Cit Media

At UC Berkeley’s Journalism School tomorrow evening, there’s a Screening of “Citizen McCaw”:

the new documentary film about the journalism ethics battle and meltdown at the Santa Barbara News Press. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion on the state of journalism with former News Press Editor Jerry Roberts, “Citizen McCaw” director Sam Tyler and San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Page Editor John Diaz, moderated by journalism school professor Cynthia Gorney.

“Meltdown” is an understatement for what has happened at the Santa Barbara newspaper, a once-respected journal that has fallen under harsh times during the Wendy McCaw ownership.

If I were going to be in California tomorrow I’d be at this screening. If you’re in the neighborhood and have the time (and nontrivial but $50 admission going to the legal defense fund of people who were kicked out of the paper), please consider it.

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Glenn Greenwald (Salon) writes:

The most interesting part of the controversy over Obama advisor Samantha Power’s referring to Hillary Clinton as a “monster” — one might say the only interesting part — is that immediately after Power said it, she tried to proclaim that it was “off the record.” Here was Power’s exact quote:

“She is a monster, too –- that is off the record –- she is stooping to anything.”

But the reporter who was interviewing her, Britain’s Gerri Peev of The Scotsman, printed the comment anyway — as she should have, because Peev had never agreed that any parts of the interview would be “off the record,” and nobody has the right to demand unilaterally, and after the fact, that journalists keep their embarrassing remarks a secret.

Read the whole piece for a solid, if repetitive, analysis of U.S. journalists often-pathetic deference to power.

When I was a reporter and then a columnist, I had a rule that no public figure — that is, anyone who’d had experience with being interviewed — had the right to declare anything off the record after the fact. Now I might agree not to publish something if it wasn’t relevant, but if something was to be off the record it would be decided ahead of time.

I didn’t have the same policy with people who weren’t media-savvy. Sometimes I’d actually say to someone, “Do you realize that I what you’re telling me might go into the newspaper?” I’d let them reconsider their words.

In the past several days I’ve had a brief email correspondence with a journalism student (not from my own school) who is determined to conflate citizen journalism with the deliberate and unfair maligning of people for political reasons. He knows what he is going to say and only wants a quote or two from me to reinforce it. I declined to be part of his broad slam on a genre that is much more nuanced than he’s apparently trying to portray.

I will be publishing the emails in another post, with my commentary. My current intention is not to publish his name or institution, because I suspect he — despite his course of study — is not savvy about the media in any serious way.

Sadly, savvy in media for U.S. journalists tends to mean doing what powerful people want you to do. That’s the more serious problem, far more so than Powers’ unfortunate remark.

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I have a column running on the Guardian’s website today. It’s entitled “Freedom of information” — and is reprinted below:

What does a Swiss bank that does business in the Cayman Islands have in common with a Hong Kong actor who jets around the globe? They are object lessons this month in a reality that anyone handling information needs to understand. Like toothpaste squeezed from a tube, information, once out in the wild, is all but uncontainable.

The Julius Baer Bank is a protagonist in the now-famous Wikileaks case. The bank’s lawyers managed to persuade a US federal judge, Jeffrey White, that the first amendment of the US Constitution had no meaning, obtaining an injunction and follow-up order that, among other things, required blocking the visibility of the domain wikileaks.org in the internet’s Domain Name System (DNS). A former bank employee had posted documents on the anonymous whistle-blowing website, allegedly describing shady dealings - hmmm, Cayman Islands, Swiss banks - on behalf of clients.

“The orders don’t just direct the take down of existing content, they also enjoin any future publication of the material,” says David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society (of which I’m a co-founder). “Even more significantly, the second order requires anyone who receives notice of the order to refrain from publishing, distributing or linking to the documents.”

In a blog post on the project’s site, Ardia called the judge’s action “unthinkable”:

“He issued an order that is so broad I haven’t been able to find a single example in the US that comes close: he ordered the complete shutdown of the Wikileaks website. He did this not by ordering that the parties shut off access to the offending documents (that came in a second order), but by ordering that [Wikileaks's domain registrar] erase the ‘navigation information’ that directs people to the site … . That is like telling a newspaper it can continue to print its paper, but the delivery drivers all have to go home.”

The judge blatantly abused his power. Luckily, due to the nature of the internet and the anger of the online community, it had precisely the opposite effect of what was intended.

First, Wikileaks’s proprietors are not stupid. They have several “mirror” sites with other domain names (such as wikileaks.be) where the bank documents, among 1.2 million other documents contributed by whistle-blowers around the world, can also be found. Meanwhile, people sympathetic to Wikileaks immediately began putting up their own mirrors and distributing the documents in question. And due to the judge’s (and bank’s) utter cluelessness about how the internet actually works, the injunction (essentially a rubber-stamp of something the bank’s lawyers wrote) didn’t prevent the Wikileaks site from being visible via its more direct URL - http://88.80.13.160/ - which the DNS translates into words we recognise.

If I were a customer of that bank, I’d quickly withdraw my business on several grounds, not least the institution’s inability to keep records secure in the first instance but also the way it flailed about once the records were public. (If I were a member of the US Congress I’d be launching an official inquiry into judge White’s fitness for office as well, though Congress is not noted these days for its understanding of, much less appreciation for, the Constitution.)

But the bank’s dilemma does elicit some sympathy, and suggests a larger issue that proponents of whistle-blowing and transparency - count me loudly among them - should acknowledge. The dissemination of information may be all but unstoppable, barring an absolute crackdown on and censorship of all online data (which could never be fully effective in any event). But there are troubling implications.

Consider, in that context, the sad case of Edison Chen, a Vancouver-born actor who now makes his base in Hong Kong. He famously took photographs of himself and at least five women (sequentially, not all together) in sexual situations and stored them on his laptop computer. After he took the machine for repairs, the photos made their way to the internet, apparently copied by a technician at the shop and then put online. It is trivially easy to find the images online now.

This was not about blowing whistles on possible corruption. Chen doesn’t deserve this, however foolish he was to leave the pictures, unencrypted, on a disk that he put in someone else’s hands. The women especially don’t deserve it, however foolish they were to participate in the photo sessions. These pictures were never meant to be public, and the people who participated in their distribution - including, in my view, anyone who continues to send them around - are morally and legally wrong. (Disclosure: I did obtain them to verify how easily this could be done, and then immediately deleted them from my computer.)

Chen, the women and the authorities can and probably should pursue various legal remedies to punish whoever put the photos on the internet. Apart from asking the rest of us to be decent and honourable, however, they have few further options.

The situations of Julius Baer Bank, Edison Chen and a host of others are fodder for the control freaks of our age. Governments and big business fear their power will dissolve. Moral crusaders fear almost everything. They all quake at the consequences of what they consider liberty run amuck.

So there are powerful forces at work to clamp down on this infinitely valuable medium. It can never be a 100% solution, of course, because digital information can be encrypted, disguised and otherwise manipulated to make porous even the most seemingly impenetrable barriers. But the rich and powerful interests that want to control our lives can make it vastly more difficult to have any measure of free speech.

I tend toward the absolutist side of the argument. Yes, there are negative consequences to freedom. Liberty brings risk. We take those risks because they are essential to progress, and to fundamental human rights. Abuses by the wielders of great power are much more dangerous than those by the rest of us.

But that doesn’t absolve us from doing the right thing. Let’s keep the control freaks at bay, but exercise some self-control, too.

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Hilariously, but unintentionally so as always, an editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal entitled “Lawsuit Inc.” wails over connections between trial lawyers and state politicians:

Should state Attorneys General be able to outsource their legal work to for-profit tort lawyers, who then funnel a share of their winnings back to the AGs? That’s become a sleazy practice in many states, and it is finally coming under scrutiny — notably in Mississippi, home of Dickie Scruggs, Attorney General Jim Hood, and other legal pillars.

You will look in vain, of course, for Journal editorials complaining about the fact that Big Business practically owns the regulatory agencies in Washington, or that business interests have pretty much been the deciding factor in just about every environmental, labor and social-welfare decision from the Bush administration. Whoops, move along, nothing to see there!

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NY TImes: Putting Candidates Under the Videoscope. (T)he embeds have changed the dynamic of this year’s election, making every unplugged and unscripted moment on the campaign trail available for all to see. One particular video shot of American flags tilting over behind Hillary Rodham Clinton last November has been viewed more than 300,000 times on the ABC News Web site. A video of the Fox News host Bill O’Reilly shoving a member of Barack Obama’s staff at a New Hampshire campaign rally has drawn almost 150,000 views on YouTube.

The dynamic was changed earlier, actually — supporters and opponents have been making videos of candidates for some time. What has changed is the notice of this by major media organizations as an endemic part of the process.

What is still not part of the understanding is the sheer unfairness of letting a single moment on video reflect a person’s reality. Yet this is what seems to happen on a regular basis.

When, as in the case of former Sen. George Allen — he of the famous “Macaca” comment — there is a history of racially charged words and deeds, then you have something worth discussing. When it’s simply one of those weird moments on the campaign trail, it’s nothing or close to it.

I could follow anyone reading this with a video camera for an hour and post something on the Web that would make you look ridiculous. You could do the same to me. Neither posting would reflect who we really are.

A culture of gotcha is a shallow culture. Is it the one we really want to promote?

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It’s hard to know where to begin in responding to David Hazinski’s “Unfettered ‘citizen journalism’ too risky,” an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he calls for regulation of citizen journalism:

Supporters of “citizen journalism” argue it provides independent, accurate, reliable information that the traditional media don’t provide. While it has its place, the reality is it really isn’t journalism at all, and it opens up information flow to the strong probability of fraud and abuse. The news industry should find some way to monitor and regulate this new trend.

It is false, of course, that anyone who’s serious about this field argues that it’s entirely accurate or reliable (though it is often independent, and often covers what traditional media can’t or won’t spend time on). In fact, as many of us have been noting for years, accuracy and reliability are key areas for improvement.

Then, having kindly allowed that this new media “has its place” — use the servant’s entrance, please — Hazinski removes it entirely from the realm of journalism, which is literally absurd.

And then, with the kind of hubris that sounds like a lampoon of a Big Media Guy turned professor, he demands that the news industry regulate it all. (Could they first turn some of that regulatory sternness on themselves? More on that in a minute.)

Let’s note the one sound point in his generally bizarre piece: To the extent that traditional media organizations are going to bring their audiences into their journalism processes, they should insist doing things in an honorable and journalistically sound way. If he’d left it at that, Hazinski would have had a reasonable argument. But with dismaying lapses in fact and logic, he goes much further.

For example, consider this:

The premise of citizen journalism is that regular people can now collect information and pictures with video cameras and cellphones, and distribute words and images over the Internet. Advocates argue that the acts of collecting and distributing makes these people “journalists.” This is like saying someone who carries a scalpel is a “citizen surgeon” or someone who can read a law book is a “citizen lawyer.” Tools are merely that. Education, skill and standards are really what make people into trusted professionals. Information without journalistic standards is called gossip.

The bogus logic is standard-issue for the naysayers. Unpacking it:

First, no one involved in citizen media is arguing that every posting of a photo, or every blog post, or ever video, is journalism. Nor would we argue that the people doing these things are journalists. But anyone — anyone — can commit an act of journalism using these tools. (And, as Hazinski fails to notice, there’s a heck of a lot of actual, no-kidding journalism going on out there in the blogosphere and other conversational media, some of it by people who have probably never been in a newsroom.)

Hazinski treads on the thinnest ice when he compares journalists with surgeons and lawyers, people who go to school for years and pass extremely difficult tests to earn the right to practice. There has never been such a requirement in journalism — ever. Nor should there be, for several reasons including the fact that a) some of the best journalists have never taken a college course on the subject; b) the skills required are simply not that hard to learn; and c) journalism is not a profession in the sense of being a lawyer or doctor. Journalism is a craft — a valuable and honorable one, but still a craft.

The analogy is absurd even if we pretend that journalism is a profession. We don’t go to the doctor (at least I don’t) to remove a splinter. We take a pin, sterilize it with flame and/or alcohol and remove it ourselves. We have, at some level, done a minor act of surgery.

And we don’t go to a lawyer when we lend money to a relative, or sign some kinds of agreements. We have a contract nonetheless, because some things with legal ramifications are simple enough to do ourselves.

Hazinski proceeds into baffling territory as he continues:

But unlike those other professions, journalism — at least in the United States — has never adopted uniform self-regulating standards. There are commonly accepted ethical principals (sic)— two source confirmation of controversial information or the balanced reporting of both sides of a story, for example, but adhering to the principals (sic) is voluntary. There is no licensing, testing, mandatory education or boards of review. Most other professions do a poor job of self-regulation, but at least they have mechanisms to regulate themselves. Journalists do not.

So without any real standards, anyone has a right to declare himself or herself a journalist. Major media outlets also encourage it. Citizen journalism allows them to involve audiences, and it is a free source of information and video. But it is also ripe for abuse.

The logic of all this (not to mention the spelling; doesn’t the Atlanta newspaper employ copy editors?) is completely escapable.

Having said journalism has standards, all of a sudden journalism really doesn’t have any real standards. Ah, you see, it’s that the standards are not written. Except, of course, that just about every major media organization has an internal code of ethics and behavior (usually in writing), and organizations like the Society of Professional Journalists has elaborately crafted codes, too. Except, as well, that (as Hazinski notes) those other real professions are famous for not enforcing their own rules.

Has Hazinski failed to notice that these abuses are all too common even in traditional media, which (at least most of the Washington variety) have served as stenographers instead of actual journalists? Is he aware that the media have been conned by experts for decades or longer?

Of course citizen media is leading to fakery and cons. The fakers and con artists use whatever works. And, yes, there will be a video that inflames public opinion and turns out to be a fake. There have already been stock swindles based on fake online press releases.

Hazinski’s remedies start off making some sense, at least those applied to the news industry. It’s definitely a good idea for traditional media organizations to verify what goes out under their banners or on their programming. Even better, as he suggests, they should apply those standards to their own work.

It’s also fine to suggest that journalism schools offer courses to citizen journalists. But the granting of certifications is a bit weird. Who’s that for? The media company? People who grant press passes? Beats me.

In the end, taking his logic on yet another S-curve, Hazinski calls for the regulation not just of citizen journalists but all journalists. So who’s going to be responsible for this regulation, anyway? I think he’s asking for self-regulation, which he has acknowleged doesn’t work very well with doctors and lawyers. But he doesn’t really say.

The regulators of speech should be all of us, collectively voting with our eyes, ears and dollars in the fabled marketplace of ideas. New tools coming along will give us better ways to do that in a Digital Age than we’ve had in the analog one, a good thing when the data out there is orders of magnitude greater and, so far, more difficult to sort for the good stuff.

The media industry and journalism educators do have a valuable role to play in all this. It’s to teach media literacy for a media-saturated world. That is not about regulation or do-it-this-way standards. It’s about helping media audiences and creators alike to understand how media and persuasion work.
For journalists, citizen or otherwise, it is very much about principles, and ultimately honor. For the audiences, we need to instill deep, critical thinking and a solid grasp of media techniques.

Let’s regulate ourselves to end up with a diverse, vibrant journalistic ecosystem that serves and informs us.

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I want to come full circle on a posting last July, when a London newspaper, commenting on the likely move of a senior News Corp. editor to the Wall Street Journal should — as has happened — Rupert Murdoch’s company buy Dow Jones. The paper wrote:

Robert Thomson, the present editor of The (London) Times, nonetheless seems quite likely to exchange his once great office for a job on The Wall Street Journal. This depends on Rupert Murdoch acquiring the American business title, which seems highly probable. While he has been attempting to persuade the Bancroft family to sell its controlling stake in the WSJ, Mr Murdoch has called on the advice of Mr Thomson, a former Financial Times executive who has worked in America.

Mr Thomson’s denial that he is leaving The Times, and his expressions of devotion for London, are widely discounted as spin. He is more likely to become The Wall Street Journal’s publisher than its editor. Many Murdoch editors have yearned to escape the yoke of editing for the less taxing responsibilities of senior management.

Now it appears that, indeed, Thomson will become publisher of Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.

My thought back in July, expressed in this posting, was what corruption the Independent story took for granted — and how especially ugly that is when journalists are the wrongdoers. Bad enough when journalists let politicians lie with impunity, I said. But I added:

It’s especially disgusting when the lies come from journalism organizations, which (call me naive) ought to consider truth to be the top value. I don’t expect Murdoch’s operations, or operators, to adhere to high standards, but when media critics correctly rage at bad ethical behavior from people lower down on organization charts at, say, the BBC, and then give a pass to this kind of thing, the contradiction is blatant — and telling.

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Jon Garfunkel has done prodigious homework on how a variety of online video posters used (and abused) the attribution principle in “Internet Slash-Ups: Even the pros rip off C-SPAN.

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Jonathan Weber at New West Network asks, “Michael Moore, Why Are You Stealing Our Content?” Pretty shabby…

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Anil Dash: Fake Steve Jobs and the Triumph of Blogs. Daniel Lyons, author of the heretofore-anonymous Fake Steve Jobs blog, which comments extensively on companies in the technology industry, was also the author of Forbes’ November 2005 cover story “Attack of the Blogs”, a 3000-word screed vilifying anonymous bloggers who comment on companies in the technology industry. In 2005, I spoke to Lyons for the article, though the comments I made about both the efforts that have been made to encourage accountability in the blogopshere, as well as the many positive benefits that businesses have accrued from blogging, were omitted from the story. My initial temptation was to mark Lyons as a hypocrite. Upon reflection, it seems there’s a more profound lesson: The benefits of blogging for one’s career or business are so profound that they were even able to persuade a dedicated detractor.

The Forbes article in which Lyons trashed the blog world was such a bad piece of journalism that it was easy to discount. But let’s be generous and give Lyons credit for understanding that the new medium is worth trying after all.

Of course, the Fake Steve Jobs blog does a lot of what Lyons complained about in his original Forbes tirade: It’s deliberately unfair, and it is (or was) published anonymously without any serious accountability.

Of course, maybe Lyons just decided to have some fun…

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