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These 11 journalists will go in search of a “networked” model for beat reporting

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In March, the Membership Puzzle Project, which I direct, announced its Join the Beat initiative. We invited applications from beat reporters who want to figure out how to work in a more “networked” fashion. I also wrote a concept paper that explains this idea:

So here is what I mean by a networked beat: when a beat reporter plus a knowledge community positioned around the beat work together — routinely — to produce better, richer, and more three-dimensional coverage. The hard part is “routinely.” Journalism is built on routines: producing on deadline. A networked beat goes beyond special projects that depend on contributions from readers. It incorporates knowledgeable contributors into the way the beat normally functions.

Today we are announcing the cohort of beat reporters who will try to put that concept into practice. Each will work on his or her own reporting projects and independently experiment with how to bring  knowledge and intelligence from “the people formerly known as the audience” into their beats— not once or twice but routinely. They will then share what they are learning with other beat reporters trying to do something similar with their own beats. What one reporter is learning in Toronto could be useful to another in North Carolina, and vice versa. Membership Puzzle Project will surface the lessons, connect the parts and keep the experiment in touch with itself.

Project director for Join the Beat is Melanie Sill, an experienced editor who has led newsrooms in Raleigh, Sacramento and Los Angeles. Here are the reporters who will participate.

Eric Berger, Ars Technica (rocket development/ space)

Rob Edwards, the Ferret (environment)

Maite Vermeulen, De Correspondent (migration)

Alia Dharssi and Lauren Kaljur, Discourse Media (environment and sustainability)

Meghan McCarty Carino, KPCC (commuting/ mobility)

Zachery Eanes, Herald-Sun (housing and gentrification)

Nicholas Keung, Toronto Star (immigration)

Will Carless and Aaron Sankin, Reveal/ CIR (Hate beat)

Stephen Babcock, Technical.ly (Baltimore/DC tech community)

Here’s more detail on how they will be approaching the problem of adding a network of knowledgable users to the normal conduct of beat reporting

Eric Berger, ArsTechnica 

Editor: Jay Timmer

Beat: Global aerospace industry and rocket development 

The challenge I seek to address is the rapidly changing nature of the global aerospace industry. After a lull in innovation during the 1990s, the launch industry has undergone a renaissance with a host of new technology and concepts such as rapid reusability, 3D printing, and commercial heavy lift. There is a lot of hype amid this process. With a rocket newsletter, we seek to provide clarity amid the confusion, and helping readers stay on top of emerging trends. To do so, I will rely on input from our well-informed readers.

My greatest need in this environment is the freedom to experiment, innovate, and learn from mistakes. I am hoping to draw upon the lessons and experiences of others throughout the process.

Reporter: Rob Edwards, The Ferret, Scotland 

Editor: Rachel Hamada, head of engagement and innovation

Beat: Environment

The biggest challenge faced by The Ferret is making investigative journalism in Scotland economically sustainable. We have made considerable progress in the last two years, but still have a way to go. We need to find new ways of continuing to grow our operations and generate income, by increasing subscriptions, winning grants and selling services. A vital part of that process will be finding innovative ways of involving our readers in our research, story-telling and decision-making.

This will help to inform a greater range of stories on our platform that are of interest and relevance to our existing audience and should also help to bring in new readers. We hope to develop innovative environmental news products that will help to bring together communities of interest in Scotland. Our greatest need is capacity and I aim to bring the wider editorial team in on this work while leading on it overall. The aim from this experiment would be to see if the “networked beat” approach can be monetised enough to guarantee the capacity it requires to be sustainable.

Maite Vermeulen, De Correspondent, The Netherlands

Editor: Rosan Smits

Beat: Migration

Challenges/opportunities I hope to tackle:

  • Structuring networks. I want to find ways in which to use my different networks (members/readers, experts, other journalists, migrants) in a more structured way, allowing the network to provide input in logical places in the story process. Main question would be: do my stories and questions end up with the right people at the right time?
  • Saving time. Working with a networked beat creates added value, but also costs a lot of time. Especially contact with readers/members is time consuming and not always relevant to my reporting. How do I structure this contact to save time? And how do I focus the contact with networks in such a way that it generates truly relevant input for my story?

My biggest needs would be to think of models for structuring networks. To learn from other examples.

Alia Dharssi & Lauren Kaljur, The Discourse (Canada) 

Editor: Lindsay Sample

Beat: Environment and Sustainable Development (paired beats)

Alia says: My greatest opportunity is to hear insights from people concerned about upcoming investigations related to Canada’s refugee system, as well as responsible consumption and production, and use these insights to produce compelling and useful investigations for my audience. My greatest challenge is to find and build relationships with the people/members who can provide these insights. I need support to brainstorm how to go about reaching out to potential members for my networked beat, such as opportunities to speak to people who have done it, to learn from people with expertise in building online communities and to brainstorm with people who can support me.

Lauren saysMy greatest opportunity is to hear insights from people affected by wildfires and to relay those lessons-learned to other communities across Canada. My greatest challenge is to build these relationships remotely, sustain them, and to share their information and stories in ways that further inspire action/engagement. To do this, I need to commit to deliberate experimentation and testing, fueled with ideas from my fellow experimenters at Join the Beat.

Together, our opportunity is to collaborate in ways that maximize impact, through idea-sharing and leveraging our individual networked beats to maximize one another’s work. Our shared challenge is that neither of our beats have an obvious gathering “space” through which we can engage networks. The needs are to make collaboration and idea-sharing “work” into our workflow so it’s not just another thing to do and to combat the siloed tendency of beat reporting.

Meghan McCarty Carino, KPCC Southern California Public Radio

Editor: Sandra Oshiro

Beat: Commuting & Mobility

My two main objectives are

1) Being better able to utilize experts and highly engaged audience members to inform and generate coverage. To do this I need to identify and reach out to potential participants, organize regular communication with them through something like an email newsletter, social media group or online forum and build time to cultivate and check in with such sources into my workflow. I could probably use the most help identifying the most useful platform for interacting with sources in this context and formalizing the steps to do so in my workflow.

2) Create a space where “members” are enabled to not only interact with me, but with each other to leverage a multitude of perspectives to problem-solve and to expose frequently siloed groups to interact, particularly within the context of polarizing subjects like street safety/road diets or gentrification/densification around transit. The biggest challenge in this would be identifying the best technical platform, whether that be something like a Facebook Group or some other kind of online or real life social experience, and steering the rules of the environment to encourage constructive interaction not just trolling.

Zachery Eanes, Herald-Sun and News & Observer, Durham/ Raleigh, NC

Editor: Mark Schultz, Mary Cornatzer

Beat: Gentrification in Durham/ housing and development/ Triangle

1) Our challenge in this gentrification series is to find sources and viewpoints that usually never make it into the media. The people most often pushed out by gentrification (older, poor, nonwhite) often have the fewest outlets to voice their concerns and opinions. But there is opportunity in that challenge. We can tell rich and contextual stories of the changes in Durham, if we are able to find voices that are usually never heard. Hopefully we will also find stories that we would have never found on our own. Another challenge is to find experts on this area, who can lend their knowledge to the story. So far, we have been able to attract a lot of experts to come speak to us in group settings, which was really helpful for our first story in the series.  

2) Our biggest need is to build an open and inviting community on this issue, so that residents in Durham feel comfortable talking with media members about their neighborhoods. I have found there can be an inherent distrust of traditional media outlets, because residents who don’t often interact with us feel like we are going to take advantage of them. So we desperately need to build an inviting space that those people feel comfortable being candid with us.  We have started a Facebook page, which has been extremely helpful in building discussion, but I am not sure if poor and elderly people, who are often the ones being pushed out by gentrification, are going to gravitate toward that platform. So we need to figure out how to bridge the digital space with the physical space.

Nicholas Keung, Toronto Star

Editor: Janet Hurley

Beat: Immigration

I think the networked beat approach works nicely for me with the immigration beat cos it’s a very niched beat. The stories often involve vulnerable migrants and refugees who do not have full rights in Canada. Many of them are unfamiliar with how the media works, hence their stories don’t appear in press releases. So a networked approach is a practice of trust building as much as community building. For generating story ideas, it’s a very effective approach. However, I’m kinda hesitant about counting on the “members” of the network to contribute to stories or moderate our publication’s social media platforms. I don’t know what role they can play. Obviously, there are different types of members: experts, lawyers, advocates and migrants themselves. So I  think maybe there could be different roles each could play. Need to find out what that role would be.

The challenges include developing trust, determining roles and responsibilities, marketing and promotion, resource and support from within the newsroom. Reporters are already overworked. These days, few reporters could afford the time to develop sources and build contacts by attending conferences and events for networking with people related to our beats. More and more we are working from our desks and dealing with people we have never met but could only recognize their voices. How do we adapt the traditional way of professional networking and development in an internet age? It’s sort of moving forward from traditional courtship and dating online. Building trust will be a huge part to make it work for the reporters and the members of their network.

Stephen Babcock, Technical.ly

Editor: Zack Seward

Beat: Tech community, Baltimore and DC

Additionally, our community is growing, and we would benefit from tools that could help reach more people. During our pilot, we’ve identified that membership must come from our newsroom. We want to explore how to tie it directly to our reporting.

Biggest needs: Resources describing methods and digital tools that have been used to reach members on a source level. Resources on successful membership models.

Will Carless & Aaron Sankin, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Editor: Andy Donohue

Beat: The new era of hate in America

We have an enthusiastic and engaged following with our weekly newsletter investigating hate in America, The Hate Report. We want to find ways of channeling those qualities into sustained action and activity, and considering the topic, to draw on the unique life experiences of our subscribers. We’ll need to find the right ways and right rhythm to do that. And we’ll have to find ways to open up unfinished investigations in ways that are fair and safe for the people being covered.

The post These 11 journalists will go in search of a “networked” model for beat reporting appeared first on PressThink.


What savvy journalists say when they are minimizing Trump’s hate movement against journalists

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For two years I have been tracking a speech pattern among American journalists, in which they try to explain to us — and perhaps to themselves — why Donald Trump’s campaign to discredit them is not what it seems, why it’s no big deal.

In this post, I am going to show you the pattern (mostly) and comment on it (a little bit.) It started during the 2016 campaign…

1. Jack Shafer, media writer for Politico, June 6, 2016

Donald Trump’s Phony War on the Press.

Some journalists—dare I say it?—are overreacting to Trump’s bile and bluster. It’s not that his outbursts are merely for show. He obviously gets steamed at direct, prodding questions that he can’t evade. But his eagerness to insult the press—it was by his choice that the press-damning press conference went on for 40-minutes—perversely signals his passion for the labors of the fourth estate. The Trump vs. the press story is like a rom-com sit-com, only it airs on the news channels!

Truth is, he loves us! He lives and dies by what we say about him.

The anthropologist in me views the Trump-press contretemps as the endemic and persistent warfare associated with the stylized combat sometimes observed between tribes in the Papua New Guinea Highlands: The two sides pair off, shouting insults and derision at one another, claiming the other side started it. Much noise and many insults are traded, grudges are captured and preserved. Skirmishes break out here and there, followed by temporary truces until the cycle begins anew. A lot of people pay attention. Only rarely does anybody die.

To the uninitiated it may look like a fight. Actually, it’s a dance.

2. Matthew Yglesias, senior correspondent, Vox.com, Apr. 5, 2017

Though during the campaign it was suggested at times, including by Trump, that he would seek to enact actual, specific legal and policy changes that would be bad for the media, Trump has never gone there as president. He enjoys the political pretense of a war with the press, and much of the press has used the pretense of conflict with the Trump administration as a marketing gimmick. But the whole conflict has a kayfabe aspect to it, in which the appearance of a feud is entertaining for the audience and mutually beneficial to the practitioners.

It appears as one thing. To the savvy observer it’s really another.

3. Glenn Thrush of the New York Times on CNN, April 23, 2017.

On CNN’s Reliable Sources, Thrush said: “I never bought the shtick in the first place, that he hated the media.” The “slap and tickle” approach, as Thrush called it, has been standard operating procedure for Trump from the days when they were all coming up together in the New York tabloids: Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush, and Donald Trump.

The experienced pros see through the bluster and show a sense of humor about it.

4. Ben Schreckinger and Hadas Gold of Politico April 23, 2017.

Trump’s Fake War on the Fake News. “The president puts on a big show of assaulting his ‘opposition’ in the news media. But inside the White House, it’s a different story.”

On the campaign trail, Trump called the press “dishonest” and “scum.” He defended Russian strongman Vladimir Putin against charges of murdering journalists and vowed to somehow “open up our libel laws” to weaken the First Amendment. Since taking office, he has dismissed unfavorable coverage as “fake news” and described the mainstream media as “the enemy of the American people…” Not since Richard Nixon has an American president been so hostile to the press— and Nixon largely limited his rants against the media to private venting with his aides.

But behind that theatrical assault, the Trump White House has turned into a kind of playground for the press… The great secret of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is that Trump’s war on the media is a phony one, a reality show that keeps his supporters fired up and distracted while he woos the constituency that really matters to him: journalists.

It’s a “playground” because starting with the man at the top they all care desperately about how they are depicted in the news media, because the different factions are always knifing each other by going to the press, because the leaking is like nothing anyone has seen before, and because they’re incompetent at almost everything they try to do.

5. Peter Baker, White House correspondent for the New York Times in Politico, Nov. 29, 2017.

“Every president to a greater or lesser degree is unhappy with the coverage, and has an adversarial relationship of sorts with the people who cover him every day, so that goes with the territory. This one happens to be more vocal about it,” Baker said. “Where I think we as reporters ought to be concerned is if that kind of sentiment is translated into tangible actions that restrict our ability to do our jobs.”

Trump is not so different from other presidents. Just louder.

6. Matt Yglesias, Vox.com, January 9, 2018.

Donald Trump’s phony war with the press, explained “A genuine — but mutually beneficial — antagonism.”

The marketing pitches [“Democracy dies in darkness”] underscore that in concrete dollars-and-cents terms, Trump has been very good to the mainstream news media — driving clicks, ratings, and subscriptions at a time when the broader economics of the industry have grown difficult, due to Facebook and Google hoovering up a rising share of advertising revenue… What matters to Trump isn’t any actual crushing of the media, but simply driving the narrative in his core followers’ heads that the media is at war with him. With that pretense in place, critical coverage and unflattering facts can be dismissed even as Trump selectively courts the press to inject his own preferred ideas into the mainstream.

The war is phony because both “combatants” get something from it.

7. Peter Baker, Feb. 21, 2018.

New York Times reporter on Trump’s media attacks: ‘It’s just theater’

“The people who say this has a broad impact on society and the credibility of the media and so forth and so on, I get their point,” said New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker at a Tuesday night event hosted by the White House Correspondents’ Association. “I don’t dispute that. In terms of my job, worried about working as a reporter in the White House, it doesn’t have that much impact. I mean, it’s just theater.” Baker said he would get “more worked up” if the name-calling “leads to specific limitations on access or our ability to do our jobs.”

Note the comparisons: Theater. Professional wrestling. Tribal ritual.

Baker highlighted the gulf between Trump’s pronouncements about the media and his personal approach. When the president does his rallies, said Baker, he’ll blast the media and generally create an atmosphere of intimidation toward the people who cover him. On the plane ride home, Trump will say, ‘Hey, everybody, how’s it going? Everybody have a good time?’ He’s like the valet at his resort; he wants to make sure everybody’s having a good time,” recalled Baker.

“It’s like he’s two different people sometimes…”

8. John F. Harris, editor-in-chief of Politico, April 27, 2018 in conversation with James Bennet, editorial page editor at the New York Times.

Trump’s attack on the legitimacy of institutions including the free press— how seriously should we take it? There seem to be two schools of thought. One is that this is one of those historic moments where core values are under attack and that we’re going to be judged historically by how well we defend and vindicate those values, and that the Trump threat is serious. I think the other school is, “It’s just so much bluster and bullshit that’s not even meant by him to be taken seriously, and it really pales in comparison to places around the world where journalists actually are executed or opposition politicians are executed or jailed over these issues. So we shouldn’t delude ourselves that we’re really on the barricades of the front lines of freedom here in the United States.

Drama queens, inflating the threat so they can feel important.

Harris: In the news media context, I don’t think it’s an assault on democracy. Personally, I feel like Trump’s bombast is not meant to be taken seriously and not intended to be taken seriously even by him.

Bennet: You mean he doesn’t intend it to be an assault on journalism?

Harris: That’s right. And I don’t think journalists in this country face any real obstacles to our task of getting information and telling the truth as best we can ascertain it. I think it seems especially frivolous compared to lots of countries where there are real genuine obstacles—there’s government surveillance; there’s government censorship; there’s government punishment for challenging authority. And so, I think it makes us seem a little frivolous to be portraying ourselves on the front lines as though we’re freedom fighters.

9. Hiawatha Bray, a reporter for the Boston Globe business section, April 26, 2018, reacting to John Harris at my Facebook page.

So far, all Trump has done is utter a flood of dishonest and stupid insults, culminating in, well, nothing. This really is, so far, just a lot of noise. Sticks and stones, everybody. Call me back when they start slapping the cuffs on reporters. Till then, fasten your seat belts and remain calm.

So that’s the pattern I wanted to show you. What are we to make of it? First, the speakers in this post make valid points. Among them are:

* In Turkey journalists are being arrested. Independent media has been absorbed into the state. Nothing like that is happening in the U.S.

* Journalists can still report freely and publish what they find. As far as we know, Trump’s worst threats on that score have not materialized.

* The civic emergency created by Trump’s election has been good for the media business, and good for writers who wish to be read.

* Reporters on the White House beat find sources eager to talk and an almost unlimited supply of big, important stories to chase.

* Trump is desperate to be liked. He craves press attention. He is a media animal. These facts modify his public expressions of disdain for journalists.

I do not contest the truth of these observations. Journalists are right to point them out, and we should factor them into our understanding of events.

But I do dissent from the larger theme of a “phony war.” Something quite dangerous is happening. I have put my arguments for that proposition into an essay for New York Review of Books. You can read it here. It begins, “There is alive in the land an organized campaign to discredit the American press. This campaign is succeeding.”

To my thoughts in that essay I would add a few headlines.

AP: “President Donald Trump’s campaign to discredit the news media has spread to officials at all levels of government, who are echoing his use of the term ‘fake news’ as a weapon against unflattering stories.”

All for show?

Buzzfeed reporter Anne Helen Peterson:

Spent the last 2 days at the Range Rights Conference in Modesto, CA, where Rep. Devin Nunes made a surprise appearance and told the crowd:

“The media that’s here, they’re here to mock you and call you a bunch of people in cowboy hats.”

“I think we need a free press, but 90% of publications are owned by hard left billionaires”

“The media is totally corrupt, if you don’t think 90% of the media is totally corrupt, you’re fooling yourself.”

What Nunes is doing there: akin to professional wrestling?

Axios, Dec. 10, 2017. How Trump is spreading the “fake news” virus around the world.

Politifact, Jan. 22, 2018 Donald Trump’s ‘fake news’ epithet emboldens despots around the world.

CNN, Jan. 29, 2018 Asia’s strongmen follow Trump’s lead on fake news.

Just theater?

Last night at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, WHCA president Margaret Talev said: “We reject efforts by anyone, especially our elected leaders, to paint journalism as un-American, to undermine trust between reporter and reader.”

To undermine trust between reporter and reader is one thing Donald Trump definitely aims to do. Contrary to what Margaret Talev said, the journalists who speak in this post do not “reject” that project. Their response is cooler than that, more distanced. They are fixed on the irony of it all. Actually he loves reporters! He wants them to enjoy their time on Air Force One. He craves the attention too. Undermine trust? It’s just for show! Stop being so dramatic. He hasn’t put anyone in jail yet… has he?

The post What savvy journalists say when they are minimizing Trump’s hate movement against journalists appeared first on PressThink.

I will be studying German pressthink in Berlin this summer.

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In 27 days I fly to Berlin to spend June, July and August as a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy. I have never lived in a European city, so this will be a new experience for me.

I am posting here a description of my project, so that people with suggestions can share them, either by using the comment section, by talking to me on Twitter, or by sending me an email, hopefully with Berlin! in the subject line. Here’s my project:

I want to answer this question: What is German pressthink and how is it changing? In order to show what I mean, I need to explain that term, “pressthink,” which is my invention. It is also the name of my blog. I define pressthink as the common sense of the journalism profession, the ideas that journalists share in common about their work, the meaning and importance of that work, and the way it should be done— or should never be done. You could also say that pressthink is the assumptions journalists make about what “good” journalism is, and how to do good for society through journalism. Sometimes these are less-than conscious.

Up to now my writing has been primarily about American journalism and its pressthink. So, for example, I have analyzed “he said, she said journalism,” and what I call the View from Nowhere because these are practices that reveal how American journalists think. In the summer of 2017 I wrote about how asymmetry in the two-party political system is almost too much for American pressthink, which can’t handle it.

During my stay at the Bosch Academy in the summer of 2018 I want to ask German journalists, editors, publishers, scholars, activists, and politicians: what is German pressthink? What makes it distinct? How is it different from American pressthink? What are the common sense ideas about the role of the press that almost all German journalists understand and take for granted? Where did those ideas come from? What pressures are they under? What is uniquely German in them? A lot of American pressthink has been broken by Trump. It doesn’t work very well any more. Has anything like that happened in Germany? Is German pressthink evolving? Is there consensus among German journalists about what “good” journalism is, and how to do good for society through journalism? Or is that breaking apart?

I will investigate these questions by talking to people and trying to make sense of their answers.

The post I will be studying German pressthink in Berlin this summer. appeared first on PressThink.

When the President’s own lawyer pictures him a grifter

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By Jay Rosen

White House reporter Jonathan Karl of ABC News gave a scary report Sunday about the recent round of interviews by the President’s new lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. On ABC’s “This Week,” Karl said:

“I think what you are seeing now is a new war on Robert Mueller, a new war on the investigation. Mueller and the investigation are now central to the Trump midterm election strategy and his re-election strategy. They want to vilify, they want to delay this investigation. They want to draw it out. You will see more interviews like this. They actually want this issue to be front and center. Because, George, they believe that the biggest motivator for the Trump base in the midterm elections will be fear of impeachment.”

Speaking on CNN’s Reliable Sources, Carl Bernstein said of Guiliani:

“What he has done, unlike any of the president’s surrogates, is to picture the President of the United States as almost a grifter, with no interest in anything but conning the American people, saying as he said today, ‘Oh yeah, there might be more Stormy Daniels,’ and ‘there might be more hush payments.’ It’s extraordinary what Giuliani is saying and the picture he — not the press — is presenting.”

On Jake Tapper’s “State of the Union,” Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff said:

“I have to say I am a little taken back by this new lawyer Giuliani’s strategy. His legal defense for the President seems to be, ‘You can’t believe the President of the United Stated, that’s our defense. So when he says things you just gotta discount them’… Other things that Giuliani said in his maiden voyage as the Presidents new lawyer were deeply hurtful to the President’s case.”

I was confused by this myself until I heard Jon Karl’s interpretation this morning. By normal criteria, Giuliani’s recent television appearances have been at best puzzling and at worst disasters for his client. “Normal criteria” means common sense propositions like these…

  • the President doesn’t want to be seen as a liar in front of the whole world;
  • the President doesn’t want to do anything that would put him at greater legal risk;
  • the President doesn’t want to prolong an investigation that is time-consuming and emotionally-draining;
  • the President doesn’t want to strengthen the case for his own impeachment, the ultimate humiliation for any commander-in-chief.

What if none of these any longer apply? We need to be alert to the possibilities Jon Karl outlined. I think we should resist the term “strategy” for Trump’s egoistic maneuvering. There is no strategy. But there may be a new fact pattern, the outcome of his lawyers attempting to manage their client’s malignant narcissism by accepting its most bizarre constraint: any managing will have to be done through semi-regular television appearances that explode the news cycle. Nothing else will the big boss trust.

Plug in those factors and the crazy machine spits out widgets like these…

  • prolong the special counsel’s investigation as long as possible so as not to relinquish a potent source of resentment;
  • add to the chances that impeachable offenses will be found— by, for example, making the Comey firing sound sketchier and sketchier;
  • instead of building a case for the President’s basic innocence, confuse the case by constantly shifting your explanations and by spicing them up with trace elements of guilt;
  • instead of steering away from sources of legal danger, like the Stormy Daniels case and lawyer Michael Avenatti, sail right into them so as to thicken the atmosphere of crisis and guarantee non-stop news coverage;
  • instead of minimizing evidence that the President lies in his public statements, dangle additional proof and let the press pounce on it;
  • instead of projecting lawyerly competence and command of the case, let Giuliani admit that he still doesn’t know the facts, even though he’s on TV arguing about them.
  • instead of denying that worse news is yet to come, flip it around: it may well be that more damaging stuff about the president will come out… so stay tuned!
  • raise the psychological price that core supporters would have to pay for abandoning Trump by making them swallow bigger and more blatant falsehoods, and then hint around that this is indeed what you have done.

As with so many other moments since that escalator ride, we’re in uncharted territory for the American presidency, where crashing the ship of state is seen as clever programming, and willing the impeachment of the President is revealed as an Oval Office plan.

The post When the President’s own lawyer pictures him a grifter appeared first on PressThink.

Why does CNN continue to have Kellyanne Conway on?

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I want to capture for you a little moment today on the Sunday shows.

It came during Brian Stelter’s lengthy and of course contentious interview with Kellyanne Conway on CNN’s Reliable Sources. (I watch so you don’t have to…) Something happened during the struggle that I believe sheds light on a question that a great many people have about such interviews. Why do the networks keep doing it?

I tried to answer that in January of 2017. Everything I wrote then still appplies, including “they’re never going to stop with @KellyannePolls. Never! She’ll be on TV for as long as she works for Trump.”

Today Stelter had a starter question for Conway: If special counsel Robert Mueller has yet to make any report, how does President Trump know that Mueller has found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia? “Who’s telling him that?” Good question! A full 20 minutes later — with no commercial break — he had gotten no answer, despite coming back to the same question at least five times (I counted.)

Which is exactly why people continue to ask: why do you have Kellyanne Conway on? On Sunday morning, before his show aired, Stelter asked his followers on Twitter:

1,500 people answered. Typical replies:

So that happened. Here’s something that happened on the show. Read carefully, or you might miss it.

Conway makes an offhand reference to “people on your side of the aisle…” The implication: Stelter is a Democratic party operative.

Stelter: I am not on any side of the aisle.

Conway: Oh yeah? Who did you vote for?

Stelter: I didn’t vote for president. I left that line on the ballot blank. Anyway, it’s not appropriate for you to ask me that.

Conway: Oh, so it’s appropriate for you to ask me things?

Stelter: “We asked you to come on the program because you’re representative of the President… that’s the point of the interview!”

Conway. Well, the President thinks there’s no collusion. And even you guys seem to be losing faith in that narrative. You now have Michael Avenatti on all the time. The Democrats promised evidence of collusion. Where is it? “You confused America and you wasted time talking about that,” instead of trade deals, national security, a prosperous economy. These things matter to people. 

Stelter: They do matter.

Conway: “Look, if you think your job is to get the president and not get the story, you ought to just own it. Just say it. Because I know your viewers expect that now. Look at their comments all the time, ‘Don’t have Trump people on.’ They expect you to be reflexively, invectively anti-Trump, and that’s problematic.”

Stelter: “I’m glad you’re here! The goal is not to get the president, the goal is to get the truth. There’s a lot of people lying…”

There! Did you catch it? Kellyanne Conway knows that a whole lot of Stelter’s viewers don’t understand why he and the rest of CNN (Jake Tapper, Dana Bash, Chris Cuomo) continue to fence with her when the informational results are so thin. She brings up their complaints, but inflates and distorts them to make the critics sound as unreasonable as possible. (“Don’t have Trump people on.”)

Instead of siding with his puzzled viewers (“Well, Kellyanne, maybe they’re just frustrated, like I am, that I cannot get an answer to my original question, after six tries…”) Stelter places puzzled viewers in opposition to his own approach. That’s the moment I wanted to freeze for you. Some people may think there’s no point in listening to you, Kellyanne, but I’m not like that. I’m glad you’re here! (Go to 6:00 in this clip to see it yourself.)

Why does CNN continue to have Kellyanne Conway on its shows? Stephen Colbert asked Tapper that directly

Colbert asked. “Kellyanne Conway — why have her on TV? She is a collection of deceptions with a blonde wig stapled on top.” Tapper didn’t disagree, exactly, but he said he thinks “sometimes it’s worth it to have people on so you can challenge the very notion of the facts that are being disregarded and the lies that are being told.”

So that’s one answer: We may know with a high degree of probability that facts will be disregarded and lies will be told, but the interview is a chance for us to challenge that. From Reliable Sources today came a different answer. Interviewing Kellyanne Conway places us in opposition to our core audience— which is exactly why we do it, Kellyanne. To prove to the world how open we are to your voice, even when “they” are not. And we’re thrilled to have you here.

“I’m happy to be here!” she exclaimed, smiling.

The post Why does CNN continue to have Kellyanne Conway on? appeared first on PressThink.

It’s time for the press to suspend normal relations with the Trump presidency

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It sometimes happens in diplomacy that one country has to say to another: “This is extreme. We cannot accept this. You have gone too far.” And so it suspends diplomatic relations.

In 2012 the government of Canada announced that it would suspend diplomatic relations with Iran. “Canada views the government of Iran as the most significant threat to global peace and security in the world today,” said the foreign minister.

Journalists charged with covering him should suspend normal relations with the presidency of Donald Trump, which is the most significant threat to an informed public in the United States today.

That is my recommendation.

I began making this point on the third day of his presidency, January 22, 2017, when I said the press should send interns to the White House briefing room. Normal practice would not be able to cope with the political style of Donald Trump, which incorporates a hate movement against journalists.

“Send the interns” means our major news organizations don’t have to cooperate with this. They don’t have to lend talent or prestige to it. They don’t have to be props. They need not televise the spectacle live (CNN didn’t carry Spicer’s rant) and they don’t have to send their top people. They can “switch” systems: from inside-out, where access to the White House starts the story engines, to outside-in, where the action begins on the rim, in the agencies, around the committees, with the people who are supposed to obey Trump but have doubts… The press has to become less predictable. It has to stop functioning as a hate object. This means giving something up.

So that’s one way to suspend normal relations: send the interns. On MSNBC June 12, Rachel Maddow described another. She said that frequent viewers of her show may have noticed a pattern:

I don’t go out of my way to play tape of the president speaking. Nor do I tend to spend too much time parsing whatever the latest quote is from him. That is not out of any animus on my part, it’s just that the president very frequently says things that aren’t true. He admits that he says things that aren’t true. He calls it, you know, hyperbole, but he lies. And I feel like on this show I’d like you to be able to trust me to give you true information. Because I generally feel like I can’t trust what purports to be information from this president, I just try to do the news without words from him, most of the time.

Normally, the president is quoted more than any other public figure, and clips of him speaking are ubiquitous in television news. Maddow told her viewers that she had suspended this practice because, more likely than not, the president’s words would only misinform them. Every president needs to be fact-checked. This one doesn’t care if what he says is true. That’s extreme, and it calls for a response.

The opposing proposition was stated well by Chris Wallace, of Fox News:

“Anything that a president would say — even if it was libelous or scandalous — it’s the president talking, and I think you report it,” said Chris Wallace, the “Fox News Sunday” host who moderated this year’s third presidential debate. “Under any definition, it’s news, whether it’s sensible or not, factual or not, productive or not.”

A middle-ground would be this: what the president says is neither automatically newsworthy nor automatically suspect. Rather, it has to be judged in context. Which sounds super-reasonable. Who can be against “context” and case-by-case judgment? But here’s the context: bad actor, cannot be given the benefit of the doubt, no matter what the case is.

“How,” asked Chuck Todd on Meet the Press June 17, “can we believe a president who routinely says things that are provably false?” Instead of treating these questions as unsolvable riddles, Chuck Todd could… suspend normal relations. For Meet the Press, that might mean: don’t accept as guests the people the White House sends out as defenders of the provably false (especially Kellyanne Conway.) If Trump himself is willing to sit down with Chuck Todd, fine. Take him on over his many falsehoods. But no surrogates or fog machines unless they are willing to correct the president.

The American press corps is not like the government of Canada, which can speak with a single voice. Thousands of people working for hundreds of newsrooms cannot change their practices in synch with one another. But they can all decide, “This is extreme. We cannot accept this. This has gone too far.” And then make a break with normal practice.

For the Washington Post it might be declining to participate in so-called background briefings. For NPR, it might be refusing to report false claims by the President unless they are served as a “truth sandwich,” a suggestion recently made by Brian Stelter and Margaret Sullivan, interpreting the work of George Lakoff. For CNN, never going live to a Trump event — on the grounds that you will inevitably broadcast falsehoods if you do — would be a good start.

Suspend normal relations. It’s up to the journalists who cover Trump to decide how they will do it. The important thing is that they do it. And then announce what they did, to get others thinking about their own steps. In this way the sovereign state of journalism can take action, and show, as the Canadian prime minister said recently, that it will “not be pushed around.”

The post It’s time for the press to suspend normal relations with the Trump presidency appeared first on PressThink.

A current list of my top problems in pressthink

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1. Across Europe and the United States there moves a right wing populist wave that includes in its political style the rejection of the mainstream press as corrupt, elitist and part of the system that is keeping the good people, the pure people — the Volk — down. Illiberal democracy is on the rise. It has no use for real journalism, except as hate object. (Link.)

2. For most news publishers the advertising model continues to decline. Google, Facebook and ad tech companies dominate the digital ad market. The VC route does not seem promising. (“Pivot to video” is a good title for that feeling.) The chances of generating more state support — on the public service media model of the BBC, CBC or ZDF — are zero within the current climate. That leaves subscription, crowd-funding and friendly billionaires. Each is shaky in a different way. The business model for serious journalism remains unclear and unstable. That’s a problem.

3. In the United States the President is leading a hate movement against journalism, and with his core supporters it is succeeding. They reject the product on principle. Their leading source of information about Trump is Trump, which means an authoritarian news system is for them up and running. Before journalists log on in the morning, one third of their potential public is gone. No one knows what to do about it.

4. Marty Baron’s famous phrase, “We’re not at war, we’re at work” captures the consensus in American newsrooms about how to respond to Trump’s attacks. As I wrote here, “Our top journalists are correct that if they become the political opposition to Trump, they will lose. And yet, they have to go to war against a political style in which power gets to write its own story.” How to put that distinction into practice is not clear. That’s a problem. So is thinking you’re not at war, when in some ways you are.

5. Leading journalists in the US seem stuck on what they regard as a supremely telling fact: the same man who is leading the national hate movement against their profession cares desperately about his portrayal in the news media, consumes news with a vengeance, loves hanging out and sparring with reporters, and admits that he still holds tender feelings for the New York Times, which he nonetheless attacks as corrupt and failing. Struck uncommonly hard by this irony, they underrate the damage his campaign is doing. (Link.)

6. In local news the wreckage continues, with newspaper staffs reduced by 3X or 4X from their highs. TV newsrooms, public broadcasting and digital start-ups cannot make up the difference. The eye on power that local journalists once provided, fitfully and imperfectly, is today withering away, with no clear answer in sight. The slow motion collapse of the local newspaper is especially painful because that is where a relationship with trusted news providers typically begins.

7. The lack of diversity in American newsrooms and the loss of trust in the American news media are factors clearly related to one another, but there is no agreement on how to move forward, or even on which diverse perspectives are most needed. On top of that, most of the newsrooms from which genuine diversity is missing are officially governed by the View from Nowhere, an ideology that stands in subtle contradiction to the very premise that diverse perspectives are required to produce a fair and compelling portrait. No one wants to deal with that mess.

8. I refer now to a cultural condition and media climate involving bad actors and false claims that is so confusing and seemingly hopeless to most of us that terms like “death of truth” and “post-fact” are routinely used by educated people as they try to name and frame what stands out about this. Journalism’s response has been more fact-checking and the calling out of untruths, but it’s clear by now that fact-checking is not having the desired effect. So what lies beyond fact-checking? We do not know.

9. For 50 years or more, university-based journalism schools in the United States have connected with the news industry and the journalism profession using a simple formula that worked for everyone. “Send us people we can plug into our production routine tomorrow.” This was the agreement these schools had with students and their future employers in American newsrooms. But it isn’t good enough anymore. For one thing, the production routine itself has to be re-engineered, and the J-schools of America aren’t set up for that. Finding a business model that can sustain a quality newsroom is the industry’s biggest problem, but J-schools aren’t designed for that, either. There’s plenty of change, energy and optimism in journalism education, but it’s not clear what replaces the prior consensus: “Send us people we can plug into our production routine tomorrow.”

The post A current list of my top problems in pressthink appeared first on PressThink.

What The Correspondent adds to the American press

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We make free presses one at a time. Those we have spring from the protections of law in a given country, and from the history and culture of the people who live there. When you look at the world map, there are not a lot of them. Many fewer than we need! The free presses we do have face common problems:

  • a broken business model, as the advertising business is transformed by the internet;
  • the slow motion collapse of the local newspaper, which is where a relationship with trusted news providers begins;
  • attacks on the news media by authoritarian leaders and the movements they head, along with a rising mistrust of governing elites and the institutions they direct;
  • a cultural condition and media climate involving bad actors and false claims that is so confusing and seemingly hopeless that terms like “death of truth” and “post-fact” are routinely used by educated people as they try to name and frame what to them stands out about it;
  • in countries with a long tradition of public broadcasting, the beginnings of a revolt against the financing system, typically led by right wing populists;
  • deficits in agility, urgency, and diversity in newsrooms that aren’t changing as fast as their predicament shifts;
  • and everywhere the capture of the relationship with users by the big tech platforms.

Instead of seeking universal answers (“write once, run anywhere,” as they say in the software business) we should commit to global collaboration, and to learning from the journalism of other countries: one free press to another.

This is the choice I made in trying to recover my bearings after the shocking results of the 2016 election in the United States — shocking for journalism, I mean. I decided to work with a small Dutch site, De Correspondent.

This essay explains why.

November 9, 2016, the day after: The press-hating candidate had just won the big prize. Journalists obsessed with the horse race — who’s going to win? — had not made clear the possibility that Donald Trump could be the next president. This was a massive intelligence failure, a trust-crushing debacle. His demagogic attacks on journalists not only didn’t hurt him; they fit smoothly into a political style that capitalized on mistrust of the system and the people who ran it.

American journalism wasn’t ready for what was coming after the election, I felt. The roots of 2016’s collapse ran deep, but there was no tradition of deep reflection following equally massive failures, like the phony case for war in Iraq in 2003, which the political press failed to detect, or the financial crisis of 2008, against which the business press was no protection.

There was no equivalent in journalism of the 9/11 commission to ask: how could this happen? After the election I wrote a two-part post called “Winter is Coming” that summarized a bleak situation this way:

Low trust all around, an emboldened and nationalist right wing that treats the press as a natural enemy, the bill coming due for decades of coasting on a model in political reporting that worked well for “junkies” but failed to engage the rest of us, the strange and disorientating fact that reality itself seems to have become a weaker force in politics, the appeal of the “strong man” and his propaganda within an atmosphere of radical doubt, the difficulty of applying standard methods of journalism to a figure in power who is not trying to represent reality but to substitute himself for it as a show of strength, the unsuitability of prior routine as professionals in journalism try to confront these confusing conditions, a damaged economic base, a weak institutional structure and newsroom mono-culture that hinders any creative response, and a dawning recognition that freedom of the press is a fragile state, not a constitutional certainty.

That’s what I saw on the day after. I did not know how to solve any of these problems, but I knew from experience that the American press — after a short period of self-flagellation for getting the winner wrong — would simply move onto the next story: Trump as president, which was going to be a wild, wild ride.

To just follow along and criticize the coverage I could not do. I had to find a project more constructive. In the weeks after Trump’s improbable victory, I had felt despair creeping up on me. For the first time in my life, I was measuring the years until my possible retirement. (Five at least, ten at most.) I wanted to let others figure a way out of this mess, even though I knew it was equally my gig. Here I detected a new emotion: intellectual shame.

We make free presses one at a time. We have to fix them that way too. My personal breakthrough came at the Newsgeist conference in Phoenix, a month after the election. That was when I first heard Aron Pilhofer, formerly of the New York Times and the Guardian, a self-taught digital journalist and change-maker, say: What if news organizations optimized every part of their operation for trust? Not for speed, traffic, profits, scoops, headlines, prizes, or time-on-site… but for trust. What would that even look like?

I had an idea of what it might look like because I had been talking to the founders of a Dutch news start-up, De Correspondent. Optimized for trust was a plausible description of the model they were developing as the world’s most successful member-funded news site, launched in 2013. Now they were looking to expand to the U.S. and to English language publishing. The more I learned about them, the more distance I gained from my egocentric despair.

Events in the election of 2016 had exposed weaknesses in American journalism that went far deeper, and started much earlier than the post-mortems and press reviews would ever reach. I wanted to work on something that treated the problem at the level where I thought it resided. The entire relationship between journalists and their publics needed to be reconfigured.

Now let me explain what I mean by that.

Five years before Trump’s victory I had given a lecture in Melbourne, Australia entitled, “Why Political Coverage is Broken.” It was mostly a critique of the “savvy” style in the mainstream press, where the object is to get inside the game and show how the winners play it.

Promoting journalists as insiders in front of the outsiders, the viewers, the electorate — this is a clue to what’s broken about political coverage in the U.S. and Australia. Here’s how I would summarize it: Things are out of alignment. Journalists are identifying with the wrong people. Therefore the kind of work they are doing is not as useful as we need it to be… Savviness as a political style [tries] to split the attentive public off from the rest of the electorate, and get us to join up with the insiders. Under its gaze, other people become objects of political technique. In this sense savviness is an attack on our solidarity with strangers who share the same political space.

Out of alignment. This was the key point. In 2011 I knew how to describe that condition, but I did not know what to do about it. Five years later I felt I did know: Join forces with De Correspondent, and its Dutch co-founders, who were half my age. They were busy reconfiguring how a public stands toward its journalists. Their scheme seemed to be working in the Netherlands. Making it work in the U.S. would be much harder, but worth a try.

I am a fan of tinkering. But I knew that tinkering would not be enough. Somehow we had to rebuild the contraption of journalism by realigning its parts. The business model; the distribution system; the style of reportage put before the public; the implied contract between makers and users, writers and readers; the feedback loops; the incentives that drive newsroom behavior. The use of talent. The role of editors. The bid for customer loyalty. It’s not that each and every one of these had to be re-invented. Rather, we had to take them apart and fit them together in a different way. That required an organizing principle potent enough to inspire creative effort at every level of a news company. Optimizing for trust could, I thought, be that principle.

So to describe how the membership model pioneered by De Correspondent works:

1. No ads. This is the most critical decision the founders made. Because there are no ads there are no daily traffic quotas, and no need to chase the controversy of the day. The site is not in the business of measuring, packaging, and selling your attention to someone else. And there’s no third party in between journalists and members. As my colleague Clay Shirky puts it, Best Buy and Wal-mart “never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway”.

2. Member-funded. In the Netherlands, 6,000 members pay 70 Euros a year to be members. Member fees and reader donations cover 84 percent of the costs (the rest comes from book sales, speaker fees, and syndication.) As Shirky said, advertisers don’t advertise because they want to support kick-ass journalism. But members become members because they do. That’s part of what I mean by a better alignment.

3. No meter. With revenue from digital advertising difficult to capture, many news sites have turned to subscriptions to survive. Typically they use a “metered” system, in which readers get a certain number of free articles per month, after which their access is blocked — unless they subscribe. De Correspondent doesn’t do that because its model is not subscription. Subscribing is a product relationship: you pay your money and you get the product. If you don’t pay you don’t get it. Membership is different: you join the cause because you believe in the work.

If you believe in the work, then you want it to spread — including to non-members. Thus any link to De Correspondent’s journalism that Dutch readers come across they can access for free: no limit, no meter. To put it another way, the members are an active subset of the readers, and they willingly subsidize the journalism that often spreads beyond the community of supporters to a larger public. This is how De Correspondent gets around the frustrations of a paywall.

4. Escape from the 24-hour news cycle. In the Netherlands, De Correspondent doesn’t try to have something on every news story that the media system is buzzing about. It describes itself as an “antidote to the daily news grind”, then tries to live up to that description. Like other digital publications it sends members a daily email highlighting recently published work, but its goal is to have a different mix of stories, originating not in an editor’s exquisite taste, but in explicitly different principles about what is newsworthy.

In his excellent series, “Unbreaking News”, which explains De Correspondent’s public philosophy, founder and editor-in-chief Rob Wijnberg wrote about those principles. A few highlights:

  • “The problem isn’t liberal bias, it’s recency bias.”
  • “Instead of looking only at what happened today, at De Correspondent we look at what happens every day. When you do that consistently, it makes for a different view of the world.”
  • “We try to tell precisely those stories that aren’t news, but news-worthy nevertheless. Or, as we often say, that reveal not the weather but the climate.”
  • “We encourage [our writers] to seek inspiration for article ideas outside of the day’s newspapers, talk shows, and tweets — by going out into the streets, by reading books, and, above all, by asking our readers the question, ‘What do you encounter every day at work or in your life that rarely makes the front page, but really should?’”

5. A revised contract between editors and reporters. As these principles imply, the editors of De Correspondent have different expectations. “Don’t tell me what happened today. Reveal in a new way what happens every day.” But this is just one of their revisions. Another is that correspondents are permitted to define their own beats and pick their own reporting projects. The idea is to better align commitment with assignment — and to attract the best talent.

In exchange for this extraordinary freedom, writers agree to devote 30 to 40 percent of their time to interactions with members, with a special emphasis on tapping the knowledge and life experience that members bring to the table. The contract with editors thus says something like this: “Writers, we are confident that what excites you as a journalist will also work for our members, but you have to bring them into it. When they know things that you need to know, you must make that exchange happen — or you failed at our style of journalism.”

6. Writers inform readers, readers inform writers. Correspondents are required to send a weekly email to members who follow them at the site, explaining what they are working on and outlining any information needs they have that members might assist with. Members are encouraged to form attachments with the individual writers whose beats interest them most. Comment threads have been reframed as reader “contributions”. Only readers who are paying members can comment, which more or less eliminates trolling.

De Correspondent tries to teach its members that opinion is less valuable than what they know about the topic at hand, or a perspective they can supply that is missing from a published report. Doctors and nurses and patients know more about the healthcare system than even the most well-connected medical correspondent. That’s the idea. More recently, the site has begun verifying what its members are expert in, creating an online database that allows editors to be proactive in asking for help. With all these moves, the goal is to realign the reader-writer relationship around knowledge exchange, in the belief that this will lead to better journalism, greater accuracy, deeper loyalty, and a richer experience for members, who will then be more likely to renew.

7. No View from Nowhere. De Correspondent tries to specialize in slow journalism, in-depth investigations that shift the focus “from the sensational to the foundational”, as Wijnberg puts it. Writers are encouraged to become experts in their subjects and to share conclusions when they have them. They are permitted to say what they think, as long as it is evidence-based. They do not have to obey any party line. Nor do they have to babysit readers, or give them what they’re clamoring for. But they are supposed to practice constructive journalism, which means no description of a problem is complete unless it includes informed discussion of what can be done about it.

These moves are a kind of ideological realignment, not on some left/right axis but toward view-from-somewhere reporting, a transparency that discloses rather than concealing the individual journalist’s point of view. In a suspicious age, the practice of disclosure, coupled with high standards of verification, is more optimal for the production of trust than the Voice of God, the View from Nowhere, or what journalism professors call “neutral professionalism”.

By kicking the advertisers out of bed, by pushing the distinction between subscription and membership to the key point of sustainability, by exiting from the hamster wheel of clickbait and 24-hour news, by putting high concepts like “not the weather but the climate” into practice with its 21 full-time correspondents, by redrawing in a creative way the contracts between writers and readers, editors and reporters, news site and supporters, by encouraging a view-from-somewhere approach and making “constructive journalism” the house style — and by surfacing demand for these things — De Correspondent went beyond tinkering with a broken business model. It reconfigured how a public stands toward the makers of journalism. This was inspiring.

We make free presses one at a time. We ruin them that way too. Incredibly, this is what the President of the United States is trying to do, at least for his core supporters: ruin their trust in professional journalism. No one knows how to stop him from doing that. No one knows how much damage to the press will ultimately result.

But we do know that it didn’t start with Trump, that the problems in journalism are far bigger than one man’s campaign to elude accountability, that the people who care about creating an informed public will have to work together and learn from each other, and that despair is always waiting to substitute itself for honest effort on a distant goal.

By distant I mean we are a long way from knowing what to do to “fix” journalism. But I know what I’ll be doing in the months ahead: everything I can to build a base of support for The Correspondent, the English-language version that will launch its membership campaign in the coming year. I am meeting with the founders weekly as we plan that campaign. I also direct a research project that is studying membership models around the world. Aron Pilhofer is on board. Like me, he’s an “ambassador” for The Correspondent in its drive to expand to the U.S. So is comedian and author Baratunde Thurston, the singer Rosanne Cash, the artist and writer Molly Crabapple.

You can sign up for updates here. And soon you will be able to do much more than that. I hope when your chance comes you will join me, and become a member of The Correspondent. For I’m not ready to retire.

This essay originally appeared at The Correspondent’s collection on Medium.

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Next time you wonder why New York Times people get so defensive, read this.

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The readers of the New York Times have more power now. They have more power because they have more choices. And because the internet, where most of the reading happens, is inherently two-way. Also because Times journalists are now exposed to opinion and reaction on social media. And especially because readers are paying more of the costs. Their direct payments are keeping the Times afloat. This will be increasingly so in the future, as the advertising business gets absorbed by the tech industry. The Times depends on its readers’ support more than it ever has.

When I say the readers have more power I mean the core readership, the loyalists, the people for whom the Times is not just an information source, but a necessary part of life. The subscribers. That’s about 4 million people out of a monthly readership of more than 130 million. More than 60 percent of total revenue comes from them.

One of the joys of having a subscription to the Times is threatening to cancel it. Which is simply to say that a Times loyalist is also a critic. It has always been that way — the Times gets a lot of criticism — but now the situation is growing more tense and anxious.

Recently the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, said something that I believe touched on this anxiety.

We won’t be baited into becoming ‘the opposition.’ And we won’t be applauded into becoming ‘the opposition.’

By “baited” he clearly meant the taunts of people like Steve Bannon and President Trump. By “applauded” he meant, I think, the pressure coming from Times loyalists. For the most part these are people appalled by Trump who want to see him further exposed. They want the Times to be tougher on his supporters and more relentless in calling out his lies. They want Times journalists to see what they see — an assault on democratic institutions, the corruption of the American Republic — and to act accordingly.

But these people are perceived as a threat by the Times newsroom. The fear is that they want to turn the Times into an opposition newspaper. This is not how the Times sees itself. The fear is that they want the Times to help save American democracy. This too is not how the Times sees itself.

Remember when the Washington Post came out with its new motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness?” It put Post journalism on the side of keeping democracy alive. Dean Baquet, executive editor of the Times, made fun of it. “Sounds like the next Batman movie,” he said, while being careful to express admiration for the Post and its editor, Marty Baron.

The Times debuted a new marketing program around the same time, but the message was different. It went something like this: People on all sides are shouting at each other, full of zeal and certainty. Amid the claims and counter-claims of a polarized nation the truth is hard to find, hard to know. But the truth is more important than ever, and that is why you need the New York Times. Not for its defense of democracy, but for its careful distance from the cacophony, in which Times loyalists are themselves participants. Watch this and you will see what I mean:

Let’s bring these strands together. Times journalists are aware that they are more dependent than ever on their core readers. They also feel incredibly lucky to be working at the New York Times. Mostly they are institutionalists, whose worst fear is screwing something up that would injure the Times, which they love and respect. They are further aware that their most loyal readers want a more confrontational approach taken toward the Trump movement and government. And they know that enemies of the Times, including the movement that brought Trump to power, want to see it fail and lose face, lose influence, lose power.

Navigating these tensions and sensing what needs to be done— that is the job of leadership. How do you recognize the rising power of core readers and still maintain a healthy independence from them? How do you fight against a political movement that wants to destroy the Times without politicizing the product? How do you oppose Trump’s attempt to discredit the Times and the press as a whole without becoming “the opposition?”

Well, you don’t do it by eliminating the public editor. You don’t do it with a flippant, “sounds like the next Batman movie” when a rival is trying to stake out territory as democracy’s defender. You don’t do it by worrying about whether a hostile White House perceives the Times arts writers as unfriendly voices on social media, as Dean Baquet said he does. For as I wrote then, “if the perception of critics can edit the actions of his staff then he has surrendered power to enemies of the Times, who will always perceive bias because it is basic to their interests to do so.”

The rising power of Times readers has, I believe, unsettled Times journalists. They are both grateful and suspicious. They want the support, they also want to declare independence from their strongest supporters. (And they do not want to open the box that is marked Coverage of Hillary Clinton, 2016.) They are tempted to look right and see one kind of danger, then look left to spot another, equal and opposite. They want to push off from both sides to clear a space from which truth can be told. That would make things simpler, but of course things are not that simple. The threat to truthtelling — to journalism, democracy, the Times itself — is not symmetrical. They know this. But the temptation lives.

These are matters of institutional psychology, which I observe from the outside. I am sharing my impressions as a close reader, a subscriber for 30+ years, a loyal critic myself, and a watcher of Times journalists. In any relationship, a shift in power alters the dynamic between the parties. In so many ways since the election, the Times has risen to the occasion and excelled. But it has a problem with its core supporters. Until it is put right, there will be blow-ups, resentments and a lot of misunderstanding.

The post Next time you wonder why New York Times people get so defensive, read this. appeared first on PressThink.

Election coverage: the road not taken

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Originally published as a Twitter thread on election day, 2018.

There was a path the American press could have walked, but did not. This alternative way was illuminated as far back as 1992. Our political journalists declined it. And here we are. This post is that story.

One of the problems with election coverage as it stands is that no one has any idea what it means to succeed at it. Predicting the winner? Is that success? Even if journalists could do that (and they can’t) it would not be much of a public service, would it? A very weird thing about horse race or “game” coverage is that it doesn’t answer to any identifiable need of the voter. Should I vote for the candidate with the best strategy for capturing my vote? Do I walk into the voting booth clutching a list of who’s ahead in the polls?

In 1992, the The Observer in Charlotte, NC teamed up with the Poynter Institute to pioneer a different way to cover elections. The idea was very simple: campaign coverage should be grounded in what voters want the candidates to talk about. Which voters? The ones you are trying to inform.

This came to be called the “citizens agenda” approach to campaign coverage. It revolves around the power of a single question: “What do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes?” From good answers to that everything else in the model flows.

A few things about that question, “What do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes?” Notice what it is not. It is not “who’s going to win?” It’s not “who are you going to vote for?” And it’s not “which party would do a better job at addressing…” For the whole purpose of the citizens agenda approach is to find an alternative to the horse race style in campaign coverage, which starts with “who’s gonna win?” What are the keys to winning? How close is the race? Which tactics seem to be working? What do the latest polls say?

The horse race style is the default pattern. It’s easy to criticize, and I have done that. A lot. But the default has some impressive strengths. It’s repeatable in every election, everywhere. It creates suspense and thus interest. It tells you where to put your resources (on the closest races.) 

Here’s how the alternative style — the citizens agenda in election coverage— works. First you need to know who your community is. If informing the public is the mission statement of every good journalist, then identifying the public you’re trying to inform is basic to the job. If you can identify the particular public you’re trying to inform — and you know how to reach those people — then you can ask them the question at the core of the citizens agenda approach. “What do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes?” 

The key is to pose this question in every possible form and forum. Interviews with reporters. Focus groups with researchers. Call and leave us a message. Email us. Tweet us. Text us. Fill out this form. Speak up at our event. Comment on our Facebook page. Talk to us! 

In addition to those inputs, the polling budget has to be redirected. Away from the horse race, toward the organizing principle in our revised approach, “What do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes?” You can poll for that. But it’s not normal.

Put it all together, and the journalists covering the campaign have what they need to name, frame and synthesize the citizens agenda. The product is a ranked list, a priority sketch. The top 8-10 issues or problems that voters most want the candidates to be talking about. The citizens agenda, an exercise in high quality public listening, is both a published product (tested, designed, packaged properly for multiple platforms) and a template for covering the rest of the campaign. It tells you how to “win” at campaign coverage. Or stop losing.

But you have to get the list right. If you can spread out and properly canvas the community, ask good questions, listen well to the answers, transcend your limited starting points (your bias) and piece together an accurate and nuanced understanding, then you have something truly valuable.

The template has multiple purposes. It helps focus your “issue” coverage and voters guide. It informs your explainers. And it keeps you on track. Instead of just reacting to events (or his tweets…) you have instructions for how to stay centered around voters’ concerns. When a candidate comes to town and gives a speech, you map what is said against the citizens agenda. When your reporters interview the candidate, questions are drawn from the citizens agenda. If the candidate speaks to your editorial board, you know what to do.

But it goes beyond that. Synthesizing a citizens agenda at the beginning creates a mission statement for your campaign coverage later on. Now you know what you’re supposed to accomplish. Press the candidates to talk about what your readers and listeners want most to hear about. 

The citizens agenda approach in campaign coverage (sorry for the dorky name) tells reporters, editors and producers how they’re doing. Here’s how. If you’ve done the work and your list is accurate, the candidates will have to start talking about the items on that agenda. That’s how you know it’s working. That’s how you know you’re winning. Now you can press them for better answers, and dig deep on things you know people care about. That’s pubic service!

This I can tell you. If reporters ask the people they’re trying to inform, “What do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes?” no one is going to answer with, “You’re down five points in the latest polls. Realistically, can you recover?”

The citizens agenda approach in campaign coverage was first tried at the Charlotte Observer in 1992. I wrote about that adventure in my book, What Are Journalists For? in 1999. I explained it again in 2010 at my blog. So it’s been out there. My own read is that it never took off because this is not what political reporters want to do. They want to hang with the pros. They want to pick apart the strategy. The best ones (and there are some very good ones) want to explain what the candidates are appealing to. In us.

Yesterday, Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post gave a grade of C-minus to the campaign press. “Too many journalists allow Trump to lead them around by the nose,” she said. “With the president as their de facto assignment editor.”  And I agree with that. But here’s the kicker: You can’t keep from getting sucked into Trump’s agenda without a firm grasp on your own. But where does that agenda come from? It can’t come from you, as a campaign journalist. Who cares what you think? It has to come from the voters you are trying to inform. 

A demonstrable public service, the citizens agenda approach puts the campaign press on the side of the voters and their right to have their major concerns addressed by the people bidding for power. That is the road not taken. Now I have to add that good reporters on the campaign trail spend a lot of time listening to voters. This happens. They ask about the issues on voters minds. But it’s pitched to who’s ahead and why. To which appeals are resonating.

For the sophisticated professionals who cover elections, the “citizens agenda in campaign coverage” sounds — let’s be honest — a little too earnest, a bit minor league. Civics class, as against drinks with the county chairman at the Des Moines Marriott. I know this. I get it.

Thing is, the only way up from the hole they’re in is to pitch their journalism at an electorate they understand better than the politicians who are leading it off a cliff. You don’t get there with a savvy analysis of who’s going to win this round. You have to represent.

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Letter to My Network: Join The Correspondent

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This is for everyone who follows me on social media, or who has read my press criticism. All my former students. Fans of this blog, PressThink. Anyone who owns my book. Anyone who’s heard me speak. It is a personal statement, from me to them.

I have never asked you for anything. Except maybe to read this, or share that. I don’t push products, or join campaigns. But now, after 32 years as an observer and critic of the press, I am breaking with that policy. Breaking it in half.

I am asking you to do what I have done: join The Correspondent. If you have ever wondered what I would recommend to public-spirited people who want a better press, this is it. Go here, read about the site’s founding principles, and if they move you become a member.

I won’t make a dime if you do. I am not getting paid to tell you this. I have no stake in the company. I am not an officer or an employee. I just believe in what they are doing, and I have tried to advise them on how to do it better.

After the shock of the 2016 election, I felt I had to find something more useful to do than criticize the performance of the news media. (I do that, as well.) So I decided to work with The Correspondent on its membership campaign, which launched on November 14. Now I am asking you to participate, for reasons I will explain.

Journalism is in a jam. I don’t think better practices are enough. Better principles are needed too. The principles I would add are visible in the design of The Correspondent, and in its membership campaign. So I’m saying something stronger than, “I endorse this.” I’m saying: This is what I would do…

The Correspondent is the extension into English-language publishing of decorrespondent.nl, the world’s most successful member-funded, ad-free news site. It launched with a crowdfunding campaign in the Netherlands in 2013. Publishing daily in Dutch, they now have 61,000 members supporting 21 full-time correspondents on a broad range of beats. (List of Dutch beats here. It tells you the kind of journalism they do.)

Their model is working in the Netherlands, but that’s not the exciting part. The exciting part is the principles that make it go. These are different from any news site you can name.

Start with no ads, the key move the Dutch founders made. Downstream from that original “no” are others, equally welcome. No click-baity headlines. No auto-play videos. No ugly promos sliding into view as you try to read the article. No “sponsored content.” (No sponsors at all.) No third party — the advertiser — in between you and the people trying to inform you. No need to track you around the internet, or collect data on your browsing habits. No selling of your attention to others.

Also: no controversy-of-the-day coverage, which happens when editors from different newsrooms react to the same data showing clicks and taps going to a few “hot” stories. These are typically the stories that trigger outrage in the most people. The people at The Correspondent have a phrase for it. “Your antidote to the daily news grind.” If that’s an idea you can get behind, then get behind The Correspondent. Join our club.

Now for the next principle, equally basic. This is not an exclusive club. It’s extremely inclusive. Two reasons I can say that. Yes, you have to pay to be a member. But you pay what you feel you can afford. The Correspondent believes you are smart enough to figure this economy out. A paying membership is the other side of the coin that reads: no ads. And no ads, as we have seen, has all those welcome effects downstream.

The other reason I can say “extremely inclusive” is that The Correspondent is not selling digital subscriptions, as the Washington Post, the London Times, and most local newspapers nowadays do. Paid subscription is a product-consumer relationship: you pay your money and you get the product. If you don’t pay you don’t get it. Membership is different. You join the cause because you believe in the importance of the work. If you believe in the work, you want it to spread, including to non-members.

If The Correspondent’s membership campaign reaches its goal of raising $2.5 million by December 14, it will hire a staff and start publishing, in English, in 2019. When that happens, there will be no “meter” measuring how many articles you have read this month. No one will ever get that notice, “you have used four of your five free clicks.” Any link that comes to people in their social feeds will be clickable and shareable, without limit. In this way it is more like public radio in the U.S. Members who believe in the public radio mission support their NPR station, but everyone can listen.

The differences compared to the NPR system are important too: The Correspondent will have no corporate sponsors. No government funding. And thus no fear of that money getting cut off. Which in turns means no tendency toward false equivalence, no incentive system for “he said, she said” journalism. These are deeply-woven patterns for which I have often criticized NPR.

Built into The Correspondent are other ideas I have tried to speak up for in my work as a critic. For example: In 2003 (here) and in 2010 (here) and at other points in my writing, I have attempted to point out that the “view from nowhere” is getting harder and harder to trust.

But journalists who can say “here’s where I’m coming from,” and then combine that act of transparency with high standards of verification (reporting, digging, presenting the data…) stand an increasingly better chance of gaining trust. This philosophy is coded into The Correspondent. Number six on their list of ten founding principles says, “We don’t take the view from nowhere. We tell you where we’re coming from.”

In 2006, I wrote The People Formerly Known as the Audience, probably my most well-known post. Seven years later, the founders of De Correspondent (who had read that post) asked the people formerly known as the Dutch audience to support a new kind of journalism platform: member-funded, ad-free… and participatory. Which is another key principle. They required the writers they had hired to treat the former audience as a knowledge community, people who ought to be listened to because they know things that can make the journalism better.

I had been pushing that principle for years. They wove it into their operating style. Reporters treat members as sources of knowledge and feedback. They share what they’re working on, and ask for help.

From the moment it “jumped” to the internet, journalism has been trying to figure out how to become more two-way. The Correspondent has the best answer I have seen. Its writers are given freedom to define their own beats, and pick their own reporting projects. But in exchange for that extraordinary latitude they are expected to spend 30 to 40 percent of their time interacting with members and drawing knowledge from them.

No one else in journalism does it this way. If they did, I would know about it.

For you as a member it means this: You are not just expected to give money. You are also expected to testify when you know something the writers should know. If you have expertise, you may be called upon to share it. Members follow writers at the site, not just topics or sections. The writers are required to send their followers a weekly email updating them on their reporting projects. It’s a more intimate relationship with journalists, the opposite of yelling at them on Twitter and hoping to be heard.

One more principle. The Correspondent practices “constructive journalism.” That means no treatment of a problem is complete unless it includes what can be done about it. What we as individuals can do (like reducing your carbon footprint) and what we as a society can do (like requiring more energy-efficient products.)

Are you starting to get the idea? Hope so. There’s a lot more to why I support this project. You can read my fuller explanation here: What The Correspondent will add to the American press. (“It reconfigures how a live public stands toward the makers of journalism.”) Or check out the analysis in Nieman Lab by news industry expert Ken Doctor. It explains how The Correspondent is trying something no one else is trying.

What I want you to know is that I not only endorse what they are doing. It is what I would do if I started my own site.

So join us.

Jay Rosen (bio) teaches journalism at New York University and writes the blog, PressThink. He has been working with The Correspondent on their expansion to English-language publishing for two years. On Twitter he is @jayrosen_nyu.

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Yep. The Correspondent screwed up in its communications with members. Here’s how.

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By request, here’s my post explaining how I view The Correspondent’s decision not to have its headquarters in New York or the US, and to base the English-language operation in Amsterdam. (I am an advisor, and the Membership Puzzle Project, which I lead, is partners with The Correspondent.) You can find the background to this controversy in Mathew Ingram’s report for CJR.

First, it’s entirely understandable why people thought The Correspondent would be based in New York. At one time, that was the plan. The plan made its way into communications in a broad variety of ways. As I told Nieman Lab, “That’s not anyone’s fault but The Correspondent’s.”

Here’s how Founding Editor Rob Wijnberg put it in a letter to members that was sent today. (Bold lettering in the original.)

Members who read about this decision elsewhere have shared with me that they feel misled because they had a reasonable expectation from our crowdfunding campaign that we would open an office in the US. I am truly sorry for this. As an organization built on a commitment to transparency and trust, we recognize how serious this is. We should have communicated with you as our thinking evolved and you should have heard this from us first, rather than on Twitter or via other news outlets. We will learn from this, and do better in the future.

Now to the question of how it happened. I have some knowledge of this — and of the mistakes we made that led to today’s apology — because I was part of the campaign.

Through 2017 and much of 2018 we shared a default assumption that The Correspondent would be based in New York. I call it a ‘default’ because we never sat down to decide it, and there was no real cost study or strategic analysis behind it. Rather, we had opened a campaign office in New York (with borrowed office space) and it seemed like that would evolve into The Correspondent’s newsroom. At some point in 2018 we mentally shifted from “New York, probably” to “location: undecided” but (and in retrospect this was an error…) we didn’t think to announce this to the world because in our minds we had not announced “newsroom in New York” to the world. But we were mistaken.

Instead of announcing “we have changed our default location from New York to Undecided, so please be aware…” we tried to practice message discipline during the campaign itself, which ran from Nov. 14 to Dec. 14, 2018. We spoke about expansion to the English speaking world. In our minds, shifting the way we talked about the expansion during the campaign so that we referenced the globe and the English language, rather than New York and the US, brought our campaign communications in line with “location: undecided.”

But we know now that this was a failure of imagination, especially for a site that talked about “optimizing for trust” and working collaboratively with members.

To illustrate what I mean by “we tried to practice message discipline during the campaign itself” see this paragraph from the Guardian’s story, which ran the day the campaign started:

Wijnberg, a former newspaper editor in the Netherlands, and his co-founder, Ernst Pfauth, have been based in New York City for a year planning the launch, working with media experts and researchers at New York University. If the Correspondent reaches its fundraising goal, it will hire five to six full-time correspondents focussing on specific beats, Wijnberg said. Instead of a traditional office, the Correspondent’s journalists could be based around the globe – wherever their focus may be.

But for every careful reference like that, there seem to be three more — in news reports, prior messaging, or from the team itself — supporting the impression that The Correspondent would have a newsroom in the US and become part of the American press.

Some other things that were going on might make this a little more explicable. It’s in the nature of a crowdfunding campaign with a do-or-die target and a 30-day run that all sorts of questions are put off while you are working on the campaign, because only if the campaign succeeds will there be any cause to examine those questions. That’s not an excuse for what happened, but it is part of the context.

Similarly, you can try to estimate from Amsterdam what the true costs of running a newsroom in New York are, but for the founders of The Correspondent it was the experience of moving their own lives to the US, establishing a campaign office in the city, hiring people to staff it, paying for their health insurance, getting visas to work in America and a hundred other, smaller real-world discoveries that slowly, and bit-by-bit weakened the case for a New York newsroom.

It made sense then to consider other American cities (Detroit? Pittsburgh?) but did it make sense to try to decide on newsroom location before you even knew if there would be a newsroom to locate, or what the budget would be? The feeling was that it did not make sense to decide that now. Instead we would practice message discipline during the campaign itself, so that no one felt misled about an HQ decision that was very much up-in-the-air. (Not saying it happened that way. I am saying this was our thought.)

Another factor was uncertainty around who the members would turn out to be. There is no way to know that until you run the campaign. The US has the most native English speakers, so one would expect most of the members to be Americans. But we did not know how well The Correspondent’s origin story and principles would resonate around the world, or how a Dutch-born site would be received. When the campaign concluded and the numbers were analyzed they showed about 40 percent of The Correspondent’s founding members are from the US, 40 percent are Dutch, and 20 percent are from the rest of the world.

What location does that argue for? To me it makes for a tough call.

An additional factor, of course, is costs. My sense was that a member-funded newsroom needed to put as much as possible into the journalism, especially at the beginning. This was doubly true for The Correspondent, which ran a campaign based entirely on its founding principles and its success (60,000 paying members) in Dutch. As Emily Bell wrote Dec. 16, “Particularly admirable about the Correspondent’s campaign was that it raised membership without publishing a word. It asked people to buy into the idea of journalism created in a transparent, non-hierarchical way.”

Having bought into the idea, members, I felt, are going to want to see the journalistic goods as soon as possible, not the bill for rent and health insurance. So as the prospect of a New York City office gradually shifted to “location: undecided,” I began to feel good that we would have more money to spend on the journalism, even though I had no idea where The Correspondent would eventually be based. I didn’t think we were misleading members; I thought we were respecting their hard earned cash. Maybe I was wrong, but that’s how I felt.

On top of that there was another decision to make. Should there even be a central newsroom, or did a distributed model make more sense? Why not base the correspondents where it made sense for them to live and work? Why not widen the talent pool by allowing for remote work? This was particularly important because the kind of correspondents we would be looking are journalists excited about the challenge of treating members as a knowledge community and routinely integrating them into the reporting in crowdsourced (or David Fahrenthold) fashion. They aren’t that easy to find. This too argued for a distributed model.

When in January 2019 the founders of De Correspondent told me that a one newsroom strategy was the leading option, with headquarters in Amsterdam and the new correspondents working remotely, I was initially taken back. I would not have come up with that idea. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made, especially when it came to the talent search, and to the aspiration to one day be a global brand. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about how many of our supporters had assumed there would be a US newsroom, probably in New York. Now I am.

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Hating on journalists the way Trump and his core supporters do is not an act of press criticism. It’s a way of doing politics.

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“Hate movements” are the mobilization of resentment against a particular group of people for political purposes. When journalists are the group targeted, those of us who believe in a free press have a right to be worried, and a duty to understand.

I am going to focus on the hate movement against journalists that President Trump is leading in the U.S. But I am not saying this kind of movement originated in America. I am not claiming that it is anything “new.” Or that Trump’s methods are some kind of innovation. I’m not saying we in America have the worst case of it; we do not. I am simply describing the situation in my country because I know it best. Our purpose today is to compare.

So here are some of the features that stand out about the hate movement against journalists that our president is conducting in the United States. Tell me if any of these sound familiar:

Trump’s campaign to discredit the press comes disguised as the criticism of bias in the news media. Defenders of Trump’s attacks on journalists routinely tell me: “you brought this on yourselves.” They mean by being so biased. But what they mean by bias is not cases of unfairness or blindness that can be highlighted and corrected. They see a complete evacuation of public responsibility by journalists. From their point of view, American journalism is not reformable. It is corrupt and dangerous.

Within the frame of this movement, no distinction is made between professional journalists and political opponents. Rather, journalists are political opponents, and that is the only thing you need to know about them. It is routine within the conservative movement in the US to describe journalists as “Democratic party operatives with bylines,” or “progressive activists with press credentials.” This was common before Trump. He has weaponized it.

Hate objects need names. Before Trump, the object’s name was “the media” (or mainsteam media.) Trump has been slowly changing it to “the fake news,” but The Media is still common. That term, The Media, doesn’t refer to specific institutions like the Washington Post or the AP. It’s like saying “the banks,” or “the deep state.” The Media has no address. It is a mental construct, not an institution.

Hating on journalists the way Trump and his core supporters do is not an act of press criticism. It’s a way of doing politics, often called populism. In populism, you aggregate and mobilize for political gain people’s resentment of elites, who are described as corrupt and dangerous because they operate behind the scenes using unearned power. The leader promises to deal harshly with this despised group, and deliver justice to “the people.”

When Trump points to the reporters and camera men at his rallies, he is presenting the hate object to his fans. It doesn’t matter who the journalists are, where they work, or what their recent performance has been. Again, this is not an act of criticism. It is a potent form of symbolic politics. Like putting 20 bankers in a cage, dropping the cage into the middle of a political rally, and then pointing at the people inside. “There they are. The banks!”

The Republican Party has been practicing this form of politics since at least the time of Barry Goldwater’s run for president in 1964. It is not new. What’s different now is that mobilizing resentment is increasingly what holds the party together. And there’s another factor. The Republican Party increasingly takes positions that guarantee conflict with fact-checking journalists doing their job. The clearest example is climate change denialism. When that becomes an orthodox position within the party, conflict with the press is guaranteed— unless, of course, journalists retreat from truth telling and evidence-weighing into he said, she said reporting.

That dynamic — forcing conflict with a fact-checking press — was there before Trump. But he has weaponized it. Every day he makes false claims that are easily checked— thousands of them so far. Recently he announced on Twitter that Puerto Rico had received $91 billion in hurricane aid from the USA. The actual figure is $11 billion and Puerto Rico is the USA. The conflict with the press is therefore structural, built into the Trump presidency. If journalists do their job, and point out the truth of the situation, what his supporters will see is The Media attacking their guy again. This enrages them. The only way to prevent this reaction is to abandon the job and just pass along whatever Trump said, even if it’s disinformation.

Previous presidents struggled with the press, of course. They sometimes thought journalists as a class were “against” them. Obama thought reporters were preoccupied with trivialities. Nixon hated the press, but he mostly kept it private. Whatever their problems with it, previous presidents also saw the press as a crucial part of American democracy, like free and fair elections, the rule of law, and an independent judiciary.

Trump attacks all these institutions. He undermines trust in all of them. But his hate movement against the press has a special intensity and tempo. It is basic to the way he governs, even though, as many White House correspondents have pointed out, he cares deeply about his coverage in the press, calls journalists at all hours, and can be friendly and charming to them in person.

It is true that there is disgust and resentment at the press on the American left too. Some of this criticism can be quite totalizing and dismissive. The difference is that the Democratic Party has never incorporated that rage into the way it does politics.

“We’re not at war, we’re at work.” This sentence from Marty Baron, editor of the Washington Post, captures perfectly how journalists think about this situation. Don’t let Trump provoke you. Remain calm. Don’t play his game. What Baron’s remark does not do is address the problem I have described here. If you do your job, then you’re playing the role of hate object and participating in Trump’s political style. If you don’t want to be a hate object, sorry— then you cannot do your job. Detachment loses its meaning in this system, which incorporates journalists whether they like it or not.

Why does it matter? It matters because one third of the American electorate has been isolated in an information loop of its own. For this group, which mistrusts the mainstream press on principle, and as a matter of political identity, Trump has become the major source of information about Trump, along with Fox News, which has slowly been merging with the Trump government. An authoritarian news system is up and running, in the country that was once known for having the strongest free press protections in the world.

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A current list of my top problems in pressthink, April 2019

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1. Absent some kind of creative intervention, 2020 campaign coverage looks like it will be the same as it ever was. Who’s ahead? What’s it gonna take to win? The debacle in 2016 has not brought forth any dramatic shift in approach. The “savvy” style remains in place. Its practitioners are confident that they can prevail. They are probably right.

2. The Correspondent, with which I am publicly identified, met its crowd funding goals and now has to deliver on these principles. That will not be easy.

3. With his hate campaign against journalists, Trump has been successful in isolating about a third of the electorate in an information loop of its own. These are people beyond the reach of journalism, immune to its discoveries. Trump is their primary source of information about Trump. The existence of a group this size shows that de-legitimizing the news media works. The fact that it works means we will probably see more of it.

4. Fox News is merging with the Trump government in a combination unseen before. We don’t know what that combined thing is, or even how to talk about it. The common shorthand is “state media.” But that is only half the picture. It’s true that Fox is a propaganda machine. But it is also true that the Trump government is like a cable channel— with nukes.

5. Around the world, so called populist movements are incorporating media hate into their ideology— and replicating. No one knows how to stop or even slow this development.

6. Now in its 15th year, the business model crisis in journalism is still unsolved. (But at least we know that except in rare cases digital advertising is not going to be the answer, which counts as progress.)

7. Membership models in news need to be participatory to work, but we’re falling behind in our understanding of how to make that happen. With ad-supported media, we know what the social contract is. We know how it works with subscription, as well. For membership, we do not yet know what that contract is.

8. The harder I work on some these problems (1, 3, 4, and 5 especially…) the more cynical I get. The more cynical I get, the harder it is to believe that any of that work matters.

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Key steps in the citizens agenda style of campaign coverage

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Part of a call to action for an alternative direction in election coverage, originated by the newsroom improvement company, Hearken, and the research project that I direct, Membership Puzzle Project

Last month I visited WBUR in Boston to talk with station leadership and the politics team about how they could bring something different to their 2020 election coverage. I was invited by WBUR’s senior political reporter, Anthony Brooks, who had read some of my descriptions of the citizens agenda style in campaign coverage.  He wanted to explore how it might work at an NPR station that reaches across greater Boston and into New Hampshire, where the first primary in the nation draws the major candidates.

Politics is a busy and important beat for them. WBUR collaborates on election coverage with New Hampshire Public Radio, which attended the meeting as well. For an academic, the opportunity to float an alternative model to people who could soon put it into practice is not something you turn down.

Here’s the whiteboard I used. On it, the citizens agenda style in campaign coverage is broken down into steps. These are the key steps:

  1. Identify — especially to yourselves — the people you are trying to inform. Your community. Your public. Your crowd.
  1. Ask the people you are supposed to inform a simple question: what do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes?
  1. Keep asking it — what do you want the candidates to be talking about as they compete for votes? — as you find new ways to explain the project, and new people to reach with it.
  1. Interpreting what you heard, and applying your knowledge as journalists, synthesize the initial results into a draft agenda, a priority list that originates in an act of listening. (Need an example? Go here.)
  1. Test, question, and revise the agenda with the people you made it for, plus any help you can get from polling. “This is what we think we heard. How did we do?”
  1. When confidence permits, or circumstances require, you then publish the citizens agenda as a “live” product on your site. Launch and promote. Gather reactions. Synthesize and improve.
  1. Now, turn the citizens agenda into instructions for campaign reporting that connects with the issues people care most about. Around the top priorities you can do in-depth journalism. Given a chance to ask questions of the people competing for office, you can turn to the citizens agenda. And if you need a way of declining the controversy of the day, there it is. The agenda you got by listening to voters helps you hold to mission when temptation is to ride the latest media storm. At every turn, you can ask yourself, “How does this align with our citizens’ agenda?”
  1. Press the candidates to address it. When they do, tell the voters. In a way, you have “won” at campaign journalism when this happens.
  1. Build your voters guide around it. Down the left side of the grid, the candidates for office. Across the top, the items on the citizens agenda. Fill in the grid with what the candidates have done, said, or proposed; that’s a public service.
  1. Keep listening for revisions to the agenda until the campaign ends. I called it a published product. I also said it was live. That means you change it when the ground shifts, or choices narrow. Maybe there’s a a few per election cycle, or a new one every Monday. 

Notes:

WBUR has not made any decisions yet. This isn’t their plan, it’s mine.

You can have it, by the way. The plan, I mean. Just let us know how it turns out.

WBUR has a pollster who joined the meeting. He said with internet polling it’s plausible to poll for, What do you want the candidates to be talking about as they compete for votes? (This was the most interesting thing I learned that day.)

The citizens agenda style is my dorky name for it. You can call it whatever you want. The active ingredient is not “citizen’s agenda,” but that question, “what do you want the candidates to be talking about as they compete for votes?”

The agenda is an editorial product, a synthesis. It involves art and judgment, not just data. You should be prepared to explain your thinking and take responsibility for what you included and left out.

Look, it’s agenda-setting. You will draw critics if you do this. Ask them to join and make the listening project better.

When people suspicious of your campaign coverage say in a threatening tone, “what’s your agenda?” just send them the URL.

Good design is critical to making this work. Obvious, but I’m saying it anyway. Graphic design, interaction design, task and workflow design are among the forms required. I’m sure you can think of others.

Finally, a note about 2020 for those who will be reporting on it: You cannot keep from getting sucked into Trump’s agenda without a firm grasp on your own. But where does that agenda come from? It can’t come from campaign journalists. Who cares what they think? It has to originate with the voters you are trying to inform.


Read the series:
Part One: A call for a different kind of campaign coverage after 2016
Part Two: Key steps in the citizens agenda style of campaign coverage
Part Three: Case Study: How the Dublin Inquirer set a citizens agenda

The post Key steps in the citizens agenda style of campaign coverage appeared first on PressThink.


A current list of my top problems in pressthink, August 2019

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1. The entire system for covering the Trump presidency is wrongly conceived. It needs to be rebuilt, faulty premise by faulty premise. But there has never been such a rebuild while the story is running hot. No one knows how it can be done. Reporting what he said today amplifies his falsehoods and hatreds, which is unacceptable, but ignoring what he said pretends it never happened, which is unacceptable in a different way. (Here’s my thread about that problem. Here’s an article about it. This podcast is also good.)

2. Explicitly or implicitly, it seems likely that Trump is going to run a racist re-election campaign in 2020, in which “othering” (not a word I like, but it’s the best I can do…) is basic to his appeal to voters. This goes way beyond noisy controversies like whether to use the term “racist.” Is the press ready for a campaign like that? Does it have the people and practices in place to respond? Is it willing to break with precedent to meet a threat without parallel? I doubt it.

3. If there somehow arises among American journalists a determination to assume a more forceful role within the atmosphere of civic emergency created by Trump, what are the best sources of inspiration — from press history, from journalists in other countries, or from adjacent fields — that can be drawn upon to guide, shape, justify and delimit these efforts?

4. So far the debacle in 2016 has not brought forth any dramatic shift in approach in covering the 2020 election. An alternative to the horse race model does exist. It’s called the citizens agenda. It starts by asking the voters you are trying to inform, “what do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes?” But how do we get more newsrooms to give it a try?

5. Something has gone awry in the relationship between New York Times journalists and core readers of the Times, a category in which I include myself. I tried to describe the problem here. As far as I can tell, no one in leadership is concerned about it. And there’s no longer a public editor who can inquire. The Washington Post seems far more agile and fluent in adjusting to new conditions. The Times is still great, still essential, still (for now) the flagship in the American fleet. As a business it has recovered its bearings and it is doing well. But the newsroom and the editorial page are having trouble navigating the culture wars. They seem to think that backlash from their most loyal readers is proof of a job well done, or something they must ignore— on principle, as it were.

6. Now in its 14th year, the collapse of the news industry’s business model is still unresolved, leading to an especially acute crisis in local news. Google and Facebook dominate the digital ad market because they own the data required to target individual users. Among legacy producers like the local newspaper, the consensus strategy is to push for digital subscriptions. But there are huge problems with that. These are companies accustomed to monopoly conditions in a manufacturing business. With a handful of exceptions, they are unprepared for technology-rich, data-centric and customer-first models. Many of the professionals in these newsrooms believe that people ought to pay them for the same journalism they have always practiced. That attitude is not going to get it done.

7. Membership models are an alternative to subscription plays but people in journalism tend to group them together as rough equivalents. In fact they lead in opposite directions and imply different requirements for newsrooms. Subscription is a product relationship: you pay your money and you get the product. If you don’t pay you don’t get it. Membership means you join the cause because you believe in the work. If you believe in the work you want it to spread, even to non-members. Therefore membership does not require a digital paywall. Subscription does. But for membership to work, there first has to be a cause worth joining, as well as opportunities for members to participate. Again, that is unlike a subscription business. Grouping them together just fuzzes everything up.

The post A current list of my top problems in pressthink, August 2019 appeared first on PressThink.

Bad headline, small changes at the New York Times

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Knowing the characters involved — columnist Joan Walsh and the New York Times — this announcement last week caught my eye:


Separating from the Times was not a decision she took lightly, Walsh said. “I’ve put this off for almost 3 years. They are blowing their coverage of this crisis. I’m out.”

I’m still in. I consider myself a Times loyalist. My loyalty is expressed through criticism and watchfulness, and by paying for a digital (plus print on weekends) subscription. I have no stake in the company, but in the institution of the Times, especially the ongoing journalism of it, I do feel a kind of stake, a public one. It’s not clear to me how I am supposed to protect it. So I write.

What do you do?

At this site ten months ago, I tried to explain why there was such tension between Times journalists and many of their core readers— like say, people who follow Joan Walsh! (Absorb that earlier post before this one if you really want my sense of the situation.)

The core readers have more power now. They are a bigger part of the mix. How that power should be recognized, when it might be used, how to listen carefully to it without listening too much… no one really knows yet. The digital audience itself, the Times own interconnected public, does not know its own power.

But how to achieve independence from the newest corrupting influence — the most attached part of the audience — is already a live concern among Times editors. These events lie in the background of Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism, which is not just a hastily abandoned headline but the name of a public episode now.

The readers have more power:

They have more power because they have more choices. And because the internet, where most of the reading happens, is inherently two-way. Also because Times journalists are now exposed to opinion and reaction on social media. And especially because readers are paying more of the costs. Their direct payments are keeping the Times afloat. This will be increasingly so in the future, as the advertising business gets absorbed by the tech industry. The Times depends on its readers’ support more than it ever has.

1.) Depends on readers’ support more than it ever has. 2.) Got rid of the public editor. That’s an example of the kind of disconnect that has created tension.

Meanwhile, pressures on the news system because an authoritarian got into office are exposing to public view parts of the Times that have never been strong. For example, filtering out the more lurid and unfounded criticisms to hear what concerned people are trying to tell you. The Times is not great at that.

The Times is not great at learning from past mistakes when the fuller dimensions of that mistake come into view. Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia. Or at reframing the way they approach Trump’s racism, away from a long string of deplorable incidents to a structural, load-bearing and thus central feature of his campaign and presidency.

Steven Greenhouse is a former reporter for the New York Times:

Maybe that “decades-old journalistic reflex” no longer applies. Maybe this is the kind of updated thinking people outside the Times are pushing for. James Fallows of the Atlantic said it on Twitter today:

the NYT is overall by far the most ambitious and “best” US news organization. But its framing of US national politics, “what about the emails!” onward, [is] really not at the standard of rest of the organization, or what the country needs.

The people outside the Times trying to tell the Times this are for the most part liberal and cosmopolitan, part of the core readership. They are appalled by Trump and want to see his dark sides further exposed. They want the Times to be tougher on his supporters and more relentless in calling out his lying, his racism, his misogyny, his xenophobia. They want Times journalists to see what they see — an assault on democratic institutions — and to act accordingly. And they want a reckoning with the coverage of Hillary Clinton in 2016 because they know that somehow this is in the way of all other things.

They are not wrong to want these from the New York Times. Each point can be acted upon within the rules of hard-hitting investigative journalism and a traditional check-on-power stance, adapted to the urgency of the hour. The reckoning with 2016 is something any good institution would do to learn and progress after a major failure. But the Times seems unable to get to that place.

In October, 2018 I made an easy prediction.

In so many ways since the election, the Times has risen to the occasion and excelled. But it has a problem with its core supporters. Until it is put right, there will be blow-ups, resentments and a lot of misunderstanding.

The mixture I described came to a boil this week and last. Not a boil over. Just a boil. But contained movement is still movement. I will try to isolate for you some of the small changes.

It started on August 5th. Public reaction to a majestically bad headline, Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism, was so strong that executive editor Dean Baquet had to do multiple interviews to explain what happened and limit the damage. These pieces are still coming in.

On Monday, August 12, Baquet called a staff meeting at the Times to air complaints. According to reports in the Daily Beast and Vanity Fair, journalists of color and younger generations of Times journalists often led the questioning. Inconsistency and lack of logic in calling things racist were said to be some of the items on the table. Though quickly corrected, the bad headline remained a flashpoint inside the paper and out.

One of the editors on Baquet’s team explained it this way:

“I think this is a really difficult story to cover, the story of Donald Trump and race and his character. We’re in a bit of uncharted territory. There is definitely some friction over, how does the paper position itself?

A Times newsroom in uncharted territory. Uncertainty over where to stand in the triangle formed by Trump, race and American politics. These were not the confident tones the editors had been striking before Monday’s meeting, or before the wildly discordant headline. Small change.

That nameless Times editor (there are lots of them in this episode) asks a good question: how does the paper position itself toward the Trump movement, which incorporates the New York Times as a hate object and tries to disqualify Times journalism in the minds of Trump supporters before they have read it, even though Donald Trump lives and dies by what the New York Times says about him?

What kind of public actor can readers, supporters and subscribers realistically expect the Times to be? And what kind of actions — what range of proper motion — can its own journalists expect from the institution they have joined?

These are some of the problems that came to a boil this week. But as I said, only a mild boil.

There is still no public editor to push the discussion along. But “why did we get rid of the public editor?” is now a question on the floor at staff meetings, the Daily Beast reported. It was asked of Dean Baquet in one of his sorry-for-that-bad-headline interviews. A decision announced in June 2017 is being publicly doubted two years later. It’s like the case against it has been re-opened. Small changes.

According to Vanity Fair, an editor at the Times said this week:

Reporters on the front lines, particularly reporters of color, are really attuned to something happening in the country that is, to a lot of them, deeply scary, both personally and politically, and there’s a hunger to have a conversation about it. If this rhetoric continues, how is the Times covering it? What are the rules of engagement for a president who traffics in this stuff? How do we, as a newsroom, grapple with that?

Does it sound like they know what to do next? Not so much, right? That too is movement.

Check out this attitude among the editors, as reported by Vanity Fair. “There’s a clear feeling from the top that we’re not gonna be a part of the resistance, and how that gets translated day to day can frustrate people.” (My emphasis.)

That clear feeling came through when Dean Baquet spoke to CNN this week.

What Baquet is certain about is that The Times should not serve as a publication of the left. “Our role is not to be the leader of the resistance,” he said, adding that “one of the problems” that would come about if the paper took that role is that “inevitably the resistance in America wins.” Baquet further explained, “Inevitably the people outside power gain power again. And at that point, what are you? You’re just a chump of the people who won. Our role is to hold everybody who has power to account.”

As a Times loyalist, I kind of resent the implication: Come join our resistance, New York Times! As if that’s what we want from the journalism, to do our politics for us. We’re not gonna be part of the resistance says nothing about how to provide less assistance to Trump’s othering instincts. We’re not gonna be part of the resistance doesn’t tell you what to do if Trump breaks through all barriers and runs a specifically racist campaign from the pulpit of the presidency.

I asked earlier what kind of public actor can readers, supporters and subscribers realistically expect the Times to be? We got an answer this week. The kind of actor that still thinks it’s just an observer. But in August 2019 there is greater pressure on that piece of pressthink than there was in July. It’s not only coming from the people who read Joan Walsh and watch her on CNN. There’s a generational divide within the Times newsroom. The source for that claim is Dean Baquet:

Baquet himself acknowledged this tension inside his newsroom. He also acknowledged that it is playing out largely across generational lines. Younger staffers generally feel The Times should be more aggressive and explicit in its coverage of Trump. Older staffers generally prefer taking the more traditional approach espoused by Baquet.

“There is a generational divide in newsrooms right now,” Baquet said. But he flatly rejected the notion that The Times has not covered Trump boldly enough, saying, “My own view is that we are covering Donald Trump very aggressively.”

I close with something you are not hearing from other commentators on these bumpy days at the New York Times .

Anxiety about the core audience’s rising influence is interfering with the newsroom’s ability to listen to its environment. A segment of the most attached readership has been vocal about its dissatisfactions. That’s good; it means they care. The editors have been adamant about hearing this criticism as a call to abandon journalism and do politics instead: join the resistance.

But now there’s a new factor. Some of the same dissatisfactions are shared by a younger and more diverse generation of Times journalists, people the organization cannot succeed without. The restiveness of this cohort changes the equation some. Instead of “we do Times journalism” vs. “please do resistance politics,” which is Baquet’s way of framing the choices — and dumbing down the debate — the next generation have made it about different ways to stand toward the staggering reality of Trump’s racism.

That’s a small change for now. But it could turn out to be big.

Update: The Transcript, August 17, 2019

Shortly after I posted this piece, Ashley Feinberg of Slate published a lightly edited transcript of the staff meeting between Baquet with his top editors and the rank and file. “The New York Times Unites vs. Twitter” was the headline Slate put on it. Feinberg wrote:

The problem for the Times is not whether it can navigate social-media controversies or satisfy an appetite for #resistance-based outrage, both of which it can tell itself are not a newspaper’s job to do. It’s whether it has the tools to make sense of the world. On this point, Baquet was not reassuring or convincing.

Exactly! (My italics.) Here are some quotes from Times staffers that show what I meant above by a generational divide.

Unnamed staffer: “I am concerned that the Times is failing to rise to the challenge of a historical moment. What I have heard from top leadership is a conservative approach that I don’t think honors the Times’ powerful history of adversarial journalism.”

Unnamed staffer: “Wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting. Just because it feels to me like it should be a starting point, you know?”

Unnamed staffer: “A headline like that simply amplifies without critique the desired narrative of the most powerful figure in the country. If the Times’ mission is now to take at face value and simply repeat the claims of the powerful, that’s news to me.”

Unnamed staffer: “One of the reasons people have such a problem with a headline like this—or some things that the New York Times reports on— is because they care so much… They are depending on us to keep kicking down the doors.”

Meanwhile, David Roberts of Vox, who normally writes about climate change, put it this way in an exasperated thread reacting to this post:

What frustrates people is not that they want to see the word “racist” in the paper. What frustrates them is that the country’s core institutions are under assault by a radical ethnonationalist minority and the sense of crisis is not being conveyed.

It has always struck me that while the people at the New York Times consider it the apex of journalism, the highest the ladder of excellence goes, they have not extended that reputation for quality to the acts of listening, receiving criticism, sorting signal from noise, and changing their work. It’s like they know they can’t do it well, so they don’t even try. And being the best in the world at listening and evolving isn’t even an aspiration there. “We are not the resistance” is a crappy read on what people are trying to tell you. But this is one area where mediocrity and worse — incompetence — is tolerated at the Times. Responsibility for that has to flow to Dean Baquet. There is no other place it can pool.

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The Christmas Eve Confessions of Chuck Todd

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‘Round midnight on Christmas eve, Rolling Stone posted a short interview with Chuck Todd, host of “the longest running show on television,” NBC’s Meet the Press.

Its contents were explosive, embarrassing, enraging, and just plain weird.

Three years after Kellyanne Conway introduced the doctrine of “alternative facts” on his own program, a light went on for Chuck Todd. Republican strategy, he now realized, was to make stuff up, spread it on social media, repeat it in your answers to journalists — even when you know it’s a lie with crumbs of truth mixed in — and then convert whatever controversy arises into go-get-em points with the base, while pocketing for the party a juicy dividend: additional mistrust of the news media to help insulate President Trump among loyalists when his increasingly brazen actions are reported as news.

Todd repeatedly called himself naive for not recognizing the pattern, itself an astounding statement that cast doubt on his fitness for office as host of Meet the Press. While the theme of the interview was waking up to the truth of Republican actions in the information warfare space, Todd went to sleep on the implications of what he revealed. It took him three years to understand a fact about American politics that was there on the surface, unconcealed since the day after inauguration. Many, many interpreters had described it for him during those lost years when he could not bring himself to believe it. (I am one.)

You cannot call that an oversight. It’s a strategic blindness that he superintended. By “strategic blindness” I mean what people mean when they quote Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

The ostensible purpose of the Rolling Stone interview was to promote a special edition of Meet the Press on December 29 that will focus on the weaponization of disinformation. But its effect is to bring MTP — and by extension similar shows — into epistemological crisis. With Todd’s confessions the mask has come off. It could have come off a long time ago, but the anchors, producers, guests, advertisers and to an unknown degree the remaining viewers colluded in an act of make believe that lurched along until now. One way to say it: They agreed to pretend that Conway’s threatening phrase, “alternative facts” was just hyberbole, the kind of inflammatory moment that makes for viral clips and partisan bickering. More silly than it was ominous.

In reality she had made a grave announcement. The nature of the Trump government would be propagandistic. And as Garry Kasparov observes for us, “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” This exhaustion, this annihilation were on their way to the Sunday shows, and to all interactions with journalists. That is what Kellyanne Conway was saying that day on Meet the Press. But the people who run the show chose not to believe it.

That’s malpractice. Chuck Todd called it naiveté in order to minimize the error. This we cannot allow.

Now let’s look more closely at his Christmas Eve confessions

* “The Ukraine story for me really crystallized it,” Todd said. By “it” he meant the damage that disinformation “was doing to our politics.” His show has been “at the forefront” of the problem, he said. “Whether we’d liked it or not, our platform has been used, or they’ve attempted to use our platform” to disseminate fabrications. (What has to change to prevent this went unremarked upon.)

* “We have a systemic issue here.” Which is that it’s easy to spread lies through social media. (And on Meet the Press!)

* Peter Wade, the Rolling Stone interviewer, asked about Sean Spicer’s inauguration crowd size rant. “Were you surprised that the president and other administration officials and their allies just kept it going?” Todd’s answer: “I guess I really believed they wouldn’t do this. Just so absurdly naive in hindsight… if people want to read my answer to your question, ‘Boy, that Chuck Todd was hopelessly naive.’ Yeah, it looks pretty naive.”

* Todd said he had been studying up on Trump’s methods. “He learned at the feet of a master of deception in Roy Cohn, who learned at the feet of the original master of deception of sort of the modern political era in Joe McCarthy.” (But McCarthy not only deceived the country. He exploited existing routines in journalism to do it, which is the theme of this book. “He was able to generate massive publicity that made him the center of anti-communism because he understood the press, its practices and its values; he knew what made news.” The press was implicated in McCarthy’s rise because he had gamed it by, for example, announcing wild new charges just before the wire services deadline. The accusations would be out there. The investigation of them took more time and made less news.)

* Todd said he recognized that “the right has an incentive structure to utter the misinformation” when they come on his show. And they welcome a confrontation with journalists over it because fighting with the press helps them with core supporters. (Again, this seemed to be new information to him.)

* He said he he was “stunned” that Ted Cruz came on MTP and did as Senator John Kennedy had done before: repeat the debunked claim that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election in a material way. “I was stunned because he’s a Russia hawk… I was genuinely shocked.” He revealed that the Cruz camp had asked to come on Meet the Press in order to spread a false story! Another shock. “And I really naively thought, maybe he wants to remind people.” Meaning: remind them that the Ukraine plot is Russian disinformation. “And it turned out not to be the case.”

* “One of the things we don’t fully appreciate in mainstream media,” he said, is that “it’s become fun to attack the press,” and “it doesn’t matter if we’re right or wrong.” The attacks keep coming. “Trump has turned this into sport.”

* As if discovering this for the first time, he marveled at pervasive bad faith on the right. He said that prominent people he knows in the Republican coalition who would normally trust skeptical accounts in the establishment press over Sean Hannity’s latest conspiracy theory will now parrot the conspiracy theory. “Wow, have we gone off the rails on the right side of the silo of the conversation that’s taking place.”

* He confessed to not understanding the motivations of Republican office holders who spread lies that are easily disproved. “I don’t get why so many people are comfortable uttering stuff that they may know will look ridiculous in three or four years.”

* He said that when the Trump era is concluded, “we’re going to have another reckoning” over how the press performed during it. About journalists in the run-up to the Iraq war, he said it’s not that they didn’t believe what they were reporting, but reported it anyway. Rather: “They were too trusting of their sources. They maybe were too naive.” (That word again…)

* Throughout the interview, Todd repeatedly changed the term “disinformation” in Rolling Stone’s questions to “misinformation” in his answers, as if United States Senators were just poorly informed and not actively and deliberately misleading the public. (Thus he continued to perform his naiveté while simultaneously calling himself out for it, a weird combo.)

* In a crucial error of omission, he said nothing about what he or his show would do to change course— other than broadcast his Dec. 29th special on the problem of misinformation.

* And to cap it off, he said of Republican operatives and office holders. “I think we all made the mistake of not following Toni Morrison’s advice, which is when people tell you who they are, believe them.” (Fact check: It was Maya Angelou who said this, not Toni Morrison.)

What to make of this performance?

It’s not naive of him. It’s malpractice. Chuck Todd’s entire brand is based on the claim that he understands politics. Since 2007 he has been NBC’s political director, which means he has influence over all coverage. He is literally the in-house expert on the subject. You don’t get to claim you are naive about politics when you have these kinds of positions. It would be like a chief risk officer saying, “I didn’t understand the gamble we were taking.” Well, that’s your job.

It’s not that he was naive. He did not care to listen. I am going to use my own writing to show what I mean, but there are many others who could be quoted in similar fashion. On January 22, 2017, two days after Trump was inaugurated, I wrote about Sean Spicer’s crowd size spectacular. There are several audiences for it, I said. One of course was the press. For them the message was…

We are not bound by what you call facts. We have our own, and we will proceed to put them out regardless of what the evidence says. It’s not a problem for us if you stagger from the room in disbelief. We’re not trying to “win the news cycle,” or win you over. We’re trying to demonstrate independence from and power over you people. This room is not just for briefings, announcements and Q & A. It’s also a theater of resentment in which you play a crucial part. Our constituency hates your guts; this is the place where we commune with them around that fact. See you tomorrow, guys!

Another message went to core supporters:

To the core Trump constituency — and an audience primed for this over years of acrid ‘liberal media’ critique — two things were said. “We’re going to rough these people up.” (Because we know how long you have waited for that.) But also, and in return, you have to accept our “alternative facts” even if your own eyes tell you otherwise. This too is a stark message. The epistemological “price” for being a solider in Trump’s army is high. You have to swallow, repeat and defend things that simply don’t check out.

That disinformation was going to overtake Republican politics was discoverable years before Chuck Todd discovered it. That attacks on the press were baked into Trump’s political style was knowable from 2015 on.

It’s not naiveté. It’s a willful blindness to what the Republican Party had become. Four years before Trump was elected, Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein wrote, “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.” Chuck Todd as NBC’s political director, and Meet the Press as its premiere politics show could have taken seriously what these exemplary members of the Washington establishment were saying back in 2012. They chose not to, but not because of their naiveté. They thought they knew better than Mann and Ornstein. And they were probably afraid of sounding too extreme themselves.

He’s not naive. He’s an insider who thought his read was better. You can smell on his Christmas eve confessions the regrets of the insider who thought he knew these people well because he broke bread with them, rang them up for off-the-record conversations, and enjoyed the kind of green room bonhomie that says, “sure, we have different roles, but we’re all part of the same industry called Washington.” He thought he could predict what a Ted Cruz would do because he has behind-the-scenes knowledge. Naiveté is not a good word for that. He thought himself savvier than the rest of us. I was not at all shocked that Senator Cruz took the party line on Ukraine interfering in 2016. Were you? Todd was because he had miseducated himself.

It’s not naive. It’s a lack of imagination, a failure of insight. The practices common to political journalism have premises to them. When the premises shatter, the practices make less sense. This has been the central problem of covering the Trump movement since 2015. (I wrote about it here.) A simple example is fact-checking. One of its premises is that candidates and office-holders can be shamed into staying roughly within factual bounds. A president who has no sense of shame “breaks” the practice by busting the premise. Doesn’t mean you stop fact-checking. But you do have to alter your expectations, and start thinking about alternatives.

A key premise for Meet the Press is symmetry between the two major political parties. The whole show is built on that. But in the information sphere — the subject of Chuck Todd’s confessions — asymmetry has taken command. The right wing ecosystem for news does not operate like the rest of the country’s news system. And increasingly conservative politics is getting sucked into conservative media. It makes more sense to see Fox News and the Trump White House as two parts of the same organism. As these trends grind on they put stress on Meet the Press practices. But it takes imagination to see how the show might be affected— or changed. In place of that we have Chuck Todd pleading naiveté.

So what will they do now? My answer: they have no earthly idea. This is what I mean by an epistemological crisis. Chuck Todd has essentially said that on the right there is an incentive structure that compels Republican office holders to use their time on Meet the Press for the spread of disinformation. So do you keep inviting them on air to do just that? If so, then you break faith with the audience and create a massive problem in real time fact-checking. If not, then you just broke the show in half.

There is simply nothing in the playbook at Meet the Press that tells the producers what to do in this situation. As I have tried to show, they didn’t arrive here through acts of naiveté, but by willful blindness, malpractice among the experts in charge, an insider’s mentality, a listening breakdown, a failure of imagination, and sheer disbelief that the world could have changed so much upon people paid so well to understand it.

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Responsible parties at the New York Times explain to the country what went wrong with their journalism in 2016. Part One.

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The New York Times has a franchise product in podcasting, The Daily with host Michael Barbaro. Last week it sent out to two million listeners a 50-minute interview with the executive editor of the Times, Dean Baquet. It was largely about the mistakes made by the Times and others, but especially the Times, in covering the election of 2016.

Since that is a subject I am known to care about, people on Twitter kindly alerted me to the appearance of this text.

I think we should read and examine what Michael Barbaro and Dean Baquet said about the lessons of 2016. That can be hard to do in the flow of a podcast. So I decided to summarize their exchanges, using a combination of my paraphrase and their quotes to condense what they said, but not to alter it in any important way.

This is not a transcript. Get the original podcast here. There is no substitute for listening to Baquet phrase and frame what the Times misunderstood, or describe his own background and class position. If you have ever wondered why the Times does what it does in covering politics, a careful listen to The Lessons of 2016 will be repaid.

The participants: Dean Baquet is the executive editor who was ultimately responsible for the Times coverage of the 2016 election. He is still responsible as the voting begins in 2020. Michael Barbaro, who has since become hugely valuable to the Times as host of The Daily, was then a political reporter and writer assigned to the 2016 campaign. He co-wrote the “Trump wins” story on Nov. 9. Mike put questions to Dean, but Mike already had some of the answers because he participated in the coverage.

He also went back and looked at stories the Times published at key moments. He asked newsroom colleagues for their recollections. Barbaro clearly paid attention to some of the most common and solid criticisms of the Times performance in 2016 and since. He was determined to put (at least some of) these points to Baquet. This was not an off-the-cuff discussion, but a sculpted event.

These, then, are the “responsible parties” mentioned in my headline. Mike Barbaro described the interview as an “exercise in explaining to the country what we learned.”

This PressThink post — in two parts — is my attempt to record for study not everything the participants said, but their body of thought on mistakes made and how to correct for them. In my opinion as a press blogger since 2003, the original interview is a key document in the study of American politics and media. That’s why I did this.

Reader’s guide: If the words are in quotes, that means I took it verbatim from the audio. If it’s not in quotes that means I am paraphrasing and condensing from many listens of the audio. I am not attempting to add my own views. This is a representation of the interview’s pressthink, using their own words or a close paraphrase, broken into 18 good exchanges with headlines that I wrote.

It’s not what I think, but how they explained themselves to what they repeatedly called… “the country.”

Part One is points 1-8.  Here is part Two.
1. By focusing on Clinton so early, we were annointing her the favorite?
2. “It feels a little pre-emptive to call someone a long shot the day they enter the race.
3. You have to tell people what to think sometimes.
4. “An assumption that Clinton was more or less inevitable.”
5. “He was an irresistable television candidate. He just was.”
6. We let party insiders guide us. We treated them as experts.
7. Do you think the Times newsroom reacted well to the discovery that its assumptions were flawed?
8. “Why is the country pushing ahead with these two very unusual candidates?”

1. By focusing on Clinton so early, we were annointing her the favorite?

Michael Barbaro: Coverage of the 2016 election has come to be criticized for three key assumptions. One: Hillary Clinton was inevitably going to be the Democratic nominee. Two: Trump would almost certainly not win. Three: Once he did win the nomination, Clinton would almost certainly defeat Trump. Today on The Daily, “a conversation with the executive editor of the New York Times, Dean Baquet, about the lessons of 2016.”

Welcome Dean. Your first time on The Daily.

Amy Chozik was put on the Hillaryland beat in July 2013, three years before the election and two years before she announced her candidacy. By focusing on Clinton so early, we were annointing her the favorite? And setting ourselves up to do skeptical stories about her before she even declared?

Dean Baquet: I do not think it was a mistake to put a reporter on the Hillaryland beat so early, no. But: “I would edit more carefully so that we did not give a sense of inevitability.”

Michael Barbaro: When Clinton officially announced her candidacy in April 2015, Amy Chozik wrote the story, which began this way: “Ending two years of speculation and coy denials, Hillary Rodham Clinton announced on Sunday that she would seek the presidency for a second time, immediately establishing herself as the likely 2016 Democratic nominee.”

Hearing that now, it jumps out at me. “We are writing the day she enters the race that she is the likely nominee. In retrospect, should we have written that a little differently?”

Dean Baquet: “Yes, of course…. If I had to edit that story all over again, I would have toned down the inevitability of it.”

2. “It feels a little pre-emptive to call someone a long shot the day they enter the race.”

Michael Barbaro: When Bernie Sanders announced in 2015, the Times story said: “Mr. Sanders’s bid is considered a long shot, but his unflinching commitment to stances popular with the left — such as opposing foreign military interventions and reining in big banks — could force Mrs. Clinton to address these issues more deeply.”

What do you think about this framing? “It feels a little pre-emptive to call someone a long shot the day they enter the race.” And by talking about him for the effect he might have on Hillary Clinton, aren’t we discounting his own candidacy? 

Dean Baquet: “I think that’s a good lede.” He was an unlikely candidate. Democratic socialist, from a small state. “I actually think it would have been sort of weird to not pull up and say: this guy’s a long shot.” We told our readers what he stood for. We described his key proposals, and the issues he cares about. The story is not too horse racey. I think we met our obligations with this one.

3. You have to tell people what to think sometimes.

Dean Baquet: “Journalism is by its very nature flawed.” (It’s also great and I love it.) One of its flaws is that “you do have to tell people what to think” sometimes— like when they’re just coming to a story because it’s new. 

Michael Barbaro: So what you’re saying is “contemporaneous understandings are by definition ephemeral.” Okay, but word choice and language are enduring. The way you characterize someone can stick. Couldn’t we have said: Clinton has advantages that might be hard to overcome, rather than characterizing Sanders as a long shot right out of the gate?

Dean Baquet. I go back to what I said: Journalism is imperfect. Political reporting especially because of the ups and downs of the horse race. Most Americans had not heard of Bernie Sanders. “I think we gotta tell the readers in the moment: how should we think about this? I think the reader picks up the New York Times and says, Bernie Sanders, I’ve never heard of him, how should I think about him? And I think this [story] captures that.”

4. “An assumption that Clinton was more or less inevitable.”

Michael Barbaro: “If we can agree that the media’s 2016 coverage reflected something of an assumption that Clinton was more or less inevitable, I wonder what you think the impact of that was… Part of what the Sanders campaign was so frustrated by, and angry about, is that they thought this coverage [had] real world consequences, that in presenting his candidacy, intentionally or not, as less valid, the mediia perpetuated those assumptions and helped to make them a reality. And if the New York Times thought that Sanders was a long shot, a voter might think that too. If they thought Clinton was the likely nominee, a voter might think that too.” 

Dean Baquet. “Part of my response to that would be we thought Jeb Bush was inevitable too and he lasted about 15 minutes… We just figured okay this going to be Bush vs. Clinton, this is going to be the old establishment… We probably should be very wary of language that seems to make somebody’s run inevitable. Because I think what we learned in 2016 is that none of the inevitable candidates were inevitable.”

5. “He was an irresistable television candidate. He just was.”

Michael Barbaro: I want to ask about our story from June, 2015 announcing that Trump will run:

Donald J. Trump, the garrulous real estate developer whose name has adorned apartment buildings, hotels, Trump-brand neckties and Trump-brand steaks, announced on Tuesday his entry into the 2016 presidential race, brandishing his wealth and fame as chief qualifications in an improbable quest for the Republican nomination…

It seems a remote prospect that Republicans, stung in 2012 by the caricature of their nominee, Mitt Romney, as a pampered and politically tone-deaf financier, would rebound by nominating a real estate magnate who has published books with titles such as, “Think Like a Billionaire” and “Midas Touch: Why Some Entrepreneurs Get Rich — And Why Most Don’t.”

But Mr. Trump, who has never held elective office, may not be so easily confined to the margins of the 2016 campaign. Thanks to his enormous media profile, he stands a good chance of qualifying for nationally televised debates, where his appetite for combat and skill at playing to the gallery could make him a powerfully disruptive presence.

Dean Baquet: “Look, nobody took Donald Trump seriously as a presidential candidate.” That story captures the moment. “The reality was Donald Trump was a long shot.”

Michael Barbaro But unlike Sanders, who was also called a long shot, the media seemed very interested in the long shot candidacy of Donald Trump, and gave it a lot of attention. Not in the belief that he could win, but from an interest in the “stunning unorthodoxy of the candidacy,” the way it broke all the known rules.

Dean Baquet: “He was an irresistable television candidate. He just was. He was funny, he was charming.” At the Times, “while we didn’t think he could win, that did not keep us from, if I can be frank, putting a lot of energy into digging into him as a candidate.” And to me that’s the test. We examined his real estate holdings. We broke the story that he barely paid taxes. We covered his mistreatment of women. We didn’t think he could win, but we still examined him critically.

In a way the Sanders and the Trump coverage is all of a piece. After the economic crisis, “more Americans than we understood at the time were rattled, and were looking for something dramatic,” which was reflected in the rise of Sanders and certainly in the rise of Trump.

6. We let party insiders guide us. We treated them as experts.

Michael Barbaro: How much do the faulty assumptions we had spring from our reliance on insiders and establishment sources? “I know as a political reporter how much I used to call figures within the party establishment, operatives, party leaders. And those become important sources in how you think about the party and the candidate.”

We know now that the Democratic establishment clearly favored Clinton over Sanders. They didn’t want him to win. The GOP establishment was horrified at the idea of Trump being their nominee. Looking back, seems we let party insiders guide us, and treated them as experts when they had their own agenda and weren’t reflecting voter sentiment. “Maybe the media allowed them to have outsized influence on the way we understood the situation.”

Dean Baquet: “I think that’s true. Coupled with, we weren’t out in the country enough.”

7. Do you think the Times newsroom reacted well to the discovery that its assumptions were flawed?

Michael Barbaro: Once the actual voting started, some of these assumptions started to give way. Sanders did much better than expected. Trump began sweeping the primaries. Do you think the newsroom reacted well to what was happening on the ground?

Dean Baquet: Yes and no. We turned up the volume on our scrutiny of Trump. It certainly felt at that moment that we started to treat both of them a little more seriously: Sanders and Trump. But I am also not pulling back from what I said: “We didn’t quite have a finger on the country…”

When Sanders started doing well it meant, “the country was a little more radically inclined than we thought.” But also that Hillary Clinton was not the perfect candidate and obvious winner that we thought she was. I do think we started to look harder at the chinks in her armor that Sanders was exposing.

Michael Barbaro: But again, that’s covering him by what he was doing to her, and framing her as the likely winner.

Dean Baquet: Yeah, but that framing was right. She was the front runner. She had all the money. She had the machine. She ultimately won the nomination. Won the popular vote.

8. “Why is the country pushing ahead with these two very unusual candidates?”

Michael Barbaro: “Is it fair to say we turned up the volume, to use your phrase, on covering the candidates” at this point in the campaign, but we did not turn up the volume on the country, the people who are voting?

Dean Baquet: Yes. I think that’s right. “That’s my biggest self-criticism.” We did cover voters and what was going on in the country, but we did not elevate those stories. We did not dig in and say, “why is the country pushing ahead with these two very, you know, unusual candidates: Donald Tump and Bernie Sanders? I don’t think we quite understood that.”

Michael Barbaro: Why did we not learn from the primary that Trump was not to be under-estimated and that he could in fact win?

Dean Baquet: “It sure looked like he was going to lose.” We bought into what the establishment was saying. We had the experts on the phone, McConnell included. We didn’t have a handle on the country. All these things we’re talking about today came together in the final months.

Tomorrow: Feb. 5. Part Two. Points 9-18.

The post Responsible parties at the New York Times explain to the country what went wrong with their journalism in 2016. Part One. appeared first on PressThink.

Responsible parties at the New York Times explain to the country what went wrong with Times journalism in the election of 2016. Part Two.

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This is part two. Part one is here.

On January 31, 2020, The Daily with host Michael Barbaro sent out to its two million listeners a 50-minute interview with the executive editor of the New York Times, Dean Baquet. It was largely about the mistakes made by the Times and others, but especially the Times, in covering the election of 2016.

I think we should read and examine what they said about the lessons of 2016. That can be hard to do in the flow of a podcast. So I decided to summarize their exchanges, using a combination of my paraphrase and their quotes to condense what was said, but not to alter it in any important way. 

This is not a transcript. The original podcast is here. I recommend it. If you have ever wondered why the Times does what it does in covering politics, a careful listen to The Lessons of 2016 will be repaid. It’s made for your ears.  

Dean Baquet is the executive editor who was ultimately responsible for the Times coverage of the 2016 election. He is still responsible as the voting begins in 2020. Michael Barbaro, who has since become hugely valuable to the Times as host of The Daily, was then a political reporter and writer assigned to the 2016 campaign.

Reader’s guide: If the words are in quotes, that means I took it verbatim from the audio. If they’re not in quotes that means I am paraphrasing and condensing from many listens of the audio. I am not attempting to add my own views here. This is a representation of the interview’s pressthink, using their own words or a close paraphrase, broken into 18 good exchanges with headlines that I wrote.

9. Did our assumption that she was going to be the next president influence coverage of her emails?
10. The next time we find a foreign government is behind a document release, what standard will apply?
11. “We do have a tendency to beat ourselves up a little too much.”
12. What have been the biggest changes to our election coverage this time around?
13. Is there a risk of over-representing the Trump voter’s perspective?
14. “The white working class midwestern voter: We tell that story a lot.”
15. “The Times has sometimes been accused of engaging in what’s called ‘both sides-ism.”
16. Has Times journalism adjusted to the reality of a president and allies who reject established facts? 
17. How do you cover Trump’s deceptions without disparaging the voters who support him?
18. After what happened in 2016, don’t we have a special obligation to get it right this time?

9. Did our assumption that she was going to be the next president influence coverage of her emails?

Michael Barbaro: About those emails from the Clinton campaign stolen by Russia and released by Wikileaks: Did the assumption that she was going to be the next president influence the coverage of those emails?

Dean Baquet: People forget there were big important stories in those emails.

Michael Barbaro: There were also less important stories. We did them. Did we apply more scrutiny to her because we were covering her in a sense as if she were the president-in-waiting? And we wanted to show we could be tough vetters of the next president?

Dean Baquet: No. I ran our coverage of Wikileaks and Snowden. You look at it carefully, but I think you have to report the newsworthy stuff.

Michael Barbaro: There are going to people who push back on this answer. This seemed like a leak designed to inflict political damage.

Dean Baquet: “I know. I get it.” At the time we didn’t know Russia was behind the release of the emails. 

Michael Barbaro: “We knew they were ill-gotten.”

Dean Baquet: We knew they were ill-gotten, but here is my view, and I understand it may not be popular: “When we learn important things, to not publish is a political act. It’s not a journalistic act.” “There should not be a whole lot that we learn about important stories that we don’t publish.” “My view is that publishing is journalism, not publishing is political balancing.”

10. The next time we find a foreign government is behind a document release, what standard will apply?

Dean Baquet: “The next big document dump comes in… I’ve even seen other journalists say I hope we understand that we can’t publish that stuff. No. I will read it. We will evaluate it. We will look at in the new context that we understand, which is Russia is actively trying to influence American elections. That will be part of the calculation. But the calculation cannot be, we’re just not going to publish because that would screw up American politics. At that point I will go into business as like a campaign adviser to people and not a journalist.”

Michael Barbaro: The next time it happens, and if we believe it’s the act of a foreign government, will we apply a different standard?

Dean Baquet: Sure. We will take all these events into account, and make a judgment about the importance of the material vs. the risk of being manipulated. “If it’s the tax returns of a candidate, and it’s really important and compelling, and we’re being manipulated, my view is we have to publish it and say we’re being manipulated… And I’m sure the debate will be more fierce that it was in 2016. But in the end if there is information the American public should know, we’ll publish it. And that’s what we do.”

11. “We do have a tendency to beat ourselves up a little too much.”

Michael Barbaro: On election night, “it felt in that moment like our asssumptions had truly guided us all the way to the final moments of election night and then they had been burst.”

Dean Baquet. Yeah. Of course that’s true. “If I could say one thing about journalism, though. We do have a tendency to beat ourselves up a little too much.” Yes, we didn’t have a handle on the turmoil in the country. “Something surprising and shocking happened with the election of Donald Trump. And it would be a little bit too narcissistic [for] my tastes to spend forever beating ourselves up over it.” This was a very unlikely event. He “walked in and captured the country at a particular moment.”

“Some things you can anticipate. But there are 300 million Americans. Some things you can’t anticipate.”

Michael Barbaro: “You used the word narcissistic, and I’m not judging that… But I think what we’re up to here is an exercise in explaining to the country what we learned.” What happened in 2016 is no small thing, “and the implications are still playing out.”

Dean Baquet: Yes, and that election changed journalism. “Something giant happened and while we should change our rules to understand it, to keep from missing a story like that in the future, I don’t think we should go into it with the assumption that all of our rules are wrong.” That’s all I meant by “narcisstic.”

12. What have been the biggest changes to our election coverage this time around?

Michael Barbaro: From our conversation “it feels clear that the source of these assumptions was in very large part a kind of institutional decision to cover the candidates so heavily, and to not cover as much or as prominently the country.” With that in mind, what have been the biggest changes to our coverage this time around?

Dean Baquet: Well, we’re covering the country better. We have plans to place writers in 7-8 states we are not usually in. We added a religion writer to our political team. “We give huge play now to stories about the anxiety in the country.” The Times now reflects the turmoil, the divisions in the U.S. We have doubled the number of people who cover the internet as a cultural and political force. “It’s a damatically different set up.” I don’t think we have annointed anyone the “inevitable” candidate. Or the long shot. “I am extremely proud of where our coverage is now, and nobody’s even voted yet.”

13. Is there a risk of over-representing the Trump voter’s perspective?

Michael Barbaro: “After 2016, there was an understandable emphasis on understanding Trump voters. Do you see any risk in giving those voters and those Trump allies and even the President himself too much of a platform in pursuit of that understanding, and over-representing their perspective, and maybe as a result missing the many other perspectives that are out there?” 

Dean Baquet: “I don’t. Not as long as you write about the other perspective.” Like Black people who are anxious about Trump and love Joe Biden. “One of the greatest puzzles of 2016 remains a great puzzle: why did millions and millions of Americans vote for a guy who is such an unusual candidate?” How did religious voters come to support someone like him? “Those puzzles are reporting targets.” When we go out and do these stories I know some critics roll their eyes. But understanding how these people voted and how they will vote in the future, that’s a pretty big thing. To dismiss 35-40 percent of Americans as people who should not be in our pages, “that’s not journalistic to me.”

14. “The white working class midwestern voter: We tell that story a lot.”

Michael Barbaro: “You’re bringing me to one of the biggest questions I have about over-correcting or over-simplifying what we learned in 2016.” There’s justifiably a very signifcant focus on the economic grievances of, for example, the white working class midwestern voter. “We tell that story a lot. But moderate voters may be driven as much by these questions of culture and morality and identity as much as anything in the economy. There may be Democrats who support universal health care and taxing the rich, but they oppose open borders, they oppose abortion, they oppose the culture of political correctness. And it’s very challening to capture that. Do you think we’re capturing that?”

Dean Baquet: “I do. I think we are capturing it.” We’re doing much more in this vein. “I always feel weird being called a member of the political elite. I’m a black guy who grew up in a poor neighborhood in New Orelans in a religious Catholic family.” I know from experience there’s a big chunk of America for whom cultural issues are a huge deal.

15. “The Times has sometimes been accused of engaging in what’s called ‘both sides-ism.”

Michael Barbaro: “When efforts are made to fairly cover this President, his voters, his allies, the Times has sometimes been accused of engaging in what’s called ‘both sides-ism,’ …this tendencty to represent both sides of a debate as equal, or both sides as having contributed equally to something.”

A few weeks ago there was a Times story about the impeachment hearings that was criticized for that. Among the lines people zeroed in on was this: “Throughout the committee’s debate, the lawmakers from the two parties could not even agree on a basic set of facts in front of them.”

The criticism is: there can only be one set of facts, so lay them out. At another point in the same article, it read: “They called each other liars and demagogues and accused each other of being desperate and unfair.”

The criticism there is: “We can tell who is lying or who is not lying based at the testimony and the evidence we have, but the story didn’t do that. It suggested both sides had equal, legitimate cases. Are stories like that a kind of both side-ism abdication?”

Dean Baquet: I will stick my neck out here and offer a “spirited defense” for “sophisticated objectivity.”

“We’re at a moment where people very much want us to take sides. And I don’t think that’s the right stance for the New York Times. I do think about the person who picks up his paper in the morning and just wants to know what happened. I do think we have an obligation to that person.” We’re sort of pretending we don’t.

Yes, there is a tendency in the American press to go for easy objectivity, especially under deadline pressure. Slap two quotes together and tell the reader: you figure it out. It happens. But that’s not what I mean when I say “sophisicated true objectivity as a goal.” True objectivity means “you listen, you’re empathetic, if you hear stuff you disagree with but its factual and its worth people hearing, you write about it.”

Do we fall into on the one hand, on the other hand sometimes? Absolutely. “It’s not the best formula for covering Trump and the impeachment trial.” “Both sides-ism and too easily saying on the one hand, on the other hand is not healthy for the discussion we’re having.”

Michael Barbaro: Who are the people who want us to pick a side?

Dean Baquet:: “Many of our readers hate Donald Trump and want us to join the opposition to Donald Trump, right? Well, I am not going to do that.” Then there are those who may have good reason to disagree with “sophisticated” objectivity. “There are people on our staff who disagree with that as a goal. I get that. I really do. That premise of sophisticated objectivity and independence? We should always debate it and question it.”

“I think of the reader who just wants to pick up his paper in the morning and know what the hell happened. I am beholden to that reader and I feel obligated to tell that reader what happened.”

16. Has Times journalism adjusted to the reality of a president and allies who reject established facts? 

Michael Barbaro: “Where do you draw the line between picking a side and holding truth to power? At this point there is a well documented pattern of President Trump, some of his allies and supporters denying established facts, speading misinformation, embracing conspiracy theories and frankly —  and this is uncomfortable to say it, it was not easy to kind of embrace this reality over time as a reporter, it’s against our nature— many of them have a different relationship to the truth than the Democrats and the Democratic Party. Do you think our journalism has sufficiently adjusted to that reality, and how central should that understanding and that reality be to our 2020 coverage?”

Dean Baquet: “I do, actually.”

Michael Barbaro:  But do you agree with that description of the pattern in the way the truth is being handled by the two parties? 

Dean Baquet: “Yes. I think it’s less the parties, it’s more Donald Trump.”

Michael Barbaro: What about the Republican Senators out there, saying what they are saying?

Dean Baquet: Yes. And there’s climate change. Trump is the most exteme version. “Donald Trump has made it his business to attack all independent arbiters of facts. And I think that you will find in the pages of the New York Times very powerful reporting that illustrates that.”

“What we haven’t done, which some people want us to to do, is to say, repeatedly, he’s a liar.  That’s the language, the word. But the reporting? No question we have done that.”

Michael Barbaro: Or racist. Another thing people have asked you to do.

Dean Baquet: “There was a big debate in our newsroom and outside our newsroom about whether the New York Times should use the word racist. And I accept disagreement.” In my view the most powerful writing let’s the person talk, and it is usually so evident that what they have to say is racist or anti-semitic, that to actually get in the way and say it yourself is less convincing.

17. How do you cover Trump’s deceptions without disparaging the voters who support him?

Michael Barbaro: How do you cover the reality of a president — and the party that supports him — repeatedly acting deceptively, spreading disinformation, without appearing to ignore or to disparage the very voters who support him, thus suggesting that we have picked a side?

Dean Baquet: This is hard. I will acknowledge that. You report the heck out of what they say. “We’ve done two or three reconstructs of what happened with the U.S. attack on the Iranian general that shows that some of the descriptions were false. That’s reporting. That’s not like labeling or cheap analysis. That’s deep reporting, lot of reporters. That’s my answer to how we cover Donald Trump… Let someone else call it a lie.”

The world is filled with pundits who can label or characterize things. There are not many institutions that can do powerful and independent reporting. And that’s what I want to do.

To convince his voters that you’re listening? “You show up.” Don’t do the cliched diner stories, or give voice to racists, you go talk to them, you listen empathetically. “I’m talking about the big unanswered question of 2016. For all our hand wringing and all the discussion, why did so many millions of  Americans vote for this very unusual candidate? I don’t think anyone has answered it, and I think one of our goals should be to come as close as we can.”

18. After what happened in 2016, don’t we have a special obligation to get it right this time?

Michael Barbaro: “In having a significant portion of the electorate share the assumptions of the media that we’ve been talkling about, that Clinton would win, Sanders and Trump wouldn’t, that when that all flipped on its head, the electorate was left feeling that they didn’t really understand and maybe still don’t understand what made for a winning candidate.”

Dean Baquet: “We don’t fully understand it, right?”

Michael Barbaro: After an election in which faulty assumptions “coursed through our veins, influenced our coverage,” leaving voters so uncertain, does this “create a special obligation to get it as right as possible, to show a certain amount of restraint, to show a tremendous amount of care and nuance?”

Dean Baquet: Yes, we have a special obligation to not to jump to conclusions too quickly, not to declare anyone inevitable and to “hold back and war against the assumptions of the political class,” which said that Trump couldn’t win. “I do think we have to keep reminding ourselves that what happened in 2016 was a remarkable, a remarkable upset and moment.”

Michael Barbaro: On Monday we’re launching a new show, The Field, that is about all of this, the lessons of 2016. Each week we’ll be going somewhere new in the country, with a Times reporter, “to talk to people and to listen, to do it in your words empathetically, and to do our part to make sure that we are not guided by assumptions.”

Dean Baquet: That’s terrific. That feels like an important contribution to not only our coverage but coverage of American politics.

The post Responsible parties at the New York Times explain to the country what went wrong with Times journalism in the election of 2016. Part Two. appeared first on PressThink.

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