Of course Facebook doesn’t “edit” NewsFeed in the same way that a newspaper editor once edited the front page. It’s a very different way. That’s why we’re asking about it!

I’ve met some of the people at Facebook whose job it is to work with journalists and media companies. They’re good people, smart people. They seem to care about the future of news. Some of my students, now graduated, work with them. I like that.

What I have to say in this post isn’t personal. It’s professional. Please stop doing this. Here’s what I mean:

Last week, at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, Facebook’s Andy Mitchell​, director of news and media partnerships, was asked how the company sees its role as a new kind of editorial filter or influence on the news— an important question, now that Facebook has become such an important part of the news ecosystem. He was also asked what kind of accountability Facebook felt it had as a player in that system. Mitchell had three answers to these questions.

1. “It’s not that we control NewsFeed, you control NewsFeed by what you tell us that you’re interested in.” You send us signals. We respond.

2. Facebook should not be anyone’s primary news source or experience. It should be a supplement to seeking out news yourself with direct suppliers. “Complementary” was the word he used several times. Meaning: complement to, not substitute for.

3. Facebook is accountable to its users for creating a great experience. That describes the kind of accountability it has. End of story.

To find these answers go to 45:50 in the video clip and watch to the end.

George Brock, journalism professor in the UK, was the one who asked about accountability. He comments:

Facebook is not, and knows quite well it is not, a neutral machine passing on news. Its algorithm chooses what people see, it has ‘community standards’ that material must meet and it has to operate within the laws of many countries.

The claim that Facebook doesn’t think about journalism has to be false. And, at least in the long run, it won’t work; in the end these issues have to faced. Facebook is a private company which has grown and made billions by very successfully keeping more people on its site for longer and longer. I can imagine that any suggestion that there are responsibilities which distract from that mission must seem like a nuisance.

Google once claimed something similar. Its executives would sit in newspaper offices and claim, with perfectly straight faces, that Google was not a media company. As this stance gradually looked more and more absurd, Google grew up and began to discuss its own power in the media.

I would put it differently: Facebook has to start recognizing that our questions are real— not error messages. We are not suggesting that it “edits” NewsFeed in the same way that a newspaper editor once edited the front page. It’s a very different way. That’s why we’re asking about it! We are not suggesting that algorithms work in the same way that elites deciding what’s news once operated. It’s a different way. That’s why we’re asking about it!

No one is being simple-minded here and demanding that Facebook describe editorial criteria it clearly does not have— like reaching for a nice mix of foreign and domestic news. We get it. You want not to be making those decisions. You want user interest to drive those decisions. We’re capable of understanding the basics of machine learning, collaborative filtering and algorithmic authority. We know that to reveal all would encourage gaming of the system. We’re capable of accepting: this is what the users are choosing to use now. We’re not platform idiots. Stop treating us like children at a Passover seder who don’t know enough to ask a good question.

But precisely because we do “get it” — at least at a basic level — we want to know: what are you optimizing for, along with user interest? How do you see your role within a news ecosystem where you are more and more the dominant player? In news, you have power now. It is growing. Help us understand how you intend to use it. What kind of filter will you be? What kind of player… playing for what?

These are not outrageous or ignorant questions. They do not misstate how Facebook works. They are not attempts to turn the clock back to a time when editors chose and readers read. We don’t need your answers to babysit us. We’re awake and alive in the algorithmic age and exercising our critical faculties just fine. If you can’t answer, then say that: We are not here to answer your questions because we can’t.

Andy Mitchell’s three replies are not adequate— for us or for Facebook.

Q. What are you optimizing for, along with user interest? A. “It’s not that we control NewsFeed, you control NewsFeed.” No, sorry. As I wrote before: It simply isn’t true that an algorithmic filter can be designed to remove the designers from the equation. The assertion melts on contact.

Q. How do you see your role in the news ecosystem where you are more and more the dominant player? A. Facebook should not be anyone’s primary news source or news experience. No, sorry. On mobile, especially, “primary” is exactly what’s happening. And everyone who pays attention knows how strenuously Facebook tries to keep users engaged with Facebook. So “we don’t want to be primary” is… I’m trying to be nice here… a little insulting.

Q. In news you have a lot of power now. How do you intend to use that power? A. We just want to create a great experience for users. No, sorry, that’s not an answer because you just said the users have the power, not Facebook, so what you’re really saying is: power? us? whatever do you mean?

Facebook’s smart, capable and caring-about-news people should be disappointed that this is as far as the company has gotten in being real with itself and with us.

(This started as a Facebook post. If you want to see it spread on that platform, I’m confident you know what to do.)

After Matter: Notes, Reactions & Links

Now here’s a good example of what I mean. In an update at a company blog, Facebook tells us:

Facebook is constantly evaluating what’s the right mix of content in News Feed and we want to let you know about a change that may affect referral traffic for publishers…

Stop the tape! Notice how Facebook is the one evaluating. Facebook is the one changing things up. This is not a scandal or a surprise. But it’s also not: “you control NewsFeed, we don’t control NewsFeed.” They control NewsFeed too. User choice is real. But code is destiny.

Mathew Ingram of Fortune magazine writes about the same announcement. Facebook, he says, “wants to have its cake and eat it too: it wants to tweak the news-feed in order to promote content that serves its purposes—whether that’s news content or baby pictures—but it also wants to pretend that it isn’t a gatekeeper, because then media companies might not play ball. So it tries to portray the algorithm as just a harmless extension of its users’ interests, when in fact it is anything but.”

David Holmes at Pando.com comments, as well:

I don’t blame Facebook for wanting to squeeze ever-increasing amounts of money from publishers and the content they produce. Facebook is a for-profit corporation and that’s what corporations do: make money. And it certainly doesn’t owe journalists or their organizations anything.

But it’s phenomenally disingenuous of the company to insist that its every strategic decision is part of some “user-first” mentality. Users don’t even pay to use Facebook — so how could they be its core constituency?

Good question.

A distinction I have tried to import into this debate is between “thick” and “thin” legitimacy. From my piece in the Washington Post about Facebook’s mood manipulation study.

Thin legitimacy is when the experiments conducted on human beings are: fully legal and completely normal, as in common practice across the industry, but there is no way to know if they are minimally ethical, because companies have no duty to think such matters through or share with us their methods.

Thick legitimacy: when experiments conducted on human beings are not only legal under U.S. law and common in practice but also attuned to the dark history of abuse in experimental situations and thus able to meet certain standards for transparency and ethical conduct— like, say, the American Psychological Association’s “informed consent” provision.

For purposes of establishing at least some legitimacy Facebook relies on its “terms of service,” which is 9,000 words of legalese that users have no choice but to accept. That’s thin.

Facebook thinks “thin” legitimacy will work just fine. That is why it can give journalists and academics the royal run around at conferences. But what if that assessment is wrong, not from some moral perspective but as a business case? The question turns on this: To what degree does Facebook’s success depend on trust — user trust, social trust, partner trust — vs. power: market power, monopoly power, the power of an overwhelming mind share. I don’t know the answer, but I don’t trust anyone who says the answer is obvious. It’s not obvious. The more the company’s fortunes turn on trust, the greater the business case for “thick” legitimacy.

I wrote about the same issue last year. This is the description I recommended if Facebook ever decided to (I know it sounds crazy) optimize for truth.

The algorithm isn’t picking stories the way a home page or front page editor would. It’s not mimicking the trained judgment of experienced journalists. Instead, it’s processing a great variety of signals from users and recommending stories based on Facebook’s overrrding decision rule for the design of an editorial filter: maximizing time on site, minimizing the effort required to “get” a constant flow of personal and public news. The end-in-view isn’t an informed public or an entertained audience but a user base in constant contact with Facebook. As programmers we have to use our judgment — and a rigorous testing regime —to make that happen. We think it results in a satisfying experience.

Ben Thompson at his invaluable site, Stratechery. “It is increasingly clear that it is Facebook — not iOS or Android — that is the most important mobile platform.”

Andy Mitchell’s answers at Perugia insulted a lot of people. Here’s an account in Italian by a student, Enrico Bergamini, who asked Mitchell about the NewsFeed alogorithm. It includes an interview with George Brock. On my Facebook page he writes: “I was at the conference, I’m the student asking the question at 45:42, and I was obviously disappointed with the empty answer Mr Mitchell gave me.” Other comments at my Facebook page from people who were there:

Mindy McAdams: “The answers Andy Mitchell gave to questions asked after his talk in Perugia were pure spin and obfuscation… The mood was sullen as he continued answering questions with non-answers.”

Eric Sherer: “I attended this conference, Jay. It was a shame. And yes, he treated [us] like children!”

“The Washington press corps is like that big extended family with a terrible secret that cannot be confronted because everyone knows how bad it would be if the discussion ever got real.”

Have you ever come to know members of a family who collaborate in staying silent about something bad that happened in the past, something no one wants to talk about because to talk about it would probably tear the family apart?

The innocent would have to accuse the guilty. The guilty to defend themselves would find a way to spread responsibility around— or just lie about what happened. Which would then enrage people who were there because it rewrites history and erases their experience. If you have ever come to know such a family — or been part of one, as I have — then you know how participants in the conspiracy share a signaling system that can instantly warn an incautious member: you are three, four hops away from violating the pact of silence… if you don’t want to bring the whole structure down, then I suggest you change the subject… or switch to one of the harmless work-arounds we have provided for the purpose of never getting too close to the source of our dread.

None of that has to be said, of course. It’s all done by antennae. The result is that serious talk about certain subjects is off limits. Key routes into that subject are closed off, because the signaling system activates itself three or four rings out from dread center. To an outsider this manifests itself as an inexplicable weirdness or empty quality, difficult to name. To insiders it becomes: this is who we are… the people who route around—

I mention this because I think it helps in interpreting a bizarre event that unfolds tonight in Washington and on many a media platform: the White House Correspondents Association dinner. How bizarre? Well, look at the evidence of compulsion:

entering #WhiteHouseCorrespondentsDinner weekend. We all hate it; it's antithesis of journalism; but everyone goes to every party they can.

— Howard Fineman (@howardfineman) April 24, 2015

It’s not like they don’t realize it. This is from Politico, house organ for the insider class in DC.

Everyone knows the White House Correspondents Association dinner is broken. What started off decades ago as a stately formal celebration of the best of presidential reporting has morphed into a four-day orgy of everything people outside the Beltway hate about life inside the Beltway— now it’s not just one night of clubby backslapping, carousing and drinking between the press and the powerful, it’s four full days of signature cocktails and inside jokes that just underscore how out of step the Washington elite is with the rest of the country. It’s not us (journalists) versus them (government officials); it’s us (Washington) versus them (the rest of America)

“Everything people outside the Beltway hate about life inside the Beltway.” True! And yet they keep doing it. Why?

I’m sure you have your ideas. Here is mine. I know it will sound crazy (and provide a few chuckles) to those in the room tonight at the Washington Hilton, but I don’t care because the event is itself one gigantic neurotic symptom that begs for some interpretation.

The Washington press corps is like that big extended family with a terrible secret that cannot be confronted because everyone knows how bad it would be if the discussion ever got real. The event at the center of this neurotic system: the failure to detect a phony case for war in 2002 and 2003 and more generally to challenge the Bush forces after 9/11. And this wasn’t just any failure. For a press that imagines itself a watchdog, failing to detect a faulty case for war, then watching the war unfold into the biggest foreign policy disaster in memory… that is an event so huge and deflating that it amounts to an identity crisis.

Now add to that very specific failure a larger lesson that is also too painful to face: in Washington access journalism has been a bust. It doesn’t work. Its practices made possible the spectacular fall down in the run-up to the Iraq War. (Under Obama it’s been so thin that Politico is this week asking: is the White House press corps becoming obsolete?) After a maximal failure like 2002-04 there needed to be a critical reckoning with the whole idea of “access to inside sources as reliable route to scoops.” You can’t maintain that idea and think of yourself as a watchdog, an adversarial force. Not with what happened in the run-up to the Iraq war.

But what if you still want both? Your scoop system, and your self-image as a watchdog. Your insider status, and the critical distance that with the right story could make you a hero of the republic. What if you want your parties with the powerful, and your check on power. What if you have to choose between these alternatives, but you can’t choose because the family has no history of making difficult choices like that. In circumstances like this, you are going to pick denial. And here we find a subterranean route into the Washington Hilton tonight.

The Washington press corps needed the equivalent of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to sort through these glaringly obvious conflicts. Instead they just moved on. No one made that decision consciously. But it happened. Access journalism did not have to answer for its sins. Judith Miller did. That’s the simplest way I can put it. And because that event — which was a massive, wrenching and psychological event — did happen the access orgy that is called the White House Correspondents Association dinner can today go on.

There is access to the dinner itself. There is access to the parties that surround the dinner. There is access to the celebrities and power players who show up at the dinner. But access is the god that failed, with terrible consequences that no one in Washington journalism can reckon with. Instead, they party the pain away. And that is one thing tonight is “about.”

That tweet was deleted.

(Photo: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes at the WHCA dinner, 2009. Creative Commons license.)

Forget it: there is no guaranteed “role.” That’s a fiction you and your colleagues created to keep the game the same every four years.

So Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post — whose mission in life is to explain to us how things really work in politics — is rolling along in his “Hillary Clinton is shamefully avoiding the press” column when he cries out to us:

Do you not think it is of value to know how Hillary Clinton spent her time since leaving the State Department? And how the Clinton Foundation handled its business with various donors who would, undoubtedly, still be in the picture if she was elected president? Or what she thinks of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the fight currently happening in Congress? Or Iran? Or the Middle East?

You get the idea. The role of the media in this process is to show voters who these people are, really, and to explain how these people would govern the country if elected. Like the media or not, that’s a very important role — and one that is essential to a functioning democracy. (My italics.)

The role of the media in this process? What on earth are you talking about, Chris?

You’re supposed to be our super-savvy guide to the way things are in the power game that is national politics. You are the least sentimental creature to walk that system’s halls… remember? No one can out-realism you! You’re Mister “let me tell you how it really works.” That’s your whole franchise. And yet here you are, bawling about “the role of the media” as if it had some sort of guaranteed status within what reporters (mindlessly) call the process.

Who could possibly be the guarantor of this role? The Constitution? (Grow up.) The Federal Election Commission? (Get real.) The political parties? (They’re too busy communicating over the top.) The voters? (I don’t think so.) Role in the process… Says who? The political system evolves, man. You’re supposed to track that for us. (Link!)

Check this out, savvy class:

@jeffcarp @jayrosen_nyu if it did I would gripe all the time. Yahoo PR has not called me back in three years, and somehow I write

— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) May 18, 2015

Yahoo PR has not called me back in three years, and somehow I write. Kara Swisher isn’t lecturing Yahoo executives, users of Yahoo, or readers of tech coverage about some imaginary “role in the process.” She knows that it’s up to Yahoo executives to decide whether they want to talk to her. And it’s up to her to find out what’s happening at Yahoo, regardless of whether the company decides to talk.

“Yahoo has not called me back in three years, and somehow I write…” is a true statement about power relationships. They have the power to shut me out. I have the power to keep reporting, regardless of their efforts to shut me out. They can refuse comment. But if my stories are good enough, people will talk about them and Yahoo will be voiceless in that conversation. Is that what you want, Marissa Mayer? Game on! Swisher’s “role in the process” doesn’t enter into it.

Political reporters: You have no guaranteed “role.” That’s a fiction you and your colleagues created to keep the game the same every four years so you don’t have to go to school on how to be useful and powerful in the election system as it evolves. The fiction works if you can get the right people to believe it, but when they clearly don’t care about your “role in the process” how are you going to make ’em care? Got a plan for that?

I doubt it. I base my conclusion on columns like this from Ruth Marcus of the same Washington Post. She’s also complaining that the candidates won’t answer questions. (My italics.)

Question time, campaign officials soothe, will come. Meanwhile, why step on her message — criminal justice, immigration — by taking questions?

Um, because that’s part of the process. You can’t tweet your way to the presidency. Because reporters have different — sometimes better and more pointed — questions than voters. Because there are growing areas of legitimate inquiry — Clinton’s position on trade, for one — that merit answers. (The New York Times’ Amy Chozick offered an excellent example on immigration: “How could you stretch the law further than the president . . . says it can go?”)

Because how you behave on the trail augurs what you’ll do in office, including how accessible you’ll be. I have forebodings of future columns lamenting President Clinton’s umpty-umpth day without a news conference.

“Because that’s part of the process.” Seriously, Ruth? Your “because” is only a cuz if candidates decide that to reach the people they want to reach, or persuade the people they need to persuade, or avoid some damage they wish to avoid they now need to engage with the journalists who cover the campaign.

Reporters ask better questions than voters? Well, part the waters, here comes the press.

I have a better idea, journalists. Figure out what the voters want the candidates to talk about. (And when they’re ready to listen.) Persuade the voters that in your coverage you’re on their side— so many of them that the campaigns have to take notice. Then leverage your superior connection to the people the candidates want to reach. (That’s what Univision and Jorge Ramos plan to do, I’d bet.) It’s a power game, not a frozen process in which you are granted some role by the mighty hand of James Carville or Ed Rollins.

In 1992, the Charlotte Observer played it that way. They determined what the voters in North Carolina wanted statewide candidates to talk about. Then they asked about that. The opposite of “reporters have better and more pointed questions than voters.” I wrote about the Observer’s approach in my 1999 book, What Are Journalists For? Here’s the former editor of the Observer, Richard Oppel:

Voters were intensely interested in the environment… So our reporters went out to senatorial candidates and said, “here are the voters’ questions.” Terry Sanford, the incumbent senator, called me up from Washington and said, “Rich, I have these questions from your reporter and I’m not going to answer them because we are not going to talk about the environment until after the general election.” This was the primary. I said, “Well, the voters want to know about the environment now, Terry.” He said, “Well, that’s not the way I have my campaign structured.” I said, “Fine, I will run the questions and leave a space under it for you to answer. If you choose not to, we will just say ‘would not respond’ or we will leave it blank.” We ended the conversation. In about ten days he sent the answers down.

Compare: “We’ll just leave a big block of white space next to your name, okay?” vs. “Answer our questions because that’s part of the process.” Or Swisher’s “somehow I write” vs. “Hey, the role of the media in this process is…”

Look: I think candidates should engage with the press and answer tough questions, reducing the importance of any single encounter with journalists by having lots of them. The fact that they increasingly don’t is partly a sign of the news media’s diminished hold on the audience and partly a sign of weak and overly cautious candidates intimidated by a staff that preserves its own power by controlling access and message. A more freewheeling style might serve some candidates equally well, but the handlers would become less important that way so they argue against it. Shutting off almost all access has become the accepted way to win. It is not necessarily a better way to win, but it is far better for a risk-averse staff, and consultants who make money off advertising. It also persuades weak candidates that they’re fine as they are. Of course none of that matters, because timid candidates, controlling staff and an over-the-top messaging system is what we have.

Nothing about the political press makes it an inherent “part of the process.” The sooner that fiction is abandoned the better off producers of campaign coverage will be. You have to compete. Or as Jack Nicholson says in The Departed: “No one gives it to you. You have to take it.”

This has been edited from the original. I toned it down a little. —JR

They had an opportunity to rid themselves of toxic anchorman syndrome and credibility collapse via celebrity behavior. But no…

This from Jonathan Mahler is dead on:

NBC’s handling of Mr. Williams suggests that the network is still clinging to an increasingly anachronistic vision of the anchor’s chair as a sacred throne, and the anchor as the voice of moral authority. It’s a response that seems in many ways tone-deaf to the striking changes in the way we consume information — changes that are reshaping the relationship between newscasters and consumers. The news anchor is no longer the embodiment of reason and truth; his voice is now just one of many. And network TV is just another platform.

Likewise: this from Frank Rich in April. (“Like the cockroach, the anchorman has outlasted countless changes in the ecosystem around him.”) In recognition of these facts, I took the liberty of composing a news release that did not happen this week. It’s my way of commenting on an opportunity missed by NBC.

The announcement that Brian Williams would return to the newsroom — but Lester Holt would take over his old job — was a gift to NBC executives because it allowed them to retire an overgrown and ill-fitting job description (lead anchor as face of the brand, “anchor’s chair as a sacred throne…”) that is not only outmoded and hard to believe but actively harmful to the news division— and to the person who is is installed in that creaking chair.

They had a chance to rid themselves of toxic anchorman syndrome and credibility collapse via celebrity behavior. But they couldn’t grasp it. They refused the gift.

Here, then, is the press release they never wrote, but should have.

Imaginary press release starts here: don’t quote it out of context. I made this up!

NBC News announced today the eventual return of its suspended broadcaster, Brian Williams, to active duty and his replacement as anchor of NBC Nightly News by Lester Holt, NBC veteran and Weekend Anchor, who had been filling in for Williams during an investigation of misstatements he made about his reporting work for NBC.

“Lester stepped into the anchor chair in a trying time and has really come through for us,” said NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke. ‘We are lucky to have him and I know he will continue to do great things at NBC News for years to come.”

Brian Williams, the network announced, will re-join MSNBC as anchor of breaking news and special reports. He will occasionally anchor “live special reports” on NBC when Holt is unable to or better used elsewhere. “Brian now has the chance to earn back everyone’s trust,” said NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack. “His excellent work over twenty-two years at NBC News has earned him that opportunity.”

Previous anchors had been named managing editor of the NBC Nightly News and were considered responsible for the final program. In a note to staff, Lack announced that this tradition would end, and the anchor’s job would be right-sized for a different era in journalistic authority. “Brian himself has said that ego got in his way, with disastrous results,” Lack said. “We do not think that was just a personal failing.”

After its internal review of Williams past misstatements, NBC and Comcast executives engaged in a wide-ranging discussion of possible remedies. Leadership came to the conclusion that a management decision by its top executives, not one or two but a succession of them, had allowed the lead anchor position to evolve into a principality of its own, ruled by one voice: the anchor’s.

The review also found that NBC and Comcast had encouraged Williams to play up his celebrity status and devote more of his after-work hours to appearing on entertainment television. This was part of a plan to appeal to younger viewers by making the face of the NBC News brand a friendly and familiar one with obvious standing in cultural venues outside of news.

“Face of the brand, ambassador for the news division in other media spaces, managing editor of the flagship broadcast, hard working anchor for NBC Nightly News, symbolic leader of the news troops at NBC, globe-trotting reporter when a big story hits, charming and funny celebrity for the talk show set, trusted on-air guide when a crisis requires the network to go live— that is far too much for any person, any position,” said Andrew Lack in his note to staff. “We allowed it to get out of hand.”

NBC said that the lead anchor position would still exist, that its salary would stay the same or rise, and that Lester Holt, a popular figure inside and outside NBC, would not only anchor the NBC Nightly News but also preside over the network’s live coverage, such as elections, a president’s speech to the nation, or a major news event like Hurricane Katrina.

“Lester Holt is our lead anchor,” said Comcast CEO Steve Burke. “We want him to focus on the news and maintaining the trust of our viewers, not his own celebrity in a cultural space outside the news.”

Andrew Lack, in his note to NBC staff, said: “When we go live, Lester Holt will preside over the broadcast, introducing and connecting the work of NBC journalists while explaining to viewers what is going on. Anchoring ‘Nightly’ and sliding into the hot seat for live coverage: these will be the core duties of NBC’s lead anchor going forward. We are reducing a bloated job description to two key elements, and re-setting everyone’s expectations.”

Lack made it clear that the executive producer of NBC Nightly News — not the anchor — would have the final word on all editorial decisions. “We are going to eliminate any ambiguity about that.”

NBC also announced that the “roving anchor” model, in which the entire broadcast shifts to a breaking news location so the anchor can be visible on scene, would be retired and the dollar savings used to put more reporting resources on the ground at major news events. “The anchorman as ‘voice of god,’ if it ever did exist, does not describe the media world of today,” Lack said. “By right-sizing the position we plan to give Lester Holt everything he needs to succeed for many years to come.”

— Imaginary press release ends here: don’t quote it out of context. I made it all up! —

Earlier from me on the Brian Williams mess:

* NBC would be insane to let Brian Williams return (March 14, 2015.)

* Brian Williams has not led. What’s an anchor for? (Feb. 6, 2015.)

Here is Brian Williams interviewed by NBC’s Matt Lauer about his return to the network.

I often ask editors and executives at news companies what kind of people they’re looking to hire. These two answers I get a lot.

The first: “Know any developers who want to work in news?” (No, sorry.) The second is a little more complicated. The conversation goes something like this:

“You know what I need?” person who hires journalists will say. “I need people who can look at the news and information situation they are handed, look at what we know about our users and how they behave, look at what we say and believe about our brand, look at all the digital tools we have now… and just make good decisions.” This one is photos and captions, that one is a timeline and a 1,500-word backgrounder. This is a video explainer with some animation, that is a chart with a graceful introduction. Let’s live blog it. “Audio clip with a good headline.” Quick commentary piece that makes one point.

“And if they can make a lot of these things themselves, they’re hired.”

Me to person who hires journalists: “I hear this from editors a lot: First figure out what the story is. Then decide what combination of media best tells the story.”

Person who hires journalists: “But maybe it’s not a story. Maybe it’s an interactive where you can look up the data on your neighborhood. That’s not ‘story.’ I need people who can make good decisions without tilting it toward the forms they learned on, or the skills they identify themselves with. Some very good editors can’t do that. Some very good writers can’t do that. Anyway, that’s what I need.”

Right. What’s the name for that talent?

“Newsrooms should be more up front with us about how they classify the candidates. Can’t even take the guy seriously? Tell us!”

This was the entire announcement. Lets look at it again:

[Huff Post Politics]
A Note About Our Coverage Of Donald Trump’s ‘Campaign’

Ryan Grim, Washington bureau chief for The Huffington Post
Danny Shea, Editorial Director, The Huffington Post

After watching and listening to Donald Trump since he announced his candidacy for president, we have decided we won’t report on Trump’s campaign as part of The Huffington Post’s political coverage. Instead, we will cover his campaign as part of our Entertainment section. Our reason is simple: Trump’s campaign is a sideshow. We won’t take the bait. If you are interested in what The Donald has to say, you’ll find it next to our stories on the Kardashians and The Bachelorette.

That’s concise. But there was no bill of particulars for the claim, “Trump’s campaign is a sideshow.” Huffington Post made a statement. It made no attempt to persuade people to it. Presumably the editors thought the evidence sufficiently clear for the basic equation: Trump campaign = entertainment.

I might have done it differently — I would have added a bill of particulars — but I support what Huffington Post did.

1. In that missing bill of particulars might have appeared this, heard on Meet the Press two weeks ago. I could show you hundreds of statements just like it from learned pundits and campaign correspondents. Here is the tireless author of the Washington Post’s The Fix blog (it’s for political junkies.)

CHRIS CILLIZZA: I certainly agree that Trump loves being anyone’s foil because it means we’re talking about him, right? And then I think this is a car accident candidacy, Donald Trump, which is essentially there’s a car accident. You don’t want to slow down. You don’t want to look. But there’s always traffic because everybody slows down and everybody looks, right? And that’s Donald Trump.

Right: that’s Trump. So to classify his campaign as entertainment is to share in — but extend a little bit — what Chris Cillizza and his colleagues have done hundreds of times in their columns and on air. There’s a different logic operating here, they have told us. The logic of… person who is a walking car wreck. A more innocent term for it is “showman.” An even milder, vaguer term is entertainment.

2. A car wreck is entertainment only in this sense: it produces attention from gruesome spectacle alone, not by persuading you of its goodness or fitness or information value. Anything that compels a look or gets ’em talking can be entertaining. We know this from social life and media life. If you’re willing to be that person who is a walking car wreck, the attention problem is easier to solve. Trump is willing. Other candidates are not. Whatever “issue” he’s talking about at the moment, the problem he’s trying to solve is continuity of attention for the figurine Trump. You can’t assess that sort of campaign in the same way, even though it might affect The Race. Even though it might have political consequences that are quite real.

3. ‘There’s a different logic driving Trump’s campaign. So we re-classified it.’ This is what I understand the Huffington Post to be saying. To me it is a sensible proposition. (Trump’s response.)

4. Yes, I think journalists should be involved in such judgments. Exactly so. What is the logic of this candidacy? Who is a serious candidate for president? Who is not capable? These are exactly the assessments editors and reporters have to be making as they review the field and decide how to “spend” scarce coverage units. They’re not deciding who we vote for. They’re deciding how best to render the field. Who is a serious foreign policy candidate? Who has proposals for addressing inequality that are worthy of more discussion? Campaign journalists should be able to tell us, and then point to the record so we can check our judgment against theirs.

Part of the reason I support what Huff Post did with its Trump coverage is that I think newsrooms should be more up front with us about how they classify the candidates. Can’t even take the guy seriously? Tell us why! It will help in evaluating your coverage. Huff Post struck a blow for editorial transparency when it said: For us, Trump’s campaign is best classified as entertainment.

5. A “symbolic” blow it was, however. From what I can tell, not that much will be different in the way the Huffington Post reports on Trump. It’s not going to ignore the Trump phenomenon. Journalistically speaking, it can’t. The big summer project from Trump studios is affecting the other candidates. It could affect the fortunes of the Republican party. (We don’t know this yet.) It says something about the GOP’s current state that Trump could get this far. And there’s clearly commercial demand for the show among readers and viewers, as well as cable bookers. So let’s be clear: the Huffington Post will still be reporting on Trump’s campaign. But as Ryan Grim said Saturday on Twitter: “It’s reported on first as entertainment. The distinction is symbolic.”

6. As rendered here:

“The distinction is symbolic.” Yes. Also difficult to observe in a wholly consistent way.

7. I asked Ryan Grim: If the move Huff Post made is symbolic — not a big shift in practice so much as a statement — what are you trying to say? He told me:

The media aren’t passive bystanders to history, but very much active participants, whether we like it or not. Polls at the early stages are largely a function of name ID. And since Trump entered the race, he has consumed the bulk of coverage and unsurprisingly he is rising in the polls, a phenomenon the media point to to justify even more coverage. It’s self-fulfilling absurdity. And we can choose to do it differently. That’s the message we’re sending.

Especially in the early stages of campaigns what appears to be significant is often a reflection of patterns in media coverage. Patterns in media coverage are a reflection of… well, that’s the problem. Huff Post is saying: We know we’re participants, as well as observers. In our role as framer of coverage and classifier of candidates we stand thusly on Trump’s 2016 campaign: its first logic is entertainment. Don’t agree with us? Fine. You know where we’re coming from.

To me that is progress. “The media aren’t passive bystanders, but participants…” is progress.

8. The opposing position was put forward by… Chris Cillizza, reacting to Huffington Post’s announcement:

Who are we to decide who’s serious and who’s not in an election? Trump’s polling suggests that, whether you like him or not and whether you think his campaign is a sideshow or not, plenty of people who identify as both Republicans and likely voters don’t see him that way. It’s not up to me, The Washington Post or the Huffington Post to decide the relative merits of people feeling that way. It’s our job to understand why they feel that way, analyze how long they might feel that way and figure out what it means for everyone else running for president that they feel that way.

In other words: We don’t know we’re participants. Maybe we’re just observers!

Other reactions I saw from journalists took a similar tack. If you dismiss Trump as entertainment you are telling the voters who support him that they are clowns and asses and dupes. But these are real voters! You can’t say that about them. (Real voters don’t show up until January 2016, of course, but never mind…)

It is not up to The Huffington Post or any other publication to decide which candidates are legitimate. That's not how this works.

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) July 17, 2015

Who are we to decide who’s serious and who’s not? The obvious trouble for journalists is they’re already doing that— but by default. As Ryan Grim said. “[Trump] has consumed the bulk of coverage and unsurprisingly he is rising in the polls, a phenomenon the media point to to justify even more coverage.”

9. I would have done it differently. I would have announced the policy with a detailed work of analysis that gives chapter and verse about early primary polls and media coverage. (Some of that started to emerge here.) I would have made sure that Trump-made news really doesn’t appear in the Politics section. (“We were ironing out kinks yesterday, but that’ll be how we handle it going forward,” Grim said Sunday morning.) And instead of asking political journalists to struggle with the entertainment logic of the Trump candidacy, I’d also ask entertainment journalists to struggle with the political consequences of the Trump production.

10. “That Trump has any support at all is a genuine phenomenon and has implications that are serious,” Grim told me. “That should be covered seriously. What we’re saying is that Trump himself shouldn’t be.” Again, seems sensible to me. And there are signs this weekend of peak Trump so maybe the problem will go away.

But what the Huffington Post did should be recalled as a slip in solidarity that revealed something about the campaign press: it likes the default settings and the circularity they create. It does not like dissent from them. That’s grandstanding. (Politico.) That’s childish. (Bloomberg.) I disagree: “We will cover his campaign as part of our Entertainment section…” is the work of fed-up and free-thinking adults.

Photo credits: Neelex and Gage Skidmore.

At a recent event produced by the NY Daily News Innovation Lab, I had a chance to interview Adam Sharp, head of news, government and elections at Twitter, and Niketa Patel, news partnerships manager.

The part I bring to your attention — and ask you to watch if you have a special interest — is in reply to this question:

Twitter hiring journalists to curate best-of tabs is the birth of a new editorial beast. How do we know this beast has a soul?

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) September 9, 2015

Going into this event we knew that Project Lightning — a Twitter improvement scheme that launches this fall — will curate best-of-Twitter streams on big topics and big events. We knew it would hire professional journalists to create that product. We knew it was meant to solve problems of discovery for users who are not experts.

Things we did not know: Twitter’s editorial idea here is… what?

Or does it even need one at this stage? Is it better off without? That is part of what I meant by asking Twitter’s News and Government team: does this new beast — curation Twitter, editorial Twitter — have a soul yet? Would a platform company already have that kind of thing ghosting around within itself? Or does it go outside and obtain it somehow?

Here’s the clip, about eleven minutes including follow-ups. (Excerpted from this video by the Daily News Innovation Lab.) Specialists: watch the whole thing. Generalists and the time-starved: read my commentary on the other side.

from Studio 20 on Vimeo.

A summary of what Twitter said in reply. (Q. “How do we know this beast has a soul?”)

* People at Twitter love news. They’re obsessed. You may not realize how deep this runs.
* We’re hiring professional journalists to curate for us. They come with souls, right? (Right.)
* Anyone can check up on us as selectors in the stream. Anyone can critique our selections.
* We equip our partners and users with good curation tools so our voice isn’t the only voice.
* We have a vocal user base. They will let us know if we’re somehow drifting off course.
* Twitter has a lot of experience in resisting commercial pressures and protecting the product.
* The curation team is working on a set of principles. They’re not done yet.

Pieces of a solid answer. “Anyone” cannot access the firehose or use the tools that company curators will use to tame the stream, so “checking up” in that sense is not really possible. But Twitter has a point. The materials from which it is sifting are themselves public: zillions of tweets. It will be easy to argue with their choices.

As I sifted through Twitter’s answers I came to one they should have given:

* Fighting attempted shutdowns by hostile states in situations where Twitter is most needed takes a First Amendent heart. Is that what you meant?

Yes! That is what I meant. When Twitter starts curating, where does the juice factor come from? Are there any animating ideas? Should we expect Twitter to debut with editorial passions that will find strong expression in its curation product? Human rights, for example. Foundation topic for editorial Twitter, or ‘cover when newsworthy, curate when called for?’ View from somewhere, to start off? Or a more generic product, with borrowed verticals — news, sports, business, entertainment — signaling “the approach of having no distinct approach.”

To me these are fair questions. They are of interest to people who use Twitter in their daily routines (as I do.) It’s fair too for Twitter not to have very good answers yet, as they have yet to launch Project Lightning. But we know a little. Buzzfeed’s glimpse came in June 2015:

On Twitter’s mobile app, there will be a new button in the center of the home row. Press it and you’ll be taken to a screen that will show various events taking place that people are tweeting about. These could be based on prescheduled events like Coachella, the Grammys, or the NBA Finals. But they might also focus on breaking news and ongoing events, like the Nepalese earthquake or Ferguson, Missouri. Essentially, if it’s an event that a lot of people are tweeting about, Twitter could create an experience around it.

…What kind of experience? “A team of editors, working under Katie Jacobs Stanton, who runs Twitter’s global media operations, will select what it thinks are the best and most relevant tweets and package them into a collection.”

I turned my interest dial up to 11 at that point. ‘Journalism’ had been struck.

No one knows if these new screens or tabs will grow to become the main way people access Twitter. No one knows if they will have any significant effect. The problem they were intended to solve is that Twitter can be a confusing mess with lots of noise, especially for new users. By creating a curated, best-of version of itself Twitter Inc. wants to make it easier for people to find value in Twitter the service, especially around big events. This is from The Verge’s very good Q and A with Kevin Weil, Twitter’s head of product.

One of the things we’ve talked about with Project Lightning is the idea of a temporary or an event-based follow. The idea is that as the VMAs conversation is playing out, in Project Lightning, you’re getting the best of this particular conversation. You’re seeing it curated live, so you can go and flip through it in a very immersive view of this conversation. You can also follow it, and when you follow the best tweets from that conversation or that event or that location or the game or whatever, it will be added to your home timeline as they happen… It’s instant, it’s immersive, and you can immediately understand what’s going on in your world as it plays out on Twitter. It will give you an entirely new appreciation for the richness and the depth of content on Twitter, but there’s also a beautiful connection between the home timeline and Project Lightning via this idea of a temporary follow.

Makes sense to me. But notice these terms: “the best of…” “the best tweets from that conversation.” We understand what he’s saying but there’s any number of ways to judge “best.” Which is yours, Twitter? “Pick the best” doesn’t say anything: on purpose. (A group of my graduate students were there and they all reacted harshly to this part.)

But Twitter is saying a lot by launching Project Lightning.

It will offer us media-rich best-of feeds that are hand picked by its own hand picked editors— assisted by machines. It will recommend them to users and make them easy to find. Here, I think, Twitter steps into another line of work. It is becoming in one part of itself an editorial company, a maker of news products. It is also starting to compete with power users and news companies that make similar “curation” products. This is from a job description for one of the editors:

We’re looking for a skilled editorial mind to lead a small team that will identify the best Tweets, photos, Vines and videos around the biggest real-world events and high profile opportunities. The ideal candidate has experience managing editorial teams in a digital newsroom and is familiar with using Twitter content to craft stories. Candidates should have experience leading editorial in one or more mainstream content verticals such as news, sports, entertainment, etc.

See? An editorial company now in one part of itself.

If Twitter’s streams catch on big then maybe getting yourself into one starts to become the point of posting a lot on Twitter. Which in turn means figuring out what Twitter’s editors want. But we already have that situation with Facebook. Which is why I asked the News and Government team: on what points of continued differentiation will Twitter be counting? (Go to 9:18 on this clip.)

Of the answers Twitter gave to the soul question the one I like the most is: People at Twitter love news. They’re obsessed. I believe it. And I think it will influence the curation product. This is from the New Yorker’s 2013 profile of Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder and current CEO. As a kid he fell hard for police radio and ambulance movements, which he saw as status updates.

He was thrilled by the police scanner, and still remembers its staccato transmissions. “They were reporting constantly, and they’re reporting three things usually. No. 1, where they are. No. 2, where they’re going. And, No. 3, what they’re doing. So, for an ambulance in St. Louis: ‘I’m at Fifth and Broadway, I’m going to St. John’s Mercy, patient in cardiac arrest.’ ”

Dorsey wanted to chart these movements. In 1984, when he was eight, his father bought him an I.B.M. PC Jr.; three years later, he was given a Macintosh. St. Louis was a technologically advanced city then, home to McDonnell Douglas and Southwestern Bell. Phrack, an online magazine for hackers, was based there. Washington University let locals use its computer network, and Dorsey tapped in so that he could gain access to the Internet.”

With Twitter Dorsey got to chart the movements of the ambulances— and a lot more. Twitter was born of a love for news systems. I know it’s pretentious and everything and I do apologize for that, but editorial Twitter needs its own (incorruptible) soul, related to the love of news for sure but equally about independence, truthelling and giving the mic to people: picking who has voice.

A lot rides on Project Lightning. Let’s see it before we assess. And the curation principles: let’s seem them when they’re ready. If I were a VC, a shareholder or an employee with a big stake in Twitter getting this right, I would be slightly concerned if the choice is simply to import consensus practice and “apply” it to make Lightning happen. “We have a professional newsroom now” you can proudly say, skipping over the part where you say what a technology company uses one of those for.

(Published simultaneously on LinkedIn. Photo credit: Mai Le.)

Fair warning: self-referential post. Not into granular reflections on shifts in blogging practice? Best to turn back now. If you are, well—

Best I have seen at it is Melody Kramer, recently of NPR, Nieman Foundation and the Federal government. You should follow her. She’s fab. But lots of people work the same way. Maybe you do. This post started as a note on Facebook. Dave Winer told me to turn it into a PressThink entry. I’m in a long-term conversation with Dave about blogging. So here I am.

When I was asked to moderate a public discussion with two executives from Twitter I said yes because that’s ‘doing your work in public.’ When I figured out my questions, I compressed them into tweets and posted them live as I put them to the guests. Doing your work in public.

I thought Twitter would soon face a problem that I have tried to alert Facebook about. (I posted my alerts on the Washington Post site, the Atlantic.com, and PressThink.) You have to learn to level with us about the kind of filter you’re becoming. Don’t hide behind mystifications like, “We don’t control NewsFeed, you control NewsFeed.”

For Twitter: level with us about the kind of editorial company you plan to be. I wanted to not only put this to Twitter but write about it later, because I felt too little attention had been paid to a “switch” moment when Twitter becomes an editorial brand. I had to pose the question in a unique-to-me way, a compression that would have to travel across different platforms and reception points.

Twitter hiring journalists to curate best-of tabs is the birth of a new editorial beast. How do we know this beast has a soul?

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) September 9, 2015

I asked the Twitter execs that: live. I rephrased and reframed the question so there could be no doubt what I was driving at. The clip of our exchange became the “text” I would later blog about. I took my time writing it because no one else wanted the clip, no one else had put the question in that way, and — as a writer in my conceit I believed — no one was seeing this crossover moment for Twitter in the way that I was. So I revised it until I was satisfied.

Then I took a week to figure out how to distribute the thing. A couple of online publications turned me down, probably because the piece doesn’t read like an article. It reads like a blog post. One thing that’s different about blogging today compared to when I started in 2003: now you have to “go where the people are” online. You can’t rely on them coming to you just because you published something new.

For discussing the moves Twitter was about to make with Project Lightning, one of the best online spaces I could imagine was the comments at Fred Wilson’s blog, AVC.com. That’s where (some of) the people are. So I asked him, over Twitter: Do you allow guest posts? He said not typically, why? “I have something that would be perfect for your commenter community,” I said. He said post it and send me the link, maybe I will blog about it. Deal!

Months ago I had been asked to cross-post on LinkedIn something I wrote for my own site. The people who run the publishing wing of LinkedIn said if I cross-posted they would guarantee me some promotional juice. I turned them down, but for this ‘Twitter soul’ post I contacted the same editors and asked if the deal was still on. After they read the post, they said: sure. Editor’s Pick and morning newsletter placement the next day. And I could publish it on PressThink at the same time, an important principle for me. Deal. (The final product on LinkedIn.)

LinkedIn would, yes, get me more traffic than I could get on my own. (33,000 page views so far. Modest but this is niche publishing. Accuracy counts more.) Traffic alone does me little good. But LinkedIn + the AVC.com post + pushing the piece out through my own network on Twitter and Facebook = yes, good. The next day they read it inside Twitter. The people working on Project Lightning read it. A lot of people who didn’t know about Twitter becoming an editorial company now do. And the public cry, “level with us about what kind of editorial company you intend to be…” has been joined a little.

My point in telling you this? Blogging is not the post I wrote that appears at PressThink or on LinkedIn— or Atlantic.com if they pick me up. “Blogging” is the whole thing: accepting the invitation, tweeting the questions, creating a clip by asking what is good to blog about later, publishing the step-back explainer, crafting a distribution plan and negotiating for a make-shift guest shot at AVC.com, participating in the comment section at Fred Wilson’s site.

All of that is blogging. ‘Doing the work in public.’

Those “laws of political gravity?” They were never really laws.

From a week ago on Twitter:

@jayrosen_nyu @alansmurray the press mostly just doesn't have the gatekeeping power it once had. (And of which Jay I think wasn't a fan?)

— Ben Smith (@BuzzFeedBen) November 23, 2015

Not quite, Ben.

I was not a fan of the way the political press used its gatekeeping powers when they were more robust. I felt that political journalism had lost its way. Still do. But I never called for, or looked forward to a system in which journalists and journalism ceased to matter. A public service press is one way we can hold power to account. It helps prevent lying from being raised to a universal principle in politics. That is important work. We need to figure out how it can continue.

Now to Ben Smith’s point — media gatekeepers don’t have that kind of muscle any more — add these observations:

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post:

There was almost always a line that wasn’t crossed in years past, a sort of even-partisans-can-agree-on-this standard. Now, in large part because of Donald Trump’s candidacy, that line has been smudged out of existence. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous quote that “you are entitled to your own opinion … but you are not entitled to your own facts” is no longer operative in this campaign.

Howard Kurtz, Fox News:

The media refs are really savaging him after a couple of misstatements and missteps, even as they struggle to understand why he pays no penalty when they blow the whistle. What they don’t quite grasp is that their attacks only make him stronger. This is not to let him off the hook for mistakes, just to recognize that Trump has completely rewritten the rule book, infuriating those who thought they enforced the rules.

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone:

Until recently, the narrative of stories like this has been predictable. If a candidate said something nuts, or seemingly not true, an army of humorless journalists quickly dug up all the facts, and the candidate ultimately was either vindicated, apologized, or suffered terrible agonies… That dynamic has broken down this election season. Politicians are quickly learning that they can say just about anything and get away with it. Along with vindication, apology and suffering, there now exists a fourth way forward for the politician spewing whoppers: Blame the backlash on media bias and walk away a hero.

NBC reporter Katy Tur (Via Greg Sargent.)

I spoke to a lot of his supporters who are waiting to come into this rally. And I asked them what they think of Donald Trump and whether or not they’re bothered by his inaccurate statements and whether they think they matter. And not a single one of them said that they thought it mattered. They said they like him because they think he’s going to be a strong leader, and they think he’s going to bring the change to Washington that they want. In fact, they blame the liberal media, as they say, on perpetrating lies against Donald Trump. They repeatedly asked, why don’t you ask this about Hillary Clinton, why don’t you ask this about President Obama? So there’s definitely a party line feeling among his supporters, that it is us-versus-them. And unfortunately, the media is very much the ‘them’ in this situation.

How should we interpret all this? Let me try my hand.

1. “The laws of political gravity” were never laws.

To an extent unrealized before this year, the role of the press in presidential campaigns relied on shared assumptions within the political class and election industry about what the rules were and what the penalty would be for violating them. This was the basis for familiar rituals like “the gaffe,” which in turn relied on assumptions about how a third party, the voters, would react once they found out about the violation. These assumptions were rarely tested because the risk seemed too high, and because risk-averse professionals — strategists, they’re called — were in charge of the campaigns.

The whole system rested on shared beliefs about what would happen if candidates went beyond the system as it stood cycle to cycle. Those beliefs have now collapsed because Trump “tested” and violated most of them— and he is still leading in the polls. (Rob Ford in Canada was there before Trump.) There has been a cascading effect as conventions that depended on one another give way. The political press is pretty stunned by these developments. It keeps asking: when will the “laws of political gravity” be restored? Or have they simply vanished?

“The question now is whether Candidate Trump is immune from the laws of political gravity or soon will be isolated and regarded as an object of scorn or curiosity rather than of presidential seriousness,” wrote the Washington Post’s Dan Balz back in July. (Other uses of that phrase here, here and here.) But what the press describes as “laws” were never really that. They were at best conventions among the political class, in which I include most Washington journalists— though they would not include themselves.

2. Isomorphism for the win!

“Institutional isomorphism,” a phrase only an academic could love, is the title of a famous paper in sociology (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) that sought to explain why different institutions in the same field tend to resemble each other, even as they struggle to compete and to “win.” The authors observe that “organizations tend to model themselves after similar organizations that they perceive to be more legitimate or successful.” It’s not a coincidence. There are structural forces at work that appear again and again across vastly different industries and fields.

For example, if a firm is competing for talent it will want to offer the same kind of stage for talent to display itself. Meanwhile, the talent knows that if it cannot mesh well with competing firms it has no leverage over its current one. When Jeff Zeleny, a political reporter for ABC News, moved to CNN this year (to do the same thing he did at ABC) he did not have to assimilate a new view of politics or a different definition of the journalist’s role. Isomorphism had already taken care of that. No one thinks this the least bit remarkable.

Similarly, when in 2009 CNN created ‘State of the Union’ to compete with the likes of ‘Meet the Press’ and ‘Face the Nation,’ it simply copied those shows in almost every detail. Again, no one thinks that’s weird. It’s just what you do in TV news.

Highly structured organizational fields [presidential campaigns would qualify as one, but so would large news organizations] provide a context in which individual efforts to deal rationally with uncertainty and constraint often lead in the aggregate to homogeneity in structure, culture and output.

In other words, the more they try to compete at one level the more similar they become at all the others. (True for universities too.) But notice: Trump is not an institution. He is really his own campaign manager, spokesman and chief strategist, which means that the chief strategist of the Trump campaign — Trump — doesn’t care if he ever gets hired by another campaign. Poof! There goes one of the little structural forces that tend toward isomorphism. Multiply by 100 and you have pundits asking: have the laws of political gravity been repealed?

3. Weak sense of purpose.

DiMaggio and Powell note that isomorphism is especially likely in institutions with ambiguous or unclear goals. That describes the teams of reporters, editors and producers who create most of the campaign coverage we see.

In May of this year I attended a two-day conference in Chicago for journalists covering the 2016 campaign. Among the panelists were established stars like Chuck Todd of NBC and Mark Halperin of Bloomberg, along with the chairs and communications directors of the two major parties. In the audience were young journalists assigned to election coverage from news organizations around the country. One of the striking things about the event (for me) was the complete vacuum of discussion around the ultimate aims of campaign coverage. No one even thought to ask: what are we trying to accomplish here? What’s the goal of our coverage in 2016? Everyone already knew the answer: We’re here to cover the campaign! To find great stories that readers will love! To be savvy analysts of what’s likely to happen. There’s a circularity to these answers that doesn’t register among the people working inside the circle.

Why does this matter? First, because it leads to a homogeneity in coverage that isn’t chosen but automatic. Second, another way to ask about ultimate goals is to put the question in a more threatening form: what’s your agenda in covering the campaign? To that question the political journalists at NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, PBS, NPR, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Politico, Time magazine would all return the same non-answer. No agenda, just solid coverage. “We report, you decide.” (Fox News.) “The Only Side We Choose is Yours.” (CNN.)

In founding FNC, Roger Ailes understood the isomorphic factor and decided to ape the conventions of TV news, while shifting the product to appeal to an under-served market and thereby become a force in Republican politics. One of the conventions he aped is to keep silent on questions of purpose. Into that vacuum flow accusations of bias, which is fine with Ailes. (“I’ll tell you what your agenda is!”) That flow has now become a raging torrent, eroding trust, coarsening dialogue, fortifying bad habits like false balance, and acting as a wedge issue in the media sphere.

4.) Strong sense of purpose.

For a good contrast with punting on questions of purpose I offer you Univision and its lead anchor Jorge Ramos, who knows what he’s for and which public he represents.

“The Republican Party has been complaining lately about how some Latino journalists, including me, only ask them about immigration,” he said. “That is correct, but what Republicans don’t understand is that for us, the immigration issue is the most pressing symbolically and emotionally, and the stance a politician takes on this defines whether he is with us or against us.”

Ramos, who is one of the most trusted public figures among American Latinos, according to polls, has been an outspoken supporter of federal legislation that would pave a path to citizenship for those living in the country illegally.

He has pressed candidates from both parties on the issue. In the 2012 campaign, he hammered President Obama, who had promised but failed to deliver an immigration bill during his first term. More recently, he has criticized Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio, who as a senator from Florida helped write an immigration reform bill but dropped support for it after it drew conservative anger.

“Both parties now view him with trepidation,” said the New York Times in January. The example of Ramos shows that knowing what you’re for doesn’t have to mean joining the team or taking a party line. It’s possible to maintain your independence, win trust with your audience, and gain a clear sense of purpose when you’re out on the campaign trail. But you have to break with the pack.

And as I have written before there is a difference — a crucial difference — between doing politics and doing journalism:

If your job is to make the case, win the negotiations, decide what the community should do, or maintain morale, that is one kind of work. If your job is to tell people what’s going on, and equip them to participate without illusions, that is a very different kind of work. To put it a little more sharply, power-seeking and truth-seeking are different behaviors, and this is what creates the distinction between politics and journalism. The work of the journalist cannot be done without a commitment to the act of reporting, which means gathering information, talking to people who know, trying to verify and clarify what actually happened and to portray the range of views as they emerge from events.

A primary commitment to reporting therefore distinguishes the work of the journalist. Declining to express a view does not. Refusing to vote does not. Pretending to be ideology-free or “objective” on everything does not. Getting attacked from both sides? Nope.

Of course, everyone can’t be Jorge Ramos or take up the Latinos-in-America cause. That works for Univision and its English-language brand, Fusion. What would work for the mainstream media, as it is still called in the U.S.? Well, I don’t know. I tried to answer that question in 2010, and I think there may be some value in the approach I described there.

Probably the best thing that the major news organizations could do at this point is differentiate: that is, go right at the isomorphism. Try different approaches to untangling the mobius strip of Trump coverage, in which he attacks the news media, dominates its coverage, withstands its “checking” powers, astonishes its pundits, and feeds off the furor that all this creates. One thing I know. Tossing around terms like “post-truth” and then moving briskly on to other news — such as you see here — is not the sign of a serious press.

After Matter: Notes, Reactions & Links

Disclosure: As reported by the Huffington Post, in 2016 my students and I will be collaborating with Fusion.net on different ways to do election journalism.

“Will Trump eventually cross a line — or do the lines no longer exist?” (Karen Tumulty, Washington Post, Nov. 25) That is another way to put the “laws of political gravity” question.

Outstanding treatment of this whole problem from David Roberts at Vox, reacting in part to this post.

What’s happened from (roughly) Gingrich forward is that the right has used coordinated institutional power and the explosion of new communications technology to sap the media’s power to do damage. This has been done in two ways. First is the unceasing attack on “liberal media bias,” which has left journalists terrified of passing judgment on any matter of controversy. And second is the development of a parallel intellectual infrastructure, a network of partisan think tanks, advocacy organizations, and media outlets that provide a kind of full-spectrum alternative to the mainstream.

Good point: “It’s difficult for journalists to successfully call politicians on their incorrect or misleading claims in the absence of political opponents who are doing the same.” Political scientist David A. Hopkins responds to this post.

Sharp analysis from New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait about what would happen to journalists in the so-called “mainstream” media if Trump wins the nomination. Currently, Chait writes, Trump “is the subject of withering attacks from many conservative commentators. This, in turn, frees up the mainstream media to assess Trump’s lies in fairly blunt terms. Rigorously down-the-middle reporters can call Trump a liar without fear of jeopardizing their nonpartisan credibility because they are echoing arguments made by many Republicans.” But if Trump becomes the nominee:

Conservatives who insisted during the primary they could never support him would see in their nominee a different, more sober and thoughtful figure than the demagogue they had lambasted months before. And because Republicans would now be rallying around him, Trump would enjoy far more latitude for his wild claims. Fear of partisan bias would then dissuade the media from labeling Trump’s lies as lies.

This is such an important point, from Maggie Haberman and Patrick Healy of the New York Times, who analyzed everything Trump said for a week:

Trump uses rhetoric to erode people’s trust in facts, numbers, nuance, government and the news media, according to specialists in political rhetoric. “Nobody knows,” he likes to declare, where illegal immigrants are coming from or the rate of increase of health care premiums under the Affordable Care Act, even though government agencies collect and publish this information. He insists that Mr. Obama wants to accept 250,000 Syrian migrants, even though no such plan exists…

Right. Trump’s rhetoric erodes people’s trust in the news media and in facts themselves, which is one reason his ubiquity in the news media is so perplexing.

Donald Trump May Not Be a Fascist, But He is Leading Us Merrily Down That Path by David Neiwert is a careful and detailed examination by a writer who knows what he’s talking about.

From Jonathan Stray, It’s not you: political journalism really is broken:

“Think for a minute what you could do about ____ that isn’t reading political news, then think if the political news you are reading helps you do that.”

Ben Smith (now editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed, formerly a political reporter) responds:

@jayrosen_nyu will this all still be true if Trump washes out and we get the usual nominee? Or contingent on him doing well?

— Ben Smith (@BuzzFeedBen) November 30, 2015

Well, I’m not sure what I said in this post that is contingent on Trump doing well, Ben.

Dec. 8: Ben Smith sends a note to Buzzfeed staff:

Trump is operating far outside the political campaigns to which [our] guidelines usually apply.

It is, for instance, entirely fair to call him a mendacious racist, as the politics team and others here have reported clearly and aggressively: He’s out there saying things that are false, and running an overtly anti-Muslim campaign. Buzzfeed News’s reporting is rooted in facts, not opinion; these are facts.

PressThink, four years ago:

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?

“Here’s what those of us trapped inside the gilded New York-Washington brain cage miss: Trump may not be telling the truth, but he’s sure as hell telling their truth. This allows him to shatter most conventions of presidential campaigning, especially the notion that you have to run a positive campaign (or at least outsource your vitriol to surrogates) in order to win.” —Glenn Thrush, Politico. (My italics.)

Responding to this post, Dan Kennedy says we should all calm down:

Trump is not winning, and he’s not going to win. Members of the political press may wring their hands over their inability to convince Trump’s supporters that his lies, his outrageous statements, and even his flirtation with fascism should disqualify him from the presidency. But the overwhelming majority of the public wants nothing to do with Trump.

I think it’s helpful to see Trump as akin to an independent supplier of programming to the big media companies. His candidacy for president is like a hit show, also called “Trump,” that performs better than the product made by the media company’s own people. That’s why he has barely has to spend anything on ads. That’s why he gets to call in to 4 out of 5 Sunday shows. Now add in the fact that in horse race journalism — or “who’s ahead?” coverage — the instructions start with: first establish a frontrunner…. The polls say that must be Trump. Put the two together: hit show, horse race, frontrunner. It’s doubtful the political press can think its way out of that box.

In a lighter vein, the way Jake Tapper says “Seriously?” to a Trump spokesperson in this clip is one of the highlights of the 2016 campaign. Click the clip; it won’t take long.

Jake Tapper saying ‘seriously?’ is everything https://t.co/neuowOBV4D

— Blake Hounshell (@blakehounshell) December 1, 2015

Interesting observation from Nate Silver.

The quality of reporting in US political journalism is often very good, but you need a decoder ring to cut through the elliptical language.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 1, 2015

When journalists try to distance themselves from our hyper-polarized politics something has to be said. Here is my little attempt to say it.

This person — a political journalist: intelligent, informed — appears on my TV screen regularly during those roundtables where pundits try to dissect the news:

In our current Polarized America, is it possible for Americans to be unified on anything?

— amy walter (@amyewalter) December 5, 2015

Over at the ‘Meet the Press’ site, where NBC’s Chuck Todd holds forth, this question was recently asked:

Why the selective political outrage?

It says something about our current polarized politics, as well as the sheer number of violent killings in this country, when the left and right are picking which mass shootings to exploit and fit into their own worldview. We saw it play out last week after a deranged man killed three people at a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado. And we saw it play out yesterday after we learned a Muslim married couple killed 14 in San Bernadino, CA — though we’re still learning more about their actual motive. But here’s our question: Shouldn’t our national and political outrage be the same, whether the shooter cried out “No more baby parts” or whether the shooters were Muslim with Arabic-sounding names?

It’s hard to know how seriously to take their bewilderment. These are people who live daily with “the partisan divide,” a cliché they helped make into a cliché. But on the chance that they’re being sincere let me be equally straight with them…

Every time you had to “leave it there” after ideologies clashed mindlessly, fruitlessly. Every dubious truth claim you had to let pass because challenging it might interrupt the flow or make you sound too partisan. Every time you defaulted to “will it work?” when the bigger question was “is it so?” Every dutiful effort you made to “get the other side” without asking if the number of sides was really two. Every time you asked each other “what’s the politics of this?” so you could escape the tedium and complexity of public problem-solving. Every time you smiled weakly to say, “depends on who you ask” before launching into a description of public actors who dwell in separate worlds of fact. Every time you described political polarization as symmetrical when it isn’t. Every time you denied that being in the middle was a position so you didn’t have to ask if it was a defensible one. Every time you excluded yourselves from a faltering political class. Every pox you put on both houses because it felt good to float above it all. Every eye you rolled at the humorless scolds who rage at the White House Correspondents dinner. Every time you jeered at the popularity of “partisan media” without reminding yourself “…there goes our audience.” Every time you laughed at the Daily Show’s treatment of you with no companion sense of dread. (They’re on to us.) Every time you said “the truth is probably somewhere in the middle” when you really had no clue. Every time you pointed with pride to the criticism you were getting from both sides, assuming it meant you were doing something right when you might have been doing everything wrong. Every operative you turned into an expert. Every unprincipled winner you admired for their savvy. Every time you thought it was not up to you to judge when it was on you — especially on you — to assess, weigh and, yes, judge.

All of it, every moment like that had the effect of implicating you in this mess.

Look: I am not saying journalists are the ones we should blame for American’s dysfunctional politics. So if that’s how you read me… well, you misread. But I do consider them active participants in the events that got us here. Instead of turning to us to ask, “why can’t you people get along with each other?” they should be trying to pinpoint it for themselves: Where did we go wrong?

Something happened in journalism two weeks ago that I want to examine before we all forget about it and election season rolls on.

On December 8, Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed and before that a political reporter, wrote a memo to his staff that he made public. This is a screenshot of the memo:

The same day, NBC Nightly News broadcast what could only be called an editorial or “column” by Tom Brokaw, although it was not described that way by NBC. Lester Holt simply tossed to Brokaw, the face of the brand for 22 years as lead anchor at NBC, for what Holt called “reflections” and “some perspective” on Donald Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States. (Watch.)

“Trump’s statement, even in a season of extremes, is a dangerous proposal that overrides history, the law and the foundation of America itself,” Brokaw said, speaking directly into the camera. “In my lifetime alone, we have been witness to the consequences of paranoia overriding reason.”

As CNN’s Dylan Byers reported on Dec. 10:

With Trump’s call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States, several of the nation’s most esteemed journalists and influential news outlets have set aside traditional notions of balance and given themselves license to label the Republican front-runner a liar, a demagogue, a racist and worse… news organizations are abandoning concerns about impartiality and evenhandedness and stating what they believe are objective truths about the Republican’s most popular presidential candidate.

“What Trump is doing is wildly outside American traditions and values, and that’s what we’re covering and responding to and I think you see that across major media outlets,” Smith told CNN. “I’ve never seen a candidate base his campaign on vilifying a minority group. So it would be misleading to characterize it any other way.”

What happened here?

On one level it’s simple: Trump went too far. As David Folkenflik of NPR put it on Dec. 11, Trump has been making pronouncements and taking positions “that are increasingly alien to mainstream American thought.” His proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. was denounced by leading Republicans (including Paul Ryan, speaker of the House) as well as Democrats, so journalists could feel comfortable joining in the condemnations. End of story.

But this tells us something about what Byers called “traditional notions of balance.” They are only partly about lending fairness and a sense of proportion to news reports. As journalism scholars have been observing since the 1970s, the practices that are variously known as “objectivity,” or in political coverage “neutrality” — or, as Folkenflik put it, the “non-ideological” approach — as well as workplace rules against expressing an opinion on social media… these practices have purposes beyond rendering the world in an accurate and truthful way.

Ben Smith in his memo referenced “the need not to needlessly undermine the work of reporters on the beat.” What is he talking about there? Well, reporters covering the presidential campaigns need certain things from those campaigns: information, interviews, phone calls returned, a minimal level of cooperation. If a stray comment on social media from a Buzzfeed staffer on a wholly different beat persuades the communications staff for a presidential campaign that Buzzfeed is “against” their candidate, that would amount to “needlessly undermining” the political reporter who has to deal day-to-day with those people. The reporter can protest: hey, I have always been fair with you. But the candidate’s people can answer: your publication is biased, look at this comment on social media. What does the reporter say then?

It may sound trivial but it’s exactly this, what people “can say” — for which there is no effective reply — that accounts for a lot of the rules and procedures that journalists associate with “credibility,” a term with no precise meaning that has outsized importance in their internal deliberations, and their automatic thinking.

Vulnerable to criticism

The way scholars of journalism look at these events is different. In 1972 sociologist Gaye Tuchman published her (justly) famous article, “Objectivity as strategic ritual.” In it she analyzed the behavior of journalists, whom she called newsmen, working within hierarchies that had to reproduce a report on the state of the world every 24 hours. Whereas a sociologist could take six months to study a situation, assemble the data, and draft a report, the journalist had to complete this act in a single day, often under enormous pressure.

Inevitably mistakes happen. The most serious of these could lead to a libel suit, which in turn could threaten the entire enterprise. There were editors charged with removing mistakes, and checking up on reporters in the field, but they too were human, and also under pressure. On top of that, the product that these “newsmen” made — news — was destined for wide distribution, including people who knew a lot more about the story than the reporter ever could.

A situation like this was made for second guessing. The city editor second guessed the beat reporter. The managing editor second guessed the city editor. The informed reader second guessed the editors. (And the ignorant reader too!)

Improvised, imperfect, incomplete, telling of events that are still in motion, but then broadcast widely, the daily news report was vulnerable to criticism on a hundred and one counts. This vulnerability had to be managed somehow, the risks of it systematically reduced. In Tuchman’s eyes, that’s what “objectivity” in newsrooms was: a way of coping with the criticism that was sure to descend on a product that was hastily made.

The people who made it needed some kind of protection against charges that would inevitably come their way: that they didn’t know what they were talking about, that they were unqualified to say what was true, that they misunderstood. And today of course we would add: that they are biased, “against us,” part of an opposing camp. Tuchman in 1972 wrote:

The newsmen cope with these dangers by emphasizing “objectivity,” arguing that dangers can be minimized if newsmen follow strategies of newswork they identify with “objective stories.” They assume that, if every reporter gathers and structures “facts” in a detached, unbiased, impersonal manner, deadlines will be met and libel suits avoided.

Probably the best example of a “strategic ritual” that meets the journalist’s vulnerability to criticism and provides a veneer of objectivity is the use of quotation to say: Hey, I’m not saying this is true, but it is definitely a fact that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said today when he met with reporters….

Bring it on

Which brings us back to Trump and his “plan” to ban Muslims who are not already citizens from entering the United States. The ritual would say: report what Trump said, report what his critics said in reply, let people draw their own conclusions. And many news organizations did exactly that. But others made a different call: Objectively speaking, Trump is a racist and if you work for us you are free to say that. (Buzzfeed) Objectively speaking, this is a dangerous proposal that goes against what America is about. (NBC News) They didn’t think they were vulnerable to criticism for calling him out. Or they didn’t care. Of course there is a big difference between those two.

Trying to protect yourself against criticism, against what people “can say…” is perhaps understandable — Gaye Tuchman understood it exceptionally well in 1972 — but that does not make it legitimate.

A different approach would be to accept with equanimity: Yes, as journalists charged with reporting things that are complex and still in motion we are uniquely vulnerable to criticism. Bring it on! Protection will come from being specialists in verification who are allergic to any party line. Accountability journalism blows “balance” out of the water. Intellectual honesty is far more important than a ritualized objectivity. Recover your voice and people will have reason to listen. But journalists must listen also, and stand ready to correct.

During that odd interval, December 8-11 of 2015, we caught a small glimpse of a different press. To let it fade would be an error in pressthink that I cannot in good conscience allow my readers to make.

The family of billionaire Sheldon Adelson bought the most widely-read newspaper in Nevada, the Review-Journal. They then tried to conceal this act. These are my posts, as I’ve followed and tried to make sense of the story. In order from Dec. 11th. New items added to the bottom.

It started with a Facebook post, and it just kept going. If you read them in order you will be caught up with all the important plot twists. I also tried to include the key links as the story metastasized. Got a correction or a suggestion? Please put it in the comments.

December 11 at 4:53pm
Last night something strange came across my screen. I think it qualifies as a mystery. The news: the Las Vegas Review-Journal, largest newspaper in the state, was sold to… well, that’s the odd part. The buyer was described as a Delaware company backed by “undisclosed financial backers with expertise in the media industry.”

Undisclosed? Weird.

The name of the company purchasing the newspaper, News + Media Capital Group LLC — about which no one knows anything — is similar to the name of the company selling the newspaper, New Media Investment Group. So similar that it seems chosen to induce confusion.
(See story here, press release here.)

All this is highly unusual. Who would buy a major newspaper and not want anyone to know? What would be the possible reasons? Last night on Twitter I asked the Review-Journal: Will your newsroom be investigating the mystery of who owns you?

Today I got my answer. I received an email from a reporter at the Review-Journal, asking if I wanted to comment on “the ethics of a newspaper trying to operate without knowing who owns it.” Among the intriguing facts the reporter relayed to me: the price was $28 million more than the sale price when the same newspaper was sold in March 2015. But the newspaper’s financial fortunes had only worsened since then, a key fact.

Why is this important? Because a publicly-traded company like New Media Investment Group (holding company for Gatehouse Media) cannot legally diss an offer like that. Or let’s say: no wise corporate lawyer would advise it.

Yes! I did want to comment. Here is what I told the reporter:

It’s possible [this] has happened before but nothing comes to mind that would be comparable. As I said last night on Twitter: “Will the Review-Journal be investigating the mystery of who owns it?” and this “takes news from anonymous sources to a whole new level.”

One of the first thoughts I had was: Nevada is an early primary state. The Review-Journal is the largest newspaper in the state. Was it sold to a player in that event, or people who want to be players? That slightly conspiratorial thought may be way off base. Of course there is no way to know as long as the ownership remains hidden. That’s the point.

The simple fact that we don’t know who the owners are, that it was not announced when the transaction was announced— this in itself breeds suspicion. Because why the secrecy if it’s a normal transaction? What kind of newspaper owner doesn’t want anyone to know? Ego buyers have the opposite incentive: they want everyone to know.

Journalists already have problems with generating enough trust to operate. This just adds to it.

So now you get to see what kind of story comes out of this. I will post the link if the report ever appears. (It did.) Clearly, the journalists at the Review-Journal are as perplexed by this mystery buyer as I am.

December 12 at 11:46am
The incredible story of a major newspaper in an early primary state that now has a mystery owner continues. The publisher is refusing to tell the staff who bought the paper. The journalists are writing articles expressing their own helplessness. And no one knows what is going on, except the people who refuse to talk for reasons they refuse to reveal.

Yesterday I gave you the background in my first post. The gist: The Las Vegas Review Journal was sold this week for a weirdly inflated price to a company whose backers remained “undisclosed.” It’s the largest newspaper in the state. Nevada is an early primary state: fourth-in-the-nation. After I talked about the strangeness of this transaction on Twitter, a reporter there contacted me for a story he was doing about it. That story is now out. It includes this astounding passage:

News + Media manager Michael Schroeder has declined to disclose the company’s investors, as has Las Vegas Review-Journal Publisher Jason Taylor.

In discussions with employees, Taylor has said only that News + Media has multiple owner/investors, that some are from Las Vegas, and that in face-to-face meetings he has been assured that the group will not meddle in the newspaper’s editorial content.

Amazing… Boss, who owns us? ‘I am not going to tell you. Just go about your business. You don’t need to know.’

Here is the quote they used from me:

The timing of the transaction might also raise a question about the new owners’ possible political motivations.

“One of the first thoughts I had was: Nevada is an early primary state. The Review-Journal is the largest newspaper in the state. Was it sold to a player in that event, or people who want to be players?,” asked media critic and New York University professor Jay Rosen. “That slightly conspiratorial thought may be way off base. Of course, there is no way to know as long as the ownership remains hidden. That’s the point.”

On Twitter Saturday, The Review-Journal’s state capital reporter, Sean Whaley, wrote: “I am just going to say it. I am personally offended & embarrassed that whoever bought the RJ does not have the guts to say so.”

Anyone who can shed light on the mystery is welcome to try.

UPDATE: It gets better: The journalists at the Review Journal are clearly in a power struggle now over how this will be reported on. “The publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal removed quotes from a Thursday night article about the newspaper’s sale that questioned its new owner’s decision to remain anonymous, according to a newsroom source.”

UPDATE, DEC. 13. Today on CNN’s Reliable Sources Jon Ralston, an extremely well-connected reporter in Nevada, speculated that one possibility was Sheldon Adelson, who is known to have an interest in buying a newspaper in the US, said Ralston. Adelson— billionaire, Republican mega-donor, pro-Israel extremist — already owns one paper in Israel. Ralston also said (on Twitter) “The RJ’s owners will have to reveal themselves eventually. Too much pressure. Ridiculous for them to think they can be invisible.” Here’s the clip.

December 16 at 4:06pm
Fortune magazine, citing multiple sources but not saying who they are, reports that Sheldon Adelson is, in fact, the mystery owner of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. See: Yes, Sheldon Adelson Bought The Las Vegas Review-Journal.

5:20 pm. Obviously, the Review-Journal has been digging too. They may have been close to naming Adelson and may be annoyed that Fortune went with anonymous sources. Pressure to go public grows for new Review-Journal owners.

8:46 pm Games: “‘I have no personal interest’ in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson said Tuesday night, in his first public comments about the mysterious sale of Nevada’s biggest newspaper.” CNN: Sheldon Adelson responds to speculation he bought Las Vegas paper.

10:54 pm. It’s starting to come out now. Review-Journal: Adelson son-in-law orchestrated family’s purchase of Las Vegas Review-Journal

December 17 at 11:01am
Last night was a good night for the journalism tribe. The journalists at the Las Vegas Review-Journal did their jobs, and found out who bought the paper. Their colleagues around the country were watching and cheered them on. Killer quote: “No matter who owns the Review-Journal, they don’t own us.” See: How the Las Vegas Review-Journal broke news about its own sale.

This is an important addition to the story. Adelson overpaid by about 3X for the Review-Journal, says industry analyst Ken Doctor. See: The new breed of newspaper mogul? On Adelson’s purchase of the Review-Journal.

UPDATE: After the revelation by others, the Adelson family published a statement in the print edition of the Review-Journal. The key parts read:

It was always our intention to publicly announce our ownership of the R-J.

This week, with each of the Republican candidates for president and the national media descending on Las Vegas for the year’s final debate, we did not want an announcement to distract from the important role Nevada continues to play in the 2016 presidential election.

Our motivation for purchasing the R-J is simple. We believe in this community and want to help make Las Vegas an even greater place to live. We believe deeply that a strong and effective daily newspaper plays a critical role in keeping our state apprised of the important news and issues we face on a daily basis.

The management team from New Media, which is currently running the R-J, will continue to oversee the operations of the publication. The family wants a journalism product that is second-to-none and will continue to invest in the paper to achieve this goal.

See: Ending Mystery, Adelson Family Says It Bought The ‘Las Vegas Review-Journal’

December 18 at 5:53pm
Incredible developments today in the ‘Sheldon Adelson buys a newspaper’ story, as the journalists at the newspaper he bought keep reporting on him— and themselves. In today’s episode they tell of a team of reporters suddenly and inexplicably ordered to stop what they were doing and instead monitor and scrutinize the work of three judges.

“One of the three judges observed was District Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez, whose current caseload includes Jacobs v. Sands, a long-running wrongful termination lawsuit filed against Adelson and his company, Las Vegas Sands Corp., by Steven Jacobs, who ran Sands’ operations in Macau.

“The case has attracted global media attention because of Jacobs’ contention in court filings that he was fired for trying to break the company’s links to Chinese organized crime triads, and allegations that Adelson turned a blind eye to prostitution and other illegal activities in his resorts there.”

The reporters did as they were told, but no story ever appeared. However a story did appear in an obscure Connecticut newspaper, owned by the same guy who served as the cutout figure (I believe that is the correct term) in the corporate filings surrounding the mystery sale. It goes on from there. See: Judge in Adelson lawsuit subject to unusual scrutiny amid Review-Journal sale.

December 20 at 2:48pm
“You can be assured that if the Adelsons attempt to skew coverage, by ordering some stories covered and others killed or watered down, the Review-Journal’s editors and reporters will fight it. How can you be sure? One way is to look at how we covered the secrecy surrounding the newspaper’s sale. We dug in. We refused to stand down. We will fight for your trust. Every. Single. Day. Even if our former owners and current operators don’t want us to.”

The journalists at the Review-Journal will not quit. That quote is from a front page editorial headlined: “We will continue to fight for your trust every day.”

Incredible. They are on their way to a Pulitzer Prize in public service, but that’s the least of it. They said to themselves: It won’t be worth working here if we don’t do this, so we may as well do this. Everyone in? And by making that decision they created tremendous power for themselves. Fight on, R-J.

See: EDITORIAL: Review-Journal will fight to keep your trust every day.

December 22 at 10:06pm
Huge news in the running story of zillionaire Sheldon Adelson’s purchase of the largest newspaper in the state of Nevada, the Review-Journal. Tonight came word that the editor has resigned. This is an ominous sign. I thought it would be the publisher. That the editor is gone is worse.

“Mike Hengel, who’s been with the Review-Journal since 2010, according to his LinkedIn profile, stunned his staff Tuesday evening when he informed them he has accepted a buyout offer. A source who was present at the meeting told POLITICO that Hengel said he didn’t believe he’d last long under the new ownership and therefore decided to consider a severance option. He told employees that the new ownership arrangement ‘had the makings of an adversarial relationship,’ according to the source.” See: Review-Journal editor steps down amid ‘makings of an adversarial relationship’

Because the Adelson forces seem ready to exert control over the Review-Journal and silence dissent, now is a good time for me to say what I heard. A team of investigative reporters similar to the Spotlight team at the BostonGlobe was to be hired at Review Journal. (It was announced here, Nov. 19.) But I was told that the journalists in the Review Journal newsroom did not know who is doing the hiring for this investigative team.

I do not know more than that, and it’s possible that this will turn out to be a minor or meaningless fact. Or there may be an innocent explanation. But since the hammer seems to be coming down, I felt I should tell you what I know. If my information is incorrect or misleading I will let you know.

UPDATE: A message from the new owners about the future of the Las Vegas Review-Journal This statement was released after news broke about Mike Hengel resigning. Key parts:

…we pledge to publish a newspaper that is fair, unbiased and accurate. We decided to buy the Review-Journal to help create a better newspaper — a forward thinking newspaper that is worthy of our Las Vegas community. This journalism will be supported by new investments in services such as enhanced fact checking and a Reader Advocate or Ombudsperson to respond to reader concerns.

Third, we regard ourselves as stewards of this essential community institution, and we promise that the Review-Journal will serve the people of Las Vegas for many years to come. In particular, we will deepen the newspaper’s involvement with the community and invest what is necessary to ensure that the R-J is reporting news in the ways our community expects.

These are the three principles that will guide our ownership of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. How will this all work over the coming weeks and months? The professionals at New Media, who are now managing the R-J as well as running more than 125 other daily newspapers nationwide, will continue to oversee all operations. Mike Hengel, the paper’s current editor, accepted a voluntary buyout offer from the R-J’s prior owners, an offer that was also made to other qualified employees.

December 23 at 5:14pm
Another amazing turn in the ‘Sheldon buys himself a newspaper’ story that I have been following for you. In this episode we discover that the top editor, who resigned yesterday, learned that he took a buyout from an editorial in his own newspaper announcing that he… took a buyout! Before that he didn’t know. I mean, why not just place on his desk a severed horse’s head? The story is in the LA Times, which considers Vegas sort of in its backyard. See: Vegas newspaper stands up to its newly unveiled owner, casino giant Sheldon Adelson.

UPDATE: The Hartford Courant picks up the portion of the story that unfolded in its backyard. Mystery Surrounds Newspaper’s Relationship To Las Vegas Casino Mogul Sheldon Adelson’s Legal Fight. The Courant reporter reveals that several people quoted in the mystery article that appeared in the Bristol Press about judges in Las Vegas never talked to the author, Edward Clarkin. Clarkin himself cannot be found, as the Review Journal revealed earlier. Even the editors of the Bristol press don’t know who he is, the Courant reported:

Jim Smith, who served as executive editor of the Herald and the Bristol Press at the time Clarkin’s first byline appeared, said he also can’t shed light on Clarkin’s identity, or how the business-court story came to be, or why the New Britain Herald was so interested in Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez. Smith said he recently reached out to Schroeder, who simply replied: “Stay tuned.”

“It’s a mystery,” Smith said. “It’s a fascinating mystery. It really is.”

UPDATE: ‎Christine Stuart pretty much solved one of the elements of the mystery. The author whom no one could find, Edward Clarkin, is probably the “cutout” figure in the original purchase of the Review-Journal, Michael Schroeder of Connecticut, an agent for the Adelson forces. Either that or Schroeder created the pen name that he assigned to another writer. As Stuart‎ of CT News Junkie reports on Facebook: “Michael Schroeder’s middle name: Edward. Mother’s maiden: Clarkin.” See: How A Connecticut Journalist Broke A Key Part Of The Bizarre Las Vegas Newspaper Story (Dec. 29)

December 24 at 12:37pm
In today’s episode of ‘Sheldon buys a newspaper, journalists fight back’ we have a man of principle, Steve Majerus-Collins, who quits in disgust because the owner of the newspaper he works for in Connecticut is in league with Adelson and doing the billionaire’s bidding while deceiving the press and his own employees about it. From his moving letter:

I have no idea how my wife and I will get by. We have two kids in college, two collies, a mortgage and dreams of travel and adventure that now look more distant than ever.

“But here’s what I know: I can’t teach young people how to be ethical, upstanding reporters while working for a man like Michael Schroeder. I can’t take his money. I can’t do his bidding. I have to stand up for what is right even if the cost is so daunting that at this moment it scares the hell out of me.

A flurry of other action on this story today:

The Review-Journal hired a political fixer and crisis management dude who worked for Clinton and Gore among other clients: Mark Fabiani.

This piece appeared on Sheldon Adelson’s newspaper in Israel and how it’s run.

And Michael Schroder, the Adelson flunkie and cutout figure who tried to keep the billionaire’s ownership secret (while telling the Review-Journal staff not to worry about who owns them) would not confirm his mother’s maiden name to journalists from the newspaper he “manages.” That’s right.

December 25 at 7:00pm
In today’s episode of the Adelson newspaper follies we learn that Sheldon’s flunky and cutout figure Michael Schroeder — described by an employee who quit yesterday (Steve Majerus-Collins) as “guilty of journalistic misconduct of epic proportions” in that he “used the pages of my newspaper, secretly, to further the political agenda of his master out in Las Vegas” — has purchased another paper to add to his toy collection.

The tiny Block Island Times will now belong to Schroeder personally. The comic touch was provided by the statement that the sellers issued.

“We are confident that the new owner, Michael Schroeder, has the vision, resources and experience to take the helm,” the statement said. “We are pleased that his wife, Janet, will also play a role in the day-to-day management. They offer decades of business experience. Most importantly, they exhibit in their employment and volunteer work, a commitment to the community and its betterment.”

I might have added, “he would make an excellent bag man.” (Definition of the term bag man here.)

December 26 at 5:25pm
For today’s episode of the Adelson newspaper follies we bring in a guest commenter, Josh Marshall, editor of Talking Points Memo, who wrote about the whole sad story yesterday. Says Josh:

“I have an obvious interest in journalism and the journalistic profession. Perhaps not much less obviously I have a taste for scandals that are not merely outrageous but are baroque in their complexity and rise above mere bad acts to reach the more sublime human qualities like impulsiveness, greed that goes beyond mere greed, hasty efforts to cover up wrongdoing which take on a level of comedy that could never emerge from conscious design. Here is where we are getting to the level of scandal as art. And this is why Michael Schroeder is really the star of this whole show for my money.”

I agree. Schroeder the cutout turns the interest dial up to 11. Read Josh’s entire piece:

And I have to add: I have the same taste for the baroque element in a running scandal. In fact, I learned the iterative technique I have been using in this series of posts from… Josh Marshall, during the US Attorneys Scandal in 2007, for which he won the George K. Polk Award. I remember how he would always have something to read each day. If there was no new information he would use the opportunity to reflect and summarize. Very effective means of engagement.

UPDATE: Reporter Who Resigned Over Adelson Subterfuge Gets $5,000 Award.

December 27 at 11:50am
Our series — Adelson tries to corrupt the press, journalists fight back — continues today with a piece by Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist John L. Smith. Like Josh Marshall yesterday, Smith focuses on the hilarious and disturbing figure of Michael Schroeder, the Adelson flunky who told the Review-Journal newsroom just to do their jobs and not worry about who bought their newspaper for 3 times market value. Smith writes:

“Schroeder’s journalistic puppetry in preparing an inaccurate story about business courts meant primarily to smear District Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez, who happens to preside over a bruising ongoing litigation involving Adelson, sends a disturbing message to the staff and readers alike. The story, published in Schroeder’s New Britain newspaper, raises serious questions: Not about Gonzalez’s competence, but about Schroeder’s veracity.

“Under the byline ‘Edward Clarkin,’ almost certainly a Schroeder alter ego, the piece contains an inaccurate appraisal of the judge and sections that appear to have been lifted without proper attribution, or created from whole cloth. The Hartford Courant reported the article contained ‘several passages that are nearly identical to work that previously appeared in other publications.’

“Ill-conceived, poorly executed. Nice job, Hemingway. To call the story ham-handed does a disservice to ham.”

There have been several indications that journalists around the country continue to dig into this story. I’m waiting for someone to start asking questions and getting answers about Gatehouse Media’s role in this spectacle. This is a company that apparently sent investigative teams after Adelson’s target before the billionaire’s purchase of any assets. What’s up with that?

December 28 at 12:14pm
Two items for today’s update in the ‘Adelson buys a newspaper, journalists fight back’ story. First, I am going to be on the radio talking about it. Remember radio?

Today at 1:00 pm EST I will be on the Colin McEnroe Show on WNPR, public radio in Connecticut, along with Steve Majerus-Collins, who on Christmas eve quit his job as a reporter for the Bristol Press, owned by Adelson flunky and cutout figure Michael Schroeder. Quit on principle, I should add.

“I have learned with horror that my boss shoveled a story into my newspaper – a terrible, plagiarized piece of garbage about the court system – and then stuck his own fake byline on it,” he wrote. “I admit I never saw the piece until recently, but when I did, I knew it had Mr. Schroeder’s fingerprints all over it. Yet when enterprising reporters asked my boss about it, he claimed to know nothing or told them he had no comment.”

I don’t know what Colin McEnroe has in mind for this discussion but it should be interesting to hear from Steve. Here’s the preview, with an audio link so you can listen to a recording of the show.

UPDATE: One thing new I learned from the show. Steve Collins said that Michael Schroeder had a backer when he bought the Bristol Press. He didn’t make the purchase with his own money. The host asked him: who? Steve didn’t know and said no one in the newsroom knew. This detail, which I had missed, was reported Dec. 15 by the Review Journal.

The other item I have for you comes from the New York Times article today about the whole sad story, which more or less repeats what others have reported. But there was one part so deliciously absurd that I cannot let it escape without comment.

You see, the Adelson forces earlier decided that they were losing control of the story. So they hired a semi-famous fixer and crisis management expert to handle national press interest, which keeps growing. His name is Mark Fabiani. He’s worked for the Clintons, Al Gore, and the owner of the San Diego Chargers, among others. No doubt he’s earning hundreds of thousands of dollars for this gig. So here’s what the Times reported:

“To deal with the fallout from its Review-Journal purchase, the Adelsons have hired Mark Fabiani, a crisis communications specialist who worked in the Clinton White House and for the cyclist Lance Armstrong. Mr. Fabiani did not respond to inquiries about whether the issue of Nevada judges came up during sales talks.”

Did you catch that? He did not respond! To the freakin’ New York Times! That’s crisis management? The clever application of Mark Fabiani’s “no comment” skills? I bet it cost Adelson 15 grand just for that. Heck, I could do it for a lot less— say, $10,000 for every phone call unreturned. I have three phones (home, cell, office) from which I could ignore reporters’ calls, so I think I am more than qualified to do what Fabiani does.

Surreal.

Dec. 29 at 4:21pm
In today’s episode of ‘the Adelson forces buy a newspaper,’ we learn that the Nevada Gaming authorities, state regulators for the gambling industry, are keeping a close eye on the purchase of the Review-Journal. We also learn that Sheldon Adelson himself denies owning any portion of the newspaper or even wanting to. It was his children’s idea, he says. All this in the latest report from the Review-Journal itself.

“We are watching all of these developments very closely,” a state official said. “Of course, it’s incumbent upon all gaming license holders to avoid actions that go against the morals, good order and general welfare of the people of the state of Nevada, and to avoid doing anything that reflects or tends to reflect discredit on the state.

“I’m sure Mr. Adelson and his team are doing their utmost to do that.”

Me too!

Speaking of morals, Adelson told the Macau Daily Times that “his children” bought the Review-Journal and he has “no financial interest” in the newspaper.

“I don’t have anything to do with it,” Adelson said. “My money that the children have with which to buy the newspaper is their inheritance. I don’t want to spend money on a newspaper.”

Meanwhile, in yesterday’s radio discussion on WNPR in Connecticut, James Wright, deputy editor of the Review-Journal, said “we’re not sure who’s in charge.” Things happen — including changes made in stories after they leave the newsroom — “at whose behest we don’t know,” said Wright.

“Strings gets pulled but at this point we are often unaware whether it’s something that Gatehouse wants to do, whether it’s something the Adelson family wants to do, or whether its somebody within this daisy chain of ownership and managers who may be taking it upon themselves to overreact to something that they think someone wants to do.” That’s pretty chilling. (Listen here.)

It’s clear to me that Gatehouse Media has to be the focus of some serious inquiry by fellow journalists now. The company is becoming an engine of opacity in this story and since it is a news company that is both a curiosity, and a problem.

Dec. 30 at 10:29am
Today’s update in the ‘Adelson forces buy a newspaper’ story focuses on a player that has gotten too little attention: GateHouse Media, a resurrected chain of newspapers (it went bankrupt in 2013) that used to own the Review-Journal. Bear with me as I explain:

On December 10th the announcement was made that GateHouse had sold the Las Vegas Review Journal to a shell company called News + Media Capital Group LLC. It then cooperated in concealing the true nature of this transaction from public scrutiny. (First dark cloud.)
GateHouse was retained by the Adelson family to continue to operate the newspaper, but since then strange things have happened to various articles the Review-Journal newsroom has prepared about the sale and suspicious circumstances surrounding it. The work of the journalists in Las Vegas gets changed before it is published, but no one in the newsroom knows why, or how, or by whom. As deputy editor James Wright said Monday on WNPR’s Colin McEnroe show:

“Strings gets pulled but at this point we are often unaware whether it’s something that Gatehouse wants to do, whether it’s something the Adelson family wants to do, or whether its somebody within this daisy chain of ownership and managers who may be taking it upon themselves…” (Second dark cloud.)

This is why I have called GateHouse an engine of opacity in this story, which is troublesome for a newspaper company that counts 125 dailies among its holdings. Yesterday, a journalist who works for a GateHouse publication, Kris Olson, posted this on my Facebook page. I thought it pretty compelling so I am highlighting his words:

I could go on at length about this subject, but as a former and future Gatehouse employee (Gatehouse has an agreement to buy the paper I currently work for in the new year), I should probably hold my fire to some degree. But I do hope Gatehouse realizes the impact of being an ‘engine of opacity,’ as you aptly put it, has on the morale of the journalists it employs. Go to gatehousenewsroom.com, and you’ll see a lot of high-minded talk about ethics in and among discussion of the company’s editorial strategy. But you can’t just talk the talk. You have to walk the walk. After all, the whole reason someone hired a lot of us, I presume, is that we have well-honed B.S. detectors (as the Review-Journal staff and others have proven time and again over the past couple of weeks). Those of us who have stuck with the profession through no pay raises, unpaid furloughs, reduced staffs, etc., etc., really need to at least cling to the idea that our bosses, on some level, get it. That they don’t wear the black hats. Steve Collins was left with no other choice but to conclude that his boss indeed didn’t get it, and indeed wears a black hat. I’ll echo many others who have lauded his brave, principled decision. As of now, I feel like Gatehouse employees are sort of in limbo. I’m not 100-percent convinced that they are in Collins’ position, but I’m not 100-percent convinced that they aren’t. But I do feel pretty strongly that Gatehouse can’t just hope this will blow over. They hired us for our long memories, too. (Third dark cloud.)

Gatehouse Media is the one who ordered R-J journalists to investigate three Nevada judges, one of whom turned out to be the presiding judge in a lawsuit against Sheldon Adelson’s company. When asked about it by reporters, Michael Reed, CEO of New Media Investment Corp., the parent company of GateHouse Media, declined all comment on whether Adelson was involved. That was a real confidence builder!

Reed said the effort was part of a “multistate, multinewsroom” investigative effort initiated by GateHouse. Really? What was this project all about? Reed said he did not know who started it or who approved it. Weird. Big investigative efforts are launched but nobody at this company knows why, or who gave the order.

“I don’t know why you’re trying to create a story where there isn’t one,” Reed told an R-J reporter. “I would be focusing on the positive, not the negative.” An incredible —and threatening — statement for a news company executive to make to a journalist pursuing a legitimate story. (Fourth dark cloud.)

Then there’s this from GateHouse CEO Kirk Davis when the sale was announced:

The Review-Journal and other Nevada newspapers are the first outlets GateHouse will manage for a company other than New Media Investment.

“We look at this as a possible new business model,” said Davis, who told Review-Journal employees he hoped the management agreement would be long-term.

Uh… really? A new business model? You mean there are other billionaires out there who want to pay three times market value for one of GateHouse’s newspapers, and then hire the company back to run them? Does that sound remotely plausible? (Fifth dark cloud.)

I hope you see what I mean by an engine of opacity. Its time for GateHouse to come under national scrutiny for its role in this lurid, comic and credibility-crushing affair.

Photo credit: Mystery man without car, Jana-Sophie Lauer, Creative Commons License.

In which I give my opinion — an educated guess — about what I think happened, and call on GateHouse Media executives to level with us.

It’s been more than three weeks since Politico’s Ken Doctor, working off conversations he had with unidentified executives at the company, published this story: After Adelson: Gatehouse moves to repair Las Vegas damage. Since then, nothing has emerged to fill in the baffling unknowns that are so threatening to the company’s reputation. GateHouse Media executives seem to think they can skate on this, that the story will peter out, that we’ll forget what they have left hanging.

Will we? I hope not. That’s why I updated 19 times over six weeks my 11,000-word post on the mysteries surrounding the sale of the Las Vegas Review-Journal from GateHouse Media to the family of billionaire Sheldon Adelson. (Read it if you’re just coming to the story. I promise: the events there will amaze and amuse you.)

This I believe: To be a player in the news industry is to accept a business model that incorporates public trust. Without it, the assets you own aren’t worth as much. GateHouse Media owns 125 daily newspapers in the U.S., and some 500 smaller publications in 450 markets. It still operates the Review-Journal in Las Vegas (circulation around 165,000). By failing to address the very serious questions left hanging by the sale — many of which arise from the Review-Journal’s own reporting — the people who run GateHouse Media are, I believe, playing havoc with its reputation, which could eventually affect the value of the holding company, New Media Investment Group (NYSE: NEWM.)

But even if I am wrong about that: How can readers of the company’s news products who may be aware of the Adelson mess trust in what they are reading every day? How can journalists working for GateHouse have any confidence in company leadership if serious questions of institutional integrity go unaddressed? Why would editorial talent with options elsewhere stay or take a job there? When it’s impossible to trust in what it says about itself, what is a newspaper company worth, really?

Let’s go back to what Ken Doctor reported on Jan. 4. He said Gatehouse executives…

can be accurately described as “horrified” — thankfully and properly — by the many missteps involved in the Adelson sale. Company leadership’s first instinct was to hire a crisis management expert. Now it has come to realize that the problem of Las Vegas could more widely affect the view of the whole company.

Exactly so. Doctor did not mince words when he described what the problems were. They originate in this still-amazing story that appeared on the Review-Journal website Dec. 18: Judge in Adelson lawsuit subject to unusual scrutiny amid Review-Journal sale. (If you have not read it yet, what I have to say in this post won’t make as much sense, so please: click the link.) Doctor writes:

It appears that Adelson, or his people, tried to commandeer R-J investigative resources to “monitor” the performance of local judges who have been thorns in Adelson’s backside. The casino magnate is involved in a civil suit. Among the allegations in that suit: his company is doing business with the Macau gambling mob.

So far, no hard evidence has surfaced of Adelson or his people directing the R-J’s news staff, but the nature, timing and oddness of the coverage (the Times’ two-word take: “ominous coincidence“) ordered from on-high leads to an inescapable conclusion: Even before the legal transfer of the paper had been inked, Adelson, with Gatehouse management help, had trampled traditional journalistic lines and convention, believing he could use journalists as a hit squad.

It appears, then, that someone thought they could use GateHouse journalists as a hit squad. Whether it was the Adelson forces demanding such, or Gatehouse executives trying to impress them, or something else, we don’t know. That’s one of the unanswered questions. Here are ten more:

* Why did the Adelson family overpay for the Review-Journal by almost triple its market value, in Ken Doctor’s estimate? (Doctor studies the economics of the news industry at his site, Newsonomics.)

* Why, starting on Dec. 10, did GateHouse and the Adelson family try to keep the purchaser of the Review-Journal secret by using a newly-incorporated shell company, News + Media Capital Group LLC, which was to be “managed” by a man named Michael Schroeder, an obscure publisher of community newspapers in Connecticut? (Link 1, Link 2.)

* Why did Schroeder tell the journalists at the Review-Journal not to worry about who bought the newspaper and to focus on their jobs instead? (Link.)

* Why in September of 2015 did Schroeder, according to this report in the Huffington Post, offer a Connecticut reporter who used to work for him $5,000 to write a piece about Nevada judicial decisions, and mention Adelson in explaining the gig?

* Why two months later did GateHouse management try to get its investigative team in Sarasota, Florida to dig into “a potentially big story regarding the court system and potential ethics violations” among judges in Nevada? (Link.)

* Why in explaining that event did a GateHouse VP later tell a Review-Journal reporter that “we were engaged to tackle an investigative story in Las Vegas with no knowledge of the prospective new buyer?” Engaged… by whom? (Link.)

* Why after Sarasota begged off on that assignment did GateHouse management turn to the Review-Journal and, over the objections of top editors there, order its journalists to monitor the behavior of three Nevada judges? These included District Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez, the same judge “whose current caseload includes Jacobs v. Sands, a long-running wrongful termination lawsuit filed against Adelson and his company, Las Vegas Sands Corp., by Steven Jacobs, who ran Sands’ operations in Macau.” (Link.)

* What happened to the 15,000 words of notes and diaries that the reporters in Las Vegas compiled in completing the judges assignment, since according to the Review-Journal none of it was ever published? Where did it all go? (Link.)

* Why did Michael Schroeder publish in his tiny Connecticut newspapers a bizarre, rambling and apparently plagiarized article on business courts that criticized Nevada judge Elizabeth Gonzalez, and why did he put a fake name (Edward Clarkin) on it?

* And finally: what relationship to each other do these events bear? There are too many common elements and common players for the dots not to connect somehow. So how do they connect?

That is the question I turn to now. In this portion of my post, I am deliberately engaging in speculation (based on what’s already been published) and offering you my opinion about what went down— again, based on what has already been reported. Just to be crystal clear about it: I am not saying I know what transpired. Rather, in the absence of any decent explanation from GateHouse executives or Michael Schroeder I believe we are entitled to hypothesize and fill in the gaps with explanations that are at least plausible.

Working with limited knowledge — because the people who know won’t talk — I may well guess wrong on some points. My remedy for this: whenever possible link to what has been reported in the press or publicly stated by key players and let readers devise explanations alternative to the ones I have offered. Don’t buy my hypotheses? Come up with your own! That’s what comment sections are for.

Before I begin with my hypotheses I have to point out: there are five men who know. Together they can shed light on all the questions I have listed as open. These five are Michael Schroeder, publisher and editor of the New Britain Herald and Bristol Press in Connecticut; Jason Taylor, publisher of the Review-Journal in Las Vegas; David Arkin, Senior Vice President of Content and Product Development, GateHouse Media; Kirk Davis, Chief Executive Officer, GateHouse Media; and Michael E. Reed, Chief Executive Officer, New Media Investment Group, holding company for GateHouse. These are the men who are trying to skate off the stage without telling us what happened. I don’t believe they should get away with that. Do you?

Hypotheses: My best guess at what happened.

1.) Strategic overpayment

My hypothesis: The Adelson family overpaid for the Review-Journal by a substantial amount because there was more to the deal than just the purchase of a publishing asset. GateHouse would be expected to keep the Adelson family’s ownership stake a secret, and cooperate in the judges project. The sellers got a fantastic price for the newspaper and what is probably a lucrative agreement to operate the property, which GateHouse identified as a promising new business model.

Fact: Citing sources close to the transaction, the Review-Journal reported Dec. 15 that Adelson had been one of several bidders for the newspaper when Stephens Media was selling it and other holdings. He did not succeed in that round.

Fact: When Michael Schroeder was introduced to the Review-Journal newsroom in early December, he said the new owners had been looking to buy the Review-Journal from GateHouse “for six to eight months.” (Link.)

GateHouse closed on its purchase of the paper in March 2015. By April-May-June it was already in talks to sell it to the Adelson family. That’s fast. My guess: after losing out in the bidding with Stephens, the Adelson forces developed an understanding of some kind with GateHouse officials that would later come into play via the shell company, the secrecy surrounding the sale, and the investigation of Nevada judges.

Fact: Stephens Media LLC, which sold the R-J to GateHouse, is a private company. It can sell to whomever it wants, and reject an offer if it doesn’t like the buyer, or the terms. GateHouse is part of a public company, New Media Investment Group. It cannot easily dismiss an offer for one of its properties that is far above the going rate. (This may help explain why the Adelson family didn’t purchase the property directly from Stephens. Certainly it could have outbid GateHouse.)

Fact: Using circulation figures as a proxy for asset value, Ken Doctor estimated that at the time of the March 2015 sale to GateHouse, the Review-Journal and smaller publications in Nevada that were part of the deal were worth about $52 million. He comments:

Nine months later, though, the R-J, and its associated holdings, have been bought for $140 million, or almost triple the likely March value. It is worth noting that in 2015, daily newspaper financial performance only worsened across the board, down in mid- to higher-single digits for many mid-sized or larger dailies, such as the R-J. Financially, then, its value may have declined.

In announcing the sale that was completed on Dec. 10, New Media said its gain on the transaction would be “an estimated 69%.” That’s not the number that would astound the ever-struggling newspaper industry: “New Media completed the sale of the Review-Journal and related publications to News + Media Capital Group LLC for $140 million, or 7.0x LTM pro-forma As Adjusted EBITDA.”

We haven’t seen 7X multiples (a price based on annual earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) among midsize and larger dailies since before the recession. Today’s average multiple – and the one paid by newly acquisitive companies like New Media Investments – runs 3-4X. That’s what financial buyers have paid in recent years. Strategic buyers may pay a little more, as Jeff Bezos did for the Washington Post, but few have paid the kind of money just disbursed for the financially struggling Review-Journal.

Seven times earnings (EBITDA) when industry standard is 3-4? Must be a reason for that. My guess: GateHouse was expected to do things newspaper companies normally do not do.

2.) Bias anyone can see.

My hypothesis: I believe the Adelson forces had convinced themselves that the judge in the wrongful termination suit filed against Las Vegas Sands Corporation and Sheldon Adelson was biased against them in the extreme. They thought the evidence for this was so clear, so obvious that most fair-minded people would come to that conclusion once the facts were properly set forth. They further believed that skeptical news coverage asking the right questions about the troublesome judge (right from their point-of-view) and digging into the pertinent facts (pertinent from their point of view) would simultaneously help in getting Elizabeth Gonzalez disqualified and meet professional standards for fair and objective news coverage, an appealing two-fer.

And so the understanding they came to with GateHouse officials was, in their minds, really nothing more than tipping off a professional news organization to a great story. However, they were aware that some people wouldn’t see it that way, so steps had to be taken to conceal the Adelson stake in the Review-Journal and its self-interest in critical news coverage of the judge. I think Michael Schroeder and GateHouse both cooperated in this as part of some understanding they had with the Adelson forces, which could have been tacit or explicit. Maybe it wasn’t “you do this, we’ll do that” but just an agreement to check out a promising story… and if there’s something there you can be sure our journalists will want to run with it.

Fact: The New York Times reported this on Jan. 2:

On Nov. 4, with Mr. Adelson already in talks to buy The Review-Journal, the Nevada Supreme Court rejected a request from Sands China to have Judge Gonzalez removed from overseeing the lawsuit. The company said that rulings and comments made by Judge Gonzalez in court reflected a bias against Mr. Adelson and Sands.

My italics. They tried to get her tossed from the case for being biased against them. But their initial attempt did not succeed.

Fact: Two days after that ruling, GateHouse management ordered the Review-Journal newsroom to begin “monitoring” three Nevada judges, one of which was Elizabeth Gonzalez. “The monitoring effort began in Las Vegas on Nov. 6 with a call from a top GateHouse Media executive to Review-Journal Publisher Jason Taylor,” the newspaper reported.

Fact: On Jan. 12 of this year, the Review-Journal reported this about the attorney for Adelson’s son-in-law skirmishing with the judge in the wrongful termination suit:

At Tuesday’s hearing, Kozlov argued that Gonzalez should recuse herself from ruling on matters related to news articles about her. The judge told Kozlov to file a motion if he thinks she should refrain from ruling on an issue.

Fact: On Jan. 19 of this year, the Review-Journal reported:

Las Vegas Sands Corp. is making a new attempt to remove District Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez from a wrongful termination case that has received widespread publicity.

The company cited “recent intensified media coverage of the lawsuit” as one of the “new grounds” for requesting the judge’s disqualification.

Notice how Sands Corp. is trying to disqualify Gonzalez by pointing to news coverage that turns her into a figure of controversy, then questioning whether she can remain impartial.

3.) Schroeder screws up.

My hypothesis: Michael Schroeder tried to fulfill his part of the deal but slipped up three times, and therefore was ousted. Schroeder, I believe, was supposed to serve as front man for the purchase of the Review-Journal, allowing the Adelson forces to conceal their interest in the property indefinitely. He was also supposed to help arrange for critical coverage of Judge Gonzalez in a way that could not be traced back to Las Vegas Sands Corp. or the Adelson family. At all these tasks he failed.

Fact: In September, according to investigative journalist Peter H. Stone, Schroeder offered $5,000 to freelance reporter Scott Whipple, who used to work for his Connecticut papers. It was an unusual assignment:

Schroeder called it a “project” looking at Nevada judges who were handling business cases and mentioned Adelson’s name. To get him up to speed, Whipple recalled, Schroeder gave him a 40-page dossier comprising court documents and some newspaper clips.

After mulling the idea for a few days, Whipple decided to pass since the assignment didn’t mesh with his reporting experience and sounded unorthodox.

Schroeder’s first mistake: by outlining the Nevada judges assignment to a freelancer, by mentioning Adelson’s name in connection with it but failing to persuade Whipple to take the job, he created a source who had critical information and suspicions that not everything was kosher with the project.

Fact: On Dec. 10 the Review-Journal reported this:

Schroeder said News + Media does not own his newspapers or any other publications. When asked, he would not disclose the company’s investors.

“They want you to focus on your jobs … don’t worry about who they are,” Schroeder said.

This was Schroeder’s second mistake: Telling journalists who are trained to be curious and aggressive “don’t worry about who they are.” This practically invites them to dig into it, which is exactly what the Review-Journal reporters did. Within a week they were revealing the Adelson family hand. That was not supposed to happen. (After journalists revealed who the real buyers were, the Adelson family said it had always intended to disclose its stake but didn’t want to distract from a Republican presidential debate to be held in Las Vegas Dec. 15. But if that was really the case all they had to do was delay the announcement until Dec. 16. They had kept the deal secret for 6-8 months; what’s one more week?)

Fact: On Dec. 1, Schroeder had published in one of his Connecticut newspapers a bizarre and badly botched article on business courts, part of which attempted to raise doubts about Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez of Nevada.

Schroeder’s third mistake: he had loaded this article with red flags for curious journalists, from the phony name, ‘Edward Clarkin,’ to the illogic of reporting on Nevada judges for readers in Connecticut, to passages lifted from elsewhere and people quoted who could not recall being interviewed. As Review-Journal columnist John L. Smith wrote, “To call the story ham-handed does a disservice to ham.”

When scrutinized, this article greatly increased interest in the story among journalists around the country. Eventually, Schroeder had to apologize for it. And he became such an embarrassment to everyone involved that he was dropped from his role as “manager” of the Review-Journal, a kind of owner’s rep.

But none of that explains why he published the ‘Edward Clarkin’ article and took such risks. My guess: as part of the deal that made him “manager,” he had promised the Adelson forces that he would help produce news coverage critical of Judge Gonzalez. He struck out with freelancer Scott Whipple. Then GateHouse struck out with its Sarasota team. The Review-Journal journalists ordered to “monitor” the judges pushed back with such ferocity that nothing was published there, either. The ‘Edward Clarkin’ article was an act of desperation and bore the signs of that.

4. GateHouse strains to cooperate.

My hypothesis: Top GateHouse officials agreed to things they could not explain to their own people, which prevented them from executing on their end. Like Michael Schroeder they tried to arrange for critical coverage of Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez in a way that could not be traced back to the Adelson empire. But it didn’t work because they couldn’t get the journalists in their employ excited about the investigation, or even to see what the point of it was. Like Schroeder they grew increasingly desperate. After the sale to the Adelson family was revealed, reporters from the Review-Journal and the rest of the press started asking difficult questions. GateHouse executives froze. Because they had no answers that would pass scrutiny, they started to say bizarre things.

Fact: As the Review-Journal reported in its blockbuster story Dec. 18, in early November, David Arkin, GateHouse Media’s Senior Vice President of Content and Product Development, tried to interest Bill Church, executive editor of the GateHouse-owned Sarasota Herald-Tribune, in what was described as a “big story regarding the court system and potential ethics violations.” The potential story was said to involve “campaign finances and how judges were ruling on certain cases.”

After talking to his staff, Church told Arkin they could not immediately help.

“Given what I knew at the time, I said no, we just didn’t have the resources, and there were too many questions that still needed to get resolved,” Church said.

One major concern, Church said, was why the Sarasota newspaper would be asked to help when GateHouse also owned the Review-Journal, a larger newspaper in Las Vegas.

Note that neither GateHouse nor Bill Church in Sarasota told the Review-Journal newsroom about this event.

Fact: Shortly after the failed attempt to entice Sarasota, GateHouse officials turned to the Review Journal newsroom: (Link.)

…three reporters at the newspaper received an unusual assignment passed down from the newspaper’s corporate management: Drop everything and spend two weeks monitoring all activity of three Clark County judges.

The reason for the assignment and its unprecedented nature was never explained.

One of the three judges observed was District Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez, whose current caseload includes Jacobs v. Sands, a long-running wrongful termination lawsuit filed against Adelson and his company…

Fact: Journalists at the Review-Journal had the assignment forced on them: (Link.)

An internal memo outlining the court initiative notes that each reporter was to “observe how engaged the judge is in the case, whether they’re prepared or not, if they favor one lawyer over another, whether they’re over- or under-worked — even whether they show up for work on time, or not.”

The memo, authored by Review-Journal Deputy Editor James G. Wright, notes the initiative was undertaken without explanation from GateHouse and over the objection of the newspaper’s management, and there was no expectation that anything would be published.

Fact: When Review-Journal reporter Eric Hartley tried to ask Senior VP David Arkin about the Sarasota contact and any connection between the judges assignment and the Adelson empire, Arkin refused to be interviewed and instead sent a prepared statement, saying the company had been:

engaged to tackle an investigative story in Las Vegas with no knowledge of the prospective new buyer. Because Las Vegas was relatively new to the company, we decided to approach our newsroom in Sarasota, Florida, a team that is known for tackling big investigative journalism… On the face of the situation, we had what appeared to be a great story we were capable of investigating, and I wanted our team to show its talent. From my point of view, it was nothing more. (Link.)

Fact: As questions mounted over GateHouse’s behavior, David Arkin refused to explain to his own company’s reporter what this “great story” was all about. Eric Hartley, who now works for the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk (not a GateHouse property), told me via email:

I emailed David Arkin seven times between Dec. 19 and 25 asking him to call me to address all the questions not answered in his emailed statement, including who “engaged” him to “tackle” the Las Vegas story and what that story was supposed to be. I also repeatedly texted and called him asking for those answers. Aside from that Dec. 18 emailed statement, he never responded.

Fact: David Arkin’s bosses were even less helpful. From the Review-Journal’s Dec. 18 story:

Whether there was a link between the GateHouse-ordered court monitoring assignment, the critical article in New Britain and the sale of the R-J to the Adelson family remains unclear.

Michael Reed, CEO of New Media Investment Corp., the parent company of GateHouse Media, declined to comment when asked whether Adelson was involved in the court monitoring directive. He said the effort was part of a “multistate, multinewsroom” investigative effort initiated by GateHouse, but said he did not know who started it or how it was approved.

“I don’t know why you’re trying to create a story where there isn’t one,” Reed told an RJ reporter on Wednesday. “I would be focusing on the positive, not the negative.”

(My italics.) Notice how the company’s top guy did know about a “multistate, multinewsroom” investigation, but did not know where it came from, or who authorized it. And he declined all comment on whether Adelson was involved. Mark Fabiani, the fixer hired by the Adelsons to handle the national press attention that has come to this story, has twice declined to answer that question when the New York Times put it to him. (Like, Arkin he wouldn’t even call the reporter back.) What does that tell you?

It tells me that truthful answers are too toxic, and deceptive ones stand a risk of being exposed by other parties. But again, that’s my opinion, not something I know for certain. One more thing: Arkin claimed GateHouse had “no knowledge of the prospective new buyer” in November of 2015. But Michael Schroeder told the Review-Journal newsroom the deal had been in the works since the spring of 2015! Arkin’s statement would be appear to be dead on arrival. To me these are signs of desperation.

What happens if we put all my hypotheses together? We get an educated guess — which is only my opinion — of what went down here.

The Adelson family overpaid by double or triple because there was more to the deal than the transfer of publishing assets. The shell company and Michael Schroeder were supposed to provide an extra layer of insulation.

Properly steered, skeptical journalists asking the right questions about the troublesome judge would simultaneously help in getting Elizabeth Gonzalez disqualified and meet professional standards for honest, hard-hitting news coverage. This made the arrangement seem almost… innocent.

In their minds the Adelson forces were simply alerting a newspaper company to a great story. But they also knew that some people, biased against billionaires, would not see it that way. So steps had to be taken to obscure the Adelson empire’s stake in the Review-Journal and its keen interest in critical news coverage of the judge.

Michael Schroeder and GateHouse agreed to take those steps. The understanding they had with the purchasers could have been tacit, explicit or some winking combination of both. Or maybe they all deceived each other. But Schroeder bungled his assignments, and GateHouse couldn’t deliver on critical coverage of Judge Gonzalez without provoking an open revolt from its journalists. The infamous ‘Edward Clarkin’ article was an act of desperation. Schroeder’s clownish appearance in the R-J newsroom became an invitation to skeptical journalists: start digging!

The sale to the Adelson family was not supposed to become public when it did. Journalists in Vegas weren’t supposed to connect the dots between the dubious story tip in Sarasota, the monitor-these-judges assignment forced on the Review-Journal and some bizarre article on business courts published in a tiny Connecticut newspaper. But that connection was made — journalism! — and reporters started asking uncomfortable questions. “Who is Edward Clarkin?” added an element of mystery, a pop culture (parking garage) trope that greatly increased interest in the story.

At the top of the company panic set in. Because they had no answers that would pass scrutiny, participants began to say things that made no sense. Or they stopped talking altogether.

How did the judges assignment get started? Who authorized it? Mike Reed, the company’s top executive, claimed not to know. In this he sounds radically incurious. When asked whether Adelson was involved at all, Reed flatly refused to answer. That’s damning. Mark Fabiani, the fixer hired by the Adelsons to handle national press attention, twice declined to answer the same question. That’ll fix it!

My guess: truthful replies were too damaging, further deception too risky. This is why nothing has happened since Ken Doctor wrote on Jan. 4 that “the company owes its readers, its own journalists and the wider public a series of explanations.”

Five men know. One of them, the hapless Michael Schroeder, has already apologized to his readers without really explaining anything. I doubt we will get much more out of him. Sheldon Adelson won’t even admit that he owns the Review-Journal, which is comical because his fixer puts him in the same category as Jeff Bezos and John Henry, two billionaires who do admit that they own newspapers. So I don’t think we’re going to get much from Adelson, either.

It is the reputation of GateHouse Media and the people who run New Media Investment Group that is truly on the line here. In my view Jason Taylor, David Arkin, Kirk Davis, and Michael Reed have reached a moment of truth in their careers. It is time for them to do what Ken Doctor said they must do: “publish a public accounting of the December mess.” And if they want to correct my informed guesswork — for that is what I have offered in this post — all the better.

After Matter: Notes, Reactions & Links

My thanks to Joseph M. Finnerty of Barclay Damon for his assistance in the preparation of this post and to John Robinson of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill for his comments and suggestions on an earlier draft.

UPDATE, Jan. 28. The noose tightens. News from Las Vegas. Jason Taylor, publisher of the Review-Journal, is out. (He’s one of the five men who know, as I put it.) Taylor was replaced today by Craig Moon, former publisher of USA Today, who left that job 2009. At the R-J Thursday morning there was an all-hands meeting where Moon was introduced. According to what I learned from GateHouse employees and this AP report, Jason Taylor will stay with GateHouse in an executive capacity overseeing Western properties. New publisher Craig Moon will not be a GateHouse person, as Jason Taylor was, but an employee in the House of Adelson.

“It wasn’t immediately clear what prompted the change in leadership,” the New York Times wrote.

This development changes the executive picture, and indicates tightening control over the Review-Journal by the Adelson forces. Meanwhile, at the centralized print production center in Austin, GateHouse employees were told by Senior VP David Arkin that as of March 1 they will no longer be composing the pages of the Review-Journal. So the “divorce” between GateHouse and the Adelsons is being finalized. Also, from sources in the Review-Journal newsroom: the disclosure statement that used to run on page 3 of the print edition and the home page of the digital edition is no more, on orders of the new publisher:

It seems like the noose is tightening in the Review-Journal newsroom. Another indication of that: I’m told that at the all-hands meeting in Las Vegas to introduce the new publisher, no one even asked about the events of December and whether lingering questions around the judges investigation would ever be addressed. On the surface all is sunny however: This passage ran in the Review-Journal:

Moon said Sheldon Adelson asks insightful questions about newspapers. Adelson owns Israel Hayom, an Israeli newspaper.

“Sheldon is pretty articulate about things about newspapers, like: ‘So do you think the presses are being optimized?'” Moon said.

Moon said the owner puts the newspaper in a solid position for the future.

“I really do want to make this a world-class media business — the best it can possibly be,” he said. “We’ve got a great owner. We’ve got the commitment of a great owner. We’re not a public company having to sit and talk about how our earnings were the for the last quarter, and I think we’re going to be able to do some really big things here.”

UPDATE: Jan. 29: Things are coming into focus now. The Review-Journal reports that Sheldon Adelson is trying to lure the NFL’s Oakland Raiders to Las Vegas by proposing to build an expensive new stadium, which is what it takes:

Casino giant Las Vegas Sands Corp. will lead a consortium of investors planning to build a $1 billion domed stadium on 42 acres near the University of Nevada, Las Vegas that would house the school’s football team — and possibly a National Football League franchise.

There are all kinds of ways that owning the largest newspaper in Nevada could be useful in trying to get a project like that done. For example, this from a Las Vegas Sands Corp spokesman: “Abboud said Las Vegas Sands may seek legislative approval for diversion of hotel room tax revenues that now support the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority to the project.” Adelson needs lots of people and public bodies to go along with his scheme if the stadium plan is to work. When you factor that in, owning the Review-Journal makes more sense.

That is exactly the theme of this column by Jon Ralston, the most prominent journalist in the state: Adelson begins to play with his new toy. It’s about aiding Adelson’s campaign for a new stadium through orchestrated coverage in the Review-Journal.

Columbia Journalism Review: Review-Journal backtracks on ownership disclosure.

John Robinson, former editor of the News & Record in Greensboro, NC, reflects on the form that I used for this post, and says journalists should do this kind of thing more often. State what is known, what remains unknown, “show your work,” and try to connect the dots.

In the deep background to this story: Daily Beast, July 6, 2015: Why Did ‘Frontline’ Kill Lowell Bergman’s Gambling Documentary? “Recriminations and accusations are flying after the PBS series shelved veteran reporter Lowell Bergman’s documentary about the gambling industry in Macau.”

From a successful writer of thrillers, formerly with the CIA:

“Journalists as Hit Squad”—thriller writers, @jayrosen_nyu just outlined a great novel for you. Seriously, read thishttps://t.co/Sr5qrvOA5y

— Barry Eisler (@barryeisler) January 30, 2016

Coda: Events since I published this post show the path that participants in the fiasco are taking to avoid responsibility for everything I wrote about. Soon the Adelson empire and GateHouse Media will be divorced from each other. No more operating agreements, no more entanglement. The Adelsons can say, “The investigation of the judges? That was Schroeder, that was GateHouse. We had nothing to do with it.” GateHouse can say: “We have nothing to do with the Las Vegas newspaper any longer. We’re moving on.” By going their separate ways, they allow culpability and unanswered questions to drop into the abyss between them. The journalists in Las Vegas are now wholly under the control of Adelson and the new publisher who was announced Jan 28. The journalists at GateHouse will feel no duty to expose the goings-on at a former property. Most likely, we will never find out what happened, unless the national press makes a continuing and big deal out of it. But with no new information to report, the chances of that happening are thin. So in all probability, the attempted misuse of journalists as a ‘hit squad’ will go unexplained and unexposed. That’s frustrating. If David Carr were still alive, I would be sending this note to him. Instead, I am publishing it. But I do not have much hope that it will make a difference. Chances are no one will pay. It appears they got away with it.

This is a key moment for Vox Media and its internal culture, which has been one of the company’s strengths. Vox can emerge a better, wiser, tougher company but only if the truthtelling is real— and made public.

On February 17, SB Nation, the founding site in the Vox Media empire, did something so inexplicable it amounts to an editorial mystery.

For about five hours the editors had up on their site a 12,000 word article weirdly sympathetic to Daniel Holtzclaw, the now-notorious Oklahoma City police officer convicted on 18 counts of rape and sexual assault, crimes he committed while on duty and against the people he was supposed to protect. This was a piece of writing so wrongheaded, noxious and ill-conceived that the editorial director of SB Nation, Spencer Hall, said later that day in a note to readers: “There is no qualification: it was a complete failure.”

A true statement. I cannot put it any better than Deadspin’s Greg Howard did:

The tone of the entire piece is fawning and forgiving; by the end, the terrifying, spectacular spree of rapes exists as little more than an unfortunate occurrence, and a 263-year sentence as an unjustly harsh burden Holtzclaw has to bear. Holtzclaw destroyed 13 women’s lives; “Who Is Daniel Holtzclaw?” told the story of how they destroyed his.

What I mean by a mystery is this: When the editors of a site receive complaints about a work they have published, and after reviewing it quickly find their decision to publish it indefensible, they are telling us, in effect, that they had temporarily lost their minds. They had quit being editors, but when alerted to the vacancy looked upon their AWOL selves with shock and horror. From the outside it’s hard to imagine how that switch happens. Continuing to defend the indefensible, as Newsweek has done with its bitcoin story (still online, unretracted) is a lot less admirable than what Vox did, but somehow easier to understand than “Hey, we temporarily lost our minds…”

In the case of “Who is Daniel Holtzclaw?” — quickly removed from the internet by SB Nation but still available in a cached version — an internal investigation is underway. It is being conducted by Vox Media’s editorial director, Lockhart Steele. According to Greg Howard’s report, he is being assisted by five women who work for Vox: Recode founder Kara Swisher, Eater executive editor Helen Rosner, Vox.com managing editor Lauren Williams, Katie Nimick of Vox Media human resources, and Miriam Nissly, who works in the company’s legal department.

“A major editorial miscalculation was made, and it’s on us that we figure out why and limit the chances of it happening again,” Steele told the New York Times. The meltdown happened in SB Nation’s “longform” division, which was launched in 2012. It publishes narrative non-fiction that takes months to report. That work has been suspended while the investigation unfolds.

“We’re reviewing all of our processes in light of this failure,” said Spencer Hall in his note to readers shortly after the piece was pulled. “There are a lot of them, and I promise to talk in detail about them publicly while we work through all of them.” Please underline that word “promise.” Greg Howard reports something different: “What the company finds may well remain unknown; we’re told the results of its inquest are unlikely to be made public.” That is not good.

I think this is a key moment for Vox Media and its internal culture, which has been a major strength. A weird thing about these meltdowns is that it’s entirely possible for Vox to come out of this a wiser and stronger company that’s even more attractive to editorial, technical and commercial talent. But that only happens if the investigation is thorough and the truthtelling is real and detailed— and made public.

In a memo to employees obtained by Deadspin, Vox’s vice president of editorial operations, Kevin Lockland, wrote: “You have every right to be angry and disappointed. We are committed to taking appropriate actions to earn back your trust, which we know will take time.” That’s a good sign. But of course it is the trust of readers that is equally a stake in this investigation. And the confidence of future employees, especially women and minority journalists, who may or may not want to join Vox. For as Greg Howard observes:

This story serves as an example of why diversity in the newsroom is so important. It isn’t because diversity is charity, or because giving opportunities to people other than white men is a Christlike thing to do, but because everyone has blind spots, and everyone fucks up.

Exactly.

Diversity = blind spot minimization. Real diversity is an improvement in editorial vision, such that things appear “in their corrected fullness.” (The phrase is Sheldon Wolin’s.) Howard’s reporting on how the meltdown happened reveals that Elena Bergeron, SB Nation’s senior editor — a very experienced journalist and “the only person of color and the only woman among SBNation.com’s top layer of editors” — had seen the disaster coming. She “explicitly and repeatedly drew attention to the story’s flaws in the days leading to its publication— and was, somehow, ignored.” Somehow ignored? That’s part of the mystery. But it has to be explained. If the explanation is kept within house, what does that tell minority journalists who will in the future be recruited by Vox?

I know a few people at Vox. I know how seriously they take minority recruitment. What happened to Elena Bergeron’s voice is now a public issue. It has to be addressed… publicly. This is too obvious to belabor any further.

Departing from what has been reported, I want to add a few thoughts and speculations of my own to the mystery of how “Who is Daniel Holtzclaw?” got published.

The writer and non-fiction master Gay Talese used to describe for anyone who asked how he would pin the typed pages of his articles to a wall, in order to step back and re-read the draft with binoculars. That’s right: binoculars! Why did he do this? Because it was the only way he could think of to examine his creation at the sentence level and as a completed whole: simultaneously. To perfect what he made, he needed distance from, and intimacy with. He felt he couldn’t sacrifice one for the other. If he planted a bomb on page 2, he wanted to see exactly how it went off on page 22, and assess whether that was the right story arc. I mention this because it is one answer to the mystery of how the Vox editors temporarily lost their minds. They didn’t have any equivalent to Gay Talese’s binoculars. They didn’t know what their creation added up to. They couldn’t see it whole.

There are other ways to get distance on a text you are too intimate with. One of them is so simple, so artless, so obvious that I’m convinced it is under-employed because editorial people — who think of themselves as sophisticated manipulators of text — are embarrassed to use something we might recommend to a sixth grader. Read the work aloud, preferably to an “average” or non-specialist listener. Just vocalizing a problematic text brings the problems with it much closer to the surface. There is no way “Who is Daniel Holtzclaw?” could have survived being read aloud to a husband, wife, girlfriend or boyfriend. No one who loves you would have let you publish it on the internet.

Which brings me to another point about putting such pieces online. In 2009 I called it “audience atomization overcome.” It means that the internet is extremely efficient at allowing people who draw the same conclusion to locate each other and realize their number. Whereas before the internet people who thought upon reading your piece “well, that’s odd,” or “this is appalling,” or “seriously, Rolling Stone?” had little recourse but to write a letter to the editor or complain to a friend, today if the sentiment is widely shared these readers quickly realize they are not alone, and that their collective disbelief is much stronger than the editors’ belief in what was just published. Audience atomization has been overcome.

The writer and software engineer Paul Ford had this in mind when in the wake of the SB Nation debacle he mused about adding a “Very Concerned!” button to content management systems. “Anyone—designer, intern, editor—could click that button. Once they click, an email goes straight up the chain (to the top of the company) flagging that someone, somewhere is concerned.” But why limit it to the people you employ?

What if you created a special reader’s program of, say, two hundred people who read your publication? Make sure they are as diverse as hell—race, gender identity, sports teams, location, age, education. Recruit them quietly. Pay them something small but meaningful: $100/month to read 10 or so stories each. They’d read them anyway; here, they get money for reading them early and carefully.

This is now your “reader’s council.” Give them unlimited access to drafts of articles and ask for feedback and notes, and give them the same “Very Concerned!” button you gave to your editors. Make it all totally anonymous—no way for the editors to reach them, or know who they are. Now instead of waiting for the Internet to take you to task, a group of strangers can take you to task, quietly, on a regular basis.

This is diversity, of the distributed kind.

Finally, a point about clichés. Here is something Poynter.org published not long ago: 15 political clichés journalists should avoid. Advice like this presents clichés as a glitch in one’s writing, a problem of attentiveness. You can avoid clichés by recognizing them early and steering around them.

I have read “Who is Daniel Holtzclaw?” four times. It is teeming with clichés. The “nice guy” who no one could believe is a rapist. The father who swears his son could never have done this. The dedicated athlete always found in the weight room, determined to make it to the NFL. (He doesn’t.) But the kinds of clichés that doom the piece are not glitches in the writing. They are way beyond the use of tired phrases that one could avoid. Rather, the author of this work thinks in clichés, superficialities that were fatal to the piece before he ever typed a word. This is not a matter of technique. It cannot be cured by better editing, or reminders from Poynter. It is not a lapse into cliché but a prior condition that should have disqualified him from ever taking on this subject.

I’m not going to even mention the author’s name because this is not about him. The editors are at fault. The writer they chose was completely over-matched by his subject. When it was proposed… a piece asking “Who is Daniel Holtzclaw, really?” …a proper answer would have been: is Joan Didion available?

After Matter: Notes, Reactions & Links

UPDATE, March 9: Glen Stout, the editor of SB Nation longform, who commissioned the piece in question, is fighting back. His lawyer sent a letter to Deadspin demanding a correction, and included exhibits like emails sent and drafts amended. Erik Wemple of the Washington Post tries to sort it out: Ex-SB Nation editor seeks correction/retraction from Deadspin over Daniel Holtzclaw story. Here’s the lawyer’s letter with quite a lot of detail.

Erik Wemple (March 10): Internal review of SB Nation’s Holtzclaw story close to completion.

If you care at all about editorial integrity (or “longform,” narrative journalism) you really should read the doomed text, “Who is Daniel Holtzclaw?” There is no need for me to repeat the many on-point criticisms that have been made of this article. Instead I will link and highlight:

* L.V. Anderson at Slate, The Worst Parts of SB Nation’s Deleted Story Lionizing a Convicted Rapist. “You may be wondering how many times [the author] directly quotes Holtzclaw’s victims in his 12,000-word piece. The answer: exactly once.”

* Barry Petchesky at Deadspin (a Gawker site): “Basically, this is the local news interviewing the shocked neighbors — ‘He always seemed like such a nice kid’ — over and over again for 12,000 words.”

* Jessica Luther at Fansided (a Sports Illustrated site.)

[The author’s] starting point is as a man who watched Holotzclaw’s entire college career, who sees Holtzclaw as an athlete first, and who imagines Holtzclaw’s story as a tragic arc. The victimized women are simply an anomaly to be explained away in the otherwise successful life of a nice guy who happened to become a convicted rapist. Yet, for plenty of sexual assault survivors, the fact that everyone in their community and friend group believed that the man who raped them was a “good guy” who “would never do such a thing” kept them quiet, made them fearful of coming forward, made them doubt what happened to them, etc.

* A Deadspin commenter who is admirably concise:

Jeez, didn’t you read the story? He was a former football player who once played football but no longer played football, and was well liked by the people who liked him! And those rapes he committed but maybe he didn’t? You weren’t there so who knows?

Crazy as it sounds, that is a good summary of what SB Nation published and then un-published, once the editors came to their senses. That the author never should have been given the assignment you can tell by trying to read his concluding paragraph. It is almost insensible:

Pending an improbable successful appeal, everything he had worked for was now gone, likely never to be recovered, ever again. Recovery, if there is any, appears to be something deserved only by the victims of a man whose belief in his innocence will apparently be, like the way he once pursued his dream of playing in the NFL, unrelenting, despite all evidence to the contrary.

That the author should never have been given the assignment you can also tell from his apology note.

Maybe when the crash site investigation is concluded it will find that the problems began with the dubious proposition that because Holtzclaw’s football career had been under-covered, SB Nation — a sports site — had something vital to add to the story of his crimes and conviction. That the writer had covered Holtzclaw when he was in college may have given the editors a false sense that they were in possession of some kind of exclusive.

“The fact that he was a football player — and a pretty good one, who fell just short of the N.F.L. — seemed to have escaped all other coverage.” These are the words of Glenn Stout, editor of SB Nation’s longform division, in an email to a writer’s group that the New York Times obtained. “I think people will be talking about this one,” he wrote.

But there’s the mystery again. When you read “Who is Daniel Holtzclaw?” it’s almost impossible to believe that a competent editor read and signed off on it. It’s that bad. But Glenn Stout is a serious journalist, a respected editor. From the comments at Deadspin:

Matt Tullis
MarcabExpat
2/19/16 9:14pm
I’ve written five pieces for SB Nation Longform, and Glenn Stout has been my editor on all five pieces. In all five instances, the editing was exhaustive. Of course, I can only speak for my own experience, but every single story I’ve written for the site, has gone through round after round after round of edits and revisions. And it’s always resulted in the story getting better.

Spencer Hall, editorial director of SB Nation, told Deadspin: “Glenn has worked his last day at SBNation.com.”

I have written often about editorial meltdowns. They interest me:

* “I want it to be 25 years ago!” Newsweek’s blown cover story on bitcoin. (March 10, 2014)

* “Events by which ‘Dr. V’s Magical Putter’ came to be published are now the best argument I have for you on diversity in the newsroom. (Jan. 22, 2014)

* Rolling Stone’s ‘A Rape on Campus.’ Notes and comment on Columbia J-school’s investigation. (April 6, 2015)

This began as an email I was going to send to a reporter who asked me for comment on the complaints of Bernie Sanders supporters about unfair treatment. I decided to post it. I do realize it will satisfy no one.

Campaign coverage as usual lacks any higher or deeper purpose beyond chronicling the race and figuring out who is likely to win. This purposelessness is the originating problem, in my view. The alternatives that are typically put forward — captured in two over-used abstractions, “issues” and “policy” — do not stir the juices among campaign journalists or inspire creative effort within their organizations.

Who wants to spend their time chronicling the policy proposals of a candidate who is not going to win anyway? No one. And if the candidate is likely to win, the story of how they did it (and what it takes…) is always more exciting to journalists than policy prescriptions that are unlikely to be adopted because they were crafted to gain votes in a presidential election, to sound right to the right groups of people, not to pass Congress after the election.

As long as the available alternatives are posed this way: chronicling the ups and downs of the race and figuring out who’s likely to win — also known as horse race journalism — on one hand, vs. “issues” and “policy” coverage (dutiful business…) on the other, nothing will really change. We will continue to be stuck in these fruitless debates wherein supporters of the candidates who are not winning in the estimation of journalists cry foul because they get less attention, which then makes it harder for them to win.

Bernie Sanders supporters are currently trapped in this catch-22; it enrages them, but it is not unique to their candidate. These complaints will continue to fall on deaf ears (sorry for the cliché) because journalists receiving them actually believe: “If you wanted your candidate to receive more coverage, you should have backed someone who was more likely to win!” But journalists who think that way won’t say it that way because a.) it sounds mean, uncharitable in the extreme, and b.) somewhere they have a bad conscience about surrendering to their own horse race tendencies.

In one breath they think: Who are these people claiming we should give their candidate more coverage? They should have thought of that before they backed an obvious loser! But in the next breath they think: issues, policy, public problem-solving, material differences among the candidates in what they would do if elected… that’s what the election is supposed to be about. We should cover that.

Reflecting for any length of time on this conflict is too painful for intelligent and self-aware journalists. Cognitive dissonance is the most likely result. Who’s gonna win? is of immediate import to the nation and more interesting to the audience, they believe. But what these candidates would do if elected is more valid journalistically, symbolized by a strange word they use for this part of the problem, “substance.” (As against “process.”) Picking between the two — substance vs. process — is hard. They say they do both, but when it comes to determining the portion of coverage that various candidates “deserve” there are no points for being the most substantial. There could be, maybe there should be, but there isn’t in the system as it stands.

Overlaid on this are, of course, the obvious commercial pressures that vastly favor Trump in this election (the handy term for which is “ratings”) and the ancient tests of newsworthiness: the different, the new, the unexpected, the man that bites dog, the spectacular, the OMG, the bizarre. These also favor Trump, hugely. And he’s winning the Republican primary, so he has the trifecta: ratings, OMG and horse race. Good luck moving the press off that!

Purposelessness is the deeper problem, I have said. But the people who produce campaign coverage don’t agree with me. They think this criticism is weird, tone deaf. They know they pay a lot of attention to the horse race, but they don’t apologize for it, because they truly believe: this is what readers, viewers and listeners prefer. The race is exciting! People want to know who’s likely to win. They don’t want to waste their votes on a loser. They want to be brought inside the process, the circus, the show. The high-minded complain, but consumers love the product. No contest.

What I mean by purposelessness is that the producers and authors of campaign coverage would find it hard to answer this question: what are we trying to accomplish here? What’s the ultimate goal of our coverage in 2016? It’s not to elect a particular candidate. (As Jack Shafer said to his colleagues today: “Your job is neither to stop Trump nor advance him.”) It’s not to make the case for the D’s or the R’s. (That’s the job of the parties.) It’s not to win the ratings or the battle for clicks. (Corporate bosses love that, but it’s not what gets political journalists jazzed.)

They could say, and some of them would say, “to equip people to cast an intelligent vote,” but if that were the purpose then it would be no contest in the other direction: “substance” would win over “process” with regularity. (Again those are not my terms, they are native to the campaign press.) Another possible answer would be: to vet these candidates and make sure they and their proposals meet the presidential test. A worthy goal but it has little to do with “who’s gonna win and how are they doing it?” which is a majority of the coverage.

When you put it all together you realize the purposelessness is intentional, or at least functional, it works just enough for everyone to keep the system as it is. Not to be too cute, but it has a purpose. For another way of saying weak on questions of purpose is “strong on advancing no agenda” and in mainstream journalism that’s good… right?

I guess what I’m saying is this: Campaign journalists have a system for determining who gets the most coverage. They have no system for determining who deserves the most coverage.

The justness of campaign journalism will change only when the people who produce it have enough confidence to declare an agenda that is not ideological or political, that does not tilt the field for this candidate or that party but rather instructs the press in where the spotlight belongs. (Example of what I mean.) Until that day, these abstractions will float around — issues, policy, substance, process — and people will continue to get mad.

I often comment on the absurdity of the relentlessly down-the-middle approach cultivated by CNN, PBS, NPR and other “mainstream” news organizations. I don’t trust this style. I think it is practiced in bad faith.

Last night I came upon a new exhibit in my running critique. I will show it to you, and then try to interpret what it means. It happened on a program where he said, she said and “we’ll have to leave it there” are a kind of house style: The Newshour on PBS. (Link.) Let’s set the scene…

* A big story: the poisoning of Flint, Michigan’s water supply— a major public health disaster.
* Latest news: the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing at which Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, a Republican, and EPA Administrator Gina McCarth, an Obama appointee, both testified.
* Outcome: They were ritualistically denounced and told to resign by members of Congress in the opposing party. (Big surprise, right?)
* Cast of characters in the clip I’m about to show you: Judy Woodruff of the Newshour is host and interviewer. David Shepardson is a Reuters reporter in the Washington bureau who has been covering the Flint disaster. (Formerly of the Detroit News and a Michigan native.) Marc Edwards is a civil and environmental engineer and professor at Virginia Tech. (“He’s widely credited with helping to expose the Flint water problems. He testified before the same House committee earlier this week.”)

Now watch what happens when Woodruff asks the Reuters reporter: who bears responsibility for the water crisis in Flint? Which individual or agency is most at fault here? (The part I’ve isolated is 2:22.)

Here is what I saw. What did you see? The comment thread is open.

The Reuters journalist defaults on the question he was asked. He cannot name a single agency or person who is responsible. The first thing and the last thing he says is “depends on your point of view.” These are weasel words. In between he manages to isolate the crucial moment — when the state of Michigan failed to add “corrosion control” to water drawn from the Flint River — but he cannot say which official or which part of government is responsible for that lapse. Although he’s on the program for his knowledge of a story he’s been reporting on for months, the question of where responsibility lies seems to flummox and decenter him. He implies that he can’t answer because there actually is no answer, just the clashing points of view.

Republicans in Congress scream at Obama’s EPA person: you failed! Democrats in Congress scream at a Republican governor: you failed! Our reporter on the scene shrugs, as if to say: take your pick, hapless citizens! His actual words: “Splitting up the blame depends on your point of view.”

This is a sentiment that Judy Woodruff, who is running the show, can readily understand. He’s talking her language when he says “depends on your point of view.” That is just the sort of the down-the-middle futility that PBS Newshour traffics in. Does she press him to do better? Does she say, “Our viewers want to know: how can such thing a happen in the United States? You’ve been immersed in the story, can you at least tell us where to look if we’re searching for accountability?” She does not. Instead, she sympathizes with David Shepardson. “It’s impossible to separate it from the politics.” But we’ll try!

For the try she has to turn to the academic on the panel, who then gives a little master class in how to answer the question: who is at fault here? Here are the points Marc Edwards of Virginia Tech makes:

* Governor Snyder failed to listen to the people of Flint when they complained about the water.
* Synder trusted too much in the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and the EPA.
* He has accepted some blame for these failures, calling the Flint water crisis his Katrina.
* EPA, by contrast, has been evading responsibility for its part in the scandal.
* EPA called the report by its own whistleblower “inconclusive” when it really wasn’t.
* The agency hesitated and doubted itself when it came to enforcing federal law. WTF?
* EPA said it had been “strong-armed” by the state officials as if they had more authority than the Federal government.

Who is responsible? That was the question on the PBS table. If we listen to the journalist on the panel we learn: “it depends on which team you’re on,” and “they’re all playing politics,” and “it’s impossible to separate truth from spin.”

Professor Marc Edwards, more confident in his ability to speak truth to power, cuts through all that crap: There are different levels of failure and layers of responsibility here, he says. Some people are further along than others in admitting fault. Yes, it’s complicated — as real life usually is — but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to assign responsibility. Nor does responsibility lie in one person’s lap or one agency’s hands. Multiple parties are involved. But when people who have some responsibility obfuscate, that’s outrageous. And it has to be called out.

Now I ask you: who’s in the ivory tower here? The journalist or the academic?

I know what you’re thinking, PBS Newshour people. Hey, we’re the ones who booked Marc Edwards on our show and let him run with it. That’s good craft in broadcast journalism! Fair point, Newshour people. All credit to you for having him on. Good move. Full stop.

What interests me here is the losing gambit and musty feel of formulaic, down-the-middle journalism. The misplaced confidence of the correspondent positioning himself between warring parties. The spectacle of a Reuters reporter, steeped in the particulars of the case, defaulting on the basic question of who is responsible. The forfeiture of Fourth Estate duties to other, adjacent professions. The union with gridlock and hopelessness represented in those weasel words: “depends on your point of view.” The failure of nerve when Judy Woodruff lets a professional peer dodge her question— a thing they chortle about and sneer at when politicians do it. The contribution that “not our job” journalists make to unaccountable government, and to public cynicism. The bloodlessness and lack of affect in the journalist commenting on the Flint crisis, in contrast to the academic who is quietly seething.

In December I wrote something on how journalists and their bad habits are implicated in our hyper-polarized politics. (“Tone poem for the ‘leave it there’ press.”) Please excuse me for quoting myself:

Every time you asked each other “what’s the politics of this?” so you could escape the tedium and complexity of public problem-solving. Every time you smiled weakly to say, “depends on who you ask” before launching into a description of public actors who dwell in separate worlds of fact. Every time you described political polarization as symmetrical when it isn’t. Every time you denied that being in the middle was a position so you didn’t have to ask if it was a defensible one.

This has to stop.

After Matter: Notes, Reactions & Links

Big thanks to Max Larkin for technical assistance.

Ron Fournier of The Atlantic writes about the same moment and completely ignores the Reuters reporter, as if he wasn’t there. Also:

@ron_fournier It's the academic who cuts through the crap. The Reuters journalist perpetuates and adds to the crap.

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) March 18, 2016

One of the reasons that journalists default to “depends on your point of view” when asked where responsibility lies is that they are wary of enlistment in partisan politics. And that is a valid concern. But it is false to equate holding people accountable with taking sides. That’s just lazy, formulaic thinking. Here’s a portion of the “About” page for ProPublica, an investigative newsroom in New York that does nothing but accountability journalism. Watch how in defining what they do they carefully distinguish it from joining up with the political circus:

In the best traditions of American journalism in the public service, we seek to stimulate positive change. We uncover unsavory practices in order to stimulate reform. We do this in an entirely non-partisan and non-ideological manner, adhering to the strictest standards of journalistic impartiality. We won’t lobby. We won’t ally with politicians or advocacy groups. We look hard at the critical functions of business and of government, the two biggest centers of power, in areas ranging from product safety to securities fraud, from flaws in our system of criminal justice to practices that undermine fair elections. But we also focus on such institutions as unions, universities, hospitals, foundations and on the media when they constitute the strong exploiting or oppressing the weak, or when they are abusing the public trust.

It’s possible to hold power to account journalistically without “taking sides” in a political dispute. But you have to actually think about the best way to do that for your newsroom. My objection to “depends on your point of view” is that it is thought-less in precisely this way.

This “reporters notebook” item by Lindsey Smith of Michigan Public Radio answers the where does responsibility lie? question very well. And it clearly shows that the journalists involved in reporting on the Flint water crisis had to deliberate — think hard about what they uncovered — to get there, because the answer is complicated. Lindsey Smith writes that in making a 50-minute documentary on “how did this happen?” they came to a conclusion:

By not requiring Flint to treat the river water in a way that would’ve helped keep lead out of the drinking water, MDEQ became the most important focus for the “accountability” portion of this documentary.

Through months of research and lengthy, recorded interviews, my editors and I came to the conclusion that, had the water experts (specifically officials at MDEQ and the engineering firm Flint’s emergency manager hired), done a better job, then who made the decision to go to the Flint River shouldn’t have mattered. If they would’ve required corrosion control treatment, treatment any normal large city in America uses, treatment that the federal government has now made completely clear is absolutely required, the lead problems Flint has faced may not have ever happened.

That’s not to say all the responsibility lies there. Rather: accountability begins there. And that does not depend on your point of view. It flows from actual reporting. (Hat tip, Dustin Dwyer.)

Today Facebook released a document it calls: News Feed Values. It’s a start on beginning to define some editorial priorities.

Even a start — and that’s all this is — is news, though. Because for a long time Facebook wouldn’t even say it had priorities. It would describe you as the editor of News Feed: you, rather than Facebook.

It would say things like: “It’s not that we control NewsFeed, you control NewsFeed by what you tell us that you’re interested in.” (2015) Or: “We try to explicitly view ourselves as not editors. We don’t want to have editorial judgment over the content that’s in your feed.” (2014)

Here’s what I said back to Facebook about this habit of theirs:

Facebook has to start recognizing that our questions are real— not error messages. We are not suggesting that it “edits” NewsFeed in the same way that a newspaper editor once edited the front page. It’s a very different way. That’s why we’re asking about it! We are not suggesting that algorithms work in the same way that elites deciding what’s news once operated. It’s a different way. That’s why we’re asking about it! No one is being simple-minded here and demanding that Facebook describe editorial criteria it clearly does not have— like reaching for a nice mix of foreign and domestic news. We get it…

But precisely because we do “get it” — at least at a basic level — we want to know: what are you optimizing for, along with user interest? How do you see your role within a news ecosystem where you are more and more the dominant player? In news, you have power now. It is growing. Help us understand how you intend to use it. What kind of filter will you be? What kind of player… playing for what?

The document released today is not a revelation, but it does say a few interesting things. Here is my summary of News Feed’s editorial philosophy:

Your social graph comes first, not the public world. Informing you is a higher priority than entertaining you. But we think “information” comes in many forms, not just serious news. A good recipe for beer can chicken is information to the person who is looking for it. We don’t exclude points of view we don’t like, or favor the sources we do like. We let the invisible hand of user choice make those decisions. Except: We do try to edit out what people find misleading, sensational, spammy— mere click bait. We do police nudity, hate speech, personal abuse, and violent or overly graphic content. Above all, we design News Feed to keep people on our platform because—

Actually the last part isn’t in there. I added that. To me it’s the obvious thing missing from this attempt to state the values that are built into News Feed. No one should expect Facebook to be a traffic distributor because that is not a priority the company has for its product. Again, this is obvious but as long as they’re trying to clarify what they stand for they should clarify that.

One more thing Facebook says in the value statement it released today: its committed to the personalization of News Feed as a kind of right that users have. “You control your experience.” I will be worth watching how this rights revolution in news display unfolds.

Now that they’re publicly committed to certain values the next thing Facebook needs is a public editor to synthesize complaints and get answers when the company falls short. It also needs to iterate on today’s statement as often as it revises the algorithm for News Feed.

Last week in the Washington Post I said that journalists covering the candidacy of Donald Trump may have to come up with novel responses. Here I elaborate by asking you examine this image:

That’s the line-up of interpreters presented by CNN on Tuesday of this week. They all fit under one of three categories: Journalists who cover politics for CNN (Gloria Borger, John King, Nia-Malika Henderson); political operatives who have worked for more traditional candidates (David Axelrod, Van Jones, Ana Navarro); and surrogates whose value to the conversation is that they reliably support Trump (Jeffery Lord, Andy Dean.)

But is that mix good enough? Can those three types — political journalists, operatives, surrogates — bring enough perspective to make sense of the Trump phenomenon?

My answer: No. Not even close.

The journalists are on screen mainly because these are the people CNN has at hand. They’re already being paid, so they have to be used. The operatives are there because, according to the producers, politics is a game and these are people who know how the game is played. The surrogates are there because in order to elude criticism — a massive and undeclared factor in political coverage — CNN needs to present itself as “balanced.” It’s hard to find anyone who from experience knows a lot about politics and also supports Donald Trump, so CNN has to pay people to even the scales.

Notice: all of these reasons are producer-centric. They aren’t responding to user demands, or the demands of the phenomenon itself. Jeffrey Lord is there because CNN needs him on air to feel fair and balanced. His job is to help CNN ward off criticism that it is one-sided or insufficiently Trumpish. This is the same reason Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, was hired by CNN. The decision has nothing to do with serving audiences, explaining politics, or telling voters the hard truth about their choices. It’s about avoiding criticism.

In order to have a prayer of meeting the interpretive challenge posed by the candidacy of Donald Trump an executive producer of election coverage at a major network would need to call on different categories than the three we commonly see: journalists, operatives, and surrogates. Here’s a partial list of the “slots” you would need to fill to even come close to a useful and rounded view…

Parody: In many ways, Trump’s is a joke candidacy, a parody of a presidential campaign. The wall that Mexico will pay for is much closer to a goof on the political class than it is to any serious policy proposal. One of the slots on our revised roundtable should therefore go to someone who is attuned to this dimension and can evaluate how well the candidate did in extending his parody to the most sacred rituals in American politics, like the acceptance speech.

Stay shocked. “Many forces will be at work in the coming weeks to normalize Trump,” wrote E.J. Dionne in May. “Please don’t mainstream [him].” Dionne’s plea deserves its own chair, a slot on the televised roundtable for someone whose only job it is to stay shocked, remain alert to the unprecedented, the hard-to-believe, the amazing, the chaotic. This person’s job is exactly what Dionne said: never normalize Trump. Remain awestruck.

‘Dominance politics’ and the imperative of humiliation. “A series of symbols and actions that mark the dominating from the dominated.” Here I am quoting Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, who has pursued this interpretation for months. (Brilliantly, I should add.) There should be someone on the pundit’s roundtable who is paying close attention to the manner in which Trump tries to establish his dominance over all comers and humiliate anyone who would try to contest his superiority. Hearing that person opine on the latest speech, or press conference maneuver would be useful and illuminating.

Narcissism watch. Anyone aware of what “narcissism” really means would also be aware that Trump is a classic and illuminating case. Narcissists are distinguished not by self-love — that is a common misconception — but by a weak sense of identity that needs constant shoring up. It is hard for the narcissist to tell what is self and not self. A pundit alert to the paradoxes of this condition might be able deliver insights that would baffle a campaign operative.

Reality TV. No roundtable attempting to size up Trump is complete without someone who can view his events through the lens of Hollywood values, entertainment priorities, reality television imperatives, the demands of the script— worlds in which Trump has truly excelled. Van Jones cannot do that. Jeffrey Lord cannot do that.

“Identity politics for white people” is a phrase I first heard in this August 2015 essay by Ben Domenech. More recently it was the subject of this report by Nick Confessore: For Whites Sensing Decline, Donald Trump Unleashes Words of Resistance. “Everyone’s sticking together in their groups,” said one of his sources, “so white people have to, too.” Instead of turning to another political consultant with a savvy take on the game of politics, Anderson Cooper should be asking his expert on white resentment to weigh in.

Political correctness. A portion of Trump’s appeal has to do with his open defiance of what is often called “political correctness.” If I were an executive producer of campaign coverage trying to capture the Trump phenomenon, I would dump Gloria Borger (what does she add, really?) and insert a careful student of this form of backlash politics, in which rules about what you “can’t say” are broken and energy is thereby released.

NPR would not call it plagiarism when Melania Trump’s speech to the Republican convention took passages from Michelle Obama. But there was a revealing moment when its people defended this policy online.

Hey, readers! This will take some explanation but if you bear with me, I promise: by the time you get to point 9 it will be worth it.

1. On the morning after Melania Trump’s speech, Standards & Practices Editor Mark Memmott published this note about NPR’s policy. The message: we can’t call it plagiarism unless it’s intentional.

On The Definition Of Plagiarism

Because it’s in the news today, here’s a reminder about how we have defined the word “plagiarism”:

“Taking someone else’s work and intentionally presenting it as if it is your own.”

Note the word “intentionally.”

We can talk about phrases that are “word-for-word” or that “mirror each other.” It’s fine to say there’s a “plagiarism issue” or that the speech last night raised questions about whether some parts were plagiarized. But we don’t know at this time whether anything was done “intentionally.” So don’t declare that there’s been some plagiarism.

2. You can see the NPR policy at work in the many reports it prepared about the Melania Trump speech. They all avoided the word “plagiarized.”

“Melania Trump’s Monday Speech Mirrors Michelle Obama’s…” (Link.) “…language in Melania Trump’s Monday night convention speech that was near-identical to a similar speech Michelle Obama delivered in 2008.” (Link.) “Melania Trump Echoes Michelle Obama.” (Link.)

Even after Trump staffer Meredith McIver took responsibility for using Michelle Obama’s words without credit, NPR would not call it plagiarism. (Link) Why? Because she didn’t mean it.

3. I came across Memmott’s note because I was mentioned on Twitter by an NPR reporter, Sarah McCammon, as she was being taken to task by a user named Shoq, who often comments on media issues. Here is some of that exchange:

4. This brought into the discussion my NYU colleague Clay Shirky. He had the following exchange with Sarah McCammon. (Link.)

Shirky: “Sarah, that’s wrong. When professors look for plagiarism, we look for copying without attribution, period.”

McCammon: “I’m aware. My husband is a professor. Different standards for different situations/fields.”

Shirky: “Are you are walking back your ‘technical’ excuse? And saying NPR’s standard is just not to use the word?”

McCammon: “Uh, not an excuse. Not walking anything back. Again, I refer you to our policy. NPR’s guidelines are different than many academic institutions, which understandably may have a lower threshold.”

Remember those words: “lower threshhold.”

5. Shirky’s point can be seen in this passage from NYU’s ethics handbook for journalism students:

Cardinal Sins

Plagiarism: Journalists earn their living with words, and plagiarism — using someone else’s words as if they were your own — is, simply stated, stealing.

Nothing about intent. This is from the Harvard College Writing Program:

In academic writing, it is considered plagiarism to draw any idea or any language from someone else without adequately crediting that source in your paper. It doesn’t matter whether the source is a published author, another student, a Web site without clear authorship, a Web site that sells academic papers, or any other person: Taking credit for anyone else’s work is stealing, and it is unacceptable in all academic situations, whether you do it intentionally or by accident.

My italics. This one is from Oxford University’s guide for students: (My italics.)

Plagiarism is presenting someone else’s work or ideas as your own, with or without their consent, by incorporating it into your work without full acknowledgement. All published and unpublished material, whether in manuscript, printed or electronic form, is covered under this definition. Plagiarism may be intentional or reckless, or unintentional. Under the regulations for examinations, intentional or reckless plagiarism is a disciplinary offence.

6. These were Sarah McCammon’s main points as she responded to the many people on Twitter who were puzzled by NPR’s refusal to call what Melania Trump did “plagiarism.”

* Our guidelines say it has to be intentional. I have to follow them. (Link.)
* I can’t see into Melania’s mind. I have no way to judge intent. (Link.)
* I present facts and trust listeners to make up their own minds. (Link.)
* What academics say isn’t relevant. My reference point is other journalists. (Link.)

7. Other journalists? Well, the Washington Post had no trouble calling it plagiarism: Why it became almost impossible for the Trumps to insist Melania’s plagiarism was coincidence. Do they have lower standards than NPR? (Another example.) And it wasn’t just headlines: (All bolding by me.)

Memo to all remaining 2016 convention speakers, whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat: You are officially on notice. The words you say will be researched by reporters to determine whether they have ever been said before, in the same order in which you are saying them now.

This is the consequence of Melania Trump using plagiarized sections of Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech in an address to the Republican National Convention on Monday. Journalists now have a new game to play when speakers take the stage: “Spot the Source.”

Would the New York Times be one of the news organizations from which Sarah McCammon takes her cues? Nope.

“My name is Meredith McIver and I’m an in-house staff writer at the Trump Organization,” began an extraordinary statement she released Wednesday morning in which she took the blame for the disastrous plagiarism of Michelle Obama in Melania Trump’s prime-time speech Monday at the Republican National Convention.

CNN, maybe? Alas, no: “Donald Trump’s campaign finally moved Wednesday to shut down the distracting controversy over Melania Trump’s plagiarized speech by identifying the writer who worked on the speech.” Los Angles Times: same deal. “The Trump campaign released a statement Wednesday – ‘to whom it may concern’ – ascribing the plagiarized passages in Melania Trump’s convention speech to a scribe working for Donald Trump’s corporate operation.”

8. The point is: if NPR wanted to call a spade a spade it had a clear warrant for doing so— from academic sources, from journalism peers, or via a simple dictionary definition. But NPR doesn’t want to call a plagiarized convention speech a plagiarized convention speech. Why? Because there could be a controversy about it! As indeed there immediately was after Melania Trump’s plagiarized speech. Trump defender Chris Christie rejected that description. So did campaign chair Paul Manafort, who even blamed Hillary Clinton for the controversy.

NPR’s intention in these charged moments is not to describe the world vividly and accurately for listeners, but to escape from acts of judgment that could be criticized in the heat of a campaign. And even though it’s a fairly simple matter to assess what happened here and decide that, yep, the speech was plagiarized — and then report on whodunit — for NPR the relevant factor isn’t the ease of applying a standard definition of plagiarism but how simple it is to avoid getting dragged into a messy fight. And so the guidance went out: “It’s fine to say there’s a ‘plagiarism issue’ or that the speech last night raised questions about whether some parts were plagiarized…”

Alongside the production of news, NPR is worried about reproducing its own innocence in matters of controversy. The code for this is: people can make up their own minds. Which is really saying: NPR can’t think, but we invite you to!

9. Now we come to the most revealing moment in the exchanges I reproduced for you: when Sarah McCammon tells Clay Shirky: NPR’s guidelines are different than many academic institutions, which understandably may have a lower threshold. Fascinating! For it’s really the opposite. NYU, Harvard, Oxford all have a tougher standard than NPR. If you borrow someone’s words without attribution, that’s plagiarism and you have to face the consequences. Under the more relaxed standard that NPR favors, you not only have to borrow someone else’s words without attribution to be committing plagiarism, you also have to show malicious intent. And NPR has to have some reliable way of knowing your intent. This is a lower threshold. Because of it many more people will be able to commit plagiarism without being called out for it by NPR.

And yet reporter Sarah McCammon says NPR has a higher threshold. What does she mean? Well, she’s not an idiot. Her claim makes sense, but only if you understand the culture of timidity at NPR. What her bosses are worried about is making a judgment that could be contested. Before they’re willing to do that, they need a lot of evidence. What they have in mind is not “what’s the right thing to call this?” or “what’s the best descriptor for our listeners?” but “how can we make fewer calls that can be criticized by powerful actors?” and “how can we report on controversies without becoming part of them?”

When those are the starting points, a “lower” threshold means you are willing to make more calls that could be criticized. And academics can tell you: almost every student who plagiarizes says “it was not my intent!” If you’re going to be real about plagiarism, you are going to be criticized, not only by students but by their parents. If you have high standards, you take the heat. If you have low standards, you worry about how much heat you will get. Sarah McCammon had flipped this in her mind, and she was unaware of it. But she was right about one thing: it’s unproductive to rage at her, for she has no choice but to follow NPR guidelines.

10. If “academic institutions have a lower threshold” was the most telling thing she said, this was to me the most interesting:

.@Shoq @jayrosen_nyu Tell me this: if I just decide to declare it plagiarism, what exactly does that accomplish?

— Sarah McCammon NPR (@sarahmccammon) July 20, 2016

In a way she’s right. If she calls it plagiarism on air that doesn’t change anything. But that’s because calling things by their right names should not be an issue we have to fight with journalists about. The fact that it is an issue, not only with plagiarism but with more serious descriptors like torture, is a sign of weakness in the culture of journalism, and this is especially so at NPR.

This makes a lot of its listeners sad.

UPDATE, July 26: Steve Buttry wrote about this issue at his blog. He also got Mark Memmott, NPR’s editor for standards and practices, to comment. Here is what Memmott said by way of explanation:

When we wrote our Ethics Handbook in 2012 we included this definition of plagiarism: ‘Taking someone else’s work and intentionally presenting it as if it is your own.’ We realized that wasn’t a strict ‘dictionary definition.’ But we included the word ‘intentionally’ for a very specific reason: to allow us to apply some judgment.

We were thinking about how we would react if a journalist who had never stolen from someone else’s work inadvertently left a line or phrase from another file in his or her copy. Did that person make a serious mistake? Yes. Does that person deserve to be labeled a ‘plagiarist’ and be disciplined or even fired? We wanted some flexibility to make an intelligent decision.

On the morning when I reminded the staff about our definition, the story about Melania Trump’s speech was developing. I was thinking that we should not rush to hold her to a different standard than we would hold ourselves.

You and others have said that no one will ever admit they intended to plagiarize. You may be right. But I would say that a confession isn’t necessary to determine intent. It’s not hard to tell the difference between a slip by someone who’s never been accused or convicted of plagiarism and a story that’s got several “lifts” from different sources. And if someone slips and is later caught again, I think intent has been proven by his actions.

You wrote that we’re guilty of ‘comical gymnastics.’ That’s a good line. I would hope, though, that you would give us some credit for trying to think things through. Have we overthought it? Perhaps. But I would say our intentions are good.

One more thing. Sarah McCammon is a good journalist who was applying the guidance she was given by her editors. If there’s a problem, it’s because of her editors (most notably me), not her.

And five other ideas I use to interpret campaign coverage this year.

On the eve of the first debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, I thought I would write down some of the precepts and maxims I have used to understand press behavior during this long and startling campaign season. If I have done this right, you should be able to test the usefulness of my list in the final six weeks of the U.S. election. (And during coverage of the debates!)

A word on how I came up with this list. I’ve been a close reader and critic of campaign coverage American-style since 1988. That’s eight “cycles,” as people in the industry say. After I started PressThink in 2003, I could write about the gatekeepers without their permission — hurray for blogging! — and so my pace increased during the 2004, 2008, and 2012 elections. This year I have done a little less at my blog (eight pieces since May 2015, plus one for the Washington Post) and put more into the real time conversation on Twitter, which includes most of the people doing campaign coverage, as well as the heaviest users of it.

Over that stretch I have tried to develop my own pressthink in reply to “theirs,” meaning the ideas most campaign journalists have about their work, and the explanations they tend to give when criticized for it. I tried to summarize the first 20 years of this tension in my 2011 lecture: Why Political Coverage is Broken. What I said there is still basic to how I do my criticism, but Donald Trump’s spectacular intervention has raised the stakes and altered the terms of the debate.

Trump is not a normal candidate and can’t be covered like one. Journalists have finally accepted that. Just the other day Dean Baquet, editor of the New York Times, said this about Trump

He’s been hugely challenging. I don’t think we’ve ever had somebody who in my time as a journalist so openly lies, and that was a word that we struggled to actually utter. We’re used to, I think as journalists, we’re used to philosophical debates, like one party thinks we should go to war on Iraq, makes its case—exaggerates its case, we now know. But there are warring philosophies. I’ve never quite seen anything like [Trump], and I think it’s a real challenge for us.

Elections were about warring philosophies. Journalists sat in the press box and brought you the action. Baquet admits: this organizing image no longer organizes much. But even his phrase “hugely challenging” understates it, I think. Here are the major propositions I have been using to understand this unique and perilous moment.

1. Political journalism rests on a picture of politics that journalists and politicos share.

As practiced by the “mainstream media” (the professionals who work at NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, PBS, NPR, the AP, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Reuters, Bloomberg, Politico, Time magazine) political journalism is constructed — it rests entirely — on a mental picture of the American system in which the two major parties are similar actors with, as Baquet put it, “warring philosophies.”

Elections are the big contests that distribute power between them. The day-to-day of politics is a series of minor battles for tactical advantage. The press is part of this picture because it distributes attention, but — in this view of things — it does not participate in politics itself. It reports on battles large and small, questions the power holders, tries to reveal machinations going on behind the scenes and generates public interest in the drama of politics. But it is unaligned with the major players and unaffected by the outcome of the contests it chronicles.

To report successfully on such a system you need sources who trust you inside both parties. You need people in both parties who will return your calls and have drinks with you at the Des Moines Marriott. The simplest way to guarantee that is to look at politics in the same way that people in the party establishments do. The political pros who staff the committees and run the campaigns and consult with the big players are the closest readers of political journalism and closest in outlook to the journalists who consider reporting on politics their profession.

I called this a mental picture, but it’s more than that. It’s a stable framework within which work can be done, coverage can be planned, knowledge can be refined, reputation can be won, careers can be built. The image of two similar parties with warring philosophies that compete for tactical advantage also positions the mainstream press in a comfortable way: between partisan players as chronicler, questioner and referee. Among those most comfortable with that position: media owners and managers hoping to alienate as few people as possible.

In other words: powerful forces keep the mental picture in place.

2. Asymmetry between the parties fries the circuits of the mainstream press.

Now imagine what happens when over time the base of one party, far more than the base of the other, begins to treat the press as a hostile actor, and its own establishment as part of the rot; when it not only opposes but denies the legitimacy — and loyalty to the state — of the other side’s leader; when it prefers conspiracy theory to party-friendly narratives that at least cope with verified fact; when it is scornful of the reality that in a divided system you never get everything you want.

This is the thesis that Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein developed in their 2012 book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks. They are think tank scholars with PhDs and Washington insiders who were frequently called on by journalists to explain trends and furnish quotes. They had incentives the same as journalists to stay on conversant terms with politicos in both parties. Mann and Ornstein came to the conclusion that something had changed in the Republican Party. Their summary of it:

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. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

Four years later, Dan Balz of the Washington Post, probably the most respected figure in the political press, admitted that Mann and Ornstein were onto something. “They were ahead of others in describing the underlying causes of polarization as asymmetrical,” he wrote. Why did it take four years? (In 2012 and 2014 Balz was noncommittal about the thesis.) Two answers: asymmetry fries the circuits of the mainstream press… and Trump.

Because journalists rely so heavily on that mental picture I described, they stick with it as the anomalies build up. Mann and Ornstein had tried to warn Balz and his colleagues about this:

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.

This advice was ignored at the time. But now it cannot be. For Trump is that “insurgent outlier” described by Mann and Ornstein. In his nativism, xenophobia, “identity politics for white people,” and loose talk about nuclear weapons he is the ideologically extreme. Like the deformed party Mann and Ornstein wrote about, he is “scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science,” and dismissive of the legitimacy of his opposition. He makes things up and doesn’t care if they are fact-checked and found to be lies. He whips up hatred of the press almost to the point of encouraging violence.

Hillary Clinton, for all her problems, including a tense and hostile relationship with the press, is a conventional politician running a conventional campaign that observes the norms of American politics.

That’s asymmetry. Asymmetry is in many ways the story of the 2016 campaign. But it fries the circuits of the mainstream press. Resistance to acknowledging this is strong because so much crumbles if symmetry crumbles. It’s not that it can’t be done. It can be:

All politicians bend the truth to fit their purposes, including Hillary Clinton. But Donald J. Trump has unleashed a blizzard of falsehoods, exaggerations and outright lies in the general election, peppering his speeches, interviews and Twitter posts with untruths so frequent that they can seem flighty or random — even compulsive.

But political journalism isn’t wired for this. It’s wired to safely reproduce the image of two comparable parties with different philosophies. As Ezra Klein noted, the fact that so many in the Republican establishment are appalled by their own nominee has made it easier for some journalists “to cover Trump as an alien, dangerous, and dishonest phenomenon.” But this is not a break with the mental picture I described. It’s a kind of permission from the insiders to go after the guy as threat to the system they share with journalists.

No one is more sold on symmetry than the people who produce political coverage at CNN, which sees itself as steering a middle course between Fox and MSNBC. This has led to a bizarre pattern in which CNN’s paid “contributors” like Corey Lewandowksi faithfully represent Trump by airing the same falsehoods the candidate has been using while freelancing some of their own. CNN hosts sometimes have to correct their own people on air and tell them to stop making stuff up— when it’s CNN who is paying them to play Trump in the first place! (See Bryan Curtis in The Ringer for examples.)

3. Campaign coverage had problems akin to the build up of “technical debt.”

This is an analogy I picked up from Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. (Technical debt is Ward Cunningham’s concept.) Marshall explains it this way:

If we do a project in a rough and ready way, which is often what we can manage under the time and budget constraints we face, we will build up a “debt” we’ll eventually have to pay back. Basically, if we do it fast, we’ll later have to go back and rework or even replace the code to make it robust enough for the long haul, interoperate with other code that runs our site or simply be truly functional as opposed just barely doing what we need it to. There’s no right or wrong answer; it’s simply a management challenge to know when to lean one way or the other. But if you build up too much of this debt the problem can start to grow not in a linear but an exponential fashion, until the system begins to cave in on itself with internal decay, breakdowns of interoperability and emergent failures which grow from both.

Josh thought this had happened with the Republican Party. For example, “a large portion of the GOP is not satisfied with what can realistically be achieved by conventional political means.” It should have found a way to put this to its most demanding supporters, but there was always a reason to avoid that massive reckoning. This left it vulnerable to a huckster and fantasist like Trump. Or: “Can Marco ‘Establishment’ Rubio really get traction attacking Trump for having no specific plan to replace Obamacare when Republicans have spent the last five years repeatedly voting to repeal Obamacare without ever specifying a plan to replace it with?” Again: they never got around to it. This left them vulnerable to Trump.

I read Marshall’s analysis and thought: the same thing happened in a different way to political journalists. They should have found a way to deal with “a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality,” but they kept putting it off, even though they knew that something was happening to the Republican Party that wasn’t happening to the Democrats. They should have built asymmetric polarization into their mental model but it was a lot of work and “both sides do it” was too comforting, too attractive.

More debt: They should have done something about the uniformity of approach from cycle to cycle and newsroom to newsroom but it was too easy to keep doing it the way they had always done it. (Two exceptions: they added fact-checking; and influenced by Nate Silver, they got more sophisticated about polling.) They should have lessened their dependence on establishment voices and political professionals but the shared sensibility — which I have called the savvy outlook — was too hard to overcome. They should have admitted that they had become part of the political class, but it required them to retire too many illusions about themselves.

4. Trump’s campaign upends the assumptions required for traditional forms of election-year journalism even to make sense.

I made this argument in the Washington Post in July. Campaign coverage is a contraption that only works if the candidates behave in certain expected ways. Up to now, they always did. But Trump violates many of these expectations. For example:

Imagine a candidate who wants to increase public confusion about where he stands on things so that voters give up on trying to stay informed and instead vote with raw emotion. Under those conditions, does asking “Where do you stand, sir?” serve the goals of journalism, or does it enlist the interviewer in the candidate’s chaotic plan?

Here’s a more granular example. Up to now campaigns for major party nominees tried to make sure that what the campaign was saying (and the campaign manager, the running mate, the chair as titular head…) reflected what the candidate was saying. If the campaign put out a message contradicted by the candidate, that was a problem. Why? Because mixed messaging confuses the voters and makes the campaign look dumb. Therefore an interview with the campaign manager, the running mate, or some other surrogate was a window into the candidate’s thinking. It had journalistic value for that reason.

The Trump campaign breaks this practice. If Donald Trump calls NBC’s Lester Holt a Democrat (in fact he’s a registered Republican) and attacks him as part of an unfair system, Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, is later free to say that Holt is a “respected, brilliant newsman” who will do a great job as moderator of the first debate. An on-the-ball journalist can ask: hey, which is it? But that’s a practice with a premise. The premise is that a presidential campaign wants to put out a consistent message to avoid confusing people, and to deny journalists a “gotcha” moment. What if that premise is false? The rationale for interviewing the campaign manager, the running mate, or some other surrogate collapses. They say one thing, the candidate says something else and the confusion is not considered a problem. It may even be a plus.

Again and again with Trump, journalists find themselves in this position: persisting with familiar practices that don’t really make sense because the premise behind them has collapsed— collapsed for one candidate, but not the other. And remember: asymmetry fries the circuits of the mainstream press.

5. Hillary Clinton would like to avoid the press. Trump is trying to break it.

I will outsource the fact pattern to Erik Wemple, media columnist for the Washington Post, and the background on Clinton to Politico. But I would add that Trump’s threat to the press goes far deeper than his flagrant abuse of journalists and the threatening noises he has made about libel law.

When I say he’s trying to break the press, I mean the entire system that gives honest journalism a role in the republic. Trump is running against such basic notions as:

• “we need a fact-based debate or there can’t be consent of the governed;”
• “there’s a public record that cannot just be wiped away;”
• “a candidate’s position on major issues should be made clear to the voters;”
• “lying cannot become a universal principle in politics without major damage to our democracy.”

Not only is he running against such fundamentals, the continuity of which is assumed by all forms of campaign coverage, but journalists are the ones who understand best his assault on these basic principles. They’re living it every day. Of course, he’s running against them, too.

A political style that mocks the idea of a common world of facts — and gets traction with that view —  is an attack on the very possibility of honest journalism. Campaign journalists have to find a way to oppose this style without becoming election-season opponents of Trump himself, which is not, I think, their proper role. Nothing in their training or tradition would have prepared them for this moment.

6. A candidate the likes of which we have not seen requires a type of coverage we have never seen.

I agree with the Atlantic’s James Fallows about Trump. “No one like him has gotten this close to the presidency in modern times.” Which is not to say he came out of nowhere, or that there is no precedent for his political style. A long series of developments left the presidential nominating system and the Republican party vulnerable to Trump. A long series of developments, which I tried to summarize here and here, also left political journalism unprepared for the challenge of covering this campaign.

But now we’re here and novelty demands novelty. If journalists are to rise to the occasion in the final six weeks of this campaign, they will have to find a style of coverage as irregular as Trump’s political style. There are powerful forces working against this. But if they don’t try, they are likely to regret it for the rest of their careers.