SITE HOUSEKEEPING

SOME EDITORIAL HOUSEKEEPING

By Chris Daly

Two quick items, before I get back to a new post about politics and journalism.

1. An apology: I was hit with a tsunami of comments Friday afternoon as I was leaving for a weekend in an undisclosed location where I did not have my computer or Internet access. I am trying to clear the backlog ASAP, so there will be a lot more comments today. Sorry I dropped the ball.

2. A request: I am soliciting comments from readers on the question of how (and whether) to moderate comments. This is a new issue for me, and I am sorting it out.
Here’s the policy I am considering:
A. No anonymous or pseudonymous postings. I believe in candor, and I don’t think it’s too much to ask. After all, we do not live in an oppressive, all-seeing police state in which anonymous posts would be justified. To me, it seems that too often anonymous posting is just a way to hide behind a screen and shoot spitballs.
B. No personal invective, ad-hominem attacks, or mere name-calling. It turns out, there are a number of people who blog who hate people they perceive as liberals. There are also a number of people who blog who hate professors. (And perhaps there is some overlap between the two groups.) In any case, if you are bitter and angry, go somewhere else.

I would appreciate any thoughts on the subject of moderating comments before I make any changes. I am naturally loathe to get involved in “censorship,” but I think these are reasonable ground rules that do not take away anyone’s right to engage in a sustainable dialogue.

Thanks, Chris

ON JOURNALISTS AND POLITICAL DONATIONS

GETTING IT WRONG ABOUT JOURNALISTS AND POLITICS

By Chris Daly

I was disappointed by Bill Dedman’s recent and seriously flawed exercise in expose on MSNBC, which ran under the headline:

Journalists give campaign cash
[Note the ambiguously unmodified noun “journalists” – Does that mean all journalists? Most? Many? Some? Who knows?]

Then the sub-head:

News organizations diverge on handling of political activism by staff
[Boy, do they!]

What followed is the disclosure that a total of 144 newsroom employees have donated to federal political candidates or to a political party or movement. This summary is fleshed out with plenty of names and dollar amounts.
It has all the makings of a good story, right?

Not really.

I see two serious problems, one due to sloppy methods and one due to faulty logic.

PART ONE
First, the technical/professional issue. Dedman’s report violates one of the first rules about working with numbers in journalism: PROVIDE CONTEXT.

The details are moderately interesting, but they really vanish into air when you read the (literal) fine print. In a sidebar box, in a smaller type size, Dedman notes that there are approximately 100,000 newsroom employees nationwide. By my calculations, then, the number of donors comes to 0.1% In other words, the headline could have been:

99.9% of U.S. journalists do not donate to politicians

[Note: There is another issue lurking throughout this piece: mixing of apples and oranges. A lot of the people he “exposes” in this piece are ridiculously peripheral to the coverage of partisan politics – gardening editors, rock critics and the like. It’s pretty slim pickings. More outrageously, Dedman decided to exclude “executives” from his investigation, without offering a convincing rationale. Where are Roger Ailes? Rupert Murdoch? Heck, where’s the ultimate boss of MSNBC, Jeffrey Immelt? The decisions that these executives make about staffing levels, budgets, and such have far more impact on the practice of journalism than someone like John Lahr, the estimable theater critic at the New Yorker.]

Back to math class:

The piece also fails to provide context in another way. It is a general rule of thumb (one I was taught working “the desk” at the AP) that if a piece presents sub-totals, you should add them up and provide the total. In the whole lengthy piece, I cannot find a grand total for the donations. I would love to see a total for all the donations given by these journalists to Democrats. Dedman reports that of the 144 donors, 125 gave to Democrats, while “only” 17 gave to Republicans. (Two, like Exxon, gave to both parties.) But, I notice that most of the donations to Democrats are in chicken-shit amounts like $200 or $250, while one of the Republican donors gave $90,000. I suspect that the totals given to the two parties are not that far off.

Thirdly, the piece fails to put the numbers in context by not toting up the Grand Total of all political donations during the relevant period. I have a sense that such a figure would absolutely overwhelm the puny amounts donated by journalists. I suspect it would be half a drop in a very big bucket. But I can’t tell from reading the piece.

PART TWO
The piece rests on a questionable premise: that all U.S. journalists embrace the notion that no journalist should ever make political donations. Without that premise, the whole “gotcha” theme of the piece is meaningless.
But, in fact, not all journalists or the institutions that employ them (or buy their work free-lance) accept this idea. Some do, some don’t.
[Notice that there is no one on the list from the AP, for example.]

As several of the “out-ed” journalists told Dedman, they operate on the philosophy that it is more honest to let readers know where they stand politically than it is to try to create an inevitably false image of complete neutrality. That is an old issue in American journalism, and it is one that has never reached a consensus. Indeed, the original premise of American journalism was one of overt partisanship and vigorous advocacy. (See chapters 1 and 2 of my book.)

Enough. Bill Dedman should really know better.

The piece is so flawed that, in the end, I ended up sympathizing with Gideon Yago of MTV, whose reaction was: “I don’t understand. Things I do as a private citizen? … I mean, what the f---, man?”

--30--

Fox News pro-Republican? Shocking

Partisan News? True, but not New.

More and more Democrats are bowing out of an upcoming debate among presidential candidates on the grounds that the television sponsor, Fox News, is not a real news operation but is instead a media outlet for the Republican Party.

They are, of course, right. Fox News is the most blatantly partisan regulated medium in America today. (Oh, alright: it is probably tied with Rush Limbaugh’s radio show.)

If you are not sure about Fox, please see my earlier post.

What I did not address in that posting is the question, So what?

If Fox is the “Republican channel,” who cares? If CNN is the “Democratic channel,” (don’t tell Jack Cafferty or Lou Dobbs!), who cares? In fact, maybe we would be better served if these alliances were more explicit and less coy.

For some perspective, consider the highly partisan origins of American journalism. This is the story told in Chapter 2 of my book, Covering America. (to read it, just click on the title in the sidebar to the right.) Long before radio or television, the nation’s newspapers were overwhelmingly partisan. Indeed, according to one of the leading authorities in this field, Jeff Pasley, the papers were instrumental in creating the parties. (For more on that topic, see his excellent book, A Tyranny of Printers.)