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A News Organization’s Right-Wing World View

politicoSalon’s Glenn Greenwald takes a long look today at a phenomenon that he and a few other bloggers have repeatedly observed. Namely, the online politics site Politico has a distinctly right-wing world view.

This is a simple fact, just as Fox News’ right-wing slant is plain as day, even though these news organizations don’t come out and admit the reality.

And the Politico editors’ disinclination to acknowledge the way they see — and report — the news has a secondary effect. They have accomplices in the traditional press. I’ve been looking for some hint in big newspapers (forget broadcast news in this respect) that Politico’s reports frequently have a Republican viewpoint, but haven’t found one so far.

Now, I have no problem with news organizations having a world view, and I do read Politico, which for all its superficiality sometimes has truly deep reporting. The problem is that most traditional ones pretend they don’t. I’m glad sites like Politico exist, but disappointed that they don’t make overtly clear the prism through which they see things.

Transparency would help. In the absence of that, deploy your own skepticism. That’s what Greenwald does, so relentlessly, and so should we all.

Walter Cronkite, R.I.P.

Others have been more eloquent, of course. But allow me to join those who mourn the death of this great journalist.

I grew up in an era when Walter Cronkite told us that’s the way it was. It usually was, and he and his CBS News team earned a nation’s trust.

Many people think of the Kennedy assassination when they remember Cronkite — his moment of visible pain after announcing the president’s death. It was, indeed, one of those moments that stays forever in one’s mind and heart.

I prefer to think of him from the day that brought the greatest joy to an American generation: the first moon landing in 1969. Like so many others, I was watching CBS. The landing was a closer call than most of us knew at the time. Clearly, in retrospect, Cronkite understood how close the lander came to running out of fuel. The relief and happiness on his face in the above video after the Eagle settled onto the moon’s surface was a great moment, brought to the world by a great journalist. (Note: I’ve chosen the clip above for another reason, as well: Cronkite was reporting a story, and the focus was where it belonged, on the astronauts and the team that put them on the moon. The reporter wasn’t the story, and he made sure we all knew that.)

Walter Cronkite was, as we all are, partly a product of his own times. There won’t be — there can’t be in a media ecosystem like the one we’re creating — another like him.

Twitter’s Security Debacle, and the Publishing of Stolen Documents

It’s now widely known that hackers got ahold of some extremely private communications held by Twitter’s co-founder, and then leaked them to several blogs including TechCrunch. For a legal analysis check out Sam Bayard’s post at the Harvard Berkman Center’s Citizen Media Law Project.

A number of folks have asked me what I think of the situation. Here’s part of what I said on a mail list yesterday:

As always, the circumstances matter; I’d never make a blanket condemnation of such acts. The New York Times’ reporting of secret — and illegal — spying by our government on Americans strikes me as exactly what we want, and need, from journalists.

This particular episode, however, makes me want to take a shower. I wouldn’t have published the material, but that’s just my personal stance. As the saying goes, what the public is interested in may not be in the public interest.

TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington is almost certainly within his rights to post at least some of this material — though no way would his lawyers let him post it all, if it contains everything he’s said it contains — even if what he’s doing is, IMO, supremely cynical. Especially puke-worthy is Arrington’s public agonizing about whether (and what) to post. It strikes me, whether he intends it or not, as linkbait designed to pull lots and lots and lots of traffic.

What boggles me almost more than anything about this, by the way, is the shabby security at Google and Twitter.

One of the most important outcomes of this event, if we learn the right lessons, will be to improve our security practices when it comes to personal and company information. The systems we now use for password recovery are absurdly open to social hacking, and that’s apparently what got the Twitter folks in trouble.

Come to think of it, I wonder how careful the TechCrunch team has been about its own passwords and other security…

White House Not Honoring Promises on Openness in Public Questioning

The Obama administration has turned its “online town hall” events into a parody of what they were intended to be, which specifically were supposed to include a genuine effort to include questions from the citizens of this nation in an open process, not the bogus pre-selection system that is turning into an Obama trademark. Yesterday’s health care event, for example, included just three questions from online contributors (and only eight in all, notes the TechPresident blog) in an event that makes some of George W. Bush’s staged events seem almost spontaneous.

When called on this by White House journalists, Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs responded with arrogance. He demonstrated not just contempt for the Washington press corps (which does often earn contempt) but also to the administration’s promises of openness and bottom-up accountability. A shabby performance, and worrisome if you care about how this White House will behave when its current public favor diminishes, as it surely will.


So when you watch one of these events in the future, be aware that there’s barely a shred of the give-and-take we were promised. This White House would rather rely, at least for now, on the kind of staging that previous presidents used so often, and which candidate Obama and many of his aides and supporters found so correctly offensive.

When the Follow-Up Compounds the Problem

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.

A Brazen Proposal to Re-Monopolize Newspaper Stories

UPDATED

My new definition for “brazen” starts with a pointer to a column by Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz, who says that “Tighter copyright law could save newspapers” — a tirade against online news aggregation that fails in logic and honesty.

Maybe her Cleveland readers know this, but you might not, and there’s no disclosure in the column (though you will find it buried in a Schultz bio on the Plain Dealer website): Schultz is married to U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat who is in a position to do something about her proposal. And if the column doesn’t qualify as lobbying, it’s awfully close. (UPDATE: My friend Jeff Jarvis discussed this issue in his blog post, where Schultz responded in the comments and drew this response from Jeff.)

Other people, notably Kathy Gill, have ably deconstructed some of the more egregious elements in Schultz’s piece. My own disgust with it is the sense of entitlement it reflects, from a journalist whose career rose in large part on the monopoly business model that enriched a few newspaper companies while ultimately impoverishing true public debate about important matters.

And a commenter on the column noted what appeared at the end of the column online, namely a list of links begging readers to send the story to the attention of friends and, ahem, online aggregators and social-networking sites, plus a permalink that further begs folks to link to the piece:

aggregators list

The entitlement Schultz expresses stems from her belief — also apparently irony-free — that newspapers have some fundamental right to survive, and her evidence of this is a (wonderful) series of articles by a Plain Dealer reporter that led to the ouster of a corrupt local sheriff):

(M)any of us wondered aloud how much longer newspapers could support this kind of journalism. It’s an anxiety that is graying hairlines in newsrooms across the country.

Journalists are not broken, but the business model that used to sustain the work we do is toeing the cliff. The Internet poses challenges we never anticipated. The question is: What will save us?

Her answer, relying on advice from brothers David and Daniel Marburger, respectively a newspaper lawyer and an Arkansas academic, would require a severe rewriting of copyright law. They’d let newspaper publishers and other content “originators” have sole rights to exploit the information, which sounds simple but is absurd on its face?

It’s not just impractical, given a world where we all have multiple ways to talk about what we’ve seen and multiple ways to find what others talk about. It’s also dangerous, because it would wound or wipe out much of what gives the Internet its journalistic value in the first place, namely linking and citation, which the the Marburgers call “unfair competition with unjust enrichment.”

To save newspapers’ monopoly profits, and to thereby save what’s left of newspaper journalism, these meddlers would severely wound journalism and crimp academic research — and create all kinds of other mischief in the public sphere.

Why? Because as newspaper journalists and editors have been doing for years, we all stand on each others’ shoulders in the creation of information that, at some point, becomes journalism. We observe. We discuss. We cite. We point. We quote. Then others pull together various pieces of this and we have news, commentary and more.

We are all “parasitic,” in the deliberately inflammatory word of the Marburgers and their credulous scribe. This is the very nature of how journalism and scholarship happen.

Schultz, whom I met several years ago and found intellectually impressive, shows none of that here. She demonstrates a shallow understanding of her own craft, and no grasp whatever about how a networked world can work for us all. As a former newspaper columnist, I’m embarrassed for her.

What Pays for Newspaper Journalism? Not the “Cover Price”

In “Is Free News Really Worth the Price?, Alan Cowell of the New York times writes:

The cover price of a newspaper acknowledges that news has a value and a price worth paying. Yet that idea sometimes seems remote to a Web-savvy generation brought up to believe that their laptops offer a portal to a cost-free universe.

Cowell’s point is muddled by reality. He’s making the same assumptions — and mistakes — that newspaper journalists have been making for a long time now. They don’t realize that they’ve already been, for practical purposes, giving away what they produce.

Cowell doesn’t mention that the advertising is the most important part of the financial equation in paying for journalism, not the cover price. It has been so for as long as he’s been a journalist. The word “Advertise” appears three times on this Web page (and “Advertisements” once), but not in Cowell’s column.

In most newspapers ads overwhelm the circulation revenues, the money people pay for subscriptions and single-copy sales. Newspaper publishers have trained readers to assume that the news is all but free.

As many folks have noted innumerable times, the monopoly/oligopoly model of news, when advertisers had few if any choices, is gone. Newspapers can’t extract the kinds of fat, unjustified profits they once did from advertisers anymore, especially on the Web, so they model of using monopoly profits to pay for some journalism doesn’t work anymore. This is sad for journalists, and in the short run for the public, but it’s also reality.

Cowell compounds his error by referring to the “cover price” of a newspaper, which is itself hugely misleading in most cases. The single-copy cover price isn’t close to what most people pay for newspapers, because most who buy the printed edition do so with subscriptions that are deeply discounted from the cover price. True, the Times costs more from a news rack than most other papers, but people who subscribe pay much less than the news-rack price there, too.

None of this is to say that journalism, or at least the journalism business, isn’t in trouble. It is. Nor am I saying that journalism doesn’t have value. It does.

We subscribe to the Times at home, gladly, and will continue to do so. (I own some NYT stock, a tiny amount that keeps losing value.) But we don’t pay anything close to the cost of the journalism, and never have. The Times’ problem isn’t so much that people don’t understand the value of what it produces journalistically; it’s that the paper conditioned everyone to have this misunderstanding in the first place. Now that economic conditions have changed, it’s asking everyone to fix the situation it helped create.