http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Mon, 17 May 2004 21:52:37 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/05/17/215237.php Jay Rosen[Senator] Inhofe said the photographs of U.S. soldiers mistreating hooded, naked prisoners should be accompanied by photos of mass graves and the executions of prisoners under Saddam-- as reported by CNN, May 12.Call it a test of news judgment. Should the full graphic horror of the Nicholas Berg beheading be shown on national television, and documented by photographs in the newspaper? So far the answer from major gatekeepers is no. But I'm not entirely certain that will hold through the week. Some think it shouldn't. Led by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, perhaps the most "watched" weblog in these matters; by Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News, who frequently departs from journalistic orthodoxy; and by others you can read about in this post, the argument has been made: editors and other gatekeepers in Big Media are mistaken--and proving themselves clueless, biased, disconnected or at least inconsistent--by not allowing, through the front page and newscast filter, the true gruesomeness and politicized horror of the Nick Berg killing.They aren't showing us everything: the knife, the throat, the screams, the struggle, and the head held up for the camera. But the sickening photos from Abu Grahib keep showing up, and other developments in the ongoing abuse scandal are considered big news. Thus, Reynolds (go here and here) writes: "the big media leaders seem almost desperate to keep the story on Abu Ghraib, even to the point of running already discredited fake porn photos purporting to be from Iraq." (See Dan Kennedy on that fiasco.)Fake porn aside, that sort of charge isn't new. What's different is the kind of evidence submitted to the court of media opinion. The Net's reactions--where, as Reynolds puts it, "users set the agenda"--are placed in live comparison to Big Media's treatment of the Berg video, photos and story. News Judgment New (the Web user's hunger to know, see, publicize and discuss) is set against News Judgment Old (the gatekeepers and their ideas about news, the public interest, and "taste.")Judgment New shows up in the meta-news about popular search terms: On Friday, phrases like "nick berg video" and "nick berg beheading" and "beheading video" topped the Google charts, indicating where the interest was. Video of the actual beheading is, of course, available on the Web, after surfacing first on a site linked to Al Queda. (See this list of sites from Backcountry Conservative.) The same video was not on network television; and it was not in the 24 hour news cycle on cable. Newspaper front pages have not featured photos of the act itself. "Our letters page today is filled with nothing but Berg-related letters, most of them demanding that the DMN show more photos of the Berg execution," wrote Dreher at National Review's weblog, The Corner. (The editorial page of the Dallas paper, where Dreher works, published a photo of one of the killers holding Berg's severed head, but blacked out the actual head "out of respect for the dead man's family and the sensitivities of our readers," as he put it.)Andrew Sullivan agreed with the letter writers in Dallas: "My gut tells me that the Nick Berg video has had much more psychic impact in this country than the Abu Ghraib horrors." He also said his traffic was way up, as it was on all political blogs, indicating sudden interest in the consequences of the Queda action: "People who have tuned the war out suddenly tuned the war in. They get it," said Sullivan on Thursday (May 13). "Will the mainstream media?"The "getting it" that Sullivan had in mind is an act of judgment about an act of terror: the Berg video, what's actually shown and said in it, and what it means for Americans are a far more urgent story than further images and details leaking out about prison abuse in Iraq. Normal sensitivity scales for violence and blood do not apply to a political murder and international crime such as this. We should look the Berg beheading full in the face; then we'll know what we're facing in the fight against terrorism. That's the argument.On Friday (May 14) the search engine Lycos was reporting--as meta-news, if you will--the Web's more user-driven agenda: As in previous horrific events -- September 11th, the murder of Daniel Pearl, and the most recent Iraqi prisoner abuse -- people turn to the Web for answers.... Today, we discover that the tenor of the searches has changed. When the story broke, searches were Nick Berg, Nick Berg murder, Nick Berg Prisoner of War, and Nick Berg assassination. Just 24 hours later, the searches are now focused on seeking out, finding, and watching the actual video.Lycos is saying: You can read the trajectory of reader interest in the progression from "nick berg murder" to the video of it, even though news of the video and murder arrived as one story. It's as if people let the news sink in, paused to register what beheading of an American, video-taped and broadcast... really means, and then said: Okay, now I want to see for myself. Show me, television set. Show me, newspaper. But there was no showing, so they went to the Web.It's not a discovery that people absorb the news in stages like this. But it's different when we can see it happening in real time, and "read" the shifts in demand and interest-- because we have Web tools like search engines, links and lists. (And yet those tools have many flaws.) From an alternative source of news, the Web has evolved into an alternative source for news judgment. Here's Jeff Jarvis, who describes himself as a recovering authoritarian (former Time Inc. editor who got awakened) on: who decides what's news? His are populist terms: We can look at what people are talking about on weblogs. We can look at what people are searching for online (see this Google search for "Nick Berg"). We can see what people are linking to on Technorati (this takes you to the latest links on "Nick Berg"). We can look at the traffic on stories about an evil enemy killing one of our innocents versus stories about -- to go to Page One of the NY Times today: stories about our "abuse" and even a story blaming us for the murder of our innocent. "The people have news judgment," Jarvis wrote (May 14.) "And it beats the judgment of many an editor."All this is partly an argument about the wisdom of the war in Iraq (Reynolds, Sullivan, Derher and Jarvis support it) and thus only partly about journalists and their news judgment. That's not a fatal qualification. Partisans on an issue can know news when they see it, and can perhaps see some things about the issue better. But it is a complication in every argument we try to have about media "bias."Meanwhile, Rich Maritt's Seldom Sober was one of the blogs that found the video and "ran" it--or sections of it--for users to download. Blogger Marotti thus became a news provider for those who demanded the more graphic footage. Not only that; he reflected on what he was doing--and who he was attracting to his site. Here's some of his open letter about it: The blogosphere (the community of those who write web logs) broke this story, not Big Media. The blogosphere continues to cover it while Big Media continues to largely ignore it. The blogosphere has the courage and integrity to show this video (or images from it) while Big Media cries "Offensive!" as they continue to show pictures of naked Iraqi prisoners piled on top of one another.Evan Coyne Maloney, another weblogger, put it concisely: "One day the media was telling us we had to see the pictures from Abu Ghraib so we could understand the horrors of war. But with Berg's beheading, we're told we can't handle the truth." As far as I know, this is the only justification editors and news executives have given for holding back the actual scenes of Berg's beheading: too shocking, too disturbing, just too much for most viewers. But Maloney's view might give some of them pause: One minute I was fretting about our treatment of Baathists, insurgents, and yes, probably innocents in an Iraqi prison. The next minute I found my head reflexively jerking from the screen as I saw life itself ripped from a living man, a man whose only offense was having the courage to step into a war zone and try to help rebuild a country. There's nothing like watching a beheading to put things in perspective.And if you aren't allowing that beheading to be watched by the big national audience, then aren't you, in a sense, denying your viewers the very possibility of gaining perspective? More Maloney:Not that you could find any depictions of the horrific murder in the traditional media. Their airwaves were absent of Berg's haunting screams. Unless you went digging online, you wouldn't see the ghastly image of Berg's severed head being held up like a trophy. The media that had--rightfully, in my opinion--showed us the ugly reality of Abu Ghraib prison refused to do the same with Berg's murder.The ugly reality of Abu Ghraib. The ugly reality of Nick Berg's execution. Maloney's argument is that we need to see both to have perspective. The editors of the editorial page at the Dallas Morning News took a similar view: (The title of their editorial: "This is the Enemy: Vile image shows world why we fight.")Presenting this photograph, which was taken from an al-Qaeda-affiliated Web site, is important because of the power of image to shape public opinion. Shocking photographs have driven the Abu Ghraib prison atrocity story, which has now become a national crisis of confidence in this nation's civilian and military leadership, and the mission in Iraq. If we show you images of Abu Ghraib abuses, and of soldiers' coffins at Dover Air Force base because we think you should know the truth about this war, then we should show you this image, too. It's hard to argue with that. Except that many did argue over the last week that the press was showing too much from the prison abuse scandal. Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) drew headlines when he said Tuesday that he was "more outraged by the outrage" generated over the prison abuses. "I'm also outraged by the press and the politicians and the political agendas that are being served by this." (Which prompted a reply by Timothy Noah in Slate: "Is the liberal outrage really worse than the torture?")It is a fact of life that there are political implications in everything the news media does when handling a big national story-- including the images that are shown and not shown to us. Writing in USA Today on May 11, the day the Berg video surfaced, Walter Shapiro speculated: "This atrocity is almost certain to inflame American public sentiment, and presumably will strengthen the position of those calling for an-eye-for-an-eye vengeance in Iraq."But if the atrocity--a political murder, committed in the Middle East--might inflame and strengthen, so too might news coverage of that atrocity inflame this and strengthen that, depending on how it is handled. And this is what I mean by political implications in everything the press does. Of course we need to argue about those, and it would be helpful to everyone if journalists learned to take a larger part in such debates.But part of the reason they don't, I think, is that discussion so easily slides from the political implications of news judgment to the political motivations that must, according to many critics (including many PressThink readers), lie behind those judgments. Not only are the motivations there, it is said, but they are easily divined.In a typical statement of this kind, Jonah Goldberg of National Review writes, "When shocking images might stir Americans to favor war, the Serious Journalists show great restraint. When those images have the opposite effect, the Ted Koppels let it fly." Goldberg concluded: "CBS should be ashamed for running those photos." (See also Mickey Kaus in Slate, who agrees, and Howard Kurtz, who doesn't.)Goldberg was not for suppressing the news of the prison abuse by Iraq. Just the photos from Abu Ghraib. He gave these reasons: These pictures are so inflammatory, so offensive to Muslim and American sensibilities, whatever news value they have is far, far outweighed by the damage they are doing. "Context" -- the supposed holy grail of responsible journalism -- is lost in the hysteria and political grandstanding.He also said that "uproar from these pictures drowns out all other messages, explanations... Lost is the fact that in America torturers get punished, while in the Arab world they get promotions." I draw your attention to a strange quality of arguments like this, equally in evidence on the Left and the Right; among supporters of the Iraq war who don't trust the media, and critics of the war who don't trust the media.In Jonah Goldberg's view, there are victims of CBS's shameful behavior. But the victims are not him and his well-informed readers at National Review, who aren't about to let proportion and context be lost in this debate. So it must be other people's reactions he has speculated and worried about. Other Americans, he said, will react to the photos but miss the context and lose all sense of proportion because the news media--their source and guide--fail to provide context, fail to maintain a sense of proportion.I think it's strange to go around telling the news media what to show and not show, based on your predictions of how other people--apparently less capable of independent judgment--will react to the news. It's strange, it's intellectually hazardous (your predictions can be wrong, and thus your conclusions too) and it risks inflantalizing your fellow citizens.You shouldn't do it, because if you keep doing it you will soon be talking about "the masses" and what they will swallow. Soon after that you will be talking about what the masses should be fed. I don't trust any argument--left, right, middle, fringe--when it assumes that others (the big audience, the mass public, the voters overall) will react with less nuance, intelligence, or critical thought than the writer and the writer's friends. To me it's a warning sign: anti-democratic attitude here in evidence.I don't think CBS should be ashamed for running the prison photos-- at all. That was a classic case of what a free press is for. However, I do think CBS and the producers at 60 Minutes, or Ted Koppel and his producer, Tom Bettag, or some other broadcast forum could announce that--after careful consideration--they're going to show the beheading, complete with warnings that it may make you sick. On that occasion, they would have to explain themselves, as the Dallas Morning News did, and that would be a good thing. Although I don't make predictions, I think it's at least possible it will happen. If so, it will be this week and someone will make the "absorbing the news in stages" argument.I also think the political implications in what Big Media does are often under-discussed by journalists and critics alike, while the political motivations of the gatekeepers are way over-drawn. (They're easier to speculate about, they generate more outrage, and they appear to "explain" a lot.) And along with this I believe we should all grow up a little.Don't be calling for self-censorship by Big Media today when you may be hoping for less of it tomorrow-- because the images have changed, and the implications are now different. Be aware that if you want gatekeepers to let pass more of the news that helps your side, and less that helps "them," then you aren't really addressing the gatekeepers at all. In fact, you have surrendered the topic of news judgment to politics and its maneuvers. You've politicized it.Way, way underneath these debates I find a disturbing fact. Even the smartest people in the major news media--and this is especially so in television news--have not really determined for themselves or explained to us exactly what their role should be in the worldwide fight against terrorism. "Cover it responsibly and well" doesn't begin to provide an answer. For it must have occurred to people high up in the network news divisions that the videotape of the beheading was made not only for Bush but for them, in their professional capacity. That is a fact they have to live with, and think about, whether or not they show us the gruesome act.We are a long, long way from coming to grips with the fact that political violence worldwide incorporates media coverage worldwide. Terrorism can be many things, but it is always an attempt at communication; and a free press in an open society "completes" the act. So it's not true that Al Queda kidnapped and beheaded an American. Al Queda kidnapped and beheaded an American and videotaped it in order to shock and sicken us when we found out. It's not easy to decide what to do with that if you run a news network. But there is no option not to decide. There may have been a time when news judgment and political judgment could be kept safely apart, but that was an era unlike our own. After Matter: Notes, Reactions & Links...Jay Rosen is Chair of the Journalism Department at New York University. His weblog is PressThink: Ghost of Democracy in the Media Machine.Andrew Sullivan presses the case: "... if we are in a propaganda war, as we are, we need to be as ruthless in publicizing the murders committed by our enemy as we are in exposing the abuses committed by our own." And he calls for a "campaign" to get the Berg images out. Let's start an internet campaign to insist that the major media - including the New Yorker, the networks, the major newsweeklies, and every major paper - run a picture of Zarqawi holding up Nick Berg's severed head. It's time to release the Pearl video and stills too. Enough with the double standards. The media were absolutely right to show the abuse photos. But they are only part of the story. It's about time the media gave us all of it, however harrowing it is.Belmont Club (referencing this piece from ombudsman Michael Getler in the Washington Post) reasons it out: "Getler's claim is really an assertion of the right to invoke outrage, disgust and hatred at a specific act and its perpetrators, and those who may have been indirectly responsible for it. By taking this logic to its limit, Sullivan claims the same right: to unleash a symmetrical set of set emotions at another group -- and demonstrates the absurdity. For it must either be correct to publish both the Abu Ghraib and Berg photos or admit partisanship."Jon Friedman of CBS Marketwatch (May 14): "Obviously, the networks didn't show the decapitating of American citizen Nick Berg because its grotesque nature would appall the U.S. viewing audience. 'It's the most horrible thing I've seen in 34 years of working here,' said Marcy McGinnis, CBS News senior vice president for news coverage. 'It was far too graphic and repulsive,' McGinnis said." (Link via Lost Remote.)Aaron Brown of Newsnight on CNN (May 12): "To show a tape of the beheading is pornographic while not advancing the story at all. But we also get there is a risk that we are sanitizing too much sometimes, that taste can interfere with understanding; and, in that regard, we have no quarrel with what they are doing in Dallas tonight even as we will not show it." (Transcript of Brown's interview with Dallas Morning News editorial page editor Keven Willey.)Cable Newser comments on this post: "If I was MSNBC, and I wanted to demonstrate the power of cable news... ...well, you can fill in the rest."Jeff Jarvis comments on this post: News judgment is political judgment.David Adesnik at OxBlog writes: If the leading newspapers and television networks responded exclusively to audience demands, domestic news would quickly displace almost all foreign coverage. And in time, entertainment, weather and sports would displace news about domestic politics.Again speaking historically, American journalists are most willing to exercise their judgment when American behavior contradicts American principles. That is exactly what happened at Abu Ghraib. I do not doubt for a second that such abuses would receive just as much attention if there were a Democrat in the White House.Newspaper editor Tom Mangan in comments here:Every day we wonder, "how low must we sink to sate an audience?" ... and reality TV, commercial interests and the Internet table pounders keep saying they want us to sink lower -- then turn around and attack us for sensationalism when we do. The errors of fact we report are bad enough. The intrusions into the lives of suffering, grieving people are bad enough. The bias and score-settling are bad enough. The demand for profit margins at the expense of reporting the news are bad enough. At some point, though, there has to be a limit on how badly we degrade our basic humanity in the name of earning a living and reporting the news. Call me a liberal, a coward, a traitor, I don't care. I draw the line at decapitation. Doc Searls comments on this post: "First, take it from an old PR guy: the Berg beheading was not an act of war; it was an act of publicity. Second, stop and think of what that publicity was meant to do, and what it has the power to do regardless of its intentions. Hal Crowther puts it best: The best way to give a lie the force of truth is to soak it in innocent blood." Journalist Dan Gillmor observes: "This is already a blood-soaked culture, where Hollywood routinely sells movies full of realistic, made-up gore. Maybe we've created a climate where the only thrill that can top movie violence is a genuine snuff film, like the one those foul criminals in Iraq sent out to the world. How many of those searches were done by people who, rather than wanting more truth, more information, were just hunting for the sick thrill of watching death for real?"Chicago Sun Times columnist Mark Steyn: "We always come back to that strong horse/weak horse thing. But the point to remember is that Osama bin Laden talked about who was seen as the strong horse: It's a perception issue. America may be, technically, the strong horse but, thanks to its press and its political class, the administration is showing dangerous signs of climbing into the rear end of the weak-horse burlesque suit."Tim Rutten, media columnist, Los Angeles Times: "There is no more insidious moral trap than the notion that immoral means can obtain a moral end. We have been told repeatedly since Sept. 11 that, if we fail to defeat Al Qaeda, a new dark age may descend. The photos from Abu Ghraib suggest it already has." (May 15)My NYU colleague Susie Linfield in the May 2001 Boston Review ("Capture the moment: On the Uses and Misuses of photojournalism.")Photojournalism shows us that human beings do things we would like to think are not human. It stretches our definition of humanity, though often in ways that grievously wound us. Can we look at the world and still love it? This is the question that photojournalism poses. Can we stare at what James Agee called "the cruel radiance of what is" without shielding our eyes? Can we drop the alibi of ignorance--the endless insistence that we did not know--and resist the seductive lures of solipsism, of denial, of dissociation? Can we acknowledge the reality of the world we have made, without forgetting that a different one is possible--and necessary?At this particular point, questions, not answers, may be photojournalism's greatest gift. Belmont Club: News Coverage as a Weapon: "Yet the extension of warfare into the area of media coverage is fraught with great danger, in no small part because it subtly alters the definition of where the battlefield lies and who an enemy combatant is. One of the enduring strengths of Western democracy and of the US Constitution in particular is the delineation between legitimate dissent and enemy activity, a boundary which enables a democracy to continue functioning, albeit in an impaired state, even in wartime. But the changing balance between the political and military aspects of war means that this line will begin to blur as military activities cross over into the political. Already, the Pentagon is beginning to offer direct news from Iraq. It has also reorganized its command structure in Iraq to explicitly recognize the role of political warfare." (May 17)See the comments on this post here. Culture15738@blogcritics.org Mon, 17 May 2004 21:52:37 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/04/29/214149.php Jay Rosen... other writers trying to do a decent weblog who wish to compare and contrast, plus curious readers of my weblog, PressThink, students in a Net journalism class, maybe. In place of an FAQ page, I now have this. I am posting it today so it can become a standing link under the About section.Some of these questions are asked frequently by readers or seen in comments. Others I ask myself. My point is to explain how a weblog like this works, according to the person who thought it up and does it. No relevance to other weblogs or writers is claimed. Part of my purpose is to observe what author Rebecca Blood said about the ethic of transparency-- "one of the weblog's distinguishing characteristics and greatest strengths." This is a transparency post. (I'll probably add sections as I go along, so comments are welcome. But if you're point is..."too much meta," we covered that.) Why are PressThink posts so long?When I started asking around about how to do a weblog, I got many kinds of answers. The one advisory every informant gave was: you must write in short bursts. That's the style, some said. That's what works, said others. And, most suspicious of all, that's what busy, web-cruising readers expect. They don't have time for your leisurely thesis, I was told. By everyone.So you decided to be contrarian and go the other way?No, contrarians are annoying. I didn't set out to write long essays; it happened as I tried to turn my ideas into posts that said something others weren't saying, and got some notice. (And I can do short, sometimes.) I set out to be unrestricted: free to figure out for myself what works, what PressThink wants to be."People don't have time for..." reasoning was meaningless to me, and I didn't trust it. It wanted to restrict my freedom to write what I think, but the whole purpose in starting PressThink was liberation: "Wow, my own magazine. Now I can write what I think." It's the same for most webloggers, I would guess. My interest was users who did have time for depth, in whatever number they may prove to exist, ocean to ocean, post to post. But it's more like: this is my magazine, PressThink... If you like it, return. In a tiny and abstract way, perhaps, my blog is part of the media marketplace, competing for eyeballs with re-runs of Law and Order. But not really. PressThink, a free citizen in a voluntary nation, doesn't have to behave like a market actor. Thus my experiment in long form.Fine, but weren't your advisors just making a simple point about the nature of the Web medium?Sure, and I thanked them. But the Web is good for many opposite things. For quick hitting information. For clicking across a field. For talk and interaction. It's also a depth finder, a memory device, a library. Not to use a weblog for extended analysis because most users won't pick that option... is Web dumb but media smart. What's strange is that I try to write short, snappy things, but they turn into long ones. A certain number of readers show up to complain about it ("too many words spent on the wrong subject!" would be typical) and that gets amusing after a while. I probably should learn the more classical blogger form-- title, link, quick comment. But there are many doing it that way, and many who do it well. Every good blog asks the Web a question at the start: is there any demand out there for an original... for a me? You have to do the actual blog for a while to find out. So what does PressThink, the title, mean? Part if it derives from terms like "group think," but the group is the press. The title is also short for press thinking or doctrine, the philosophy journalists live by, the "religion" of the press. If I wanted to risk a more academic term, I'd call it "journalism's imaginary." These are subjects that interest me, especially when they can be read into the headlines. (I've done scholarly work, including a Ph.D thesis, on parts of them.) Press think is what I do myself, as a critic and writer. I'm engaged in it when I operate this blog.I write about the press think of others-- like Geneva Overholser or John Carroll or Paul Krugman. I also interview journalists about their own press think, scholars about what they know, bloggers about what they're up to with this form. Or I might examine the press think built into a weblog (like Front Line Voices) or evidenced by a blogger (Patterico) or found in a report (Harvard study on Trent Lott, the blogs and the press).A blogger ransacks. If the managing editor of the LA Times gives a "don't kill the messenger" speech about his newspaper's bitterly-contested coverage of the California recall election in 2003--and he is defending that coverage with self-evident pride despite the attacks--chances are that some live press think will be in his remarks. Ideas about the kind of journalism worth doing today, about the job the LA Times actually is doing, about the defense of journalism from critics-- that's material. When, in order to get away from the press pack, a Pulitizer Prize winning reporter goes off on a listening tour of California, I may write in praise of her thinking, as I did here.The idea is to lift the press think part from passing events that involve the press. And then examine it, or get others to do the same. You asked what the title means. It means that. If you had asked me what the title does, it's the source code for all the writing and linking that goes on here. The blog is "about" press think; it's also a contraption for making more press think.What about this other phrase, your subtitle: "Ghost of Democracy in the Media Machine." What is that about?That's about trying to introduce a visual connected to the idea of the blog. I wanted the designers--William Drentell and Ruby Studios--to have some image to work with, and "ghost of..." did that. Once upon a time, the press was the media. But then the media grew up and it surrounded, absorbed and even overwhelmed the press. When the media grew so big it "swallowed" journalism, it took into its machinery the flickering spirit of a free press, a very old flame. Even where extinguished it hangs around. The subtitle points to that. But it's more about the visual. A glance at the header box should make that clear.Politically, where are you: left, right, middle of the road, liberal, conservative?My views on issues would be standard Upper West Side Liberal Jewish babyboomer-- even though I don't live in that neighborhood. I supported Rudy Giuliani, a Republican, over David Dinkins (D) and will probably vote Bloomberg for mayor when he runs again. I've written for Harpers, the Nation, Columbia Journalism Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times, Washington Post, Salon and Tompaine.com, to list a few, but not the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard or the Washington Times. I was media editor at Tikkun magazine for a while. That should be enough to place me on your spectrum.Ever been active in politics?Not really, except for an over-active mind. Never worked for a candidate. I began my political life watching the Watergate hearings in the summer of 1973, so my first sentient experience with government was naive amazement at how well it worked, as day by day the scandal was revealed and the Constitution came to life in those unforgettable people-- Butterfield, Baker, Dean. Politics since then has been a slow unwinding of that moment by reality. I was lucky that I began as a believer in what government could do, that I first saw politics at a moment when it worked. It was a two-month illusion, but my "political views" are bound up with that as much as party identification.Your blog is about the press. So what's your perspective on journalism? Where is PressThink coming from?I try to leave ideologically-charged press critique to others--individuals and organizations--that do it eagerly, do it well. PressThink is not a media watch site, although I have written about watch blogs. PressThink is not a bias hunter, in the usual sense, but I have written about bias hunting. It's not an "inside" look at the press, either, but I've written about inside baseball in press coverage. I don't support George Bush; I do write about his press think. I never became a Howard Dean supporter, but I was a follower of the Dean movement and wrote a lot about its entanglements with the press. Getting the picture? From an Introduction in August, 2003: "I try to discover the consequences in the world that result from having the kind of press we do."Another answer to where I am coming from: From 1989 to 2000 or so, I was devoting much of my energies to the public journalism movement, also known as civic journalism. (Click here for a book chapter, here for a Google search to get started, here for the Public Journalism Network blog, here for a PressThink post.) Of course, I don't see everything the same way now.So are you a journalist?If we speak of credentials, then no. I have never worked for a mainstream news organization or been a professional reporter-- outside a brief summer fling in college. The press "tribe," as I sometimes call it, is not my tribe, although I know and admire the work of many people in it. My background is in press scholarship and criticism, so I am really an observer and student of the press. However, I have written for numerous newspapers and magazines and I suppose it could be said that I'm an opinion journalist. But that's stretching it. Do you have a blogging method?Hmm. I read the press, watch the news, click around in my blogroll, and hunt for something juicy, current, interesting. Then I collect links, and start writing. Or someone emails me something and it leads to a post. That's it, method-wise. What I have instead of method is a kind of style sheet, which has self-imposed instructions for how to do a PressThink post.In this example, The Tipping Point, there are five fields that get filled in: the title, the subtitle, the essay, the "aftermath" (with notes, reactions and links) and the comments. Each requires a different kind of writing. The title condenses what the post is about, and arrests attention. The subheading explains the argument, previewing what's going to happen in the essay. The essay is an essay, but with links-- a gesture unto themselves. The "after" section edits and tracks the wider discussion in the blog sphere. The comments begin the dialogue. A successful post is when all five parts talk to each other as they are read against one another. A PressThink entry is not "done" until the after matter, trackbacks and comments come in, which sometimes takes more than a week. That's one cycle in the turning of a weblog. When it works (always a hit and miss thing) the post at some point turns into a forum on the subject that occasioned the post-- and the fourm is what "thinks." Of course, I didn't know about this stylesheet and the posting logic it enforces until after I had stumbled on it through trial and error.If you're not a member of the tribe, then what is your connection to the press? Just as a critic, a watcher?No. For one thing I love journalism, and devour the product. Professional journalists I find to be interesting and, on the whole, very dedicated people with a demanding job, hard to do well. They are far more scrupulous--concerned with getting things right--than many of their critics believe. (They also love to explain things to non-specialists, an attractive quality.) The press is an important institution; and it has power, although its power is changing today-- at the source, which is a free and alert citizenry. That means the errors and excesses of the press are important too. There is a lot of cynicism, even hostility out there about beliefs like these. I identify with some of that disgust, but react with disgust against much of it, because so much of it is cheap, ill-reasoned, flagrantly politicized-- a circuit closed.To me it is entirely possible that the press is failing the body politic, but a lot of the criticism heaped upon the news media is failing badly too. That's a puzzle worth blogging about-- and I have.You're a professor of it. Is journalism an academic discpline?Journalism is not a discipline the way history or psychology are, but the practice of it takes discipline, and its virtues are things I find virtuous in a writer, any writer, including citizens who may take up their pens. Accuracy, for example. If it's getting a street address right, that's a fairly simple matter. Accurately portrating how someone else thinks when it's not your experience, your world, your argument-- way harder. And there's no method for that; it's a virtue, a discipline. Try it sometime, if the point seems unclear.Then there 09/11 and everything after. The more serious events around us get, the clearer the virtues of honest journalism and of high standards in reporting the world. I don't want to live in a country with a shitty press, or a discouraged tribe of journalists. It's dangerous. So I'm not just a critic. I have a stake in the subject. But then so do you. Maybe that's what PressThink is "about." Aftermath: Notes, Reactions & Links...Jay Rosen is chair of the Journalism Department at New York University.Related: Cory Doctorow, My Blog, My Outboard Brain.Rebecca Blood, Weblog Ethics.Xeni Jardan, co-editor of Boing Boing, in an email to Halley Suitt of Halley's Comment: Best blogs follow the same form as best writing in a magazine or novel. Whether the posts are brief, a la Cory, or long-winded, a la Kevin, they use only as many words as are absolutely neccesary for the task at hand.It's not about whether posts are short or long. It's about the fact that wasted words are obstacles.In lampoon mode, Stephen Waters writes a post of 1,231 words to "spare readers the tens of thousands of words piled up by academics, journalists, and itinerant bloggers" in my post on Bush's PressThink. (I told you it gets amusing sometimes.) A savage critique, so check it out. Meanwhile, Dave Winer, master of the concise, writes: "Jay Rosen gazes at his navel." Two posts from critic Terry Teachout (one of the best) with insights and epigrams: Blogging is not a zero-sum game and Notes on blogging. Culture15232@blogcritics.org Thu, 29 Apr 2004 21:41:49 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/03/16/145942.php Jay RosenI want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years either. -- Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, Dec. 5, 2002One way to learn that pack journalism is real is to be caught outside the pack with a story it does not recognize. This happened to Ed O'Keefe, a young "off-air reporter" for ABC News in Washington, who happened to be in the room when Trent Lott, then the most powerful man in the United States Senate, gave remarks that embraced the spirit of Strom Thurmond's 1948 campaign for president. O'Keefe knew enough about that campaign to find Lott's words shocking, and he said to himself, "This is news."But Washington journalism said back to him: we don't think so.O'Keefe's judgment later won out. Pack judgment was wrong-- in this case, extremely so. Lott became the first majority leader in Senate history to resign under pressure. How it all happened is told in the new case study from Harvard's Kennedy School, "Big Media" Meets the "Bloggers." (By Esther Scott, supervised by Alex Jones of the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School of Government. Available only in pdf form here.)My favorite moment in the story is when O'Keefe's counterpart at another network asks a more senior producer in the Washington bureau to look at what Lott said that evening at Thurmond's 100th birthday party. "No, I don't think it's anything" says the more experienced pro. This gave O'Keefe some pause, causing him to second-guess his judgment. "I think there is something to the [notion] of pack journalism," he reflects, "of individuals believing that if something is noteworthy, ... everyone will get it... If they didn't all get it, then it couldn't possibly be a newsworthy item."The conservative writer David Frum would later call Lott's words, "the most emphatic repudiation of desegregation to be heard from a national political figure since George Wallace's first presidential campaign." But when "everyone" didn't get it, O'Keefe began to doubt himself. That's how group think works.The Harvard study has gotten notice in Blogistan, but its stingy formatting (the pdf is encrypted and won't allow you to cut and paste) has been discussed in greater depth than the story it tells, perhaps because we think the events are well known. According to legend--partially confirmed by the report--webloggers from Left and Right were responsible for pushing the Trent Lott story into the news, after the mainstream media missed it."The Internet's First Scalp" said John Podhoretz in the New York Post. That's hyperbole, but the report makes clear that webloggers had a crucial role. It also delimits and describes that role. Now we know more precisely why--and when--the bloggers were needed.There's another way to read this sequence of events, however. The report does not portray the blogs as lead actor, but as intelligent reactor to an event of neglect (similar to an act of omission) within professional newsrooms, where the story of Lott's remarks languished and nearly died. The case study is largely about herd thinking in the press, and the illusion that "news" jumps out at everyone simultaneously. Other than a brief item that ABC ran at 4:30 am on December 6th, television news did nothing with the story, initially. This is due in part to the strange effects of the "24-hour news cycle" in television, a creature that has its own demands and even a kind of inner logic. What it does not have is the gift of human judgment. Strangely, humans in the system understand this deficit."Part of the problem, O'Keefe points out, was that "there had to be a reaction" that the network could air alongside Lott's remarks, and "we had no on-camera reaction" available the evening of the party, when the news was still fresh. By the following night, he adds, "you're dealing with the news cycle: 24 hours later-- that's old news." Let's review what the news cycle is saying. There is a logic here, but of course it is circular:X happens. We do not report X. Nor do we solicit and air reactions to X. The next day, we ask ourselves: is X still news? It's true, no one in the nation knows about X, which entitles the nation to say, "X is still news to us," but look at the facts. X surfaced yesterday, right? That's old news by our definition. And today we find there are no reactions to what we did not report yesterday. Sorry, X. Your existence may be news to Americans out there. But not to us, the keepers of the cycle. Next time, don't be surfacing in one or two places "yesterday" if you want to be news today. "News stories," says Josh Marshall in the report, "have a 24 hour audition on the news stage, and if they don't catch fire in that 24 hours, there's no second chance." O'Keefe had one success during this interval. He got the story online and into The Note, the most blog-like medium at ABC News. This in turn gave it to the weblogs.Thomas Edsall of the Washington Post was the exception in the establishment press. He heard about Lott's statements from a Style section reporter who covered the party qua party. Then he read the key quote in The Note. "And at that point I began to press that we should do a story on that quote." Edsall is the author of Chain Reaction, a forceful book on race and American politics. He had earlier written a series of articles for the Post about Trent Lott and his connection to the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a "racialist" group and a remnant of segregation in the South.Still, the Post editors didn't think much of Lott's remarks as news, and they tried to confine Edsall to a paragraph or two. He had to write his 660-word story and show it to them before they could see any real news in it. This is where prominent webloggers like Josh Marshall, Atrios, Glenn Reynolds, but also others entered in. They and their readers (200,000 people at most) were a back-up alert system, another sphere where the story could circulate, register with people, and provoke a response. Reactions and rumblings from across the blogs were thus a kind of proxy for public reaction that had not been able to emerge.But the blogs got only temporary custody of a story that originated in a small corner of the national press on December 6th, and became big news on December 10th, with just a few days (Dec. 6-9, 2002) for the blogs to operate as bridge narrator. "For the most part," Atrios says in the study, "the influence of blogs is limited to the degree to which they have influence on the rest of the media. Except for the very top hit-getting sites, blogs need to be amplified by media with bigger megaphones." A key point. Weblogs may continue to exert some influence on the news, but it won't come by grabbing the attention of the broader public, gaining major traffic, or displacing the national press as a news source. Political blogs need the press; they are parasitic on the flow of news. They can still have an effect, however, by debating the mainstream news mind, correcting for errors and blind spots, further sifting and refining the flow. And by activating passions and commitments long ago driven from daily journalism, blogs force news through the argument test, which in this case showed that Lott had few defenders, Left or Right. That was news too.The Web legend about Trent Lott's demise says "the blogs kept the story alive," and this is basically accurate, but it misses why journalism needed weblogs for that. To understand how Lott's words were a political deed, and to see how they might be made into news, some specific background knowledge in American history was required. (The case study doesn't tell us how, but Ed O'Keefe knew his history.)The chances that this critical background knowledge would be missing are close to zero in Blogistan's reaction to the fateful words. But the chances were very high indeed in newsroom discussion of what Lott said, and in the reactions of journalists on the scene. When we can identify what blogs actually do better than journalists, the idea of weblogs as corrective starts to make some sense.Here, certain differentials in how knowledge is quickly mobilized for discussion may give weblogs an advantage in estimating the import of things spinning by in the news cycle. Another advantage, perhaps, is the quality of deliberation as the blogs talk among themselves, compared to newsroom deliberation--journalists talking among themselves--over the same stretch of time. I admit these are speculations, but they find general support in the Kennedy School study. Also required to "get" the story was a certain receptivity (an ear) that seemed to be missing in many Washington journalists. Lott had become too familiar to be revealed by his own words. "Seems the blogosphere is way ahead on this one," said Glenn Reynolds on the morning after Thurmond's birthday party. "Where's everybody else?" In other words: don't you guys have an ear for the echo here? What news was heard that night when Lott rose to speak depended entirely on prior knowledge that a journalist either did or did not have about race, Southern politics, and the re-alignment of the political parties during the civil rights era. It also helped to know something of Trent Lott's career in Mississippi, going back to his college years at Ole Miss. If you didn't, you wouldn't hear anything special in his praise of Thurmond and the Dixiecrats of 1948. A party platform Edsall dug up summarizes it well: "We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race."Well, bloggers did know this background, and they went right to it. Atrios, for example, printed the official Democratic Party ballot in Mississippi from 1948. "Get in the fight for State's rights-- fight for Thurmond and Wright," it said. Esther Scott writes: "Bloggers weighed in quickly on Lott, offering readers a short course on Dixiecrat politics and their own acid commentary on the matter."That the blogs provided, almost overnight, that "short course on Dixiecrat politics" was one reason they could play corrective to the news machine. It happens to be one of the properties of the weblog system at this stage, especially the political blogs that touch the membranes of professional journalism most often (Marshall, Atrios, Reynolds, the Daily Kos, Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus, Cal Pundit are some examples.) The blogs don't originate much, but they are quick to import knowledge that is often missing from the news. In this--and the "acid commentary"--lies their originality.Free from the craziness of the 24-hour news cycle (and from some of the reflexes in press think) the blogs, their users, and the links among them work as a second filter added to the news flow. The blog sphere sifts through information, rescuing facts and arguments from the cycle's strange habits, while loosening up the lines of debate. The case study says:What journalists found when they visited these weblogs would not be new stories, but a closer look at those that were of interest to the blogger. "There is very little--though some--original reporting on weblogs," Atrios observes, "...It's more about focusing on stories which would otherwise be buried or simply focusing on key details from stories which may be overlooked...." For a blogger like Marshall, providing what he calls "a kind of counter-conversation to what's going on in the mainstream media, particularly the national daily newspapers, was [a] driving force in his weblog writing.Counter-conversation gets it right. The initial verdict on Lott, "No, I don't think it's anything" called out for a counter opinion, which the blogs gave. According to Mark Halperin, political director of ABC News, the press "is usually not in the business of saying, 'Oh my God, this is outrageous.'" It would prefer to have someone else take that step. But journalists will go trolling about for strong responses, an act considered within their authority.Very often, Halperin observes, the he said/she said cycle is "what it takes not only to make something a story, but for journalists to realize that there is a story." This outsourcing of news judgment is most extreme in the case of television news. And it's another reason weblogs can have influence. For they are in the business of saying, "this is outrageous." On Monday, March 14, what might be a landmark in press studies was released by the Project on Excellence in Journalism. The State of the News Media is a 500-page report that attempts to account for the alarming, but also churning and complicated condition of the news business today. One of the themes is capital withdrawal, which I would contrast to the better weblogger's willing investment in time, energy and quality flow. The industry trend is clear in this passage, under "News Investment." When AOL purchased Time Warner in 2001, one early move of the new company's executives...was to institute a cost per minute analysis of the network. How much did it cost Fox News to produce a minute of its news versus CNN to produce a minute of its programming? The result of the AOL analysis was this: CNN was spending too much. It needed to rid itself of people and bureaus-- as it turned out including many of its more senior journalists... In quick succession, some of CNN's most familiar on-camera faces were gone, as well as many behind-the-scenes staff. And those are the people with knowledge. What the "counter-conversation" is countering includes this trend. Jay Rosen is the chair of the Journalism Department at New York University and writes PressThink.Big Media Meets the Bloggers, Kennedy School case studySeth Finkelstein at Infothought on the case study.See also, Jay Rosen, The Weblog: An Extremely Democratic Form in Journalism. Culture13778@blogcritics.org Tue, 16 Mar 2004 14:59:42 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/03/08/164751.php Jay RosenThis is adapted from a chapter I wrote for a collection, to be called Extreme Democracy: the Book, edited by Jon Lebkowsky and Mitch Ratcliffe for O'Reilly Books. Other authors include Adina Levin, Joi Ito, Ross Mayfield, Jim Moore, Howard Rheingold, Doc Searls, Clay Shirky, and Ethan Zuckerman."Journalism," James W. Carey tells us, "takes its name from the French word for day. It is our day book, our collective diary, which records our common life."To record the events of the day is equally the aim of the newsroom and the diary writer. Carey, a press scholar who teaches at Columbia University, finds a connection at the soul between journalism and the practice of journal keeping. Both are trying to prevent events from disappearing without reflection, narration, and the means to look back. "That which goes unrecorded goes unpreserved except in the vanishing moment of our individual lives," he writes.When Carey speaks of journalism, he mean the practice of it. "Not the media. Not the news business. Not the newspaper or the magazine or the television station but the practice of journalism," which exists independent of any media platform. He goes on:There are media everywhere. Every despot creates his own system of media. There is a news business everywhere; there just isn't all that much journalism, for there can be no journalism without the aspiration for or institutions of democratic life....Just as medicine, for example, can be practiced in enormous clinics organized like corporations or in one-person offices, journalism can be practiced in multinational conglomerates or by isolated freelancers. Just as medicine can be practiced with technologies as advanced as magnetic image resonating machines or as primitive as an ear that hears complaints and an eye that observes symptoms, so journalism can be practiced with satellites or script. The practice does not depend on the technology or bureaucracy. It depends on the practitioner mastering a body of skill and exercising it to some worthwhile purpose.And what is worthwhile about it? Carey puts it this way: "For journalism and for us, that purpose is the development and enhancement of public life, a common life which we can all share as citizens." The title of his talk where he says all this is, "The struggle against forgetting." Journalism is a part of that struggle, the simplest act of which is recording the events of the day. So a journal writer has origins in common with a journal-ist. They are members of the same family. And this is one reason that weblogs, which the press calls "online journals," are an event within journalism--the practice of it, as well as our ideas about it. Believing so, in October, 2003 I posted at my weblog, PressThink, an item listing "ten things radical about the weblog form in journalism." In the rapid way these things happen online, the list became PressThink's most popular and linked-to feature, which means it embedded itself further into the Web than any other entry before or since. It was half the length of a newspaper op-ed. In it I was trying to find points where the weblog "reversed" things about journalism, or shifted a big pattern that had held for a long time. Thus: 1.) The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most (not all) of today's journalism comes out of the market economy. 2.) Journalism had become the domain of professionals, and amateurs were sometimes welcomed into it-- as with the op-ed page. Whereas the weblog is the domain of amateurs and professionals are the ones being welcomed to it. 3.) In journalism since the mid-nineteenth century, barriers to entry have been high. With the weblog, barriers to entry are low: a computer, a Net connection, and a software program like Blogger or Movable Type gets you there. Most of the capital costs required for the weblog to "work" have been sunk into the Internet itself, the largest machine in the world (with the possible exception of the international phone system.)4.) In the weblog world every reader is actually a writer, and you write not so much for "the reader" but for other writers. So every reader is a writer, yes, but every writer is also a reader of other weblog writers--or better be.5.) Whereas an item of news in a newspaper or broadcast seeks to add itself to the public record, an entry posted in a weblog engages the public record, because it pulls bits and pieces from it through the device of linking. In journalism the regular way, we imagine the public record accumulating with each day's news-- becoming longer. In journalism the weblog way, we imagine the public record "tightening," its web becoming stronger, as links promotes linking, which produces more links.6.) A weblog can "work" journalistically--it can be sustainable, enjoyable, meaningful, valuable, worth doing, and worth it to other people --if it reaches 50 or 100 souls who like it, use it, and communicate through it. Whereas in journalism the traditional way, such a small response would be seen as a failure, in journalism the weblog way the intensity of a small response can spell success.7.) A weblog is like a column in a newspaper or magazine, sort of, but whereas a column written by twelve people makes little sense and wouldn't work, a weblog written by twelve people makes perfect sense and does work.8.) In journalism prior to the weblog, the journalist had an editor and the editor represented the reader. In journalism after the weblog, the journalists has (writerly) readers, and the readers represent an editor.9.) In journalism classically understood, information flows from the press to the public. In the weblog world as it is coming to be understood, information flows from the public to the press. 10.) Journalism traditionally assumes that democracy is what we have, information is what we seek. Whereas in the weblog world, information is what we have--it's all around us--and democracy is what we seek.What is a weblog? A personal web page, or online journal, updated easily by an author, that links outward to other material on the Web, and presents original content--typically, links and commentary--in a rolling, day-by-day fashion, with the latest entries on top.But also:* Some weblogs have comment sections after every item, so in a sense every item is an item submitted for public comment. * Some weblogs have a long list of other blogs they name, highlight and link to, (a blogroll, in the vernacular). This an author uses to define a conversational field, as if to say: "listen to me as I talk to them." * Weblogs don't have to be, but they often are designed with a given look and feel, which is to say they define a particular kind of place. To Joi Ito, a weblog is primarily that, a place its users enjoy. He says that reading his weblog is something like visiting his house. If so, it's a talking house. * Jeff Jarvis, author of Buzzmachine, a popular and newsy weblog, says: "know my blog, know me." According to Dave Winer, one of the pioneers of the form, a weblog is the "voice of a person."All weblogs offer text, increasingly they have photographs, some include audio, some now present video (and some have ads.) The weblog incorporates these earlier media forms, turning them into tools of expression almost anyone can learn to use. The software behind the form allows for production values high enough that individual authors on the Web suffer no immediate disadvantage in comparison to very large commercial providers. There's something extremely democratic about that.Remember the rationale for public access television? It was supposed to give individual television makers a place on the cable dial. Weblogs are a more effective public access point. Because they are "live" on the Web, and the Web is World Wide, the millions of weblogs already out there have some ability to compete in the same public space as hugely capitalized media companies.Although it is still a tiny universe, and not a real threat to the established media or the professionals who operate it, the sphere of weblogs is capable of something bigger inventions have not achieved. As Jarvis says, the weblog gives people in the audience a printing press, and thus access to their own audience. There's something extremely democratic about that, too.And even though we know that only a small, unrepresentative fraction of a percent will start that press up, the fact that it can be done has a radiating effect. Andrew Sullivan got more readers for himself, through his weblog, than he ever had as editor and columnist of the New Republic magazine. Granted that he began with every advantage as a journalist and writer with a track record in public controversy; still, with andrewsullivan.com he showed that an individual provider could compete with long-established journals of opinion. "If the goal of opinion journalism is not ultimately money but influence and readers," Sullivan wrote, "the blogs are already breathing down the old media's neck."Chris Allbritton, a former reporter for the Associated Press, took this empowerment further. From contributions solicited at his weblog, (back-to-iraq.com) he raised over $14,000 to report on the war in Iraq as an independent correspondent, answerable only to his readers and his conscience. Armed with a satellite phone, a global position unit, a laptop, and his reporting skills, Allbritton flew to Turkey, snuck over the border into Northern Iraq, made his way to Baghdad, and started posting live reports to his weblog, which had 23,000 users and supporters during the peak of his reporting (March 27, 2003.) That was an act of journalism--the social practice Carey talked about--that cut out "the media" entirely, proving that one does not depend on the other. (See this about Allbritton's breakthrough.)That is why I call the weblog the last mile in self-publishing. In cable television, the last mile, stretching from the system to the private home, is the most expensive and politically charged portion of the network. It's where greater media capacity comes down from the skies to plug into people's lives; and it is also the point where public regulation, the economics of television, the politics of municipalities, viewer choice, and a dozen other factors converge. The last mile brought us "public access," but it was under-funded and meant to lose out to the commercial channels people would pay for. If cable television is the heavy industry of the media age, the weblog is of much lighter invention. In fact, it was hardly noticed at first, beyond a few visionaries who invented the form, and started fooling around with it. Anil Dash is a vice president for Six Apart, a company that makes the popular Movable Type program for webloggers. In a talk he gave at New York University's Law School, (February 20, 2004) Dash said that the weblog was a "boring" development to techies, who took one look and saw nothing original in the code or functioning.Yet the genius of the weblog was not in any technological leap, but in completing the last mile in the two-way highway the Web has become. The form favors individual voices and self-publishers, most of whom will have no media institution behind them, and no hope of profit. What they are after is free speech and the enhancement of public life. Or as Tim Dunlop puts it, "an environment where ordinary people can use argument to increase their knowledge."Institutions, too, will speak through weblogs (CEO's for example) as will professional journalists. For now, at least, amateurs, "isolated free-lancers" and random citizens speak in the same public space as these other voices. The equalizing effect can be extreme. Atrios, pen name for the one of the most successful political webloggers, had no background in either journalism or politics when he began. Now his blog claims more than 65,000 visits a day. (For more on Atrios, see this case study about blogs and the fate of Trent Lott from the Kennedy School at Harvard.)On top of the Net was built the Web. On top of the Web sits the weblog and its mini public-sphere, (which Atrios and others call Blogistan) connected by links, public comment sections, search engines, online syndication (RSS), free and paid hosting hosting services, and indexes of popularity-- all the tools of the last mile. Now that it's up and running, the people formerly known as the audience, those we have long considered the consumers of media--the readers, viewers, listeners--can get up from their chairs, "flip" things around, grab the equipment, and become speakers and broadcasters in the public square.It's pirate radio, legalized; it's public access coming closer to life. Inside the borders of Blogistan (a real place with all the problems of a real place) we're closer to a vision of "producer democracy" than we are to any of the consumerist views that long ago took hold in the mass media, including much of the journalism presented on that platform. We won't know what a producer public looks like from looking at the patterns of the media age, in which broadcasting and its one-to-many economy prevailed.Weblogs potentially explode the world of authorship far enough that we can at least imagine a sphere of debate with millions of productive speakers, where there was once an audience of millions listening to a few speakers dominate the debate. The existence of such a tool is an extreme change in prospect and pattern for citizens of the media age. When I wrote my list, "Ten Things Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism" I was discussing only that, the shift in what's possible, or at least thinkable within the social practice of journalism, worldwide. What's probable in the world we inhabit today is a far different story.From what we know so far, it is probable that most weblogs will be short lived, and wind up abandoned, just as most conversations are abandoned. It is probable that a few popular blogs will have huge user base and the vast majority will be invisible most of the time, a pattern that reminds some of the "old" mass media. Since the software and interface are highly flexible, and the uses of an easily updated, good-looking page are endless, weblogs will be commonly used in closed systems--private and company networks--as much as the open waters of the Web.Most, in fact, will not attempt to reach a public, even if they are in theory reachable by all Net users. The great majority of weblogs will probably be for personal use; and the user base will be peer to peer, not author to public. Teenagers will be the biggest market for weblog software and hosting services. For the public display of private life no easier tool has ever been invented, and it should surprise no one that people use it to record their lives, even when the details are, to most others, insignificant.Now if the insignificant events in the daily life of celebrity blonde Anna Nicole Smith are worth recording and distributing to the world by cable--and the E! Cable Network thinks they are--then the sight of blogger Jane Smith recording the ordinary facts of her life, and distributing them via the Web, should strike us, not as a strange development in the life of media forms, or one to laugh at, but a far more sensible notion all around. Anna's show is the bizarre form. Jane's journal is a more natural--and a more democratic--thing to do. Jay Rosen is chair of the Journalism Department at New York University. His weblog is PressThink.James W. Carey, The Struggle Against Forgetting.Dave Winer, What Makes a Weblog a Weblog?Andrew Sullivan, A Blogger ManifestoFor a more academic perspective, I recommend Tim Dunlop, If You Build It They Will Come: Blogging and the New Citizenship.Also see PressThink: Blogging is About Making and Changing Minds.Harvard's Kennedy School does a very useful case study, Big Media Meets the Bloggers. Culture13516@blogcritics.org Mon, 8 Mar 2004 16:47:51 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/02/14/003137.php Jay RosenYou tend to put your own belief system in the vessel of the guy that you're supporting. Clearly that happened with Howard Dean as well.-- Trippi.San Diego, CA: Feb. 9-10 When Joe Trippi took the stage here at O'Reilly's Digital Democracy Teach-In, it was an address to Net loyalists by a fallen hero. Trippi had lost three battles in full public view: Iowa, then New Hampshire, and then his position at the top of what he yet called an "insurgent" campaign. If you knew the history, knew the crowd, and had followed Trippi's press, it was an appearance not without drama.Of course, loyalist did not apply to everyone in the room in their attitude toward Trippi or Dean or even Net politics. I found skepticism about all three at the conference. But the bonds were real enough to make his talk a more intimate act than "figure in the news speaks out." As Scott Rosenberg of Salon said to me the following day, Trippi was talking to his troops. For a core group at the Teach-In this was true. And Joe Trippi received a hero's welcome: two standing ovations, with 50-60 percent joining in.The d-democracy event was a shrewd and late addition to a larger happening: the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference at the Westin in downtown San Diego. It's known as E-tech. Some 800 were expected for E-tech, and perhaps a quarter of these came to Monday's events. In that group were about 45 journalists, including correspondents for Wired, Reuters, AP, Salon, the Nation, CBS News, plus all the webloggers doing the blow by blow, or commenting on parts of the day. (See Jeff Jarvis, Ross Mayfield and this page for lots more. Ross's post lists many others who blogged.) "I am out of the campaign, I am not out of the fight." So said the general to the troops. (Read the transcript here.) And a few days later, the chatter at E-tech was confirmed. Trippi started his weblog, Change for America, with its lead post: Still in the Fight.There are cynical ways to read these developments, but I think Trippi's blog is a good idea-- if it's different, and really him, linking and thinking, arguing with people while freely interpreting the news. I want to see how someone with his knowledge of politics does a newsy blog, with a comments section-- a far more promising proposition, intellectually, than Trippi mixing it up with Chris Matthews in a pundit's role for MSNBC. The line at the microphone was daunting, so I never got to ask my questions of Trippi: Since you are not out of the fight, what part of the fight can be won by putting Joe Trippi into the game as commentator for MSNBC? And, a follow on question, have you considered how this could wind up a fatal compromise with your great adversary, broadcast politics? Or perhaps you have a belly of the beast strategy to share? In San Diego, Trippi was with people who understood--but did they really understand?--what the Net could do for American politics; what was different, in some cases radically different, about the Dean campaign as it grew; and what bubble of hope had been lost when the Dean candidacy crashed in Iowa and then New Hampshire.O'Reilly Nation also knew, or thought it knew, that much more would be possible in the future, as the tools that had come into politics kept growing and the social momentum crept up. Here, Trippi was more like an Apple executive speaking to talented developers, who have to be convinced to keep developing a cause--a platform--that everyone knows may be lost. Other heads of big enterprises spoke: Wes Boyd of MoveOn.org, Scott Heiferman of MeetUp.com, David Sifry of Technorati, and Tim O'Reilly himself. Jeff Jarvis lifted the killer quote from O's welcome: "User contributions are critical to market dominance." If this becomes true in politics, what does politics become?The interesting thing to me, a rookie at tech conferences, was that in the sphere I was visiting (without a laptop, which was very dumb) innovation by Net and other means was a normal condition. That's what the people at the conference are "about." Things were expected to change as new and powerful tools came within reach, or someone sprung them on the unsuspecting.The premise of platform replacement is casually accepted in this crowd because it happens all the time. In politics, in journalism, in campaigns, a system overhaul is anything but normal. To me this is one of the great contributions techies have made to politics, which can always use people who see that things could be very, very different. (Micah Sifry, a writer for The Nation, has a yes, but view: "People here talk like all that's needed is better tools, and then people will pick them up and take back their country from the powers-that-be. There's almost no sense of how hard organizing actually is, or why.")Net literacy was, of course, sky high among this group, political savvy less so. And so Trippi came to teach, as well as explain what happened in the crash, and defend himself from critics, including that morning's Los Angeles Times. It carried a "hey, possible controversy" story about Trippi's firm billing the Dean campaign. (See the Washington Post's deeper analysis and Ed Cone's commentary. Trippi's defense is here.)First, he wanted to show how much the "Net roots," as he called them, had accomplished in a year: January to January. "That's why I am here today," he said, "because I think you started something amazing... a dot com miracle." (His soundbite phrase for Monday.) "It must survive Howard Dean and his candidacy."The miracle is that an alternative to campaigns-as-usual had finally become visible with the Internet's semi-maturation as political tool. "Broadcast politics has failed us miserably; failed the country miserably," Trippi said. "The American people now have the beginnings of a platform to change it." This alternative had proven itself in the one way that counts on everyone's scorecard: raising money.That Dean had raised it in small amounts, in distributed fashion, aided by a social movement which began to gather online and kept gathering, along with the blogs and the spirit of active participation-- all of that motion meant something. For it had proved something. Before 2003, the record take for a Democrat in a single quarter was by a sitting President, Bill Clinton, who drew $10.5 million, Trippi said. Dean, an asterisk to many people at the time, raised $14.8 million in the third quarter of 2003, then $15.9 in the fourth.Any system that can do that is a potentially powerful force. A candidate who can bank those sums is not only a threat to win, but a threat to disrupt the rules by which campaigns are run, paid for, and won. Just how surprising Dean's performance was to the political establishment can be heard in this column from Dick Meyer, editorial director of CBS News online: (July 17, 2003) Dean - maverick, outsider, underdog - cleaned his opponents' establishment clocks in the second quarter. He raised $7.6 million, almost $2 million more than the second-place finisher, John Kerry. Dean raised more cash from small donations than any legitimate, major party presidential candidate has since the 1970's. Certainly, he's the only candidate in ages that used small donations to actually win a money race. In 2000, 74 percent of Bush's donations were $750 or more and 65 percent of Gore's. Stark contrast to Dean's 29 percent. A whopping 73,226 people contributed to Dean's campaign in the second quarter, 50,000 more than contributed to Kerry's. This is something very rare: a good news story about money and politics. I've never seen one of these before. Who would have imagined that it would be money that pushed Dean over the edge into the realm of "credible candidate"? Go figure.Trippi's lesson here is not the banal one, "money talks," but a slightly more subtle point. Money is the one thing that talks to everyone, including those who may be dismissive or out to lunch about online politics or the Dean's campaign's innovations, such as they stood. Money signaled the system that something was up.The establishment had been shocked to see a power source that large--Dean raised $45 million--develop from a previously unknown direction. "The political press could never figure out what the Dean campaign was," he said. "Now they feel qualified to comment on whether what it did worked." True. But the press feels qualified to comment on any flat-on-your-face failure, which Dean has become in journalists' eyes.In the summer of 2003, Trippi as manager had enough money to go national, get his guy known, and respond to anticipated attacks. Dean was not tied to party fat cats or the office-holding establishment, in Trippi's mind. Dean had the Net for reaching his people, and his people would later grow to 600,000. He was rapidly stealing the opposition label from the opposition party.It was from that moment in political time that Trippi told his story of the climactic events in Dean's demise. The story was about broadcast politics winning out in the end. Broadcast politics has many other names. It's politics in endless refinement of the one-to-many model. It's big donor politics. It's when you purchase all the air time so your rivals can't respond, or drive up the negatives before a candidate is known. It relies on message delivery to targeted groups. It's the astroturf effect--top down media blitzes disguised as "grassroots" eruptions--and other manipulations like it. Broadcast politics takes for granted that 50 percent of the country will not participate in the vote for president, and this is one of the most political things it does.It's also the Willie Horton tradition in advertising. It's the mind that put Michael Dukakis in a tank to show who's strong on defense. It's the $2,000 a plate fundraisers to get the money to run the ads mocking a Michael Dukakis in a tank. It's the Russert primary, the zinger from Ted Koppel, the feeding frenzy when that happens, and the expectations game, which always happens.Long ago this got called the media campaign, where the basic means for connecting with voters are thirty-second ads, the news on television, the debates, a candidate's life story (in its mythic version), and a "message"--controlled at the top, refined by polling data--that is to be endlessly gotten out. There are big historical reasons why this system is in charge, which Trippi did not bother with, except to give broadcast politics a symbolic birthdate-- 1960, and the Kennedy-Nixon debates. Today this politics, in Trippi's telling, is interdependent with the finance system that supports it in both parties, the lobbying culture that overtakes Washington once the elections are run, the political establishment in the two parties, the commercial media's tollgate system through which the ads and images are run, and the national press, which both reports on the political game and becomes a player in it. "We were hot in January" of 2003, Trippi said, meaning: Dean was picking up support far in excess of his national profile. But the press did not notice this until the fundraising figures came in from later quarters. Even then journalists didn't understand how Dean had done it. It was not until Al Gore's endorsement on December 9th that the system was shocked into recognition-- "this guy's going to be the nominee."From here the pace quickened.The press turned up the scrutiny and put Dean in its sights. Meanwhile, rival candidates began to contemplate their attacks, and started swiping some of Dean's message, using it as their market research. The Washington establishment grew alarmed-- and with reason. On December 14, former Clinton administration official Everett Erlich wrote this in the Washington Post: Other candidates -- John Kerry, John Edwards, Wesley Clark -- are competing to take control of the party's fundraising, organizational and media operations. But Dean is not interested in taking control of those depreciating assets. He is creating his own party, his own lists, his own money, his own organization. What he wants are the Democratic brand name and legacy, the party's last remaining assets of value.This is what the Net had wrought, and it seemed to be working. The press realized that a "front loaded" primary schedule, designed by party insiders to produce an early winner, might make Dean unbeatable after Iowa and New Hampshire. Journalists are often accused by journalists of sharing one bias: love of a good story. (A forgivable sin.) An easy triumph by Dean and a list of meaningless primaries to play out is not where the love is for political reporters.Howard Kurtz wrote ahead of the development that reporters want a two-man race for Christmas. If at that time, you are threatening to run away with it, the press looks (and "votes" via headlines) for a lead challenger to emerge; if there are several challenging, the press looks for a frontrunner. These are the semi-predictable parts of a zeroing-in mechanism, in which every movement is magnified. One can complain about the heightened scrutiny and magnifying effect, but this is sometimes like saying: hey, turn that lens back, I want to be out of focus, take me out of frame.You run for president to make it into that spotlight, which either consumes its subjects, or clarifies them on the public screen, fixing an image of the candidate for the electorate just tuning in. If Dean and Trippi were not ready for that, they were not ready for Prime Time.With the arrival of the new year, the countdown to the caucuses began. Richard Gephardt, in Trippi's incendiary phrase, began his "murder-suicide" by stepping up the attacks on Dean. Criticism, missteps and gaffes began to characterize news coverage. "We ran straight into broadcast politics," he said. This, according to Micah Sifry, is "the webocrats catchphrase for top-down, capital-intensive politics, where the main goal is having or raising enough money to buy broadcast power to send a message to the passive masses." But Dean's Net supporters did not realize what was happening, Trippi said. They got complacent when their man seemed to be well ahead. "There was no way to communicate to people how high the stakes were right at that moment," Trippi said. The Dean campaign had "this huge target on our back," and it now had to win at broadcast politics, while avoiding minefields that come with being The Story every day. There was the air war fought with ads, the Frontrunner Stumbles plot turn from the press, the attacks by rivals (and by Dean himself, which could turn off voters.) An old quote of Dean's appeared, in which he mocked the Iowa caucuses."We were having a hard time saying, 'we could be in real trouble here,'" Trippi recalled. And this is where he made his most interesting observation. I had more than a dozen conversations with journalists about it, as we all tried to figure out what it meant. One thing was unanimous: Reuters ("How Web Support Failed Dean in Crunch") got it wrong. Here's the key passage: We couldn't figure out how to communicate to people that there was this--pardon the expression--a "holy shit" moment happening here. In other words, our Internet supporters were complacent. They were, "Man, we've got more money than anybody. We're ahead in Iowa and we're ahead in New Hampshire..."I remember sending out an E-mail that said...something like, "If you've never heard the depth of our need for your support right now, hear it now," and the blog comments were, "Why is Joe sounding so desperate? He's never sounded desperate before. We're on top of the world here. We're ahead." And so I think there was a disconnect between our Net roots' understanding of the body politic and what was happening at that moment after Gore endorsed us.The Powers that Be had struck in a pattern predictable from before; the Governor was undergoing the trials of the frontrunner. All effort had to swing from creating a movement and building the tools for expanding it further... to grinding infantry work in Iowa: finding voters who would turn out for Dean and persuading them it's worth a shot.At the same time, Trippi as shot caller for Dean had entered a dangerous area where only the rules of Realpolitik can win you the prize. These were not the terms that existed between the Dean campaign led by Trippi and the movement for Dean that helped bring 600,000 forward in one way or another. and there was really no way....we couldn't figure out a way to communicate what was happening to us in a way that either didn't sound desperate -- I do not know what the word is for it-- but did not ring alarm bells the wrong way... "Figure out a way to communicate" involves the press. The conditions of scrutiny Dean had entered disallowed honest communication with the base in the very public terms the Dean campaign had half-pioneered. If you leveled with supporters and sent out the call, "we're in trouble if we don't make a big turn away from what we're doing," then the press--on frontrunner alert--would seize on that.The master narrative has a well worn device for this: the "campaign in disarray" story. Mistakes are fodder, not only for reporters but also the comedy teams on television-- a serious consideration when you are still introducing the candidate as a person. The situation demands from Burlington an absurd level of public confidence, but it was precisely too much confidence that was hurting the campaign.Transparency--a buzzword but not only a buzzword--is a first casualty of Realpolitik. "We weren't trying to keep the Net roots out of the loop," Trippi explained. "We were trying to keep John Kerry out of it." You cannot afford transparency or deliberation as the race intensifies. Could this be announced? Impossible. And so your distributed supporters, organized in affinity style or by weblog, had to sense it happening, or read between the lines of what the campaign was saying. What alternative was there? E-mail 300,000 of your best people and ask them to keep it quiet? "The press reads the blog."That was the tipping point, in the story Trippi told to E tech. Net politics had done a lot, and confounded the establishment. But it was still immature, only half developed. A lot of people feel that way about Trippi himself: Adina Levin is one: "He didn't take responsibility for the disorganization in his own campaign and the lack of precinct organizing savvy that made the Dean get-out-the-vote effort less effective than Kerry. He didn't take responsibility for communication failures and flaws."He didn't. But maybe as a writer he now will. Jay Rosen is chair of the Journalism Department at New York University. His weblog is PressThink.Transcript of Joe Trippi's Feb. 9th speech, Down from the Mountain."Okay, so I rambled a little." (Trippi at his weblog) And don't forget his Q and A with journalist and weblogger Ed Cone. Wired magazine's Noah Shactman: Trippi: Net Politics Here to Stay Scott Rosenberg of Salon: "More than anything else Trippi said here, his confession of this 'transparency problem'--his admission that, at its hour of greatest need, the Dean campaign was unable to level with its own online loyalists--seemed to break faith with the campaign's revolutionary aspirations. What good is building a vast open network to route around the existing power structure if you can't use it?...If in the weeks before Iowa, Dean's campaign had told its followers that things weren't going so well, maybe the media would have pounced on his vulnerability; but maybe his troops would have rallied."Alex Beame, columnist for the Boston Globe, It's game over for Dean's Web dreams. And as for the Deaniacs -- where can they go? The received wisdom is that the power of the Internet mobilized Dean supporters from men and women who had been alienated from politics as usual. But if they really want George Bush out of the White House, they will have to wake up before 8 p.m. on Nov. 2, skip the trip to Starbucks, and pull the old-fashioned lever down at the polling place.The next election may be held online, but this one won't beDan Gillmor, Trippi's bet on Net will pay off far into the future (San Jose Mercury News.)Steve Gillmor in E-week: "Technologists from all four major campaigns used the O'Reilly conference as a gathering point for discussing shared usage of campaign software in the general election."Audio file: Dan Gillmor, Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen in, "Gatekeepers No More," panel discussion at the Digital Democracy Teach In. Kind thanks to Matt Welch for the title of this one. Culture12740@blogcritics.org Sat, 14 Feb 2004 00:31:37 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/01/31/103114.php Jay RosenOn the night of the New Hampshire primary, CNN's Wolf Blitzer interviewed Congressman Dennis Kucinich after Kucinich, a candidate of the Left, had received a tiny share of the vote twice-- in Iowa the week prior and now in New Hampshire.And Wolf Blitzer, who has a journalistic mind not just conventional, but wholly conventional, asked Kucinich to kindly explain why he, Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, was such a loser. I was folding socks, so I did not write down what exactly Blitzer said. And it was not on a regular CNN show, so the transcript has been hard to find. (Help: If you have it, email me please.)Lacking the text, I have just the effect of Blitzer's question, the gist. Which is arguably the unit TV communicates in. Blitzer was being "tough" with Kucinich on air about the uncomfortable but critical issue of unexplained loserhood. You have to go back in years to your own high school and try to hear Wolf saying what he essentially did say to the candidate that night: why do so few people like you, loser? Then Kucinich gets handed the mike. How would you answer in the thirty seconds provided? Explain your own ineptitude for our audience, please.But then, "why are you such a loser, Dennis?" is asked not for the benefit of the viewing audience. It is not for voters' ears, either. Blitzer asks it for reasons wholly internal to his profession, and the only interest served, I think, is the journalist's. Everyone else loses, especially Kucinich, whose minute of public humiliation may not be Wolf Blitzer's aim, but is the certain effect. When the press looks for its credibility problems today, it ought to look more at moments like these. To me, it's in-credible, Blitzer's question. The public serice validity I assign it is zero. I think most of the audience, most of the time, senses the bad faith in it, whether we "like" Kucinich or not. In a catalogue of low points for the campaign press (which, done well, is an idea for a kick-ass weblog... ) this was one.Political man gives it his best shot. He runs in order to speak to the country, and to see if the country listens and responds. It is for others to say why he failed when he is still in the campaign to succeed. Intuitively we know this. Blitzer, in a boorish way, does not.Man why are you such a loser?It is a question ignorant of its own psychology and effect, and thus it advertises the journalist as someone capable of a certain cruelty, which is not a moral category you want to be in. But the most striking thing about "why do you think your campaign has been a total failure so far?" is the impossibility of Kucinich answering it without appearing to prove the premise.Explain why you "failed," and you have almost given up... a loser. If Kucinich denies that he's failed, then he's a loser, because anybody can see that winning one and two percent of the vote is failing. If he ducks the question and goes into another advertisement for Dennis Kucinich, that's what losers do.Blitzer is a pro. He knows how to ask what the pros, in a calculus all their own, call the tough questions, which includes a great many, like Blitzer's, that can be predicted at rates close to 100 percent, causing some in the audience to wonder: what's tough about that? And this is the sense in which Wolf Blitzer is a tough interviewer.But he's not the only one who acts this way. Back in December Ted Koppel of ABC was the questioner at a candidates debate, and the following went on: (As narrated by Howard Kurtz.) Kucinich said that to kick off the debate by talking about endorsements "trivializes the issues that are before us." Koppel then voiced his apparent disdain for Kucinich, Sharpton and Braun, asking whether they would eventually "drop out" or continue a "vanity candidacy." Again, Kucinich punched back. "I want the American people to see where the media takes politics in this country," he declared to loud applause. Koppel had become one of the debaters, and he had just taken a hard right to the jaw. The candidates, many of them, were in open revolt against the moderator. Koppel pressed on, telling Sen. John Edwards that "you're not doing terrific in the polls either." Koppel voiced his apparent disdain answers to what informational need? Why are you such a loser, Kucinich? addresses which urgent issue? And when ABC News political director Mark Halperin describes his approach as, "Hand the candidate a rope and let him decide if he's going to hang himself with it," what principle of public debate is being upheld?In my view, there is no informational need to which these tactics answer. There is no issue they intend to address. Some would say, "why are you such a loser?" has entertainment value; thus it gets asked in an entertainment medium. But this is really a way of saying, "Don't you get it? Journalism is dead."When the press thinks about credibility problems, it sees cases where its standards were violated. This is logical, but incomplete. With more imagination, it might see how normal practices, within the standards of the trible, can also make a performance non-credible. Cruelty is not credible. It just sends a jolt of power through the pro. Jay Rosen is chair of the Journalism Department at New York University. His weblog is PressThink: Ghost of Democracy in the Media Age. Video12212@blogcritics.org Sat, 31 Jan 2004 10:31:14 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/01/10/213053.php Jay RosenDec. 23. At the Daily Kos, Vet 4 Dean reacts to discussion at Blog For America, the Dean campaign's main gig: Earlier today on DFA, there was a good bit of discussion of the latest piece of "journalism" committed by Ms. Jodi Wilgoren in the NY Times. Well, I decided it was time to lose my blogging virginity and created The Wilgoren Watch. Dec. 23. And he does. The Wilgoren Watch: "Dedicated to deconstructing the New York Times coverage of Howard Dean's campaign for the White House." (The inaugural post.)Dec. 28. At Steve Gilliard's News Blog, Gilliard says he has had enough: Time to Take the Gloves Off: The media in America lives in a dual world, one where they want to hold people accountable, yet flip out when people do the same to them...I think it would be a really, really good idea to track reporters, word for word, broadcast for broadcast, and print the results online. Not just for any one campaign or cause, but to track people's reporting the way we track other services....Keeping score of who's right and wrong, how many times they repeat cannards like Al Gore invented the Internet and make obvious errors. Not accusations of ideology, but actual data and facts. Dec. 30. Reacting to Gilliard's idea, Atrios gives it a second. Hardball: "We should have an 'adopt a journalist' program. As Steve suggets, people should choose a journalist, follow everything they write, archive all their work, and critique and contextualize it where appropriate." Dec. 30. Atrios returns to the subject, noting that the Wilgoren Watch already exists: "I'm not going to organize this but feel free to forward on links. I'll set up a special blogroll section." But he cautions: ...ideally whoever does this shouldn't just be doing instant reaction. I'm thinking of archiving all of their work (on your hard drive - copyright and all), and really tracing through and providing context for all their work. This includes talking heads appearances, too.Dec. 30. Ex Lion Tamer: "Gilliard's Modest Proposal."Dec. 30. See Why? "Eschaton has a cool idea."Dec. 31. At Liberal Pride, an Adopt-a-Journalist Forum is created, "to facilitate the project that was conceived at Eschaton." Jan. 1. Shadow of the Hegemon: "I'd like to see two versions of it." The first is that it should be per-journalist. I think that makes sense, and will provide a real impetus to change when the journo figures out that the only way to get this guy off his back is to stop pandering to the right. The other idea is a per-issue focus, where specific falsehoods like "Al Gore created the internet" are targeted. I don't think these two are incompatible. What would be most useful is if those who were focusing on specific falsehoods create "falsehood FAQs..." Jan 3. PressThink on horse race journalism: "Meanwhile, the weblog world is starting to stir a bit with the idea of monitoring individual campaign reporters. (But for what?)..." Jan. 5. Halley of Halley's Comment in the comments at PressThink: "I especially liked the idea of bloggers tracking reporters (per Steve Gilliard) and anticipating what they will say. Their no-story reporting style is lamentably obsolete." Jan. 6. Pipeline: "Look for the way they use various labels for unnamed sources to insert their own ideas and biases into stories. David Brooks isn't really a reporter, but I feel like I'm covering his columns every day they come out, so maybe I'll adopt him." Jan 6. Reporter Alan Judd of the Atlanta Constitution emails PressThink: "The idea of 'tracking' individual campaign reporters--as on Wilgoren Watch--is absurd. The people behind such efforts would be satisified with nothing other than stories effusively praising Howard Dean and blasting Bush as the great satan. What they advocate isn't press criticism, it's stalking."Jan. 9. Wilogren Watch, "Welcome Ms. Wilogren: "...my little blog has attracted 16 'regulars' who have signed up for the Yahoo Group! e-mail list to be notified of new posts. Including, it seems, one Ms. Jodi Wilgoren from the NYTimes. Welcome, Ms. Wilgoren."A Reference Point. The Charen Watch has been in existence since Jan. 17, 2003. Mission statement:Mona Charen is a Media Whore.What exactly is a media whore? A "journalist" in name only, perfectly willing without any hesitation to distort, obfuscate, exaggerate, skew, or hide the Truth to advance their personal views or agendas....Charen Watch is a site devoted solely to critiquing Ms. Charen as her work is posted bi-weekly from the Creators Syndicate site. Culture11615@blogcritics.org Sat, 10 Jan 2004 21:30:53 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/01/08/121616.php Jay RosenToday is a birthday. A new journal has its official launch on the World Wide Web. It is called The Revealer, a daily review of religion and the press. I am the publisher and founder, with Jeff Sharlet, the editor. Sharlet, a journalist, is the co-creator of Killing the Buddha, a much talked-about site for "people both hostile and drawn to talk of God." Now he works for the Journalism Department at NYU, where the journal will be based, thanks to a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts and its religion and public life program. The Revealer is a weblog with certain features of a magazine, including original content by professional writers. Currently, Chris Lehmann, an editor at the Washington Post book section, examines the rise of the "media church," new houses of worship where faith is suffused--and sometimes confused--with the culture of marketing and entertainment.The Revealer will point to significant work in journalism about matters of faith. It will tackle controversies in the coverage of religion. It will impart ideas. Jeff himself will comment on what he finds. And we plan to offer resources for reporters and writers on what is sometimes called the "God beat," a title we considered before settling on The Revealer. I hope readers of PressThink will check out the new journal and pass along to us their reactions.Fair warning, friends: The piece that follows is some 4,800 words.JOURNALISM IS ITSELF A RELIGION: Special Essay on Launch of The Revealerby Jay Rosen"In my view, journalism is a secular enterprise, and there is no specifically Catholic way to do it," writes John L. Allen Jr, Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter. "You try to tell the story as best you can, covering the church the way you would City Hall or the White House."Terry Anderson, formerly of the Associated Press and a hostage in Lebanon for seven years, has a slightly different view: "You can be a Christian and a journalist. But you know, you cannot be a Christian and be a bad journalist," Anderson says. "That doesn't work at all. You cannot practice Christianity and a journalism that takes away dignity, that has no compassion, that exploits pain and misery. That's not good journalism, and it's certainly not anything that Christ taught."But isn't journalism, that secular enterprise, itself a kind of religion? In what follows, I come at the question eight ways, so as to open room for comment by others who know more than I do. (And click the comment button if you are one.)1.) J-School as School of Theology 2.) The Journalist's Creed 3.) The Orthodoxy of No Orthodoxy 4.) Practicing Journalism But Not Understanding It 5.) The First Amendment as Press Religion 6.) The God Term of Journalism is the Public 7.) A Breakaway Church in the Press 8.) Interview at the Axis of EvilOne: J-School as School of TheologyAt Columbia University you can study for a degree in religion and journalism. But they are two separate programs, joined by some fine courses in how to report on religion. Nowhere can you study for a degree in the religion of journalism-- that is, the belief system shared across editorial cultures in the American press. It would make a great course at Columbia, or NYU: "The Religion of the Press." Or even better: its priesthood: Understanding the Priesthood of the Press. This course will examine the priesthood of the journalism profession in the United States, especially those at top news organizations in New York and Washington. Among the questions we'll be asking this term: How does this elite group create and maintain its authority over what counts as serious journalism? What sense of duty goes along with being one of the high priests? What are the god terms and faith objects in journalism, and how are they derived?Other questions: Through what means can a "priesthood" operate in the skeptical environment of the American newsroom? What are the major challenges to its authority, and where do they come from? What lessons do journalists at the top of the pyramid preach to others in the news tribe, and how good is the example set among the priests themselves, all of whom are active in editing, shaping, and reporting the news?You get the idea. There is a high church in journalism, with high ceremonies, like the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize, joining the panel on Meet the Press, having a dart thrown at you by the Columbia Journalism Review. One could teach a course about it. Bill Moyers once said this while moderating an event at Columbia: "I think of CJR and the J-School as sort of the "high church" of our craft, reminding us of the better angels of our nature and the demons, powers and principalities of power against which journalism is always wrestling."The better angels. Journalism needs those. In this sense, it might be said to need a religion. For how else are angels called?In January, 2003, I spoke on a panel at Columbia. This was a time when the place was in tumult over President Lee Bollinger's sequence of dramatic (and highly unusual) moves-- suspending the search for a new Journalism Dean. Bollinger, in one of his first public battles as president, then engaged in written argument with the School and its faculty over what an education in journalism should be today. That was big news in the City, and a national story for a few days.He then called together an All-Star advisory team, (largely the right coast elite of the profession) to meet with him at the Century Club in Manhattan, where they discussed what a journalism education should be today. Finally he named New Yorker writer Nick Lemann as Dean, which was one of the smartest things any president could have done. (I wrote about Bollinger's moves here, and edited a special website about the issue here.)At a mid-point in these events, the alumni group at Columbia sponsored a public forum on journalism schooling and its future. The real topic was Bollinger's actions and what they meant. A good crowd came that evening because the alumni were concerned. Almost everyone had something to say on whether Bollinger was asking the right questions, or meddling with a great program, or worse.I had taken a position on these events in the Chronicle of Higher Education--pro-Bollinger, but also read Bollinger, please--so I was asked to join the panel that night; and I learned something there. At the close of a long evening of debate, I wanted to tell the group--the graduates--how much I admired the Columbia J-School, the history of which I had studied.I said they had passed through not only a great professional training ground in journalism, but a "great school of theology." It's like a divinity degree, I said. Smart people entering the profession learn the religion of journalism, and acquire their faith in a free press, among many other practical lessons.Only rarely does a public speaker know that the audience as a whole "got" something. This was one of those times. At the words "school of theology," I saw a very large number of alumni smile or nod. They could see how this fit their experience. In J-school, they learned what it means to be virtuous, even righteous, although their education no doubt stopped short of recommending any "crusade" in journalism. (Crusades are against the religion, you see.)They also absorbed a sense of what's sacred, what's profane in journalism-- as with the wall between the news and business sides of the operation. The wall is commonly called the "separation of church and state" by newsroom pros, who speak metaphorically yet with great passion and precision about keeping this barrier intact. And who is the church in that comparison? It isn't the counting room, it's the newsroom. The church is supposed to be journalism. The money side is supposed profane. Two: The Journalist's CreedListen to this language, from an ancient oath called The Journalists Creed, written by Walter Williams, Dean of the University of Missouri's Journalism School, 1908-1935. It is the statement of a secular faith: "I believe in the profession of journalism. I believe that the public journal is a public trust; that all connected with it are, to the full measure of their responsibility, trustees for the public; that acceptance of a lesser service than public service is a betrayal of that trust."So far pretty tame-- civil religion predominates. But here is some of the rest, about the sense of calling in the believer's journalism: I believe that the journalism which succeeds the best--and best deserves success--fears God and honors man; is stoutly independent; unmoved by pride of opinion or greed of power; constructive, tolerant but never careless, self-controlled, patient, always respectful of its readers but always unafraid, is quickly indignant at injustice; is unswayed by the appeal of the privilege or the clamor of the mob; seeks to give every man a chance, and as far as law, an honest wage and recognition of human brotherhood can make it so, an equal chance; is profoundly patriotic while sincerely promoting international good will and cementing world-comradeship, is a journalism of humanity, of and for today's world.A journalism of humanity, of and for today's world. Fears God and honors man. That is spiritual counsel to the secular press. Updated to the present, it might sound like the Sarajevo Commitment, a resolution adopted Sep. 30, 2000 by the World Media Assembly, an international group of media professionals. It included journalists who had been journalists during Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, and during the rise of Balkan nationalism. But also others from the United States, Britain and continental Europe."We shall be working to raise up and not to drag down," the statement said. "We shall challenge our politicians to work for the next generation and not the next election, encourage our governments to make agreements which are effective in people's hearts as well as on paper; and stimulate our business, industrial and labor leaders to meet the material needs of humankind with fairness and equity."Delegates to the Assembly met in the city of Sarajevo, still recovering from its siege during the Balkan wars. The commitment they voted into being is not a code that would govern an institution. The text is addressed only to individual conscience, and only media people--producers of culture and journalism--are asked to sign. In one portion of the document, the signers speak of their failure to prevent evil. And they attempt to reconcile themselves to that failure:We look back on a century of brilliance and bloodshed, of amazing technological advance and distressing human misery, of mobility and isolation and of healing and hatred. A century in which two world wars emanated from the so-called advanced and civilized continent of Europe. A century in which we split the atom, but left families, communities and nations divided. A century which ended with some 30 unresolved major conflict situations.We accept that we in the media, whilst talent and technology enabled us to reach the lives of almost every last person in the world, were not able to create the climate in which problems were solved, conflicting groups and interests reconciled, and peace and justice established.The media system has closed circle on the earth. It can finally "reach the lives of almost every last person in the world." This not just an earthly power. It is greater, more mystical than that, say the signers of the Sarajevo document (which is still obscure, as universal declarations go.) The public climate is partly our creation, they said. If it turns murderous, we need to admit our part in that. And find some way to redemption: Now that we confront a new century, many of us, hoping that we interpret the views and feelings of the vast majority of our colleagues, would like to establish a commitment, an undertaking, a pledge, to all those who will live and love and work in these coming hundred years. The Journalist's Creed from long ago. The Sarajevo Commitment from today. Others may dispute it, but they seem to me spiritual documents. Three: The Orthodoxy of No OrthodoxyNinety percent of the commentary on this subject takes in another kind of question entirely: What results from the "relative godlessness of mainstream journalists?" Or, in a more practical vein: How are editors and reporters striving to improve or beef up their religion coverage?Here and there in the discussion of religion "in" the news, there arises a trickier matter, which is the religion of the newsroom, and of the priesthood in the press. A particularly telling example began with this passage from a 1999 New York Times Magazine article about anti-abortion extremism: "It is a shared if unspoken premise of the world that most of us inhabit that absolutes do not exist and that people who claim to have found them are crazy," wrote David Samuels.This struck some people as dogma very close to religious dogma, and they spoke up about it. One was Terry Mattingly, a syndicated columnist of religion:This remarkable credo was more than a statement of one journalist's convictions, said William Proctor, a Harvard Law School graduate and former legal affairs reporter for the New York Daily News. Surely, the "world that most of us inhabit" cited by Samuels is, in fact, the culture of the New York Times and the faithful who draw inspiration from its sacred pages. Yet here is the part that intrigued me:But critics are wrong if they claim that the New York Times is a bastion of secularism, he stressed. In its own way, the newspaper is crusading to reform society and even to convert wayward "fundamentalists." Thus, when listing the "deadly sins" that are opposed by the Times, he deliberately did not claim that it rejects religious faith. Instead, he said the world's most influential newspaper condemns "the sin of religious certainty."In other words, it's against newsroom religion to be an absolutist and in this sense, the Isaiah Berlin sense, the press is a liberal institution put in the uncomfortable position of being "closed" to other traditions and their truth claims-- specifically, the orthodox faiths. At least according to Mattingly and his source: "Yet here's the irony of it all. The agenda the Times advocates is based on a set of absolute truths," said Proctor. Its leaders are "absolutely sure that the religious groups they consider intolerant and judgmental are absolutely wrong, especially traditional Roman Catholics, evangelicals and most Orthodox Jews. And they are just as convinced that the religious groups that they consider tolerant and progressive are absolutely right."The apparent orthodoxy of forbidding all orthodoxies is a philosophical puzzle in liberalism since John Locke. Journalists cannot be expected to solve it However, they might in some future professional climate (which may be around the corner) come to examine the prevailing orthodoxy about journalism--how to do it, name it, explain it, uphold it, and protect it--for that orthodoxy does exist. And it does not always have adequate answers.Four: Practicing Journalism But Not Understanding It.Tim Porter writes First Draft, one of my favorite weblogs. It's about quality journalism and what gets in the way. In Porter's archives is one of my all-time favorite posts. He says that in nine months of doing the weblog, "I have read more studies about the nature of journalism and the habits of readership, more debate about what should be done to arrest the continued declined of newspapers as a mass medium, more criticism about the obdurate refusal of the industry to act on matters it knows must be addressed... than I ever did in the 24 years I worked for newspapers."Which led to Tim's mini-epiphany. I see it as the statement of a journalist disappointed in what newsroom religion taught him about larger matters:I practiced journalism, but I knew almost nothing about it - although I thought I did. Hindsight, of course, clarifies and age, if we allow it, deepens perspective. Still, while working in a role dedicated to informing the public, I had precious little information about my own profession, about its best practitioners (or greatest charlatans), about its history and role in the development and preservation of democracy, about its standards or even about the people I intended to inform-- the community around me.I practiced journalism, but I knew almost nothing about it. What do these words mean? Certainly Porter knew enough to do the job, and get promoted to newsroom management at the San Francisco Examiner. The nothing he knew means nothing deeper than news, nothing to connect the "job" to larger things, which in turn shine a bigger light on journalism. The "preservation of democracy" is one example, a larger thing. But are belief and practice in daily journalism constantly wrestling with democracy's preservation? Porter searched his experience. He did not find much of that.He took time off. Started a weblog. Began to read and reflect on journalism, and on a certain professional emptiness--a missing knowledge, a missing purpose--he had not known was there before. If you read First Draft, you may see how Tim Porter got religion again about journalism. Which, in my reading, came only after a loss of faith.Five: First Amendment as Press ReligionThere is one matter on which is it permitted, I think, to be an absolutist in the newsroom. You can even be admired for it. And that is First Amendment absolutism, with its obvious appeal to journalists. The events at Columbia's J-school were about this part of the religion, which has an epic legal narrative attached to it, a story about freedom of the press shared across the press establishment and taught to thousands of students every year as gospel, more or less.Lee Bollinger knew that story because in his other life--legal scholar, specializing in the First Amendment--he had written a book about it, Images of a Free Press (1991). The point of the book is that journalists have one "central image" of the press, standing guard against an atavistic state and serving as the eyes and ears of the public. Hands off the media in the name of the public's right to know is the biblical lesson most journalism students absorb. It isn't wrong, Bollinger argued. But it is only one kind of wisdom.Journalists also need to grasp how the press does--or does not--foster the kind of quality debate required if people are to make democracy work. They should see how it's possible for the press, when a concentrated industry overtakes it, to become a barrier to entry, even as it spouts information. Free and unfettered, the press can shut people out, ignore their views, or unfairly constrict debate.That, said Bollinger, is also a First Amendment issue, but it does not appear in the grand story of press freedom drawn from the landmark Times vs. Sullivan ruling (1964, making libel less of a threat when a public figure is involved); and from the Pentagon Papers case, (1971, where the Supreme Court sided with the publishers); and from the Watergate saga, (1973-74, where Nixon proposed using the powers of the state to punish the Washington Post Company for its trouble-making journalism.)As interpreted by journalists, these are epic events in a redemptive narrative about liberty of the press, with heroic victories won at moments of national crisis. By winning key cases, the press has been expanding its power to stand up to government. And that is where the central image directs our attention: to struggles with the state. These, according to the faith, are really victories for the public and its right to know.But Bollinger's book is about images, in the plural. He says there are two views of the press supported by different Supreme Court decisions, but the images diverge. One pictures the modern state, aggressive and powerful, with a free press trying to shine the light, pry open the records, ask the tough questions. Here the journalist represents an absent public.In a second, and more fugitive image, the action opens with modern citizens struggling to be heard in the public arena. They need help, if they are going to participate and gain active voice in their own affairs. Here the press often decides who gets heard, and when. In debates, it asks the questions that get asked of the candidates. What restrictions does it enforce? How difficult is it for minority views to be heard? If the press in some ways "runs" public discussion, what's to prevent a free press from running it into the ground? Those are First Amendment problems, said Bollinger. They just don't fit the religion.Six: The God Term of Journalism is the PublicJames W. Carey is in my view the finest press thinker we Americans have. He teaches at Columbia J-School; and he joined the panel that night before the alumni group. Like Bollinger, Carey holds to a different belief about the meaning of the sacred text: the free press clause in the Constitution. The United States, he tells us, was founded on a certain image of what public life could be under conditions of freedom and openness. This was codified in the words of the First Amendment. Carey interprets them in a strange way. Not "hands off the press," but this: The amendment says that people are free to gather together without the intrusion of the state or its representatives. Once gathered, they are free to speak to one another openly and freely. They are further free to write down what they have to say and to share it beyond the immediate place of utterance.For the people to write down what they say and share it. From this right that belongs to all citizens, Carey derives both the original meaning of press freedom, and the most urgent purpose of journalism-- to amplify, clarify and extend what the rest of us produce as a "society of conversationalists." Public conversation is not the pundits or professionals we see on talk shows. It is "ours to conduct," as Carey puts it. The press should help us out. Here emerges his different faith. For when "the press sees its role as limited to informing whomever happens to turn up at the end of the communication channel, it explicitly abandons its role as an agency for carrying on the conversation of the culture."How many journalists would say that their most basic task is to "inform" the public? Most, I think. Carey denies it: people inform themselves, he