Journalism

This “Vanity Fair”:http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/02/the-guardian-201102 piece on the journalistic politics of Wikileaks is well worth reading – it’s the most comprehensive account of the evolving relationship between Wikileaks, the Guardian and other news organizations that I’ve seen. I _think_ (this perhaps reflects my preconceptions as much as anything else) that the piece provides implicit support for two propositions. [click to continue…]

This “post”:http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2010/12/wikileaks-shines-a-light-on-the-limits-of-techno-politics.html is uniformly excellent, but this is _especially_ good and pithy.

bq. The openness question is always contingent, and to phrase political questions in terms of data is sidestepping the big issue. Your answer to “what data should the government make public?” depends not so much on what you think about data, but what you think about the government. Everyone is in favour of other people’s openness.

The exciting Berkman Center (where I spent the 2008/09 academic year as a Fellow) is accepting applications for both its Academic Fellowship program for an early/mid-career academic as well as its open Fellowship program. It is a fantastic place to spend some time so I highly encourage people with interests in Internet and society types of topics – very broadly defined – to look into these opportunities. Please spread the word! Berkman is genuinely interested in having a diverse set of voices and perspectives represented among its fellows. To achieve that, it is important that this call is circulated widely.

I don’t know whether Clive Crook is _deliberately_ trying to show us how thin the partitions are between supposedly sensible centrism and “grand guignol style theater”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bef99b4c-c9af-11df-b3d6-00144feab49a.html, but he’s certainly doing a damn fine job of it.

bq. These and other compromises disappointed the left. But the message to the electoral centre was consistent: Mr Obama would have let the left have its way if he could. What he should have done – and what he ought to do from now on – is simple. Instead of blessing leftist solutions, then retreating feebly to more centrist positions under pressure, he should have identified the centrist policies the country could accept and advocated those policies. … The left will tear its hair over another surrender and the centre will note where the president’s sympathies actually lay. … Substantively, whether taxes on high-income households rise now or two years from now does not matter very much. … Symbolically, though, Mr Obama’s position speaks volumes. … Nothing short of the Scandinavian model (plus stronger unions, minus the commitment to liberal trade) will ever satisfy the Democratic left. Its role, its whole purpose, is to be betrayed. So betray it, Mr President, and start leading from the centre.

This really is a rather wonderful piece of writing in its own, quite particular way. Mr. Crook “doesn’t have a theory of politics”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/07/19/mr-crookletides-tiger/ (he never bothers to provide any evidence for all those confident assertions about how centrists are vigilantly monitoring the Obama administration for the slightest hint of hippy-hugging), so much as a kind of torrid internal psychodrama that (for reasons best known to him) he has chosen to inflict upon us repeatedly in printed form and that (for reasons best known to them) the editorial team of the _Financial Times_ has decided to pay him for. And that psychodrama is on full display here. The dithering Obama, trying to resist the siren-calls of the left and only half-succeeding. The ever-disappointed centrist voter, sadly shaking its collective head yet again as the president hesitates over whether to embrace his true love or to succumb to the allures of forbidden passion. And that frenzied maenad, the left, fated always to be betrayed, because it is only in being betrayed that she can achieve her true destiny. It’s like an opera. A _very bad_ opera. Or perhaps one of those Greek plays in which everyone ends up killing each other after having had sex with their parents and siblings. What it doesn’t resemble – at all – is a piece of serious political thinking and writing. I’d have thought that this would be a significant problem for a political column myself – but then I’m not an editor for the _Financial Times._

“Inside Higher Ed”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/24/post has a good article on the Washington Post‘s interesting editorial stance on colleges that make their money through hoovering up the proceeds of student loans rather than, like, actually trying to graduate students with useful degrees.

bq. On Sunday, policy makers, higher education watchers and ordinary readers opened their newspapers and Web browsers to an editorial endorsed by the Post’s staff board that took a stance that could’ve come right out of Kaplan’s playbook. After disclosing the corporate link — noting that the paper is owned by the same company that “owns Kaplan University and other for-profit schools of higher education that, according to company officials, could be harmed by the proposed regulations” — the editorial bashed the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed rules, voicing concerns about access for low-income and working students, and worrying more broadly about how the country could meet President Obama’s higher education goals without for-profit colleges. … The editorial’s disclosure and others like it in the Post’s news coverage of for-profit colleges — touted by the Post’s ombudsman in a column this weekend — don’t go far enough, Asher argued. It’s one thing to acknowledge that Kaplan is owned by the same company, “it’s another to acknowledge the financial dependencies that the Post has on Kaplan, which they don’t do.” Close to 60 percent of the company’s revenues in the most recent fiscal year came from Kaplan. .. Today’s Post features another op-ed denouncing the proposed rules on for-profit higher education. The author is the chairman and chief executive of Strayer Education Inc.

At least this time they are providing some kind of disclosure. I “used to wonder”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/13/broadband-provision-and-net-neutrality/ why the _Post_ regularly “trotted”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/11/AR2006061100707.html “out”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/23/AR2010052303786.html editorials against broadband regulation, basing arguments on flagrantly bullshit statistics about rural access to broadband. When I found out that the Washington Post Company is the owner of a “cable company”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_One specializing in service provision to small rural areas my wonderment evaporated. As news publishing becomes ever less profitable in its own right, we can expect ever more attention to the possible side benefits of owning a substantial share of the public debate. The _Washington Post_ has already been a “pioneer”:http://www.slate.com/id/2222093 in exploiting these synergies, and can, I suspect, be relied upon to do more as time goes on.

I’ve been hesitating today over whether to write a post responding to the Daily Caller’s publication of a message I wrote on Journolist, talking about how I got emotional on the day that Obama was elected, when I saw African-Americans talking about what this meant to them. Perhaps a bit embarrassing, given that Obama has been in many ways a disappointing president – but as I said in a blogpost on the day, the fact that an African-American with a foreign-sounding name became President was important in itself, regardless of what disappointments came later. My personal feeling about this earth-shattering fact being made public is the kind of mild annoyance felt by Saki’s “Ms. Scrawen”:http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/l_tober.htm – even if one’s private conduct has not been especially embarrassing, one doesn’t necessarily want it to be revealed to all and sundry without one’s permission.

Still, I do think that this tells us something about the whole Journolist-in-the-media saga. That a middling obscure and openly left wing university professor gets teary when an African-American is elected president can be described in many ways, some of which, depending on your point of view, might be uncomplimentary. But what it _cannot_ be described as is breaking news. And that the Daily Caller makes this part of its top front page story, with a headline festooned with exclamation marks, tells us something about the newsworthiness of the material that they have. Without sympathizing with them at all, I can sort-of understand their position. If you believe that there is a Vast Left Wing Conspiracy ranged against conservatism, it must be very exciting to finally get your hands on the Top Sekrit archives of the shadowy network that you think Controls It All. And it must be extremely disappointing to discover that those archives in actuality consist of journalistic gossip, heated political arguments between people who disagree over an enormous range of topics, endless (and to me extremely tedious) threads about baseball and the like. This doesn’t justify the Daily Caller’s demonstrably dishonest efforts to dress mutton as lamb, and pretend that they have smoking gun evidence of coordinated plots against the right. But it does help explain them.

Update: Since Jim Lindgren has been “getting”:http://volokh.com/2010/07/21/journolist-members-suggest-that-fox-news-be-shut-down/ “very”:http://volokh.com/2010/07/22/latest-journolist-revelations-attacks-on-palin/ “excited”:http://volokh.com/2010/07/22/obama-campaign-advisor-participated-on-journolist/ about the possibility that Journolist organized multiple campaigns against this or that obscure conservative figure, coordinated its message with the Obama campaign, and maybe was behind that guy who cut him off when he was on the way into work the other day, he may want to look at this “most recent post”:http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/07/when_tucker_carlson_asked_to_j.html by Ezra Klein.

bq. If this series now rests on Tucker’s credibility, then let’s talk about something else he doesn’t mention: I tried to add him to the list. I tried to give him access to the archives. Voluntarily. Because though I believed it was important for the conversation to be off-the-record, I didn’t believe there was anything to hide. … At the time, I didn’t know Carlson was working on a story about Journolist. And I’d long thought that the membership rules that had made sense in the beginning had begun to feed conspiracy theories on the right and cramp conversation inside the list. … then wrote this e-mail to Journolist:

As folks know, there are a couple of rules for J List membership. One is that you can’t be working for the government. Another is that you’re center to left of center, as that was something various people wanted back in the day. I’ve gotten a couple of recent requests from conservatives who want to be added (and who are people I think this list might benefit from), however, and so it seems worth asking people whether they’d like to see the list opened up. Back in the day, I’d probably have let this lie, but given that Journolist now leaks like a sieve, it seems worth revisiting some of the decisions made when it was meant to be a more protected space.

As I see it, the pro of this is that it could make for more fun conversations. The con of it is that it becomes hard to decide who to add and who to leave off (I don’t want to have to make subjective judgments, but I’m also not going to let Michelle Malkin hop onto the list), and it also could create even more possible leaks — and now, they’d be leaks with more of an agenda, which could be much more destructive to trust on the list.

bq. I want to be very clear about what I was suggesting: Adding someone to the list meant giving them access to the entirety of the archives. That didn’t bother me very much. Sure, you could comb through tens of thousands of e-mails and pull intemperate moments and inartful wording out of context to embarrass people, but so long as you weren’t there with an eye towards malice, you’d recognize it for what it was: A wonkish, fun, political yelling match. If it had been an international media conspiracy, I’d have never considered opening it up. … When I e-mailed him to ask about some of these omissions, his response was admission mixed with misdirection. … Journolist has taken the Daily Caller from about 50,000 hits a day to more than 200,000. There are a lot more answers in those numbers, I fear, than in his editor’s note.

Carlson clearly has access to the list – so if Ezra were not telling the truth about this, he could give him the lie. But Ezra is telling the truth, so he can’t. A political conspiracy led by someone who wants to invite his ideological enemies to come in and take a look is a decidedly peculiar class of conspiracy. I look forward to seeing how Lindgren (and others taking the same line) explain this.

Congrats to Dave Weigel on his new gig. You might want to read his mea culpa piece that just went up at (of all places!) Big Journalism. Comments are a hoot. [UPDATE: I see Breitbart is now offering a $100,000 reward for the complete JournoList archives. Sigh.]

The mea culpa makes the point that it’s risky, trying to make too many different groups like you, by talking down the other groups – whom you also want to like you. Age of Facebook and all. Not the sort of thing you should have to lose your job over, but embarrassing.

A point about the original leaked emails/postings. Weigel’s critics didn’t take kindly to severe snark about Drudge and Newt and Rand Paul; but what was presented as truly damning evidence that Weigel wasn’t willing and able to play his role as journalistic ‘bystander’ were the bits where he seemed to be 1) saying some prominent conservative thinkers/ideas aren’t worth taking seriously; 2) criticizing framing/spin efforts by conservatives and conservative media, and maybe hinting at ways that journalists should try, collectively, to counter such efforts. It’s easy to see why conservatives would be put off by the tone of Weigel’s comments, but it was apparently the fact that Weigel expressed ideas whose content fit categories 1) and 2) that got him fired. Let me try to say why this is nuts in a slightly different way than other people have been, rightly, saying this is nuts. And let me roll up 1) in 2), because 1) is just a special case of 2): crazy people are just spin doctors who have gone native, as it were. [click to continue…]

Sometimes an _ad hominem_ attack just seems right. Such is the case with George Monbiot’s latest piece on Matt Ridley, the Dawkinsite pop-science author. I’ve been aware of Ridley in his journalistic capacity for years, but I had no idea that he also had a parallel career in banking. Monbiot on Ridley’s _The Rational Optimist_ :

bq. In the book, Ridley attacks the “parasitic bureaucracy”, which stifles free enterprise and excoriates governments for, among other sins, bailing out big corporations. If only the market is left to its own devices, he insists, and not stymied by regulations, the outcome will be wonderful for everybody. What Ridley glosses over is that before he wrote this book he had an opportunity to put his theories into practice. As chairman of Northern Rock, he was responsible, according to parliament’s Treasury select committee, for a “high-risk, reckless business strategy”. Northern Rock was able to pursue this strategy as a result of a “substantial failure of regulation” by the state. The wonderful outcome of this experiment was the first run on a British bank since 1878, and a £27bn government bail-out. But it’s not just Ridley who doesn’t mention the inconvenient disjunction between theory and practice: hardly anyone does. His book has now been reviewed dozens of times, and almost all the reviewers have either been unaware of his demonstration of what happens when his philosophy is applied or too polite to mention it.

Definitely worth a short post at CT, then, to make this connection more widely known.

“Scott’s post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/04/07/all-these-democratic-hoo-hah-dreams-of-the-internet/ yesterday reminded me that I had never linked to Ethan Zuckerman’s “fascinating discussion”:http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2010/03/04/jonathan-stray-on-original-reporting-imaginary-abundance/ of how much original reporting there is out there on the Internets, as measured through the admittedly imperfect lens of Google news.

This evening, Google News tells me that I have my choice of 5,053 articles on conflicts between Congressional Republicans and Democrats over healthcare reform. (Oh goody.) How many of those stories contain original reporting? In a world with thousands of professional media outlets at our fingertips – as well as hundreds of thousands of amateurs – how much original material do we really have access to? … What’s interesting in those numbers is the 14,000/24 ratio, implying 583 versions of each story. (That ratio is probably much higher today, with Google News following more news sources.) Jonathan Stray did a very smart analysis for Nieman Journalism Lab, looking at a universe of 800 stories about the alleged involvement of two Chinese universities in hacking attacks on Google. His findings were striking: 800 stories = 121 non-identical stories = 13 stories with original quotes = 7 fully independent stories.

Stray coded the 121 non-identical stories that had been clustered together by Google (the clustering algorithms are good, but not perfect – nine stories were unrelated to the specific case of these two universities) and looked for the appearance of novel quotes, which he considered the “bare minimum” standard for original reporting. (Interesting – it’s the same logic that led Jure Leskovec to track quotes to track media flow in MemeTracker.) Only 13 of the stories contained quotes not taken from another media source’s report. The essence of Stray’s piece is the question, “What were those other 100 reporters doing?” The answer, unfortunately, is that they were rewriting everyone else’s stories.

This hasn’t gotten the kind of pick-up that it deserves in the broader blogosphere – even if it’s not necessarily a representative sampling (other stories on other kinds of news might very plausibly do better in English language media) – it’s a rather startling finding.

If you are one of the people who hasn’t yet read “Ian Jack’s piece”:http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ian-jack/5-boys on the photo that symbolizes the British class system then you should. (h/t “The Online Photographer”:http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/blog_index.html .)

Oliver Kamm in the Times

bq. In his first book, The Destruction of Dresden, he [David Irving] concluded that at least 135,000 had died. That figure quickly made its way into culture. Kurt Vonnegut, who as a prisoner of war had survived the bombing of Dresden, alighted on Irving’s figure and made this alleged atrocity — complete with a long quotation from Irving — a central theme of his novel Slaughterhouse-Five. But the statistic was bogus and was revealed as such during Irving’s unsuccessful libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in 2000.

So what’s Kamm’s thought about Vonnegut here? That Vonnegut, who was there, wouldn’t have written the novel if he’d known that “only” 25,000 people had been incinerated? That the central event of the novel, the execution of Edgar Darby, would have lost its absurdity if a smaller casualty figure had been accepted? Incidentally, the “long quotation” from Irving appears on pp. 136-7 of the novel and is not, in fact, a quotation from Irving but rather from two forewords to “an American edition” of Irving’s book by officers of the American and British air forces. People who write columns excoriating other people’s shoddy research really should be more careful.

When I read the _Financial Times_ review of Joris Luyendijk’s _People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East_ last year, I knew it was a book I wanted and needed to read (Australian title is _Fit to Print_). So I placed an order on amazon.uk that very morning. But it never came and I only just got my hands on a second-hand copy. Amazon (US and UK) are both listing it as out-of-print. Which is a pity, because you need to read it too. Some of it will be familiar to intelligent and well-informed people: of course we _know_ things work like that. But it is hard to keep the knowledge one has of the news process in view, when watching TV, reading the papers, listening to the radio over breakfast. Luyendijk will, at the very least, do the necessary job of keeping us sensitized.
[click to continue…]

“Clive Crook”:http://clivecrook.theatlantic.com/archives/2010/01/geoff_dyers_american_friends.php tells us that Americans are ever so much more polite than Brits, and then goes on to complain about blogs.

Jarringly different standards apply in politics, and especially in the political blogosphere. There, “coarsening” is too mild a word. All that swaggering, sneering incivility: maybe I find it disgusting because it’s so unAmerican.

Fair enough if you don’t like it, but I am still at a loss to understand the difference between all this twuly vewy howwid incivility and “suggestions that civil liberties types would be perfectly fine with the deaths of millions of their fellow citizens if only they could get their way”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/10/09/centrism-as-tribalism/. Perhaps it isn’t incivil by definition when it’s an FT pundit doing it rather than a nasty little leftist blogger? Or perhaps Crook believes that he’s just telling it like it is? (the rather obvious rejoinder being, however, that the bloggers he detests so much fancy that the same thing is true of them). I’ve previously invited Mr. Crook to explain the difference between the kinds of things that he says about lefty civil liberties types and the forms of debasing discourse that he so deplores; so far, he has unaccountably failed to do so. In the absence of such a clarification, I can only presume that his distinction rests on the Yes Minister theory of irregular verbs – I engage in vigorous yet fair truthtelling, you perhaps say things a little too stridently for your own good, he is a disgusting, swaggering and incivil boor.

“Via Mark Thoma”:http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2009/10/the-pundits-dilemma.html, Mark Liberman presents us with “The Pundit’s Dilemma”:http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1824.

Overall, the promotion of interesting stories in preference to accurate ones is always in the immediate economic self-interest of the promoter. It’s interesting stories, not accurate ones, that pump up ratings for Beck and Limbaugh. But it’s also interesting stories that bring readers to The Huffington Post and to Maureen Dowd’s column, and it’s interesting stories that sell copies of Freakonomics and Super Freakonomics. In this respect, Levitt and Dubner are exactly like Beck and Limbaugh.

We might call this the Pundit’s Dilemma — a game, like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which the player’s best move always seems to be to take the low road, and in which the aggregate welfare of the community always seems fated to fall. And this isn’t just a game for pundits. Scientists face similar choices every day, in deciding whether to over-sell their results, or for that matter to manufacture results for optimal appeal.

In the end, scientists usually over-interpret only a little, and rarely cheat, because the penalties for being caught are extreme. As a result, in an iterated version of the game, it’s generally better to play it fairly straight. Pundits (and regular journalists) also play an iterated version of this game — but empirical observation suggests that the penalties for many forms of bad behavior are too small and uncertain to have much effect. Certainly, the reputational effects of mere sensationalism and exaggeration seem to be negligible.

(to avoid falling into my own version of this dilemma, I should acknowledge straight up that while I’m disappointed with the Freakonomics phenomenon _ex-post_, I was quite optimistic _ex-ante_ )