Mediactive

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.)

The photo at left is from the back cover of Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. It exemplifies much of what can be right with American journalism, and some of what’s wrong, too.

The part to celebrate, of course, is CNN’s decision to highlight some eminently praise-worthy people. Yes, there’s an element of cliche about it — running the show in Thanksgiving — but so what? If we can’t give thanks for (some of) the people who deserve it on our best holiday, when can we?

The best part of the program, at least from the promos and articles about the people being honored,  is that they’re “regular folks” doing out-of-the-ordinary things. (Military personnel seem to be ineligible for these awards, which is an odd omission, but the honorees are certainly impressive in their own right.) You can find instructions on the website on how to donate your own time and/or money to various causes championed by the honorees. All in all, CNN is doing something good for the world with this event.

But look again at this image. Who’s that towering over the honorees? Why, it’s Anderson Cooper, the host of the program. Apparently he and his network are the real heros.

Look, I know this is about promoting an event. And I  know that Cooper is the face people will recognize.

But the way this is framed tells the story of network “journalism” today — a celebrity-infused system that conflates news readers with the people they cover.

Anderson Cooper may well be a fine journalist. I can’t really say, as I’ve given up on CNN and the other U.S. “news” networks for anything but stenography for the rich and powerful, fluff and, occasionally, breaking news where the events tell their own stories.

If Cooper is a indeed good journalist, or even a respectable one, this image should make him cringe. And someday, sooner than later, he should say so out loud.

UPDATED

More than 8 months after running an editorial with an egregious factual error, the Washington Post has yet to correct or explain its mistake.

Recapping from an earlier item here: The Post suggested that the Nobel Peace Prize that went to President Obama should have been awarded instead to Neda Agha-Soltan, an Iranian woman who was shot and killed during the post-election protests earlier in Iran this year.

The Post failed to do its homework, as the Atlantic’s James Fallows noted in detail (here, here). The Nobel Peace Prize rules are clear: The only time it can be awarded after death is when the honoree had already been named “but who had died before he/she could receive the Prize on December 10.”

An editorial page concerned with accuracy would correct such a mistake. The Post, despite knowing about this, has not. Draw your own conclusion.

UPDATE: Still uncorrected as of May 18.

Ben Goldacre, a British doctor, writer and broadcaster, runs a brilliant website called Bad Science, where he routinely demolishes crappy reporting in the media. His most recent post, Aids denialism at the Spectator, is a classic of the genre. Essential reading if you care about science journalism…

From yesterday’s Washington Post online chat featuring media critic Howard Kurtz:

Fairfax County, Va.: Hi Howard, This Sunday, I read the editorials in The Post and The New York Times about the surprise Peace Prize. I liked the NYT editorial (which was pro), but like most of us, including Obama, I could certainly have handled an editorial that was anti this choice.

When I read The Washington Post editorial, I felt so sad for what this paper has become. Their whole idea was that the prize should have gone to Neda, the woman who was murdered by the Iranian police. Nobel Peace Prizes can’t be given posthumously. It’s a basic, easy factcheck. There are other fact problems, too (the protests hadn’t happened by the nomination date, Neda may not have been a protester).

So the idea that the committee made a careless or inappropriate choice is refuted by a slapdash editorial “choice” that nobody bothered to check? It just screamed out to me “we laid off almost all the copy editors.” I feel so sad for The Post I grew up with. It’s great to have an opinion. It’s bad to look dumb.

Howard Kurtz: I take your point about no posthumous awards, though by that standard Martin Luther King couldn’t have won after being assassinated (yes, I know he won the prize earlier). My reading of the piece was that Neda was being used more as a symbol (though the rule should have been mentioned). But it’s an editorial. It is by definition opinion. Of course some readers are going to disagree.

Unpack Kurtz’s reply and your jaw will drop. He acknowledges the reader’s point but then and amplifies his newspaper’s negligence.

This isn’t a trivial point. As the Atlantic’s James Fallows has noted in painful detail (here, here), the Post editorial page made a rookie error. The Nobel Peace Prize rules are clear: The only time it can be awarded after death is when the honoree had already been named “but who had died before he/she could receive the Prize on December 10.”

As Jim Fallows noted, allowing posthumous awards could spark “a debate every year on whether Abraham Lincoln, St. Francis of Assisi, or Gandhi was the most deserving choice.”

Kurtz, coming to his colleagues’ defense in a way that utterly dismisses the reader’s serious chiding of a paper he or she has long cared about, says Neda was a symbol, but that the rule “should have been mentioned” in the editorial. Come on. Had the Post editorial writer or his/her editors known of the rule, they would never have run that piece in the first place without a different spin.

The media critic runs totally off the rails when he says the editorial page gets a pass in any case. “It is by definition opinion,” he said, as if opinion journalists have less obligation to being factual than other journalists.

I infer from the still-uncorrected editorial (at least on the Post website) that the editorial page editors believe the same thing. In their world, and Kurtz’s, writing opinions means you have license to make it up as long as it has a certain truthiness.

Then again, this is the same media critic, after all, who had a glaring error in an online column last month that the paper didn’t budge on for several days despite having known about the mistake early on. When the paper did address it, the error was replaced with words that were only partially correct, and that half-truth remains intact almost a month later.

UPDATED

Arizona Republic (10/09/2009): More turning to psychics for economic advice. When the going gets tough, Valley residents apparently go in search of the metaphysical. Local psychics and astrologers say that while they’re seeing some decline in business as longtime clients cut back on discretionary spending, the recession is bringing them many new customers.

Even though it’s shrinking along with all metropolitan newspapers in America, the Arizona Republic remains by far the biggest news organization in Phoenix and the state of Arizona. It still helps set the agenda for public discourse, and claims to be a responsible operation.

The story quoted above, which ran on the front of its local/state section, demonstrates serious irresponsibility on the part of the newspaper. It’s a textbook example of why smart readers are tuning out the press.

Consider the way the story starts. The word “apparently” is a tip-off that the piece is based on no actual data. Who’s the source for this alleged mini-flood of new customers? Why, the people selling the product. Makes sense to me: In I-can-see-into-the-future territory, we can just take their word for it.

Not a single customer is quoted. We hear only from the people who are claiming to be getting this influx of new customers. Can’t the newspaper find even one client?

Look. Newspapers run astrology columns — something I’d ban if I ran a paper, because I’m old-fashioned — with no disclaimers that there is no scientific basis for what these planet- and star-gazers tell us. But the astrology columns run, typically, near the comics, which is the fiction section of the daily paper.

No newspaper, as far as I know, gives its pages over to self-described psychics. Yet the Republic’s story quotes several, along with the astrologers, with a straight face.

It even provides a helpful sidebar explaining the difference between psychics, astrologers, fortune-tellers and mediums (in each case with the same level of “here’s what they say, never mind what science says” logic). For example, we learn that a psychic is “sensitive to non-physical or supernatural forces and influences, able to see into the future and into the events in a person’s life. Often uses tools such as tarot cards, crystals or tea leaves.” Gosh, thanks the the deeper insight.

I have to note that journalists spent much of the last decade quoting with a straight face the people from the financial and real estate industries who sold inflated goods to suckers, pulling big fees from the transactions. (Note: I do not indict the entire industry. I have a financial advisor who works for one of the big banks, an old and close friend who’s never, ever steered me toward something that was aimed at enriching him, and someone who’s comfortable with my tendency to buy and hold.)

The peddlers got rich, and then disclaimed culpability for the bubble or the financial catastrophe it spawned for those average folks (many of whom, we should noted, played the markets like insane gamblers who lose their kids’ college money at Las Vegas casinos). Maybe a responsible story would have contrasted the slimy advice from the past with the advice people now seek — foolishly, in my view — from the self-professed seers.

Had this story appeared on April 1, I’d have applauded the piece as droll satire. Running with scarcely a hint of reality, it only satirizes the condition of the newspaper industry, or at least this corner of the trade.

(Note: The updates to this include some or all of the 3rd, 4th 7th and 8th paragraphs. Also please understand that the post update will make some of the earlier comments feel out of place. This is my doing, not the commenters’. Anyone who commented early on and wants the comment removed, please email me.)

The UK Health Service site, Behind the Headlines, is an excellent resource for calm and understandable health information — making sense of alarmist news stories.

Also, do read Dr. Alica White’s “How to read articles about health and healthcare” (pdf). Great advice.

Via BoingBoing

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)