Center for Citizen Media

The National Journal’s William Powers, in “Mirror, Mirror,” writes of the “Scooter” Libby trial in Washington, where various kinds of journalistic and political malpractice (and just plain regular functioning) are on display:

It’s a high-stakes game. In the Libby trial, we have a living tableau of a bunch of people who were playing it together, against the backdrop of war. Nobody comes off especially well: The war was based on bad information and everyone in the news establishment got taken for a ride. And this is part of the story of how it happened. This is Washington, not as some screenwriter or scolding ethicist would have it, but as it really is. Transparency like this doesn’t come along very often. Enjoy it while it lasts.

NY Times: Fox to Begin a ‘More Business Friendly’ News Channel. No one has ever accused CNBC, the cable TV home of Jim Cramer, Larry Kudlow and Maria Bartiromo, of being antibusiness. Until now. Yesterday, Rupert Murdoch confirmed one of the worst kept secrets in the media industry, that the News Corporation will start a long-awaited business news channel in the fourth quarter of this year. In doing so, he also took a shot at CNBC, the leading television business news outlet, vowing that the new channel would be friendlier to corporations.

It’s not a joke, but you wish it was. CNBC is the ultimate business booster. How could Murdoch’s new plaything be any more so?

Here’s what we really need: a channel that tells the truth about business. There would actually be an audience for it.

Dave Winer, commenting on Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ open letter on digital restrictions for downloaded music, says Apple is now a media company:

Now the morning after it hits me how new this is, because Apple usually communicates through bigpub reporters like John Markoff at the NY Times and Steven Levy at Newsweek. This time he went direct, Markoff’s article appeared this morning, more than 12 hours after the essay was published, and makes clear how much better this system is than the old one.

Actually, not so. Jobs has been going direct for years, with his speeches to Apple acolytes several times a year at various Apple conferences. The company’s (i.e. his) paranoid secrecy is specifically designed to hype those speeches, where most of Apple’s real news is released.

True, Jobs does occasionally bring a favored big-journalism reporter into the tent for a preview, but almost never to actually announce something via that reporter’s news outlet. Rather, it’s to amplify the news.

Other CEOs have offered up open letters before, too, such as the letter on net neutrality last year by Google’s Eric Schmidt, who got some attention in the press. CEOs don’t do it ever day, and when they do it’s usually to rebut or clarify something already in the public arena.

In each case, though — and this is where Dave is entirely right — they are in part going around the traditional media, being their own journalists, in effect. They want to get their message directly to the people who care most about it, and not allow professional journalists to massage it on the way. This is what Sun Microsystems’ Jonathan Schwartz does all the time in his blog, though he’s not normally using it to push major changes in the business models of another industry.

The Net is the first medium to make this affordable and practical — especially because when someone says something newsworthy, as Jobs did, the blogosphere and major media alike, along with people on discussion boards and mail lists, pounce on it and analyze every word. This combines amplification with dissection, and in the end we have news that is more thoroughly understood than just about any other kind.

The CEO today who doesn’t route around the traditional press on some issues is making a big mistake.

AP: Comcast, Facebook to launch TV series with user videos: Comcast Corp. and Facebook.com are joining forces to create a television series from user-generated videos that will appear online and through video on demand.

Good to hear about this, but what will these “users” — the wrong word here — get paid? No word on that in the story.

SF Chronicle: Blogger jailed for defying grand jury sets record / He’s U.S. journalist imprisoned longest in contempt of court. Josh Wolf, a blogger who refused to give a videotape of a San Francisco anarchist protest to a federal grand jury, achieves an unwanted distinction today, when he becomes the longest-imprisoned journalist for contempt of court in U.S. history.

It is difficult to know which party to hold in the most serious contempt here — but Josh Wolf isn’t in the running. Candidates:

• The federal prosecutors for the Bush administration, collaborating with the San Francisco Police Department, who blew away California’s journalism-shield law that would likely — and properly — have protected Wolf from having to turn over his video out-takes.
• San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who’s apparently been too busy with personal problems to care about California law and a free press. Ditto the SF County Board of Supervisors. Is there any record of these folks asking even basic questions, or do they like what happened? Has anyone asked them?
• Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is equally unconcerned the the federal government’s unilateral overriding of California statues.
• The state’s traditional media organizations, who’ve persistently howled at the moon over the threatened jailing of two Chronicle reporters but with few exceptions, such as today’s story, have paid far too scant notice to an imprisonment that has even greater implications for the practice of journalism. Nothing new there, given the traditional media folks’ unconcern when Apple went after online journalists, a silence that only ended when it looked as though a court ruling might threaten the big guys, too.

This jailing is a scandal, and it gets worse every day Wolf remains in jail.

(Corrected to reflect that San Francisco does not have a City Council.) 

Editor & Publisher: How ‘Orlando Sentinel’ Broke Astronaut Arrest Story. The Orlando Sentinel mixed old-fashioned beat reporting with the modern advantages of the Web to break the sensational story Monday evening of a NASA astronaut’s arrest on charges she attacked the girlfriend of another astronaut in an unfolding love triangle that has drawn national attention.

When, oh when, will it stop being journalism-business news that a newspaper breaks a story on the Web? The real news would have been if the paper had done anything else with a scoop of this kind.

It’s ridiculous — and telling of an industry that remains impossibly hidebound — that anyone would offer the paper a pat on the back for doing the obvious.

CyberJournalist.net: TV news stations air incorrectly identified ferry video from YouTube. A number of Canadian television news broadcasts aired a user-submitted video clip falsely labelled as a ferry battling rough seas in the Cabot Strait, reviving questions about how news organizations handle user-submitted content. The reports prompted some passengers to cancel their bookings.

One or two lessons here for traditional news organizations — and the rest of us?

Accuracy matters. That includes fact-checking. When you aren’t sure of the original source, this goes triple.

Jan Schaffer and colleagues at J-Lab have produced a terrific study of the citizen-media movement. You can find “Citizen Media: Fad or the Future of News?” on the Knight Foundation’s new Knight Citizen News Network site, which will officially launch soon.

Edward Wasserman at the Miami Herald, in “Flying high with the Money Honey,” observes:

CNBC no longer perceives a difference between journalist and show pony. Bartiromo’s jet-setting isn’t, as the network claims, source development. She isn’t doing legwork on stories. She’s a corporate emissary and brand-enhancement, helping favored companies — many of them CNBC advertisers — to put on successful events. She partners with the world she’s supposed to cover.

The Bartiromo situation is only the most recent flagrant example of questionable ethics in big media, but far from the only one. Look at the Scooter Libby trial in Washington, where all kinds of unhealthy journalistic practices are being hung out for exposure.

CNBC is turning into a promotional channel for corporate America and the stock markets. Nothing wrong with that, actually — except the falsehood of conflating news with boosterism.

The next time a Big Media organization thinks about taking a dig at blogger ethics — which are sometimes quite questionable — it should consider looking first at the really big game, where the biggest audiences still converge: in Big Media.

UPDATE

Here’s an example of CNBC’s stock-market boosterism: the “Million Dollar Portfolio Challenge” that is little but an invitation to see who can make the most lucrative short-term bets. No one is actually investing real money, of course; it’s just an online contest running 10 weeks. Pseudo gamblers can make up to 50 mock trades a day, and the 10 best gamblers go onto a final round.

This kind of thing does nothing but promote the worst excesses of the dot-com bubble days, when CNBC’s on-the-air “news programming” could move stocks instantly skyward just by mentioning them — when a few day traders scored big and a lot of average Americans got absolutely screwed.

CNBC’s event would be named more accurately as a day-trading gambling contest. It has nothing to do with the kind of investing that builds real wealth for average people, where slow and steady gains are the goal. It’s irresponsible in the extreme, but unsurprising from the Money Honey channel.

The Consumerist’s readers have ruled: ‘All I Want For Xmas Is A PSP’ Wins Best Flog 2006.