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.

David Carr (NYT): Dirty Job, but Someone Has to Do It - New York Times. Go to a nondescript office building on the East side of Manhattan, down the hall to a door already in the clutches of a fake dismembered hand, and you will find the newsroom of The Smoking Gun. The take-no-prisoners Web site at thesmokinggun.com is in the midst of spilling affidavits in a Texas polygamy case and recently pushed The Los Angeles Times to retract a major article about the murder of Tupac Shakur by pointing out that it was based on fake documents.

LA Times: CBS layoffs signal a financial squeeze on TV stations. CBS insists that the quality of its (local) news won’t suffer because of the cuts, which hit three-quarters of the company’s 27 stations.

Right, because local TV journalism is already pretty much at rock-bottom.

ZDNet: Anatomy of a ‘Blogging will kill you’ story: Why I didn’t make the cut. I read the New York Times’ take on how the stress of blogging and how it can kill you with great interest: I was interviewed for it. But I pretty much knew I wouldn’t make the final story as my take was different than Matt Richtel’s.

My own reaction to Matt’s piece was similar: I find the premise breathtakingly shallow because the data are so breathtakingly shallow. As Dingan notes in his piece:

Yes, blogging is stressful. Yes, it can be insane. But is it any worse than being a corporate lawyer? How many of those folks dropped in the last six months? How about mortgage brokers? Hedge fund traders? FBI agents? Any job where you gnash your teeth together? We write for a living, yap all day and don’t have to wear suits. You could do worse than blogging.

A truly extraordinary example of journalistic malfeasance is playing out right now. Attorney General Michael Mukasey told a San Francisco audience last week that the Bush administration was aware in the days before the 9/11 attacks that an Al Qaeda official was making calls from a “safe house in Afghanistan” to U.S. but that our government failed to act on that.

Mukasey said the U.S. lacked the legal authority, a flat falsehood as legal commentators have pointed out. But why aren’t journalists pursing what Salon’s Glenn Greenwald explains is a huge question:

Mukasey’s story is either true or false — and, more importantly, nothing like it happened. He can’t claim that he just misspoke or was confused because not only was there no such call from Afghanistan (at least according to everything that is known, including by the 9/11 Commission’s version), but FISA could never possibly have prevented interception of any calls remotely like the one Mukasey described.

He just made this up out of whole cloth in order to mislead Americans into supporting the administration’s efforts to eliminate spying safeguards and basic constitutional liberties and to stifle the pending surveillance lawsuits against telecoms. That isn’t hard for anyone — even including those who play the role of journalists on TV — to understand and convey.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s article about the speech at least raised the issue:

Mukasey did not specify the call to which he referred. He also did not explain why the government, if it knew of telephone calls from suspected foreign terrorists, hadn’t sought a wiretapping warrant from a court established by Congress to authorize terrorist surveillance, or hadn’t monitored all such calls without a warrant for 72 hours as allowed by law. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for more information.

As far as I can tell, however, the paper hasn’t pursued it further. That’s bad journalism if so.

It’s vastly vastly worse journalism that virtually the entire media establishment has failed to pick up on a story of real significance. Why are journalists not hounding the Justice Department, White House and Congress for answers? (The failure of Congress to ask obvious questions is nothing new for that weak-kneed crowd, sadly. And it’s scary that the presidential candidates don’t care, either.)

Who’s asking, besides MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann? Bloggers, for the most part. Oh, right, blogging is just a trivial activity, unworthy of journalistic recognition.

This kind of thing is why traditional journalism is forfeiting its soul.

At a conversation site where I spend some time, someone noted a Twitter posting from earlier today — well worth repeating:

“What I like about April Fool’s Day: one day a year we’re asking whether news stories are true. It should be all 365.”

Editor & Publisher: Newspaper Biz Editors Defend Mortgage Crisis Coverage. Did the growing mortgage credit crisis, which took a huge turn with last week’s collapse of Bear Stearns, get enough early coverage from newspapers? Top business editors at several of the nation’s major papers say yes, although a few admit some of the more complicated elements may not have been broken out enough for readers.

What tripe. The newspaper industry almost totally failed to do its job, and the public got screwed once again.

Citing a story here and there, as several editors do in the E&P piece, is not evidence of newspapers doing their job. It’s quite the opposite.

When an economic catastrophe of this sort — and entirely predicable one — is building, journalists are failing to do their jobs when they don’t harp on it.

As I said in a previous posting, newspapers and broadcasters were raking in billions in advertising from the real estate and banking industries as this bubble inflated. I do not believe this is a coincidence. I also don’t believe it was deliberate malfeasance; but you just don’t see lots of tough coverage in media of the people and companies paying the bills.

Many if not most papers have special weekly real estate pages or sections where you would find little hint of the potential for trouble. I know I looked for it in the papers I read. That’s where the discussion belonged — as well, of course, as Page One — not solely in the occasional business page stories. Hundreds of references to bubbles, most in the past year and not when there was a chance to slow down that train, were dwarfed by comparison to the buying advice that dominated coverage of real estate overall.

Oh, sure, there were extremely infrequent stories containing warnings in a few publications — and occasional quotes from skeptics in the prices-just-keep-rising stories that overwhelmingly dominated the coverage. But the reality is that journalists mostly didn’t have a clue, or didn’t want to have a clue. I don’t know which is worse.

Some bloggers, and some economists, did shout warnings. They were ignored, or worse, insulted by wishful thinkers and (I suspect) people who stood to gain from the continuing bubble.

Again, from a previous post, here are some questions the media all but ignored until too late:

Where were the stories we should have been seeing, noting that “buyers” — a word that is ludicrous in context –were running headlong toward a financial cliff? What happened to the coverage of a housing market that fewer and fewer people could afford to enter except with no-interest or no-down-payment loans, where home prices were so far out of sync with the economy that there was no precedent for such imbalance?

Where were the stories pointing out that the secondary (and far beyond) mortgage markets were salting hugely risky debt all through the American economy? You think your bank or pension fund doesn’t have some of this garbage somewhere in its books? Think again.

The media also bungled by not fingering the makers of this bubble apart from foolish “buyers” who proved to be such suckers. This boom was fueled by people who knew it couldn’t last: brokers, bankers and, above all, Wall Street’s ever-clever wizards who risk other people’s money for gigantic fees.

This is another journalistic scandal. It’s not quite on the order of the bended-knee, pre-war coverage — stenography of government officials’ lies and deceptions — that helped steer America into the Iraq war, but only because it’s not killing people in large numbers.

It’s a massive enough scandal, though. There’s plenty of pain left in this deflation, possibly including an outright tanking of the economy.

The journalism craft should take a long, hard look at what it’s failed to do, yet again, in the housing bubble. It has failed to warn — as loudly and incessanty as it did in promoting the housing bubble — that a financial crunch was on the way.

There’s plenty of blame to go around in this mess. The finger-pointing has barely begun. But when it gets going for real, I hope that journalists who do some of that pointing will at least look in a mirror.

Jon Garfunkel: Easy Mark: The Elephant in the Locker Room. (I)t’s still immensely foolish as it is to ban someone from the lockerroom because they call themselves a blogger. If a cutoff is needed, I’d suggest one based on the old standby, circulation.

“Mark” is Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks franchise, and he’s decided bloggers aren’t welcome in the team’s locker room. Given his status as a popular blogger this is modestly hypocritical, but it’s his franchise to muck with as he wishes.

There is, of course, a space problem in any locker room. Only a certain number of people fit, and a team is entirely justified in limiting the number of reporters allowed inside. So how to decide which ones?

Circulation or viewership/listenership is one metric that’s workable — though a blogger in question in this case works for the big daily paper, making Cuban’s decision even more odd. The best metric, of course, is clout: What reach does the journalist have in a more general way? What audience does he or she have? If a blogger’s chief audience includes journalists who cover the team and the team’s most fanatical fans, that would seem to be a good person to have around.

Rank speculation: One possibility here is that many bloggers, such as Cuban, don’t follow other people’s rules of verbal decorum. Sports reporters often become fanboys (or girls) of the teams they cover, to the detriment of the journalism and fans. Maybe Cuban is worried, in part, of more serious journalism about his team and its famous follies.

Great headline, meanwhile, from the Deadspin blog: “Mark Cuban Dislikes Bloggers Who Aren’t Him.”

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.

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!