Mediactive

Politico, the website devoted to all things political, almost certainly got pwned by scam artists Friday when it posted an unverified memo — a probable hoax — about health care. It’s an embarrassment for journalists who fall for fakery, but these kinds of things do happen.

What doesn’t usually happen is how Politico dealt with its inadequate journalism. And the case brought back memories of another, more significant mess: the “Rathergate” affair of 2004; more on that below.

It’s obvious, if you read the non mea culpa posted by Political’s White House editor, Craig Gordon, that his organization didn’t check the memo’s authenticity before putting it online, and only pulled it down after Democrats complained. But instead simply apologizing forthrightly, he basically said a) Politico now couldn’t verify anything about the memo’s authenticity; b) but it seemed real (as if that’s an excuse; c) and besides, the Democrats were probably doing what the memo said they were doing anyway.

Then comes his conclusion, a howler for a journalist:

“In the end, POLITICO followed an old rule-of-thumb in journalism in taking down the memo: when in doubt, leave it out. By day’s end, it was still impossible to tell exactly what’s the real story behind the memo. But in the next few months, when Democrats try to pass a multi-billion-dollar ‘doc fix,’ maybe that will shed a little light on the Democrats’ real intentions.”

Except that “leave it out” is not synonymous with “publish it and then take it down if we learn later that we can’t verify its authenticity” — or is this the news standard for news organizations boasting a co-founder who serves on the Pulitzer Prize governing board?

The standard Politico has applied here, is, of course, “truthiness”: Because they want it to be true, it’s close enough.

To be more fair to Politico than the publication may deserve, the memo seemed to many others like something some Democratic aide, somewhere in Washington, might have written, perhaps as a draft. This helps explain why so many journalists took the bait and became part of the vast spin machine that so defines our nation’s political press.

As Talking Points Memo’s Christina Bellantoni reports, the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder had the honor to apologize for posting without checking. The Hill, a publication with apparently more traditional principles, got the memo but decided not to run it at all.

Remember, just a few years ago the journalism and political worlds went appropriately berserk when CBS’ 60 Minutes II team ran a story about George W. Bush’s “service” in the Air National Guard. The report was based, in part on memoranda that CBS not only couldn’t prove were authentic but which were at best highly questionable as to their authenticity. The journalism was awful; CBS and its people took a deserved hit to their reputations. Sadly — and I use that word partly because the journalists involved had long and outstanding records for doing great work — the people who made the mistakes held fast to the notion that they’d done nothing wrong.

It’s obvious, based on the verifiable record, that Bush got strings pulled to avoid Vietnam service and then all but ducked out on his duty. And it may turn out that some Democrat’s fingerprints are on the health care memo. In both cases, the journalism was lacking, and the journalists’ response even more so.

Politico is widely considered a new gold standard of political reporting. That worries me.

UPDATED

NY Times Public Editor: The Olympics? Don’t Tell Me: “‘Could you please ask the editor of the front Web page to not name the winners within the headlines/sub-headlines?’ asked Ken Waters of Phoenix. Matt Gooch of Harrisonburg, Va. said he was disappointed when The Times reported the results of the men’s downhill before NBC showed the event. ‘This is not Taliban news, nor TARP news, or even Paula Jones type news,’ Gooch said. ‘There is no meaning to this except the anticipation and suspense that sports viewers feel watching the event live. Please help me understand why your organization needs to spoil the experience.’”

Good. Grief.

The fact that the ombudsman of the New York Times needs to explain to readers why his newspaper reports actual news as it happens — and Olympic results are actual news — is a depressing commentary on our nation’s entertainment-driven culture.

NBC bought U.S. TV rights to the Olympics, and NBC has chosen not to present live coverage. It wants to put the high-profile events on at night in the U.S. when it can score the biggest audience. It’s entirely about money, as the Olympics are in a general sense at this point.

But to suggest that real news organizations should defer to NBC’s greed is beyond idiotic. It’s pathetic.

Mr. Waters of Phoenix and Mr. Gooch of Harrisonburg, and others like them, need remedial education in at least three respects. First, they need to understand that news organizations are in business to report news. Second, no one is forcing them to look at the Times website in the first place.

And, third, remember: The spoiler here is NBC, which wants you to live in a fantasy world. Blame the entertainment moguls there, not real journalists, if you learn who won an event before NBC deigns to show it on TV.

Any news organization holding back on news because entertainment consumers want to live in their fantasy worlds deserves utter contempt. As a (very small) shareholder in the New York Times Co., I’m glad to see that America’s best newspaper has the right standards in this regard.

UPDATE: Several commenters have defended the notion that news organizations have some kind of duty to hold back their reports or put reports on pages where news viewers won’t have to see the reports. One commenter, who says he’s a journalism school graduate, even suggested a “civic function” in such a method. This is head-slappingly strange logic (as I responded):

To suggest there’s some kind of civic function in asking news organizations to withhold breaking news of an entertainment event (I agree the Olympics are entertainment more than anything else) is bizarre. There is no civic value in two corporate media giants colluding to help one of them make enough money to justify its overpayment for TV rights. NBC has absolutely no interest in performing a civic function; its entire motivation is the bottom line.

Your idea of “timeliness” is equally odd. No one is preventing you from structuring your news the way you want to. If you prefer not to learn about news events until later in the day, or tomorrow or next week, you have an easy way of doing this: Don’t read, listen to or watch news reports until you’re ready to learn what’s happened. You will also need to stay away from the water cooler and conversations with friends and colleagues who don’t share your desire to learn about the outcome of ski races only when a giant media corporation deems it most profitable.

I watched the skiing last night on NBC. The network severely edited the race, ignoring the runs of roughly half of the top seed (first 15 racers) because the women crashed or were otherwise deemed uninteresting to the American audience by the NBC entertainment editors. It inserted a vast number of commercials into what little of the event it decided to broadcast. This is the civic virtue you want to reward? Please.

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

Rupert Murdoch’s influence on the Wall Street Journal has not been the disaster many feared it would be when News Corp., the company he controls, bought Dow Jones several years ago. In many ways, the paper has actually improved.

The worry was that Murdoch would do what he’s done at almost every other media property he controls: Turn the journalism toward political ends. The Journal’s editorial page has been an entirely predictable arm of the American political right for some time now. Would that infect the news columns as well?

It appears that this is indeed happening. That’s the significance — assuming this is not a one-time case of an editor going overboard — of a news story in yesterday’s paper, which carried the headline, State Death Taxes Are the Latest Worry and began this way:

With the federal estate tax disappearing for most people, state death taxes have emerged as a surprise new worry.

This is not neutral language. Nor is it accurate. It’s a deliberate perversion of language to make a political point; dead people do not pay taxes. Their estates and heirs do.

(The people who oppose estate/inheritance taxes have a variety of arguments against the practice. I side with Bill Gates Sr., Warren Buffett, several Rockefellers and lots of other people who believe the arguments against the tax are specious and, more than that, dangerous to the nation’s future should massive, untaxed transfers of wealth to people who haven’t earned a dime of it become the law of the land.)

The Journal’s editorial page has called the estate tax a “death tax” for years, in keeping with its wealth-equals-good stance on just about all issues. Moving this language to the news pages is a sign that the newspaper is taking on a more overt world view — a view that takes its lead from the truth-be-damned ideologues on the editorial page.

I don’t mind that the Journal is doing this, though I suspect more than a few of the journalists who write for the paper must be having major qualms. In fact, it strikes me as healthy that the paper is showing its world view in such a deliberate way.

There are risks for News Corp. in taking this stance, not least a repeat of the self-marginalization that Fox “News” has chosen with its incessant BS, to the point that no one who cares about honest journalism has much respect for the channel. Fox has thrown away any reputation it might have had for being even remotely interested in contrary facts, because even its supposed straight news reporting so often takes a political stance and the lies of the commentators are so astonishingly in-your-face.

The greater risk, in the short run, is whether the Journal’s journalists will let themselves be turned into propagandists. This need not be the case.

The Telegraph in London has a right-of-center view of the world, proudly so, even in its news pages. But its journalism is generally excellent, rarely (from my reading, at any rate) propaganda.

I’m all for the Wall Street Journal turning itself into an American equivalent of the Telegraph: a responsible news organization with a transparent world view. But should the Journal turn itself into a newspaper/Web version of its Fox TV channel, it will be making a fatal mistake in the long run.

(Note: These are first impressions, and I’ll be updating this posting.)

The Federal Trade Commission noticed a while back that marketers of brands, products and ideas have used new media in some incredibly dishonest ways. These include paying people or giving them freebies in return for positive mentions and not requiring (or even encouraging) them to disclose that they’re being compensated.

So with laudable goals, the commission issued a document (390k pdf) aimed at better disclosure — with penalties of up to $11,000 in fines for violations. Basically, the FTC is saying that if you have a “material connection” to a product or service you’re praising, you are an endorser who must disclose that connection.

Sounds good, doesn’t it. But when you read the FTC’s ruling, published today, you get the sense of a government-gone-wild travesty. Why?

First, the new system is unworkable in practice, which is bad enough. Worse, the rules are worryingly vague and wide-ranging. Worse yet, they appear to give traditional print and broadcast journalists a pass while applying harsh regulations to bloggers (and others using conversational media of various kinds). Worst and most important, they are, in the end, an attack on markets and free speech, based on a 20th Century notion of media and advertising that simply doesn’t map to the new era.

The advertising of the past was a one-to-many system. Call it broadcasting. The Internet is a many-to-many system. Call that conversation. They are not the same.

The FTC would deal with this essentially by throwing sand into the gears of online conversations. The rules are explained through examples — which means that almost no one can be sure that what he or she is doing, at least at the margins, is allowed or forbidden.

Here’s an example of the practical unworkability of what the FTC demands.

I disclose my various affiliations with companies when I do blog posts relating to them (or at least I try; I don’t doubt that I’ve forgotten to do this from time to time). And I have a long “About” page that includes my various financial and other interests. That page notes, among other things, that Google has loaned me a bunch of Android phones to use with students for experiments.

I’ve posted a number of Twitter tweets about Android, including my preference for that environment than Apple’s restricted system. Where, exactly — in a post with a total length of 140 characters — should the disclosure go? Has the FTC, for all practical purposes, just forbidden all positive comments about products and services on Twitter when the person doing the posting has a relationship of any kind with the company? Do I want to be the FTC’s guinea pig in a lawsuit where the world works this out?

And what about the extremely common practices of traditional media? Every news organization covering technology gets freebies by the container-load. Book reviewers’ offices overflow with volumes sent by publishers. Subsidized or even complimentary travel, food and other things of this sort are common but too-rarely disclosed.

The answer is transparency. But do I want the feds enforcing it, especially when their rules can be interpreted narrowly or widely, depending on the circumstance?

Again, let’s be clear that the motives behind the FTC’s rules seem to be well-intentioned. I also loathe the odious practice of using bloggers and other online conversationalists as commercial sock puppets in a sleazy online word-of-mouth operation. Let’s also agree that disclosures are always better than hiding one’s affiliation with a company.

We already have laws against fraud. Let’s enforce those — first against the serious fraudsters, who keep getting away with it — before we even consider harsh regulations on speech.

We all want more transparency. I don’t see this as the right way to get it.

But I do predict one outcome of this FTC action: a slew of court cases. This is a full employment act for First Amendment lawyers, who have better things to do.

Note: Sam Bayard, assistant director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society (disclosure: I’m a co-founder of the project), corrected me on my initial language, in which I called today’s document “revised rules” from the FTC. He writes:

They are non-binding guidelines meant to help advertisers, bloggers etc comply with the FTC Act:

“The Guides are administrative interpretations of the law intended to help advertisers comply with the Federal Trade Commission Act; they are not binding law themselves. In any law enforcement action challenging the allegedly deceptive use of testimonials or endorsements, the Commission would have the burden of proving that the challenged conduct violates the FTC Act.” (from FTC press release today).

As a matter of substance, you’re right that they will have much the same effect as rules because one would have to face an enforcement action by the FTC to challenge them — not a pretty prospect at all. And their status as guidelines doesn’t lessen your concerns with practical workability, vagueness, and lopsidedness because the FTC will use them itself as guidelines for when to pursue investigations and bring enforcement actions.

I’ll be updating as I learn more. Meanwhile, for more reactions, take a look at some of these postings:

• Jeff Jarvis: FTC Regulates Our Speech

• ReadWriteWeb: FTC to Bloggers: Disclose Freebies or Face $11,000 Fine
• MediaBistro: Transparency is Key
• Edward Champion interviews FTC official in charge of this. One word: Wow (and not in a good way).

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)