Oppo Research on Reporters

Date: January 5, 2011
Author: Bob Griendling
Categories: Jane Mayer, Koch brothers, Right-wing echo chamber

Who is trying to discredit the reporter who wrote about the ultra-conservative Koch brothers?

There have been at least three efforts so far:

  • The Washington Examiner (which editorialized extensively against Mayer’s Koch brothers piece) did research trying to turn up evidence of Mayer’s political partisanship; they apparently didn’t find anything worth reporting.
  • Elaine Lafferty wrote a pro-Koch response to Mayer’s story in The Daily Beast, complete with friendly quotes from David Koch—who was unwilling to speak with Mayer herself. TDB later added an editor’s note to the story admitting, among other things, that they "should have noted that the writer who interviewed Koch had been a consultant for the McCain/Palin campaign."
  • And today, Keith Kelly reports on a third incident: The Daily Caller spent "several weeks" investigating a story that Mayer plagiarized work in her Koch brothers article, and in another story years ago. They found no evidence, and now they’ve dropped the story.

The View from Somewhere Isn’t Where It’s At

Date: January 5, 2011
Author: Bob Griendling
Categories: "He said, she said", NPR, Objectivity vs. Balance, Political Labels

Part two of David Folkenflick’s excellent report on the news media is online. And indeed Jay Rosen, who I cited in yesterday’s post, makes the case for reporters revealing more of their beliefs. In fact, it is the focus of this report.

"If they’ve been covering a beat for a while, I’d like to know what fascinates them about their beat, what they think are the biggest challenges facing the nation, who some of their heroes and villains are, and any convictions — deeply held convictions — they’ve developed by reporting on the story over a long period of time."

"We can tell where the person is coming from and apply whatever discount rate we want to what they’re saying," Rosen says. "I also think that it’s more likely to generate trust. And this is the main reason why I recommend ‘here’s where I’m coming from’ replace ‘the view from nowhere.’ "

I agree completely with Rosen’s critique of today’s media and the “view from nowhere.”  Peter Goodman, who recently left the New York Times to become business editor at the Huffington Post describes the problem pitch perfectly.

"This is not about ranting; it’s not about working for a particular partisan interest or set of interests; it’s not about getting individuals elected," Goodman says. "It’s about the same mission that I think has been part of quality journalism forever, which is uncovering truths that aren’t so easy to uncover."

He says The Times gave him great leeway to follow his reporting, wherever it led. But Goodman says his reporters at the Huffington Post will have some liberties other news organizations might not afford.

"I don’t want them feeling like they have to hand in [stories that say], ‘Well, these people said this, those people said that; here, dear reader — you know, you figure it out,’ " Goodman says. "I would like them engaged in a process of getting to a satisfying conclusion." [emphasis added]

In other words, “he said, she said” journalism, another phrase that may be Rosen’s.  While this type of journalism is well accepted in America (and in the NPR report former Post editor Len Downie vigorously defends it) to other western countries it is laughable.

"I’m rather extreme on this subject," says Simon Jenkins, the former editor in chief of the center-right Times of London who now writes columns for the liberal Guardian. "I find American newspapers boring — and biblical. I cannot believe how dull they are. These are news sheets for a genre of readers who want vast slabs of information and get entertainment in a different way. And they are micro-monopolies, all of them."

Still, I can’t bring myself to agree with Rosen’s conclusions. I object when reports describe even institutions as “liberal” or “conservative,” “left” or “right.” What that does is signal the reader to be ready to discount or embrace the following viewpoint because it tracks (or doesn’t) with their view of the world.  Labeling these institutions really does nothing to combat the rampant “view from nowhere.” And having reporters reveal their politics, if that indeed is what Rosen is suggesting, will be an impotent solution to the problem. I think what it will lead to is the same thing we now see: groups from either side demanding that a news outlet add more conservative or progressive reporters to offset a perceived imbalance, as they do now with opinion writers. Then what? Do you have a conservative and a progressive covering the same beat? Otherwise, if it’s one or the other, the opposite inclined reader will not read the stories at all or complain incessantly about them.

Besides, it’s hard to pinpoint where someone is coming from based solely on a few biographical paragraphs. I am a progressive and support many progressive causes. But I also think government is seriously flawed, inefficient and ineffective. I think the age at which one can start to draw Social Security should be raised. Gun control laws are largely ineffective. If I were a reporter, would I need to reveal all my views on each issue?

Let reporters gather the facts, weigh them on the “truth-o-meter if possible, and report the truth as close as they can divine it. The truth is what readers want. The reason newspapers and other MSM are failing is not because we don’t know the ideologies of the reporters and editors. It’s because they are not giving us information we can use. The are stenographers of the status quo, worried more about their continued access to the centers of power than in revealing what’s really going on.

Topic A: Usual Suspects

Date: January 5, 2011
Author: Bob Griendling
Categories: Punditry, Usual suspects, Washington Post

One fair criticism of newspapers in general and The Washington Post in particular is that they too often rely on the same people, whether to comment on breaking stories, add insight to enterprise ones or opine on the op-ed page. 

As I read Sunday’s Topic A section in The Post, I felt I was seeing the same names over and over again.  As any casual reader of the section knows, the editors try to balance Democratic and Republican viewpoints. Which is to say not only the usual suspects but the traditional DC-defined left and right.  Rare are the truly left or ultra right viewpoints, although one wonders how much farther to the right one can go from today’s GOP, short of calling for a military dictatorship or a corporate oligarchy.

The same people are called on again and again as a quick search of Lexis-Nexis confirmed.  It appears this Topic A section in The Post, which usually runs on Sunday but has appeared on other days on occasion, began in March 2009.  Here’s how often some usual suspects have appeared:

Name Topic A contributions
Matthew Dowd 6
Newt Gingrich 12
Donna Brazile 9
Dan Perino 6
Robert Shrum 6
Scott Keiter 9
Dan Schnur 19
Douglas E. Schoen 25
Ed Rogers 25

The more I looked at Topic A columns, the fewer new names appeared.  Sure, there are the occasional pundits who only appear one or two times, but over the course of nearly two years, it’s clear we get the views of about a dozen or so people, virtually all of whom are aligned with one party or the other and give us predictably partisan views. You wonder how Doug Schoen or Ed Rogers find time for their day jobs.

Is it really that hard to find different voices? Or is this section on auto pilot as The Post continues to find ways to fill up its dead tree real estate without much heavy lifting?

Is the British Press a Better Model?

Date: January 4, 2011
Author: Bob Griendling
Categories: "He said, she said", Access, Mainstream Media, Objectivity vs. Balance

Can we expect any news organization to be fair and balanced? Is objectivity an unattainable goal?  More important, does the quest for objectivity require the American press to become not only neutered but lacking in any useful information and reluctant to declare anything true or false?

David Folkenflick has what is described as the first in a two-part series examining such questions on this morning on NPR’s “Morning Edition.” (The article on the website follows closely the audio story but isn’t verbatim from the ME report.  Listen to the story from the link at the website.)

Basically, he reports that British newspapers, while striving to be accurate and fair, do not try to hide their point of view.  Anyone who’s ever read, say the Guardian or The Telegraph would recognize the different takes on the same event.

"In Britain, we feel that it’s better to know where people are coming from and then to make up your own mind about what you think, because the truth is nobody can be completely impartial and objective," Boles says. "I mean the idea [that] The New York Times doesn’t have a political point of view — it’s ridiculous. It does, but it twists itself into knots in an attempt to pretend that it doesn’t."

This idea of transparency among reporters is one explored in depth by Jay Rosen of “PressThink” and others. It has been suggested that reporters should reveal their biases for everyone to know, so we can make a judgment about their reporting.

Guardian Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger argued that British papers give more room than their American counterparts to voices that challenge conventional wisdom.

"I think it’s quite a striking thing about the British press that you get this polemical battle over the basis for what news is, which I feel is to a large extent missing in the American scene," Rusbridger says. "No judgments are free of ideologies, so who you choose to quote and how you structure stories are highly political judgments. I think that’s the problem with trying to place too much faith in something called objectivity."

I disagree, perhaps because I have a different definition of objectivity.  (However, I agree that American mainstream media typically rely on the “usual suspects” and often little opportunity for views outside Washington conventional wisdom a voice; but that’s another topic.) Objectivity does not mean that you give both sides of an argument equal voice or that you make no judgment about an argument. It does mean, to me, that you give both sides a chance to explain themselves but that a reporter should be free to express a judgment on those arguments. All too infrequently, you’ll see a reporter say that something isn’t true or misleading. But it should happen far more often. For example, the GOP argument that taxes hurt the economy or job creation is not one that many informed economists will make. The CBO reported last year that of 11 ways it studied to improve the job market, tax cuts were the least effective. It’s OK to allow one to make a claim once, especially if the reporter doesn’t know if it’s true. But a good reporter will try to gauge the accuracy of a claim and at the very least suggests in her reporting that the claim is suspect and point to informed sources as evidence. That’s objective reporting, which is to say reporting that objectively strives for truth. It’s what’s required for a democracy to function, that is, an informed voter.

Which is what I think this Labor member of Parliament is getting at.

In the Palace of Westminster lobby, surrounded by marble statues of prime ministers that date back centuries, Anne Begg — a Labor member of Parliament who represents the south part of Aberdeen, Scotland — says she reads British newspapers every day, but finds them wanting.

"One of the concerns I have with some of the print media is that it’s almost all comment, which is always partial and is always partisan," she says. "In that respect, I don’t know if you could call them newspapers anymore — they’re perhaps comment papers."

In fact, if you remove quotations from many news stories you end up with a very short story.  Still some would stand on their own without the quotes.  Read a story sometime and imagine what it would be like without the quotes, which typically are often misleading spin. If reporters were tasked with writing stories of substance that don’t rely on spin from both sides, we’d have a better product.

Bloggers vs. Reporters

Date: January 4, 2011
Author: Bob Griendling
Categories: Mainstream Media, Washington Post

Remember in the early days of blogging when reporters would dismiss our work as nothing more than a bunch of people sitting at their computers in their pajamas expropriating journalists’ work? We weren’t doing the hard work of true professionals, who would dig up resources and conduct tough interviews before writing exposes of how things really were.

Fast forward to Monday, when we find this article in The Washington Post.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the incoming chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was bullish in laying out his agenda for the new Congress with Republicans in control of the House.

And how did writer Philip Rucker know this?

Issa, who as chairman will have subpoena power, said he will seek to ferret out waste across the federal bureaucracy. While he used fiery rhetoric in describing the Obama administration in a series of television interviews Sunday, he said he will focus on wasteful spending, not the prosecution of White House officials. [emphasis added]

To be fair, it wasn’t quite a rewrite of a GOP press release.  He had Democratic congressman Elijah Cummings of Maryland give the rebuttal from a transcript of Cummings’ appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

But Mr. Rucker was busy working for this report.  Apparently even going so far as to change the station!

"I think [Attorney General Eric Holder] needs to realize that, for example, WikiLeaks, if the president says, ‘I can’t deal with this guy as a terrorist,’ then he has to be able to deal with him as a criminal," Issa said on "Fox News Sunday." "Otherwise, the world is laughing at this paper tiger we’ve become.

Mr. Rucker may have received overtime or hazardous duty pay.  He actually watch a third TV program, quoting Issa from his CBS interview Sunday.

This entire article was written based on two Congressmen’s Sunday TV interviews.

Mr. Rucker was able to write this entire story by watching TV, probably while in his pajamas.  This one was literally “phoned in.”

How is Julian Assange Different from Bob Woodward?

Date: December 28, 2010
Author: Bob Griendling
Categories: CNN, Mainstream Media, WikiLeaks

Seems like journalists don’t like it when someone—other than themselves—reveals what really goes on in government.

Or consider the theme that framed last night’s segment:  Assange is profiting off classified information by writing a book!  Beyond the examples I gave, Bob Woodward has become a very rich man by writing book after book filled with classified information about America’s wars which his sources were not authorized to give him.  Would Yellin ever in a million years dare lash out at Bob Woodward the way she did Assange?  To ask the question is to answer it (see here as CNN’s legal correspondent Jeffrey Toobin is completely befuddled in the middle of his anti-WikiLeaks rant when asked by a guest, Clay Shirky, to differentiate what Woodward continuously does from what Assange is doing).

They’re all petrified to speak ill of Bob Woodward because he’s a revered spokesman of the royal court to which they devote their full loyalty.  Julian Assange, by contrast, is an actual adversary — not a pretend one — of that royal court.  And that — and only that — is what is driving virtually this entire discourse:

Social Security Is Not a Problem; The Press Is

Date: December 21, 2010
Author: Bob Griendling
Categories: Right-wing echo chamber, Social Security

Journalist and author William Greider eviscerates the journalism profession over its failure to describe issues surrounding Social Security.  It’s a worthy interview by Trudy Lieberman at the Columbia Journalism Review.

This is a staggering scandal for the media. I have yet to see a straightforward, non-ideological, non-argumentative piece in any major paper that describes the actual condition of Social Security. The core fact is that Social Security has not contributed a dime to the deficit, but has piled up trillions in surpluses, which the government has borrowed and spent. Social Security’s surpluses have actually offset the impact of the deficit, beginning with Reagan.

But what’s as damaging and insightful is his criticism of how the press works and especially why certain viewpoints are regularly ignored.  Read it.  Here are some highlights with emphasis my own:

[Reporters] identify with the wisdom of the elites.

..There are layers of influence that tell reporters this is the safe side of the story. They don’t go to people who might be unsafe sources, like labor leaders who know how changes will affect workers, or to old liberals who are out of favor but who know the origins of Social Security and why it was set up in the first place, or to neutral experts like actuaries who actually understand how it works and what the trust funds are all about. If they write about what the AFL-CIO thinks, they are out of the orthodoxy.

…Most reporters who cover difficult areas typically develop sources, and they write for those sources. They don’t want to offend them for fear they will lose access. Reporters, we know, are sensitive, nervous animals; they act like scared little rabbits. They also know what the owners of their publications think. And those owners think pretty much what the Business Roundtable and Chamber of Commerce think.

…Reporters are so embedded in the established way of understanding things. They are distanced from people at large and don’t spend much time trying to see why ordinary people see things differently from the people in power.

…In the last twenty years, as media ownership became highly concentrated, the gulf between the governing elites, both in and out of government, and the broad range of ordinary citizens has gotten much worse. The press chose to side with the governing elites and look down on the citizenry as ignorant or irrational, greedy, or even nutty.

…The press is dangerously over-educated itself, in that reporters have developed different kinds of expertise themselves. And that brings them closer to their sources, more motivated to write for their approval.

…The new technological knowledge becomes a tool that blocks old-fashioned street reporting. The polling and focus groups work against old style reporting. Political reporters rely on the pseudo-science to tell them what people think instead of doing what reporters are supposed to do—talking to real people where they live, listening to their perspectives and respecting their views.

Guv, We Love You. Signed, Roz & Anita

Date: December 20, 2010
Author: Bob Griendling
Categories: Anita Kumar, Roz Helderman, Washington Post

This is almost comical. It’s clear that Anita Kumar and Roz Helderman are in love with Gov. Bob McDonnell. Most of their coverage of him has been almost fawning over the last couple of months. Perhaps most egregious was the story the weekend before the elections. It was on the front page with a headline that blared:  “Virginians share lesson learned: GOP in power not so bad.” Really?  Not so bad, Roz? Well, she maybe didn’t write the headline, but she wrote this:

Voters, including some who didn’t back him, credited Gov. Robert F. McDonnell with working hard and engineering deep budget cuts from a generally fractious General Assembly with relatively little heartache. The result of those efforts was a narrow surplus by the end of the fiscal year, achieved through bipartisan action and without the tax increase that Gov. Timothy M. Kaine proposed before leaving office.

No tax increase, but he borrowed from the retirement fund—and he’s now claiming the budget has a surplus. Which is ludicrous. We only have a surplus because he transferred money from the retirement fund.

The federal government had a balanced budget this year, too. Because it borrowed a bazillion dollars from China.

Saturday’s Metro front page article was but the latest in this line of fluff, though not without its own WTF-edness. Almost the entire article before the jump could have been written by the Guv’s press office.

In his annual speech to the General Assembly’s money committees Friday, McDonnell (R) told legislators that the state’s economy is growing at a pace slightly better than expected, allowing him to raise Virginia’s financial forecast by $283 million over the next two years.

As a result, he announced more new spending than cuts for the first time in years while releasing amendments to a still-lean two-year budget over the last week.

They include down payments on some of McDonnell’s top priorities, which focus heavily on economic development, substantial funding to shore up the state’s pension system, as well as goodies for pet projects, including $500,000 for the state’s food banks and Operation Smile. Proposed cuts include a hit to social services for children, reduced advertising for the lottery and the elimination of state funding for public broadcasting.

"Government must set priorities, encourage cost savings and frugality, fund core functions of government well, set the right climate for job creation and economic development, and then, basically, get out of the way," McDonnell said to a standing-room-only crowd on Capitol Square.

So far, so fawning. Then we have a couple of paragraphs that defy rationalization or really, lucidity.

He took lawmakers and college presidents by surprise by stripping nearly $17 million in funding for Virginia Commonwealth University after it raised tuition 24 percent this year. Other schools increased tuition by nearly 10 percent.

The father of five, including three at Virginia public universities, said he hopes his decision sends a message to the rest of the state’s schools that they can no longer dramatically increase tuition and fees. "It’s leaving our kids with a decade of debt when they get out," he said. "This will certainly be a good message to our higher-education institutions that need to govern their tuition rates accordingly."

Help me out here. He cuts funding to colleges after they raise tuition because the state has been cutting state funding for years and then says that further cuts should teach colleges not to raise tuition. What am I missing here?

Ladies, your love is blind. It also must paralyze your ability to put together a coherent story.

Then, apparently just regurgitating what the Guv’s flaks told them, Kumar & Helderman write:

Against that political backdrop, McDonnell has proposed several major structural changes to government, which would come with substantial price tags.

He said state agencies have not been paying for all of the information technology services they have been using, requiring Virginia to spend $58.3 million more over the next two years. The state is already paying billions for such services as part of a troubled technology overhaul contract with Northrop Grumman.

Agencies “have not been paying for all of the information technology services they have been using.” What, are they past due on the bills Verizon sent them? Who are they not paying? And when they are not paying whomever it is they’re supposed to be paying, why does that require Virginia to pay $58.3 million more over the next two years?  Is that the late fee Verizon is charging them for their internet connection?

Ladies, I understand that love can make you silly sometimes. But have an editor take a look at your missives before publishing them.

And take a cold shower before you write them.

NPR Stations: Who’s Juan Williams?

Date: December 16, 2010
Author: Bob Griendling
Categories: NPR

It should surprise no one that NPR donations have not been impacted by the Juan Williams firing. The network and its affiliates got some angry emails, but likely from people who don’t listen to the station.

Several station managers say the angriest responses have been from people who appeared not to be regular contributors, based on their cross-referencing caller and e-mailers’ names with databases of donors.

In fact, I gave that day to my local station with a note that if NPR backed down, I’d demand a refund.

“Just Kids”

Date: December 15, 2010
Author: Bob Griendling
Categories: Books

They say if you remember the 60s, you weren’t there. Just Kids will jog your memory.

This is touching memoir by the “godmother of punk rock,” Patti Smith, and her relationship with the then equally unknown Robert Mapplethorpe who was to become the iconic photographer.

Smith met Mapplethorpe in New York City, after she had left her loving but insular home in South Jersey, abandoned college, and gave up for adoption the child had by a boy she described as even more callow than herself. Arriving in the city with literally a couple of dollars in her pocket, she embarked on a journey that many of us who in fact remember those times will appreciate: the desire to be an artist, to make a mark on the world under terms our parents could not appreciate.

But this memoir tells of her journey and the loving friendship the two of them enjoyed without self righteousness or sense of entitlement. Mapplethorpe would soon come to grips with his homosexuality but that did not alter the main trajectory of their relationship, which began sexually but evolved into one of where each was the other’s greatest champion.

From the telling of the small vignettes that remind us of how little material possessions meant to many people of this age in the 60s to the larger narrative how each eventually found their way to fame, this book, which won this year’s National Book Award for non-fiction, is a delightful read. Her seminal album “Horses,” which has been recognized as one of the top 100 albums of all time, included a memorable cover photograph by Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989. While this album launched her career, which has been as much about her poetry and visual art as music, preceded his fame. He eventually became known as the photographer of images that were as disturbing as they were groundbreaking. Yet in this book, which is obviously sympathetic to him, reveals a sensitive and thoughtful—and yes, somewhat self-absorbed—young man.

They both had a strong religious upbringing, and we see in Just Kids how it shaped their art. We also see how others in New York at that time, Andy Warhol, Sam Shepard, Bob Dylan among them, impacted their art. It is a book about a time that some of us remember, however we try to deny it. Or perhaps of a time as we would like to remember it.