McCAIN ON TORTURE, 1973

By Chris Daly

In doing research today for chapter 11 of my book, I was reading a lot of writings about the war in Vietnam. I came across a powerful and quite moving two-part article that John McCain wrote for U.S. News and World Report in May 1973, shortly after being released after more than 5 years as a POW in Vietnam. (To the best of my knowledge, this is McCain's only venture in journalism, other than op-ed pieces. But if you know of others, please let me know.)

I was reading it in the endlessly useful Library of America anthology called Reporting Vietnam. But I got to wondering... is McCain's article on-line anywhere?

Turns out, although U.S. News does not have a very robust archive, the McCain article from 35 years ago is very accessible from their home page. In a maddeningly terse editor's note, the magazine says only: "It was posted online on January 28, 2008." (Great, but why? At whose initiative? Why in January? What else do you have in your archives?)

The point: McCain observes that conditions in the POW camp in Hanoi improved dramatically in the fall of 1969. He attributes this to the policy of the Nixon administration to publicize reports and photos depicting American military men suffering from horrendous abuse at the hands of the North Vietnamese. In the battle for global approval, the North Vietnamese were embarrassed by the disclosures, and they decided to scale back the abuse.
This is an important point, I believe, but I wish McCain had developed a theme that remains implicit in his account. As I see it, the reason that the U.S. could claim the high ground and attempt to shame the North Vietnamese is that we had comparatively clean hands. Conversely, we can hardly complain about torture and abuse by others if we are doing it ourselves.

IT PAYS TO SPEND MONEY

By Chris Daly

Here is a fine piece in The Washington Post praising the amazing performance of two NPR reporters in China during the recent quake. Melissa Block and Robert Siegel deserve the praise -- their reports have been outstanding.

I would make one additional point: Reading between the lines of the Post piece, you can see that long before the quake, NPR had sent the two reporters as part of a team of nine (9!) to just go to China for a broader story. That's why they were in the vicinity -- because a serious news operation was spending the money to send them there in the first place.

It was that investment in news coverage that paid these dividends.

The Times' Loose Cannon

TIMES FIRES A BIG GUN, HITS WRONG TARGET

By Chris Daly

As the world knows, the Times launched a massive assault Sunday on the Pentagon in the form of a 7,625-word front-page “expose” of the cozy relationship between the Pentagon and an inter-service corps of “analysts” who feed the news media. The paper did some valuable reporting (and should be applauded for bringing suit to pry loose some of the documents the report was based on).

But the piece, by David Barstow, failed to score a direct hit. In my judgment, it was aimed at the wrong target. The newspaper came off sounding disingenuous and (needlessly) antagonistic to the military.

Certainly, it can come as no surprise that the Pentagon seeks to shape the battlefield in the media world just as it does in the real world. I more or less figured that’s what they were up to.


Torie Clarke, the former public relations executive who oversaw the Pentagon’s dealings with the analysts as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, had come to her job with distinct ideas about achieving what she called “information dominance.” In a spin-saturated news culture, she argued, opinion is swayed most by voices perceived* as authoritative and utterly independent.
[* emphasis added]


And, though it is chilling to hear it actually stated, I suppose it is no surprise that the top brass seek to target the hearts and minds of the American people.


“The strategic target remains our population,” General Conway [operations head for the Joint Chiefs] said. “We can lose people day in and day out, but they’re never going to beat our military. What they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys[referring to the analysts] can help us not let that happen.”


As for the “analysts,” they were guilty only of pursuing their own interests. Some of them are trying to drum up business for the defense contractors they work for. Some may be bored with retirement and may want to feel important by going on TV. Most of them probably believe that it was a good idea to invade Iraq, or at least not to get defeated there.

So, the Times’ sense of shock, disappointment, and outrage over these disclosures was misplaced. The real target should have been the media, which got off rather lightly. The question should have been: In all this mess, which institution is not living up to its own standards?

The answer, of course, is the media, which employ these “analysts.” They are the ones who are guilty of shoddy practices. Where is the transparency? Why don’t they vet these guys? Why don’t they disclose the massive conflicts of interest? Why don’t they bestir themselves to find – or hire – truly independent analysts?

The television network that relies most heavily on the analysts is, not surprisingly, Fox News, which seems to operate on the principle that the proper role for the media is to cheer for Republican administrations. The others – CNN and the broadcast networks along with, to a less extent, the print media, including the Times itself – should be ashamed of themselves. And they should not have been allowed to get off with the mealy-mouthed non-denial denials they all issued.


[p.s. This seems like a good time to re-visit “Wag the Dog” (1997, Barry Levinson) and see how much of this was foretold in that brilliant satire.]

SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS

FAR FROM THE BEST POLITICAL REPORTING OF 2008

By Chris Daly


I realize that the train has pretty much left the station on the Times/McCain story. But I wanted to wait to let the whole life-cycle of such a piece unfold before commenting. Now we can see (or infer) the process in something like its journalistic fullness:

--concocting the story line
--reporting it
--editing it
--sitting on it
--hearing footsteps of someone reporting about your reporting
--publishing the story.
--getting criticized for it
--following up in the news pages, while at the same time…
--sending Executive Editor Bill Keller out to defend it.
--commenting on the whole thing by the ombud... er, Public Editor.



One easy issue: the “romance” angle. It may have happened, but you cannot tell from this article. They simply didn’t nail it down. When that happens, there is an inevitable choice to make: keep reporting, or give it up. It is not an option, especially on the front page during a presidential election season, to say, “What the hell? Let’s go with what we’ve got and hope for the best.”
This was an embarrassing journalistic failure, one that begins with the reporters but certainly extends up the food chain to all the editors who have a hand in Page 1 stories. The story violated the paper’s own rules on sourcing, as well as common journalistic standards and common sense.

One sub-issue raised by the reporting on the “relationship” has to do with the competencies of sources. Not all sources are alike. Not all sources are competent to help us get at the truth of things. In this case, (never mind the anonymity for the moment), the sources were cited as experiencing “waves of anxiety” about WHETHER the boss was having an affair. The narrow and not-terribly-interesting question was their state of mind, and they can be reliably quoted on that topic. They are, after all, experts on their own feelings.

But those sources are not NECESSARILY experts on the truth or falsity of the things they were worried about. For the broader and more interesting factual question of whether there was an affair, the Times needed a different kind of source, or better yet, some hard evidence. In other words, it’s not enough to just have a source; the source has to know what he or she is talking about.

As to the anonymity: that’s always a judgment call, but in this case, it must be said that it would have been a whole lot better to have sources on the record, or to just bag the whole project. To quote a brief passage from the Times’ own lengthy (and admirable) policy on confidential sources:

In any situation when we cite anonymous sources, at least some readers may suspect that the newspaper is being used to convey tainted information or special pleading.

Predictably, the “romance” angle has blotted out the rest of the sky. The main theme of the story – that the righteous John McCain has blinders when it comes to his own public ethics – is an important one. If the Times had started with the Keating 5 and stuck with the abundant on-the-record material about McCain, they could have put together a solid (i.e., un-sexy) story on a serious issue. As it is, they just made McCain (and a lot of other people) mad for no good reason.

As Machiavelli warned: “If you would strike at a Prince, you must kill him.”

Nader and the Etiquette of Epithets

A QUESTION OF EPITHET ETIQUETTE

By Chris Daly

The re-emergence of the recidivist presidential-election spoiler Ralph Nader raises political considerations, which, in turn, raise journalistic considerations.

Of those, one of the most fascinating is watching the results of the agony that political reporters (and their editors) go through in deciding how to identify Nader. Especially on the “first reference,” journalists must choose which of the many possible epithets to apply to the gaunt gadfly.

Just today, I found this sampler:

“Consumer advocate Ralph Nader…” …. Used by Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, Newsday, Reuters, and others. By far the most popular epithet, perhaps because it sounds serious and neutral, although both points could certainly be argued.

“Controversial consumer advocate…” Used by the BBC, presumably to distinguish RN from the ranks of non-controversial consumer advocates.

“the veteran American consumer-rights activist” – Al Jazeera.net. Is “veteran” a synonym for “aging”? Or is it a code-phrase for “even older than McCain”?

The AP and the New York Times both paid Nader the compliment of dispensing with any identifier at all, just invoking the name in their lead paragraphs:

Actually, in the Times, writer Sarah Wheaton chose to “back in” to the story, beginning with a two-graf version of recent political history:

When Ralph Nader ran as a third-party candidate in 2000 and drew 96,837 votes in Florida, he was widely derided by Democrats, who saw him as a spoiler who siphoned crucial votes from Al Gore and tipped the election to George W. Bush. When he ran again in 2004, Democrats in many states tried to keep him off their ballots.
On Sunday, Mr. Nader officially announced that he would seek the presidency as a third-party candidate one more time — driven in part by his frustration over the efforts to thwart his last run.

This shrewd approach has the advantage of handing off the responsibility for choosing epithets to “Democrats,” who are allowed to characterize Mr. Nader, sparing Ms. Wheaton of appearing to describe him directly.


On the Web, of course, most blogs are more candid (and more vicious), to wit:

“longtime consumer advocate … still loathed by many Democrats” – Huffington Post.

“Bush’s Chief Enabler” – Josh Marshall on TPM.



Actually, I believe Nader poses a special case for the mainstream media. He is someone about whom I assume every reporter and editor has strong feelings – feelings that they are determined to disguise. It’s an issue that isn’t discussed very much, perhaps because it would trigger the bigger discussion about politics and “objectivity” that no one in a newsroom has the appetite (or the time) for.

Personally, I have no use for Nader and his endless egoism. Much as I would be open to the idea of viable third- and fourth-party candidates, the fact is, Nader is the not the one. Between elections, he does next to nothing to build a party that might make him anything more than a spoiler. Then comes the late-winter of a presidential election year, and he’s back, hectoring and lecturing.

If Nader ends up getting McCain elected and extending Republican rule, that would have to be considered, in his long career, the (there’s no other word for it) ... nadir.

Hiding in Plain Sight

Why don’t reporters talk to voters?

By Chris Daly

[A version of this essay was posted today at a fairly new website based in the UK devoted to international relations.]

As it turns out, the big story so far from this presidential campaign is the turnout. Evidence is mounting that U.S. voters are shaking off their customary apathy and voting in record numbers. Not only that, the surge of extra voters is clearly tilted in favor of the Democrats, a trend that may be setting the stage for a Democratic landslide in November.
But all this is very hard to discern from the political reporting. As usual, the vast preponderance of the campaign coverage is focused elsewhere – on the candidates, on campaign spending, on tactics, on endorsements, on all the usual fuss and trappings of campaign coverage.
It’s not hard to understand why.

Those things are fun to cover and easy to write (or blog) about. I learned a little bit about this by covering past presidential campaigns, in 1988 (for the Associated Press), and by helping out in 1992 and 1996 (for the Washington Post). When you’re on the campaign trail, you are looking at the world as if through a straw, and all you can see is what’s right in front of you.
When a candidate thinks about actually campaigning for president, the U.S. suddenly looks like a very big country. It is almost 3,000 miles across. There are 50 metropolitan areas with more than 1 million population. There are 30 or more major TV markets. So, the candidates have to keep moving. If you are a political reporter, it’s a non-stop world of hotels, airports, and “events.” Life is exciting, high-tech, and glossy. (I know, I know: it can also be boring, tedious, and frustrating, but even those moments provide material to grouse about.) You meet a lot of bright, articulate, ambitious people. The candidates and their top strategists are your universe.
Those people are accessible (within limits), and they have “quotable” things to say. If you ask them a question, they don’t say they have to think about it. They don’t say they’ll get back to you. And they never say “I don’t know.” Instead, they say something quotable; they deliver the goods.
The candidates themselves are (usually) charming, sometimes even glamorous. Above all, they DO things – they give speeches, travel, hold debates, check in and out of hotels. If you hang around them for about two seconds, most of them will learn your name (they are unnaturally good at this sort of thing, of course, or else they would never make it in politics.) The next thing you know, Hillary or Mitt or John is asking about your kids.
Or, consider the fuss over endorsements. Political reporters are suckers for them, as evidenced by the fact that reporters almost always give endorsements excessive coverage. Look at the recent endorsement of Obama by Ted Kennedy and his niece, Caroline. For 48 hours or so, it dominated the coverage, evoking comparisons between the young senator Barack Obama and the young senator Jack Kennedy. But, even in Kennedy’s home state of Massachusetts, his endorsement did not translate into a victory for Obama. The people heard all the hoopla and shrugged, but no one was paying attention to the people. (No matter: Just today, the endorsement of Obama by superdelegate Rep. John Lewis is front-page news.)

In any election, the candidates are only half the story, at most. The business of politics, by definition, involves the relationship between candidates and the electorate. Yet, almost all the coverage focuses on only one party, or one side of the equation – the politicians. The people who cover politics rarely cover the people.
Again, it’s not hard to understand why. The fact is, a lot of people are not that easy to talk to. For one thing, when most people are approached by a reporter, they are not ready with a “quote.” A lot of people, when approached by a total stranger, won’t say much of anything, at least at first. You have to hang around a while. You have to bring topics up over and over again, probe and wait. It’s time-consuming, even tedious.
This is why when reporters are in planning sessions with the top editors, they rarely pipe up and say, “Hey, I’m going to go hang around with a bunch of nobodies for a while, and if I come up with anything, I’ll let you know.” That is hardly the ticket to Page 1. Far better to say, “Hey, I just got talked to Hillary’s top guy, and he tells me…”
One recent day’s coverage is typical. On January 15, during the run-up to the Super Tuesday primaries, the New York Times carried eight staff-written stories about the presidential campaign, which was commendable. But only one of them was based on interviews with actual voters. All the rest dealt with candidates, their staffs, or staged events.

Obviously, political reporters should get out of the bubble, cancel the next flight, and go talk to people, ordinary people. They should go to bus depots (nobody in America, except John Madden, rides an inter-city bus if they can afford any alternative). They should go to bowling alleys. They should go to someplace they do not usually go with their own family and friends.
They also need to acknowledge that in many cases, they are venturing across a culture gap. Almost all the members of the press corps are college graduates, and most of them are in middle or upper-middle class. They are no longer considered blue-collar, and fewer and fewer are union members. That is one reason that they feel like foreign correspondents when they report on ordinary people.
One special problem reporters have in covering voters has to do with age. News media executives are obsessed with young people – with their high-tech toys, their culture, and their looks. (This is because advertisers care about young people). But young people do not vote. Or, they do not vote in numbers proportionate to their numbers. Old people vote. They “out-vote” young people. But old people are considered boring, so they are not covered in anything like their fair share.
Another problem that bedevils the coverage has to do with class. American journalists are schooled in the belief that the United States is a classless society. So, they usually ignore class and focus instead on religion, gender, race.
One example: the Times presented a recent (Jan. 30) snapshot of the social make-up of the voters who cast ballots in the Florida Republican primary. The only indicator of social class was “income.” But income is not the same as wealth. Often, income is inadequate as a marker of wealth and can be down-right misleading. In Florida, for example, a lot of those Republican voters are retirees. They are no longer big earners. But a lot of them have significant wealth – in the form of real estate, big boats, or investment portfolios. They may still be quite well-to-do without a lot of income.

To be fair, it should be noted that once in a while, political reporters do get out and talk to people. A very small number of news organizations even recognize voters as a “beat” – at least from time to time. At the Washington Post, for example, veteran David Broder can be counted on to get off the campaign trail for a while and go ring some doorbells. But usually, such coverage is sporadic (especially in an era where there are fewer bodies in the newsroom to throw at campaign coverage). It is almost never anyone’s regular territory. So there is no continuity, no real methodology, and almost no follow-up.
For example, a lot of reporters tried to get a handle on South Carolina in advance of the voting in the Democratic primary there on Jan. 26. In that Southern state, a majority of Democratic voters are black. A slightly bigger majority are women. So, reporters asked: What are black women thinking? Do they support their fellow woman, Hillary? Or, do they support their fellow black, Barack? Did they listen to Barack’s endorsement by Oprah Winfrey? Or did they listen to Hillary’s endorsement by her husband, the man called our “first black president”?
In search of black women, reporters descended on the hair salons of South Carolina. (Like many personal-care businesses, these appear to be spontaneously segregated along racial lines.) That was fine, as far as it went. But most reporters went ONCE. After that, they began obeying one of the iron laws of journalism: Been there, done that. As far as I can tell, no one has gone back to South Carolina.

It may be objected that the big media and the elite press corps keep their finger on the pulse of the people through polling. With each new election, more polls are conducted, analyzed, and commented on than ever. Doesn’t that count?
Well, yes and no. For one thing, a lot of the polling that gets done in presidential elections is conducted by the different campaigns, for their own purposes. The results are often leaked, selectively, to favored reporters, always with the ulterior motive of making the candidate look good or harming some rival.
Then there are the polls that are commissioned, designed, and paid for by the media themselves. These are better, to be sure, but even those still have their limits. They are not very good, for example, at gauging the intensity of people’s feelings about a candidate or an issue. They rarely include open-ended questions, which would allow the voters to express what’s on their minds; instead, voters are asked pointed questions about what’s on the pollsters’ minds.
Polls are also not very good at measuring humor, which sometimes drives popular feelings. And they are not well suited to probing about subtle, ambivalent, or complicated attitudes. What does it mean to "disagree somewhat"?

In a sense, political reporters are similar to business reporters, especially the ones who cover markets. In the stock market, for example, the prices of stocks are driven by the uncoordinated actions of millions of investors. (Indeed, most members of the business press believe fervently in “the market” and will defend it against all comers, just as most political reporters believe in the sovereignty of “the people.”) But that’s not usually reflected in what business reporters actually write or say. Business reporters tell us a tidy narrative – every day! – about some fact or fear that changed everything and determined that day’s outcome. If the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates at 2 p.m., then by 2:15, there’s a whole new story – usually focused on heroic or venal individuals. Both kinds of reporters boldly make assertions about the future actions of millions of individuals whom they have not even spoken to.
On Jan. 30, I heard a political reporter on NPR “explaining” the McCain victory in Florida by attributing it 100 percent to a late decision by the state’s governor to endorse McCain. Never mind the action by thousands of late-deciding voters. They are not seen as agents; they are acted-upon. They are not the subjects of history; they are its objects.

In another sense, a lot of political coverage is not really journalism at all, if you start with the premise that the proper subject matter of journalism is the recent past. (What happened yesterday?) In this, it is different from history (What happened a while ago?) or anthropology or evolutionary biology. It is also different from astrology (What will happen next?). But very often, during campaign season, people called “journalists” break away from discussing the recent past and head off into an entirely different domain – the future.
They are constantly asked, What will happen next? That is a question to which a journalist can, logically, only summon up a single answer: I don’t know. But to say “I don’t know” – especially on television – is professional suicide. So, political journalists boldly go into terra incognita. Like medieval cartographers, they confidently describe places they have never been – complete with boiling vortices, sea monsters, and lands full of gold. It’s very exciting, but not very reliable. (Like the ancient cartographers, they don’t consider being wrong a rebuke – it’s just evidence of the need for a new map!)


Ultimately, there’s not much reason to think this system will change any time soon. It has a lot of momentum behind it, and it has a lot of self-perpetuating features. The system rarely looks back, so it’s entirely possible for a political reporter to be wrong all the time and yet thrive professionally. In such a culture, it is far more important to be clever and emphatic than to be right.
Besides, as long as nearly all the press corps share that same culture, there’s really no penalty for being “wrong.” Indeed, there is a sense in which you cannot be wrong provided you have enough company. On those frequent occasions when the entire press corps is wrong, all they have to do is declare the unanticipated outcome a “SURPRISE!” Then, it’s off to the races again.
Just recently, the Times (Feb. 8) had a piece about how those pesky voters keep confounding the experts. The piece cited a couple of spectacular gaffes by prominent members of the commentariat. But those mistakes were not the fault of the experts; they were blamed on the people, for being so fickle. The article was punctuated by this blow-up quote:

“The public turns out to have a mind of its own.”

Gee, imagine that.


--30--

NEW HISTORY

By Chris Daly

The departing managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, Paul Steiger, has written a noteworthy piece about the last few decades in the newspaper business. The piece is written from his perspective as a major executive at an incredibly prosperous, somewhat specialized news operation.
I wish he had paid more attention to the much longer history of news in America (see chapters elsewhere on this page), which would suggest that this current crisis in the business model is not the first.
Still, there are some notable highlights in Steiger's piece. He draws attention to the crucial business changes taking place in the 1960s and 70s (local monopolization, selling stock to the public) that created the conditions for what now appears to have been a brief period of exceptionalism in American journalism.
Plus, he offers some hilarious inside testimony about just how flush those times were. He writes:

Around the time of the 1980 slump, L.A. Times editors were told they needed to impose modest spending restraints. I figured out I could meet my target just by eliminating first-class travel on my group's reporting trips, then allowed on flights of more than three hours or so. I was quite proud of myself until the next day, when the top editor of the entire paper, who only occasionally visited our floor, strode straight to my desk. "I like flying first class," he said with a grin. "You're setting a bad example." I found another way to reach my goal.
In the mid-1980s, when I was a deputy managing editor at the Journal, the Dow Jones CEO almost apologetically imposed limits on our then-ample spending, in the face of cyclical advertising cutbacks by financial firms. As the CEO quipped, referring to then-managing-editor Norman Pearlstine, "We gave Norm an unlimited budget, and he exceeded it."

One remarkable oversight: Steiger makes no mention of one of the biggest holes in the bucket of U.S. newspapers -- Craigslist. I guess the WSJ never derived a whole lot of revenue from readers trying to sell their used boats or extra puppies.

EVALUATING F.C.C. DECISION

By Chris Daly

In the wake of the FCC ruling on media cross-ownership, here's one way to think about how to evaluate the decision:

Will it lead to the hiring (or retention) of a single journalist? Can it be shown that it strengthens a single newsroom? Is there any reporter, editor, photographer, columnist, or other news person who gets a job or keeps a job as a demonstrable result of this ruling?

If so, then I would consider the ruling a good thing. Until then, I'm skeptical.

THE WORST POLITICAL REPORTING OF 2007

WAS PUBLISHED IN THE WASHINGTON POST.

By Chris Daly

I have been holding off writing about this, but I can't avoid it any more. It pains me to see such horrendous reporting, writing, and editing in a paper I used to work for. Now, the paper's "ombudsman," Deborah Howell, who seems like a nice person, has weighed in. As so often happens, the ombud is pulling punches and not doing the kind of reporting that would satisfy a moderately curious person.
Where to begin?
The front-page story by Perry Bacon Jr. connected Barack Obama and Islam so tightly and so frequently that it really doesn't matter what else is in there. The message was: Obama=Muslim. (Not that there's anything wrong with that. And not that religion even belongs in politics.)

Here's a little thought exercise: What if the Post ran a front-page story saying that Perry Bacon is not a child molester. Not only has Perry Bacon never been convicted of child molesting, he has never even been indicted for child molesting. So those rumors about Perry Bacon and child molestation are just not true, folks.
Now, in such a story has Perry Bacon been
1. harmed by the story?
2. helped by the story?
3. held harmless by the story?
Obviously, he has been ruined by it, in a way that can probably never be undone. Most readers would retain only the association between the name and the allegation, and certainly computerized searches are going to link the two in perpetuity.

How could this have happened?

I don't know. All I have is questions:

1. Who is Perry Bacon Jr.? I don't really know, but in two minutes of Googling him, I learned that he graduated from Yale in 2002, so he is approximately 27 years old. Since when does the Post assign 27-year-olds to write Page 1 presidential campaign pieces? (Of course, a partial explanation may arise from the fact that Bacon won a coveted 2001 internship at the Post while still at Yale. At that point, he was the features editor for the Yale Daily News, and he had already had an internship at the National Journal and was described as having been "a reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal." This is fast-tracking with a vengeance -- a problem that I thought the Post had gotten past.)

2. Who edited this story? This is an important question when things go wrong, and one that is rarely answered. In this case, the Post is offering some lame statements by two editors. In a column by the paper's ombuds-person, M.E. Phil Bennett is quoted saying that the topic was "a legitimate subject for journalism" (What is? Untrue rumors?) and that it had been tackled by "one of our most sophisticated political reporters." (Please. If he's so damn sophisticated, how did he ever drive this train off the tracks?) Bill Hamilton, the paper's AME for politics, also had to talk to the ombud. He said he was "sorry it was misunderstood," when actually the problem is that it was understood. The problem was that it was a mistake.

3. Where is everyone else? At the Post, as at most papers, Page 1 stories are read by many, many editors, including most of the top people. Where are their comments? Who is taking any real lumps for this? Is the Post going to change anything?

I am pleased to think that the Post would not accept this kind of "investigation" and "explanation" of a similar screw-up from any institution that it really covers. It's too bad that it covers itself this way.

Praise for a great new book

By Chris Daly

The best book I have read lately is Backcast, by Lou Ureneck. Don't just take my word for it (in fact, you shouldn't take my word at all. Full disclosure: Lou is the chairman of my department at BU, and he's a good friend of mine). You can see for yourself in a review, written by Chuck Leddy, in The Boston Globe.

An excerpt:

"Backcast" ... is difficult to categorize and impossible to forget. It might be described as a stunning memoir, a marvelous outdoor adventure, or a breathtaking travelogue that explores the wilds of Alaska and the intricacies of the human heart. Whatever it is, it's wonderful....
....It would be unfair to reveal whether Ureneck finds what he's looking for in Alaska, but his readers will find more than enough beauty and humanity within these pages. Lou Ureneck is a master craftsman, and in "Backcast" he has meticulously constructed a story that's lasting and splendid to behold. You need not love fishing or the outdoors to enjoy this redemptive and intensely observed journey of self-discovery."

Backcast is a gem of narrative nonfiction -- brave, honest, and beautiful. The book is a triple-braided story that combines memories of Lou's childhood, nature-writing about his trip down a river in Alaska with his son, and a tough look at his relationship with that son. It's charming, funny, disarming, and occasionally hair-raising.

Lou has landed the big one.

Should news be interesting?

Of course, it should.

Here is a piece in the Atlantic that I find fairly suggestive. Basically, the author, Michael Hirschorn, took a sample of front pages over a period of time from the serious MSM and compared the editors' selections to the people's choices, as indicated by the articles that readers chose to e-mail.

The nut graf:
"What unites the most–e-mailed list (and granted, it’s hard to draw a single thread through stories about parrots, nuns, and Dumpster-diving foodies) is uniqueness. These stories, as they say in marketing, offer a “value add,” something that’s not available on the vaguely Soviet-seeming syndication-fed news pages of AOL, Yahoo, or Google. The real value now lies in non-commodifiable virtues like deep reporting, strong narrative, distinct point of view, and sharp analysis, which even in the blogger era (or especially in the blogger era) is available only piecemeal."

Turns out, editors of serious MSM newspapers are far more likely than their readers to highlight stories that dwell on depressing news, process stories about legislation, and "results" stories whose content reaches those interested constituencies much faster through some other means. And it turns out that the editors of MSM newspapers hide really cool, interesting stories all over the paper.


(I thought the Atlantic article, alas, could have been sharper: it should be tighter; it should state its point sooner and more forcefully; and it is crying out for a graphic presentation of the data.)

Review of new book on The AP

Here is a review I wrote for H-Net, an on-line scholarly site for humanities and social science scholars. It is a review of a big, new history of The Associated Press (yes, my old employer, as I disclose below). In case it's not clear fromthe review, I think everyone should read this book.

Here is the text of the review, in case you want to read it right here:

REVIEW: How the Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace, and Everything Else


H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by Jhistory@h-net.msu.edu (November 2007)

By Reporters of the Associated Press.
Breaking News: How the Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace, and Everything Else
New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007. 432 pp. Photographs. $35.00 (cloth),
ISBN 978-1-56898-689-0.

Reviewed for Jhistory by Chris Daly
Journalism Department, Boston University

More than 30 years ago, the media scholar James Carey declared a need for a
history of reporting, calling it the central story in the realm of
journalism history.[1] Reporting is, after all, the core activity of
journalism. It is not founding newspapers or arguing over control of the
radio spectrum or defending libel suits or inventing new devices--important
as those are. First and foremost, journalism is about finding things
out--either by witnessing them or talking to people who did or reading
documents. Then, it is about writing rivers of simple declarative sentences
and taking in-focus photos and video.

Despite the explosion of research in the field since Carey's rallying cry,
the grand project of a history of reporting remains incomplete. With the
publication of _Breaking News_, though, we are a step closer.

As far as it goes, this is a terrific book. It is packed with thrilling
tales of the kind of journalistic enterprise, bravery, and occasional dumb
luck that have marked Associated Press (AP) news-gathering since the news
cooperative was founded in 1846. It is also lavishly illustrated with gems
from AP's vast storehouse of photos. To accommodate the photos, the book is
slightly oversized, and the stock is heavy, giving it the heft of a
coffee-table book.

In a decision that is reflective of the AP ethos, _Breaking News_ is a
collective effort, with authorship by "the reporters of the Associated
Press," and so lacks a distinctive voice or a strong point of view. A
wonderful touch is the foreword by David Halberstam, which only highlights
the contrast in prose styles. In his foreword, one of the last projects
completed before his death in a car accident, Halberstam offers a fond
tribute to the AP bureau he knew best--the one in Saigon in the 1960s. That
alone makes the book worthwhile.

[Full disclosure: I worked for the AP for more than ten years between late
1976 and early 1989, in New York and Boston. I mostly enjoyed it, and I left
on good terms.]

Much of _Breaking News_ pursues a familiar genre--the "story behind the
story." A reader can dip in just about anywhere and plunge into some clever
or heroic episode of triumph over obstacles or of victory over "the
opposition." We learn about some of the great lengths AP men (and a few
women) have gone to in order to "get it first and get it right." And there
are oddities, like the AP staffer who witnessed more than three hundred
executions. Many of the stories are indeed thrilling, some are inspiring,
and a few are endearing.

There was, for example, the amazing brawl for the bare-knuckle heavyweight
boxing crown in July 1889, between Jake Kilrain and the magnificent John L.
Sullivan. (It went seventy-five rounds--yes, seventy-five rounds!--but
that's another story.) The fight was hidden away in the woods near
Hattiesburg, Mississippi, more than 100 miles from the nearest telegraph
station, in New Orleans. To make matters worse, some 3,000 fans were packed
in around the ring, and no one could move in or out. How was the AP going to
get the news out?

Step one was to charter a private train and have it stand by. Step two was
to equip the ringside fight reporter with "hollow wooden balls that could be
screwed open and shut" (p. 137). The reporter wrote his account of each
round, stuffed it inside a ball, then heaved it to a waiting courier. At the
fight's end, the courier rushed all the copy to the waiting train. As the
train dashed toward New Orleans, the AP found some stowaways on board from
other news outlets. So, the nameless AP man rushed forward to the engine and
cut the other cars loose, allowing him to get to the telegraph first--and
alone.

An episode that was perhaps more emblematic of the hard-news tradition of
journalism involved the Lindbergh flight of 1927. Because the AP had
bureaus, correspondents, and member newspapers all along the route, it was
uniquely well positioned to cover the flight. Everyone along the route was
mobilized. One of the Paris correspondents went out to Bourget Field in
advance and realized that there was only a single pay phone, so he
"arranged" to get a phone line in a private building nearby. Once again, the
AP flashed the news to a waiting world. The moral of the story is not that
it takes a dashing superhero to cover the news but that a little planning
ahead goes a long way.

Another strength of _Breaking News_ is the collection of amazing photos.
They are integrated with the text, so that they appear in context, and the
best of them get their own full page. The Pulitzer Prize-rich photo staff
has taken dozens of iconic photos since the Civil War, and plenty of them
are here: the Iwo Jima flag-raising, the self-immolation of the Buddhist
monk in Saigon, the "napalm girl" in Vietnam, the "tank man" in Tiananmen
Square, the "falling man" at the World Trade Center. There are also some
photos of AP reporters at work.

Especially valuable are the accounts of how such photos were made, which is
usually lacking from pure photo books that reproduce pictures without
contextualizing them. We learn, for example, that in the Saigon bureau in
the 1960s, chief photographer Horst Faas insisted that all the print
reporters take cameras with them whenever they went out in the field. That's
why reporter Malcolm Browne had a camera with him when the monk set himself
ablaze. This approach, which would probably have run afoul of union rules
back home, is now becoming a more common practice in today's convergent
newsrooms, more than forty years later.

_Breaking News_ is also useful as a source for getting the AP's version of
some historic news moments that are still subject to dispute. Who really
reported the first news about Pearl Harbor? What was going on in the JFK
motorcade? Here, the AP tells its side. In addition, the book helps fill a
gap in most histories by pointing out the role the AP played over the
twentieth century in defending freedom of the press and freedom of
information, often by filing lawsuits.

Overall, the book is arranged by topics-- war (two chapters), trials,
Freedom of Information, aviation, sports, elections, civil rights, foreign
reporting, photos, disasters, and the White House. (Oddly, there is no
chapter on business news, which is a pretty significant part of the AP).
This arrangement evokes the reality that these topics are all separate
"beats" in the view of the AP, but at a cost. Even though the chapters are
generally chronological, the topical approach makes it hard to follow the
overall story of the AP from start to finish. Helpfully, there is a "brief
history" (eleven pages) of the AP at the back, written by veteran Walter
Mears.

_Breaking News_, which includes endnotes, reflects a concern about sources.
Many of the older anecdotes are based on Oliver Gramling's mother lode of AP
stories, _AP: The Story of News_ (1940). The authors also make good use of
two essential scholarly studies, Menachem Blondheim's _News over the Wires_
(1994) and Richard Schwarzlose's _The Nation's Newsbrokers_ (1989-1990). As
each chapter approaches the present, more and more use is made of the AP's
corporate archives, which lay almost forgotten in the basement of AP's
landmark headquarters in Rockefeller Center until the company moved in 2004,
as well as oral histories conducted for this project.

In all, _Breaking News_ is a valuable addition to the literature. But (ah,
the "but graf") this book will leave many historians of journalism wishing
for more. It doesn't really meet the standard that Carey was calling for.
His often-quoted call for a history of reporting was part of a larger point:
that a history of reporting should be part of a _cultural_ history of
journalism. Such a history would go beyond the question of "What happened?"
and take up larger questions: Why did people in the past act as they did?
What did their experience feel like to them? What did it all mean?

The authors of _Breaking News_ are very adept at handling 80 percent of the
five W's, especially "what." But in true AP fashion, they shy away from the
"why" question. As a work of history, this is a remarkably unreflective
book.

One episode is indicative: _Breaking News_ proudly tells the story behind
the story of the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1973. An AP
messenger recognized Agnew as he was entering the federal courthouse in
Baltimore to address the charges of corruption. The (nameless) messenger
called the Washington bureau. Reporter Richard Pyle then called Agnew's
office, and a sobbing secretary confirmed the vice president's resignation.
Pyle flashed the news.

The result was the AP got a full half-hour "beat" on everyone else. Which
raises a question, one that is never raised inside AP to the best of my
knowledge, and not raised in this book: So what? The news of Agnew's
announcement was going to be announced in a little while anyway, so what
difference did half an hour make? In a book devoted to an institution
organized around the belief that such "beats" are of transcendent
importance, this question should be at least addressed.

_Breaking News_ is also disappointing in another way. It is fundamentally
misleading about the historical reality of the AP because it focuses so
strictly on news flashes, bulletins, and other earth-shattering events. The
fact is, most days in most bureaus are routine, and this book sidesteps that
reality, which is made up of an endless round of shifts in which stories
from the members are rewritten, correspondents cover meetings with entirely
predictable outcomes, desk supervisors see to the routing of ski conditions
or produce prices to members who can't publish without them, and staffers
take dictation from stringers at Division III college football games. It's
not all V-J Day, prize fights, and trips on Air Force One. History happens
even when all hell is not breaking loose.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, _Breaking News_ does not approach its subject
critically. The authors celebrate their subject and avoid asking whether AP
could be better. The AP is the only news organization in America that covers
every state legislature, every governor, every state supreme court. What do
they have to show for it? The AP is not only the biggest employer of
journalists in the country, it also has a high "churn rate," because people
are always leaving and the AP is constantly hiring new people. How does it
impart skills to them? How does it acculturate them into the values and
traditions of journalism? What is the philosophy or ethos of the place? We
cannot find out from _Breaking News_.

To the AP's credit, this book does make some (brief) admissions. It
acknowledges that the AP was an enabler of racism during the modern civil
rights struggle. It admits that the AP dropped the ball on Watergate.
Reading between the lines, it allows that the AP has had a horrible track
record in hiring women and minorities. (The first black reporter, Austin
Long-Scott, was hired in 1961, and he did not have much company for a long
time.)

But as might be expected of an in-house production, _Breaking News_ pulls
some punches. There is no discussion of the nonprofit cooperative's
governance or finances. There is no criticism of the print and broadcast
"members" who are the AP's ultimate masters. And it's hard to find any
evidence that any AP staffer ever screwed up, arrived late, or spelled a
name wrong.

Finally, this big new book on the AP falls short by not engaging any of the
scholarly, political, or economic debates surrounding the practice of news
gathering. There are only passing references to "objectivity," which would
seem like a fairly central issue for an organization like the AP. Nor is
there any discussion of the AP's role as the ultimate agenda-setter in U.S.
daily news reporting.

In the literature on the history of American journalism, there is no
shortage of books about the _New York Times_, the _New Yorker_, CBS, or a
handful of other hardy perennials. There are shelves full of studies,
memoirs, and anthologies. Yet, the AP remains the elephant in the library.
Although it is, in many ways, the center of gravity in American journalism,
it is still lacking the full-blown cultural history that it deserves.

_Breaking News_ helps, but the definitive study still awaits.

Note

[1]. James Carey, "The Problem of Journalism History," _Journalism History_
1 (Spring 1974): 3-5, 27.

A REAL TREAT

Here is one of the best pieces I have read in a while.

It's hilarious, it's heart-breaking, it's smart, it's real. It is also a lively update on an enduring genre: What happens when a writer takes a vogue notion and tries to actually implement it?

It just makes me wish that New York magazine had more stuff like this more often.

(Thanks to friends Nat & Nancy Gardiner for flagging it to me.)

SECOND THOUGHTS ON FREE ACCESS

"By Chris Daly


“Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute,
copy and recombine – too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it
can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away.”
--Stewart Brand, “The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT” (1987)



When the top brass at The New York Times announced last week that the paper was scrapping its experiment in posting a tollbooth on the information superhighway, there was a lot of cheering. Most commentators hailed the move as an acknowledgement of the new media realities. Dan Gillmor, for example, the estimable head of the Center for Citizen Media and an insightful former journalist, said:

"Glad to see that the Times is putting its great cast of columnists more firmly back into the public conversation than they’d been behind the pay-wall. That’s excellent news for the writers and the readers."

At first, I agreed with him (and others, like Doc Searls) and joined the cheering section. After all, who wants to be against freedom?

But in the past few days, I have felt troubled by some of the implications.

Originally, of course, the Times made a pretty straightforward business decision in setting up the TimesSelect pay wall. (It must have been a business decision, because it certainly made no sense from a journalistic, public-service, or historical point of view.)

The calculation was that the paper recognized that its celebrated and comprehensive news coverage was attracting a lot of what economists call "free riders," or what the rest of us call "free-loaders" -- people who wanted something for nothing. They were coming to the Times' website, reading to their heart's content, and contributing no revenue to the expense of running the paper. They were behaving in a way that is somewhere between window-shopping and shop-lifting. So, why not try to get some money out of them?

As someone who used to make my living as a journalist on the payroll of traditional news media, I have to say that I do not consider the idea of asking your customers to pay to be inherently evil. I know that many cyber-thinkers and bloggers think so, but I do not. I think that having squads of professional journalists doing original reporting is worthwhile, and it is certainly not free.

So, my question is this: If the readers won’t pay, who will?

And this brings me to what I find troubling about the Times’ decision to give away its news report for free: it makes the newspaper even more dependent on advertising revenue.

As I point out in my book, the news business has operated since at least the early 19th Century on a model that was based on a “dual revenue stream” – money coming in from subscribers and money coming in from advertisers. The exact proportion varied a bit from place to place and from time to time, but they were both important.

Now, obviously, the old business model is crumbling. The question is: what will replace it? A model that depends 100% on advertising is not self-evidently better. If there is no revenue coming in from readers, the news organization is entirely dependent on advertising revenue. History tells us that advertisers can have all kinds of bad influences. For one thing, ad revenue is fickle: it goes through an annual cycle of ups and downs, and it tends to shrink in recessions. Not only that, but advertisers have been trying to weasel their way into news and editorial decision-making since the earliest days, and there is no reason to believe they will ever stop.

If the news must depend on a single stream of revenue, I would rather see that stream made up of millions of readers trying to learn things than see it made up of a few hundred corporations trying to sell things.

NOW They Tell Us

New York Times coverage shows independence (at last)

By Chris Daly


THE MOST IMPORTANT THING about the special report on Page 1 of the Sunday New York Times (Sept. 9) was that it existed at all. Taking up the bulk of the front page space “above the fold,” the report was an effort to supply readers with a comprehensive assessment of the situation in Iraq, just ahead of the long-awaited report by Gen. David Patreus.
What’s significant about the Times’ report is that it was the product of independent, on-the-ground reporting. It was not a summary of things that were said by experts or other people. It was first-hand.

Whether the report was correct in every particular is another question. Whether the conclusion is justified by the facts is open to dispute.

But that is precisely the point. Those of us who cannot go to Baghdad and see for ourselves are entirely dependent on those who are there on the ground. In a time of war, what could be more valuable to those reader/citizens who must ultimately decide what to do in Iraq?

The story also reflects the institutional heft of The New York Times. The page 1 piece bears two bylines, but that fact barely suggests the commitment behind the story. Inside, there is an italicized “credit box” listing 16 other people who contributed to the report, including military affairs specialist Michael Gordon and quite a few whose names appear to be Iraqi. Add to that the number of artists, photographers, videographers, and cartographers who created the accompanying visual package. Add to that the teams of editors who doubtless pored over the whole thing. There were probably no fewer than 40 people involved.

And it was hardly a “day” story. That is, this piece was not a reaction to events that occurred on Saturday. It was the results of weeks of sustained reporting targeted toward this final result. It was undertaken at the newspaper’s initiative.

Still, the report raises a question: Where was this kind of tough, skeptical, independent reporting before the war?
Or in the first couple of years of the invasion and occupation of Iraq?
After the passage of this much time, World War II was over.

Things You Can Learn from Fox News

THINGS YOU CAN LEARN FROM FOX NEWS

By Chris Daly

With the recent disclosure that Rupert Murdoch, global media mogul, is attempting to buy the Dow Jones Company and its flagship, the Wall Street Journal, I have been paying more attention lately to one of Murdoch’s journalistic operations, the Fox News Channel. You can learn a lot from watching Fox News, especially if you ignore what is being said and focus instead on what is not being said. Here are some things I learned:


1. President Bush is perfect and never makes mistakes.

2. If Bush makes a mistake, see #1.

3. Real men have blunt-sounding, single-syllable names like Biff, Brent, Shep. They sound like names from a rodeo rather than a newsroom.

4. America has an endless supply of fairly young, totally blonde women who are fairly smart and totally deferential.

5. The oil business is complicated and off-limits. All you need to know is this: everything would be fine if we could just increase the supply of oil, but liberals won’t let us.

6. Everything bad is Clinton’s fault.

7. Ronald Reagan is the godhead.

8. The cops are always right and just need more firepower.

9. Prosecutors are always right and need stiffer penalties, including the death penalty.

10. When things are going badly in Iraq, it’s time for a story about the weather.

11. Left-wing celebrities are all hypocritical kooks.

12. Right-wing celebrities are charming individuals.

13. America is a Christian country, so (obviously) there should be Christmas displays outside our city halls and the 10 Commandments in our courtrooms. Anyone who disagrees is a dangerous atheist.

14. A lot of the countries we don’t like are theocracies, but they’re not usually Christian, so that doesn’t count. We can still make fun of their practices and cluck over their backwardness.

15. In sports, what matters is football and NASCAR. Everything else is for liberals, girls and foreigners.

16. The “culture wars” matter, 24/7.

17. Most Americans need regular instruction in how to think about politics.

18. Foreigners come in two flavors: Silly and Scary. That’s because…

19. All of the decent, hard-working foreigners came to America long ago (when our own ancestors did), before our leaders discovered an immigration crisis.

20. A subject that cannot be mentioned: corporate CEO compensation rates. Shhh.

21. That’s because in America all rich people deserve to be rich (except for left-wing Hollywood stars).

22. People like Oprah, Michael Jordan and Beyonce are a pain the ass and can give you a headache if you think about them long enough, but they are useful because their success “proves” that America is not a racist country… so GET OVER IT.

23. History is complicated and can also give you a headache. But history comes in handy when you need to rationalize anything that conservatives want to do, and there are conservative “intellectuals” who will provide the proper historical analogies just in time, on an as-needed basis.

24. The average, normal American is rightly aggrieved because un-deserving people are always trying to take things from us. (Jobs, certitude, etc.)

25. Taxation is theft.

26. All government spending is wasteful. (Except military spending and Republican earmarks).

27. The following statements are all ones that reasonable people disagree over but can be asserted as self-evident:
--Human life begins at conception.
--Lower taxes stimulate the economy and thereby yield greater revenue.
--Crime is the result of liberal coddling.

28. If you say “fair and balanced” often enough, who knows?

I have also noticed that whenever the news is really bad for conservatives, Fox finds a reason to change the subject. It seems there is always a blonde abduction case, a tornado in a Blue State, or a low-speed car chase being held in reserve. Sex offender, anyone?