Mediactive

Anyone involved in the Twitter world and journalism has surely heard about the Washington Post’s decision to sharply restrict what editorial employees can say online, especially in social networks like Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc.

The newspaper has been ridiculed more than praised. My contribution to the early debate was a Tweet saying that I considered the move to be more proof — as if anyone needed it — that old-line print-journalism people have taken firm control of the Post’s news operation.

The paper’s ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, called yesterday. He’s looking into the situation, and wanted to chat further. I agreed that this deserves more than 140-character microblog posts. Here’s what I sent him this morning by email (expanded somewhat for even more nuance and to generalize beyond solely the Post’s interests):

From my perspective, this is a case of wanting to do the right thing in principle — assuring readers that the journalism they read is being done with the highest attention to honorable practices — but then getting it wrong in practice. While this isn’t a binary, yes/no question, it’s a also case where the principle collides with reality and, in my view, more compelling principles.

There are two issues, one immediate and practical and the other larger and more important, but also murkier.

The immediate one is to what extent the Post, or any other news organization that wants to be relevant in the Digital Age, should participate in social media. The Post seems to have taken the most restrictive possible position. As noted, I think that’s a mistake in a variety of ways.

The larger issue is transparency. I’ll come back to that, but it comes down to something that may sound counter-intuitive: So long as you do excellent journalism, greater transparency will lead readers to believe you less — that is, they’ll understand better why it’s impossible to get everything right all the time — but they’ll trust you more.

Others have done a much better job than I’ll attempt in deconstructing the memo that went out to the staff; Stowe Boyd’s line-by-line analysis, while more harsh than I’d have done, makes the essential points.

The editors’ priestly-vows tone was only one reason some folks ridiculed it, however. So was what lots of us perceived as an unrealistic and ultimately damaging attempt to wall off journalists from participation in real life as a consequence of their work.

Any news organization contemplating such rules has to ask itself, and be prepared to answer, how far up the food chain the rules will travel. In the Post’s case, does this edict apply to Katharine Weymouth, CEO of Washington Post Media and publisher of the paper? To Don Graham, CEO of the parent company? To the advertising salespeople? To Andy Alexander?

The Post’s frown on social interaction has ramifications from the purely practical standpoint that social networks are central to tomorrow’s journalism. Journalism organizations have absolutely no alternative but to participate, in particular in the Post’s case because it’s as much a local newspaper, where conversation is core to the future, as a trade journal for the political class (the latter also has plenty of social networking potential).

The new policy misses that, but the paper still pretends to participate in social networks via semi-official accounts on Facebook, Twitter, et al. But social networks are about being social, and human voice is at the heart of online social interaction. Twitter posts from corporate entities are PR. They have no voice. Strip out voice, and there’s not much point in joining that conversation.

If the Post bosses are really serious about this, by the way, they’ll need to take it further. Consider this from the memo

Post journalists must refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything—including photographs or video—that could be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility. This same caution should be used when joining, following or friending any person or organization online.

Never mind the truly weird equating of racism with religious or political beliefs. I wouldn’t employ anyone who expressed racist views in any capacity, period.

The bigger problem with the policy, as quoted above, is that it only covers online social networks. It doesn’t cover the social network we all have in real life, namely our “analog” contacts with others.

New shut-up orders will surely have to be extended to social interactions at parties, won’t they? Given the increasing (and somewhat disturbing) possibility or even likelihood that someone may be collecting audio or video of what people in public life say or do in public, and given the fact that journalists are players in this public arena, isn’t it now necessary to prohibit journalists from expressing opinions in any setting except, perhaps, at work? (Ask Time magazine’s Joe Klein about this.)

If the Post extends the edict to offline encounters, at logically may have to, the rights of the employees start to sound like the ones at the CIA, which unlike the Post is not an organization that helps the people you serve have a vital conversation about public policy. But it’s inevitably where the paper will have to go if this policy sticks.

Which brings me back to the more important issue of transparency. I’m convinced that it will become one of journalism’s core principles in this new era, right up there with thoroughness, accuracy, fairness and independent thinking. It has to become part of the process, because without it people will have even less reason to trust what journalists do. It will be forced on some organizations that resist; the Post seems likely to be in that camp of resisters, at least for now, because the trend is largely in the wrong direction.

The paper is in good, or at least typical, company. The journalism craft has been almost entirely opaque during the monopoly/oligopoly era of media. Some of the reasons for this made sense, including the legal ones (though lawyers are always too cautious, because that’s their job). Apart from your column and the occasionally revealing remarks people make in the scheduled online chats, the Post is almost completely opaque.

Transparency takes several forms. I strongly believe that news organizations have a duty to explain to their audiences how they do their journalism, and why. Even the organizations that claim to have no world view should be telling people much more about the “how” — though too few do — because they’d help readers/viewers/listeners/etc. understand what it takes to do good journalism, assuming they actually do good journalism. It baffles me that an industry that wants to be perceived as better than the newcomers to the craft doesn’t grasp this, but it clearly doesn’t.

The “why” is more nuanced, especially for big organizations (at least in America). They could take a page from the newcomers.

The best journalistic bloggers are much more open on this; their world views and motivations are typically crystal clear. And their audiences, even people who disagree with those world views, can refract their own understanding of the topics through those lenses.

The response I get when I say these things is typically along these lines: But if journalists say what they think, they’ll call into question their objectivity. I don’t believe in objectivity in the first place. And the public already perceives journalists to be biased, which of course they are — though I don’t believe this is the same as unethical.

I wish that U.S. news organizations would drop the pretense of being impartial and having no world view. There’s no conflict between having a world view and doing great journalism.

When I go to London I buy the Guardian and the Telegraph. Both do excellent journalism. The Guardian covers the world from a slightly left-of-center standpoint, and the Telegraph from a slightly right-of-center stance. I read both and figure I’m triangulating on the essence of (British establishment) reality. Even if I read just one, the paper’s overt frame of reference gives me a better way to understand what’s happening than if it pretended to be impartial. And — crucially — both of them run articles (and lots of op-eds) that either directly challenge their world views or, more routinely, include facts and context that runs contrary to what the editors and proprietors might wish was true. Relentless journalism’s independence of thought means, in particular, being willing or even eager to learn why your core assumptions could be wrong.

The Post had a profoundly obvious world view during the run-up to the Iraq War: pro-administration, pro-war — and it was reflected principally in the fact that the little journalism it did questioning the war rarely if ever made the front page, as opposed to relentless parroting of war-mongering from Bush administration insiders. The evidence is overwhelming, and even Post journalists have admitted as much, though not in those precise words. I’m guessing that the newspaper’s editors, who can be as good as (or better than) anyone else in the field, would have done a better job of covering the opposing views (and facts) if the paper’s world view had been stated as a matter of policy, partly because the best journalists enjoy challenging conventional wisdom even when it’s from their own bosses.

When it comes to individual views and specifics about individual reporters and editors, I grant that this does get a bit more tricky. I’m not suggesting that the Post or anyone else put reporters’ tax returns online. But I would suggest that when something they are, or believe, might be relevant to a reader that it’s OK, and maybe important, to let the reader know. (A religion reporters’ faith, as in what religion or sect he follows (or absence of faith, for that matter) seems relevant to me.)

And I’d strongly suggest that while a random opinion or quip might be bothersome, letting journalists be human beings would have a better outcome in the end. Telling staff to hide all opinions doesn’t cause readers to trust you more. It tells them you’re hiding something, because they aren’t stupid.

The principle behind the Post’s social media policy is based on instincts derived from the 20th century monopoly/oligopoly business model. The wishful thinking it represents is unfortunate. It’s not going to work in the end, and in the meantime one of the world’s great news organizations will be losing ground that will be harder and harder to make up.

(“See no evil” picture by Rose Davies via Flickr)

The context was very different, but the words of Shakespeare in Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5, foretold what mainstream news in America has become: mediastorms of tales told by idiots, full sound and fury, signifying nothing.

In a Q&A on Tuesday at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, President Obama cautioned a group of 9th graders to be careful of what they post online. He was too cautious by half.

The question was from a student who wanted to be president some day and asked for advice on career paths. According to the White House transcript, he said, in the first of what he called “practical tips” for ambitious young people:

I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook — because in the YouTube age, whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life. And when you’re young, you make mistakes and you do some stupid stuff. And I’ve been hearing a lot about young people who — you know, they’re posting stuff on Facebook, and then suddenly they go apply for a job and somebody has done a search and — so that’s some practical political advice for you right there.

The president may have been right about this in today’s world. I hope he’s wrong in tomorrow’s. Let’s unpack what he said to see why.

It’s absolutely true that young people make mistakes and do stupid things. Anyone who doesn’t commit youthful stupidities is either inhuman or stunningly boring and inconsequential. Who wants someone like that to be in charge of anything as an adult? Not me.

But it doesn’t follow, as the president suggested, that posting weird (to older people) things on the Web — in blogs, social networks and the like — should be an automatic turnoff or disqualification for a responsible job later on. The notion of punishing someone decades later for what he or she said or did as a teenager or college student just feels wrong to me.

A journalism student where I teach recently asked if it was advisable to have a personal blog or, if so, to be outspoken on it. He’d apparently been warned that it could put a crimp in his future journalism career plans.

I can’t say how others would react. I do know that if I were hiring someone today I’d want to know what (not if) he or she posted online, not to find disqualifying factors but to see if this is an interesting person. I’d take for granted that I might find some things that were risque or inappropriate for my current world. I’d expect to find things that would be “unjournalistic” in some ways, such as outspoken or foolish (or both) views on important people and issues. But I’d also remember my own ability, if not tendency, to be an idiot when I was that age. And I’d discount appropriately.

This is all about giving people what my friend Esther Dyson has called a “statute of limitations on stupidity.” If we don’t all start cutting each other more slack in this increasingly transparent (often by our own choice) society, we’ll only allow drones into positions of authority. Now that’s really scary.

We’re making progress, probably more than Obama gives us credit for. Recall that it was impossible for a Catholic to be president, until John F. Kennedy was elected. It was impossible for a divorced person to be elected until Ronald Reagan won. It was impossible for a former pot smoker to be president until Bill Clinton (who bizarrely claimed not to have inhaled) got elected. And so on.

How we make these judgements is neither clear nor simple. Robert McDonnell, a candidate for governor in Virginia, is taking hits for a 20-year-old master’s thesis in which he denounced programs that encouraged women to work outside the home and said working women were bad for families. He wants voters to ignore all this and concentrate on what he says are his positions now.

McDonnell deserves some slack, too, but he wrote the thesis when he was in his mid-30s, not his early 20s or younger. His record as a legislator since then has been extremely conservative, as well. What he said two decades ago is obviously more relevant, given the circumstances, than what a student posts on a high-school Facebook page today.

In the foreseeable future, we’ll elect a president who had blog or Facebook wall or MySpace page when she was a teenager and college student. By the standards of today she’ll be utterly disqualified for any serious political job. But because we’ll have grown as a society, not just more tolerant of flaws but understanding that we all have feet of clay in some respect, we’ll elect her anyway, because we’ll realize that the person she became — and how that happened — is what counts.

Eric Boehlert at Media Matters for America has pulled a horrifying (if you care about journalism) quote from an ABC News online report. In a post entitled “With one simple sentence, ABC News confirms the death of Beltway journalism,” Boehlert notes this line from ABC’s Dan Harris:

“While the media loves a good fight — even when the charges are unfounded — there may be more to conservatives’ complaints that play into larger concerns about the president on health care reform.”

One word: Yike.

It’s easy, and appropriate, to feel gloom mixed with contempt at the way some right-wing flamethrowers, abetted by mass media’s love of conflict, have turned President Obama’s webcast to the nation’s schoolchildren into a new socialist manifesto. They cherry-picked an innocuous idea from a lesson plan — the president asking kids to help him do his job better — and claimed it was radical ideology.

The Obama critics do have one thing right, though they don’t seem clear on the concept. They’re skeptical of what people in authority say. In this case skepticism has morphed into paranoia, as they claim children watching the talk could be indoctrinated by an authority figure who, in their view, is wrong on policy and morality.

Attempting to prevent children from hearing the president’s words is not just foolish, but counterproductive. I’m betting this has backfired, given kids’ tendency to seek out what adults tell them to stay away from.

The administration seems to believe that if all the information on a given issue is on the table — or in this case, on the Web — then the truth, or at least their version of it, will win out. (The president announced on Friday that with certain exceptions, the names of visitors to the White House would be posted for all to see). For all his modern impulses, President Obama’s press operation seems mired in a high school civics debate version of governance, where points are given for logic and argument.

That is not how the media works, however, in an environment that prizes engagement and conflict. The long town-hall process over health care, for example, has given ordinary citizens a voice but it has also produced hundreds of video clips of angry, scared Americans. For every aging secretary who can’t afford prescriptions, there is a small business owner who wants less government in their life, not more. Tropes like “death panels” may lack substance, but they make for pretty compelling viewing day after day.

In part, the outrage and hyperbole work because the mainstream media, insecure about their own status in an atomizing world, play into the tyranny of split-screen coverage where almost any claim — no matter how outlandish — becomes one side in “an interesting debate.” When not listening to talking heads, the traditional news outlets go to great efforts to get a microphone on vox populi. If the people, even if it is some unknown number, are hopping mad, we don’t want to be the last to tell you about it.

Bingo. Too bad Carr doesn’t take his own logic to a logical conclusion. He merely notes “how the media works” but doesn’t even suggest that journalists who cover these issues bear any responsibility for their preference to feed the lie machine instead of counter it. Oh, there have been a few stories pointing out the fundamental unreality on which the protests have been based, but vastly more on the protests themselves.

The most important concept, which Carr misses, is the one the media have abandoned in recent times: responsibility. Look again at the White House graphic at the top of this piece. The president is urging students “to take responsibility for their educations” because all the good teaching and parenting won’t be enough if the students themselves don’t care.

We share responsibility for knowing what we’re talking about. The traditional media’s unwillingness to help — part of its general collapse — means that, more and more, it’s up to the rest of us to figure things out for ourselves.

UPDATED

At Time magazine’s Swampland blog, Joe Klein has posted an astonishing attack on Salon’s Glenn Greenwald. He starts:

Twice in the past month, my private communications have been splashed about the internet. That such a thing would happen is unfortunate, and dishonorable, but sadly inevitable, I suppose. I ignored the first case, in which a rather pathetic woman acolyte of Greenwald’s published a hyperbolic account of a conversation I had with her at a beach picnic on Cape Cod. Now, Greenwald himself has published private emails of mine that were part of a conversation taking place on a list-serve. In one of those emails, I say that Greenwald “cares not a whit for America’s national security.”

The commenters below Klein’s rant, and Greenwald himself, do a more than adequate job of refuting the factual misstatements and showing why, in fact, Klein deserves what he’s been getting in the way of criticism. He’s a good writer and frequently an astute commentator, but he has committed serious journalistic malpractice, backed by editors who refuse to honorably admit their own gross errors; they’re part of a Beltway media culture that has so often in recent years disgraced the craft.

The post I’ve cited above betrays quaint notions of what is private in today’s world. And it’s an almost perfect illustration of how not to conduct a conversation in which basic issues are in dispute.

Let’s begin by examining Klein’s definition of “private communications.” If they were truly private, it would indeed be unfortunate, even dishonorable, if they’d been exposed. But they weren’t really private at all.

The most baffling notion in Klein’s post is that his posts to the “JournoList,” a mailing list of at least several hundred influential “journalists, bloggers and policy wonks” are, or even should be, equivalent to “private emails.” This is ludicrous on at least two levels.

First, even a closed mail list is a long way from one-to-one emails, which have the illusion of privacy but, as anyone the least bit familiar with computer security understands, are too easily subject to surveillance. A mail list of 20 people might — might — stay with just those people. The JournoList is going to suffer leaks. Period.

I’m on, and have been a member of, several mail lists. I do not assume for a second that anything I write there is private. In fact, I assume the precise opposite: that anything I say online in even a semi-public forum is likely to make its way to anyone else. You should assume the same thing. Period.

Second, the JList, as the insiders (I’m not one) call it, testifies to the fundamental seaminess of Washington’s journalistic culture. Its members — power players in American political life — are using it to thrash out what they believe. Policies and journalism may well be influenced by what they discuss there. If the insider-participant journalists weren’t so compromised by their presence on the list, some of them (one hopes) would be doing their best to expose what’s being said there. I would nominate for a Pulitzer Prize any journalist who got ahold of JList archives and published, along with the archives themselves, a thorough analysis of how/whether its members’ postings had influenced policy and public understanding.

The question gets murkier when we think about where to draw the line in what’s private, or should be. If the members of JList debated each other over bar stools, wouldn’t that be a different issue? Yes, and no, and that gets to the other part of Klein’s whine.

Klein cites the public recounting of a conversation held in the middle of a Cape Cod party, and this is a much closer call. (Here’s the woman’s post about their conversation; Klein hasn’t disputed the substance of what she wrote, and he definitely hasn’t answered the important questions she raised, such as her request that he name names when accusing prominent Democrats of hating America.)

You can make a good argument that party talk — at most a semi-public venue — deserves some leeway. I’m deeply ambivalent about the idea that people would post their recollections of what I’d said at a party (including the possibility or probability that both people in our the conversation had been drinking, and what that might mean as to the reliability of the recounting; NOTE: THIS IN NO WAY REFERS TO THE CONVERSATION INVOLVING KLEIN ON CAPE COD).

As noted, Klein is a public figure who cultivates a public following. He was holding forth at a party in a public place about his beliefs — including in this case his vitriol for another person who has gone after him about the work he does for a huge audience. Is he really so naive to the reality of blogging and mobile-phone cameras that he couldn’t imagine that some element of his ranting wouldn’t escape from this well-attended party into the public sphere?

Again, not only will such things emerge, but in some cases they should. If a politician or powerful business person started ranting at a party in this way, about matters such a person could influence, (real) journalists would consider that news. Why, then, when powerful journalists are the ones doing the ranting, are their statements unworthy of public attention?

Even public figures, deeply flawed journalists and hypocrites deserve some privacy, however. I don’t want to see us recording everything we hear in every setting; that would be poison to the kinds of conversations we all need to have, especially the kinds of conversations where we give ourselves the essential freedom to say stupid things that a wise friend or colleague can shoot down. We all say and do stupid things all the time, and a society that made us too cautious would be a deadened one.

Klein’s distress over the reporting of his outburst at the Cape Cod party is understandable, then, even if it’s hypocritical and ultimately unworthy of too much sympathy. In the end, we all might be better off he’d been cut some slack in this particular case. What the blogger reported came as no surprise to anyone who was following Klein’s work; I just wish she’d found a way to confront him in a place that everyone would consider entirely public.

UPDATE: Aimai, the blogger in question, strongly disagrees with me in the comments. She’s not the only one who thinks I’m wrong about this.

***

However mistaken Klein’s view of privacy may be, he’s clearly clueless about another element of discourse, online or not.

You can never win a debate — at least not any debate that I pay attention to — by resorting to ad hominum insults. If everyone adopted this tenet, we might all be better informed.

Klein’s reference to what he terms Greenwald’s “rather pathetic woman acolyte” at the Cape Cod party is a tip-off that the facts are probably not on his side. But Klein reserves his most vehement insults for Greenwald, and in the process costs himself credibility.

When you read someone else’s mind and declare that the other person doesn’t care about national security, for example, you are engaging in something indefensible. You are implying that the other person is, let’s put this bluntly, a traitor who welcomes terrorist attacks on our nation. If Klein has evidence of this he should produce it or apologize; do not hold your breath.

And when Klein calls Greenwald a bully, that’s rich. It’s Klein who commands the podium at one of America’s biggest media companies, while Greenwald writes for a well-respected but relatively tiny online publication.

Greenwald is extremely tough on the people he criticizes, but he marshals enormous amounts of evidence for what he writes. He also has an occasional tendency toward shrillness, which I believe (from my own mistakes in this regard in the past) can be a distraction from the facts and conclusions he’s posting.

But Greenwald has gone way, way out on a journalistic limb — itself a sad commentary on the state of journalism in recent times — to champion the Constitution of the United States and the liberties that have helped make us a strong nation. By any standard I can name, preserving liberty is an essential part of national security. Greenwald, in my view, is more patriotic than the people who’d shred the Bill of Rights to create an illusion of security.

Klein’s ugly and evidence-thin invective demeans him and what he claims to believe, far more than anything it says about Greenwald. He’d be wise to use his platform to argue the issues — if he has arguments that genuinely hold up. In too many cases, he hasn’t, maybe because he doesn’t have the best of the debate.

This is just weird: a conference called Audience.

There’s a reference on the About page to “engage”-ment with the audience, but the real thrust is ” the bedrock of reaching, addressing and influencing an audience of some kind.”

It might have been more interesting 30 years ago.

Here we go again — a new attack on anonymous speech, misusing the facts ripped from the current headlines about a case of one person’s slimy online attacks on another. So, as what Maureen Dowd today called the “Case of the Blond Model and the Malicious Blogger” gains publicity steam, Dowd and too many other commentators seem to be missing some key points and drawing the wrong lessons.

To refresh your memory, if you haven’t heard about it, this case involves Liskula Cohen, a model who was on the receiving end of some vile comments next to suggestive pictures, posted under a pseudonym on one of gazillions of such blogs at Google’s Blogger service. Cohen’s lawyer persuaded a judge that the posts were arguably defamatory, and the judge ordered Google to turn over the email address and other logged information it had about the blogger. The company, after first denying Cohen’s request and saying she’d need a court order, then complied and handed over the information. The data trail led back to a Cohen acquaintance named Rosemary Port. Cohen, in a demonstration of her own better instincts, said she would forgive Port instead of suing her.

That’s where this nasty little incident might have ended. Unfortunately it appears to be heading off in new directions.

Port says she’s going to sue Google, arguing that she had a right to confidentiality. Give me a break. I’m a privacy nut, but I believe Google did exactly the right thing in this instance, in part because it obeyed a clear order from a judge who also did the right thing.

No one can dispute that we have a category of human slime that uses online anonymity (or, usually more accurately, pseudonymity) to attack other people. These people, classic cowards, hide behind the virtual bushes to take potshots, and they do so with the ugliest kind of satisfaction.

But as Cohen’s case shows — the postings about her weren’t even close to being the worst material I’ve seen from anonymous sources –  online media creators aren’t exempt  from defamation laws, though it may take more effort to find out who they are. The judge in New York, Joan A. Madden, looked at the facts and, in my view, correctly decided that Port’s blog postings were sufficiently crude to justify Cohen’s plans to file a defamation lawsuit — not that they were absolutely defamatory, but that they were within the ballpark that could justify letting a jury decide.

Port, for her part, told reporters that almost no one would have known about her sleazy behavior had Cohen not gone to court in the first place and had Google not turned her name over. Talk about twisted logic. Cohen, and most likely some of their mutual acquaintances, knew about it. And the likelihood, given the Internet’s staying power, is that at least some others would have seen Port’s remarks, too. Let’s hope the courts toss any lawsuit from Port into the nearest trash can.

But, as sometimes happens, the larger case is growing, in part due to the large amount of attention it’s received from media of all varieties — newspapers, TV, radio and, of course, blogs. It’s turning into a morality play that could have a real impact on the issue of anonymity. If that impact comes in the form of helping us to establish new norms of behavior, great. If it turns into new laws, watch out.

One of the norms we’d be wise to establish is this: People who don’t stand behind their words deserve, in almost every case, no respect for what they say. In many cases, anonymity is a hiding place that harbors cowardice, not honor. The more we can encourage people to use their real names, the better. But if we try to force this, we’ll create more trouble than we fix.

People who’d ban anonymity don’t seem to realize that it’s technically impossible unless we’re willing to turn over all of our communications in every venue to a central authority — a system that would herald the end of liberty. They can’t really want such a regime, can they? Meanwhile, even that kind of structure could and would be hacked by motivated types, though with more difficulty.

Moreover, anonymity has crucially important value. We need it for whistleblowers, for political dissidents in dictatorships — for those who have important stories to tell but whose lives or livelihoods would be in jeopardy if their identities were exposed.

In other words, to save the heroes who tell us about vital matters, we have to recognize that we’ll also have people who use free speech to ignoble ends. When they cross the line to defamation, they deserve the woes they may bring on themselves.

But we don’t want, in the end, to turn everything over to the lawyers. The rest of us — the audience, if you will — need to establish some new norms as well.

We are far too prone to accepting what we see and hear. We need to readjust our internal BS meters in a media-saturated age.

So start with this principle: When you read or hear an anonymous or pseudonymous attack on someone else, you should not just assume — barring persuasive evidence of the charge — that it’s false. Assume that the accuser is an outright, contemptible liar.

This wouldn’t solve the problem. But it would help.

Inadequate journalism often leads to worse journalism. A case in point is Wired.com’s follow-up on a dubious Wall Street Journal story about alleged “deep packet inspection” (DPI) — an invasive digital surveillance method — on Iran’s mobile-Internet users.

Here’s how the Wired Threat Level blog posting, “Deep-Packet Inspection in U.S. Scrutinized Following Iran Surveillance,” begins:

Following a report last week that Iran is spying on domestic internet users with western-supplied technology, advocacy groups are pressuring federal lawmakers to scrutinize the use of the same technology in the U.S.

The Open Internet Coalition sent a letter to all members of the House and Senate urging them to launch hearings aimed at examining and possibly regulating the so-called deep-packet inspection technology.

Two senators also announced plans to introduce a bill that would bar foreign companies that sell IT technology to Iran from obtaining U.S. government contracts, legislation that is clearly aimed at the two European companies that reportedly sold the equipment to Iran.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Nokia Siemens Networks, a joint venture between Germany’s Siemens and Finland’s Nokia, recently gave Iran deep-packet inspection equipment that would allow the government to spy on internet users.

According to the Journal, Iranian officials have used deep-packet surveillance to snoop on the content of e-mail, VoIP calls and other online communication as well as track users’ other online activity, such as uploading videos to YouTube. Iranian officials are said to be using it to monitor activists engaged in protests over the country’s recent disputed presidential election, though the Journal said it couldn’t confirm whether Iran was using the Nokia Siemens Networks equipment for this purpose or equipment from another maker.

Nokia Siemens has denied that it provided Iran with such technology.

But similar technology is being installed at ISPs in the U.S.

The piece goes on at some length to discuss the reasonable concern about the threat posed by deep-packet inspection by ISPs, acting on their own initiative or for government-mandated surveillance.

But wait. The Journal’s weasel-worded original story itself (buried far down in the piece) acknowledges that the DPI may not be happening at all, at least not in the way the story strongly suggests or by the company it implicates. Read David Isenberg’s detailed explanations (here, here) to understand why the Journal story is so problematic.

Consider the sequence in the Wired follow-up:

1. Cite the Journal story and describe its contents with no hint that credible outside observers, such as Isenberg (a friend of mine), have major questions about its accuracy.

2. Add a sentence saying that the company accused of providing the gear to the Iran dictators flatly denies the report. (Don’t bother to mention that the only named source in the original Journal piece loudly denounced it on his own blog.)

3. Then pivot: Talk about US companies that are installing DPI equipment at ISPs, as if this proves the original point.

If Wired wanted to write about American ISPs using DPI — a topic that deserves wide attention — it shouldn’t peg the story to a Journal report that is so open to question, at least not without noting that people who understand the technology have raised serious questions about it.

Iran’s dictators are a murderous bunch; I have no doubt about that. Nor is there doubt that western telecom companies are selling dictators surveillance tools; they’ve been doing it for years — and in my view they are morally culpable in the misuse of those technologies. In the matter at hand, we don’t know for sure what’s going on.

For what it’s worth, I consider Wired’s Threat Level to be a normally credible and well-reported blog. But journalists should try harder to be careful on matters like this. Sloppiness in these circumstances can undermine our trust in everything else they report.

David Weinberger live-blogged my recent talk at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society: “Dan Gillmor on journalism supply and demand.“

Here’s a webcast, if you have the time to sit through it.

We also did a Radio Bergman podcast chat, which captured many of the salient points.