Modern Mass Media Are All Twitter

The side-by-side cover shots above are stolen from my friend John Maniaci’s Facebook page.  John is one of the most talented news photographers in the country, whose work formerly graced the State Journal and the Cap Times. These days John is a colleague of my wife’s at UW-Health, where his phenomenal talent captures unforgettable images of world-class health care providers and the people who benefit from their skill.

Look at the contrast in the two cover-shots above: a true study in divergent approaches to telling a story with a photograph.  To use John’s own words, “Sports Illustrated – tells the story in a single image, instantly, preserving the anonymity of the runner. Time – horrible; says nothing about the race and puts this poor kid front and center.”

To me, the Time Magazine cover photo represents many of the things that are wrong with modern mass (well, not so “mass” any more, for Time) media. Without the caption "Tragedy in Boston", the photo represents nothing but a traumatized child.  Like television, the news magazine's default position has become “EXCESS”.  Images of crying or traumatized children are exploited, just as in the Sandy Hook mass murders.  Televised interviews are fraught with people breaking down in tears.  No cloying emotion is left unexploited.

And the most stupid of questions are asked by supposedly seasoned reporters: “What did it feel like?”

As if we are devoid of imagination, and can’t possibly conceive of what it might be like to be trapped in a classroom or theater with an insane gunman on the loose, or in a group watching an event when suddenly a shrapnel bomb goes off.  As if we can’t imagine what it’s like to have a limb hacked off by a ball-bearing going a thousand miles an hour.

There is no such thing as subtlety in modern mass media; in fact, it’s quite the contrary.

Ten seconds of video showing the bomb-blast on Boylston Street is run over and over and over and over, in a seemingly endless loop – just the same as the media showed the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsing – again and again and again and again. And the frightened children being led away from the schoolhouse, again and again and again, over and over and over.

This is the grist of the modern media mill.

And the insane scramble to get ANY new “information” on the air, which results in huge mistakes in fact.  It’s Ryan Lanza.  No, it’s Adam Lanza.  No, it’s Ryan Lanza.  No, it’s Adam Lanza.  He had four guns.  Or two. Or six. Or ten.  There’s another bomb at the JFK Library.  Wait, no there isn’t.  Wait, there is.  OK now we think there isn’t.  The suspected bomber is in custody.  No, he’s not.  He is.  Is not.

If credibility were important, there’d be a lot of losers in the news game these days.

Modern media has become Twitter – a huge volume of empty talk, a lot of unsupported assertion, a lot of unattributed “fact”, a lot of noise.  Nuggets of truth.

And very little real information.

And no one in news content management insists the time be taken to filter the raw feed and sift the truth from the chaff.

It's all about speed, not accuracy.

And cloying emotion.

The Cult of Balance (Again)

Now that the Grey Lady (The New York Times) has taken up the discussion and developed new guidelines for its reporters regarding balance and false equivalence, it’s likely to become a very hot topic in mainstream journalism.

The analogy I like best, to explain false equivalence, is the one where someone (like, for instance, Michelle Bachman, although she did NOT say this) says “the earth is flat”, and the person running against her says “the earth is round”, and the news story is headlined “Opinions Vary on the Shape of the Earth” – as if both the flat earth statement and the round earth statement were of equal truth and value.

I’ve ranted several times in the past about the cult of journalists who believe every story must be balanced, particularly when politics is the topic, and they accept the nonsense being spewed by one person/candidate is being as valid as whatever’s being said by the opposition.

Complicating the issue in this Presidential election cycle is the fairly recent phenomenon that as Americans, we now have our own sets of “facts”.  We don’t agree and what is and what isn’t a fact, and we have the ability to expose ourselves to only one set of “facts”: Fox News and its ilk have one take on what’s fact and what isn’t; MSNBC and its ilk have a different, and often opposite take on what’s fact. We can select the information we consume to fit our bias.  Case on point: the birther issue.

It seems as a result of this recent “my facts aren’t your facts” phenomenon, fewer Americans, particularly those with deficient education, are not able to make an independent determination of what’s fact and what’s not.

Suppose you’re a reporter doing an interview with Tommy Thompson (or Paul Ryan), and he trots out the line about repealing Obamacare, which he characterizes as a government takeover of health care.  Do you let it slide? Politfact and many other reputable watchdog groups have clearly exposed the “takeover” line as bunk – Politfact called it “the biggest political lie of 2010”.  The Affordable Care Act is nothing near a “government takeover” – the government will not take over hospitals and clinics, the government will not put doctors and caregivers on the federal payroll, and on and on.  Do you stop Thompson (Ryan) and challenge him on the line right then and there?  Do you point out when reporting the story that the ACA is not a government takeover of health care?  Or, do you do what 99.445% of reporters do, and simply let the tape roll, because, after all, as your journalism professors taught you, it’s not YOU that’s making the false assertion, it’s the candidate?

When Paul Ryan spun his lie about the Janesville GM plant in his speech at the Republican Convention, he was caught immediately.  But today’s political tactic is to continue to tell the lie, again and again, regardless of how many times reporters call you on it.  Piers Morgan’s interview with Scott Walker the night after Ryan’s convention speech is quite instructive: Morgan essentially said to Walker “why the lie?” – and Walker simply repeated it – twice.  Is “Obama promised to keep the GM Janesville plant open” a true or false statement?  Now, the Ryanites have doubled-down on the falsehood, and are running a TV ad which infers Obama broke  promise to keep the plant open - even though the context of CANDIDATE Obama's quote clearly indicates the plant could stay open another hundred years IF General Motors would re-tool to make more fuel-efficient vehicles - an option GM decided not to take.

That’s why we don’t – and can’t – have political discourse any more.  We can’t agree on what’s a fact and what isn’t.

As a varsity debater in college, I learned the importance of defining terms.  Seems now we have to define facts.  And, since we can’t seem to agree on facts, we’ll remain divided and gridlocked.

The image at the top of this post is Copyright PolitiFact.

The Cult of False Balance

If ever there was an outfit that’s not fair and balanced, it’s Faux News.  But Roger Ailes is smart enough to know that “balanced” is a very important word to news consumers, who want to believe they’re getting both sides of the story; and Ailes is clever enough to know that when you have no intention of being balanced, you need to tell people, and tell them frequently, that your product is “balanced”.  And, of course, fair.

Full disclosure: I am not a journalist and have never claimed to be one, even though I was a radio and TV news anchor for much of my adult life.  I have no formal training in the profession.  Not that long ago, a journalist was a journalist.  Either you were or you weren’t.  If you worked for a newspaper as a reporter and claimed the mantle “journalist”, if you shifted jobs from reporting to writing a column, you became a “columnist” rather than a journalist.  There used to be very high walls between such compartments and very bright lines defining what a journalist is or does.  You don’t have to be a journalist to commit journalism, but if you claim the title, you’d better follow the standards to which journalists are held.

Now, we have people using terms like “advocacy journalist”; “investigative journalist” (as if regular journalists didn’t investigate); even “crusading journalist”, the term local muckraker Dave Blaska uses to describe Vicky McKenna.  (Sidebar: I used to be Vicky McKenna’s boss.  I hired her in 1995 to be a radio news reporter.  She was a journalist and a damn good one.  She uncovered more stuff about the behind-the-scenes dealings involved in the early stages of the plan to build Miller Park than any other radio news reporter in Madison.  But when she started doing a talk show, she stopped being a journalist, no matter what Dave Blaska says.)

The concept of balance in journalism has been, I believe, corrupted to absurdity.  Too many people practicing and managing the art and science of journalism have apparently adopted an attitude that EVERYTHING must be balanced.  Again, my favorite example: some dweeb currently in the public eye, say, oh, a politician or movie star, says the Earth is flat, and the headline of the story is “opinions vary on the shape of the earth”.

Don Lemon, the young man who anchors many hours of CNN’s weekend news coverage, was clearly out of his depth Sunday afternoon when trying to report on the attack in Oak Creek (which one local reporter, who was on the scene Sunday night, repeatedly referred to as “Oak Park”).  Lemon repeatedly called the temple a church, repeatedly said the shootings happened “south of Wisconsin” when he meant south of Milwaukee, and repeatedly contradicted in his summaries what reporters on the scene were saying moments earlier.  In the most egregious case of this, shortly after Greenfield Police Chief Bradley Wentlandt (and wasn’t he GREAT in the role as law enforcement spokesman!!!) held a news conference and announced for the first time that the officer who first responded to the shooting was NOT the officer who took down the shooter – a real piece of news – Lemon summarized the news conference as not containing much new information.  Ooops.  Only the biggest scoop to be revealed in the past four hours.

As usual, I digress.

Lemon at one point in the coverage read a statement from President Obama regarding the shootings, and as soon as he finished reading it, he said, in an urgent tone of voice, that CNN was expecting to get a statement from Mitt Romney regarding the shootings, and AS SOON as CNN got it, he would “report” it.

God forbid CNN should read a statement from President Obama, without a “balancing” statement from Mitt Romney (which came about 10 minutes later).

This may come as a shock to you, but I don’t care what Mitt Romney has to say about the shooting; and truth to be told, I don’t care what President Obama has to say about the shooting, unless it’s something other than the usual platitudes politicians mouth after events like this.  I think if I were anchoring CNN coverage, I would have appended the President’s statement by saying something like “the President, who made some bullshit statements he never followed up on about demanding stricter gun controls in this country following the shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, has apparently learned to avoid making such statements, since he omitted such a statement following the theatre shootings in Colorado and now has chosen not to make any reference to gun control following the shootings in Oak Creek”. 

And, I think if I were anchoring CNN coverage of the Oak Creek shootings, I would have further said “and don’t expect us to read a statement from Mitt Romney; his PR people can get back to us with a statement if Romney is elected”.  I have this vision of all sorts of behind-the-scenes functionaries at CNN falling all over each other “efforting” (God, I hate that non-word…..) a comment from Romney to “balance” the comment from the President.

I guess I’m emboldened by Aaron Sorkin’s fictional news anchor Will McAvoy (brilliantly played by Jeff Daniels) in the new HBO series “The Newsroom”:  McAvoy tends to call a spade a shovel and calls out politicians on their bullshit statements.

You can call it balance or perspective or whatever you want; but I do believe the concept is widely misunderstood by far too many people putting out news today.

Feel free to disagree with me.  I may need someone to “balance” my comments.

Should Advocacy Replace Journalism?

Watching the premiere of Aaron Sorkin’s “Newsroom” on HBO prompted some questions I’m still pondering.  The title of this post is one of them.  Jeff Daniels’ character is an irascible cable news anchor, prone to fits of pique and ready to issue a blistering rant at any moment.  During one of the rants, excoriating the current state of the news profession, Daniels’ character asserts that TV news has everything to do with entertainment and diversion, and not with facts, because today people chose their own set of facts.

The online publication “Gawker” asked Dan Rather – certainly one of my least favorite anchormen of all time – to watch the HBO show and comment.  Among other things, Dumb Dan said this of Sorkin’s portrayal of a TV newsroom, with the push and pull of whether or not what they’re doing matters: “It's a fight that matters, not just for journalists but for the country. It centers on whether news reporting is to be considered and practiced — to any significant degree, even a little — as a public service, in the public interest, or is to exist solely as just another money-making operation for owners of news outlets.”

Well-said, Dan.

There are plenty of reporters – national and local – who ferret out good stories and report them with little bias.  I’m referring to the straightforward stuff where facts are facts, and they’re not in dispute: somebody shot somebody, somebody wrecked their car and got hurt, the city council passed a new ordinance, a family needs financial help for an expensive operation for a child, a local company is expanding operations – those sort of stories that comprise the warp and woof of daily journalism.

But when it comes to getting at the truth of statements made by public officials, private business owners/managers, and certainly political candidates, I think Journalism has been falling down on the job for quite a while.  There’s a tendency to report anything an official, a spokesman, or a candidate says, as “fact”.  (The fact is, of course, they said it; I think we can trust nearly every reporter to get that part right.)  I have often used the lighthearted poke at Journalism that goes “Candidate X says the earth is flat; the story is headlined ‘Opinions on the shape of the earth vary’”.

No matter how stupid, inaccurate, or wrong the statement is, it’s reported – and repeated – unchallenged.  Many reporters will say it’s merely their job to report the news accurately, not to try and interpret it – that’s somebody else’s job.  And that’s where I begin to have some questions about that model.

Take the case of Tea Party darling Tommy Thompson, who is doing his best to remake his image as a cordial consensus-builder (and a HUGE tax-and-spender) into a tea party conservative.  Because he’s actually spent most of his time the past few years as a lobbyist for huge health care corporations, he’s doing his best to distance himself from the (accurate) image of being a “Washington insider” to being a regular fellow, just like you and me, who has knowledge about how the health care system works, and wants to reform it.

Here’s the image for Tommy’s online manifesto about health care – but note that whenever he talks about it, he refers to his position as “repealing Obama-Care”.  (He’ll do that all by himself, Tommy will, without the help of 99 other Senators or 435 Members of the House of Representatives.)

The first sentence of the second paragraph of Tommy’s health care reform plan contains a Republican Party position-line cooked up a few years ago by party operative Frank Luntz, that refers to the President’s plan as a “government takeover of health care”.  (Politfact calls that statement the biggest lie of 2010.)  Tommy parrots that line constantly in his TV ads and his stump speech.  To characterize President Obama’s health care reforms as a government takeover is complete horsepoop, because it’s no such thing by ANY definition.  The government will not take over hospitals and health care institutions, and doctors and nurses and health care professionals will not suddenly cease to be independent and become employees of the state.  It doesn’t even work that way in the “European Socialism Model” we’re constantly being warned about: doctors contract with health care providing organizations, but remain independent.

Tommy’s “market-based solution” is just as much hogwash.  The market doesn’t work, because insurers can turn you down for damn near any reason, and once one of them does, the others won’t touch you.  It’s not free-market, even if you take away the pre-existing condition argument.  It’s not like any other good or service that operates in a free market, where if one vendor turns you down, you can buy the item or service somewhere else.  So the health insurance racket is NOT a “free market” by any definition.  And, of course, Tommy prattles on about tort reform and not lining the pockets of the malpractice lawyers with millions of dollars in huge verdicts.  Suffice it to say Tommy’s plan is Paul Ryan dogma.

Back to the Journalism/advocacy question.

Shouldn’t a good reporter stop Tommy in his tracks when he starts talking about Obama-care being a government takeover of the health care industry, and say “wait, wait, that’s a bunch of crap and you know it”?  Shouldn’t the “Journalists” who conduct the candidate “debates” (and anyone who’s ever actually been on a debate team knows that those joint appearances by the candidates are certainly not “debates”) do the same?  Shouldn’t they call them on their falsehoods, no matter which party they belong to?

Or should they leave every statement unchallenged, and let the opposing candidate call an assertion into question?

I don’t know.  I’m sure this line of questioning is being repeated in college classrooms across America, and I have no idea if the “model” is changing or not.  The media certainly have changed, and the way we consume media certainly has changed.   I think we have to ask the question, though, so that we start thinking about an answer, and perhaps a different model.

Perhaps Sorkin’s new show will cast more light on this in future episodes.

This is What Happens When You Fire All the REAL News People

One of the many bad things that happen when you have managers with no background in news, making decisions about staffing levels in the news department -whether it’s print or electronic medium -is that you wind up with people completely unqualified for the task making stupid mistakes.

Case on point: the “April Fool” that the “news” announcers at Magnum Communications (12 radio stations scattered around Wisconsin) thought was real, and put on the air without checking.

Years ago, before news budgets were so severely slashed in the broadcast medium (particularly radio) there was a disgusting practice called “rip and read”.  It referred to ripping a piece of news copy right off the Associated Press teletype and reading it on the air.  No re-write, no scan for mistakes, just straight from the “news wire” to the air.  In the digital age, there’s no teletype any more; the AP feed is digital, direct to the newsroom computer – in those few station clusters that still spend what it costs to have AP news delivered.

Rip and Read also refers to the process of ripping a story right out of the local newspaper and reading it on the air – no rewrite; no attribution (“The Wisconsin State Journal is reporting  xxxx”); just outright theft of the newspaper’s product.

That’s what happened late last week when the Ontario County Line, a western Wisconsin weekly newspaper with a couple thousand circulation…ran its annual April Fool story.  Karen Parker, who’s been the editor of the paper for three decades, does an April Fool story every year, and tries every year to write something even more absurd than the prior year, as a lesson to readers to be skeptical about what they read.  That’s what she told Jim Romenesko, the veteran media critic who blogs at jimromenesko.com.

Parker’s joke this year was a story saying Disney had purchased the popular Elroy-Sparta Trail from the DNR.  She told Romenesko Saturday afternoon “Oh my God, this thing just boomeranged all over the state. The worst thing is our radio stations around here don’t spend any money on reporting, so they just read our news. Magnum Radio has 12 stations and they all read the story as a regular news story. “

Suffice it to say the DNR was inundated with calls from people who said “say it ain’t so!”

It used to be that when you worked in a broadcast newsroom there were enough old hands around, who’d been burned enough times by making mistakes, to teach the youngsters about verifying information, being doubly certain that what they were going to report as news was accurate, and having a healthy dose of skepticism when they encountered a story about something as wild as Disney buying a state recreation trail.

Not now.  All too often, it’s just some young person who wants to be on the radio, and the only open job is the “news job”, and they take it, just to get on the radio – with the hope of “advancing” to the high calling of “disc jockey”.  Not all that long ago young men seeking a career in broadcast sports would apply for broadcast news openings, hoping that this “foot in the door” would eventually lead to an on-air sports job.  Never mind that they had no journalistic or news training or experience whatsoever – it was their way in, for a shot at a sports reporting job.

I’ve said many times radio is dying the death of a thousand cuts.  I know Dave Magnum, the owner of Magnum Broadcasting.  He’s a responsible broadcaster.  He was probably more embarrassed about this stupid mistake than the “news” people who committed it.

But it’s stuff like this that’s killing what’s left of radio.

I Call B.S. on the Appleton Post-Crescent

A few days ago Genia Lovett, the president and publisher of the Appleton Post-Crescent newspaper, which is owned by Gannett, made note in her column in the newspaper that 25 Gannett Wisconsin media journalists, including nine employed by the Post-Crescent, signed the petition to recall Governor Walker.  She went on to say those employees broke the paper’s “Code of Ethics” by signing, and further said they would be disciplined.

This is the biggest load of BS that’s come down the road in a long time.

First, before we go any farther, I’m sure people more experienced and smarter than I, have already explained (in colorful language) to Ms. Lovett that Wisconsin has very specific laws in place to prevent organizations like Gannett from taking any sort of “disciplinary” or “retraining” action against employees who are exercising protected rights.

The concept that a reporter can’t write unbiased news coverage because he or she signed a recall petition is as ludicrous as saying a reporter who owns a Ford  can’t write about General Motors.  Or a reporter who's ever been treated by a doctor can't report on health care.

Ever since I was a boy who grew up in Hortonville reading the Post-Crescent, the paper has endorsed political candidates every election cycle.  So, the newspaper itself takes political positions.  And yet its reporters can’t?  What kind of cockamamie “code of ethics” does Gannett follow?

Shout-radio tea partiers like Charlie Sykes and Vicki McKenna loudly trumpet that they’re going to “expose” local reporters who signed the petition, apparently unaware that one of Appleton’s other notorious products, Senator Joe McCarthy, had a brief and failed career trying to “expose” the communists that he saw everywhere.

It’s being reported that Ms. Lovett (who apparently lives in Hortonville!) is on the board of the Appleton Chamber of Commerce.  If that’s true, I expect she will resign that position immediately - or resign from the Post-Crescent - so there can be no “appearance of conflict of interest” if her newspaper decides to report anything about a business located in Appleton.

In her column (and yes, there is a difference between a column and an article) Lovett talks about the “higher standard” she expects her reporters to adhere to, by apparently not having any opinion on any political issue.  Some of my long-time friends in the news business have made public posts on social media, clucking about how “wrong” it is for “journalists” to engage in such blatant political activity as signing a recall petition.

Next thing you know, reporters will be outed for voting.

In a world where Rush Limbaugh refers to himself as “America’s Anchorman” and people actually believe he is giving “news” on his program….in a world where Fox News and MSNBC both exist under the banner of “news”….in a world where George Stephanopoulos leaves the Clinton administration and suddenly becomes a “trusted, non-biased journalist”, it may be well past time for organizations like Gannett, and Ms. Lovett, to get off their high horse for a few moments and re-think their “code of ethics” for reporters.

Have the hiring standards for news reporters plummeted since I was last in that business, four years ago, to the point where reporters can’t be trusted to hold a political opinion and still write balanced, unbiased work product?

Or, are we “safe” because Ms. Lovett and her ilk are carefully monitoring the work-product of these reporters, making sure no “opinion” slips into their work?

Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse.

The Politico Gaffe: It Really Happened

Probably millions of people have seen the image and story above, which appeared – briefly – on the politico.com site yesterday.  Politico pulled the story almost instantly, but in the internet age, nothing really disappears.

A lot of people thought this was a fake.  No reporter for a national organization that covers politics – particularly the organization’s White House reporter – would mistake the state flag of Wisconsin for a union banner.   Certainly some editor would have caught this incredibly stupid gaffe and spiked the story, right?

Nope.

Donovan Slack – and by the way, she’s a “she”, not a “he”, as a lot of people have mistakenly referred to her – worked for the Boston Globe for 8 years before taking the job with politico.  When politico was inundated with derisive communications about the stupid mistake, it quickly pulled the story, and later made what serves as a retraction and apology in this day and age.

How can someone who’s had a decade of experience as a “reporter” write a sentence like the lead you see above: “It’s very clear what side President Obama is on here in Wisconsin”.  If you don’t know what’s wrong with that sentence, you’ve never had an editor correct your mistakes.  And how about “…two flags:  an American one, as usual…..”  What kind of semi-literate person would write that?  It looks more like the work of a blogger who’s never had any formal training in writing English.

My point is there’s an abundance of really sloppy stuff that passes for “journalism” these days, which was the theme of my Facebook post on this topic, a post that generated similar responses from a lot of former broadcast news people with whom I remain acquainted.

A couple examples from last night’s local TV fare: one station’s anchor did ten-second inserts promoting the station’s 10 o’clock news which teased “a horrible incident of alleged child abuse”.  ALLEGED child abuse?  You think the young girl in the story did this to herself?  Her parents may be alleged child abusers, but what we’ve got here is certainly not an incident of “alleged child abuse”.   And on an earlier newscast, one of the anchors referred repeatedly to “the one-year anniversary” of the protests in Madison.  (In English, it’s “first anniversary”, if you didn’t know; but news professionals SHOULD know.)

I guess what really bugs me, and apparently a lot of my friends who used to do news for a living, is that way too much stuff like this (“alleged child abuse”, “one-year anniversary”, the lunacy of the politico gaffe) is presented to the public – stuff that not that many years ago would have been caught in edit or review before it ever hit the airwaves or the internet.  The people who do the job today are all too often ill-prepared for the profession; no one mentors them, coaches them, or really supervises their work-product; and newsroom leaders who once would have caught this stuff are either gone, have taken a different job, or are just plain tired of the responsibilities of leadership.

I know I’m painting with a broad brush, because there are still plenty of people in the nooz biz that can write a snappy sentence in clear English with good grammar, who really care about being accurate, who are conscientious and thorough in their approach, and – unfortunately – who are pulled in many directions by the demands of a job which has changed dramatically over the past few years, with deadlines and demands on many platforms instead of one.

But stuff like the politico thing?  Absolutely inexcusable.  They should be ashamed, but I know they’re not.