and I agree—that journalism should drop value-neutral ‘he said, she said’ journalism, and actually explain to the reader what is true and not true…. The results will look biased only to those who lie, spin, and deceive the most, and the public will be better served by a press that informs as much as it reports.”

The Washington Post’s ombudsman, Michael Getler, evaluates Milbank and VadeHei’s “From Bush, Unprecedented Negativity.” He has no problems with the article, didn’t like the headline. Here are the thoughts of a Post reader, quoted at length by the ombudsman:

“One of the reasons the administration has been able, for example, to convince the American public of a causal link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, while maintaining that they did not lie, has been the press’s tendency to try and always present two sides to each issue, regardless of how false one of the two points of view is. The press often adopts a credulous ‘he said, she said’ approach rather than investigating the truth of assertions and placing them in context when they present them in print.

“This is not fairness,” this reader continued, “but rather an abdication of the responsibility to make an honest assessment of the facts. Journalism should strive to be unbiased, but it should not simply parrot what it hears, and it should not be afraid to delineate between what it believes to be the truth and what it is told. The tendency to do this has led to the expectation among both readers and journalists that articles critical of one side or another will always have statements that provide balance.”

More

Steve Lovelady, managing editor of Campaign Desk, was bothered by the headline too: “There are no new stories; only new reporters.”

Atlantic Monthly: “There’s another reason campaigns are so quick to employ, and often abuse, negative ads. Unlike Bud Light, which seeks to maximize its public appeal, political campaigns can afford to alienate the more sensitive members of the electorate and are perfectly happy to drive down turnout—as long as they win votes from a plurality of those who do show up.”

Seth Godkin: “So, we come to the moment of truth. Now that anyone who wants to be a journalist CAN be a journalist, are the ethics going to get better… or worse?”

“But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about ‘listening to customers.’ They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.” From a famous document, the ClueTrain Manifesto. Go here for more…

On the Media interview with Dana Milbank from 2002: “I have covered the Clinton administration, I covered the Gore campaign, and in each of those times I would get a certain amount of criticism for being unfair to the guy and each of them assumed that I had a bias. Then they assumed I had a conservative bias. Now they assume I have a liberal bias. I mean my bias is in terms of being a watchdog, of trying to point out what the facts are. The truth is the president has thousands of people to go out there and say he’s a great guy and he’s doing everything terrific. I feel that our job is not to amplify that but to take a critical look at things.”

Posted by Jay Rosen at June 4, 2004 5:49 PM   Print

Comments

After this link was posted here pointing to the 'about' page of presscourt.com a great deal of page views occurred which caused the server's security software to ban the university domain.

That has been taken care of, but it would be nice if the actual domain was used since it will not cause the server to assign the university to the banned list again.

Thank you for the story.

Posted by: Lee Hempfling at June 4, 2004 6:23 PM | Permalink

Perhaps it's the word "unprecedented" that sets people off. I'm not sure what part of negative campaigning could be considered "unprecedented," but it's one of those words that rhetoricians and headline writers love to use.

Posted by: bryan at June 4, 2004 8:56 PM | Permalink

Woo hoo. PressCourt! Let's criminalize bias.

Holy Smokes! Viva transparency. Is MediaWitchHunt.org available?

Man, what a brand!

Posted by: panopticon at June 4, 2004 8:59 PM | Permalink

To the extent that readers truly care about facts -- many don't -- folks embarking on the "we said" part of the formula should start by avoiding subjective language ("unprecedented") in favor of objective language.

For example, don't say the city councilman is "ineffective." Say that he has by far the highest absentee rate on the council, that he has introduced far fewer bills than any other council member and yet has the lowest passage rate of any council member, that dozens of his constituents report calling or writing him and never getting a response, and so on.

That approach won't win over everybody. But it will win over the ones who matter: those to whom facts matter.

Of course, you'll still face accusations of bias over which stories you choose, or choose not, to cover. But I'm going to need another daiquiri before I can come up with a solution to that one. :-)

Posted by: Lex at June 4, 2004 9:44 PM | Permalink

On "willingness to openly draw conclusions when participants in a conflict contest each other's claims." -

One can be willing to draw conclusions, but still fail to inform the reader, either by drawing very broad conclusions ("what a lot of mudslinging the candidates are doing this season, how shameful") or very narrow ones - the latter by using a quota system, taking care to pick one [valid] fault of Faction A to criticize for each [valid] fault you criticize of Faction B, and admonishing both offenders with equal severity. This "equal" treatment preserves the form - and literal fact - of fact-based reporting, while providing minimal utility for the reader and no incentive for either side to improve its behavior.

I could give examples... :-}

Posted by: Anna at June 4, 2004 10:49 PM | Permalink

beleza de blog hein, camaradinha? aqui quem escreve é um brasileiro, e portanto escrevo aqui em português ´talvez alguém me reconheça aqui.
como disse fernanda montenegro: meu inglês é ruim, mas minha alma é melhor.

Posted by: choen at June 5, 2004 12:25 AM | Permalink

Good stuff here, Jay.

What's really happening here is the collapse of journalism's artifical hegemony, objectivity. Whenever we examine issues like these, we must always remember our history. The father of modern journalism was Walter Lippmann. He and his Creel Committee cronies were social engineers, who invented PR as a clever way to manipulate the masses. Lippmann honestly believed the masses were incapable of governing themselves, and that the job belonged to an educated elite. Chris Lasch has noted that the lack of participation in the political process in the U.S. can be directly tied to rise of "professionalization" within the news media.

The people are taking things back, and the Internet is the disruptive innovation enabling it. We have to take a look at the press prior to Lippmann to get an idea of what's ahead. Of course, we won't go all the way "back to the future," because I would hope we've learned a few things since. However, I'd much prefer a transparent, opinionated press to the one we have now.

Frankly, it's an amazing time to be alive.

Terry

Posted by: Terry Heaton at June 5, 2004 12:23 PM | Permalink

It is comments like these (see below) that concern me for the future of reporting credibility: and here is why...

I surely hope the person who wrote these comments is not a journalism major.

When a person first responds with ridicule they fail to think through the object of their disdain. A reporter who fails to think about what is to be written has his or her work resulting in bias without intent. The end result is a story that is slanted without the writer being aware of its perception by readers. The first thing to acquire in the business is a sense of mind: not just being conscious, but being aware of potential outcomes, ramifications, consequence. And those are never more obvious than when a writer places words on paper or monitor intended for another to read that are not written in the reader's perspective, but rather based in a quick response aimed at making a point but only proving the bias of the writer. I don't like run on sentences either. Credibility is the most important reward for journalism. Ridicule is one notch on the dissenter's weapon to destroy your credibility. Don't give them that chance.


Comments referenced: "Woo hoo. PressCourt! Let's criminalize bias. Holy Smokes! Viva transparency. Is MediaWitchHunt.org available? Man, what a brand!"

Posted by: Lee Hempfling at June 5, 2004 12:32 PM | Permalink


I'm so glad to see the media is finally considering "we said" as a valid point of political and other news reporting.

As a science journalist, I have always been infuriated when reporters give equal play to some schmo running a drug program who says he has a "90% success rate" and to 20 peer reviewed studies of similar programs which show that such programs aren't effective and may even be harmful.

Not to give these very different weight (even, to my mind, to mention the un-refereed 90% claim at all) is to say that there's no need to do research or to try to construct such studies so as to get a sense of what really works and what doesn't.

If someone can just say whatever they like with no basis and that will be given equal consideration as an entire, carefully controlled body of literature representing years of work, why try to objectively study anything at all?

In politics, of course, where there are two or more widely varied ways of seeing the world, it's more complicated.

But similar to my analogy above, if one guy's economic statistics are carefully borne out by real data and the other guy has major errors even in his broad estimates, if you give "balance" you are essentially saying that the truth doesn't matter. By doing so, you encourage a race to the bottom to use the most egregious falsehoods and you also encourage policy-making to become entirely divorced from its real world effects.

I think we can see examples of this in the world today and I think the media bears a great deal of responsibility for it. False objectivity takes relativism too far-- sometimes, it's clear that one person is correct and the other is wrong. The media needs to show who is closer to our consensual best guess of the truth and explain why.

Otherwise, those who cry "bias" will be allowed to
let politics drift into a fantasy world where the horse race is all that matters since policy views are conjured from the air anyway.

Posted by: Maia Szalavitz at June 5, 2004 7:36 PM | Permalink

To the owner of presscourt:

Ridicule? No. I was merely admiring the monomanaical intensity with which you extended the "court" metaphor to build a strong brand. Call that ridicule if you will - I call it genius! But you need to cap it off with a strong persona on the site, an equivalent of Judge Wapner or Judge Judy or the King of Hearts.

And you are correct: run-on sentences are a drag. I prefer run-off sentences. Oh my dear paws! Oh my fur and whiskers! I'm late...

Posted by: panopticon at June 5, 2004 9:05 PM | Permalink

To the Chesire;
Open not the door you seek as it shall only show you just how weak the will can be when left to defend what it cannot see and cannot mend.

You mean to tell me that all that rhetoric about credibilty and the lesson of thinking was misdirected? I sit corrected, sir. But if I don't stand for something I will fall for anything. Heard that from some 20th century philosopher somewhere.

Posted by: Lee Hempfling at June 6, 2004 12:31 PM | Permalink

I noticed the Washington Post's ombudsman also picked up on the Vandeihei, Milbank article this sunday, but after a through investigation decided the article was "justified." or some such language.

Posted by: catrina at June 7, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

"Many who rail bias don't know the difference between the editorial page and the news stories."

tangential counterquestion -
What is it about the editorial page that renders it off-bounds to criticism regarding accuracy and fairness, and (AFAIK) invisible to journalists discussing ethical issues?


"I'm so glad the media is finally considering "we said" as a valid point of political and other news reporting."

warning, hyperbole ahead:
We're witnessing the attempted escape of "we said" from enslavement in a den of iniquity, obscurity and manipulation (the editorial pages, where the owner? publisher? editor? holds sway, where a fact can be whatever the writer claims it is, where no comprehension of the news pages' contents is required (as noted here - http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_03_28.php#002780 ) to a cleaner, more well-lit place whose denizens are expected to adhere to ethical principles of accuracy, transparency, and fairness.

This escape attempt is extremely welcome news for the reader. But is it likely that the owner and publisher of most newspapers will allow it to spread?

Posted by: Anna at June 7, 2004 4:10 PM | Permalink

To the extent that a newspaper has readers who trust the "we said" of the editorials to make sense of "he said,she said" (or in any case not "we said") news articles, they can sway enough people to change the course of elections - at least local ones - and thus "install" the government they want.

A lot of people don't read more than one paper regularly, or pay much attention when management (and editorials' trustworthiness) changes. A lot of communities don't have more than one institution covering local news. (And when one newspaper has a near-monopoly, it isn't going to be too aggressive about informing its readers of competitors...)

One afterthought to my previous comment - "is it likely that the owner and publisher of most newspapers will allow [we-said journalism] to spread?" -
"allowing" isn't likely to be the obstacle, it's more likely to be "encouraging" - since hesaidshesaid is much easier and quicker to write, and - for overworked reporters at least - is likely to stay the default, in the absence of pressure to do more.

disclaimer: I am not a journalist, just a reader, observer and complainer.

Posted by: Anna at June 7, 2004 10:57 PM | Permalink

All well and good. But what about instances when we don't even know what "he said," but the press runs with a damaging characterization of what "he (being a politician) said five days before an election. See: http://commonwealthcommonsense.typepad.com/commonwealthcommonsense/2004/06/post_plays_poli.html

Posted by: Bob Griendling at June 8, 2004 11:38 AM | Permalink

A charge of anti-Semitism five days before the election is pretty serious. At least it warrants reporting what the remark was. If there's no remark, no corroboration and the leaking of it was made two months after it was allegedly made, that stinks enough in my book to not run the story.

Posted by: Bob Griendling at June 9, 2004 12:50 PM | Permalink

I believe it was Hunter S. Thompson who said, "Objective Journalism is a pompous contradiction of terms." I tend to agree. Rather than trying so hard to be "objective," or "unbiased" or whatever words we use to perpetuate this fantasy that there is one singular Truth to all events, I think journalists should instead focus on having INFORMED opinions -- actually doing thorough research and making sure their assertions are based on fact, logic and reason. I don't mind informed opinions, but most of what we see today is simply ignorant spouting off or pandering to the target demographic.

It's not the bias of media that bothers me. It's the laziness.

Posted by: Craig Anderson at June 18, 2004 2:06 PM | Permalink

P.S. - I AM a journalist. I work for a daily newspaper in Arizona.

Posted by: Craig Anderson at June 18, 2004 2:12 PM | Permalink

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