Mediactive

More than 4 months since it published an editorial based on a false premise, the Washington Post has neither acknowledged nor corrected its mistake.

Sad, pathetic, among other things…

More than 3 months since it published an editorial based on a false premise, the Washington Post has neither acknowledged nor corrected its mistake.

Disgusting…

More than 10 weeks since it published an editorial based on a false premise, the Washington Post has neither acknowledged nor corrected its mistake.

Then again, the same editorial page routinely publishes op-ed columns that are not truthful. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised when the people who write the unsigned editorials do the same.

In any event, the Post’s refusal to even address this error — I’ve expressed my disgust to the newspaper’s ombudsman, who says the editorial page is off limits for his reviews — is disgraceful.

More than nine weeks since it published an editorial based on a false premise, the Washington Post has neither acknowledged nor corrected its mistake.

Then again, the same editorial page routinely publishes op-ed columns that are not truthful. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised when the people who write the editorials do the same.

UPDATED

Today’s Washington Post editorial pages feature an “op-ed” column entitled Sarah Palin on the politicization of the Copenhagen climate conference. Never mind that the column is full of falsehoods; the Post and most other papers often run letters, op-ed columns and editorials that contain falsehoods. (Sometimes they correct the errors; often they don’t.)

My issue here is with the column’s tagline:

The writer was the 2008 Republican nominee for vice president and governor of Alaska from 2006 to 2009.

Does anyone who understands media and PR really buy this — the notion that Palin wrote the column in question? Of course not.

Op-ed pieces that run under the bylines of famous politicians, celebrities and business people are almost never written by those people, just as they rarely write their autobiographies, even first drafts, by themselves. They don’t have time. Their staffers and PR people research and write the pieces.

Society has a serious blind spot about this kind of thing — and applies a pernicious double standard. If we catch a student paying someone to write his or her paper for a class, we give the student an F. Or, in some cases (like a journalism school), we might even ask the student to leave.

So why do newspaper editors think it’s fine to wink at obvious deception? They could put a stop to the fiction tomorrow, but probably won’t. The continuing lure of “free content,” especially with famous names at the top, is an ingrained habit, however wrong.

Ghost-written op-eds are often compared with speechwriter-written speeches. Since we all know that most famous people don’t write their own lines for speeches, goes this logic, we should assume the same with a byline — whether on a book or an op-ed.

Call me naive, but I’d like to hold journalists to a slightly higher standard. Newspapers have given away enough of their credibility in recent times. Maybe this is a place to regain a little.

UPDATE: A Twitter commenter asked, essentially, what’s the harm if everyone knows it’s happening. First, not everyone does know. Sure, media-savvy people are well aware of the fakery. I’m not certain that everyone takes for granted that these are ghost-written, however.

Again, the point is not that celebrity politicians are going to stop doing this. It’s that newspapers, which should care about little things like credibility, should stop being complicit in the deception. Even if it turns out to be true that everyone knows, it’s still wrong.

More than eight weeks since it ran an editorial based on a false premise, the Washington Post has neither acknowledged nor corrected its mistake. Shameful.

UPDATED

On the front page of Sunday’s print edition and home page of the online edition, the New York Times is clucking about an animation it puts in the category of “Maybe Journalism.” The widely seen video, from a Hong Kong media company, purports to show what transpired between Tiger Woods and his wife in the recent incident that has dominated our celebrity-addled news programming lately.

Here’s the top of the Times’ story, entitled “In Animated Videos, News and Guesswork Mix”:

Welcome to the new world of Maybe Journalism — a best guess at the news as it might well have been, rendered as a video game and built on a bed of pure surmise.

A computer-generated ‘news report’ of the Tiger Woods S.U.V. crash — complete with a robotic-looking simulation of Mr. Woods’s wife chasing him with a golf club — has become a top global online video of the moment, perhaps offering a glimpse at the future of journalism, tabloid division. (No matter that the police said she was using the club to release Mr. Woods from the car.)

The minute-and-a-half-long digitally animated piece was created by Next Media, a Hong Kong-based company with gossipy newspapers in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The video is one of more than 20 the company releases a day, often depicting events that no journalist actually witnessed — and that may not have even occurred.

A glimpse at journalism’s future, tabloid division? How about journalism’s present, in a somewhat different form?

It looks more to me like the latter. Next Media is following in the footsteps of what American journalism has made a trademark, particularly in the book, magazine and tabloid-TV businesses. Modern books about politics and business, in particular, are loaded with direct quotes and minute details of events “no journalist actually witnessed.”

These techniques have a purpose. They’re designed at least as much to capture and hold the attention of print and video audiences as to enlighten them.

I acknowledge that this is a bit of a stretch. I’m emphatically not saying that fly-on-the-wall print accounts, which journalists claim are based on extensive interviews with principals, are close to the same thing as this maybe-it-happened video.

I am saying that when people ask you to trust their depictions of “events that no journalist actually witnessed — and that may not have even occurred,” you take them with a serious grain of salt.

Some of this stuff has been going on for decades. In 1965 Truman Capote called his masterwork — In Cold Blood, about the killing of a Kansas family and the killers’ path to their executions — a “nonfiction novel”. He helped create a new form of literature. He also helped spark the form of journalism that has become so standard now: the fly-on-the-wall pretense that pervades so much of what we see.

Critics later questioned Capote’s motives and methods, and ultimately the basic honesty of the book. But he was honest at least in the sense that he acknowledged that he was writing a novel, and more rigorous as a reporter than a lot of modern journalists even pretend to be. (Norman Mailer also called his brilliant book about a real crime, The Executioner’s Song, a novel.)

The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward is the most famous current practitioner of the nonfiction novel, though he’d undoubtedly insist that his work is pure journalism. I don’t trust a thing he writes, and haven’t for some time.

Woodward’s books are loaded with direct quotations of people he says he interviewed, and some he didn’t. How can you have faith, beyond assuming that he’s telling the truth  when he says he has it right, that it is right? Why should you?

Now everybody, or seemingly everybody, follows the Woodward lead. Novelistic journalism is the order of our times. But I’m convinced it’s one the reasons people have concluded, rationally, that they can’t really believe anything anymore.

Newspapers, too, play the fly-on-the-wall game. Consider what the Times itself did today.

The “Maybe Journalism” piece runs at the bottom of the front page, while at the top is a long story about how President Obama, after long consultations with advisors, reached his decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan. The story is based, says the reporter, on “dozens of interviews with participants as well as a review of notes some of them took during Mr. Obama’s 10 meetings with his national security team. Most of those interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, but their accounts have been matched against those of other participants wherever possible.”

We readers are still being asked to trust the word of people who violated the confidentiality of the White House Situation Room and other internal deliberations. I tend to believe the overall thrust of the story — that Obama and his team struggled mightily with this decision — but I don’t have any faith in most of the particulars, including the anonymously sourced direct quotes of the president and others in the deliberations.

Why is this not, in the words of the story about the Hong Kong animators, “depicting events that no journalist actually witnessed — and that may not have even occurred”?

This isn’t the first draft of history. It’s the first draft of someone’s nonfiction novel on the Obama presidency.

(Disclosure: I own a small number of shares in the New York Times Co. They’re worth a lot less than I paid for them. Updated to make clearer that I’m not equating in any apples-to-apples way the animations and the fly on wall journalism.)

More than seven weeks since it ran an editorial based on a false premise, the Washington Post has neither acknowledged nor corrected its mistake. Shameful.

Michael Gerson, former chief speechwriter for George W. Bush and now one of the Washington Post’s assemblage of conservative columnists, bemoans today what his headline writer calls “journalism’s slow, sad death.” It’s yet another paean to the demise of monopoly/oligopoly media that, at its best, did perform occasional acts of public service. (Like so many pieces of its ilk, the column complains, among other things, that all those bloggers and other Internet news sites are living off the work of actual reporters; but the column contains no actual reporting other than a visit to a museum of journalism.) He writes:

Professional journalism is not like the buggy-whip industry, outdated by economic progress, to be mourned but not missed. This profession has a social value that is currently not reflected in its market value.

It wasn’t economic progress, but technological progress, that did in the buggy-whip industry. Did anyone ever mourn it, much less miss it, other than the people it employed and the communities where they lived?

Journalism’s social value is real. But the social value of the journalism business? Of the professional class of journalists that rose to claim white-collar, insider status and abused it so royally?

I suspect that what Gerson really misses is the subservient lapdog the Washington press corps, with a few honorable institutional exceptions, became during the early part of this decade.  And what, for example, is the social value of his own newspaper’s continuing refusal to acknowledge, much less correct, an egregious error on the editorial page that employs him?

My disgust with American newspapers grows with every such woe-is-us piece. They complain and complain about what we’re losing, and howl at the moon over the flaws of what’s emerging, even as they so often fail at remotely living up to their own proclaimed standards.

In my last posting, “That Hallowed Standard of Accuracy: Oops“, I deconstructed, at perhaps tedious length, a column by a Tennessee editorial page editor, Tom Bohs, who got so many things wrong in a piece that briefly discussed me and my work. The errors included misspelling my name and the name of a university with which I was once affiliated, and those were emblematic of the pure sloppiness and incoherence of the overall piece.

My name and the university’s have been corrected in the online column. But there is not even a hint that anything was wrong before — a correction method that holds ethical transparency in contempt –and none of the other points was addressed.

What kind of standards do these news organizations have? They don’t seem close to the allegedly professional ones Bohs and Gerson claim for their craft’s traditional members.

For years I’ve argued that we need to keep the good things that newspapers and the (vanishingly few) good broadcast journalism outlets do in the course of their work. We do need good journalism, but it’s increasingly clear that we’ll have a lot of it from the new entrants in the digital media ecosystem.

As for the old guard, I’ve just about given up caring. Their organizations are committing slow-motion suicide. Maybe the people left in the business, apart from the few serious innovators, lack the imaginations and/or talent, or are so overworked by corporate bosses that they can’t even try. But I’m not sure anymore what we’d really lose if their organizations all died tomorrow.

(UPDATE: Since I posted this on Nov. 24, the two misspellings in the newspaper column discussed below have been corrected, without a hint (in the online version, anyway) that there was ever a mistake in the first place. The other inaccuracies and questionable information remain in place.)

My heart goes out, at least a little, to Tom Bohs, editorial page editor of the Jackson Sun in Tennessee. He is undoubtedly wishing he’d spent a little more time on a column he published this week.

His piece, entitled “Citizen journalist, pick your beat.” featured some standard, boilerplate stereotypes — such as people with mobile-phone cameras who contribute what they shoot to “real” media organizations like, uh, the Sun — with just the barest effort to acknowledge the enormous variety and in some cases quality of non-traditional offerings that are diversifying the media ecosystem. Overall, the column comes off as yet another semi-informed member of the old guard wishing he could turn back the clock. No big deal.

So why am I feeling some sympathy for Bohs? It’s because of his column’s final four paragraphs, which may well have earned him a spot in the Irony Hall of Fame, or at least the Media Criticism wing.

Bohs wrote:

To give you a little perspective, however, the guy who folks say invented modern citizen journalism is former San Jose Mercury News journalist Dan Gilmour. He was a technology columnist for the newspaper which operates deep in the heart of Silicon Valley. He allegedly wrote the first newspaper online blog. Then he wrote a book about citizen journalism titled ‘We the Media.’ Then he got out of the news business.

I’m not sure what that means. Today, Gilmour runs an operation called the Center for Citizen Media at UC Berkely. I guess he figured with all these citizens running around doing his job, he needed to find a new line of work, teaching them to do his former job – for free.

As the news business continues to evolve at the mercy of technology, citizen journalism is going to play a major role. Here is a simple guideline to help you evaluate what you read on the blogs and forums, chats and tweets. It is a guideline old school journalists still live by: If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.

I hope our new era of citizen journalists adopt the standard, as well.

Oh, my, where to begin…

• I don’t know which folks say I invented modern citizen journalism. I’m not one of them. I’ve definitely been among the many people who’ve worked to help it happen, and to make it as good as possible for everyone involved.
• My last name is spelled Gillmor, not Gilmour.
• I “allegedly wrote the first newspaper online blog”? (Copy editors: All blogs are online.) Not sure what the “allegedly” is all about, except possibly to suggest some faint unseemliness or false claim. Who’s alleged to have said it, anyway? Mine may well have been the first blog by a daily newspaper journalist, but that’s all I’ll claim.
• Aha, a true fact: I did write We the Media.
• No, I didn’t then get out of the news business. I started what turned out to be an ill-fated Bay Area news site, Bayosphere, which was definitely part of the news business. I started the Center for Citizen Media (see below for current status), one of the purposes of which was to help extend the news business. I’ve invested in and/or advised a number of enterprises — some for-profit and some not-for-profit — that have been deeply involved in the news and information sphere. I’ve been a paid speaker or consultant for several newspaper companies, and wrote occasional columns for the Financial Times (which I trust Bohs will concede is part of the real News Business) and still contribute periodically to other publications. My current position at Arizona State University is all about the news business: working with students studying journalism, business and other disciplines to help them create what we hope will be some of tomorrow’s lasting local-information enterprises. I’m more in the news business than I ever was as a columnist for a California newspaper.
• The Center for Citizen Media still exists, but is mostly dormant at this point. It was affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley (that’s Berkeley with an “e” between the “l” and “y”), as well as Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and is now affiliated with Arizona State. I haven’t been affiliated in any way with UC Berkeley for almost two years at this point, though I’m still fond of my former colleagues and students.
• At no point in my work on citizen journalism have I pitched it as a replacement for traditional journalism. From the beginning I’ve said it would be a great addition, in its myriad forms, to the ecosystem, and competitive only in some spaces. I’ve also said, again and again in talks and in public writing, that while I hoped citizens would help traditional news organizations by participating in community journalism, I was and remain flatly opposed to business models that assume citizens are offering nothing but free labor for others to monetize.
• Who’s running around doing my old job as a business and technology journalist? Lots of people, including traditional journalists and online-only creative types whose work has greatly increased the amount and in many cases the quality of tech information. Some bloggers are doing it for little or no money, for lots of reasons — they may be in the business; they may be building their brands; they may just love to cover a small niche — while other online journalists are making serious money at it, building important and well-funded new media organizations. The very last thing I figured when I co-taught a course at Berkeley was that I needed the job because citizen journalists had priced me out of the market. (When Bohs says “I guess”, that’s a point I won’t argue.)
• The news business is clearly being affected by technology. It is not at the mercy of technology. Journalists will continue to do journalism, using the evolving tools of the trade in enterprises that adapt to change, long after newspapers have faded from the scene. The only news people at the utter mercy of technology are the ones who have given up on themselves.

And now we come to Bohs’ stern advice — preceded, to be fair, by an acknowledgment that citizen journalism is here to stay — to all those who need to decide what to make of what they find online. Follow the lead of the pros, he says: Don’t trust it unless you’ve checked it out.

Bohs could have checked out everything he said about me and got so absurdly wrong, even without picking up the phone and calling. He could have used that new-fangled Google thing, where typing in “Dan Gillmor” — or even “Dan Gilmour” — returns links to dangillmor.com (the top one with the correct spelling, third on the list for the one Bohs used), where I lay out in some detail exactly what I’ve been doing for the past few years and am doing now, with links to the blogs where I’ve been saying what I actually believe about journalism and its future, not what other people may claim (or imagine) I’ve said. Even my Wikipedia entry, which has some small inaccuracies, has my current gig listed correctly.

This is why Bohs, who clearly cares about journalism, surely must have had a sinking feeling in his gut last night or this morning when he discovered his mistakes. I hope he’ll turn that into a renewed dedication to the principles in which he says he believes.