A Brief Essay on the Origins of Authority in Journalism

A few months ago at PressThink, I published Voice of San Diego’s guidelines for new reporters. They say:

Write with authority. You earn the right to write with authority by reporting and working hard.

Which is true. The way I like to phrase that idea is in the title of this post: “I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.” This, I think, is the original source–headwaters–for all forms of authority in journalism.

By “authority” I simply mean the right to be listened to, a legitimate claim on public attention. You begin to have authority as a journalist not when you work for a brand name in news (although that helps) but when you offer a report that users cannot easily get on their own. If we go way back in journalism history, the first people to claim this kind of authority were those who could say… I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.

1.

Perhaps the first people to be employed as professional correspondents were letter writers hired by rich merchants and bankers in early modern Europe. These correspondents lived in cities from which the banker or businessman needed regular reports. Their letters conveyed much the same news that a trader would want today: prices, conditions for trade and transport, what the local authorities were up to, rumors of war, court news and gossip, business disruptions. The most famous examples are the newsletters written for the House of Fugger, perhaps the most powerful banking family in Germany in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Here’s a sample:

Insolvencies at the Exchange at Antwerp
From Antwerp, 9th December 1570

Here the Genoese have arranged a competition at the Exchange & because of it two Genoese houses have gone bankrupt this week: they are Giovanni Grimaldi & then Pedro Francesco et Pedro Christophoro Spinola, who have behind them all the Germans here. It has always been regarded as a well-established business, & has long traded in this town. The creditors kept of good cheer. It is, however, to be feared that it may be with this as with other bankruptcies. At first there is ever enough on hand, but in the end no-one can obtain anything…

This bankruptcy has put an end to credit among the Genoese. Within the space of a few years many bankruptcies have taken place, but I have never seen such excitement on the Exchange as there is regarding this. They are owing a large amount, but no-one knows how much, for their books have not as yet been balanced.

It will probably not end with these two, but they will drag others down of their nation with them.

What is this, but a dispatch from 442 years ago on the difficulty of valuing toxic assets? “I’m in Antwerp. You, the Fugger family, are not. Let me tell you about two big bankruptcies.” Reporting! At a minimum, it involves a correspondent, an event, and a report, but also—and this is the part we tend to overlook–recipients who have a stake but can’t be there themselves to see how their investment fares.

In my example from 1570, that part is played by the Fugger family. It’s tempting to say that they were among the founders of modern journalism, but we can’t for a simple reason. The newsletters they paid for didn’t circulate publicly. They weren’t meant for public eyes at all. They were a private intelligence network for a rich family that had a stake in Antwerp’s business climate but couldn’t be there. The public, you see, hadn’t been invented yet. The advantage of this system is that the correspondent with a single house to inform is easily instructable.

2.

Here’s the example I would use in the classroom to make certain that every student understood what I meant by, “I’m there, you’re not…” It’s a clip of Edward R. Murrow reporting from London for American audiences during the Battle of Britain in 1940. Indulge me for a moment (actually a minute, thirty-nine seconds) and listen to it. Go on, I’ll wait…

Murrow is there. We’re not. His report has an unmistakeable authority, not only because we can hear the air raid sirens and feel the urgency in the air, not only because he’s good at telling us what he sees, but also because we feel for the Londoners and don’t want Hitler’s Luftwaffe to win. That’s our stake. Yet we’re an ocean away. Like the House of Fugger we can’t know how our investment is faring without a correspondent who is on scene and able to tell us.

Shared language, shared assumptions, a similar-enough consciousness across reporter and recipients: these make possible the depiction of reality. Had Murrow been there and said: “Tonight in London, God is crying. Here, listen…” the sound of air raid sirens would still be heard, but his report would shatter in the clash of worldviews: secular vs. religious.

So there’s a lot packed into that plea: Let me tell you about it. No one can be informed without her consent. Information requires for its transmittal the user’s grant of attention. Among the prerequisites for reporting to take its course is a shared world, a weave of common assumptions, connecting reporter to recipient. If that breaks apart so does the possibility of there being any journalism. There has to be some stake, or who cares about a bankruptcy in Antwerp? And it has to be difficult to know how our investment is faring without the work of the reporter.

I’m sorry if some of this seems obvious. It’s like the frame around a painting. Obvious, but if you’ve been staring at the painting for a good while, maybe not.

3.

I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it… is headwaters for a whole system of authority in journalism. Further downstream we find:

“I reviewed those documents, you couldn’t–you were too busy raising your family, trying to pay the mortgage–so let me tell you what they show.” (Link.)

“We interviewed the workers who were on that drilling platform when it exploded, you didn’t, let us tell you what they said.” (Link.)

“I found out how that bill died in Congress. You didn’t have access to the key players. Let me tell you what I learned.” (Link.)

“We fact checked that statement, you didn’t, let us tell you what we found.” (Link.)

As Voice of San Diego said, authority originates in hard work–reporting!–but also in the conditions that prevent the users from doing that work themselves. We can describe those conditions in either spatial or temporal terms. “I’m there, you’re not…” is a more spatial image. “I took the time to look through those documents, you couldn’t…” is temporal. Something I teach my students: the simplest way to create value in journalism is to save the user time. As in, “I give you the most interesting parts of the Facebook IPO so you don’t have to dig through it.”

4.

Let’s bring my story up to the present. “I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it” isn’t limited to professional journalists. That should be obvious to everyone by now. The tools for staking this kind of claim have been distributed to the population at large. So rather than decide, “who’s a journalist?” we should focus on who’s doing the work. Who’s there when we’re not and ready to tell us about it?

Tim Pool has made a name for himself by live streaming the action around the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City. He simply carries his camera into events and shows what’s going on: live, over the web, for free. He sometimes has a few hundred viewers and at other times his audience swells to 10,000 or more. Starting at about 28:05 in the clip below, Pool comes upon people letting the air out of the tires of New York City police cars, which of course is an illegal and provocative act. He is met with hostility and attempts to keep him from broadcasting, but he continues to broadcast.

Video streaming by Ustream

As he later told On The Media, “When we’re at something as pivotal, something as historic as that night, the camera’s not going off. Especially since we had a very large amount of people watching, and I have an obligation to those people to let them know what’s happening.”

In other words, “I’m there, you’re not and no one’s going to stop me from telling you about it.”

Help me figure it out. Here are five explanations, each of them a partial truth.

As you can see from the chart, the percentage of Americans who had a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the news media has declined from over 70 percent shortly after Watergate to about 44 percent today.

Why? That is my question here.

What makes it a puzzle is that during that same period, several other things were happening. Journalists were becoming better educated. They were more likely to go to journalism school, my institution. During this period, the cultural cachet of being a journalist was on the rise. Newsrooms were getting bigger, too: more boots on the ground to cover the news. Journalism was becoming less of a trade and more of a profession. Most people who study the press would say that the influence of professional standards, such as we find in this code, was rising.

So the puzzle is: how do these things fit together? More of a profession, more educated people going into journalism, a more desirable career, greater cultural standing (although never great pay) bigger staffs, more people to do the work … and the result of all that is less trust.

Why?

Let me be clear: I’m not saying there’s no explanation, or that this is some baffling paradox. Only that it’s worth thinking through how these things fit together. (For more on declining public confidence see this overview from 2005.) Here are some possible answers. I am going to keep this post open for a week and add the best ideas I get to my list.

When you put my trust puzzler to professional journalists (and I have) they tend to give two replies:

1. All institutions are less trusted. The press is just part of the trend. Here are a few comparison figures from Gallup’s confidence surveys (Pdf):

The Church. In 1973, 66 percent had a great deal or a fair amount of trust. In 2010: 48 percent.

Banks. 1979: 60 percent, 2010: 23 percent.

Public schools. 1973: 58 percent, 2010: 34 percent

The Presidency: 1973: 52 percent, 2010: 36 percent

The problem with this answer is that it ignores the whole idea of a watchdog press. If these other institutions are screwing up, or becoming less responsive, then journalists should be the ones telling us about it, right? Suppose the Catholic Church fails (scandalously) to deal with child abusers among its priests. If journalists help expose that, confidence in the press should rise. That’s the watchdog concept in action. Big institutions are less trusted. But in itself that doesn’t explain falling confidence in the press. Public service journalism is supposed to be a check on those institutions.

2. Bad actors.  The second answer I hear the most from journalists is that bad actors–especially the squabblers on cable television, and the tabloid media generally–are undermining confidence in the press as a whole. Just as Americans hate Congress but tend to love their local Congress person, they can’t stand “the media”–as reflected in your chart, Jay–but they feel differently about their own habitual sources of news. (Go here for some evidence of that.)

From this point of view, there’s no trust problem at all, really, just a category mistake. The most visible news people are being mistaken for the whole institution. If we could stop doing that, there wouldn’t be any drop in confidence.

The conservative movement has an answer to my question, which they try to drill into my head whenever they can:

3. Liberal bias. The United States is a conservative country (center-right, as radio host Hugh Hewitt likes to say) but most journalists are liberals. Even though they claim to practice neutrality, they weave their ideology into their reporting and people sense this bias. The result is mistrust. The problem has gotten worse since 1976. What else do you need to know?

Well, one thing I’d like to know is: how come Fox News, dedicated to eradicating liberal bias, is simultaneously the most mistrusted and the most trusted news source, according to survey research. That suggests it’s a little more complicated than: conservative country, liberal press. Wouldn’t it make more sense to begin like this? The United States is a divided country…

The political left has a different answer to my question. I should point out that it is not analogous to the right’s answer:

4. Working the refs. The right has learned how to manipulate journalists by never letting up on the “liberal bias” charge, no matter what. This amounts to working the refs, in Eric Alterman’s phrase. In basketball, some coaches will as a matter of course complain that the referees are favoring the other team. Their hope is to sow confusion in the minds of the officials, and perhaps get the benefit of the doubt on some calls.

Working the refs is indifferent to the actual distribution of judgment calls. Coaches who believe in the method use it regardless of whether the refs have been unfair (or generous) to their side. The aim is to intimidate. In the degree that “working the refs” works, journalists favor the side that is complaining the most. This amounts to a distortion of the picture presented to the public. From that distortion, mistrust follows.

But is it really true that the left does not know how to complain about bad calls, while the right screams at every opportunity?  Maybe in 1969, when Spiro Agnew’s complaints began, that was so. It hasn’t been so for a while. This complicates the case.

My own theory, which I do not think of as complete or even adequate. 

5. Something went awry. My own sense is that the loss in confidence in the press has to do with professionalization itself. There was something missing or out of alignment in the ideas and ideals that mainstream journalism adopted when it began to think of itself as a profession starting in the 1920s. Whether it was newsroom objectivity, or the View from Nowhere, the production of innocence, the era of omniscience, the Voice of God, or the claim to provide “all the news,” whether it was the news tribe understood as a priesthood, monopoly status for metropolitan journalism, the identification with insiders, or an underlying media system that ran one way, in a one-to-many or broadcasting pattern… I don’t know. Maybe all those things.

I haven’t figured it out yet (in fact, much of my writing at PressThink has been an attempt to think this through…) but it strikes me that something went awry within the professional project–which also did a lot of good for journalism–and eventually that flaw began to take its toll on public confidence. The press got out of alignment with its public, and mistaken ideas that weren’t seen as mistaken prevented self-correction, resulting in symptoms like this.

The first addition based on a number of comments I received since this was posted.

6. Just part of the power structure now. Over Twitter, investigative journalist Phil Williams wrote, “Press more popular when viewed as standing up to power. Then it became part of power structure.” From this point of view, the glamorization of journalism after Watergate, combined with the influence of celebrity within the news tribe, plus the growing concentration of media ownership in a few large companies that themselves seek influence, had made mockery of the journalist as a courageous truthteller standing outside the halls of power.

Ground zero for this explanation would be the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner, in which all the factors I just mentioned are on vivid display.

I’ve been blogging at PressThink since 2003. The comment thread at this post may be the best since I started. Nos. 7-8 derive from it.

7. Culture war! Let’s say 20 percent of the country buys No. 3: liberal bias, 20 percent buys No. 4: working the refs, and 10 percent is ready to tear its hair out with the professional journalists’s imaginary solution: “he said, she said” reporting. (These, I think, are conservative estimates.) Put them together and half the country is angry at the press before it gets its boots on.

Like I said, America is a divided country. There’s a seductive pull to placing yourself in the middle between what you imagine to be “the extremes.”  That seems like the safest position, but is it really? The trust figures suggest the answer is: no, not really. Have you heard CNN’s slogan for its 2012 election coverage? “The only side we’re on is yours.” But it’s just that: a slogan. CNN has no idea how to make it real.

8. Too big to tell. In the comments, John Paton, the CEO of Digital First Media, second largest newspaper company in the U.S. (Disclosure: I’m a paid advisor to this company) speculates:

Society has profoundly changed in the last three decades.

The factors are many: economics; wealth; job security and empowerment. Technology empowers but real power to change one’s life is perhaps even further outside of most people’s grasp than before – i.e. Job expectations; education expectations; home ownership expectations; upward mobility, etc.

If there is a growing awareness of those disconnects, then perhaps society understands that the news media has failed them on the bigger issues and no amount of exposing corrupt politicians and thieving captains of industry will let the news media regain that trust.

According to this interpretation, stories that are “too big to tell” (not that they literally could not be told but they overwhelm journalism as it stands today…) are the ones that have really affected people’s lives. For example: “real power to change one’s life is perhaps even further outside of most people’s grasp than before.” Intuitively, the audience understands that journalists are never going to tell them “what’s going on” in the largest sense of that phrase. And this takes its toll on trust.

After Matter: Notes, Reactions & Links…

Aug. 16, 2012: Pew Research Center comes out with a new report: Further Decline in Credibility Ratings for Most News Organizations:

For the second time in a decade, the believability ratings for major news organizations have suffered broad-based declines. In the new survey, positive believability ratings have fallen significantly for nine of 13 news organizations tested. This follows a similar downturn in positive believability ratings that occurred between 2002 and 2004.

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein takes up my puzzle:

I think you should see #3 and #4 as mirror images: One is the argument the right has used to erode trust in the press. The other is the argument the left has used to erode trust in the press. Both, it should be said, have their roots in real events and real grievances. The rush to war really was an example of the media — including me, as a dumb blogger in college — getting worked. But both are also the result of organized campaigns to take those real events and real grievances and turn them into a durable distrust of the media that can be activated when convenient for the two parties.

That doesn’t mean Republicans or Democrats have stopped reading, or caring about, the news media. Indeed, the loss of trust in the press has, as I understand it, coincided with a rise in the actual consumption of news media. I think we should take that revealed consumer preference for more news and news-like goods at least as seriously as we should take these poll numbers. The parties certainly do. That’s why, rather than trying to persuade their folks to abandon the media, they have contented themselves with trying to persuade them to simply mistrust the media.

Responding to both me and Ezra Klein is political scientist Jonathan Ladd: Why Don’t People Trust the Media Anymore?

I see two structural trends coming from outside of journalism as the main drivers of media distrust. First, the political parties have become much more polarized in their policy positions. Second, because of technological changes such as the rise of cable and the internet, as well as regulatory changes such as the end of the fairness doctrine, the media industry has become much more diverse and fragmented.

He also includes this chart showing the long-term decline in trust for the press as against other institutions:

One thing I don’t understand in Ladd’s post is this part: “I tend to be skeptical of any explanation for broad change that hinges of human nature simply improving or degrading. I suspect that human nature tends to be constant. Instead, I look for structural explanations. (Thus, I disagree with Rosen’s explanations #2, 3, 5, 6, and 8.)”

Human nature? I don’t get it. I don’t see how these explanations derive from a claim that human nature changed after Watergate, which is indeed absurd and unconvincing.

Ladd responds: “What I was trying to say was that journalists haven’t simply developed a greater natural propensity to behave like ‘bad actors,’ or exhibit bias, or be out of touch with the public, or co-opted by elites, or to miss scandals (like the Jayson Blair scandal) for too long, or exhibit other behaviors that we as observers might fault them for.”

Part two of Ladd’s post: Why It Matters that People Distrust the Media. Indeed.

Craig Silverman author of Regret the Error, and a student of trust construction in journalism, replies to this post with: Connecting the dots: Why doesn’t the public trust the press anymore?

Journalism that acts as the voice of God, that doesn’t listen, that doesn’t admit failings, that often punishes others for showing vulnerability does not build connection with the public.

Poynter’s resident sage, Roy Peter Clark, organized a chat with me and Craig Silverman: What can writers do to build the public’s trust in the media? The main point I tried to make is that the means for generating trust must themselves evolve.

In the comments: Clay Shirky, John Paton, Marcy Wheeler, Jeff Jarvis, Tom Watson, John Robinson, Chris Anderson, Andrew Tyndall, Roy Peter Clark and a whole lot more. Best comment thread I’ve have ever had at PressThink. (Not joking.)

The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi takes on a similar subject, but his point seems to be that there’s nothing to see here, so move along: How biased are the media, really? Not much, he seems to say, so why do people tell pollsters the opposite? He then lists possible explanations, which resemble some of mine.

James Fallows in 1996: Why Americans Hate the Media.

√ Public Trust in Government: 1958-2010.

Christopher Lydon–journalist, intellectual, radio host, and Boston presence–interviewed me when I was in Cambridge about the declining faith in American institutions, including the press. Because he is so good at what he does, it is one of the best interviews I’ve done in many years, and very much on point for this post. It will cost you 35 minutes to listen to it.

National Journal: In Nothing We Trust: Americans are losing faith in the institutions that made this country great. Loss of confidence in our major institutions is typically a social science subject. Here is a journalistic treatment that is quite good.

Clay Shirky argues that what was called “trust” in the Cronkite era was really just scarcity. And now that’s over.

Gallup chart by Terry Heaton’s PoMo blog and Audience Research & Development LLC.

This is my keynote address to the 2nd UK Conference of Science Journalists, June 25, 2012 at The Royal Society, London.

I think every writer, every journalist, every scholar, should tell you where he’s coming from before he tells you what he knows. I am not a science journalist, or a science blogger, or a scientist who writes. But I am interested in your world, and I try to follow developments in it. My field of study is what I call “pressthink,” which is sort of like groupthink– but for people in journalism. Lately I have been fixated on the problems of the press as it tries to adapt to the digital world. So that’s what I do. But it’s not where I’m coming from.

Culturally, I’m a secular Jew. (From New York.) Demographically, a baby boomer. Socially, I’m an introvert who has learned to fake conviviality. Politically, a liberal democrat. Musically: lost. Intellectually, I am a pragmatist. Among professional philosophers, practitioners of what used to be called “moral science,” pragmatism is sometimes called the only homegrown American philosophy. William James and John Dewey are the heroes of the discipline, and two big ideas animate us. First: the test of a good idea is what you can do with it. A thinker should try to be useful. Second: pragmatists believe that our knowledge advances not when we have the best theory, or the best data, or the best lab, but when we have really good problems.

And that’s what I have for you today: a really juicy puzzle. It begins with a distinction that I have found useful. The distinction is between tame and wicked problems. Now given what’s happened to science writer Jonah Lehrer lately I should tell you that I’ve written about this issue before and since I said it about as well as I could say it then, I am going to say it in a similar way again… okay?

Here is a problem that anyone who has lived in New York City must wonder about: it’s impossible to get a cab at 5 pm. The cause is not a mystery: taxi drivers tend to change shifts around 4 to 5 pm. Too many cabs are headed to garages in Queens because when a taxi is operated by two drivers 24 hours a day, a fair division of shifts is to switch over at 5 o’clock. Now this is a problem for the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, it may even be a hard one to solve, but it is not a wicked problem. For one thing, it’s easy to describe, as I just showed you. That right there boots it from the category.

Wicked problems have these features: It is hard to say what the problem is, to define it clearly or to tell where it stops and starts. There is no “right” way to view the problem, no definitive formulation. There are many stakeholders, all with their own frames, which they tend to see as exclusively correct. Ask what the problem is and you will get a different answer from each. Someone can always say that the problem is just a symptom of another problem and that someone will not be wrong. The problem is inter-connected to a lot of other problems; pulling them apart is almost impossible. In a word: it’s a mess.

But it gets worse. Every wicked problem is unique, so in a sense there is no prior art and solving one won’t help you with the others. No one has “the right to be wrong,” meaning enough legitimacy and stakeholder support to try things that will almost certainly fail, at first. Instead failure is savaged, and the trier is deemed unsuitable for another try. The problem keeps changing on us. It is never definitely resolved. Instead, we just run out of patience, or time, or money, or political will. It’s not possible to understand the problem first, then solve it. Rather, attempts to solve it reveal further dimensions of the problem. (Which is the secret of success for people who are “good” at wicked problems.)

Know any problems like that? Of course you do. Climate change! What could be more inter-connected than it? How the hell do we define it? Is it the burning of fossil fuels? Is it modernization? Capitalism? Externalities? The whole system of states? Man’s false dominion over nature? Someone can always say that climate change is just a symptom of another problem– our entire way of life, maybe — and he or she would not be wrong. We’ve never solved anything like it before, so there’s no prior art. Stakeholders: everyone on the planet, every nation, every company. Super-wicked, as some have put it.

In the United States, almost everyone knows that our public schools don’t work. Almost no one admits that this too is a wicked problem.

Tame problems are not easy to solve, but they are easy to define, to fix in a proper frame. How to build a bridge over the Mississippi that won’t fall down, and determining what it will cost: we’ve tamed that one. The engineers apply the science and select the best design within the constraints the government has put forward. The politicians figure out how to pay for it and how to sell it. We can know in advance what kind of expertise will be needed.

Wicked problems aren’t like that. As the founders of the concept said in 1973, “You don’t understand the problem until you have a solution.” When I first moved to New York City in 1980, lowering the sky high crime rate was a wicked problem. Now we know that the same people who were evading the fare in the subways were committing more violent crimes; if you arrest them for these petty violations the bigger violations decrease. And the crime rate in New York City has fallen dramatically since 1980.

It’s not that simple, of course. Other factors are involved and there are unintended consequences. In New York these include a stop-and-frisk practice that may be unconstitutional because it is so weighted toward minorities. That’s the way wicked problems roll. Lots of times you never solve them. Each successful action reveals a further dimension of the problem. Which is frustrating. But less frustrating if we learn to distinguish between wicked problems and the other kind.

Remember: we’re all pragmatists here today. So instead of shooting holes in my description of wicked problems (which you certainly could do…) try asking yourself: what is useful about this distinction? What is the intellectual work–or as Williams James always said, the “cash value”–of the concept? I have a short answer and a longer one.

On April 15, 2010 Nick Clegg, David Cameron and Gordon Brown took the stage for a candidates debate. Imagine if the questioning had been divided into “current issues” and… “wicked problems.” Wouldn’t that feel fresh and different? More… grown-up?

That’s my short answer. Now for my longer answer. How to cover the wicked ones differently from the tame problems is my idea of a juicy puzzle in press practice. If we could solve it, our knowledge would be greatly advanced. So now I want to sketch for you what a wicked problems “beat” might look like.

Suppose we had such a beat. How would you do it? How might it work? I have ten descriptors to share with you. Ten ways of imagining how a wicked problem beat would operate.

1. It would be a network, not a person. My friend Dan Gillmor, the first newspaper journalist to have a blog, said something extremely important in 1999, when he was reporting on Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News. “My readers know more than I do.” So simple, and profound. Any beat where the important knowledge is widely distributed should be imagined from the beginning as a network.

The wicked problems beat would have to be a network because the people who know about coping with such problems are unevenly distributed around the world. Imagine a beat that lives on the Net and is managed by an individual journalist but “owned” by the thousands who contribute to it. Journalists from news organizations all over the world can tap into it and develop stories out of it, but the beat itself resides in the network. In the way I imagine this working, news organizations that are members of the beat might “refer” problems discovered on other beats to the wicked problems network and say… “look into this, will you?” The beat would in turn refer story ideas and investigations back to the member newsrooms.

2. The beat would be pattern-based. Meaning: all instances of the pattern, no matter where they are found, are fair game for the beat. Wicked problems turn up in business settings all the time, but this is not a business beat. Wicked problems originally emerged from urban planning and design. But this is not a public policy beat. You can find wicked problems in politics, education, criminal justice, economic development and of course the environment. So this is a beat that would cut across newsroom verticals, looking for places where people get stuck because they are treating a wicked problem as if it were tame.

3. A classic narrative stands at the heart of the beat. How many of you have heard of “agile development” in software? It’s an approach to doing big software projects that grew out of the recognition that many big software projects are in fact wicked problems, and that the existing approach–called the waterfall model–frequently ended in massive failure. In the prior model, the software team would survey the clients needs, develop a feature list for what the software had to do, prioritize that list, get a check off and a budget from the client, then determine the best design, build it, test it, de-bug it, and deploy it. The client would then say: this is not what we asked for! This sucks! And the developers would (try to) say back: what are you talking about? This is exactly what you asked for! We don’t suck, you suck!

Why does this happen? Because software clients are stupid and they don’t know what they want? Nope. It’s what I said earlier. “You don’t understand the problem until you have a solution.” We might call this the founding insight of the wicked problems school of thought. So a better way to go about these huge software projects is to listen to the clients and quickly prototype something that solves one little problem. Then show it to the client, knowing that it will probably reveal further aspects of the “big” problem the software has to solve. Then you do that again. And gradually you get there. (Of course, I am simplifying–perhaps over-simplifying–a rather contentious term.)

Jumping back and forth from a global understanding that is constantly in revision to local solutions that are constantly being tested: this is a better way to go. Better than: gather information, outline the options, analyze costs, pick the best option, hire the experts, and implement. Agile development is learned behavior for coping with wicked problems. Whenever something like that happens, the wicked problems beat springs into action. Because that’s a great story. It is in fact the classic story on this beat: getting stuck, and then getting unstuck.

4. The beat would be global because wicked problems are a global phenomenon. They are found everywhere. In fact, a good funder for the beat would be the World Bank. Come to think of it, I gave a talk to their communication officers a few years ago. I think I’ll suggest it.

5. The wicked problems beat can’t rely on the experts. Wicked problems are in a way a deep reflection on the limits of professional expertise. No matter how good our software designers are, they are still going to produce big projects that clients hate because the problems are not technical. They are matters of judgment. This is another reason the beat has to be a network, and it has to be global. It can’t rely on authorized knowers and institutional experts.

6. The “stars” of the beat would be people all over the world who seem to be good at wicked problems. And the firms that listen to those people. Meaning: those who show good judgment when all the options can never be on the table because (once again) we don’t understand the problem until we’ve solved it. The bread and butter of the beat is the profile of those who “get” that.

7. The beat would treat denial as a news story. I’m 56 years old. The older I get, the bigger denial looms as a wild card in human affairs. I see it everywhere today. A wicked problems beat would have to be especially well tuned to denial, which is the stage that precedes that classic moment when participants realize they have a wicked problem on their hands. Denial is a psychological category, so it is an inherently risky thing to report upon. After all, if I disagree with your description you can always say: Jay, you’re in denial.

But I think it can be done. And those of you who have followed the climate change story understand that it must be done. The starting point has been pointed out to us by Chris Mooney. The more educated and intelligent the denialist is, the more intractable the problem seems to be. People become expert in their own systems for ignoring reality. Systems become expert in concealing from their operators wicked problems. That is something we can learn to report on.

8. The wicked problems beat would have to be a learning machine. We know that reporters get smarter about a beat the longer they do it, but what if the beat itself got smarter? Wouldn’t that be cool? That’s how I envision the wicked problems beat. Over time, it gets smarter about locating the stories that help us cope with wicked problems. Not solve: cope.

In one of the articles I read for this talk, a Harvard Business Review writer was talking about companies that do wicked well. He said they “continuously scan the environment for weak signals rather than conduct periodic analysis of the business landscape.” A networked beat should do that. Over time, it should get better and better at picking up the faint signs of wickedness in problems that do not yield to expertise or that overwhelm their would-be solvers with complexity. Obviously the global financial system is rife with such. But what we need is an alert system that works before the crash. After all, the press is supposed to inform us, yes. But it is supposed to inform us in time to make a difference.

9. The beat would have a goal, a mission. And I think I can say what it is. Earlier, I said it is characteristic of wicked problems that key stakeholders define the problem differently. That plurality of frames is inevitable. But what’s not inevitable is the stakeholders’ mutual ignorance of each other’s incompatible starting points. There is no kumbaya moment. You never get everyone on the same page. Consensus? You must be kidding. In dealing with wicked problems these are vain hopes, signs of the stupid. What’s possible is a world where different stakeholders “get” that the world looks different to people who hold different stakes. In reporting on wicked problems, that’s the goal. That and learning from the work of people who do wicked well.

Which brings me to something I’ve wanted to say for a long time. Journalism belongs to the vernacular, or it has no place in the world. When reporters render things, they have to find a common language for them. That is why the great vice in journalistic writing is cliché. Cliché is the vernacular in its spent state. Savage clarity is the vernacular coming alive again. Rendering stakeholders intelligible to one another, and to the larger public, is journalism at its best. No one should become a journalist who cannot tolerate the paradox of being a specialist… in the vernacular.

10. The wicked problems beat implies a view from somewhere. I said at the beginning of this talk that every journalist, every writer should tell us where he’s coming from. So it is with networked beats. So it is with this beat. The wicked problems beat is not a View from Nowhere thing. It starts from the limits of professional expertise. It is a reflection on unmanageable complexity. It preaches humility to the authorized knowers. It mocks the one best answer and single issue people. It seeks to deliver us from denial.

I am coming in for landing. There has to be someone in this crowd today who is sitting there thinking: Hey, that’s nifty, this new beat you’re sketching for us, but realistically who’s going to pay for it? We can’t even cover the tame problems with the shrinking work force we have in most newsrooms. We can’t even cover science. Now you’re dumping on us this whole other job?

Well, I have to confess. I don’t have a solution for that. And you know why? Because how to fund and sustain a vigorous public service press is not just a really hard problem. It’s a wicked one! Of course it is. So we better get smart about such things. Before it’s too late.

Thank you very much.

No, they would not. This falls under: too big to tell.

The Boston Globe reports: Mitt Romney stayed at Bain 3 years longer than he stated. ”Firm’s 2002 filings identify him as CEO, though he said he left in 1999.”

Fallout. Which fits well into the controversy of the day template, that reusable campaign good.

Un-templated: Suppose a major party candidate for president believed we were in a “post-truth” era and actually campaigned that way. Would political reporters in the mainstream press figure it out and tell us?

I say no. They would not tell us. Not in any clear way.

Instead, they would do what the Globe did here: try to nail the candidate on specific misstatements that can be documented. Which is good and necessary and difficult and contentious and honorable. Keep going, Boston Globe! And don’t forget to credit others who have done similar work.

What template is there for reporting on a strategy that incorporates…

1.) Key lesson of the climate change debate: you can run a political campaign against verifiable facts, and thereby weaken those facts in the public’s mind.

2.) The Palin-ator: you can invent stuff and stick with it when it is shown to be false because culture war politics feeds off the noise and friction when fictional claims are fact-checked by the mainstream media.

3.) David Frum’s observation from within the Republican tent: “Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.”

4.) Old-fashioned secrecy, as in: don’t release information, don’t explain.

I think there’s evidence that the Romney forces have figured much of this out. And so even though we have a political press that believes itself to be a savvy judge of campaign strategy, here is one that will probably go unnamed and un-described because (…and this may be the cleverest part) a post-truth campaign for president falls into the category of too big to tell.

Meaning: feels too partisan for the officially unaligned. Exposes the press to criticism in too clear a fashion. Messes with the “both sides do it”/we’re impartial narrative that political journalists have mastered: and deeply believe in. Romney will be fact checked, his campaign will push back from time to time, the fact checkers will argue among themselves, and the post-truth premise will sneak into common practice without penalty or recognition, even though there is nothing covert about it.

UPDATE: Aug. 5, 2012: What matters for the savvy class is not what’s true. What matter is what works, as I explain in my new post: Everything that’s wrong with political journalism is one Washington Post item.

(Image by fimoculous. Creative commons license.)

So what is the job of a political journalist today? Is it to describe the reality of American politics, as a “straight” reporter would? Or is it to defend reality and its “base” in American politics… more like a fact checker would?

I was alerted to the find by Alec MacGillis of the New Republic. He was exasperated by this brief report in the Washington Post, which appeared at The Fix, the Post’s top political blog. If you don’t know it, The Fix is a reporting and analysis franchise built around the many talents of Chris Cillizza, a star reporter and key presence on its most important beat: national politics.

The Fix is a group blog now; the item in question carried the byline of political reporter Aaron Blake. It’s a 700-word analysis of a Mitt Romney ad that twisted some words of Obama’s into a claim that could be more easily attacked:

Context be damned: Obama’s ‘It worked’ quote should work for Republicans.

Context is dead. Long live context.

For the second time in two weeks, Mitt Romney’s campaign has an out-of-context quote it can use to bludgeon President Obama. First it was “You didn’t build that,” and now it’s two ill-fated words that Obama spoke at a fundraiser Monday: “It worked.”

As with “You didn’t build that,” the Romney campaign’s attacks on “It worked” will be criticized for being out-of-context, lowest-common-denominator politics. And as with “You didn’t build that,” “It worked” is going to … well … work.

The rest of the item runs in this vein: Scream all you want about “context” and accuracy; these ads are effective, and that’s what counts. Listen to a bit more:

Fact-checkers are great (especially our Glenn Kessler), but as long as either side has an argument to justify its attacks, the history of politics dictates that it’s all fair game.

Romney’s team is exploiting that fact — to the credit of its political acumen, if not its strict adherence to accuracy.

Some people don’t hear it, others do: the way the tone of the piece… don’t get me wrong, fact checkers are great, but… eats away at our confidence that this kind of journalism can ever be the truthelling kind. MacGillis of the New Republic heard it. “Ah yes,” he wrote. “If only there was someone whose job and calling it was to ferret out the truth of such things, to provide some context for voters. Let me think, there must be someone we can think of, a profession of some kind perhaps, sort of like a researcher but also a communicator…”

Now I ask you: What is the job of a political journalist today? Is it to describe the reality of American politics, as a “straight” reporter would? Or is it to defend reality and its “base” in American politics, more like a fact checker would? I know what you’re thinking: the press should do both! But this is exactly what’s missing in the Aaron Blake item. There is no tension in it between insisting on truth and describing what works. Truth has seemingly become irrelevant. And that alone is a reveal. MacGillis is among the amazed:

That’s part of our job, isn’t it, holding the candidates to some modicum of reality? Or we could simply sit by our screens and marvel at their “acumen.”

Here we have a dispute. But the dispute has yet to break into the open among journalists. I wish it would, because it would be fascinating to see who lines up where.

One camp, represented for the moment by Aaron Blake of The Fix, has drifted into a state of low grade nihilism in which complaining about truth, accuracy, fairness and missing context is beside the point because those very complaints have become another way of doing politics. Both sides pretend to get all worked up about it. Both sides rely on misleading claims when it’s convenient for them. Observing this, a smart reporter like Blake can’t fall for any of it. He stands between warring camps, reminding each side that they too are sinners. Here, “both sides” is a kind of magic phrase, putting partisans in their place and clearing the ground for the journalist to come in and settle matters. Thus:

The fact is that the Obama team’s hands aren’t quite clean when it comes to context, either, including its use of Romney’s “I’m not concerned about the very poor” and “I like being able to fire people” quotes.

In all of these cases, we’re dealing with a somewhat ambiguous quote.

From Blake’s point of view, the story that needs to be told is not about the granularity of deception, the misuse of words to make them mean what they did not mean when spoken, or the tricky matter of which side is relying to a greater degree on truth-busting, context-shredding claims. The real story lies in the game of it all: the daily routine of scoring points, landing blows, seizing on any little advantage and making it work for your side. “Acumen,” as he put it. There is a worldview on display here, but to my knowledge it has never been articulated or defended by a journalist who holds it.

“First, do no harm” is supposed to be bedrock for the medical profession. First, show you’re savvy. That’s how I would sum up The Fix’s worldview. But it’s not just The Fix or Aaron Blake. This is the first commandment for a whole class of reporters and interpreters who keep the politics beat humming. Mark Halperin of Time magazine is at the head of that class, along with Chuck Todd of NBC and Cillizza of the Post. The Politico has the first newsroom that is built entirely on the savvy worldview. I have written about it many times:

Savviness! Deep down, that’s what reporters want to believe in and actually do believe in— their own savviness and the savviness of certain others (including operators like Karl Rove.) In politics, they believe, it’s better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere or humane.

Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.) Savviness—that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, “with it,” and unsentimental in all things political—is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it.

Praising “political acumen” while putting questions of accuracy and context to one side– this is the essence of the savvy outlook.

Fight for what is true. That is how I would put the alternative to “first, show you’re savvy.” From this point of view, it is a regrettable loss for the polity, and for political journalism–and for the voters, the public–when dubious claims gain traction and quotes pulled from their context appear to “work.” What the press can do to prevent this is try to raise the costs of making false or misleading claims, which is the whole point of fact-checking.

Recognizing that there are no angels in competitive politics, recognizing also that our choices are typically binary, journalists can point out to voters (or at least the portion of voters who are users of political journalism) which candidate is stretching the truth more often or more strenuously. If it’s fair game (Blake’s term) to assess which candidate is connecting more effectively with voters or following a shrewder strategy, then it is equally fair to judge who’s being more deceptive.

But the savvy won’t do that. Instead they do this: “Obama team’s hands aren’t quite clean when it comes to context, either…” Which is another reason Blake’s item illustrates everything that’s wrong with political journalism today. Again: There are no angels in politics. We know that. Both sides mislead. But we still need to know who’s misleading us more because our choices are binary. If political reporters can’t tell us that, but they can tell us things like “the history of politics dictates that it’s all fair game…” then why do we need them?

It probably took an hour or so for Blake to draft his post. But 25 years of drift went into it. I could be wrong, but I think a growing number of Blake’s colleagues in journalism are losing patience with the kind of analysis on view in his rancid item. They are not for the most part political reporters, for whom the savvy is everything. They are journalists from other beats and other persuasions. And they’ve had it with the “who cares if it’s true? it works” attitude.

After I talked on Twitter about the Blake item, Nick Fox, an editor in the opinion section of the nytimes.com, said he could not recall an instance of more cynical reporting. Michael Powell, a columnist in the metro section of the Times, described the Blake post thusly: “In which reporter locates his brain’s off switch…” Powell’s comment was in turn picked up by ProPublica’s Jesse Eisinger.

These are small clues that a split is beginning to develop within the journalism profession. The savvy is still in charge. It is the worldview of choice in pro journalism; in the political reporting wing it wins maybe 95 to 5. But it has a potentially fatal weakness built in: it brackets questions of truth, suggesting that they have become either quaint (meaning: of interest only to the unsavvy) or irrelevant in making distinctions (because both sides do it.) The more open this attitude becomes among political reporters–and this is what distinguished Blake’s post, its baldness–the more repulsive it feels to their colleagues.

Though some might like to think so, “first, show you’re savvy” is not compatible with “fight for what is true.” It’s time we saw journalists line up behind these claims so we know who’s who.

After Matter: Notes, Reactions & Links…

The Blake Item: a debate in five links. When confronted with misleading claims that work, should journalists accept and report that, or fact check and fight back? (Supply your own framing; that’s mine.)

1.) Begin with Aaron Blake’s piece at the Washington Post’s blog, The Fix, Context be damned: Obama’s ‘It worked’ quote should work for Republicans.

This provoked 2.) “It’s All Fair Game” by Alex MacGillis in The New Republic. He wrote in exasperation about the Blake Item.

Which led to my contribution at PressThink 3.) Everything That’s Wrong with Political Journalism in One Washington Post Item.

and then to 4.) Fix-ing Aaron Blake by David S.Bernstein of the Boston Phoenix. He was not impressed with my case.

Then 5.) The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf: Should the Press Shame Presidential Candidates for Lying? digs in further on the Blake post and why it bothers some people. A lot.

Bonus link: CJR, Another factchecking fiasco. Journalistic failure in coverage of Harry Reid and his mysterious source. Also about “confronted with misleading claims, what do journalists do?”

If there is more, I will add it.

Obama as press critic: It was amusing for me to read that President Obama’s critique of the press corps resembles my own in that he’s disgusted with “false balance” and “he said, she said” journalism. But far more significant is this quote in the same article from Paul Steiger:

“I think sometimes we in the media — particularly under the crunch of deadlines — don’t have time to work through all the issues of discerning what is fact,” said Paul E. Steiger, chief executive of ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative news organization, and a former Wall Street Journal managing editor, “and so we say ‘he said, she said.’ ”

Here is the shift to watch for. From… our job is not to take sides, and that upsets partisans who of course think they’re right, which had been the standard reply, to… we fall back on “he said, she said” when we don’t have time to do a better job. If a mainstream heavyweight like Steiger is opting for the latter, that could be a sign that professional opinion is starting to shift against the church of the savvy and its ways.

The Economist comments on the Obama’s critique of the press: The Balance Trap.

A reaction to all this at US News by opinion editor Robert Schlesinger.

The Romney campaign’s gambit plays on two things: One is the instinct on the part of the press to treat such disputes as he-said-he-said in the name of objectivity (hence much coverage of the welfare ad as being Team Romney charge followed by Team Obama retort with little discussion of the facts).

But underlying the cynical belief that they can game the press is an even more contemptuous and condescending belief in the basic laziness and stupidity of the American people.

If Mitt Romney were running a “post-truth” campaign, would the political press report it? No, they would not. This falls under: too big to tell.

How interesting: Aaron Blake comes back at it with this passage at The Fix:

We’ve argued recently on this blog that out-of-context ads tend to work, provided there is a modicum of believable justification and the media don’t call them out. It may not be right or just, but most keen observers recognize that fact.

Actually that part about “…provided that the media don’t call them out” was not in the original, which is part of what led to the criticism Blake got.

Truth vigilantes? That was the question earlier at PressThink: “Somewhere along the way, telling truth from falsehood was surpassed by other priorities to which the press felt a stronger duty. Arthur Brisbane, public editor of the New York Times, was unaware of this history when he asked users of the Times whether reporters should call out false statements.”

So what do we do about that divide? And what if the problem isn’t evenly distributed across the landscape or within a party, but pools and concentrates in certain spots? Do journalists go to those (malignant) spots and fight?

The lines are usually attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “You’re entitled to your own opinions. You’re not entitled to your own facts.”

But suppose there arose on the political scene a practical caucus for the opposite view. We are entitled to our own facts, and we will show you what we think of your attempt to “check” us. If that happened, would the press know what to do?

We hear quite a bit about the partisan divide in Washington and around the country. We hear a lot less about the divide around Moynihan’s famous lines. Those who think you’re not entitled to your own facts vs. those who dispute the statement. Or feel unbound from it. Or they simply run right over it trying to win today’s battle or deliver today’s news.

“Hey, you’re not entitled to your own facts…” vs: That’s your opinion. Kiss my ad. Read my poll.

Evidence that others at least know what I’m talking about came from David S. Bernstein of the Boston Phoenix (an occasional critic of mine) who recently sent this plea out over Twitter:

Dear media critics: OK, entire news media called Romney’s welfare attack a lie. Campaign still pushing it. Now what?

I don’t know the answer. I do know that it’s troubling to other journalists sifting through the 2012 campaign. Two weeks ago a bureau chief wrote to me for comment on a story he was doing about the same development. My reply:

If we start back in the 1990s and read forward to the current campaign, we see distinct phases of innovation as political journalists react to misleading ads: first, the ad watch phase in the 90s; there was some mention of misleading elements, but the final tally was about effectiveness, or what I call “savvy.” The limitations of the ad watch led to direct fact-checking by the press, where actual grades are handed out. The emphasis is on judging truth and falsehood, not assessing effectiveness. So now we’re in a new phase: fact checking alone is not enough. The campaigns seem able to override it, which does not mean they override it equally or with the same vengeance. So what’s the next innovation?

He wrote back: right, well what is the next innovation? Again: I don’t know. (Hit the comment button if you do know.)

Time magazine’s Michael Scherer, a political reporter, gives his answer in his August 10th post, Why Deceit Is Everywhere in the 2012 Campaign. Scherer complained on Twitter that I did not give the argument a fair summary, so I want to make sure I do that here.

Scherer is interested in why deceptive ads and misleading claims don’t receive more censure from the public and from allies of the deceivers. That would change the dynamic, far more than press coverage could. So why doesn’t it happen? Scherer’s answer is that we’re over-reliant on outrage as a “mode” of public action:

The elemental move in modern politics always looks like this: The other side is not playing by the rules. An injustice has occurred. Be outraged.

But who draws the lines when strategists for both parties believe there is little cost to peddling deliberate, carefully crafted falsehoods? The vast majority of the American voting public long ago demonstrated their willingness to simultaneously forgive fibs told by their own team and express umbrage at the deception offered by the other team.

“All of this creates a huge problem for the nonpartisan, less ideological core of the fourth estate,” Scherer writes about himself and his peers. “We journalists, after all, are supposed to be champions of facts, accuracy and truth. But audiences have left nonpartisan outlets for the comfort of organizations, like Fox News and the New York Times editorial page, that focus on one side of the outrage story.”

The audience for political news is fragmented, segmented, at times even regimented to think one way. And that fact check you’re calling for isn’t going to reach the people you think need it. So wake up. Scherer goes on:

Turn on Fox to find out the latest Democratic outrage. Turn to the New York Times editorial page for the latest Republican outrage. Neither outlet need confuse its audience by cross-pollinating its outrage with context. Both sides reinforce the divide, and, in preaching to the choir and building the team spirit and the sense of victimization, they both clear the way for more deception.

He thinks it folly to rage at political journalists or The Media for this state of affairs. The answer lies within. Within political coalitions. Outrage at the other guy/”we can have our own facts…” is a perverse pattern. But is it inevitable? Infuential supporters, active citizens, home team bloggers: all have to get mad at their own side when deception or rank bullshit is tried. Scherer says to the close readers of political coverage who assail him in the comment threads at Swampland, and to press bloggers in a lather about “false balance…” Where has all this activity in the key of outrage gotten you? Maybe you should try something else. The “next innovation” he has in mind:

… if we remove the outrage, or at least minimize it, then maybe we can focus not just on the deceptions of the guy we don’t like but also on the deception of the guy we like. For in the end, there is only one thing that will force these candidates, their campaigns and supporters to hue a straighter line: Their own constituencies must object.

That’s the real fact check, Scherer says. Politicians will feel less entitled to their own facts when voters and fans make them pay a price. Go ahead and rage at the press when it fails to call out the other guy. See how far that gets you.

Alec MacGillis of The New Republic has a simpler answer to, “Entire news media called Romney’s welfare attack a lie. Campaign still pushing it. Now what?”

Using whatever platform you have, speak up about it. If they keep using it, you keep speaking! His plea: “for the political press to do its job when it comes to the basic task of calling out blatant, repeated dishonesty on the campaign trail.”

Part of the problem is the lack of a handy index that shows which “we are sooo entitled to our own facts…” ads are drawing the most investment from campaigns and candidates. Money, TV time, visibility can flow toward the blatant misstatement that’s been fact checked and labeled toxic, or away from. When they move toward it that’s a story. Reporting that story is not like reporting: they all lie. (But hey, it works, right?)

“There is no question that what Romney is saying about Obama ‘taking the work requirement out of welfare’ is knowingly false,” MacGillis wrote. The fact checks already happened. But most of the political press still treats it as a controversy most of the time. Which side of the divide are they on? MacGillis said he was surprised when “of all people, a former Republican congressman used his morning talk show to call out Mitt Romney. Take it away, Joe Scarborough:”

“I’ve been looking for a week-and-a-half to try to figure out the basis of this welfare reform ad, I’ve scoured the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, I’ve scoured…. the ad’s completely false. It’s just completely false.

And I’m pretty stunned.”

So that’s what MacGillis recommends. Journalists should be speak confidently into the microphone and declare things “completely false” when their own judgment tells them so. That isn’t a moment you can outsource to fact-checkers. It’s a “which side are you on?” thing: The people who think “you’re not entitled to your own facts,” or those who say: Wait a minute, maybe you are?

Joe Scarborough “did the basic job of a journalist,” MacGillis writes. “He looked into whether someone was telling the truth, found that they weren’t, and said so, clearly. So, to the rest of the pack, I ask: what’s stopping you?”

One thing that’s stopping them: the production of innocence.

Entire news media called Romney’s welfare attack a lie. Campaign still pushing it. Now what?

David Bernstein, that DC bureau chief who wrote to me, Michael Scherer, Alex MacGillis: all are realizing that mainstream political journalism offers no clear instructions to its people about what to do in this situation. The only “pack” response available is to do nothing. But nothing isn’t working. So which side are you on? becomes unavoidable for people who thought there would never come a day when they had to choose sides.

After Matter: Notes, Reactions & Links… Aug. 28-31

September 16: Margaret Sullivan, the new public editor at the New York Times writes a landmark column, and it cites this post: He Said, She Said, and the Truth. “The more news organizations can state established truths and stand by them, the better off the readership — and the democracy — will be,” she writes. But some of the Times editors have a very different view.

Good background: David Corn, How to Beat the Fact-Checkers. Kind of a short history of the fact-checking movement in the press.

Readers: I revised it and turned this section into a new, more updated post. See #presspushback (PressThink, Aug. 31.)

Revolt of the savvy: some in the press push back against continued use of a false claim

The anger in Ron Fournier’s Aug. 29th explainer for National Journal: Why (and How) Romney is Playing the Race Card is to me a high point amid the literature, journalism and noise of campaign 2012.

Why ignore fact-checkers? First, internal GOP polling and focus groups offer convincing evidence that the welfare ad is hurting Obama. Second, the welfare issue, generally speaking, triggers anger in white blue-collar voters that is easily directed toward Democrats. This information comes from senior GOP strategists who have worked both for President Bush and Romney. They spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.

… Before explaining why these tactics work (and why Romney’s team knows, or should know, they are playing the race card), let’s quickly deal with this fact: The ad is wrong. As countless impartial fact-checkers have noted, the Obama administration memo cited by the Romney team actually gives states flexibility to find better ways of getting welfare recipients into jobs.

In Fournier’s column I saw the first signs: a possible revolt of the savvy, a case with a long build-up, triggered by an ideological and ongoing event: post-fact checked use of the “Obama says no more work for welfare” claim. Which is a heavily fact-checked claim. We now have different authors finding multiple ways to report on the continued pursuit of a critically important piece of false information, turning that falsehood into a stream of news.

Further signs of a push back. On the convention floor, Andrea Mitchell asked Rick Santorum about the “no more work requirement” fact check right after his speech. (Video.) “Whatup with that?” she said. (Direct quote.)

James Fallows has other sightings: news people, including NPR’s Morning Edition, openly struggling with the “we have our own facts” people. Media Evolution for the ‘Post-Truth’ Age.

From Greg Sargent, a Washington Post blogger. A summary of where things stood in the revolt of the savvy on Aug. 29, after Romney tries to overawe fact checking. His view: Might be a spasm. Might be a trend. Might get old fast and expire.

I track these things. This headline is not usually seen in a news story reporting on a speech: Rick Santorum repeats inaccurate welfare attack on Obama. (Los Angeles Times.)

Three bells went off for this post (“you have a news alert”) when Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith reported from a breakfast briefing at the Republican convention in Tampa the clarifying remarks of Mitt Romney’s pollster, Neil Newhouse: “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”

Exactly! They’re not. Which is like saying to political journalists: your move, fellas. Ben Smith’s fuller report…

The welfare ad has been the center of intense dispute, with Democrats accusing Romney of unearthing old racial ghosts and Romney pointing out that the Obama Administration has offered states waivers that could, in fact, lighten work requirements in welfare, a central issue in Bill Clinton’s 1996 revamping of public assistance.

The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” awarded Romney’s ad “four Pinocchios,” a measure Romney pollster Neil Newhouse dismissed.

“Fact checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs, and we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers,” he said. The fact-checkers — whose institutional rise has been a feature of the cycle — have “jumped the shark,” he added after the panel.

There it is. The conflict I just wrote about: “You’re not entitled to your own facts” vs. That’s your opinion!

What the mainstream press has said back to the Romney ad amount to “you are not entitled to your own facts.” The ad has been called false or very misleading; and it’s not just the fact checkres but also the day-to-day narrators saying it…

That’s Your Opinion! is what the Romney campaign said back. (“Fact checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs, and we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by–”)

Notice also that if the Romney campaign wanted to push back hard on the welfare ad ruling, but leave in there a modicum of respect for the fact checking enterprise, it could have said:

We think fact checking is an important but fallible part of the campaign dialogue; we also reserve our right to contest in absolute terms some of the rulings. They are, after all, acts of judgment. And this is one of those judgments we completely reject and disagree with.

But that is not where the Republican party is right now. It has set up in a more fearsome place, closer to the heart of the culture war. Professional journalists, whose self-image starts with: “We’re a check on…” have to decide what to do about the truck that just ran their checkpoint, carrying the brain trust of the Romney campaign, who are inside laughing at how easy it all was.

Meanwhile, the editors of the National Review, the premier conservative journal in the country, write: “The website PolitiFact is going to be truth-squadding the Republican convention speakers this week, delivering verdicts on which claims are ‘mostly true’ and which deserve a ‘pants on fire’ rating. Our advice: Pay no attention to those ratings. PolitiFact can’t be trusted to get the story right.”

Human Events, a another conservative magazine, sees Politfact as “left wing.” Evidence: it’s calling out Republicans way more. Think about that: If asymmetry counts as evidence for media bias, an asymmetrical situation can never be portrayed by the media in an unbiased way… by definition! Human Events also says that when you look at Politicfact’s “proof” it is laughably missing. And this is from a Pulitzer Prize winning outfit!

Now comes James Bennet in the Atlantic on the “new assertiveness” in calling out lies: “Instead of being able to stand above the fray as some sort of neutral arbiter of the truth, the press may be finding that it is winding up on one side of a new kind of he-said-she-said argument.”

Precisely. Can our press handle it?

Signs of a push-back, cont. At the close of the Republican convention (Aug. 31) the New York Times reports: Facts Take a Beating in Acceptance Speeches. In other words, that was part of the news. There’s more: two bells.

The two speeches — peppered with statements that were incorrect or incomplete — seemed to signal the arrival of a new kind of presidential campaign, one in which concerns about fact-checking have been largely set aside.

This post has a name for the “new kind of presidential campaign” the Times mentioned. Call it the “We are entitled to our own facts” style in campaigning. The press should be on the lookout for it, wherever it appears. By the way, Mitt Romney said this on August 9:

“You know, in the past, when people pointed out that something was inaccurate, why, campaigns pulled the ad. They were embarrassed. Today, they just blast ahead. You know, the various fact checkers look at some of these charges in the Obama ads and they say that they’re wrong, and inaccurate, and yet he just keeps on running them.”

Hungry for your “both sides do it” moment? It has arrived.

If you’re wondering: don’t I also recognize that the Obama forces have used deceptive, depraved and untrue claims in their attempt to stain Romney before his own message gets through? Yes. I do. These stand out: Romney didn’t say he likes firing people in the way some Democrats and TV personalities have suggested, so that counts as a kind of extended lie. The Priorities USA ad that suggested (without quite saying it) that Bain Capital was somehow responsible for the death of a steelworker’s wife: that goes in the depraved category, I think. When the White House claimed it knew nothing about the case that was clearly untrue– pathetic, really. The refusal to condemn the ad was a black mark, as well. Obama ads calling Romney “outsourcer in chief” were over the top and relied on false or overblown claims.

In my view these are serious transgressions, full stop. And in my view they do not compare to the use of falsehood and deceptive claims in the Romney 2012 campaign. Nor is there anything coming from the Obama machine that is like the open defiance of fact-checking we have seen from Romney and his team. I don’t think it’s a character issue but a kind of post-truth strategy in electioneering, which is itself a response to huge tensions within the Republican Party. I see the situation as highly asymmetrical, with just enough on both sides to make “both sides do it” sound plausible.

I also recognize, because I read my incoming, that this conclusion is bitterly contested by other critics looking at the same facts and by opponents of Obama. Or it just sounds ridiculous to them, a substitution of political preferences for fair-minded analysis. That response, which flows to me constantly over social media, is part of the reality of culture war politics, media bias division.

“Professional journalists, whose self-image starts with: ‘We’re a check on…’ had to decide what to do about the truck that just ran their checkpoint, carrying the brain trust of the Romney campaign, laughing at how easy it all was.”

This week, one of the presidential campaigns said: “We defy the fact checkers. Your move, journalists.” The political press reacted with some signs of a push back. These are my notes and key links from that event, Aug. 26 to 31, the week of the Republican convention.

1. “You’re entitled to your own opinion. You’re not entitled to your own facts.” On Sunday I posted at PressThink about the coming conflict between the fact-checking press and the forces in politics who seem ready to override it:

Suppose there arose on the political scene a practical caucus for the opposite view. We are entitled to our own facts, and we will show you what we think of your attempt to “check” us. If that happened, would the press know what to do?

This week, it kind of happened.

2. “You have a news alert.” On Aug. 28 Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith reported from a breakfast briefing at the Republican convention in Tampa the clarifying remarks of Mitt Romney’s pollster, Neil Newhouse: “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”

Exactly! They’re not. Which is like saying to political journalists: your move, fellas. Smith’s fuller report:

The welfare ad has been the center of intense dispute, with Democrats accusing Romney of unearthing old racial ghosts and Romney pointing out that the Obama Administration has offered states waivers that could, in fact, lighten work requirements in welfare, a central issue in Bill Clinton’s 1996 revamping of public assistance.

The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” awarded Romney’s ad “four Pinocchios,” a measure Romney pollster Neil Newhouse dismissed.

“Fact checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs, and we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers,” he said. The fact-checkers — whose institutional rise has been a feature of the cycle — have “jumped the shark,” he added after the panel.

There it is. The conflict I wrote about on Sunday.

“You are not entitled to your own facts” is what the mainstream press had already said about the Romney ad, which claimed that Obama wanted to eliminate work requirements from welfare. (Sample.) The claim had consistently been called false or very misleading; and it wasn’t just the fact-checkers but also the regular narrators of news saying it. That’s unusual.

That’s Your Opinion! is what the Romney campaign said back. (“Fact checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs..”)

Notice that if the campaign had wanted to push back hard on the welfare ad ruling, but leave in a modicum of respect for the fact checking enterprise, it could have said:

We think fact checking is an important but fallible part of the campaign dialogue; we also reserve our right to contest in absolute terms some of the rulings. They are, after all, acts of judgment. And this is one of those judgments we completely reject and disagree with. Here’s why…

But that is not where the Republican party is right now. It has set up camp in a more fearsome place, closer to the heart of the culture war. By investing more in the welfare ad after the nearly unanimous fact checking verdict of the mainstream press, and by sounding a deliberate note of defiance about it at the convention (we’re not going to be dictated to by fact checkers…) the Romney campaign had reached its Gary Hart “follow me around” moment with the 2012 campaign press. Go ahead: check our facts!

Professional journalists, whose self-image starts with: “We’re a check on…” then had to decide what to do about the truck that just ran their checkpoint, carrying the brain trust of the Romney campaign, laughing at how easy it all was.

3. Revolt of the savvy: first signs. It’s impossible to miss the anger in Ron Fournier’s Aug. 29th explainer for National Journal: Why (and How) Romney is Playing the Race Card. His piece is a high point amid the literature, journalism and noise of campaign 2012. It was reported from Macomb County, “a racially charged suburb long identified with so-called Reagan Democrats.”

Ron Fournier is a consensus figure in the press, a former Washington Bureau chief for the AP who had once been approached for a job with John McCain’s presidential campaign. He describes the strategy of “we have our own facts.”

Why ignore fact-checkers? First, internal GOP polling and focus groups offer convincing evidence that the welfare ad is hurting Obama. Second, the welfare issue, generally speaking, triggers anger in white blue-collar voters that is easily directed toward Democrats. This information comes from senior GOP strategists who have worked both for President Bush and Romney. They spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.

He makes a swift call on how false the no-more-work-for-welfare ad is:

Before explaining why these tactics work (and why Romney’s team knows, or should know, they are playing the race card), let’s quickly deal with this fact: The ad is wrong. As countless impartial fact-checkers have noted, the Obama administration memo cited by the Romney team actually gives states flexibility to find better ways of getting welfare recipients into jobs.

In Fournier’s column I saw some signs: a possible revolt of the savvy, triggered by an ideological event: The post-fact checked use of the “Obama says no more work for welfare” claim, a critically important piece of false information. Other signs:

* On the convention floor, Andrea Mitchell asks Rick Santorum about the “no more work requirement” fact check right after his speech. (Watch the Video.) “Whatup with that?” she says. (Direct quote.)

* James Fallows has sightings: news people, including NPR’s Morning Edition, openly struggling with the “we have our own facts” people. Media Evolution for the ‘Post-Truth’ Age.

* From Greg Sargent, a Washington Post blogger who is also on the story. A summary of where things stood in the revolt of the savvy on Aug. 29, after the Romney forces try to overawe fact checking. His view: Might be a spasm. Might be a trend. Might get old fast and expire.

* I track these things. This headline is not usually seen in a news story reporting on a speech: Rick Santorum repeats inaccurate welfare attack on Obama. (Los Angeles Times.) That’s taking a side on whether it’s kosher to keep making the attack. “If you’re confident about putting it in print, you should be confident enough to put it in the lede, and if you’re confident enough to put it in the lede, you should be confident enough to put it in the headline,” says bureau chief David Lauter, who wrote the story.

* James Bennet in the Atlantic commented on this “new assertiveness” in calling out lies: “Instead of being able to stand above the fray as some sort of neutral arbiter of the truth, the press may be finding that it is winding up on one side of a new kind of he-said-she-said argument.”

Which is precisely what happened this week. Can our press handle it?

4. “Pay no attention to those ratings!” On Aug. 28, the editors of the National Review, premier conservative journal in the country, sent some advice to their readers: “The website PolitiFact is going to be truth-squadding the Republican convention speakers this week, delivering verdicts on which claims are ‘mostly true’ and which deserve a ‘pants on fire’ rating. Our advice: Pay no attention to those ratings. PolitiFact can’t be trusted to get the story right.”

Timely reminder. For on the same day Politifact said: “Rick Santorum repeats Romney claim that Obama is ending work requirement in welfare,” which it called Pants on Fire false, the worst rating it has.

Two days later, Human Events, a another conservative magazine, described Politfact as “left wing.” Initial evidence: it’s calling out Republicans way more: 9 to 1.

Think: If asymmetry counts as evidence for media bias, an asymmetrical situation can never be portrayed by the media in an unbiased way… by definition! Of course, Human Events also says that when you look at Politifact’s “proof” it is laughably missing. They got nothing! And this is from a Pulitzer Prize winning shop! Nothing. So don’t listen to them… At all. Ever.

5. Let’s recap.

Press forces: Sorry, you’re not entitled to your own facts.

Romney forces: Look, we’re not going to be moved off winning arguments by your flimsy attempt to “check” us.

Conservative opinion magazines: Politifact? That’s been discredited.

Conservative bloggers: Liberal, biased journalists don’t improve their arguments by re-titling themselves “fact checker.”

Press forces (well, some of them): Seriously, folks, these people are not entitled to their own facts.

6. Day five of the little push back that did. At the close of the Republican convention (Aug. 31) the New York Times reports: Facts Take a Beating in Acceptance Speeches. Notice: This beating the facts took was reported as regular news.

The two speeches — peppered with statements that were incorrect or incomplete — seemed to signal the arrival of a new kind of presidential campaign, one in which concerns about fact-checking have been largely set aside.

Correct! And that is a campaign moment. The press should be on the lookout for it, within any wing or side of the American political house. Censure is allowed in the news columns and headlines and television reports, the whole stream, not just the official fact check item itself. Push back is public service.

Beware “the misguided conclusion that factchecking is a failure if it does not eliminate deception” and keep the pressure on! So says political scientist Brendan Nyhan in Columbia Journalism Review. His point: Push back has invisible victories, along with very public defeats. But Ben Smith of Buzzfeed thinks the fact-checking surge is a little silly. He’s worried about “the conflation of the new pseudo-science of fact-checks and policy differences.”

7. The revelation. I have never seen any Washington journalist come forward with a conclusion like this. Ezra Klein of the Washington Post on Thursday of convention:

Quite simply, the Romney campaign isn’t adhering to the minimum standards required for a real policy conversation. Even if you bend over backward to be generous to them… you often find yourself forced into the same conclusion: This doesn’t add up, this doesn’t have enough details to be evaluated, or this isn’t true.

I don’t like that conclusion. It doesn’t look “fair” when you say that. We’ve been conditioned to want to give both sides relatively equal praise and blame, and the fact of the matter is, I would like to give both sides relatively equal praise and blame. I’d personally feel better if our coverage didn’t look so lopsided. But first the campaigns have to be relatively equal. So far in this campaign, you can look fair, or you can be fair, but you can’t be both.

It’s difficult for me to explain to you how much energy in political journalism is devoted to avoiding Ezra Klein’s verdict.

8. Hungry for your “both sides do it” moment? It has arrived. I bet you’re itching to know: Don’t I also recognize that the Obama forces have used deceptive, depraved and untrue claims in their attempt to stain Romney before his message gets through? Yes. I do.

These stand out for me: Romney didn’t say he likes firing people in the way some Democrats and TV personalities have suggested, so that counts as a kind of extended lie. The Priorities USA ad that suggested (without quite saying it) that Bain Capital was somehow responsible for the death of a steelworker’s wife: that goes in the depraved category, I think.

When the White House claimed it knew nothing about the case that was clearly untrue– pathetic, really. The refusal to condemn the ad was a black mark, as well. Obama ads calling Romney “outsourcer in chief” were over the top and relied on false or overblown claims. An Obama ad about Romney’s position on abortion made false statements in order to position him as more extreme. That was stupid, unnecessary and wrong.

These are serious. In my view they do not compare to the use of falsehood and deceptive claims in the Romney 2012 campaign on a “falsehood x broadcast distribution x centrality to the campaign” index. Nor is there anything coming from the Obama machine that is like the open defiance of fact-checking that Romney and his team showed in their handling this week.

A crude name for the larger play is the post-truth strategy in electioneering, born of tensions like these within the Republican Party. I see the situation as highly asymmetrical, with just enough on both sides to make “both sides do it” sound plausible.

I also recognize, because I read my incoming, that this conclusion is bitterly contested by other critics looking at the same facts and by opponents of Obama. Or (more likely) it just sounds ridiculous to them, a substitution of political preferences for fair-minded analysis. That response, which flows constantly to me over social media, is part of the reality of culture war politics in the media bias division.

I stick by my report. The press showed some push back when the Romney for president project said it would defy the fact-checking press. That was a valid thing to do. The continuing status of #presspushback is now a story in the 2012 campaign.

After Matter: Notes, Reactions & Links

This is one in a series of posts about the post-truth style in presidential campaigning and the fact checking efforts of the American press. In order they are:

July 12: If Mitt Romney were running a “post-truth” campaign, would the political press report it? No, they would not. This falls under: too big to tell.

August 5: Everything That’s Wrong with Political Journalism in One Washington Post Item. So what is the job of a political journalist today? Is it to describe the reality of American politics, as a “straight” reporter would? Or is it to defend reality and its “base” in American politics… more like a fact checker would?

August 24: “You’re not entitled to your own facts” vs. That’s your opinion. Kiss my ad. So what do we do about that divide? And what if the problem isn’t evenly distributed across the landscape or within a party, but pools and concentrates in certain spots? Do journalists go to those (malignant) spots and fight?

August 31: #presspushback. “Professional journalists, whose self-image starts with: ‘We’re a check on…’ had to decide what to do about the truck that just ran their checkpoint, carrying the brain trust of the Romney campaign, laughing at how easy it all was.”

September 18: The clash of absolutes and the on-air fact check. “Soledad O’Brien makes political television slightly realer-er when she comes ready to fight on air for a documented fact.”

The savvy hit back. I expect to see more of this in the coming days. First it was Ben Smith, writing about “the new pseudo-science of fact-checks.” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo called that an act of positioning more than analysis. I would agree. The “position” desired is savvy analyst of what works. Getting all jacked up about what’s true or false just gets in the way.

Now comes Reuters press critic Jack Shafer, who insists he supports fact-checking while underlining how futile (his word) that activity is because politicians always lie. That’s how the game is played, says Jack. And if there’s one thing the savvy know (better) it’s the game:

As much as I applaud the fact-checker profession — it’s vital for politicians to know that we know that they know they’re lying — the enterprise is a mug’s game. Of course politicians and their campaigns lie. Of course they continue to lie even when called out. If you think otherwise, you’re looking for truth in all the wrong places.

Shafer objected on Twitter when I said he sees the recent fact-checking surge as “silly.” (Full exchange.) I’m not sure, but I think his position is this: He thinks fact-checking is great and there should be more of it, but it’s an exercise in futility because politics ain’t beanbag. It’s always been about deception and always will be. Because deception works. If voters wanted truth there would be truth but they don’t so there isn’t. Plus, politicians can just incorporate the fact checks they like into their next manipulative appeal. So knock yourself out, fact checkers! Just don’t expect any return on your investment.

Read it yourself and see if I have it right. Then see Brendan Nyhan on fact-checking and the problem of effectiveness.

The savvy always try to out-realism you.

However: it is true, as Mickey Kaus writes, that a key problem for fact-checkers is “the ease–rather, the constant temptation–of presenting debatable policy issues as right/wrong fact issues.” If there’s a discipline here, it’s to remain aware of that danger and avoid it. The more lightweight or dubious fact-checks often fail on that score.

Advice to fact checkers from Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum: Call out deception, not lies.

Bottom line: if you focus only on actual lies, you miss too much. But if you try to turn everything into a lie, you sound like a hack.

A better approach is to focus instead on attempts to mislead.

He has some smart things to say about how you do that. See his three-part test.

Pull the camera back. And the fact-checking thing is part of a much larger story: Making the Election About Race. Tom Edsall has written some outstanding books on that subject so I pay attention to what he says.

Off message. Former John McCain adviser and political consultant John Weaver has no doubt that Romney’s welfare ad states things that are not true. “GOP attacks on this issue are a lie,” he said on Twitter. He thinks Republicans will regret that they “decided to lie about welfare.”

Taking sides. Ezra Klein writes:

The fact checkers are changing political reporting in a way that, until now, I hadn’t really thought much about: They’re stiffening the media’s spine when presented with lies and deceptions. Previously, it was difficult for reporters to say that a politician said X, and that was a lie. That’s taking sides, even if it’s simply taking the side of the truth. But now they can say that a politician said X, and the fact checkers said it was a lie. This is a slightly weird arrangement, as they’re just another arm of the media (Politifact is run by the Tampa Bay Times, Glenn Kessler is employed the Washington Post, etc), but it seems to be what’s happening.

Which is why the Ben Smith/Jack Shafer position is noteworthy.

Diffusion graph. Wow. Not sure what it means, but it looks techy.

This is an international story. Australia. Because the reluctance to call out untruths for fear of looking one-sided or getting attacked, as well as the mounting pressure to do something as politicians exploit this fear, are both found in other democracies with “clubs” of professional journalists.

Dan Conover used to run political coverage for the Charleston Post and Courirer in South Carolina:

…if the Republican Party produces 10 fact-mangling whoppers to every arcane Democratic stat-fudger, you’ve got a serious problem as a journalist. You simply can’t present that ratio as-is without looking like a liberal hack.

So here’s what we did — what I did — and what others have certainly done as well: I downplayed Republican dishonesty while judging Democratic failings with an unfairly harsh bias. I applied this to assignments, to the tone and presentation of stories, and to the various gimmicks we invented to try to evaluate claims. The results didn’t reflect the true scale of the dishonesty gap, but they at least demonstrated that a gap existed.

He is pessimistic that fact checking as currently conceived can work. “You just can’t look fair if you’re disproportionately coming down on one side, and people won’t listen to you if they think you’re not fair. So to have public credibiltiy, you can’t judge fact the way a scientist would. You have to judge it as a political actor. Which kinda defeats the purpose of political fact-checking.” For a perfect example of his point, see this.

The unease that fact-checking generates has never been explored with more finesse than Conor Friedersdorf shows here.

Some disputes are matters of fact; other are matters of opinion. Surveying attempts at fact-checking, I’ve sometimes thought that individual fact-checkers are less adept than they ought to be at discerning the difference. It’s as if they have the urge to weigh in on matters of opinion, sometimes with very persuasive analysis, but are uncomfortable straightforwardly operating in the realm of opinion journalism. So they declare what they’re doing to be “fact-checking” as if to retain the fig-leaf of ostensible neutrality.

NPR on Sep. 5: “Independent fact checkers spent the first day of the Democratic National Convention listening for claims that don’t add up — and found them.”

Soledad O’Brien makes political television slightly realer-er when she comes ready to fight on air for a documented fact. Yes, I have a clip to show you.

The fact checkers in the press have spoken on a key Republican Party claim: that President Obama has gone around the world “apologizing for America.” Here are the speeches in question. And here are the checks:

Politifact.com: Obama’s remarks never a true ‘apology’. The claim is rated false.

Washington Post fact checker: Obama’s ‘Apology Tour.’ Four Pinocchios, which means a whopping lie.

Factcheck.org: Romney’s Sorry ‘Apology’ Dig. “We’ve read through the speeches as well. We’ve come to the same conclusion: Nowhere did we see that the president ‘apologized’ for America.”

Yesterday, Republican Congressman Peter King was on CNN with Soledad O’Brien. He mentioned “the apology tour.” O’Brien, well aware of the fact checkers’ verdict, decided to challenge him. First you watch, then we talk:

Several things happened during this exchange that I want to point out to you.

* Soledad O’Brien mentions the factcheck.org verdict. King said he doesn’t care what factcheck.org says. If King really doesn’t care at all about a clear cut fact-checking verdict, honest journalism must in a sense do battle with Peter King, or abandon the fact check as a defensible form.

* King says that “any logical reading of that speech” leads to the conclusion that Obama was apologizing for America’s sins in the Middle East. If he really means that, then this isn’t a case of competing arguments but of logic vs. its natural opposites.

* King says that by ”any common sense interpretation of those speeches, the President is apologizing…” Again, we’re not in the realm of clashing interpretations but of sense vs. the crazy. The fact checkers are the crazy. The polarization temperature at this point: max.

* King asks O’Brien: ”How else could it be interpreted?” (Which is a great, table-shifting question.) And she answers: ”A nuanced approach to diplomacy is how some people are interpreting it.”

Here the drama turns a little, and we have to pay closer attention. So far, this. (I paraphrase):

Soledad O’Brien Could you tell me where you found that apology because I’ve read this stuff [holds up her papers] and I don’t see it.

Peter King: Cairo and other speeches.

O’Brien: Well, fact checkers in the establishment press say it isn’t true.

King: I don’t care. On any logical, common sense, plain reading of the words, it’s apologizing for America.

O’Brien: That’s why I asked you: where do you see that? The apology part. [holds up papers again]

King: (turning tables) How else could it be interpreted?

O’Brien: It could be interpreted as nuanced diplomacy. That’s a logical reading to lots of people.

King: “I don’t interpret it that way and I think more importantly our enemies don’t interpret it that way.”

O’Brien: “Well, I don’t know that that’s necessarily the case. I think that’s what we’re trying to figure out.”

King: ”I think it is and that’s where we have an honest difference of opinion.”

Notice how King switches from… the fact checkers are out of their minds, any logical reading of Obama’s words shows that “apology tour” is correct, it’s just common sense!…  to…

“Well, we have an honest difference of opinion.”

And this gets to one of the most important sub-themes of the 2012 campaign. What does a wise press do when confronted with public actors who feel entitled to their own facts? I think Soledad O’Brien of CNN is starting to answer that.

The clip shows these elements in her style: If you interview people on television for a living, you and your team over-prepare. You anticipate points where a Peter King may feel entitled to his own facts. You know your material (and his) cold, so you aren’t worried about the interview spinning out of control. You smile more as the struggle heightens. You interrupt when a dubious claim is first introduced, and each time it is re-asserted. The tone you maintain is a plea for evidence. You have your mark-up of the documents with you. You have your pen. You wave them, which is theatrical. But you also read from them, and send through the lens an evidentiary calm.

If you do all this well, the clash of absolutes may cool into conflicting interpretations right on your show, a more livable zone for sources, journalists and citizens. Soledad O’Brien makes political television slightly realer-er when she comes ready to fight on air for a documented fact. Peter King didn’t back down or change his mind. But he shifted modes. From: what planet are you and your so-called fact checkers on? It’s obvious to anyone who can read that Obama apologized for America. To a point closer to…

Okay, he didn’t apologize or say I’m sorry. There was no apology in the diplomatic sense. But I read those speeches differently; to me and to my party they sound like an apology.

Not there, but closer is what he came. I agree it’s not much. But it’s not make culture war on the press when you get fact-checked, either. The difference was made by O’Brien’s tough and graceful intervention.

Bring that difference forward into an operating style and maybe CNN can re-build its franchise in news.

“I was not there to question people. I was there to allow the candidates to question each other.” Yeah, we saw that, Jim. Will Martha Raddatz of ABC News take the same approach in tonight’s Vice Presidential debate?

Warning! This is a synthetic product. All the answers are Jim Lehrer’s words quoted verbatim. Click on the red A. for the source and to check up on my scissoring. I crafted the questions myself as a way of stitching different interviews together, especially his appearance on WNYC radio and his interview with Politico. My purpose is to show how Jim Lehrer handles the doubts I have heard about his performance since last Wednesday. I did not interview Lehrer myself.

Q. It seemed to us, and a lot of other people, that you lost control of the debate. Did you?

A. “It’s not my job to control the conversation. If the candidates gave me resistance, and I let them talk, to me that’s being an active moderator, not a passive moderator.”

Q. So letting them talk was what you were trying to do?

A. “I thought the format accomplished its purpose, which was to facilitate direct, extended exchanges between the candidates about issues of substance. Part of my moderator mission was to stay out of the way of the flow and I had no problems with doing so.”

Q. How did this format come about?

A. “The Commission came to me with this idea… Let’s see if we can try to have a real debate–not a moderated, simultaneous one-on-one interviews with the candidates, which is what they’ve been for all practical purposes–and set up a situation where the challenging is done not by the moderator, but is done by the candidates. And the candidates are either up to it or they’re not up to it. They’re either ready to go or not ready to go.”

Q. And if they’re reluctant to engage on the harder issues, which has been known to happen in politics, it would not be your job to prod or challenge them?

A. “I was not there to do the challenging. I was there to facilitate the challenging. If they didn’t want to do it, then I wasn’t going to do that work for them.”

Q. Okay, but does this extend even to keeping time? At several points in the debate, both candidates just rolled right over when you tried to enforce time limits. Was that part of the plan too?

A. “The first few times I said ‘let’s move on’ and they wanted to keep talking, the inclination of course is to stop them so I could cover all the subjects I wanted to cover. But I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Wait a minute, they’re talking to each other, leave ‘em alone.’ So I backed off.”

Q. And are you happy with how it turned out?

A. “Sitting here talking to you now, I have absolutely no second thoughts about it. I think it was a major development in the growth of presidential debates.”

Q. Major development: How so?

A. “This is the first time in the history of American political campaigning where an incumbent president of the United States stood eyeball to eyeball to a challenger and they talked at each other and they talked about things that mattered. That each was allowed to challenge the other and respond to that challenge.”

Q. If it’s candidate to candidate, eyeball to eyeball, then why have a moderator at all?

A. “I don’t know if I’d go that far. But I think we took a step in that direction on Wednesday night and I think that’s a very good thing. It’s not about a moderator following up and asking tough questions. You can do that in interviews.”

Q. Mitt’s Romney’s comments on the 47 percent of Americans who see themselves as victims and want the government to take care of them: do you think that should have been part of a debate on domestic policy? You could have asked about it, but you didn’t. Why?

A. “The reason I didn’t ask that is because I felt those were the questions the two candidates were to ask. I was not there to question people. I was there to allow the candidates to question each other. Certainly I could have brought up the 47 percent. All kinds of things I could have brought up.”

Q. Were you bothered at all by the way Governor Romney at times bullied and interrupted you?

A. “Everybody saw it. If somebody was turned off by the way Romney interrupted me, then they saw it… Judge it and react accordingly.”

Q. What about a situation where a candidate lies or distorts the record, and his opponent is reluctant to go after him for his own reasons? The American people in that situation won’t even get a shot at the truth. That’s a problem, isn’t it?

A. “No, I couldn’t disagree with you more. This is ninety minutes in a campaign that’s already been underway for a year… This was ninety minutes of the two candidates showing who they are and what they were willing– if Obama made a decision, he didn’t want to do that, alright, now we know that.”

Q. So you’re not moved by any of the criticism since the debate?

A. I’ve heard some of the criticism, but it’s not keeeping me awake at night. My conscience is clear.”

Five comments of my own about Jim Lehrer’s responses:

1. They have integrity, in the sense that they form a coherent vision to which he held: Raise some big topics and get out of the way. Leave the follow-ups and the fact-checking to the candidates themselves. Don’t challenge them; instead, invite them to challenge each other. Lehrer unquestionably believes in this approach. He thinks it’s the right way to go for all the debates.

Dylan Byers of Politico reports: “Though criticism remains, many are beginning to warm to the idea — advocated by Lehrer and by the Commission on Presidential Debates — that the PBS Newshour veteran was actually setting a new standard for debate moderation by making himself all but invisible.”

2. It was not clear to anyone before the debate that we should expect the vanishing moderator, whose responsibility is reduced to a minimum. If Lehrer’s account is correct, the Commission kind of sprung it on us without warning. Byers, for example, wrote this in an extensively reported preview of the debate:

But at a time when the electorate is as divided as ever, and when media scrutiny is more intense than ever, his is a task that carries unprecedented responsibility. Lehrer, colleagues and campaign strategists say, must ask tough, substantive questions and yet maintain total impartiality. He must shepherd the candidates through a range of topics while allowing them to drive the debate. And he must push Obama and Romney for genuine responses without injecting himself into the conversation.

There was talk of the new format, including the eleven minutes of open conversation in each segment, but “Lehrer will actually play a more active role than ever,” Byers reported. Bill Wheatley, a former NBC executive vice president who has produced presidential debates, had this exchange with Nieman Lab, published October 1.

LaFrance: But, theoretically, with the continuity of one moderator and the opportunity for longer back-and-forths, the moderators are better positioned to challenge candidates in real time, call them out on misleading spin.

Wheatley: You would think so. And of course there’s lots of spin. It’s up to the moderator to decide when to interrupt — when to say, “That doesn’t square with the facts,” or something like that if a candidate goes that far. They’re generally pretty careful in the presidential debate not to make errors of fact, but they can.

Neither had any clue that the Commission had agreed to the vanishing moderator and that “calling them out on misleading spin” had been written out of the job description.

Here’s the executive director of the debate commission, Janet Brown, explaining the new format to the Washington Post: “Each debate will cover six topics lasting 15 minutes, picked by the moderator and announced ahead of time. That places a big burden on the moderator to use the time wisely to craft a good exchange. You can lob up names of accomplished journalists ‘til the cows come home, but it’s very hard to find someone who can do that.”

See what I mean? Nothing about: “I was not there to question people. I was there to allow the candidates to question each other.”

3. None of this lessens in any way President Obama’s responsibility for a listless and passive performance. In fact, it makes Obama’s failure look even larger. If Lehrer’s account is correct, then Obama and his team knew he could not count on Jim Lehrer to correct anything or raise uncomfortable issues. “The challenging is done not by the moderator,” as Lehrer put it. Romney got that memo. Obama did not.

4. Let’s see if Martha Raddatz of ABC News takes the same approach in tonight’s VP debate. Based on this Politico profile, it does not seem in character for her, but who knows? If she does toss them a topic and get out of the way, it will validate Jim Lehrer’s explanation: the Commission’s plan all along was to install the vanishing moderator. (“I was not there to question people…”) If she does not take his approach, the story gets more interesting because then the opacity of the Debate Commission becomes even more outrageous.

5. For me it’s impossible to overlook the congruence or fit between these two things: 1.) Lehrer’s vanishing moderator who does not challenge or correct but merely “facilitates” the exchange between party leaders and 2.) the weakness of the PBS system itself, especially the Newshour, it’s flagship program best known for those non-confrontational interviews that allow the talking points on both sides to pour forth. The problem for PBS is not the imperative to remain impartial. It’s the assumption that impartiality is well served by the genteel style. There are more muscular forms of impartial journalism but you rarely see them in action on the Newshour, which is still dominated by Lehrer’s presence even though he is mostly retired.

I note, as well, that the imperative at PBS to avoid criticism (even when they know that the culture war attacks are coming) is congruent with Lehrer’s approach. He knew he would get a lot of criticism after the debate. But since he defined his primary job as “get out of the way,” the only valid criticism–by his lights–is that he did not get out of the way fast enough. As far as I know, no one has made that point about Jim Lehrer.

Post-script: October 12, the morning after the Vice Presidential debate.
Jim Lehrer has said that the new format put in place by the Commission on Presidential Debates included what I have called the Vanishing Moderator. As he put it, “I was not there to question people. I was there to allow the candidates to question each other.” He presented this approach as part of the Commission’s plan to advance the art of presidential debates, a decision he agreed with and embraced.

But now those explanations look kind of strange because it would appear that Martha Raddatz of ABC News undid the shift to the Vanishing Moderator in last night’s Vice Presidential debate. As Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times wrote:

Mr. Biden was not the only one in the room intent on rectifying his predecessor’s mistakes. Martha Raddatz of ABC News was the moderator, and she made a point of speaking forcefully, pushing the candidates to be specific and changing subjects abruptly. She seemed determined to be less passive and sleepy than Jim Lehrer of PBS was as moderator of the Obama-Romney debate.

Andrew Rosenthal of the Times opinion staff noted:

Ms. Raddatz showed a consistent willingness to call the candidates on their “malarkey,” as the Vice President put it. When Mr. Ryan said he could cut taxes without reducing the deficit by eliminating loopholes, but didn’t actually mention which loopholes, she drew attention to his evasiveness: “No specifics, again.”

And she refused to let Mr. Ryan ignore her question about his ticket’s plan to increase the defense budget. By my count, she returned to that point six times, culminating with the rather sharp: “I want to know how you do the math and have this increase in defense spending?”

With 15 minutes left, after dragging the candidates through taxes, Medicare, Social Security, the budget deficit, terrorism and Afghanistan, she raised a topic that didn’t come up at all last week: How did each of the candidates’ personal beliefs (they are both Catholic) affect their views on abortion.

This is the very opposite of the policy that Lehrer said the Commission had decided on, with his enthusiastic support. In the Vanishing Moderator scheme, interventions like refusing to let Paul Ryan ignore questions about the defense budget would be left up to the candidates. It would be Biden’s job. That Raddatz saw it as her job represented a shift in policy from the week before. Which leaves us with these questions: Did Martha Raddatz go off the reservation and simply ignore the Commission’s new Vanishing Moderator format? Was it never the Commission’s intention to make the Vanishing Moderator part of its debate scheme? (Lehrer said it was.) Did the Commission change its mind without telling anyone? Was Lehrer’s story (scroll up for the quotes) incorrect in some way? We don’t know.

“We, the journalists, have part of what it takes to create an informative and exciting site. You, the users, have the other part.”

Yesterday, Andrew Sullivan announced that he’s parting ways with the Daily Beast and taking his blog, The Daily Dish, independent. Truly independent: no advertisers! (Though he hasn’t ruled that out for the future.) Today he announced that he’s already raised a third of his $900,000 annual budget by asking loyal readers to pay $19.99– or more if they choose. I’m a big fan of the site, and a daily user, so I bought a membership on the first day. And I’m rooting for Sullivan and his team.

What interests me most about his gamble is what Andrew Sullivan is gambling on: the relationship between an obsessive blogger and his most loyal users. As Mathew Ingram puts it: “Sullivan is betting that his personal brand and goodwill with his readers is enough to convince a substantial proportion of them to fund his writing.”

Thus: “The only completely clear and transparent way to do this, we concluded, was to become totally independent of other media entities and rely entirely on you for our salaries, health insurance, and legal, technological and accounting expenses.”

Independence from big media = dependence on passionate users. Before they ran this calculation, Sullivan and his team (it totals seven people) had several indicators of how strong their relationship with the users actually was. For example: “The computers say the average Dish reader spends up to 17 minutes a day on the site – a massive investment of time and energy.”

Another indicator was the contents of the inbox. Conor Friedersdorf filled in on the staff of the Daily Dish when Sullivan and his team were employed by The Atlantic. He describes what it’s like to sift through the emails that come in to the Dish:

I finally saw the reader inbox in all its glory while guest blogging for Sullivan as he vacationed. It’s a gig I did several times, all of them while The Dish was hosted here at The Atlantic. I’ve never received so much delightful correspondence. The Dish readership is massive, highly educated, ideologically diverse, employed in a stunning array of fields, and spread out across the world. Of course, those same attributes characterize the readership here at The Atlantic, and I’ve gotten tons of wonderful emails in the course of my current job, but something about the blogger’s personal, informal tone inspires correspondence of a different character. Compare the comments on the average item here at The Atlantic with the loyal readers Ta-Nehisi Coates has cultivated in the comments section of his blog, where it’s more like an intimate community.

At The Daily Dish, I once asked readers in advance of a road trip across The South what I should see. I didn’t just get hundreds of suggestions; I didn’t just get extended essays on the geography, sociology, and competing styles of barbecue that characterize the region; I didn’t just get notes from people in eleven states; I also got invitations to stay overnight with Dish readers in a dozen cities, or to stop by for dinner at the houses of their parents, or to please write if I passed through where they live so they could at the very least buy me a cold beer. I was just a guest blogger. I don’t doubt that Sullivan could live rent free for five years if he asked nicely.

In other words, core users have been “giving” to Sullivan’s site for years. They have been giving their time, their persistent attention, their loyalty (meaning: a bond strong enough to withstand the moments when Sullivan offends the user with his opinions and unruly emotions) and such other contributions as can be seen only by sifting though the inbox.

Q. Can you charge for news and commentary on the web?

A. It depends.

It depends on how strong the relationship is between you and the regular users of your site. Sullivan and crew have ample reason to bet on that relationship– not only the stats, but the inbox, out of which emerges regular features like View from Your Window and the curated reader comment posts. The Daily Dish is mainly an aggregation site. The editors find some of the stuff, the users find the rest.

I know of no site that better fulfills Alan Rusbridger’s vision of “mutualised” journalism. (He’s the editor of The Guardian in the UK.) What Rusbridger means by that is simple, really: We, the journalists, have part of what it takes to create an informative and exciting site. You, the users, have the other part. You give to us so that we can we give to you.

This open and collaborative future for journalism – I have tried the word “mutualised” to describe something of the flavour of the relationship this new journalism has with our readers and sources and advertisers – is already looking different from the journalism that went before. The more we can involve others the more they will be engaged participants in the future, rather than observers or, worse, former readers. That’s not theory. It’s working now.

And, yes, we’ll charge for some of this – as we have in the past – while keeping the majority of it open. My commercial colleagues at the Guardian firmly believe that our mutualised approach is opening up options for making money, not closing them down.

I would never have given my twenty dollars to Sullivan if I couldn’t link to items on his site, knowing that any user of my Twitter feed could freely access them, regardless of whether they subscribed to the Daily Dish. Part of the intimacy between Sullivan and his core readership involves this (somewhat obscure) third party: the much larger group of web cruisers who will never pay but who will visit from time to time when something strikes their interest. If the core users understand and accept that they are, to some extent, subsidizing the more occasional visitors then their annual payment is more likely to be renewed.

Eliminating advertisers from the equation promotes this kind of clarity. My guess is that the more open Sullivan chooses to be about the finances of the site, the more successful he will be in raising money from the most loyal users. An advertiser-supported site has a harder time being completely transparent, for the simple reason that “part of what we sell is you, commoditized…” is not easily communicated to fully sentient beings.

One of the first things I teach my students about the transformation of journalism by digital means is the unbundling effect. Nicholas Carr summarizes it:

Readers don’t flip through a mix of stories, advertisements, and other bits of content. They go directly to a particular story that interests them, often ignoring everything else. In many cases, they bypass the newspaper’s “front page” altogether, using search engines, feed readers, or headline aggregators like Google News, Digg, and Daylife to leap directly to an individual story. They may not even be aware of which newspaper’s site they’ve arrived at. For the publisher, the newspaper as a whole becomes far less important. What matters are the parts. Each story becomes a separate product standing naked in the maketplace. It lives or dies on its own economic merits.

The unbundling effect–which is (sorry to use this term) a mega-trend in digital media–strongly favors niche journalism. So what is Sullivan’s niche? It would be awkward, but you could try to characterize it topically: gay rights including gay marriage, Obama’s “long view,” the coming crack-up of the Republican Party, decriminalizing pot, the struggle for freedom in Iran and the rest of the Muslim world, the Global War on Terror (GWOT) and its discontents, all views of the world descendent from the philosopher Michael Oakeshott and the critic Christopher Hitchens…

But a better way to put it would be: Andrew’s own obsessions. That’s the real niche. This is the extreme opposite of the “all the news that’s fit to print.” I think Sullivan and his team are going to meet their goal. They will raise more than the $900,000 they need to run the site for the first year of their independent existence. They could never do it if they fell back on the View from Nowhere. Loyalty and obsession are intimates.

The outlines of the new system are now coming into view. Accuracy and verification, fairness and intellectual honesty–traditional virtues for sure–join up with transparency, “show your work,” the re-voicing of individual journalists, fact-checking, calling BS when needed and avoiding false balance.

For about 20 years (yikes!) I have been trying to move American journalists off their default view of newsroom “objectivity.” The default view goes like this:

There is something called “news,” another thing called “opinion,” and professional journalists can be trusted because they keep their opinions out of the news.

My primary objection to this safe, cozy and ultra-simplified view was that it imposed certain intellectual costs on journalists that could not be waved away. The costs lay in everything the default view rendered invisible– like, say, framing decisions. The news is rife with such, but it’s hard to call them opinions, and they certainly aren’t “objective.”

A nice illustration of that came the other day from The Atlantic’s James Fallows, who took note of an ordinary Wall Street Journal story that began like this:

Americans are using more gadgets, televisions and air conditioners than ever before. But, oddly, their electricity use is barely growing…

The story wound up framing this oddity as bad news for utility companies, rather than good news for climate change. His point was not to denounce the Journal for its pro-utility bias. Rather:

I mention this story because it’s as stark an example as you’ll find of the impossibility of presenting “objective” news, and of the power of the “frame” the writer and editor choose to place around the daily increment of information.

Exactly. And if there’s power in a frame, there’s trouble when framing patterns escape notice and become defaults themselves. Another example is what’s come to be known as false balance (or phony equivalence, fake symmetry) a form of distortion that arises from the pressure to demonstrate that the journalist doesn’t have an opinion and isn’t taking sides. Dubious framing decisions and false balance are invisible to the default view of objectivity, which makes it harder for journalists to fix these problems when they become chronic.

By now the default view comes with its own concession, which is intended to shore up the model by acknowledging a problem or two. The concession goes like this: “Of course no one can be totally objective, we’re all human. But we try to come as close as we can.” In an alternate version, the second sentence reads: “Maybe a better word is fairness.” (It is a better word, but in the concession speech it means pretty much the same thing as the term it replaces.)

For the last few years I have been using the phrase, the View from Nowhere, when I want to reference the default view and deny it the prestige it has accumulated in mainstream newsrooms. I’ve said that it’s getting harder and harder to trust the View from Nowhere (or in broadcast news, the Voice of God) but easier to trust a journalist who can somehow say, “here’s where I’m coming from.” (Example in this disclosure page.) Part of the reason for this is that finding multiple frames around the same facts is a normal occurrence for a consumer of news on the Internet. One thing the users know: those frames didn’t get there objectively.

More and more, the heaviest users of news are exercising a kind of veto over the default construction of newsroom objectivity. If the users don’t find “we keep our opinions out of the news” a credible statement, if they’re on to things like lazy frames and false balance, then not only will journalists hear these complaints with noisy regularity, but further assertions of objectivity aren’t going to reverse the trend and produce more trust. They will in fact produce less. And it doesn’t matter how many old school journalists stamp their feet and repeat the mantra. That’s what I mean by the users’ veto.

Over the weekend the Public Editor of the New York Times, Margaret Sullivan, took on these issues without over-simplifying them. She also interviewed me for her column, for which I am grateful. Sullivan did not endorse my take. But she helped legitimize the argument about the costs of the default view. It’s easy to see why. The previous public editor had openly demonstrated his naiveté on the matter, to devastating effect. Sullivan hears a lot from readers about phony balance and calling bullshit on false claims, and so she writes about these things. On Sunday she said it plainly:

What readers really want is reporting that gets to the bottom of a story without having to give opposing sides equal weight. They also want reporters to state established truths clearly, without hedging or always putting the words in a source’s mouth. They’re most interested in truth.

Right. Truth telling is more important than a ritualized demonstration of viewlessness; Times readers are demanding it. Sullivan also shifted the ground a little, away from objectivity toward impartiality, which is also a constitutive term for the BBC in Great Britain. I find it hard to dismiss the struggle to remain impartial, because in some ways that’s what any truthteller is trying to do: get beyond a partial view and try see a bigger picture. Two years ago I put it this way:

If objectivity means trying to ground truth claims in verifiable facts, I am definitely for that. If it means there’s a “hard” reality out there that exists beyond any of our descriptions of it, sign me up. If objectivity is the requirement to acknowledge what is, regardless of whether we want it to be that way, then I want journalists who can be objective in that sense. Don’t you? If it means trying to see things in that fuller perspective Thomas Nagel talked about-–pulling the camera back, revealing our previous position as only one of many–-I second the motion. If it means the struggle to get beyond the limited perspective that our experience and upbringing afford us: yeah, we need more of that, not less. I think there is value in acts of description that do not attempt to say whether the thing described is good or bad. Is that objectivity? If so, I’m all for it, and I do that myself sometimes.

The View from Nowhere is my attempt to isolate the element in objectivity that we don’t need, and call attention to it.

Sullivan began her column with the now forgotten tale of Farnaz Fassihi’s viral e-mail. She’s the Wall Street Journal reporter who was stationed in Baghdad and in 2004 wrote an email to friends giving her impressions of how miserably the war was going. The email, which was quite compelling, got passed around among friends and eventually became public, raising the question: why isn’t this the news? As I wrote at the time:

Her e-mail report can have references to what a friend of hers saw on a drive through Sadr City. Her Wall Street Journal report cannot. The “authorized knowers” in her Journal reporting tend to be experts and authorities, often government officials, or they are participants in events, people close to the action.

Fassihi was telling friends what she felt she knew. In her email she herself is the authorized knower, and she speaks directly, not through sources and quotes. As the Houston Chronicle put it in an editorial, “Though the missive apparently does not contradict her reportage, it is blunt, bleak and opinionated in a way that mainstream coverage generally avoids.”

Viewlessness as a means of trust production in news came with voicelessness for the individual author. That is now ebbing away, especially with social media and two-way interactions between journalists and users. But it’s not just that. As Eric Black of MinnPost put it three months ago:

After 35 years of doing my scribbling within the confines of the “objective journalism” paradigm, including objective journalism about perceptions of journalistic bias, I’ve about had it. Journalists’ worries about being brought up on bias charges do more to get in the way of good reporting and analysis than any benefit it delivers.

The costs of sticking with the default model in trust production are visible and mounting, and increasingly journalists are looking for a way out that doesn’t cause them more problems than the View from Nowhere already has. The outlines of the new system are coming into view. Accuracy and verification, fairness and intellectual honesty–traditional virtues for sure–join up with transparency, “show your work,” the re-voicing of individual journalists, fact-checking, calling BS when needed and avoiding false balance. Progress is slow, we’re not there yet, but this is the direction things are headed in.

Sullivan’s column is an important  marker in that struggle. So read it and let me know what you think in the comments.

Romney’s chief strategist Stu Stevens is trying to re-litigate a campaign ad suggesting that Jeep was shipping factory jobs to China. Why? I speculate.

“Lie of the Year,” people in the establishment press called it. As bad as it gets.

To which professional strategist Stu Stevens, head thinker for the Romney campaign in 2012, says: Nonsense, gentleman, our work on this ad was pristine. A model of accuracy, upholding a standard in verification beyond what is normally seen in politics.

Surreal exchange, right? But it happened the other day, as I will soon explain.

But first, a brief check-in with common sense.

1. Standard deviation from the verifiable fact

To some extent all political campaigns are run against reality. No mystery lies about it. There is a tendency to portray the opponent as the embodiment of everything wrong in the country. There is a tendency to portray your own candidate as right about everything, and a great husband and father or wife and mother to boot. There is a thing called confirmation bias. We may safely posit a kind of standard deviation from the verifiable fact that is part of the messy carnival of politics. It is juvenile to make too much of it, or to get worked up about its appearance on one side of the ledger, while minimizing or ignoring its solid presence on the other.

However, it can also happen, and here we drift out of “common sense” and into a political argument with consequences for press treatment… It can also happen that a political party works itself into a position where it has to run against reality in a more serious way, beyond some standard range of distortion. Because, for example, a substantial portion of its base is committed to propositions that aren’t so, like: Obama is for sure a socialist and probably a Muslim. Or: what unites the various factions is thinning, and so a demonized other and paranoid charges serve as the “glue” keeping parts of the coalition together. Non-standard deviation from verifiable facts becomes normal politics for the party in such a weakened state. Wilder charges must be made for reasons internal to the party’s malfunctioning state of denial.

2. Agreed upon untruths.

For this thesis (in which I join) Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein’s April 27, 2012 Op Ed in the Washington Post is the standard text. Part of the reason for that is Mann of the Brookings Institution and Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute are establishment figures par excellence, think tank centrists and students of How Washington Works who for that reason have been among the most quoted men in political journalism over the span of their influence. So when they say it, the meaning is somewhat different:

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

One of the flash points during the campaign–and one I wrote about–was the tension between Romney aides doing what it takes to win and fact-checkers in the press, who had to cope with distortions that sometimes went beyond the normal range. These tensions led to the now famous statement by Romney pollster Neil Newhouse: “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”

That was a true statement. If they had to bend more facts beyond the sort of breaking point that establishment journalists had set up, it was not because they were professional liars or more mendacious than your average campaign Joe, but because political fictions — agreed-upon untruths — were doing more of the work in holding the Republican Party together, even though the Democrats and the Obama campaign relied on distortions too, sometimes outrageously so. (A list of the ones that concerned me, written during the campaign.)

That’s what Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann were trying to try say to the sober-minded political professionals they wanted to reach. It’s not you, Stu: your party has become an outlier. Of course Stuart Stevens didn’t want to hear that. He didn’t believe it, and never accepted it.

3. Re-litigating the Lie of the Year.

The campaign has been over for almost three months. Here and there, the Republican Party has started the confrontation with its ruling fictions that it could not have afforded during the struggle to get Romney elected. But for at least one of the guys who ran the Romney campaign, the tourniquet of denial has tightened since the election returns came in.

Witness the letter Stevens recently sent to the Washington Post fact checker column, asking to re-litigate a Romney campaign ad that had suggested, using weasel wording, that Jeep was shipping American jobs to China. (Romney said this on the campaign trail too: “Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China.”) Stevens thinks that new facts announced recently show that the original ad was true. “I would hope that you would take another look at this and stress test it for accuracy away from the heat of a campaign,” he wrote to the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler.

Kessler agreed. He took another look and re-awarded the ad Four Pinnocchios, the highest level of mendacity the Post system registers. Keep in mind: this is the same ad that won Politifact’s Lie of the Year award. The Politifact researchers noted that not only did Romney make the false claim himself, and then work it into an ad, but the campaign then “stood by the claim, even as the media and the public expressed collective outrage against something so obviously false.” (The Weekly Standard’s take: a pathetic case of liberal bias; the ad is true.)

But it gets even more strange. For Stu Stevens isn’t saying, “Oh come on, fact checkers, it was bad, but it wasn’t that bad.” He’s not trying to make an outrageously false claim seem routine– within the standard deviation for campaign rhetoric. No, he’s upholding the “Jeep shipping jobs to China” statement as exceptionally well-founded, a kind of model for people in his business. ”I believe that the ad and Romney’s statement were completely accurate, unusually so by any standards,” he wrote to Kessler. Thus we have:

Lie of the year!

(Folds arms.) “Unusually accurate.”

We double checked. Still a total lie.

(Stamps foot) “I shall not hear of it!”

Why is this a conversation that Stuart Stevens wants to have? He’s initiating these events, after all. For what reason? Is there even a strategy here?

4. Both sides do it most of the time.

It’s worth nothing that Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post fact checker, and Michael Scherer of Time magazine, along with others who do fact checking or cover politics full time, are convinced that it’s simply too hard to say which side is distorting the facts more in a hard fought campaign. Both sides do it most of the time, they say. People tend to see mendacity in the other guy and forgive their own side’s BS, as Scherer explained at some length in Time. This is from Scherer’s Fact Checking and the False Equivalence Dilemma:

Kessler at the Washington Post has what he calls the Pinocchio tracker, which gives you the average number of Pinocchio’s for a given politician for the statements he has reviewed. Obama gets an average of 2.04 Pinocchios out of 4, while Romney gets an average of 2.35 Pinocchios out of 4. Romney has had 10 statements that received the maximum [number of] Pinocchios, compared to six statements for Obama that received the maximum. Does this mean anything? According to Kessler, not really.

Kessler has repeatedly said that he thinks all politicians “will twist or spin information if they believe it will advance their political interests.” To him that’s the right starting point. He has “a both sides do it” thesis, born of experience, and unfriendly to… The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. Stevens should be happy with Kessler, who is willing to slap Four Pinocchios on a particularly bad ad but usually resists conclusions like “The GOP is a party unmoved by conventional understanding of facts.”

5. Embrace asymmetry, avoid distortion.

Look at Mann and Ornstein’s op-ed, again:

We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change anytime soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.

After the campaign they assessed the news media’s performance in meeting this challenge.

“The mainstream press really has such a difficult time trying to cope with asymmetry between the two parties’ agendas and connections to facts and truth,” said Mann, who has spent nearly three decades as a congressional scholar at the centrist Brookings Institution.

Mann and Ornstein had this advice for the press: “Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?”

Embrace asymmetry, in other words. That’s the way to avoid distortion.

6. Danger, journalists

Here I speculate: In his attempt to re-litigate a campaign ad that everyone else had nearly forgotten about, Stu Stevens is fighting Mann and Ornstein’s advice to the press, which comes from a key part of the Washington establishment. He has some advice of his own:

Danger, press corps. Don’t switch out of your symmetry-making machinery just yet. And don’t be so quick to declare “unbalanced phenomenon” conditions. For there is doubt. Even about your Lie of the Year, Four Pinocchios and all that– there is doubt. My advice: do seek professional safety. You are risking a lot when you try to declare: Which politician is telling the truth?

“Fierce arguments still rage over…” That’s the sentence you should bet on if you care about being right and avoiding distortion. Allow me to demonstrate…

And thus we have Stuart’s fierce argument, raging at a kind of consensus verdict in the political press about the mendacity of the Jeep ad.

“A balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality,” Mann and Ornstein had advised the press. Along with: “The mainstream press really has such a difficult time trying to cope with asymmetry between the two parties’ agendas and connections to facts and truth.”

“Even about your Lie of the Year there is doubt. So don’t try anything.” That’s what I hear Stuart Stevens saying back.

A post that arises from a certain image I have of disaffected newsroom “traditionalists,” who look upon changes in journalism since the rise of the web with fear and loathing. It is not addressed to particular people but to a climate of mind I’ve encountered a lot in blogging about all this since 2003.

Look, you’re right. About a lot of things.

Editing by click rate is stupid and unethical. Chasing traffic is an abyss. The hamsterization of journalism is degrading the work environment for news professionals. Expecting reporters to report, write, blog, tweet, shoot video, sift the web, raise their metabolism, and produce more without time and training is guaranteed to fail. Trading in print dollars for digital dimes has been an economic disaster for newsrooms that ran on those dollars. Online advertising will never replace what was lost. The editorial staff is the engine that makes the whole thing go. You cannot cut your way to the future. The term “content” is a barbarism that bit by bit devalues what journalists do. Pure aggregation is parasitic on original reporting. Untended, online comment sections have become sewers, protectorates for the deranged, depraved and deluded. That we have fewer eyes on power, fewer journalists at the capital or city hall watching what goes on, almost guarantees that there will be more corruption. Bloggers and citizen journalists cannot fill the gap. Experienced beat reporters are the community’s institutional memory. Everyone needs an editor. It’s absurd to claim that “anyone” can be a journalist if we mean by that someone who knows how to find the right sources and ask the right questions, dig for information, counter the spin, produce a fair, accurate and unflinching account without libeling anybody– and do it all on deadline.

But you’re wrong about a lot of things too.

Being ignorant and uninvolved in “the business side” has been a disaster for the newsroom. For all its strengths, separation of church and state also meant no seat at the table when the big decisions were made. Anyone who doesn’t want to know what the numbers say should not be trusted with editorial decisions. Listening to demand is smart journalism, so is giving people what they have no way to demand because they don’t know about it yet. If you are good at one, the other goes better. “Do what you do best and link to the rest” isn’t a slogan, it’s your only hope for comprehensive coverage. Figuring out how to make things happen at lower cost is intrinsic to quality journalism today. Pack journalism and duplicative coverage mock your claims of crisis. In the aggregate, the users know more than you do about most things. They are in many more places than you can be. They also help distribute your stuff. Therefore talking with them is basic to your job. Google isn’t the source of your troubles; it sends you traffic. Digitally, the original sin wasn’t failing to charge when the first news sites came online; it was re-purposing the old platform’s material. A journalist is just a heightened case of an informed citizen, not a special class. The First Amendment doesn’t mention your occupation; it refers to everyone’s right to publish. “Who’s a journalist?” leads nowhere so drop it.

“To some degree they have achieved what Tim Russert of NBC News had when he was host of Meet the Press. Sitting down for an interview with Swisher and Mossberg is a thing you do to show that you are a serious player…”

Quick: How many shifts in power can you spot in this one report? From Reuters:

AllThingsD, the widely read technology blog run by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, has begun discussions with owner News Corp about extending or ending their partnership, sources familiar with the situation told Reuters. According to these sources, AllThingsD‘s contract with News Corp expires at the end of the year…

Sources said the website is receiving a lot of “inbound interest” from potential buyers parallel to its talks with News Corp. Among the names mentioned as having reached out to AllThingsD were Conde Nast, where Swisher recently signed to work as a contributing writer for Vanity Fair, and Hearst.

… While AllThingsD is recognized as the brainchild of Swisher and Mossberg, News Corp actually owns the website and its name. However, according to provisions in their contract, Swisher and Mossberg have approval authority over any sale, the first source said.

I count five power shifts. Now I’m not claiming that any of these are new this year, so don’t freak out! Several have been watchable trends since before Barack Obama ran for president. But they continue to alter what is possible for journalists, so it’s worth going over them one by one.

* Writers ascendant over publishers. Not completely. Just: relatively speaking. The brainchild of Swisher and Mossberg… Swisher and Mossberg have approval… It’s their franchise, not News Corp’s. AllThingsD is built around their talents as reporters, interviewers, reviewers and occasional breakers of news. Robert Cottrell, editor of The Browser, an aggregation site, put it this way in a recent essay for the Financial Times:

Think back to the days when print media ruled. Your basic unit of consumption was not the article, nor the writer, but the publication. You bought the publication in the hope or expectation that it would contain good writing. The publisher was the guarantor of quality.

Professional writers still see value in having publishers online, not so much as guarantors of quality, but because publishers pay for writing – or, increasingly, if they do not pay for it, they do at least publish it in a place where it will get read.

Readers, on the other hand, have less of a need for publishers. One striking trend I have noticed in the past five years is the way in which individual articles uncouple themselves from the places where they are first published, to lead their own lives across the internet, passed from hand to hand between readers.

Right: readers have less need of publishers. That is one reason writers are in the ascendant. Another is what my friend Clay Shirky said: “There’s a button that says ‘publish,’ and when you press it, it’s done.” The internet does much of what publishers used to do: bring the goods to the users.

* Shifting modes of scarcity. Technology news isn’t scarce. The ability instantly to distribute technology news: that isn’t scarce. (The internet does it.) The capital required to begin providing technology news is extremely low, so that isn’t scarce. Genuine news is scarce. Talent and experience–and scoops, of course, which come from being well-sourced–are scarce. Kara Swisher, Walt Mossberg and their colleagues at AllThingsD are good at what they do. By now it is primarily this, not the fact that they did it under the banner of Dow Jones (owned by News Corp) that makes a difference. Even a 19 year-old kid can be a player in technology reporting if he has the (scarce) goods. And check out the way Mark Gurman is compensated:

Despite the fact that his work is only part-time, his pay check from 9to5Mac is not. Weintraub [his boss] tells us, “I have an unorthodox model where I give my writers ad space on their posts and on the homepage. For Mark in particular, it has been very successful because his exclusives get a lot of attention.”

How successful? Weintraub says he “makes enough money to buy a Tesla every year (he hasn’t…yet) with change left over.” Teslas generally sell for ~$100,000 a pop.

* The economics of human presence. AllThingsD began in 2003 as a conference. The site was created for people who could not be there. It grew from that to become a daily source of news and views. The conference is still the soul of the enterprise. Here it is, sold out in February, though it doesn’t happen until May. Speakers haven’t even been announced yet! News isn’t scarce, commentary isn’t scarce, but an opportunity to watch Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, think on stage? That is scarce; people will pay for it. The site boasts:

D is different from other conferences: no canned speeches, no marketing pitches, and no bull. Instead, creators and executive producers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher put the industry’s top players to the test during unscripted conversations about the impact digital technology will have on our lives now and in the future.

Swisher and Mossberg were smart to make the conference about the interviews, rather than speeches, panels or presentations. That way it is their presence, as well as Tim Cook’s or Marissa Mayer’s, that makes the event go. To some degree they have achieved what Tim Russert of NBC News had when he was host of Meet the Press. Sitting down for an interview with Swisher and Mossberg is a thing you do to show that you are a serious player. That’s the economics of human presence. Which is why the Atlantic, The Economist, the New York Times and the Washington Post (among others) are trying to make events part of their business model. There is no “save as” command for events.

* The renewed importance of voice. Kara Swisher is fast on her feet, witty and sarcastic, hyper-informed about the tech industry and she’ll try to cut you to pieces on Twitter if you challenge her, especially one of her scoops. Walt Mossberg is like a graybeard of tech, part of its institutional memory, someone who has seen it all and cannot easily be snowed. These personas are part of what they have to sell, and they emerge especially in conversation with industry leaders at their annual conference. If they were View from Nowhere journalists their franchise would not be nearly as strong as it is.

From Mossberg’s “ethics statement” on the AllThingsD site: “I am not an objective news reporter, and am not responsible for business coverage of technology companies. I am a subjective opinion columnist, a reviewer of consumer technology products and a commentator on technology issues.” From Swisher’s: “While I still intend to break news on this site, as with my previous print column, I will make subjective comments on the business and strategies of technology companies and issues.”

They know where the value lies.

* The rise of niche journalism. It’s not called “all things newsy,” or “all things business.” The business that Swisher and Mossberg built is about “digital technology meets consumer capitalism.” And that is all. This is the logic of niche jounalism. The writer Nicholas Carr summarized it five years ago:

A print newspaper provides an array of content—local stories, national and international reports, news analyses, editorials and opinion columns, photographs, sports scores, stock tables, TV listings, cartoons, and a variety of classified and display advertising—all bundled together into a single product. People subscribe to the bundle, or buy it at a newsstand, and advertisers pay to catch readers’ eyes as they thumb through the pages. The publisher’s goal is to make the entire package as attractive as possible to a broad set of readers and advertisers. The newspaper as a whole is what matters, and as a product it’s worth more than the sum of its parts.

When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart. Readers don’t flip through a mix of stories, advertisements, and other bits of content. They go directly to a particular story that interests them, often ignoring everything else.

“The bundle falls apart.” That’s a power shift. And it leads directly to: Sources said the website is receiving a lot of “inbound interest” from potential buyers…

“When the users know more than the journalists, what are good journalists supposed to do?” These are lecture notes and links from my presentation to the editors of Quartz, May 13, 2013.

The ideas that I share with you tonight originate in a personal obsession of mine that is now 14 years old. It dates back to 1999 when I read this article by Andrew Leonard in Salon: “Open Source Journalism.”

Leonard’s piece is not a manifesto. It tells the story of a specialty site, Jane’s Intelligence Weekly, which lacked confidence that its draft article about cyber-terrorism was good enough. So Jane’s decided to consult the readers of Slashdot, who knew a lot about the subject. And they made the article better. (Here’s the original Slashdot thread.)

This, I felt, had implications for beat reporting.

Also in 1999, Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News, the first newspaper journalist to have a blog, strung these simple words together. “My readers know more than I do.” It was one of the discoveries he made covering Silicon Valley during the first internet boom. Of course this would have been true in 1959. Gillmor was one of the first to see what was different about 1999. The people who knew more than he did could easily reach him with that knowledge. They were more connected: to the reporter and each other.

This too had implications for beat reporting.

In 1999, that fateful year, Dave Winer published his seminal post, Edit this Page, in which he said: “Writing for the Web is too damn hard.” He and others were then working on blogging tools that would explode over the next year or so: Winer’s Frontier, blogger.com, Live Journal, and later Movable Type.

To me, Edit This Page is the moment just before the web goes from Read Only to Read/Write. (Later, of course, it would become read/write/share.) In 2009, Winer put the consequences as clearly as he could: “The sources go direct.” They can now publish directly to the users.

This had further implications for beat reporting.

Behold, then, the spirit of 1999:

* “My readers know more than I do.”
* Open source journalism can work.
* Edit This Page, which became blogging
* “The sources can go direct.” (And they do.)

The spirit of ’99 affected me personally. These are projects I undertook in the same spirit:

2003 PressThink
2006 Assignment Zero
2007 Beatbloging.org
2008 Off The Bus.

So this is my obsession, distilled down:

When the users know more than the journalists, what are good journalists supposed to do?

Many people who are here tonight do this kind of work every day. A good name for it is networked reporting, which is by now an established practice. Consider:

* Live blogging as demonstrated by The Guardian and the New York Times Lede blog is an inherently networked practice.

* So is Andy Carvin’s “twitter anchor”.

* CNN’s i-Report is a network of contributors that can be activated when there is breaking news.

* Web forms as used by ProPublica, The Guardian and other sites allow for collecting data from those very users who know more than journalists.

And, of course, it is routine for journalists to find sources through social media.

We’ve made a lot of progress since 1999! But not nearly enough. So this year I shared my obsession with my graduate students in NYU’s Studio 20 program. We began with a simple definition of networked reporting:

When the many contribute (easily) to reporting that is completed by a few… that’s networked reporting.

Our aim was to make incremental progress on that problem by doing small projects with six partners using 2-3 person teams. Here’s the list of projects. My partner was Quartz, Atlantic Media’s new business publication. I wanted to work with Quartz because their concept of editorial obsessions intrigued me. I proposed that we work together on designing a networked approach to covering what they call an “obsession.” They would give me the specs, I would reply with my designs.

The specs from Quartz are here. (“Put together a suite of tools and techniques for quickly booting up a network around a fast-moving, ongoing global news story that cuts across traditional beat boundaries and is worth obsessing about…”) The tools were researched and tested by Anna Callaghan, a journalism grad student at NYU. We decided to use covering bitcoin as window into digital money as the “fast-moving, ongoing global news story” that we would design a networked approach for.

Warning: These ideas are 100% synthetic. They are not original to me. They have emerged from the practice of networked reporting and the use of social media tools by thousands of journalists since 1999. So if your instinct is to reply, “we did that four years ago!” you’re right. You probably did.

Pro tip before we begin: It’s smart to treat the One Percent Rule as a design principle for a networked beat.

Thus, a networked beat…

√ makes better products for the 90 percent who will only consume…

√ from efficient interaction with the 10% who will possibly engage, while

√ recruiting the best of the 1% into co-production.

My eight steps to a networked beat follow:

Step 1: Define the right combination of news flows for this particular beat.

Step 2: Put an intelligent filter, made for multiple uses, on the combined flow.

Step 3: From smart filters on combined streams, make a series of simple and useful products.

Step 4: Start to register, verify and make contact with the best independent sources on the beat.

Step 5: When they’re good enough hook the filtering tools up to the work flow for beat coverage.

Step 6: Launch your “inbox on steroids” and prove to the users that it works.

Step 7: Bring key sources (from step 4) and fellow obsessives into co-production. And be prepared to compensate.

Step 8: Go pro-am. Try some campaigns. Crowdsource from an earned crowd.

Another way to display the same design is to describe the different levels of investment in networked reporting. You could also call them stages of development. I see three:

Level One (steps 1-4): Minimum viable product. It includes:

* Bot for the beat: an automated Quartz Twitter feed for bitcoin news
* People to follow: a list of people who converse and share links about bitcoin.
* Rock solid explainer: original content by Quartz explaining background to bitcoin for its users.
* Preferred sources list: the best of the best, selected and vetted by Quartz
* River of news: An automated feed of bitcoin news via select sources curated by Quartz.(Like this one for tech.)

* Register as a Quartz bitcoin source: (Legal name or pen name allowed. This is one way people can raise their hand as a fellow obsessive, and get vetted.)

* Good alert systems for writers and editors, making assignments easier and coverage better
* Newsroom talent ready to do stories when signals are strong.

Level Two (steps 5-6). Committing to the beat.

* Twitter feed for beat, handmade and a human voice

* Link and comment blog fed by Quartz filters.

* Inbox on steroids

* Beat journalism made clearly distinct from commodity coverage

Level Three (steps 7-8). Turn to the community

* Engage key contributors in co-production, similar to the moment when a successful blog becomes a group blog by hiring from the comments.

* Launch a sources poll. A weekly survey of obsessives, carefully designed to consume a finite amount of time per week, which takes the temperature of the beat but also provides clues to what the beat should be covering by asking the people who care the most. (Sort of like this.)

* Crowdsourced investigations. By now a known practice.

* “Quest journalism,” an example of which is here.

Summing up: My recommendations for Quartz.

Recommendation 1. Invest now in Level One development: unique news flows and intelligent filters– something Quartz should try to become good at. Very good. This is my primary recommendation.

Recommendation 2. “Filtered by Quartz.” We think there are brand opportunities for Quartz in making its own: Intelligent filters, Preferred sources, Rivers of News (another Dave Winer concept.)

Recommendation 3. Influence the development of tool companies that make your filters smarter and your work easier. Little Bird and Storyful are two we especially recommend.

Recommendation 4. Pick your spots for fuller investment in a beat via metrics that flow from the minimum viable product. An obvious example: where the alert systems are spitting out very good story ideas, the beat is ready for more investment.

Recommendation 5. Put all tools and practices to the “enterprise journalism” and “unique signature” tests. Meaning: you’ll know it’s working if the tools and methods recommended here help Quartz transcend commodity coverage and produce journalism with a unique signature. If they don’t help with that, drop this approach.

Recommendation 6. Quartz Pro. There’s a possible business opportunity in monetizing signaling systems that you know from Quartz experience work. That’s why its crucial to bring some of the obssessives in from the cold, so to speak.

Recommendation 7. Campaigns can be good punctuation points. Once they’re over, fold your tent and move on to other beats.

Recommendation 8. Stage Three beats are an insight community, as Techdirt’s Mike Masnick calls it. Some will pay to know what a crowd earned this way thinks.

“His colleagues at other news organizations know it. His friends at the network, were they real friends, would try to talk him out of this disastrous state of denial.”

[With four updates below: May 19, 20, 22.]

I am going to be brief here because for anyone closely following the story of the Benghazi talking points these facts are well known. And if you’re not following the story closely, you probably don’t care. If you do care, but aren’t following it, just click the links below and you can get caught up.

1. On May 10th ABC’s Jonathan Karl reported a source’s description of a White House advisor’s email about the Benghazi talking points:

“We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation. We thus will work through the talking points tomorrow morning at the Deputies Committee meeting.”

2. That turned out to be misleading and inaccurate, as revealed initially by CNN’s Jake Tapper and later confirmed by the release of all the emails in question. Karl’s source, said Tapper, “seemingly invented the notion that Rhodes wanted the concerns of the State Department specifically addressed.” Tapper had obtained the text of the email in question. It simply didn’t say what Karl said it said on one key point. Karl, it appeared, was relying on a source’s quotation.

3. Tapper is a former colleague of Karl’s at ABC News, and a former guest host of ABC’s This Week, a duty Karl also takes on from time to time. The two men are in the same business. Both have covered the White House for ABC. If one says the other’s source “invented” evidence that was passed along to ABC’s audience, that is a serious matter.

4. Karl responded to Tapper’s report by obfuscating without backing off, and claiming that the release of the full email chain would clear this up. So how about it, White House? ABC News also doubled down. It’s spokesperson told Erik Wemple of the Washington Post that Tapper’s report was consistent with Karl’s.

5. The White House said Karl’s source had “fabricated” the email in question. Here, the Obama Administration was warning ABC News that Jon Karl got played. Again, a serious matter. Also: news.

6. Karl’s colleagues weren’t buying his defense, as can be seen from this post by NPR’s Scott Neuman and Mark Memmott. They were bothered, as well, by the way Karl created confusion about whether he had obtained the email in question or just heard its contents described by a source. This too counts as a serious matter.

7. Later, when the full email chain was released, the news was bad for Karl. The originals show that Karl’s source was wrong about the White House protecting the State Department’s concerns over other agencies. Jon Karl had called for this evidence to be released. It was released. The results only cast more doubt on his defense of the original story, and strongly suggested he had been played.

8. Yesterday, Taking Points Memo reported that members of Congress and their staffs were briefed on the emails and their contents. That’s how Karl’s source knew about them.

The ABC report was based on notes taken by a still-unnamed source, presumably a Republican, in attendance at one of two briefings the administration held for members and senior staffers of the Senate and House intelligence committees and top leadership offices in February and March of this year. The ABC report contained a great deal of the information the White House would ultimately reveal itself this week when it released all of the inter- and intra-agency email communication that ultimately resulted in the talking points Susan Rice used in a now-infamous series of appearances on network news shows on the Sunday after the attack.

But it got one big part about the White House’s role wrong…

Again: serious business.

9. I had been following all this and last night I said on Twitter: “Jon Karl got played. But he refuses to admit it. Every ABC anchor who doesn’t ask him about it is complicit, too.” I was anticipating Karl’s appearance on ABC’s signature political program, This Week with George Stephanopoulos. He had appeared on May 12th, two days after his original report, to talk about Benghazi with guest host Martha Raddatz. There had been big news in the intervening week: the release of the original emails. I figured that ABC News would have him on again, if they believed so strongly in his original report. He is, after all, ABC’s Chief White House Correspondent; the story that dominated Washington all week was the re-emergence of a scandal narrative. A typical headline: Obama Pivots to Jobs Tour at End of Scandal Filled Week. (That’s from The Note, the politics blog at ABCNews.com, to which Karl is a major contributor.) Well, here’s the line-up for This Week with George Stephanopoulos. No Jon Karl. Instead, ABC News Senior Washington Correspondent Jeff Zeleny.

10. When a confidential source burns a reporter, a reporter is within his rights to burn–that is, “out”–that source. But it almost never happens because reporters are concerned that potential sources will take it as a sign that the reporter cannot be trusted to keep their names secret. That’s bad enough. But this is worse. Karl had a chance to limit the damage to ABC News from his faulty reporting when he first responded to Jake Tapper’s report. He blew that. Inexplicably, an ABC News spokesperson then doubled down on Karl’s original reporting: strike two. They had a chance to recover by asking Karl to explain how he got misled on This Week. They blew that when they chickened out and asked Jeff Zeleny to appear instead.

11. None of the major networks–ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN–has an ombudsman. This is mystifying to me. They don’t seem to realize that since the rise of the Internet, their reporting is called into question far more easily and far more effectively. This case was especially likely to blow-up in ABC’s face once Jake Tapper’s report appeared online. When one reporter pisses on another reporter’s scoop, the first reporter enters a danger zone. The overwhelming temptation is to defend the story and treat the critique of it by another reporter as professional jealousy. A wise editor would intervene. (Attention: Rick Klein.) That did not happen. When the newsroom hierarchy fails, as it did here, the ombudsman can step in and force an accounting. But there is no ombudsman at ABC.

Jon Karl has dragged the entire news division at ABC (and now George Stephanopoulos) into his self-dug pit. He got played. His colleagues at other news organizations know it. His friends at the network, were they real friends, would try to talk him out of this disastrous state of denial.

Clearly, I regret the email was quoted incorrectly and I regret that it’s become a distraction from the story, which still entirely stands. I should have been clearer about the attribution. We updated our story immediately.

In the statement he did not apologize. On Twitter he did– for failing to make clear that his reporting was based on a summary provided by a source. My favorite part of his statement is: “Clearly, I regret…” That’s exactly what he and ABC News, through its spokesperson, were refusing to be clear about!

Media Matters has many more quotes from former journalists calling Karl’s actions into question. Also see Josh Marshall’s analysis at Talking Points Memo.

Andrew Tyndall of the Tyndall Report, which tracks television news, sends this:

On Thursday’s CBS Evening News, Major Garrett spelled out how Jonathan Karl’s Republican source had misrepresented the content of the e-mails in his Exclusive on the previous Friday. But Garrett did not mention Karl by name as the one who disseminated the falsity.

On Wednesday, when Karl covered the publication of the actual e-mails by the White House on ABC World News, he resorted to a post hoc, propter hoc sleight of hand to suggest that they vindicated his previous reporting. Garrett, also on Wednesday, reported the opposite: that the relationship between the State Department’s comments and the CIA’s wording changes were coincidental, not causative.

Per Garrett, the CIA redacted its talking points in response to the FBI’s need not to compromise its investigation, not in response to the State Department’s need to avoid Congressional criticism.

Update II, May 19: After thinking about it some more, here’s the problem for ABC:

If a reporter for your network tells the public he has “exclusively” obtained evidence he has not in fact obtained, causing other reporters for the network to repeat that untruth, and part of his report turns out to be wrong, in a way that a.) is politically consequential and b.) would have been avoided if the evidence was actually in the reporter’s possession… what is the proper penalty?

ABC’s current position: The reporter has to say that he regrets the misreport, and apologize for not being clearer, while benefitting from the confusion he created across multiple reports by sometimes being accurate (that he had summaries of emails read to him) and sometimes misleading us with the claim that he had “obtained” the originals. (Link.)

Can that stand? We will see this week, I guess.

Update III, May 20: Looks like we have our answer. There is now an editor’s note attached to the original “exclusive” by Karl. It reads:

Editor’s Note: There were differences between ABC News’ original reporting on an email by Ben Rhodes, below, and the actual wording of that email which have now been corrected. ABC News should have been more precise in its sourcing of those quotes, attributing them to handwritten copies of the emails taken by a Congressional source. We regret that error. The remainder of the report stands as accurate.

I would have retracted the report, both the online and and on air versions. Not only because of the sourcing problems. The entire story seeks to make a scandal out of the fact that that the talking points were edited, or as Karl says on air “dramatically edited!” But how else do you get inter-agency agreement on what to say? Karl says on the air that many of the changes were “directed” by the State Department, but State didn’t have the power to direct anything. With the editor’s note and Karl’s updates attempting to rescue his “exclusive,” the thing is now a mess. All to avoid confessing error and protect a misbegotten scoop.

Academic opinion as surveyed by Salon is strongly against Karl and ABC for flunking the basics of transparency.

Here’s NPR’s report, quoting this one.

The Washington Post fact checker takes on this episode, in particular the White House’s claim that Karl’s Republican sources must have fabricated and “doctored” the emails they talked about with him. He is not impressed with this claim, awarding it Three Pinocchios (significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.) “We see little evidence that much was at play here besides imprecise wordsmithing or editing errors by journalists.”

Update IV, May 22: It is in the nature of these disputes that they get more granular as they go on. Andrew Tyndall, who monitors TV News at the Tyndall Report, has been thinking it through. He sends me an after-action report that I am publishing here. Tyndall effectively isolates the layer of Jon Karl’s report that was, yes, a genuine scoop but also an important part of the story, if you really want to know what happened with the Benghazi talking points: The precise steps through which interagency drafting weakened the text into something opaque and, eventually, deceptive and wrong. That additional detail advances the story, as the Weekly Standard’s earlier reports did. No doubt this is why Karl and ABC are insisting their story “stands.”

But as Tyndall says, Karl’s report also tried to explain these changes–it went into the who and the why–by vaguely suggesting that the White House rep and the State Department rep directed them to be made, or somehow controlled the process. He wants to establish a kind of authorship or custody by State and the White House because he is aiming at another prize, beyond his “precise steps” scoop: catching Jay Carney in a lie or bald misstatement of fact.

The statement he was aiming at was the closer for his Good Morning America report on May 10. “They [the White House] initially said only one word had been changed.” He’s trying to show us that together, State and the White House changed a lot of words. Karl wanted to go beyond his exclusive. He wanted a scoop and a nailed lie too. But he mis-nailed it by getting a bum quote, and by failing to establish the undue authorship claim.

With that in mind, read Andrew Tyndall’s take:

The essence of Jonathan Karl’s scoop in the Benghazi Consulate story on ABC on May 10th, was his exclusive revelation that the talking points prepared for members of the Intelligence Committee by the CIA (the ones that also guided Ambassador Susan Rice on those Sunday morning shows) had gone through a series of 12 drafts, each one more vague and less informative, with the end result that their imprecision turned out to be deceptive. Specifically, the decisions not to redact the point about the anti-blasphemy protests, but to redact the point about the al-Qaeda-connected Ansar al-Sharia militia, amounted to misleading the public.

It is that process of deception-by-redaction that Karl has defended as the central point of his exclusive, and has led him to stand by it. Karl never actually uses the term “deceit” but his implication is clear.

There are two subsidiary elements to the story, which Karl either stated or implied, that do not contradict his deception-by-redaction thesis, yet do cast it in a different light. First, who made the changes? Second, what was the motive for the changes?

1. Who made the changes? Karl’s exclusive on May 10th asserted that either the White House or the State Department made at least some of the changes. The story leads with Jay Carney’s claim that those two institutions only changed one word, a claim that Karl contradicts. He later, on May 15th, reported that the final changes were made by the CIA. He remains silent about which of the intermediary changes were made by the White House or by State instead, yet he stands by his premise that some of them were.

2. What was the motive for the changes? In his exclusive report, Karl focuses on the State Department, with its concerns not to open itself to criticism from members of Congress, as the motivator for the redactions. Subsequently a memo has surfaced, written by Ben Rhodes at the White House, that casts doubt on the State Department’s influence over the CIA. First, Rhodes never singles out State’s concerns; second, he does single out the FBI’s concerns that its investigation should not be compromised, as is standard procedure.

The fact that Karl’s reporting relied on an incorrect paraphrase of Rhodes’ memo, which inaccurately did spell out State’s particular concerns, makes Karl’s decision to point to State as the motivator less convincing. In Karl’s defense, he did not report on World News, either on the 10th or the 15th, that the changes were made to the talking points because of State’s input; only that they were made after State’s input. This distinction between “after” and “because of” is never spelled out for viewers.

On the other hand, as said, he did report that some of the intermediary changes were in fact made by either State or the White House, and earlier on the 10th, on Good Morning America, he quoted from an e-mail (again, one he had not seen but had been read to him) that the CIA changed some words after being “directed” to do so by State (later that day on World News, Karl made no stronger claim than “input” from State).

So, Karl’s scoop about the fact of the changes in the talking points was a genuine one. His reporting on who made the changes and why they were made is vague or shifting or absent.

No one knew if it would work when the Times started to charge regular visitors to its site. There were no experts. But there was a reasonably well-informed debate among people who followed it closely. Here is what they said then.

In a recent speech to the Columbia University business school graduates, the new CEO of the New York Times, Mark Thompson, said this:

Two years ago The Times launched a new digital pay model, essentially asking users of The Times on digital to do what more than a million print users of the newspaper were already doing, which is to pay a regular subscription in return for extensive access to our journalism.

The consensus among the experts was that it wouldn’t work, was foolhardy in fact and not needed. People just weren’t prepared to pay for high quality content on the internet and, besides, wasn’t digital advertising enough – wouldn’t it grow until, just as with print advertising in the golden age of physical newspapers, it alone was enough to support America’s newsrooms?

The part I put in bold is bad information. In my view it should not have been passed along by Mark Thompson to the graduates of one of the world’s leading business schools. It is bad information in four or five ways, which I will describe, but before I do that I have to admit that there is one sense in which Thompson’s “consensus among the experts” is plausibly stated.

If he was using the term “experts” with pure derision, as in “people speaking LOUDLY with all of the confidence but none of the knowledge…” then, YES, there were such people. Definitely. Yelling (reflexively) at the New York Times: Readers won’t pay for news on the internet! Because… because they won’t!

So if in citing “the experts” Thompson was speaking sarcastically about this sort of display, he is unquestionably right: some said that, and probably chuckled among themselves at the cluelessness of the Times. But since when is the opinion of internet yahoos relevant to decision-making at a cultural powerhouse like the New York Times? If the business school students were handed this case–and it is a good case for them–how much time would they spend on propositions like, “you can’t charge for news on the internet because you can’t” and “digital ads will save the day.” Five minutes, maybe?

For all other senses of the term “expert,” Thompson’s statement about the consensus opinion is distorted or just wrong. Bad information, as I will try to show.

Overview: Two years ago The New York Times launched a new digital pay model: The Meter. Along with the people I will be quoting, I had a professional interest in the matter. The sustainability puzzle in the press is the number one problem in journalism at the moment. Therefore The Meter was a big deal for everyone who followed the fortunes of the news business. Mark Thompson was Director General of the BBC at the time. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., CEO Janet Robinson, editor Bill Keller and digital publisher Martin Nisenholtz were the executives in charge at the Times.

The Meter is a leaky paywall. You get a certain number of articles free per month; after that you pay. It’s an attempt to capture revenue from the heaviest users and allow casual visitors to come by freely. With this mixed system you try try to retain the advantages of the open web and gain a new revenue stream. Setting the number of free views, and the cost of a subscription can only be done experimentally: pick a number, see what happens, adjust to that.

The metered system wasn’t entirely new–the Financial Times already had one working–but trying it with a general interest news product like the Times was different. Certain lessons from earlier attempts to charge–especially Times Select– seem to have been learned, but would that make a difference? Impossible to say.

1. There were no experts in what would happen when the New York Times flipped the switch on its pay meter in March, 2011: inside or outside the building. You could try to bring knowledge to bear. (The Times spent $40 million researching it.) You could not say what the users would do with enough precision to make a firm call.

Still, a reasonably well-informed debate about the wisdom of the Times move took place among reporters in the specialist press, bloggers who kept track of paywall news, media writers and journalism professors, working journalists who understood the stakes, and other, perhaps harder-to-classify observers who tried to master the details of the various pay and meter plans and grasp how they work. These people cared how the big experiment of 2011 turned out. Some of them speculated about likely outcomes. Some put pen to paper and tried to calculate the payoff.

2. There was no consensus. People predicted failure for The Meter. Other people stood and applauded the Times for finally doing it. Others were primarily in a mood of uncertainty: they hedged. (I will bring you all these points of view.) To its credit, the team at the Times went ahead despite this confusion. And the Meter is now an estimated $100 million revenue stream. Paid digital subscribers: around 700,000. When Thompson took the podium at Columbia, there was no need to create a cartoon debate for the Times decision-making to stand out. The real story is bold enough.

3. The median view or center line in the debate was not, “It will never work.” If there was no consensus but a range of views, we can still try to identify the center line, where the sample is divided in half. Here’s how I would summarize it.

This is a big gamble. It might work or it might not. The Times meter seems to be intelligently designed, with an awareness of most of the risks. Whether it will pay off cannot be known until the numbers come in– not just how many sign up, but what The Meter does to advertising rates, what it costs to market the product, whether it slows the erosion in print subscribers.

4. Opinion within the Times was split along similar lines. Because no one knew what the users would do. This split was reported in the press at the time. (I will bring it to you.) That Thompson declines to menton it is… odd.

5. No one thought digital advertising alone would solve the problem. Thompson is simply wrong when he paraphrases the experts:

Wasn’t digital advertising enough – wouldn’t it grow until, just as with print advertising in the golden age of physical newspapers, it alone was enough to support America’s newsrooms?

By 2010, when the Times announced The Meter, it was well known (again, to anyone following the story but maybe not to assorted internet yahoos) that digital advertising was not about to replace lost revenues for the print press. Knowing this fact was basic to participating in the debate at all.

When I say Thompson gave bad information to the graduates of the Columbia Business School–and he did–I don’t expect you to take my word for it. I am going to link you to the evidence for my propositions 1 to 5 above. Interspersed with quotations from 2010 and 2011, I bring you commentary from people who were following it even more closely that I was.

Don’t have time for those details? Then just click and browse these two links: Nieman Lab’s round-up on Dec, 13, 2010 and a similar forum in March 17, 2011. Josh Benton, director of the Lab and one of the people I sought recollections from, comments on the 2010 round-up:

To paraphrase each, ranked roughly in order of pro- to anti-:

Brill: It makes a lot of sense.
Kennedy: A smart and nuanced approach.
Overholser: It seems like an informed attempt.
Webb: I agree with the paywall, but subscribers will want fewer ads.
Fry: It’s too restrictive in some ways and too loose in others.
Langeveld: It’s confusing, but they’ll tighten it over time.
Cohn: Happy to see them try, not very optimistic.
Stray: It won’t change the NYT’s revenue in an earth-shaking way.
Dash: It’s too complicated a setup.
McCarthy: It’s short-sighted and doomed.
Buttry: It’s ridiculous on multiple levels.

These are all smart people. Some thought it was a good idea, some didn’t.

You can see the same spread in this weekly review post by Mark Coddington. (“There was no consensus of initial opinion about the plan…”) Benton’s reflections:

My general thought at the time was happiness that someone was taking the paywall leap — because we’d spend all of 2008/09/10 talking about paywalls and their prospects, usually in ideological ways, but we had precious little data on what worked and what doesn’t. My expectation was that it would do better than TimesSelect had done —

— because people were more willing to pay for content in 2011 than they were in 2005

— because the value proposition was more clear (all news content vs. just columnist and a grab bag of other stuff)

— because the Times’ digital presence, always good, had kept improving over that span

— because the web had grown so much outside the United States among elite potential Times digital subscribers

but that it was unclear whether the growth curve would flatten out as it did for TimesSelect, and if so, at what level it would flatten out.

That’s what the debate was about: the nitty gritty of such projections. You can hear Josh wrestling with those details here. Why couldn’t Mark Thompson do the same?

Let’s listen to some other voices, keeping in mind Thompson’s capsule summary: The consensus among the experts was that it wouldn’t work, was foolhardy in fact and not needed…

Alan Mutter, Reflections of a Newsosaur: NYT.Com pay scheme can succeed, but…

The long-awaited, much-delayed digital pay scheme at the New York Times should work just fine, but that doesn’t mean it can be replicated successfully in other markets. Accordingly, other publishers should proceed with caution.

Rick Edmonds, Poynter: New York Times paywall could increase circulation and ad revenue while protecting print

The New York Times new metered paywall corrects the mistake it made in its first foray into charging for online content — blocking search. At the same time, the paywall represents a calculated risk on maintaining and ultimately growing digital ad revenues.

Megan McCarthy, at the time editor of Mediagazer, Nieman roundtable, Dec. 2010.

I think the New York Times’s paywall is short-sighted and doomed. If they want to make the Times more valuable, they need to focus on changing their model of digital advertising to be as profitable as their print side. The Times has the clout to help Madison Avenue realize the value of online advertising. I’m not sure why they’d rather deal with the intricacies of custom subscriptions and meters instead of charging brands and agencies which hold much more money and can get much more value (exposure) from the Times in return.

Ken Doctor, Newsonomics and Nieman Lab:

March 14, 2011, NYT’s good timing on pay launch, amid news chaos.

Charging for digital news is no panacea. It’s a platform for a growth, and the beginning of a new business model. Most newspaper company CEOs have done the math, and with the current trajectory of print ad decline, modest digital ad growth and no digital circulation money, they have no hope of sustaining their businesses into 2015. That’s a bleak, but fair, conclusion.

So, as we approach the proliferation of pay models, consider the Times’ and other moves as getting up on a bicycle and learning to ride it. For 15 years, newspaper companies have been careening around on unicycles, trying to make digital ad revenue, in and of itself and with too little attention to core readers, work. Now, they are trading in those unicycles for bicycles. 2011 is the year of training wheels, before the tough road work — tablet-focused product renewal — consumes their attention.

March 17, 2011, The Newsonomics of The New York Times’ pay fence

It’s a high price, a gamble, and a big hedge — see Test 5 below — against print subscribers migrating too quickly to the tablet. Since it is not charging print subs, it’s going to be an uphill battle to get non-print people to pay a minimum of $195 a year for something that was free, and it eschews conventional wisdom that $9.95 a month is a consumer limit on many digital items. The lack of an annual offer is glaring, and makes it far less friendly to expense accounts for business readers.

Though the FT and the Wall Street Journal have long operated successful pay models, the Times’ leap is a big one: The Times isn’t mainly a business newspaper. If it can succeed charging readers for “general news,” that’s a milestone for newspapers around the world. Most fundamentally, it adds a second leg — digital circulation revenue — to the new business model for newspaper companies. Fifteen years into the Internet, they’ve proven to themselves that digital advertising money alone won’t sustain their newsrooms in the years ahead, as print continues its inevitable decline

Ryan Chittum, Columbia Journalism Review: The New York Times Paywall Looks Good.

The New York Times paywall is here, and it’s about time. Don’t ask me why it took so long and why it cost $40 million to build, the point is after a decade and a half of giving away its expensive journalism online, the Times is saying it’s worth something: Pay us, please.

Chittum has continued to follow the paywall debate with intensity, as you can see here and here.

Joseph Tartakoff, paidContent.org: How Much Revenue Can The New York Times Paywall Generate?

We believe at least 500,000 people (or more than 10 percent of those heavy users) may be willing to pay up — and here’s how we get to that number. TimesSelect, the 2007 initiative that charged online-only readers $7.95 a month to accessNYTimes‘ columnists and some original content attracted 227,000 paid subscribers, or about 1.17 percent of the 13 million people who were reading NYTimes.com at the time.

If that same percentage agrees to pay for the new digital subscriptions, that would amount to about 527,000 subscribers in the U.S. alone. The minimum price of $15 for NYTimes.com plus smartphone access would generate about $100 million in additional annual revenue for the newspaper. A blend of subscriptions would push sales higher. And, the number of subscribers could be significantly greater, as well, considering that a higher percentage of people might be willing to pay for all of the Times‘ digital content [rather] than for just a piece of it — even though the price is higher too.

Staci Kramer, paidContent.org:  The NYT Pay Plan’s Most Dangerous Foe: Perception.

For all this research and all the effort, the digital subscription space is a work in progress and this particular plan, is still experimental. Nothing is frozen in place. Prices can change. Plans can change. Consumer behavior in research and reality may not match. The Times invested tens of millions ($40-to-$50 million, according to Bloomberg) to build the system to be as flexible as possible, including the ability to allow universal access for major news events. Sulzberger and company need to stand fast enough to see if it works — TimesSelect lasted for two years — and be nimble enough to fix what doesn’t.

Along with Ken Doctor (quoted above) Staci Kramer of paidcontent.org was probably the closest student of the Times paywall. She did the kind of reporting that tries to nail down every detail, so I especially wanted to know what she thought:

I think Mark Thompson is very bright but he’s wrong about the “expert concensus,” particularly on his last two points.

The majority of knowledgeable observers, industry analysts and insiders have known for years [that] digital advertising alone wouldn’t be enough and that just as is the case with print, which relies on advertising and subscriptions, multiple revenue streams would be needed. Ditto for relying only on subscriptions to make up the difference during/after the print-digital transition. I also recognized — and contended — early on that making full online access a value-add for print subscribers versus charging extra for it was needed to keep that revenue stream healthy.

As options to reach news and info have grown — smartphones, tablets, smart TV, etc — so have the opportunities for subscriptions (cross-platform access as a lure), advertising, sponsorships, content licensing (NYT Crosswrods, for example), ebooks and more. The TimesCenter provides a steady stream of revenue from tickets for NYT events as well as fees from outside conferences or events.

(Even The Guardian, the champion of open-access web news, charges for apps and has been working on additional revenue streams.)

Many have consistently opposed charging for access to online news, particularly switching existing ad-supported sites to subscription for all or some access. In the case of the Times, the biggest argument centered on loss of influence when TimesSelect made opinions and columnists subscription only.

Kramer makes an important point. Among some of those who said “don’t do it” the argument was not, “because it will never work.” They were pointing at a subtler danger: The Meter might work and yet diminish the Times as an influence machine and public service. That seems to have been the concern of Emily Bell, now at Columbia J-school, but before that digital editor at The Guardian, which had to struggle with the same uncertainties.

Emily Bell in The Guardian, The Times’s paywall move does not begin to tackle the wider challenge.

So the challenge for the Times, and the rest of us, in a world of fragmented media is not principally to make journalism pay, but to keep it relevant. The paywall debate at heart is partly pragmatic, as the risk of implementing the strategy is high and the rewards are unknown; but also philosophical, about whether journalism is viewed as a commodity or a democratic necessity.

Those of us who have been around the paywall block a few times, and there have been many guided tours over the past decade, see it as a very risky and sometimes philosophically unpalatable option. The paywall may address the issue of newspaper circulation decline, but it does not begin to tackle the far greater challenge of telling effective stories and creating activities and audiences in a constantly changing digital landscape.

To stimulate a market for news, you need an engaged population, so perhaps the news business needs to think harder about creating engagement rather than merely encouraging consumption. I am happy to be proved wrong, but I still find it hard to understand how deliberately downsizing your audience is ever going to help with the broader problem.

“I think I was sceptical about the ultimate return on investment from the Times paywall and remain troubled that ultimately bundling and charging for news and information across the board is problematic,” Bell told me last week. “I am not and have never been opposed to payment mechanisms on news sites but have been consistent in my view that the paywall is not a panacea.” The Meter is not by itself going to solve the problem. But nether is digital advertising. That’s why Bell focuses on a third factor: creating engagement.

When I asked her, Megan Garber, then of Nieman Lab, now of the Atlantic, recalled ”a concern about the Times’ place within the social web, and within the social sphere more broadly.”

The Times had been not just a newspaper or a news product, but also, in the Arthur Miller sense, a conversation. It had played an important role in the digital public square. I know one of my concerns about the meter — and one of the things, as a media-watcher, that I was paying a lot of attention to when it came to the model’s outcomes — was what would happen to that role when the meter was in effect. Would people be disincentivized from sharing a Times link, not wanting to add to their friends’ and followers’ monthly tallies? Or would the meter prove malleable enough that those concerns would be mitigated? Could the Times — to use the jargon of 2010 — really be a walled garden and public square at the same time?

Felix Salmon, Reuters: The NYT paywall arrives

Emily Bell reckons that the number of people who’ll even hit the paywall in the first place is only about 5% of the NYT’s 33 million or so unique visitors. That’s 1.6 million people — compare the 1.3 million people who already subscribe to the paper on Sundays. The former is not a perfect superset of the latter, of course, but there’s a big overlap; let’s say that realistically the NYT is going after a universe of no more than 800,000 people that it’s going to ask to subscribe. And let’s be generous and say that 15% of them do so, paying an average of $200 per year apiece. That’s extra revenues of $24 million per year.

$24 million is a minuscule amount for the New York Times company as a whole; it’s dwarfed not only by total revenues but even by those total digital advertising revenues of more than $300 million a year. This is what counts as a major strategic move within the NYT?

…I just can’t see how this move makes any kind of financial sense for the NYT. The upside is limited; the downside is that it ceases to be the paper of record for the world. Who would take that bet?

Mathew Ingram, GigaOm: Grey Lady’s Troubles With the P-Word.

So what will become of the NYT if and when it actually launches a pay system? The response from many observers seems to be binary — either it will succeed or it will fail. But the real danger is that it will be somewhere in between: neither a runaway success, nor an abject failure, but a slow and steady decline (Jeff Jarvis thinks it will likely be the latter).

The paper’s previous paywall experiment, Times Select, which was dismantled in 2007, arguably fell into that chasm too; plenty of people paid the monthly subscription, but not enough to make a real difference to the bottom line (for what it’s worth, the newspaper I used to work for had much the same experience with its own version of Times Select), and eventually the number of people paying leveled off. In the end, the paper decided (as my former employer did) that it just wasn’t worth it.

Will a metered model produce a different outcome? Perhaps. On the other hand, someone once said that insanity consists of “doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.”

Nicholas Carr, Rough Type: The Times delayed, leaky paywall.

The Times subscription plan may fail. It may be built on a misreading of the marketplace. But it’s not super weird, and it’s not cockeyed. It’s a reasonable, thoughtful plan, and the company may discover that a delayed, leaky paywall is the kind of paywall that pays.

Frédéric Filloux, Monday Note: The numbers behind the paywall.

A carefully set up paywall significantly increases revenue as long as:
* it doesn’t block access for the general audience (minimum traffic loss)
* it doesn’t discourage linking from other sites (preservation of the page rank)
* it targets only the heaviest users, those willing to pay $6.00 rather than $2.00 per month, and those ready to be charged for ad-free content on mobile. Or on a Tablet.

 Jean-Louis Gassée, Monday Note: The NY Times: Un-Free At Last!

On March 28th, after much handwringing, the New York Times will finally deploy a paywall. NYT fans, your author included, rejoice: We see this as a necessary condition for the newspaper’s survival. Necessary…but not sufficient.

Lauren Kirchner, Columbia Journalism Review: “Information Wants to Be Free”; The NYT Does Not

There’s a big misunderstanding here. Journalism is not mere “information”; it is a product, created by people at some expense. No one would say “groceries want to be free” and use that as an excuse to steal steaks. Or I guess some people might, but those people would be jerks, and also criminals. “Information wants to be free” does not mean “journalism wants to be free,” or, more to the point, “journalists want to work for free.”

I like the way the Free Software Foundation puts it: “Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.”

If we want to keep getting quality news, someone has to pay for it. We, as readers, don’t have a “right” to free anything. Journalists, though, do have a right to get paid for their intellectual labor. If simple traffic and advertising isn’t doing the trick, then that money has to come from somewhere else. No aphorism is going to deliver us from that basic truth.

Jeff Jarvis, CUNY and Buzzmachine:

January 17, 2010, The cockeyed economics of metering reading

The irony of the report that The New York Times is going to start metering readers and charging those who come back more often is this: They would would end up charging — and, they should fear, sending away — the readers who are worth the most while serving free those who are worth least.

…Clay Shirky has ridiculed micropayments, saying that we don’t like being nickel-and-dimed. I’ll ridicule metering, reminding those who contemplate it to remember what we think of meter maids. We curse them.

There is only one thing that can happen should The TImes put a meter on us. It will shrink.

December 19, 2011: Why not a reverse meter?

Imagine that you pay to get access to The Times. Everyone does. You pay for one article. Or you pay $20 as a deposit so you’re not bothered every time you come. But whenever you add value to The Times, you earn a credit that delays the next bill.

* You see ads, you get credit.
* You click: more credit.
* You come back often and read many pages: credit.
* You promote The Times on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or your blog: credit. The more folks share what you’ve shared, the more credit you get.
* You buy merchandise via Times e-commerce: credit.
* You buy tickets to a Times event: credit.
* You hand over data that makes you more valuable to The Times and its advertisers (e.g., revealing where you’re going on your next trip): credit.
* You add pithy comment to articles that other readers appreciate: credit.
* You take on tasks in crowdsourced journalistic endeavors: credit.
* You answer a reporter’s question on Twitter and the reporter uses your information: credit.
* You correct an error in a story: credit.
* You give a news tip or an idea for an article The Times publishes: credit.

Maybe you never pay for The Times again because The Times has gained more value out of its relationship with you. If, on the other hand, you hardly do any of those things, then you have to pay for using The Times.

Jarvis told me that he has since recanted his conclusion: “it will shrink.” He said: “I fear it will not grow as it could have.”

Clay Shirky, NYU. I was unable to find anything Shirky had written or said about the likelihood of New York Times meter succeeding in either January, 2010, when it was announced, or spring 2011, when it was launched. I include him only because his name is sometimes mentioned among those who predicted that the Times experiment would fail. As far as I can tell, this claim is untrue. I asked him about it and he told me this:

The meaning of the word “paywall” has changed.

The model whose failure I have consistently predicted is the “If you don’t pay us any money, we won’t let you look at any ads!” We used to call this model — require payment from 100% of the audience, for access to 100% of the content  – a paywall, and it does not work for general-interest news online. (Indeed, almost by definition, a publication that pursues this model becomes a newsletter.)

Sometime around the turn of the decade, though, what we used to call metered billing (and which is more accurately labeled a threshold payment) started to be labeled paywalls as well. So now we have a word that describes both models that lock out 100% of non-paying readers *and* models that allow something like 97% of non-paying readers in.So almost nothing anyone said about paywalls, sense one, has any predictive value for the behavior of paywalls, sense two. (Indeed, I’ve stopped using that word, for that reason.)

What I did say at the time of the NYT announcement was that I didn’t know where that system would end up on the spectrum of ‘donation’ to ‘loyalty tax’. But I certainly didn’t tar it with the same brush as ‘lock out all the users’ schemes (including QPass and TimesSelect), which have always been disastrous, but whose design is radically different from threshold-billing models.

Jay Rosen, NYU. You might wonder, what did the author of this post think? I didn’t write anything about the prospects for the Times meter, except for this about one puzzling detail, but I did give an interview to NPR about it. There I said it was a “difficult choice” and that it was understandable that they agonized for a year about what to do.

There’s really no way to tell yet. It’s a gamble by the New York Times. I don’t think they know if it’s going to work. And we still have a lot of details missing from their plan…

The people who work for the New York Times believe that their journalism should be addressed to the public at large. And one of the things that happens when you start to charge is, you’re in effect cutting yourself off from the widest possible public your journalism can reach. And if the real product of the New York Times is its influence, then this is a very risky move with the very heart and soul of the newspaper, which is its ability to affect and influence public conversation.

I hedged. And I worried, as Megan Garber did: would the Times be the same force?

A final observation about the ways in which Thompson was passing bad information to the graduates of Columbia’s B-school. Inside the building, there was tremendous anxiety about whether the decision the Times took was a wise and necessary move, or slow motion suicide. No one knew! Gabriel Sherman of New York magazine, who broke the story about the decision to go with a metered system, found the same thing:

The decision to go paid is monumental for the Times, and culminates a yearlong debate that grew contentious, people close to the talks say. In favor of a paid model were Keller and managing editor Jill Abramson. [Martin] Nisenholtz and former deputy managing editor Jon Landman, who was until recently in charge of nytimes.com, advocated for a free site.

The argument for remaining free was based on the belief that nytimes.com is growing into an English-language global newspaper of record, with a vast audience — 20 million unique readers — that, Nisenholtz and others believed, would prove lucrative as web advertising matured. (The nytimes.com homepage, for example, has sold out on numerous occasions in the past year.) As other papers failed to survive the massive migration to the web, the Times would be the last man standing and emerge with even more readers. Going paid would capture more circulation revenue, but risk losing significant traffic and with it ad dollars. At an investor conference this fall, Nisenholtz alluded to this tension: “At the end of the day, if we don’t get this right, a lot of money falls out of the system.”

The Times itself later confirmed this basic portrait. “The risks were manifold,” wrote reporter Jeremy Peters. “The company might jeopardize its huge online reach, and no one could predict what would happen to digital advertising, which had gone from being a drop in the bucket to more than a quarter of The New York Times Company’s overall advertising revenue.” Jim Roberts was the assistant managing editor for digital at the time. He later recalled his thinking:

I argued against it. It was a position that wasn’t extremely popular throughout our newsroom but I really worried a lot that our audience which we had worked so aggressively to build would shrink a lot.

I really worried that we’d lose a lot of our younger readers who we had really aggressively courted with a bunch of innovative ideas, social media use etc. I worried deeply they would flee, worried there would be an impact on our advertisers, if our readership shrank.

“I’m here to tell you I was wrong,” Roberts said in October, 2011.

If Mark Thompson has said this to the graduates of Columbia B-school…

Times people were quite nervous about it, but determined to get the decision right. Opinion outside the Times was uncertain– and often uninformed. Opinion inside the building was very well informed, but still uncertain.

… I could rate him as truthful. But he did not, and that is unfortunate, as well as weird for a news executive. Giving a commencement speech. To a new class of MBAs. Who could check up on him.

“Edward Snowden’s decision to leak to Greenwald, and Glenn’s domination of newsland for several days, tells us that politics: none is not the only way of excelling in journalism. It now has to share the stage with politics: some.”

I offer one observation about the story that has consumed the worlds of journalism and politics for the last eight days: leaks describing how vast is the United States government’s electronic monitoring of communications. Near the center of that story is Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian columnist who was one of three journalists that the leaker, Edward Snowden, chose to trust.

For five days, June 5 to June 9, Greenwald sat atop the journalism world as the revelations he brought forward jolted the rest of the press. As Jack Shafer of Reuters wrote on June 8: “This will now fuel new cycles of reporting, leaks and scoops — and another, and another — as new sources are cultivated and reportorial scraps gathering mold in journalists’ notebooks gain new relevance and help break stories. Greenwald’s storm will continue to rage…”

It will. Which brings me to my one observation. This should have been obvious from many prior events trending in the same direction, but as things stand today the proposition is clear to all but the most resistant minds in legacy media: The professional stance that proscribes all political commitments and discourages journalists from having a clear view or taking a firm position on matters in dispute (you can call it objectivity, if you like, or viewlessness, which I like better) is one way of doing good work. A very different professional stance, where the conclusions that you come to by staring at the facts and thinking through the issues serve to identify your journalism… this is another way of doing good work.

They are both valid. They are both standard. (And “traditional.”) They are both major league. Greenwald operates in the second fashion, but the language we have for this style — calling him a blogger or an advocate, hoping that these shorthands convey what’s different about him — is not very illuminating. “Blurring the line between opinion pieces and straight reporting…” is not very illuminating.

My intervention:

Politics: none is what most of the editors and reporters at the Washington Post practice and preach. (But not all.) It is not the natural, inevitable or “right” way to do journalism, but rather a form of persuasion in which journalists try to get us to accept their account of the way things are by foreswearing any political commitment, avoiding overt displays of opinion, and eluding strong conclusions via quotation or summary of competing arguments.

Of course they also try to persuade us by pointing to irrefutable facts, uncovering new information, and being accurate, truthful and fair, but this does not distinguish them from…

Politics: some is what the journalists at the Guardian practice and preach. It is not the natural or inevitable way to do journalism, but a form of persuasion in which journalists try to get us to accept their account by being up front about their commitments, grounding their freely-expressed opinions in fact, and arriving at conclusions through the sound conduct of public argument.

“None” journalists have certain advantages over their “some” colleagues, but the reverse is also true. If you want to appear equally sympathetic to all potential sources, politics: none is the way to go. If you want to avoid pissing off the maximum number of users, politics: none gets it done. (This has commercial implications. They are obvious.) But: if you’re persuaded that transparency is the better route to trust, politics: some is the better choice. And if you want to attract sources who themselves have a political commitment or have come to a conclusion about matters contested within the political community, being open about your politics can be an advantage. That is the lesson that Glenn Greenwald has been teaching the profession of journalism for the last week. Edward Snowden went to him because of his commitments. This has implications for reporters committed to the “no commitments” style.

I know Glenn. Glenn is a pro. I mean that in different ways. Obviously he gets paid to write his columns. But he is also an independent force in drawing traffic, reader reaction and dollar support. He is methodical. He is responsible. He thinks the public should know what’s going on. He spends most of his time verifying, digging and writing, delivering information in the form of public argument about what the government is really doing. Familiar in the arts of denunciation and the joys of savage critique, he is also trained as a litigator. He is good at dividing what can be documented from what can be said because the documentation is missing.

This is the life of a political journalist, although it is equally correct to say that Glenn is a lawyer who writes about the fate of the republic rather than practicing law. He is also an activist, if we mean by that someone who thinks his fellow citizens should wake up and change things, and who participates himself within the limits of the forms he has chosen. With Greenwald the forms are writing, blogging, researching, political commentary in the “reported opinion” style, public speaking and appearing on television. He is good at all of them.

Edward Snowden’s decision to leak to Greenwald, and Glenn’s domination of newsland for several days tells us that politics: none is just one way of excelling at political journalism. I do not think it invalid. It simply has to share the stage with politics: some. Together they make for a strong press.

“You have to know your stuff. You have to mute your instinct to reduce everything to the next election. This is serious business. We need interviewers who are dead serious about holding people accountable for what they say.”

Watch what happens at the 7:00 mark in this interview that CNN’s Candy Crowley did today with Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, chair of the House intelligence committee.

Here’s what the transcript says. The part that I bring to your attention is in bold.

ROGERS: I’m just saying that there’s a lot of questions we don’t have the answers to, and it goes beyond the bounds of him trying to claim that he’s a whistleblower, which he is not. A whistleblower comes to the appropriate authorities with appropriate classifications so that we can investigate any possible claim. He didn’t do that. He grabbed up information. He made preparations to go to China, and then he collected it up, bolted to China, and then decided he was going to disclose very sensitive national security information, including, by the way, that benefits the Chinese and other adversaries when it comes to intelligence relationships. I just find that that — that doesn’t comport with the story, and it certainly doesn’t comport with the story that the media is portraying about some have called a hero. I think he’s betrayed his country, and he should be treated just like that.

CROWLEY: As a final question, I want to turn to some home grown politics here and ask you about your decision not to run for the Senate…

No, Candy Crowley. Just… no. You do not let Mike Rogers invoke the established procedures for whistleblowers to get a hearing within the system without asking him if he thinks the track record is good for previous whistleblowers who did just that. Because the track record is terrible! This is from a column in The Guardian by Thomas Drake, a whistleblower who did as Rogers recommended:

…in accordance with the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, I took my concerns up within the chain of command, to the very highest levels at the NSA, and then to Congress and the Department of Defense. I understand why Snowden has taken his course of action, because he’s been following this for years: he’s seen what’s happened to other whistleblowers like me.

By following protocol, you get flagged – just for raising issues. You’re identified as someone they don’t like, someone not to be trusted. I was exposed early on because I was a material witness for two 9/11 congressional investigations. In closed testimony, I told them everything I knew – about Stellar Wind, billions of dollars in fraud, waste and abuse, and the critical intelligence, which the NSA had but did not disclose to other agencies, preventing vital action against known threats. If that intelligence had been shared, it may very well have prevented 9/11.

But as I found out later, none of the material evidence I disclosed went into the official record. It became a state secret even to give information of this kind to the 9/11 investigation.

I reached a point in early 2006 when I decided I would contact a reporter. I had the same level of security clearance as Snowden. If you look at the indictment from 2010, you can see that I was accused of causing “exceptionally grave damage to US national security”. Despite allegations that I had tippy-top-secret documents, In fact, I had no classified information in my possession, and I disclosed none to the Baltimore Sun journalist during 2006 and 2007. But I got hammered: in November 2007, I was raided by a dozen armed FBI agents, when I was served with a search warrant. The nightmare had only just begun, including extensive physical and electronic surveillance.

We know that Edward Snowden was aware of this history because he told the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman about it.

Whistleblowers before him, he said, had been destroyed by the experience. Snowden wanted “to embolden others to step forward,” he wrote, by showing that “they can win.”

Here’s what national security reporter James Risen of the New York Times said the same day on Meet the Press about this breezy claim that Snowden should have followed procedure, instead of going public.

JAMES RISEN:
And I think one of the reasons that’s happened and has repeatedly happened throughout the War on Terror is that the system, the internal system for whistle-blowing, for the watchdog and oversight system is broken. There is no good way for anyone inside the government do go through the chain of command and report about something like this. They all fear retaliation, they fear prosecution.
And so most whistleblowers, the really, the only way they now have is to go to the press or to go to someone, go outside like Snowden did. He chose people in the press to go to. He picked and chose who he wanted. But the problem is people inside the system who try to go through the chain of command get retaliated against, punished, and they–
ANDREA MITCHELL:
I–
JAMES RISEN:
–eventually learn not to do it anymore.

The system is broken. (See also this account in USA Today.) So I’m sorry, Candy Crowley, but it is simply not good enough – you are not doing your job well – when you permit Mike Rogers to say what he said about whistleblowers without following up, especially when the topic to which you shifted is how Rogers feels about his decision not to run for Senate. You have to be better prepared. You have to know your stuff. You have to mute your instinct to reduce everything to the next election. This is serious business. We need interviewers who are dead serious about holding people accountable for what they say. So please: get with it.

That’s my interpretation. But watch the clip and see what you think.

On Meet the Press Sunday, host David Gregory said the question, “who is a journalist?” was raised by Glenn Greenwald’s dealings with Edward Snowden, the 30 year-old American who is currently on the run from the government after leaking classified information. Gregory asked:

To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movement, why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald be charged with a crime?

Greenwald objected to this: during the show, after the show on Twitter, and on other shows the same day. On Meet the Press (transcript) he said:

I think it’s pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies. The assumption in your question, David, is completely without evidence, the idea that I’ve aided and abetted him in anyway… [snip] If you want to embrace that theory, it means that every investigative journalist in the United States who works with their sources, who receives classified information is a criminal.

On Twitter he said: “Who needs the government to try to criminalize journalism when you have David Gregory to do it?” Gregory replied to that tweet on the same NBC program Greenwald had just left, a ricochet that tells us something is at stake here.

This is the problem, for somebody who claims that he’s a journalist, who would object to a journalist raising questions, which is not actually embracing any particular point of view. And that’s part of the tactics of the debate here when, in fact, lawmakers have questioned him. There’s a question about his role in this, The Guardian’s role in all of this. It is actually part of the debate, rather than going after the questioner, he could take on the issues.

Gregory told us he had no view of the matter to advance (“I’m not embracing anything…”) he was just doing his job: asking hard questions, some of which get uncomfortable for the guest. Chuck Todd of NBC agreed that Greenwald should explain how ”involved” he was with the leaker, Edward Snowden. “Did he have a role beyond being a receiver for this information?”

Greenwald continued the exchange on CNN’s Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz:

KURTZ: My time is short. I have to ask you whether you’re concerned, if public opinion and the media environment turns against Ed Snowden, whether you as somebody who’s worked closely with him will be tarred almost as a kind of co-conspirator.

GREENWALD: Well, the Obama administration has flirted with that theory with other reporters, David Gregory all but endorsed it when I gave him an interview with him earlier on “Meet the Press.”

So, sure, it’s an issue. But it’s not going to constrain me or deter me in any way. I believe in the First Amendment and the freedom of the press guarantee in it.

I have some notes and comments on what happened here, which I will update as debate on the episode continues. But first, watch this clip of the June 23rd Meet the Press interview (via Crooks and Liars.) If you want to know what I think, meet me on the other side…

1. Whether Glenn Greenwald will and should be charged with a crime is fair game to ask anyone, including Greenwald. The approach other interviewers have used most often is to ask Greenwald if he’s worried about prosecution. There are other ways to do it. I see nothing wrong with the question. But Gregory went beyond that, as I will try to show.

2. That certain steps the government might take to prevent the escape of its secrets would criminalize normal practice in journalism is also worth asking about. On air and on Twitter, Greenwald tried to insert as context McClatchy’s latest report:

Even before a former U.S. intelligence contractor exposed the secret collection of Americans’ phone records, the Obama administration was pressing a government-wide crackdown on security threats that requires federal employees to keep closer tabs on their co-workers and exhorts managers to punish those who fail to report their suspicions…

“Hammer this fact home . . . leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States,” says a June 1, 2012, Defense Department strategy for the program that was obtained by McClatchy.

3. Gregory decided to push the premise of a possible prosecution of Glenn Greenwald. Leaving behind “are you worried that the government will come after you?” he also passed over:

Snowdon knows he committed a crime by releasing classified material. He says he did it to alert the public to an abuse of power.You’re trying to alert the public to what you see as an abuse of power. Are you also defying the law to make it happen?

The point is: there are ways to challenge Greenwald and ask him about the law that do not involve…

4. David Gregory’s phrase: To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden… renders the situation in a threatening way. His premise packs a punch. For the criminalization of journalism is most likely to happen when normal relationships with sources get called “aiding and abetting” by the state. That’s why so many journalists flipped out when similar language was used in a government affidavit about James Rosen, the Fox News reporter who was investigated in a separate leak case.

5. “He seeded his question with a veiled accusation of federal criminal wrongdoing, very much in the tradition of ‘how long have you been beating your wife.’” That’s how Erik Wemple of the Washington Post put it in his assessment of the same incident. “Mr. Gregory may have thought he was just being provocative, but if you tease apart his inquiry, it suggests there might be something criminal in reporting out important information from a controversial source,” wrote David Carr in the New York Times.

6. Gregory’s attempts to separate Greenwald from normal practice matter. Greenwald is “somebody who claims that he’s a journalist,” Gregory said. (Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t.) What we know is that Glenn is a polemicist, prosecutor for a point of view. “The question of who’s a journalist may be up to a debate with regard to what you’re doing,” he told Greenwald. “What is journalism?” is involved here, he said to Republican political consultant and NBC contributor Mike Murphy. (Murphy agreed.) Why did Gregory turn his table on Meet the Press into a “who’s a journalist” seminar if he wasn’t trying to place Greenwald outside the club?

7. And that is why I wrote my June 13 post, Politics: some / Politics: none. Two ways to excel in political journalism. Neither dominates. Whether journalists with a source inside the government have a clear POV or claim “no-POV, just the news,” whether they are called columnists or reporters by their employers, whether they are doing a documentary to rouse public opinion or a news story for a wire service– these are considerations irrelevant to any claim on membership in the press and its protections.

8. Former general counsel to the NSA and Bush Admninistration official Stewart Baker has a blog, at which he wonders whether Barton Gellman of the Washington Post – Snowden also went to him – “has slipped from journalist to advocate.” In prosecuting leaks the government is supposed to take special precautions around a journalist. But an advocate? Maybe not so much. You see it matters what you call these people. It matters when you try to divide them from “real” journalism. I’m not sure David Gregory understands that.

9. From what I can tell (and we cannot see fully into this from the outside) in interacting with Edward Snowden, the Guardian have handled their source in a way that is fundamentally similar to the Washington Post’s handling of Snowden. And on “activity protected by the First Amendment” grounds, I see no difference between Greenwald’s Snowden-derived journalism and Gellman’s Snowden-derived journalism. David Gregory didn’t present any evidence for such a difference. In fact he said nothing about Gellman and the Post “aiding and abetting.” Why?

10. David Gregory does not know it, but journalism with a point of view, journalism in the style that calls for viewlessness, and advocacy journalism can all deliver good work in the imperfect art of source-driven reportage and commentary. They can all be criticized, too: for hyping the story, falling in love with their sources or failing to apply doubt where needed– Greenwald and Gellman and their colleagues included. This is normal debate. “To the extent that you have aided and abetted…” is not. It suggests transgression against professional norms. But on what grounds? Gregory didn’t try to establish any. That’s one thing that made his intervention so odd.

11. Barton Gellman made an important point in defending himself against Stewart Baker’s criticism. In a sense I am an advocate, he said. But… “What @stewartbaker overlooks is that my advocacy is for open debate of secret powers. That’s what journalists do.” This is not the View from Nowhere. This is acknowledging that journalists are actors too.

12. “There’s a question about his role in this, The Guardian’s role in all of this…” is David Gregory gesturing toward an argument he apparently wants to make for why Greenwald and The Guardian are beyond the pale. But we never find out what they have done to deserve this placement. Because that’s not how he sees himself: as a man mounting arguments on Meet the Press. Instead he just asks the questions that have become necessary to ask because people are asking them. The more he relies on tautologies like this, the weaker he sounds.

13. I agree with Ben Smith of Buzzfeed: You don’t have to like Edward Snowden– or Glenn Greenwald, for that matter. While it’s natural to focus on the moral standing of the source, the story stands or falls on other grounds:

Snowden’s personal story is interesting only because the new details he revealed are so much more interesting. We know substantially more about domestic surveillance than we did, thanks largely to stories and documents printed by The Guardian. They would have been just as revelatory without Snowden’s name on them. The shakeout has produced more revelatory reporting, notably this new McClatchy piece on the way in which President Obama’s obsession with leaks has manifested itself in the bureaucracy with a new “Insider Threat Program.”

14. True: we know substantially more than we did about the surveillance state. Also true: the public debate we did not have in 2010 after the Washington Post’s massive reporting project, Top Secret America, we are having now. This is the main reason I support what The Guardian and the Washington Post are doing, although I recognize that their actions (and Snowden’s) are going to generate a lot of pushback.

15. Glenn Greenwald is going to face more and more questions about his motives and methods as the Snowden story divides the country and the press. He might as well prepare for it, and try to accept these encounters with good humor when he can.

16. As statements like this one indicate, I don’t think Greenwald cares whether he is invited back on Meet the Press. There’s something to be said for that in a talk show guest.

17. Andrew Sullivan starts the critique of Gregory’s performance farther back.

Notice that Gregory calls Greenwald a “polemicist” – not a journalist. The difference, I presume, is that polemicists actually make people in power uncomfortable. Journalists simply do their best to get chummy with them in order to get exclusive tidbits that the powerful want you to know.

Second: ask yourself if David Gregory ever asked a similar question of people in government with real power, e.g. Dick Cheney et al. Did he ever ask them why they shouldn’t go to jail for committing documented war crimes under the Geneva Conventions? Nah.

Sullivan concludes: “At some point the entire career structure of Washington journalism – the kind of thing that makes David Gregory this prominent – needs to be scrapped and started over. And then you realize that it already has.”

18. “Does David Gregory think he should be charged with a crime for talking to sources, asking questions about classified information, and then reporting what he learned?” Because he’s done exactly that, by his own account. See Trevor Trimm’s analysis at Freedom of the Press Foundation blog. (Greenwald is a co-founder of the foundation.)

June 25, 2013.

19. “From behind the veil of impartiality, Gregory and his colleagues went to bat for those in power, hiding a dangerous case for tightening the journalistic circle.” That’s from Benjamin Wheeler’s column in the Los Angeles Times. It mentions, absorbs and extends my analysis in this post. “Lately, large institutions of viewless journalism have been throwing around their weight to discredit point-of-view journalists with subversive positions. And, in the tradition of viewless journalism, they’ve been doing it without announcing their stance.” I have almost never seen that point made in the mainstream press.

20. Erik Wemple of the Washington Post returns with a deep dive: What would it take to nail Glenn Greenwald under the Espionage Act? His conclusion:

Reading through the opinions and scholarly work on the Espionage Act reveals how carefully this country’s finest legal minds have sought to protect press freedoms vis-a-vis our precious national security interests. Stunning to behold how carelessly some commentators would trample it all.

Exactly. Stunning.

21. Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times and CNBC had to apologize for his carelessness in saying on TV that he would “almost” like to arrest Greenwald for what he’s done. (Video here.) Sorkin’s contrition is real and clearly expressed. Good for him. One thing he did not explain is what he actually meant, if he didn’t really mean that Glenn should be arrested. On Twitter he told Greenwald: “my point was about the role of advocacy journalism & some misimpressions re: prism program as result of reports.” It’s pretty easy to see what “misimpressions re: prism” refers to: this critique. But look at the other phrase: the “role of advocacy journalism.” It sure sounds like he was trading in the dangerous idea that a journalist with a point of view loses the protections that a viewless journalist has. That is dead wrong about the law, and insidious for other reasons. Which is why I asked him to clarify on Twitter.

You’d “almost arrest” him for what reason? Does advocacy journalism turn an almost into a legitimate arrest?

No reply yet.

22. Frank Rich says it’s time for NBC to move David Gregory to The Today Show, “where he can speak truth to power by grilling Paula Deen.”

23. It’s worth recalling that David Gregory is a loud and proud denialist about the biggest and most consequential screw-up in American journalism during his watch: the failure to uncover a faulty case for war in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In 2008 he said on MSNBC: “I think the questions were asked. I think we pushed. I think we prodded. I think we challenged the president. I think not only those of us in the White House press corps did that, but others in the rest of the landscape of the media did that.” In 2009 he said on the Colbert Report that there was no fall down, people just say that because they’re ideological hacks.

I actually do think that the right questions were asked, and I think — this criticism is certainly out there of the press corps, and I tried to be thoughtful about it, reflective about it, but I do think the right questions were asked, and I think people view our job through their own ideological prism, and they’ve made some judgments along those lines.

David Gregory’s denialism on Iraq coverage was a warning to NBC News that they failed to heed. They knew about it before they gave him Tim Russert’s chair on Meet the Press. It indicated an inability to learn from criticism and get outside one’s clubby world of press room pals.

24. So far this week, after three days of getting ripped by his peers for what he did on Meet the Press, Gregory has made no public statement or even indicated that he’s listening. This does not meet the standard any longer, even for media stars. In the New York Times newsroom there’s no bigger star than Andrew Ross Sorkin, and he apologized the next day for some dumb things he said about arresting Greenwald. For someone like Jake Tapper of CNN, not responding to such a wave of criticism would be unthinkable. This is another reason David Gregory belongs on the Today Show, grilling salmon with some celebrity chef.

25. I somehow missed this first time around: Paul Farhi in the Washington Post: On NSA disclosures, has Glenn Greenwald become something other than a reporter? It appeared on the same morning as David Gregory’s interview with Greenwald, and it tracks closely with his questioning. This is speculation, but I wonder if Farhi gave Gregory a misplaced confidence that the consensus view in the press was rapidly becoming “Greenwald: not a journalist.” It’s possible. Gregory has a deeply conventional mind, to which Farhi’s “he’s not one of us” frame would appeal. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone has a good time mocking Farhi and ripping into Andrew Sorkin. Taibbi’s take on the journalism issues is similar to mine in Politics: some / Politics: none. But he’s far more entertaining and blunt.