Could Open Source Journalism Have Saved 60 Minutes?
Related link: http://rkoman.blogspot.com/2005/01/how-osj-could-have-prevented.html
A few days ago I posted a blog called "Are Blogs the New Journalism?" which garnered some lengthy rebuttals both here and on my blog. I learned something from that conversation and some other reading and started thinking about it in terms of open source.
Back in 1999 my friend Andrew Leonard wrote this on Salon.com:
On Monday, Jane's Intelligence Review, the "international journal of threat analysis" (a must-read on your average CIA spook's list), solicited feedback on an article about "cyberterrorism" from the geeks who hang out at the Slashdot "news for nerds" Web site. On Thursday, after the Slashdot members sliced and diced Jane's story into tiny little pieces, an editor at the magazine announced that the story would not be published as planned. Instead, the editor, Johan J Ingles-le Nobel, declared that he would write a new article incorporating the Slashdot comments, and would compensate Slashdot participants whose words made it into the final copy.
"When you ask for feedback you get feedback," wrote Nobel, "and since roughly 99% of the posters slammed the article, even saying things like 'we'd expect better from Jane's', I've informed the author that we're not going to run with it. Instead I'm going to cull your comments together and make a better, sharper feature out of it -- I'll be getting in touch with several of you for more specific details or for more clarification."
This week, CBS released a report on the National Guard documents debacle, firing four producers, but not the head of CBS News or Dan Rather. The story was a scoop of the highest degree. Except that is was wrong. Opinions on how they got it wrong include "staff is all leftists who wanted to get Bush" in the words of PowerLine Blog to the systemic problems of a monolithic monopoly. As has been well reported, the story of the debunking of the documents is the story of blogs
-- as Time trumpeted a few weeks back.
Conservative bloggers -- with an axe to grind -- were suspicious. The night the story ran someone named buckethead wrote this on www.freerepublic.com:
"Every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman. In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts. The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90's. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used monospaced fonts. I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old. This should be pursued aggressively."
Pursued it was. Picked up by PowerLine's Scott Johnson, the idea that the docs were fakes just gained more and more energy, evidence, conspiracy theories, investigation. Johnson's post, called the 61st Minute, was updated continuously the day after the 60 Minutes piece including a comments like this from Larry Nichols:
As a PSM I had to know every job in Personnel, including the proper filing of documents in individual military records. Memos were NOT used for orders, as the one ordering 1LT Bush to take a physical. This would have done as a letter, of which a copy should have been sent to the CBPO (Consolidated Base Personnel Office) to be filed in 1LT Bush's military record. Memos DID NOT get filed in personnel records.
Then, over at www.littlegreenfootballs.com, Charles Johnson simply retyped the suspect document in Word and came up with a document that looked identical, he claimed, to the 60 Minutes document. A blog called INDC Journal (www.indcjournal.com) ran a report of an analysis by a forensic scientist. Legitimate signatures of Col. Killian were dug up. Someone pointed out that the memos feature kerning, which typewriters are physically incapable of. Amar Sarwal found that the Gen. Straud that a 1973 memo refers to actually retired the previous year. Theresa McAteer pointed out that a legit memo written on Sept. 5, 1973, a month after the suspect memo is dated, is typed on a monospace 70s-style typewriter.
By the end of the day, PowerLine's John Hinderaker put it succintly: "60 Minutes is toast."
In a piece celebrating bloggers as People of the Year, Time described the process like this:
"The more comments Johnson posted, the more e-mail he got, which he then posted, generating even more e-mail, and so on. The process turbocharged itself. In all, he updated the post 15 or 20 times over the course of that day. ... By 10:30 a.m., Power Line had an arsenal of arguments attacking the memos-typographical, logical, procedural, historical. ... The Drudge Report, the Mondo Cane grandfather of all right-leaning news blogs, linked to their site about midafternoon, sending a torrent of traffic their way and promptly crashing their Web server. By the end of the day, about 500 sites had linked to Power Line. 'I think it's fair to say that that post that Scott began is probably the most famous post in the young history of the blogosphere,' [Power Line blogger John] Hinderaker says proudly. "
What's interesting about this story is not so much that there are "citizen journalists" out there, doing the job that "real" journalists are not doing. In fact, there was no reporting or investigation to the original post -- just a bit of reasoning and reasonable suspicion. It was the flood of posts from readers that created a virtuous circle of other people's ideas, documentary evidence, and widespread dissemination. It is this ecology of facts, opinions and linking that is best described by the term"blogosphere."
But of course real journalists -- producers, editors, reporters -- are supposesd to be doing this job. It's a massive failure of journalism for this big a story to be based on a hoax, and for CBS to have backed up the story for so long. But it's hardly the only fiasco facing Big Journalism these days. The bitter taste of Jason Blair must still be fresh in press executives' mouths.
Now think back to 1999 and that Jane's piece on cyberterrorism. Is it so crazy to imagine that rather than keeping these documents top secret, going public only in front of millions of viewers and every press outlet in the world, that 60 Minutes would have released a few online, to the blogopshere, and received the benefits of their suspicious, research, and nitpicking? Apparently, a few hundred conservative bloggers have to be tougher than any editor inside of CBS.
When you talk about this, you're talking about Open Source Journalism, which is the opposite of the Art of the Scoop. Open Source Journalism is about getting it right, rather than getting it first. But getting it all is still a job for news organizations; journalism is not dead but it is going to be changing rapidly from here on out.
Will organizations like CBS change with it? Dan Gillmor isn't optimistic: "I don't think CBS is, today, institutionally capable of truly understanding the value of listening to its audience -- of grasping how much help the audience can be in the journalistic process. The network's offhanded dismissal of the grassroots continues even now. (I know there are individual people at CBS who do get it. But they are not running things.) That said, it would have been at least tactically smart for CBS to have acknowledged the grassroots component of this debacle. Common-sense PR should have made this obvious. Is this a cynical comment on my part? I guess so, but I hate to see the network compounding the damage so unnecessarily, in part because (unlike some in the blog world) I still value the good stuff CBS does."
Gillmor, the author of the influential book "We the Media," has long practiced his own brand of Open Source Journalism. Back in 2001, he talked to Online Journalism Review about his own blog at the San Jose Mercury News, a job he recently left to pursue a grassroots journalism project. "There have been occasions where I put up a note saying, 'I'm working on the following and here's what I think I know,' and the invitation is for the reader to either tell me I'm on the right track, I'm wrong, or at the very least help me find the missing pieces."
Despite the buzz about blogs as the new journalism, Jay Rosen, author of the PressThink blog, doesn't think that blogs by themselves represent the end of Big Journalism. "Blogging is only one part of a larger development--citizen's media," he writes, "that forces smart people in the press to confront the paradox of the self-informing public, previously thought to exist only at the level of the primordial village."
A self-informing public is in fact a movement, but it's not necessarily an antagonist to mainstream media -- if journalists will embrace the amazing power of the many, take advantage of their willlingness to inform themselves, and meet their expectations for accuracy. To be fair, it won't be easy because bloggers on both extremes of the political spectrum will be out for blood. But a little blood now could prevent major hemmoraghing in the future.
Are these powerliners truly citizen journalists, or just media-bashing conservatives who smelled a royal f-up?
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it can go both ways
One more addendum. In your blog your wrote,
I'm not really interested in this right-left discussion. To me its a power-grassroots discussion. Disenfranchisement comes in many forms. To me blogs represent a nonpartisan method of the grassroots being able to hold those in power to speak the truth and to be deeply transparent. That is a fundamental shift.If you fail to understand why the vast majority of blogs, and the accompanying success of the blogsphere, came into being then you'll never understand why liberal media will fight the blog movement, even when they harm their liberal friends like DailyKos or TalkingPointsMemo. The blogosphere is all about politics, no one can claim to be a fence-sitter. In fact, most blogs to the left and to the right enjoy vivid exchange with other blogs on matters of politics.
Believe me, you can't talk away liberal bias in old media by ignoring it, and you can't cure it by ignoring it. The benefit of the 'sphere is that it makes visible bias on both sides, and that both sides still have the feeling that they get their fair share of public representation.
it can go both ways
I don't want to drag this on and on, but -
Of course liberal journalists describe themselves as being "moderate" or "centrist" inasmuch as you'll find no liberal Democrat at the DNC who'd describe himself as being a liberal. Suddenly all of them become moderates. Could that be because they know they can't win an election when being so much to the left of mainstream opinion?
Doesn't it strike you as odd that the self-description depicts even-handedness while actual voting among journalists follows a strict liberal line?
Furthermore, you've cherry-picked conservative pundits as to give the impression that indeed there's not much to the liberal bias thang.
Well, let's assume for a moment that your sample were accurate. Take a look at final election results by county. Urban coastal counties, and a few in the midlands voted overwhelmingly for Kerry. Compare that figure to the home markets, and aggregation of aforementioned liberal news outlets. So you want to tell me that journalists at New York's Gray Lady are surrounded by a majority of Democrat voters, that they hang out only with Democrat associates, that they put out hit piece after hit piece on Bush months before election time, but, miraculously, they are "centrists"? No, Richard, they breath the liberal line, they stick strictly to Democrat talking points, and they vote Democrat. Please, don't fool yourself.
In the end I don't really mind how you try to explain away liberal bias. What really matters is market movement. You don't seem to understand that blogs are not about shaping public opinion. No blog can invoke a lasting sentiment based on political leaning. As I've explained before in the other thread the marvelling success of blogs lies not in simply creating an alternative news or opinion source but in resembling a movement which was already there.
The point is that the blogosphere in terms of political leaning is divided into two camps, liberal and conservative, and that both sides attract approx. half of the 'spheres visitors. Which is just fine. Actually, this is the equilibrium where traditional paper- and tv-based journalism once was. However, during the past three decades we've seen an unfortunate development which resulted in news outlets being dominated by liberal hacks, perpetually re-inforcing their one-minded worldview by hiring mostly liberals. Even the emergence of Fox News could not even-out that drift.
Blogs do not restore the old equilibrium by counter-balancing old media. They are a new media that mirrors actual political leanings in the public.
We don't have to fix old media. Fixing corrupt (as in broken) market players is the statist, top-down way of regulating markets. The news slash punditry market has regulated itself by creating the blogosphere, thus leaving old media in the dust because they simply refuse to give to the customer what 50+ percent of them, i.e. Republican voters, want.
And the customer is always right.
it can go both ways
The fact that CK appears in the Post in no way zeros out his conservative take on things. His shocking figures outline a whopping two week sample, during which Bush was stumbling over himself during the debates and deaths were mounting in Iraq. Bad media coverage isnt necessarily a sign of bias; it could be a sign of bad leadership. (I couldnt find this study by the way - have a link?)
When asked, this is how journalists describe themselves:
Q#22. On social issues, how would you characterize your political orientation? Q#23. On economic issues, how would you characterize your political orientation?
22 23
Left 30% Left 11%
Center 57% Center 64%
Right 9% Right 19%
Other 5% Other 5%
So strongly center and leaning right on economic issues.
see http://www.fair.org/reports/journalist-survey.html
what about the pundits who really frame the way people think about things. Hmm:
Conservative pundits: Pat Buchanan, Fred Barnes, John McLaughlin, David Gergen, Robert Novak, William F. Buckley, Jr., George Will, William Safire, Cal Thomas, Jonathon Alter, Joe Klein, Robert J. Samuelson, James Kilpatrick, Rush Limbaugh, and hundreds of other conservative radio talk-show hosts.
Centrists (self-described): Sam Donaldson, Mark Shields, Michael Kinsley, Morton Kondrake, Al Hunt, Jack Germond, Hodding Carter.
Progressive pundits: Jim Hightower (cancelled), Barbara Eirenreich, Molly Ivins.
see http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-liberalmedia.htm
it can go both ways
I will give you a hint what this "something" could be which is "systemic".
(Note that the quote is from conservative Charles Krauthammer writing for liberal Washington Post, so according to the rules put out by our friends at CBS the bias is being zeroed out this way.)
I attribute it to (as Marx would say) false consciousness -- contracted by living in the liberal media cocoons of New York, Washington and Los Angeles, in which any other worldview is simply and truly inconceivable. This myopia was most perfectly captured by Pauline Kael's famous remark after Nixon's 1972 landslide: "I don't know how Richard Nixon could have won. I don't know anybody who voted for him."Multiple polls of the media elite have confirmed Kael's inadvertent sociological insight. One particularly impartial poll, taken by the Freedom Forum in 1996, found that of 139 Washington bureau chiefs and congressional correspondents, 89 percent supported Bill Clinton in the previous election, vs. 7 percent for George H.W. Bush. The rest of America went 43 percent to 37 percent.
Some argue that personal allegiance does not matter because it is possible to be partisan at home and yet consciously bias-free at work.
Possible, yes. Actual? The Project for Excellence in Journalism did a careful study of mainstream media stories in September and October. The numbers are stunning.
To take one example, Oct. 1-14, 2004: Percent of stories about Bush that are negative -- 59 percent. Percent of stories about Kerry that are negative -- 25 percent. Stories favorable to Bush? 14 percent. Favorable to Kerry? 34 percent.
That is not a difference. That is a chasm. And you do not have to be a weatherman to ascertain wind direction. When, in February 2003, Gallup asked Americans their perception of media bias, 45 percent said the media were too liberal, 15 percent said they were too conservative. That's 3 to 1.
Or, to put it in my words - there are more liberals working at Fox News than there are conservatives working at CBS, ABC, NBC, New York Times, LA Times, and Seattle Times combined.
it can go both ways
Actually, in this particular case the maintainers of Power Line published their personal and contact information all the the way. Pictures, and phone numbers. The same information could be obtained from Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs who offered the first conclusive report by typpgraphy expert Dr Newcomer that the memos were fake, and also from big-time aggregator Glenn Reynolds.
So the only one who's been hiding in the process was ... Dan Rather, who had the luxury of waiting ten (10) days before he admitted in public that he "could not vouch for the authenticity of the documents".
However, adding insult to injury, little later a senior figure of the media industry complained that these were "guys in pajamas ... sitting in the basement ... and no one holds them accountable". Well, if you sincerely wanted to hold them accountable, you could have called them.
it can go both ways
The fact is that journalists are being watched, actively, by people who do not necessarily wish them success, or even believe in the virtues of a watchdog press. In this context, it is practically untenable for them to continue producing news in the same way, with the same vulnerability to making mistakes.
In point of fact, CBS had advisors tell them three days before the story ran that the documents looked fishy for the same reasons the bloggers offered. So there is something systemic at CBS that needs to be dug out.
it can go both ways
While in this particular case bloggers exposed the falsification of the documents which Dan Rather and his crew had obtained or produced (I'm not certain which, probably noone except the perpatrators ever will be) in many other cases bloggers are material in the spreading creation of rumours, hoaxes, and other scams targeted purely at damaging someone's (political) enemies.
While journalists are (supposed to be) ruled by some form of professional ethics bloggers are not in any way so limited.
They also far more easily hide behind the anonymity of screennames and anonymous hosting services, making their credentials (and thus their capability to make what claims they make) far harder to determine.
In fact the opponents of president Bush used (or rather tried to) use pretty much that very claim to discredit the bloggers who questioned the validity of the fake memos. In this case they failed because the bloggers had stirred up such a firestorm the real journalists could not ignore them and ordered their own research done (which of course should have been done before the story ever went life, I wonder if Dan Rather would have revealed someone tried to pass him faked documents with the intent of harming president Bush). Only then were the claims withdrawn (though I think no public apology to the president or the ANG was ever aired?).
Line Breaks, Please
Oops. Try it now.
Line Breaks, Please
Umm . . . could you please put in line breaks? One long paragraph is kinda hard to read through. Thanks!