Center for Citizen Media

Technorati: State of the Blogosphere 2008.

If you’ve been reading the traditional press to try to understand the financial meltdown of the past week and the government’s responses, you’ve probably become more confused than enlightened. This comes as no surprise, given the general ignorance of economics among so many journalists. They’re doubly burdened now, they’re confronting the typical (these days) lack of detail from authorities as well as the well-founded sense that the government is making this up as it goes.

So much of the coverage has centered on the amount of taxpayer financing the government gurus want: $700 billion. Too little has been about where it would go and what it would do.
So I’ve been turning to real experts, people like Brad DeLong, the UC-Berkeley economist whose blog is a must-read if you want to be even halfway well informed. It takes some work to parse postings like “The Liqudity Trap, and Open Market Operations on the Risk Premium on a Pan-Galactic Scale” — but the information is incredibly useful and illuminating.

DeLong is of the best of the economics bloggers: incisive, smart and constantly pointing us to other writers and resources, including people who don’t agree with him, some of whom are politically very opposed to his views. Solid stuff, and critically important at this scary juncture…

Columbia Journalism Review: Boiler Room. It seems to me that well into Year II of the Panic, the business press is in the process of making the same mistake it made in the run-up to the debacle: focusing on esoteric Wall Street concerns and ignoring the simplest, most basic, but most important one—the breathtaking corruption that overran the U.S. lending industry, including and especially the brand names, and the extent to which Wall Street drove that corruption. Let’s just call it a case of over-sophistication. Its persistence, however, will only impede journalists’ ability to cover this thing going forward.

True, as far as it goes. But the journalistic scandal, which will go forever unpunished — except, perhaps, to the degree that journalists will lose jobs in the economic carnage — is failing to go after the story that was in front of people’s noses as the bubble inflated — at a time when it might have done some good.

There were a few exceptions, as Dean Starkman notes in his CJR piece. But the overwhelming majority of coverage of housing during that period was of the cheerleading variety. It was uncritical and shabby work.

If our economy goes off a cliff, journalists won’t be the ones at fault. But they’ll have much to answer for anyway, because they utterly failed to do their jobs when it counted.

Previous postings on this topic are here, here.

NBC has every right to take Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews out of their anchor chairs for political events. But there’s a bizarre double standard at work in much of the traditional media commentary on this.

In the Washington Post, for example, Larry Grossman, former president of NBC News, is quoted as saying that MSNBC has “been doing very well as the liberal antithesis to Fox, everyone knows that. But at some point standards and journalistic integrity have to take over.”

The same standards that have taken over at Fox, which boasts one of the most obviously biases anchor people around, Brit Hume. The Post ignores this, to its discredit.

I’m at Highway Africa, an annual journalism conference that brings together some of the continent’s most Internet-savvy folks to discuss ways to boost African journalism. It’s my third visit to the gathering, held in Grahamstown, South Africa, and sponsored by the journalism school at Rhodes University and SABC, the country’s biggest broadcaster.
The theme this year is citizen journalism, which has taken root more slowly in Africa than in some other places — in part due to the slower pace of Internet adoption — but which is now generating significant interest from constituencies of all kinds. Those include the traditional media, of course, representatives of which have pointedly asked about issues of trust and credibility; some have hinted broadly, in a place where government intervention in media has been endemic, that regulation may be needed. To the latter I respectfully disagree, naturally.

I’m dazzled by some of the things I’m hearing, however. The level of innovation is just as high in Africa as anywhere else, even if Internet usage is considerably lower. (One organization with which I’m quite familiar as an advisor, the superb Global Voices Online has several folks here including Georgia Popplewell, managing director.)

This is my third trip to South Africa and this conference, which is now in its 12th year. The first time was in 2001, as part of a small group of foreign journalists. We were on our way back to the airport when we got news, by mobile phone, of the Sept. 11 attacks.

African journalists live and work amid some of the most difficult conditions on the planet. The optimism and grit of the ones I’ve met here in these visits stays with me.

Carl Malamud, a hero in providing access to information, has posted online the the 38-volume California Code of Regulations, over which the state claims copyright ownership.

The Santa Rosa (Calif.) Press Democrat reports the story.

UPDATED

If the Rupert Murdoch story in Vanity Fair(Tuesdays with Rupert) is accurate, one reason for Fox News’ bias against Obama during the campaign — apart from the fact that the news channel is a mouthpiece for right-wing ideology and politicians — is that Roger Ailes, the head of the operation, was in a snit because Obama recognized the bias and wouldn’t grant interviews. From the article:

Obama lit into Ailes. He said that he didn’t want to waste his time talking to Ailes if Fox was just going to continue to abuse him and his wife, that Fox had relentlessly portrayed him as suspicious, foreign, fearsome—just short of a terrorist.

Ailes, unruffled, said it might not have been this way if Obama had more willingly come on the air instead of so often giving Fox the back of his hand.

A tentative truce, which may or may not have vast historical significance, was at that moment agreed upon.

This shows — again, assuming its truth — Fox as not just ideologically skewed, but as a channel willing to trash a potential president because he wouldn’t help bring in viewers, and willing to say so. Wow.

But another question: What does it say about Obama that he’d cut such a deal, agreeing to be interviewed in return for getting less sleazy coverage? Practical, sure. Cynical, too.

If he hoped for better treatment, it’s not obvious that his deal worked, of course. Fox continues to be reliably right-wing.

Update: Fox is denying this. Quoted in today’s Washington Post, Ailes claims he told Obama: “Senator, you’re the one who boycotted us… We’re not the ones who boycotted you. Nor did we retaliate for your boycott.”

The Vanity Fair article, “Tuesdays with Rupert,” is worth reading both as an exercise in vanity by a journalist (Michael Wolff) and as yet another 1.5-dimensional view of a thoroughly amoral media baron. Murdoch comes across — nothing new here — as an essentially shark-like figure: a predator that can’t stop chasing prey because that’s what predators do.

I’m honored to be speaking at the upcoming Kosmopolis 2008 in Barcelona, Spain. The biennial gathering, held this year in late October, brings together an amazing group of people involved in literature and the arts. I’ll be part of a program on the future of journalism.

Here’s Volume 01, which contains interviews with several friends and colleagues including Joi Ito, Ethan Zuckerman and Henry Jenkins. Take a look.