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.

UPDATE, Jan. 1 2019: The campaign succeeded! Some 45,000 founding members from 130+ countries gave $2.6 million to launch The Correspondent. (You can still join.) And I appeared on the Daily Show Dec. 6 to make my pitch.
ORIGINAL LETTER, Nov. 14: 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. (“There is no news company I know of that builds its business — and its journalism — so completely around the reader.”)

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.

The post Letter to My Network: Join The Correspondent appeared first on PressThink.

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.

The post Yep. The Correspondent screwed up in its communications with members. Here’s how. appeared first on PressThink.

“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.

The post 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. appeared first on PressThink.

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.

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

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.

2. 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?

3. 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.

4. 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.)

5. 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?”

6. 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.

7. 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?”

8. Press the candidates to address it. When they do, tell the voters. In a way, you have “won” at campaign journalism when this happens.

9. 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.

10. 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

UPDATE: The WBUR project is moving along.

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

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.

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

I canceled my subscription. I know a lot of folks will tell me I’m wrong. I will miss it. But I can’t keep rewarding such awful news judgment. “Trump Urges Unity Against Racism” is almost as bad as their full-page Comey letter coverage just before 2016 election. Nobody learns. https://t.co/FNUyXN9TmB

— Joan Walsh (@joanwalsh) August 6, 2019

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:

There’s this decades-old journalistic reflex that because of the importance of the office, you have to take everything a president — including this president — says seriously, no matter how demagogic Trump is.

— Steven Greenhouse (@greenhousenyt) August 7, 2019

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.

The post Bad headline, small changes at the New York Times appeared first on PressThink.

‘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.

The post The Christmas Eve Confessions of Chuck Todd appeared first on PressThink.

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.

Hey @jayrosen_nyu, Dean Baquet says quite a lot in this episode of The Daily:

“I get it. I get it.”

Do you think he gets it?https://t.co/ixqTJWxRtR

— Kenwardjr (@Kenwardjr) January 31, 2020

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.

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.

Even this far into his term, it is still a bit of a shock to be reminded that the single most potent force for misinforming the American public is the current president of the United States. For three years this has been a massive — and unsolved — problem for the country and its political leadership.

But now it is life and death. On everything that involves the coronavirus Donald Trump’s public statements have been unreliable. And that is why today we announce that we are shifting our coverage of the President to an emergency setting.

This means we are exiting from the normal system for covering presidents— which Trump himself exited long ago by using the microphone we have handed him to spread thousands of false claims, even as he undermines trust in the presidency and the press. True: he is not obliged to answer our questions. But neither are we obligated to assist him in misinforming the American people about the spread of the virus, and what is actually being done by his government.

We take this action knowing we will be criticized for it by the President’s defenders, by some in journalism, and perhaps by some of you. And while it would be nice to have company as we change course, we anticipate that others in the news media will stick with the traditional approach to covering presidents.

This we cannot in good conscience do.

Switching to emergency mode means our coverage will look different and work in a different way, as we try to prevent the President from misinforming you through us. Here are the major changes:

* We will not cover live any speech, rally, or press conference involving the president. The risk of passing along bad information is too great. Instead, we will attend carefully to what he says. If we can independently verify any important news he announces we will bring that to you— after the verification step.

* We plan to suspend normal relations with the Trump White House. That means we won’t be attending briefings. (We can watch them on TV.) We won’t gather around him as he departs in his helicopter. We won’t join in any off-the-record “background” sessions with Administration officials. We won’t enter into agreements of any kind with the Trump team, which includes those nameless “senior advisers” who mysteriously show up in news stories.

* We have always tried to quote public officials accurately, including President Trump. In emergency mode we add a further check. In addition to, “does this fairly represent what he said?” we will ask: is what he said something we should be amplifying? If it is simply meant to demonize a group of people, rewrite a history that now embarrasses the President, or extend his hate campaign against journalists who are doing their job, we may decide not to amplify it, even though it happened. An old tenet of White House reporting states that what the president says makes news— automatically, as it were. Today we are disabling that autoplay system and replacing it with a manual one.

* In general, we will be shifting the focus of our coverage from what President Trump is saying to what his government is doing. We will be de-emphasizing the entire White House beat and adding people who can penetrate the bureaucracy from the rim, rather than the center of the distortion machine.

* Experience has taught us that there will occassionally be times when the President makes a demonstrably false claim, or floats a poisonous lie, and it is too consequential to ignore. We feel we have to tell you about it, even at the risk of amplifying his deceptions. In those special cases, we will adopt a newswriting formula that has been called the “truth sandwich.” It is a more careful way of reporting newsworthy falsehoods. First you state what is true. Then you report the false statement. Then you repeat what is true. Like so:

In January and February, President Trump minimized the danger of the coronavirus. “We have it totally under control,” he said on Jan. 22. But two days ago he tried to erase that fact and escape accountability for his prior statements. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” he said. If we judge by his public statements this is an outright lie. On Feb. 27, at a White House meeting he said: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”

Refusing to go with live coverage. Suspending normal relations with his White House. Always asking: is this something we should amplify? A focus on what he’s doing, not on what he’s saying. The truth sandwich when we feel we have to highlight his false claims. This is what you can expect now that our coverage has been switched to an emergency setting.

One more thing. Because we don’t know that we have done this right, and because your confidence in us describes the limits of what we can achieve as journalists, we will be hiring immediately a public editor who is empowered to field complaints, decide if something went wrong, find out how it happened, and report back.

Early in President Trump’s term, Marty Baron, the editor of the Washington Post, spoke these memorable words about the President’s “enemy of the people” rhetoric: “We’re not at war, we’re at work,” said Baron. This was a smart warning not to get caught up in bringing down a president.

Today we are recognizing that our journalism must shift, not to a “war” but to an emergency footing. (Donald Trump, meanwhile, is calling himself a “wartime president.”) We feel we cannot keep telling wild and “newsy” stories about the unreliable narrator who somehow became president. Not with millions of lives at stake. We have to exit from that system to keep faith with you, and with the reason we became journalists in the first place.

Notes

I need to clarify what kind of text this is. I am not a news organization with a White House press pass. I am a journalism professor and writer who is also a press critic. Since 2015, I have written a lot about the problem of covering Donald Trump. This post is a further elaboration of that work. It is written in the voice of an editor’s note “announcing” a new policy. But I am not a news executive in a company of journalists, and I don’t want to give the impression that a national news organization has made this shift. As far as I know that has yet to happen.

The post Today we are switching our coverage of Donald Trump to an emergency setting appeared first on PressThink.

A few days ago I was contacted by Canadian editor and journalist David Thomas with an idea. Why don’t all the major media companies collaborate in producing an independent daily briefing on the Coronavirus? I thought Dave’s idea had merit, so I drafted this short description of how it might work. 

What: A daily briefing on where we are in fighting the Covid-19 virus.

When: Every day for the forseeable future, 4 to 5 pm ET.

Where: On the internet. Streaming video and audio always. Broadast whenever a particpating channel or station decides to pick it up. All guests appear remotely. All questions asked remotely.

Why: For the same reason there needs to be a daily briefing at the White House, but this one is independent from the White House. It provides a stream of factual and relevant information from experts who can speak with authority, and people on the front lines who are in a position to know.

Who: Originated by the “network pool,” a consortium of ABC, CBS, NBC, FNC and CNN that already collaborates on big occasions like the State of the Union, plus a few other events like this. Any other media company can join for free, submit questions live, and carry the video or audio, which are also available on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, and as a podcast.

How: Features 4-5 guests a day who have advanced knowledge or a vital perspective: public health experts, epidemiologists, scientists, hospital officials, governors. Journalists who are part the AMDB can submit questions live. Anyone on the internet can submit questions in advance.

FAQ

What are the minimum requirements to make this happen? A control room at one of the networks. A technical staff of 2-3 people. A unaligned moderator like Steve Scully of CSPAN, plus a back-up person for off days. An executive producer. An editorial staff of 3-4 people to vet and book guests.

What stands in the way? The hard part is to reach an agreement among the networks and people whose shows compete. The rest could be up and running in a couple days.

How do you know that? I asked people with network television backgrounds.

Is this supposed to replace the daily White House briefing? No. It is a parallel institution.

Is it supposed to compete with the White House briefing? All information competes with other information these days.

What’s your agenda? To build a daily audience for independent, evidence-based updates and to inject more quality, real time information into the news system during a public emergency of unprecedented scale.

Why would the big media companies collaborate on this? They’ve never managed to do that before. Well, they have never faced anything like this. And as I said, the five big commercial networks have collaborated before. A vehicle for doing so already exists. It’s called the network pool.

How do we convince them? We appeal to their public service mandate. We appeal to their instinct for cross-partisan truth. This is chance to show Americans that “the Media” can come together with one daily news update for everyone of every political stripe because these extraordinary times require it.

Why is Fox News included? Like CNN, Fox is part of the network pool.

Why is CNN a part of this? Like Fox, CNN is a part of the network pool.

Why is MSNBC included? Like Fox and CNN, NBC is part of the network pool, which is the most likely consortium to tackle something like this.

Who picks the questions? The executive producer and the staff he or she hires..

I will add to the FAQ as more questions arise.

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Last week Maggie Haberman of the New York Times observed about Donald Trump’s daily briefings, “As long as he’s fighting with reporters, he can attempt to shift focus from where the government has lagged in its response.”

Which raises the question, “why stick around for that?” As Mehdi Hasan of The Intercept put it:

So why are the reporters, and the networks they work for, allowing him to do it? Being his punchbags on live TV *every single day*? Playing their role in his TV production? Why not ditch these ‘briefings’ and focus on the failed response? Relentlessly, forensically, passionately?

On social media people ask me this question a lot. Why don’t they just walk out?  There is no simple answer to that. I have no elegant explanation. What I have instead is a list of factors that might help you understand why the walk out doesn’t happen. But I want to be clear: I think it should happen. Here’s the way I have put it when people ask me what I would do:

If I ran a newsroom I would not broadcast Trump’s Covid-19 briefings live. I would not send reporters so he can waste their time and use them as his hate objects. I would instruct them to watch it on CSPAN, and report any news that emerges. If he makes a factual claim it has to be verified or no go.

A few months ago this would have been an unthinkable stance for journalists who report on politics. But that is changing. Ron Fournier is a former White House reporter and Washington bureau chief for the AP. You cannot get more establishment than that:

As a former White House reporter, I don’t say this lightly: Media should ignore the Trump follies, abandon the WH briefing room, and interview governors, doctors, nurses, victims and anybody else approaching the truth.

Stop being props.

Just stop.

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) April 7, 2020

So why do newsrooms keep sending their people to the briefings? Here is my list of factors, which, again, is a long way from an explanation. I’m not defending these propositions. But I am proposing that the answer to the question is some combination of items 1-13 here.

1. What the president says is news. This was a wrong turn taken long ago in American journalism. It’s a kind of bug in the code for how to report on national politics. As a writer for the New York Times said in 1976, “Journalism has long been caught up in the particular tautology that runs, news is what the President says, so what the President says is news.” This never made a lot of sense. For one thing, it effectively hands over editorial control to the president. Another: what the president does is news, what the president says may or may not be. Third: journalists are always working with limited time or limited space. They cannot treat everything the president says as news. Nonetheless, the tautology remains. Trump has weaponized it. And if you think this way — what the president says is news — you’re going to want to be there when he says it.

2. There is enormous prestige in being the president’s official interlocutor because it means you are effectively part of the presidency. This is not something journalists think to mention, but to me it is major. There is glamour in being at the White House every working day. It means you’re important. If you’re not in the actual room where history happens, you’re pretty damn close. That’s seductive. One occasion on which you can feel this is an official prime time press conference in the East Room of the White House. Quitting that is hard if you want to feel important— and close to power.

3. It’s part of our franchise, a thing we are able to do that others are not. This is a prestige factor, as well, but more for the executive suite. Having a seat in the briefing room means your brand has made it to the big time. You are now part of the national press. And if you have been big time forever, like CBS News, that’s not something you relinquish. It’s one of the advantages of media incumbency.

4. We fought for this space in the White House, it’s valuable, we protect it, and we’re not going to give it up. This is how the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) thinks. Its agenda can be summed up in one word: access to the president and his aides. It’s not only about the briefing room, but work spaces in the White House and the ability to ask questions of the president’s communicatons staff, and perhaps develop valuable relationships. (Update, April 26. On CNN, Brian Stelter asked Jonathan Karl, head of the WHCA, “why don’t they just walk out? See his reply.)

5. The American press tends to be a “herd of independent minds.” Meaning: it often moves as a pack, but each individual believes in his or her autonomous decision-making. Which means it can be acted on collectively, but it rarely acts as a collective. By attacking and ridiculing the reporters in front of him, Trump can lower trust in the press corps as a whole. But the press corps as a whole has developed no effective response to this. Still, there’s nothing in principle that prevents reporters from working together more often. It happens in other democracies. (See, ‘This is the Netherlands, you have to answer questions.’) The White House press works together on so-called “pool” arrangements. But on challenging Trump it’s considered a breakthrough in solidarity if one or two reporters re-ask a colleague’s question that went unanswered.

6. It’s a cheap, easy and endlessly repeatable way to “capture” some news. This is especially relevant for the TV networks. Setting up cameras in the White House and using footage from the podium is cheaper, easier and more reliable than sending reporters to investigate and camera crews to record interviews with sources. This is not a principle of journalism; rather, it’s the logic of content production, which favors predictability, repeatability and cost control.

7. Our job is to tell you what happened. You decide what to make of it. There is huge power in this principle. It is an utterly convincing, open-and-shut case to many people in journalism— and in the audience for news. Fox News made it into a tagline: “we report, you decide.” Applied to the coronavirus briefings it means you carry these events live because they happened, they involve the president, everything the president says is news and viewers will decide what to make of it. The trouble, of course, is that such logic does away with the whole principle of editorial control. In practice, Fox News like all other producers picks and chooses what it will report, including when it will go live from the White House podium. “We tell you what happened, you decide what to make of it…” is a clever way to avoid talking about those decisions. Nonetheless to many people in and out of journalism this is wisdom itself.

8. The news media should not be “protecting” the American people from their president. Tom Jones, lead writer for Poynter.org, a leading professional development center in journalism, writes:

Trump’s news conferences must be aired live and in their entirety. It’s critical to see what Trump and his team are doing and how they are thinking even if we don’t like or agree with it. When it comes to the president and his actions, it’s necessary that the media does not shield the American people and, in effect, protect Trump from the public.

9. The briefings let us hear from experts and White House advisors. “It is important for viewers to hear critical information from the administration’s public-health experts like Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx…” That’s the Daily Beast paraphrasing what CNN president Jeff Zucker said on a conference call with employees that was partly about this issue.

10. Sure, Trump is often untruthful, but that’s why our reporters are there, so the audience can hear the president face tough questions from journalists. Zucker said “he felt comfortable airing the briefings live because of those grillings by reporters,” according to the Daily Beast. (In this thread I explain why “grilling” Trump is a farce and counter-productive.)

11. Trump is good TV. Good TV means big ratings. Big ratings means big money. Among people who follow me on social media, this is by far the most popular explanation for why they don’t walk out. What could be clearer? They remember what CBS Chairman Les Moonves said about Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” There was some reporting in the press that Trump’s virus briefings were pulling good ratings. Recently they seem to be trending down. Of course you don’t see many ads during briefings, so that complicates things for the “televising Trump = $$” equation. Ad rates for the cable networks are not set by hourly fluctuations in viewership; they reflect longer term trends. And such a high proportion of their revenue is derived from multi-year contracts with cable systems that the day-to-day shifts in audience size have minimal effect on their yearly balance sheets.

12. TV news has no clue what to do about bad actors using air time to spread disinformation and hate. I am going to turn this one over to Andrew Tyndall, publisher of the Tyndall report, which tracks what the broadcast networks are reporting. I asked him, Why don’t they just walk out?

When television journalism presents a political debate it needs to do more than report on the gist of the competing arguments that are presented by the rival factions. It has to organize a format in which viewers can see those arguments being articulated by real live partisans. The requirement for talking heads on a Meet-The-Press-type show means that potential guests have more leverage over the show’s booking producers, more of an opportunity to game the system.

While it is commonplace nowadays for those operating in social media to concern themselves about how to conduct political discourse when some participants are committed trolls, television booking producers are faced with the same crisis in the extreme. The entire system of talking heads requires that those politicians who are booked in order to re-enact their disagreements in front of television cameras speak in good faith when they appear: good faith meaning that the guiding principle of the encounter should be that the audience be productively informed and honestly persuaded.

The system has no place for bad faith actors; yet no procedures for screening for them transparently and notifying the audience when they have been banned. It is through this loophole that President Trump (but not only he) walks.

13. We can’t abandon the briefing room to the OANN’s and Gateway Pundits of the world. If all the correspondents from the establishment press “walked out,” or quit the briefing room, there would still be people in those seats asking questions. To White House correspondents whose companies long ago made it to the big time, it’s unthinkable to leave that task to the low-rent pro-Trump media— plus a competitor like Fox News. (Update, April 26: A former White House press secretary, who ran the briefings during the Clinton presidency, gives his advice to the press on how to ask questions.)

Finally, I put the question in my title to Mark Lukasiewicz, a former Senior Vice President at NBC News who is now a journalism dean at Hofstra University. He has recently been critical of the major news networks for broadcasting Trump’s briefings live, and for airing live discussions with political figures who repeatedly lie. Here is what he said about “why not walk out?” His answer touches on many of the factors I have reviewed in this post.

If I were a news manager with responsibility for covering the White House, yes, I would send reporters to cover the coronavirus briefings. I would send them to the rope line when the president is walking out to Marine One. I would send them to the driveway mics when someone from the administration emerged to make a statement.

I would send them because asking questions and demanding answers in all of these settings is an important part of the job. I would send them because at least with Dr’s Fauci and Birx, real information is sometimes being elicited. Not being there eliminates even the possibility of getting new information. Not being there increases the chance that bad information goes uncorrected.

The reporters being subjected to abuse and insults from the lectern is not a consideration. Journalists are accustomed to — and are generally unintimidated by — important and powerful people not liking them and pushing back on their reporting. Reporters around the world have endured much worse.

Boycotting the hearings would also risk subjecting a news organization to retribution from the White House, in the form of restricted access, loss of press room privileges or other measures. I have argued strenuously however that none of this should necessarily air live. Journalists should be able to treat these sessions like the dozens of other media briefings that happen every day, and sift them for news and information that is relevant to their audiences.

One last note: The New York Times does not send anyone to the coronavirus briefings. They walked out.

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One: End duplication, work together, publish at the same time.

This idea comes from my friend Dan Gillmor in his March 8 Medium post. His complaint is about the division of labor in journalism. When each newsroom produces its own story covering essentially the same ground, that is an inefficient and ineffective way to do things.

“If you’re like me, you have no idea where to start given the duplicative work we’re seeing from so many news organizations,” Gillmor writes. “I want the best. I don’t have time to hunt around for every new scrap of information.”

Here’s an example of what we mean:

• Politico, March 7: Trump’s mismanagement helped fuel coronavirus crisis
• NBC News, March 14: Mismanagement, missed opportunities: How the White House bungled the coronavirus response
• The Guardian, March 28: The missing six weeks: how Trump failed the biggest test of his life
• Washington Post, April 4 The U.S. was beset by denial and dysfunction as the coronavirus raged
• Associated Press, April 6. US ‘wasted’ months before preparing for coronavirus pandemic
• New York Times, April 11: He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus
• Rolling Stone, April 12: How Donald Trump failed at the single most important task of the Oval Office: keeping the American people safe from harm
• USA Today,  April 13: Golf, handshakes and a Mar-a-Lago conga line: Squandered week highlights Trump’s lack of COVID-19 focus

The point is not that these stories are identical. But they do have the same goal: to look back and describe the “lost month” or months when the federal government could have seen what was coming but failed to act, in large part because of the president’s management failures.

There is massive overlap among them.

Now imagine if instead of eight stories over six weeks, each trying to find its public, a consortium of newsrooms worked on one big story and published it on the same day. Imagine if the consortium included the major newspaper chains like Gannett (publisher of USA Today) and McClatchy (which has a strong Washington bureau), so that on the big day 100+ local newspapers ran with the same revelations that were dominating the national press. Now imagine if it was not just one splashy story — like the “lost month” — that received the consortium treatment, but all the major threads in coronavirus coverage.

Right now we need this kind of consortium to investigate “where are the tests?” because there is no plan for emerging from this crisis that does not depend on exponentially better testing. Gillmor has many concrete suggestions for how such a consortium could work:

Create a “war room” of editors, graphics experts, reporters (especially science journalists, not political ones), data specialists, and others who have the expertise and public-minded spirit for this kind of collaboration. Find someone not from any of the participating media companies to lead the project: a person of unchallenged credentials, who understands journalism, and is an expert in running complex projects in crisis mode.

He also understands that journalism won’t do this itself:

There’s a force in our society big and powerful enough to help jump-start it, however: major philanthropic organizations and wealthy individuals. I’m not just begging journalists to rise above business as usual here. I’m begging the funders, journalism-savvy and otherwise, to see the big picture — they’re often great at that — and come up with emergency resources right now to support what the public so manifestly needs.

I think Dan is right: Journalism has come a long way on cross-newsroom collaboration. (See Covering Climate Now, for one example.) Now we need it to find another gear and achieve a larger scale in coronavirus coverage.

Two: The Urgency Index.

One of the problems with our news system is that it’s designed for daily content production, not for enlarging public understanding over time. Another way to say this: the system as it stands tells us what’s new today. But we also need to know what’s true today, including what’s still true whether or not there was news on that subject over the last 24 hours. On top of that we need some sense of hierarchy: what’s most important, next most important, and so on.

Every time I bring this up to someone with long experience in journalism, they say the old print newspaper model did what I am asking for. The most important stories were given the biggest headlines and placed “above the fold.” The lesser, but still important news appeared further down the front page. The notable, but not essential developments were placed inside the newspaper, etc.

I get their point, but it’s not quite what I mean. The old front page system was a hierarchy of what’s new today, not of what’s true today— or better yet, still true. And so I propose the The Urgency Index. Think of it as an answer to the question, “what in the public realm should I be most worried about?” Or, “what do we need to be monitoring to stay reasonably well informed during this crisis?”

The Urgency Index is just a fancy top-ten list that is updated and re-published daily. Like a Google Form where you fill in these fields:

Headline: Where are the tests?

Current rank: 1

Rank a week ago: 1

Description: No one who knows the subject says we can get out of this without a vast expansion of testing. That’s the only way we can tell how far the virus has spread and who has to stay inside. But governors and public health officials continue to report big problems in ramping up their testing efforts.

The latest: U.S. Not Testing Enough for States to Reopen, Experts Say.

Catch me up: Everything You Need to Know About Coronavirus Testing

Do that ten times, rank the items on your list, add design touches to make it attractive and easy to use, and re-publish every day. That’s your urgency index.

Here, I think, diverse approaches are called for, rather than collaboration on a single product. Each newsroom should make its own Urgency Index because priorities will — and should — differ by region and editorial point-of-view. The Wall Street Journal’s urgency index will not be the same as the Seattle Times. That’s a good thing. Created for consumers of the news, the index will also have uses for the producers. It tells the editors what to keep focusing on. It tells reporters what to ask the office holders about. (Update, April 24. This idea has now been put into practice by The Verge, a technology news site in the Vox Media family. Skip to the second item on this page. Testing, isolation and contact tracing are the first three items on their list. April 28: the Urgency Index gets traction in the newsletter world.)

Three: How much closer are we to normal? 

This one comes from one of my colleagues in press criticism, Dan Froomkin, author of Press Watch. Listen to what he says here:

Donald Trump’s fixation on setting a deadline for “reopening” the country – first it was Easter Sunday, now it appears to be May 1 – is currently the leading indicator of his complete lack of understanding of what is required from a government during a pandemic.

If the goal is to get society back to normal, you don’t announce a date and then try to justify it.

You set conditions that must be met, and then try to meet them.

Again, one of the problems with the news system we have is that “it’s one damn thing after another.” This is the logic of content production, not of public service journalism. When journalism is at its best, it helps us get our bearings in a confusing world of conflicting reports. It tells us where we are in public time.

Where in the news system can I go to find out today how much closer we moved yesterday to meeting conditions for quarantine to sensibly end? Or did we lose ground? That would be news I could use. Instead I have 13 accounts of some wild-ass thing he said. https://t.co/MQH0mT5q1b

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) April 16, 2020

Governor Gavin Newsom has given residents of his state a list of what it will take to “re-open” or re-start the economy. (See: California lists 6 tests for gradually easing virus limits.) Don’t like Gavin Newsom? There are other resources that do the same thing. Far better than “one damn thing after another” is “how much closer are we to resuming normal life?” I wish the news could give me a clearer sense of that.

Content production: what we have that is new today.

Public service journalism: here’s where we are today.

Four: Dislodge Trump from his position as “protagonist” of the coronavirus story.

It would greatly improve things if the producers of our national news flows actively de-centered the president in accordance with his recent statement to 50 state governors: “You’re gonna call your own shots.” This is a telling admission and a fateful decision. The press has to find the courage and wit to treat it that way.

Here I agree with Ben Smith, now the media columnist at the New York Times: The coronavirus story isn’t “about” the president. Of course, he wants it to be about him, and in order to make that so he will continue to say outrageous, embarrassing, contradictory and chaotic things to bait the press into covering him, despite his clear statement that he is out of ideas and will turn things over to the governors.

Journalists are aware of this tactic, but still they fall for it. (I am guilty of that myself sometimes.) The answer is not to ignore him, but to de-center him.

If you don’t want to take the bait, but you feel you cannot ignore — and by ignoring accept — his behavior, then a distinction worth making is between coverage in which Trump is the protagonist, and coverage where his actions are reported, but he is not the main character. 15/

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) July 21, 2019

To summarize: He is not the central character, the White House is not the “nerve center” for the national response, and his daily briefing is not a good way to update us on where we are. He said the governors are now calling the shots. Rather than try to see through it, journalists have to look squarely at that confession, and adapt to what it says.

Five: Track what you are doing.

None of this can work unless the producers of news know what they are spending scarce resources upon. How much space, how much time are you giving to Trump compared to other key actors— like the governors, or public health experts, or victims of his decision-making? How much attention is going to what he’s doing as against what he’s saying?

More questions: Who are you quoting most often? What are the triggers for the reports your newsroom is producing? Who are the implied protagonists? From whose point of view are your stories told? Who is visible in the frame— and who is invisible? Whose knowledge is considered authoritative?

Unless you are tracking these things you have no means for improving them.

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1. The manufacture of confusion. The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the American economy, and killed more than 50,000 people— in an election year.

There is going to be a campaign to prevent Americans from understanding what happened within the Trump government during the critical months of January to April, 2020. Many times Donald Trump told the nation that it has nothing to worry about because he and his people have the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus well under control. They did not. He misled the country about that.

This basic fact is so damning, the evidence for it so mountainous, and the mountain of evidence so public — and so personally attached to Donald Trump — that the only option is to create confusion about these events, and about the pandemic generally, in hopes that people give up and conclude that the public record does not speak clearly and everything is propaganda.

Creating confusion is basic to how he operates anyway. But now his time in power and control of Congress are in doubt because of the pandemic. The stakes are unimaginably high, not just for him, but for the entire Republican Party and for all who have gained from his chaotic reign. The manufacture of confusion will thus move to the center of his 2020 campaign strategy. Is the American press ready for that? No, it is not. And that’s a problem.

2. The White House press needs to switch settings to cope with Trump. But this is not happening. For five years I have been sounding this alarm: your practices are built on assumptions about how presidents will behave. None of those assumptions apply to Trump. So your practices will have to change. On the second day of his presidency I said it as clearly as I could. “They can’t visit culture war upon you if they don’t know where you are. The press has to become less predictable. It has to stop functioning as a hate object.”

Margaret Sullivan pulled the same alarm in a column published today. Plenty of good work has been done by individual reporters, she writes. (I agree with that.) Small adjustments in practice have been made. (I agree with that too.)

But in the big picture and as a whole, we’ve never quite figured out how to cover Trump for the good of citizens. We’ve never really fully changed gears despite Trump’s constant, norm-busting behavior. Determined to do our jobs — dutifully covering the most powerful person in the world — we keep coming back for more: Beat reporters file into the briefing room, sometimes to be publicly insulted and disparaged as “fake news” or “a terrible reporter.”

James Fallows of the Atlantic put it this way: “The media were not built for someone like this. That someone has not changed. The media must change.” But it has not happened, not at the depth required. Which is why a few weeks ago I wrote this: Today we are switching our coverage of Donald Trump to an emergency setting. It’s a sample editor’s note from an imagined newsroom that spells out how to shift footing. It didn’t work, of course, but then nothing does.

3. The advertising model is dying. Direct dollar support from readers, viewers and listeners is difficult to come by and requires a lot of knowledge and training to do well. Creating a digital news product that people are willing to pay for is way harder than luring an audience and selling it to advertisers. Sustained government subsidy is unlikely and undependable— and it could be ruinous for independence. The tech platforms are not going to take responsibility unless they are forced. The economic crisis in journalism has no clear solution. Employment is falling. The news industry is contracting: shedding talent, losing memory. No one is going to ride to the rescue.4. At the deepest roots of our thinking about journalism are these fixed ideas now leading us astray. The French have a term: idée fixe. It means a persistent preoccupation that dominates the mind and resists any attempt to modify it. Some examples that vex me:

• “What the president says is news.” (This dooms the press to reporting lies.)
• “News is what happened in the last 24 hours.” (Also known as recency bias, where the thing that happened yesterday is elevated over what is still true.)
• “Conflict makes news.” (Which hands control over to the makers of conflict, turning manipulation of the news system into child’s play.)

My most recent Twitter thread is about another idée fixe: the image of “exposure” as a description of what good journalism does: “Many of the biggest and hardest problems before the American press involve matters that have already been ‘brought to light,’ meaning they cannot be resolved by further exposure.” We can think of fixed ideas as places where journalism refuses to adapt. They are defended as if they were first principles. But they’re not.

5. We are heading into an election and it’s not clear what will be different from 2016. I can say this in a sentence or two because I think you all understand what I mean. It’s Trump against Biden. What evidence do we have that journalists have learned from the 2016 campaign (“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS…“) and are ready to take a different approach? Very little. Recently I tried to ask a CNN reporter that question. No reply.

The post A current list of my top problems in pressthink, April 2020 appeared first on PressThink.

In this space I am parking my short description of the de facto plan the Trump government has for getting the United States out of the public health emergency caused by the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This is my read on what the government’s guidance and actions amount to. I will revise the text and add new links as more information flows in. My purpose in posting it is to challenge the American press to be a lot clearer in its descriptions. 

The plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and three thousand become a normal thing, and then to create massive confusion about who is responsible— by telling the governors they’re in charge without doing what only the federal government can do, by fighting with the press when it shows up to be briefed, by fixing blame for the virus on China or some other foreign element, and by “flooding the zone with shit,” Steve Bannon’s phrase for overwhelming the system with disinformation, distraction, and denial, which boosts what economists call “search costs” for reliable intelligence.

Stated another way, the plan is to default on public problem solving, and then prevent the public from understanding the consequences of that default. To succeed this will require one of the biggest propaganda and freedom of information fights in U.S. history, the execution of which will, I think, consume the president’s re-election campaign. So much has already been made public that the standard script for a White House cover up (worse than the crime…) won’t apply. Instead, everything will ride on the manufacture of confusion. The press won’t be able to “expose” the plot because it will all happen in stark daylight. The facts will be known, and simultaneously they will be inconceivable. 

“The plan is to have no plan” is not a strategy, really. Nor would I call it a policy. It has a kind of logic to it, but this is different from saying it has a design— or a designer. Meaning: I do not want to be too conspiratorial about this. To wing it without a plan is merely the best this government can do, given who heads the table. The manufacture of confusion is just the ruins of Trump’s personality meeting the powers of the presidency. There is no genius there, only a damaged human being playing havoc with our lives.

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Not sure how long I’m going to be doing this.

By “this” I mean critiquing the American press as it reports on national politics, and trying to get journalists to adopt better practices when they are public actors who present to us as observers. It is a frustrating assignment, and I am wary of burnout.

But since I am self-assigned — self-appointed, really — I have freedom of movement, intellectually speaking. Were it not for the fact that we are all enmeshed in the biggest national emergency since the Great Depression, I would probably have exited by now from the “press coverage of politics” beat, in the belief that I have contributed what I can, worn out my welcome, and exhausted the patience of anyone who has been following along.

But I cannot quit before the 2020 elections are run. Until then I am going to press my case as hard as I can. Today my case to American journalists is this: You cannot keep from getting swept up in Trump’s agenda without a firm grasp on your own. I am quite aware that journalists are taught not to let their political preferences, party membership, or personal ideology shape their reporting, and I have no quarrel with that restriction. But it does not end the discussion.

Here is Jake Tapper on CNN in May of 2016, after one of Donald Trump’s fact-free accusations. (Italics mine.)

There is no corroborated evidence that Ted Cruz’s father ever met Lee Harvey Oswald, or, for that matter, any other presidential assassin. We in the media don’t talk about it because there’s no evidence of it. In fact, there is contrary evidence. Well before the picture was taken, Rafael Cruz’s sister was brutally beaten by Castro forces and Rafael Cruz had denounced the regime. So, any suggestion that Cruz’s father played a role in the Kennedy assassination is ridiculous and, frankly, shameful. Now, that’s not an anti-Trump position or a pro-Cruz position. It’s a pro-truth position.

Jake Tapper knows that journalists are not supposed to push an agenda like “Ted Cruz for president!” But he also knows there are fundamental values that he and his colleagues in the news business have to stand up for. Among these are a decent respect for truthtelling in public settings. When politicians competing for votes float poisonous charges without even a modicum of evidence, self-respecting journalists have to push back in some way.

In doing that, Tapper wasn’t crossing the border from journalism into some other line of work. He was practicing his craft the way he understands it— and legitmately so. The distinction he makes is important. Yes, he took a position on air, but it’s not anti-Trump or pro-Cruz. It’s pro-truth.

Now I want to go beyond what Jake Tapper said in 2016, and introduce a distinction of my own, between the political and the politicized. About press coverage of politics, nothing would improve our conversation more than a careful separation of these two terms. Not easy, but worth trying. Here is what I mean:

When TV journalists with Sunday morning shows push back against major party candiates who are floating poisonous charges without evidence, that is a political act. We should be clear-eyed in acknowledging such. Same goes for the newspaper fact checkers who wrote, “Trump is once again making a ridiculous claim.” With these moves journalists are trying to alert viewers and voters to be wary of Trump’s false charges. They would not put it this way, but I will: their implicit “agenda” is to prevent lying from being raised to a universal principle in politics.

That is a valid goal. When I call it a political act, I mean several things: It is undertaken for the good of the nation. It is a use of power in one sense, a check on power in another. It is constitutionally protected. And it is contestable. People can and do disagree about the propriety of journalists declaring what is true and what is false, what is in or out of bounds during an election, and they argue about the calls made. All these make it (properly) political.

But — and here comes my distinction — if journalists lose their place and operate as cheerleaders for individual candidates (“Ted Cruz for president!”) or they let their ideology distort their reporting so as not to injure a cause they manifestly believe in, then their work has been unduly politicized. This is not good. It erodes trust, validates bad faith attacks on the press, and ultimately renders journalism useless as a check on power because it is trying to be the power.

So we should be leery of an overly politicized press. We should also watch out for politicized attacks on the press. And we should be wary of journalists who don’t think their work is political at all. Here is Peter Baker, White House correspondent of the New York Times:

As reporters, our job is to observe, not participate, and so to that end, I don’t belong to any political party, I don’t belong to any non-journalism organization, I don’t support any candidate, I don’t give money to interest groups and I don’t vote.

I try hard not to take strong positions on public issues even in private, much to the frustration of friends and family. For me, it’s easier to stay out of the fray if I never make up my mind, even in the privacy of the kitchen or the voting booth, that one candidate is better than another, that one side is right and the other wrong.

I don’t trust this attitude. I think it is dismissive of some of the hardest problems in journalism. Correct in warning against an overly politicized press, it has nothing to say about the inescapably political nature of Baker’s day-to-day work. Not voting on principle, never making up your mind on tough issues, deliberately frustrating friends and family when they ask around your kitchen island: what do you think? These are fantasies of detachment.

When the president is using you as a hate object in order to discredit the entire mainstream press in the eyes of his supporters so that your reporting and the reporting of all the people you compete with arrives pre-rejected, what good is “our job is to observe, not participate?” You are part of that system whether you like it or not. You either think your way out of it, or get incorporated into it.

The hard work is deciding where the properly political part of journalism ends, and its undue, unfair, unwise and risky politicization begins. But we don’t have a discussion like that. Instead we have media bias wielded like a baseball bat, and journalists who think they can serve the electorate better if they remove themselves from it.

Now we are met on an ugly and brutal battlefield: the 2020 campaign for president. How should American journalists approach it? I have previewed my answer in the title of this post: You can’t keep from getting swept up in Trump’s agenda without a firm grasp on your own. But what should that agenda be? To this tricky question I now turn, armed with my distinction between the properly political and the overly politicized.

I am going to list a few things I think journalists can legitimately be “for” as they report on the coming election. If they choose not to choose, and head into the 2020 campaign without stars to steer by, they are likely to become lost in Trump’s predictable flood of newsy distractions and lurid controversies. They know what’s coming. What they don’t know is how to avoid playing along. Here are some suggestions.

1. A citizens agenda. This I have described many times, and I am working with a group that is advocating for it in 2020. It’s an alternative to the horse race model for election coverage. There, the organizing principle is: “who’s likely to win?” In the citizen’s agenda style, you start by asking the people you are trying to inform: what do you want the candidates to be talking about as they compete for votes? If you keep asking that question, and listen carefully to the answers, you can synthesize from them a kind of priority list that originates with the voters. (Example here.)

This list then becomes your “agenda” for covering the campaign. Get the candidates to address what the voters said they most want to hear about. Focus your journalism around key items on the citizens agenda. When one of Trump’s media storms blows in you can hold fast to your own priorities by asking if his latest controversy advances discussion of the citizens agenda. If not, you have good reason for downplaying it.

Because it pressures the candidates to address these issues rather than those, the citizens agenda is a political project. But it can be done without unduly politicizing election coverage if the act of listening to voters is a genuine one. The agenda comes from them, not from the newsroom’s political preferences.

I have been recommending this approach for many years. I wrote about it in my 1999 book, What Are Journalists For? The basic model has been around since the early 1990s. If journalists in the national press wanted to move toward this alternative they would have done so by now. My read is that it feels too earnest to them, too much like civics class, or “eat your vegetables” journalism, not enough like drinks with the country chairman in the Des Moines Marriott to see who has the early jump on the Iowa caucuses. I still think it’s the best way to keep from getting swept up in Trump’s agenda. But they do not. So we need other ideas.

2. Fighting authoritarianism and the subversion of democracy. Suppose you began with a frank recognition among editors, producers and reporters that democracy is at risk in the United States. (News flash: it is.) This would argue for extra emphasis on the integrity of elections, extra vigilance against those who would try to subvert them, and a special watchfulness for — a duty to warn about — authoritarian movements in the body politic: demonization of minorities, trashing of democratic procedures, evasion of checks and balances, erosion of accountability, threats of violence, and other forms of above-the-law behavior. (For what I mean by watchfulness, see this post by Dan Froomkin, When Trump takes a step toward autocracy, journalists need to call it out. For a “fighting voter suppression” agenda see this project.)

The extra watchfulness I speak of is a small-d democratic act. It has to be applied across the board: left, right, center, fringe. With that condition, it is entirely within journalists’ rights to make fighting authoritarianism the mission and heart of their campaign coverage. Call it threats-to-democracy journalism. If we were ever going to need an agenda like that, this is the year.

3. A more evidence-based political debate. Journalists could also decide to stand more forcefully and consistently for an evidence-based politics. If they did, this too would be a political act. But again, it does not have to be politicized. Asking, “is this evidence-based?” could be a way of deciding whether a campaign controversy is worth discussing— or dismissing. Holding all candidates to the same standards of evidence is the very essence of across-the-board fairness. Rating the campaigns on how evidence-based they are willing to be might prove especially useful in a political environment dominated by our struggle with COVID-19.

Imagine asking the best public health and immunology experts you can find, “When it comes to the pandemic, what do you want the candidates to be talking about as they compete for votes?” Filtered through community knowledge and common sense, this might be a good way of organizing state and local coverage of candidates who will have to speak about recovering from the virus to get elected. “We are going to be relentlessly evidence-based, because that is what our community most needs to get out of this mess…” is a solid agenda to adopt in an election year likely to be dominated by a public health crisis.

4. Pro-participation. Democracy is not a spectator sport, though some forms of punditry seem to frame it that way. The more people who participate in the system the stronger the system is. Journalists can design their coverage so that it helps people go out and vote. With good information and timely notice, they can make it easier for eligible voters to get registered and exercise their rights. They can expose those who would discourage citizens from voting. They can fight disinformation that tries to depress turnout. They can hold accountable the public officials who run elections. They can warn about problems that could haunt us on election day.

But it’s not just voting: all forms of participation could be part of this agenda: how to volunteer, how to contribute, where to see the candidates.

No way around it: encouraging participation is a political act. But as long as it includes all parties and all voters, election coverage that is shamelessly pro-participation does not unfairly politicize the press. Bad actors will of course make that charge, but bad actors always complain about good journalism.

Don’t like these ideas? Come up with your own! Some I didn’t get to: Fighting cynicism. Making politics fun again. Bringing emotions other than rage to campaign coverage. Transcending the red-blue divide. It would take courage and imagination, but all of these could work as organizing principles, possibly in combination with others I have mentioned. (You don’t have to have one and only one agenda!)

My point is that journalists need to know what they’re trying to accomplish with their election coverage. Covering the campaign the way campaigns in the U.S. are covered — which, as far as I can tell, is the current “agenda” at CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS, NPR — does not provide a sense of mission strong enough to prevent a repeat of the debacle in 2016. Nor does vowing not to make the same mistakes. Something stronger is required.

They know what’s coming, I said about the campaign press. What they don’t know is how to avoid capture. Donald Trump is going to campaign the same way he “governs.” By flooding the zone with shit, and making so much news that no single revelation matters much. By accusing opponents of the very things he is manifestly guilty of. By giving his supporters license to reject the news: “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” By persuading the uncommitted that it’s useless to pay attention because you will never get the story straight. By leveraging his weirdness as a human being, like the fact that he lacks the gene for feeling shame. By lowering all of us. By manufacturing confusion. By calling himself the victim of journalists who point these things out. By warring against the press.

These methods — but they’re not methodical, just compulsive — exploit errors in the journalist’s code. Among them are:

• • What the president says is news.
  • Issues are boring. Controversy is good.
  • Conflict makes news, attacks are exciting.
  • Doesn’t matter if it’s true. If it could become a factor in the election, it’s worth reporting.
  • In theory, sources that flood the zone with shit should be dropped. In practice, we need them.
  • More information is better than less.
  • Meeting traffic goals means you’re winning at this.

These are propositions set too deep. There is zero chance of removing them in time for 2020. Each one opens the press to manipulation by Trump and his campaign. Which is part of why I say: You can’t keep from getting sucked into his agenda without a firm grasp on your own. Only a strong sense of mission will prevent a repeat of 2016. But I am not optimistic. It is so much easier to go with the flow.

A final thought: Campaign professionals speak of “earned” vs. “paid” media. Earned means news coverage. Paid means political ads. What if earned media really had to be earned? That might help a bit.

The post You cannot keep from getting swept up in Trump’s agenda without a firm grasp on your own appeared first on PressThink.

It was 2005 when Bob Sipchen, then an editor at the Los Angeles Times, said at a public forum about bloggers and journalists that he had always thought of the LA Times as “a heavy battleship under steam, regarding its critics as no more important than swimmers in the water throwing dead fish at it.”

I begin with this almost surreal image from 15 years ago — newspaper as giant battleship moving slowly out of harbor, critics so impotent they can only toss dead fish at it — because it shows how much has changed for the people formerly known as newspaper journalists, and especially for the editors who try to steer these organizations. They have suffered a massive loss in power as the media and political worlds have changed around them.

To whom has this power gone?

To the tech platforms that have a stronger hold on the audience for news; they do a better job and charge a fairer price for targeted advertising. To the internet itself, which continues to disassemble the newspaper “bundle” into specialist sites that satisfy niche audiences. To the faux-populists preaching resentment politics who have turned the “liberal media” into their always-on hate object, accelerating a loss of trust in the journalism that big city newspapers once practiced with impunity.

Power has been lost to Fox News. And to the trolls, including the one in the White House. And to sources who can find a following without playing ball with the press.

Battleship Newspaper was built for a world that has largely vanished. That means a lot of ideas have to come down that are still standing, like statues from an earlier era. This is my primary takeaway from the events at the New York Times last week that resulted in the resignation of editorial page editor James Bennet, who was thought to be one of the favorites to replace executive editor Dean Baquet when Baquet retires. (He is 63.)

Bennet left because his opinion section published “Send in the Troops” by Republican Senator Tom Cotton. It argued for intervention by the U.S. military in response to a nationwide protest movement that has taken up the Black Lives Matter cause. “Rioters have plunged many American cities into anarchy, recalling the widespread violence of the 1960s,” Cotton wrote. “One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers.”

“Send in the Troops” went online Wednesday afternoon, June 3. It drew intense criticism that evening, including unprecedented resistance from Times journalists who took to Twitter to say, “Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.” But James Bennet defended the decision to publish it. His logic: I don’t agree with it myself, but we have to be open to opposing points of view. (“Times Opinion owes it to our readers to show them counter-arguments, particularly those made by people in a position to set policy.”)

Publisher A.G. Sulzberger also supported the decision in a memo he later called a “placeholder” pending further review. By Thursday night June 4 that review had come to a startling conclusion: “A rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards.”

On Friday Bennett apologized to his colleagues in a tense staff meeting. An editor’s note was then attached to Cotton’s Op Ed:

After publication, this essay met strong criticism from many readers (and many Times colleagues), prompting editors to review the piece and the editing process. Based on that review, we have concluded that the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published… For example, the published piece presents as facts assertions about the role of “cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa”; in fact, those allegations have not been substantiated and have been widely questioned.

Two days later James Bennet resigned.

Where to begin in interpreting these events? Where I begin is with the opening paragraphs of Michelle Goldberg’s outstanding column in the Times on June 4.

Before Donald Trump became president, most newspaper op-ed pages sought to present a spectrum of politically significant opinion and argument, which they could largely do while walling off extremist propaganda and incitement. The Trump presidency has undermined that model, because there’s generally no way to defend the administration without being either bigoted or dishonest.

In normal times, editors pick and choose among critics and defenders of the people in power in order to create a lively mix of plausible views. That’s what opinion journalism is at daily newspapers… in normal times. But what if times change? The Trump presidency is demagogic and mostly fact-free. What if there is no way to defend the government without practicing bigotry or demagoguery— or just making stuff up? This is the kind of question editors at the New York Times have tried to avoid. They want to declare it impossible. And by trying to avoid it, by declaring it impossible, James Bennet lost his way, then lost his job.

Michelle Goldberg again:

Opinion sections, eager to maintain ideological diversity without publishing lies or stuff that belongs in Breitbart, have therefore filled up with anti-Trump conservatives. As a result, newspapers like this one have often been criticized for elevating an intellectual clique that has little mass base or political influence.

Tom Cotton’s “Send In the Troops” was supposed to be provocative. A joint product of Cotton’s staff and Times editors, it was designed to challenge core readers with a point of view they were likely to reject, but still ought to hear. That was the idea, anyway. Rather than construct a “both sides” world out of liberals and conservatives who share a common opposition to Trump, the Times went to a Trump backer and rising star who could provide more friction than, say, Charlie Sykes.

Cotton delivered on his end. The editors could not deliver on theirs. This we learn by returning to the web address where “Send In the Troops” was first published. With the editor’s note attached that page now says, absurdly: here we bring you an essay we should never have brought you. The New York Times was unable to sustain an act of publishing that was supposed to challenge its audience. Why? Because it lacks courage and can’t stand the heat?

That’s what Cotton, Trump and their allies would say. (And this episode is a huge propaganda win for them, a successful troll.) My answer is different. Battleship Newspaper lives on, intellectually, but the costs are mounting. Ideas born in that era have refused to die, and their continuation is proving more and more costly.

Debate club democracy — where people of good will share a common world of fact but disagree on what should be done — is an expensive illusion to maintain during a presidency that tries to undermine every independent and factual check there is on the executive’s power, not just a free press and its journalism, but the intelligence community, the diplomatic corps, the civil service, government scientists, inspectors general, and Congress in its oversight function.

Stories about the Trump government undermining all of these have appeared in the New York Times. They are ably reported. But at some point the light bulb has to flick on. This isn’t debate club. It’s an attack on the institutions of American democracy. Just as police work in our cities isn’t law enforcement constrained by the Constitution. It’s systemized suspicion of Black people, free of Constitutional constraint, and it frequently ends in violence.

The idea that the New York Times can never reach conclusions like this, and build them into its core values, because it has to remain neutral in order to be trusted as a news source by the very people who reject those values  — an idea I have called the view from nowhere — might have been a mistaken-but-survivable construct in the era of Battleship Newspaper. That is no longer the case.

Many decades ago, the leadership class in big league journalism accepted the argument that racial integration had to come to their newsrooms, or the journalism would suffer. Or at least, this is what they said to themselves. But what they also said (without quite realizing it) is: We can have all that, a more diverse and multi-colored newsroom, and maintain the view from nowhere. They never faced up to the contradiction: minority journalists who are supposed to simultaneously supply a missing perspective and suppress that perspective in order to establish their objectivity.

Appearing on CNN the same day that James Bennet resigned, Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, who is African American and a Pulitzer Prize winner, made the connection explicit: “This adherence to even-handedness, both-sidism, the ‘view from nowhere’ doesn’t actually work in the political circumstances that we’re in.”

A few days earlier it was Wesley Lowery, formerly of the Washington Post, and now at 60 Minutes:

American view-from-nowhere, “objectivity”-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed experiment. We need to fundamentally reset the norms of our field. The old way must go. We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity

— Wesley (@WesleyLowery) June 4, 2020

Lowery also told Ben Smith, media columnist of the Times, that the “core value needs to be the truth, not the perception of objectivity.”

Elite newsrooms badly need people like Wesley Lowery and Nikole Hannah-Jones. But these people have no need for detritus from the age of Fortress Journalism. They aren’t going to shut up. And they aren’t throwing dead fish. Their moral clarity is a rebuke and wake-up call to an older generation of journalists.

In November of 2019, Ben Smith, then at Buzzfeed, published a long article on the succession drama at the New York Times. Who will replace Dean Baquet? He also checked in with some of the arguments made in this post. Smith concludes his piece this way:

And what about the Times that Sulzberger and Baquet hear so much about from critics on Twitter, from grumbling subscribers, and from much of the young generation of their own newsroom? The one that stops trying to be perceived as fair by Trumpian critics whose beef is with journalism itself, and shakes off the old obsession with political neutrality?

Sorry. The phrase I heard to dismiss that again and again: “It’s just not in our DNA.”

Dean Baquet and his lieutenants have another phrase: We are not the resistance. But if that were entirely true, James Bennet would still have a job. The Times has evolved a lot since 2005. But now it has to update its pressthink; it has to evolve politically. That’s not in the newsroom’s DNA. But it is the call of the times.

The post Battleship Newspaper appeared first on PressThink.

On March 19 of this year we alerted readers to a shift in our coverage of Donald Trump’s presidency. We said then that we were moving to an “emergency” setting, which had these consequences for how we would treat Trump as a figure in the news.

• •  To prevent him from misinforming you about matters of life and death — the coronavirus — we will no longer carry his news conferences live.
  •  From all normal press relations with the Trump White House our reporters will withdraw. We will not attend briefings, we won’t gather around him as he departs in his helicopter, and we will not enter into “off the record” arrangements with White House sources.
  • In reporting on his public statements, in addition to asking, “does this fairly represent what he said?” we will ask: is what he said something we should be amplifying?
  • In general, we will shift the focus of our coverage from what Trump is saying to what his government is doing.
  • If we feel we have to report something he said that contains deceptions and falsehoods, we will use the “truth sandwich” method for reporting on false or dubious claims.

Today we are announcing further steps to respond to Trump’s escalations. Democrats, Republicans and voters who call themselves independent are all equally entitled to news coverage that properly gauges the urgency of the threat to American democracy represented by the President’s conduct of the presidency and methods for winning re-election.

If, as a member of the Democratic Party, some future president resorts to similar methods, we will take similar measures in response. For the principle on which we are acting is not reflexive opposition to Donald Trump, or some standing hostility to the Republican Party, but loyalty to democratic institutions, including the surpassing importance of free and fair elections.

When the powers of the Federal government are turned against the reliability of the vote itself, we have crossed an invisible boundary that separates a bitterly fought election from an enterprise-threatening event.

We know this sounds extreme. We wish it were not happening. We understand the risk we take by putting it so starkly: The presidency of Donald Trump is an active threat to American democracy. What do we mean by an active threat? Using the powers he won by election, the incumbent is trying to destroy public confidence in the results of the next election.

For example: “A Wall Street Journal review of Mr. Trump’s tweets dating back to 2012 found more than 110 instances of the president claiming widespread illegal voting, asserting an election or primary was rigged, or that voting by mail would allow for rampant fraud. More than half of those tweets were from this year, with the most of them concerning mail balloting.”

Upon his campaign against the expanded use of mail-in ballots, Trump has constructed a new threat: his sabotaging of the Post Office, a part of the government that is more necessary than ever to this year’s election because of the coronavirus pandemic. Here is how factcheck.org put it:

In an Aug. 13 interview, Trump admitted that he opposes a coronavirus pandemic relief bill crafted by the House Democrats because it includes funding the U.S. Postal Service and state election officials — funding that Trump said is needed to allow the Postal Service to handle an expected surge in mail-in voting.

What do we mean by an active threat? Look again at what is happening:

1. Using the public platform of the presidency, Donald Trump is trying to persuade Americans that their elections cannot be trusted, while standing for election as a candidate himself.

2. Using the formal powers of the presidency, he is trying to make this reckless claim come true by preventing the Post Office from performing reliably as the country turns to mail-in voting.

3. And he is doing this during an election in which a reliable mail service is an imperative because of a public heath crisis that his presidency has failed to contain.

Put 1, 2 and 3 together — examine the way they loop into one another — and it’s more than a civic emergency; it’s a national crisis. News coverage has to reflect that. We can’t just cover these events in bigger type. We have to take commensurate action.

And so we are announcing today these additional measures, beyond the “emergency” setting to which we shifted in March.

Almost all the resources we would have used to cover the party conventions will be redirected to a threat modeling team. This team will be responsible for locating the most likely breakdowns in the election system, and for advising the assignment desk on what deserves attention in our daily report. Everyone in the newsroom will know what our top priorities are in covering the campaign: the biggest threats. There will be no excuse for getting distracted by his tweets.

One of the products of that new team will be a “live” Threat Urgency Index, re-published daily at our site, and in a newsletter you can subscribe to. It will summarize and rank the biggest dangers to a free and fair election by merging assessments of how consequential, how likely, and how immediate each threat is. Right now, for example, the crippling of the postal service would be expected to rank highly on that list. But we don’t know what others will emerge between now and January 20.

One purpose of that index is to provide a counterweight to the confusing onslaught of America-in-crisis headlines, each of which feels like a “big story.” (Usually because it is.) This has been called “flood the zone with shit” by Trump confidant Steve Bannon. It shrinks the importance of any one warning signal by jamming the system with too much signal. When outrageous conduct produces no outrage because people have given up on trying to process it all, the zone flooders have “won.”

The Threat Urgency Index will try to combat this method by adding hierarchy, continuity, composure, clarity. Voters and news consumers will be able to hold us accountable for our coverage of what we publicly declare to be the biggest threats to a free and fair election.

As President Trump becomes a more active danger to American democracy, the rest of the political system has to decide what to do about it. This is one of the levers that journalists have. They are in a position to pressure office-holders and other government officials to go on the record with reactions to what Trump is doing. Pressing for answers can itself can have effects, as we saw last week in Montana.

In a normal campaign year, we assign people to “embed” with the candidates and follow them around as they hit the campaign trail. This time there is no campaign trail because of COVID-19. So we are shifting those resources to a different project: getting key office holders in both parties on the record through relentless questioning designed to hold them accountable for supporting, opposing, or interrogating what Trump is doing to undermine the vote.

In a normal election cycle, we put considerable effort into tracking “the race.” We do this in the belief that people want to know who’s winning and how they’re doing it. But we’re confident we can keep you informed with a simple daily summary of polling averages in key states and nationally. (Sites like 538.com and Real Clear Politics speciaize in this kind of information.)

With a deadly pandemic that has not been brought under control, a collapsing economy that is leaving families adrift, and a threat to its democratic institutions coming from the top, the United States is badly in need of people with political courage and practical vision who can inspire others.

And so the resources we would normally devote to state-of-the-race journalism will be redirected: to reporting about people who are providing exceptional leadership, or devising solutions, like the team from Yale and the NBA who this week came up with a coronavirus test that the FDA called “groundbreaking” in its efficiency.

We are well aware of the smirking contempt in which “positive” news is held by the most hard-boiled journalists. But anyone who has listened carefully to readers, viewers and listeners knows that news fatigue and a sense of hopelessness are now serious obstacles to the maintenance of an informed public.

If the United States is to emerge from this crisis with its democracy intact, we are going to need an alert and engaged citizenry. It is unrealistic to expect people to pay attention to an unending stream of crisis news, especially in a nation deliberately polarized by a president sowing chaos, selling hate. There has to be another key in which the country’s song can be played. Instead of who’s ahead in the horse race, we will be reporting on who’s ahead in the human race to get us out of this mess. We feel this is part of a rounded approach to crisis reporting.

Finally, if you want to contribute to our project of combating an active threat with careful journalism, you can become a member of our Red Alert team. You sign up, get verified (real names and addresses only) and then pick among different ways to get involved.

Our first crowdsourcing project will ask Red Alert members to help us test wait times for mail delivery in different parts of the country. Other projects will track the spread of misinformation through Facebook ads and messaging apps. You can sign up to monitor local TV news for us. Know someone we should be reporting on? (Someone who’s ahead in the human race to get us out of this mess?) Red Alert members can suggest stories, and help us diversify our reporting.

So here again are the steps we will be taking:

• • We will shift resources from convention coverage to a threat modeling team.
  • We will generate with that team a Threat Urgency Index, and reorganize around it. That will become a priority list for our day-to-day campaign coverage and for our investigative journalism.
  • The index will also be a published product. You can use it to hold us accountable.
  • We will shift resources from campaign trail coverage to reporting that gets office-holders and govenment officials in both parties on the record in their response to Trump’s active threat to American democracy.
  • We will further shift resources from “who’s ahead?” coverage to profile people with political courage and practical vision who can inspire others.
  • You can become a member of our Red Alert team and participate in crisis coverage by helping us gather information.

In our March note to readers we said this: “Even this far into his term, it is still a bit of a shock to be reminded that the single most potent force for misinforming the American public is the current president of the United States.”

A few days ago, Stephen Collinson of CNN wrote something similar: “The most dangerous threat to the integrity of November’s election is coming from the man sworn to protect it, the President of the United States.”

That is an escalation. Trump is an active threat. This has consequences for our journalism. How can it not?

Don’t be surprised if you get another of these notes.

I need to clarify what kind of text this is. I am not a news organization, just a lone writer, and a journalism professor who is also a press critic. Since 2015, I have written a lot about the problem of covering Donald Trump. This post is an extension of that work. It is written in the voice of an editor’s note “announcing” a new policy. (A similar note was published in March, 2020. This is part two.) But I am not a news executive within a company of journalists, and I don’t want to give the impression that a news organization has made this kind of shift. That has yet to happen. So consider this my statement of what editors in the national media could and should be doing right now. Call it press criticism in a different key. That means you can’t sign up for the Red Alert team or subscribe to the Urgent Threat Index. Those are my ideas, awaiting pick up by the American press. —JR

The post From emergency to active threat: We have again switched settings in our coverage of Donald Trump appeared first on PressThink.

As voters, as journalists, as citizens, and as writers, as participants alive in what was once considered a secure democracy, we are today living through what Masha Gessen (following Bálint Magyar) calls an “autocratic attempt.”

Let those words sink in for a moment: an autocratic attempt…”the build up to actually wielding autocratic power.”

When a political figure who has gained power tries to use that power to probe the possibilities for establishing an autocratic state, that’s an autocratic attempt. The other stages in the process are an “autocratic breakthrough,” and an “autocratic consolidation.” I hope we never get to either point. But I cannot say with confidence that we will not. Neither can Masha Gessen. (Read their book, Surviving Autocracy.)

Four weeks ago I recommended that the big national newsrooms create threat modeling teams to help organize coverage of the Trump government and the 2020 elections. My concern was that American democracy was being put at risk, and traditional campaign coverage was not capable of addressing that kind of threat.

Today I am back to develop this suggestion a little further, in hopes that some of our major news providers will take an interest. I consulted two people who have worked with threat modeling in other danger zones, and I asked them to help me imagine its possible uses in a newsroom setting.

One is Joshua Geltzer, currently a Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University. From 2015 to 2017 he was Senior Director for Counterterrorism on the National Security Council staff, where he particpated in what are called “table top” exercises that try to imagine how threats would play out. (This is often called “threat ideation.”) As a “customer” working on counter-terrorism for the executive branch, he used the products of threat modeling teams based in the intelligence agencies and law enforcement. He has also written about Donald Trump’s attacks on the 2020 election.

My other informant is Alex Stamos, former Chief Security Officer at Facebook, and Chief Information Security Officer at Yahoo, which he described as “the most senior person at a company who is solely tasked with defending the company’s systems, software and other technical assets from attack.” At Facebook his duties were two-fold. One involved defending the company’s IT systems against hacking: “supervising the central security team that tries to understand risk across the company and work with many other teams to mitigate that risk.” His other duty was to help prevent misuse of Facebook products to cause harm. “Exploiting a software flaw to steal data is hacking. Using a product to harass people, or plan a terrorist attack, is abuse,” he explained. (The full text of my interview with Alex was published at The Verge.)

Incorporating what I learned from Josh Geltzer and Alex Stamos — and from an off-the-record briefing about election threats put on by the Aspen Institute, which I attended last week — here is how I see it working.

The recommendation: The big national news providers — ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, NPR, PBS, AP, Reuters, New York Times, Washington Post — should have threat modeling teams, just as they all have pollsters. These teams would try to identify the most serious threats to a free and fair election and to American democracy over the next four months, so that their newsrooms can take appropriate action.

What is threat modeling and how does it work? 

“Threat modeling is the effort to articulate dangers in ways that allow us to prepare to prevent, mitigate, or respond to them,” said Josh Geltzer. “It’s a way of identifying and describing threats that helps us to address them.” Its purpose is to assess vulnerabilities and anticipate attacks in a more systematic fashion than just being worried about them. Alex Stamos put it this way.

“Threat Modeling” is a formal process by which a team maps out the potential adversaries to a system and the capabilities of those adversaries, maps the attack surfaces of the system and the potential vulnerabilities in those attack surfaces, and then matches those two sets together to build a model of likely vulnerabilities and attacks.

What does it take to do threat modeling well?

Josh Geltzer told me: “You need to have a deep sense of what you’re trying to protect in the first place.” (I will come back to this point later; it is critical.) You also need expertise in the kinds of dangers that are likely to arise. For Donald Trump as a threat to American democracy, this might mean consutling people who have devoted serious study to “how democracies die.”

For other kinds of threats newsrooms often have in-house expertise, in the form of beat reporters who know their terrain intimately, like NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins, who have been tracking QAnon and other misinformatiom rabbit holes.

You need to be able to step into the shoes of your adversary, and think like they do. You need the right temperament, says Geltzer, “to take seriously dangers without inflating them (which can happen when you start thinking hard about them!) and also without underestimating them,” which cognitive bias and organizational pressures can make us do.

What kinds of things do threat modelers do?

They identify weaknesses or likely points of attack, what Stamos called “attack surfaces.” For each plausible threat they try to divide the assessment of how consequential it would be from how likely it is to happen, and then carefully combine those two to determine its overall urgency. As Josh Geltzer said, they study how attacks can be prevented, how the damage can be mitigated if they do happen, and what kind of response is required if an attack succeeds.

Threat modeling also flows into exercises that help an organization prepare for threats and understand them better. At Facebook Stamos helped run “red team” exercises. “A Red Team is a team, either internal to the company or hired from external consultants, that pretends to be an adversary and acts out their behavior with as much fidelity as is possible,” he said. “At Facebook, our Red Team ran large exercises against the company twice a year. These would be composed based upon studying a real adversary— say, the Ministry of State Security of the People’s Republic of China.”

What is the product — or deliverable — of good threat modeling, and what does it help you do?

One answer: it helps you deploy scarce resources. As Stamos said to me, his security team had only so many people. They could only take on so many projects. Threat modeling can tell you how to spend your budget. The parallel to the newsroom is clear: you only have so many reporters. There is a limited number of investigations you can do before the election. With Trump in power there is always a flood of news. How do you decide what’s urgent?

Another answer: Done well, threat modeling — and what’s called threat ideation — makes your staff more alive to dangers that their routines or assumptions might have obscured. It’s an awareness tool.

Beyond raising awareness, what specific uses would threat modeling have in a newsroom setting?

In a previous post, I described a published product that could emerge: A Threat Urgency Index. It would summarize and rank the biggest dangers (to the election and to American democracy) by combining assessments of how consequential, how likely, and how immediate each threat is.

The Index would have a web address. It would be updated when there is new information, sort of like Five Thirty Eight’s Election Forecast. You could also subscribe to the Index as a newsletter. Right now, for example, the crippling of the postal service might rank highly on that list. Or the call — echoing from Trump’s Twitter feed — for armed militias to “protect” the vote count in a disputed election.

Another use might be to run excerises that raise newsroom awareness around the possible manipulation of the news system as we get closer to the election. “The obvious one is hacked documents,” said Alex Stamos. “Worked great in 2016. Why change horses?”

What problem is threat modeling supposed to solve? 

As Steve Bannon famously said, Trump’s method for neutralizing the news media is to “flood the zone with shit.” There’s always too many things to pay attention to. Threat modeling could help with that by separating things that sound scary from things that really are scary— and could happen.

That’s one answer. Another comes from Kyle Pope, the editor of Columbia Journalism Review, who recently wrote:

The American people are living on the edge of death and economic despair. Those are the stakes of the 2020 election, one whose integrity is in jeopardy thanks to the hypocrisies of Silicon Valley and the influence of foreign (and domestic) actors, on top of voter suppression—by online disinformation campaigns and simpler means (including manipulating the post office). The press must look past the campaign coverage that was and embrace its role as a safeguard of democracy.

To be a safeguard of democracy you cannot just react to what explodes into the news from now until January 20. You have to zoom forward in imagination, glimpse danger, and then work your way back to decisions made today and tomorrow. Threat modeling helps you move about in time.

If threat modeling is defensive, what is it that journalists should be trying to defend? 

To me this is one reason to do it. In order to deploy a threat modeling, or threat “ideation” team you have to know what you are trying to protect against. You have to own that responsibility. Which is a lot different from reporting whatever comes down the pike.

Earlier in the campagn, I wrote a post about this problem: You cannot keep from getting swept up in Trump’s agenda without a firm grasp on your own. But what should that agenda be? I think it has to be some kind of defense of American democracy and its central ritual: free and fair elections that engender trust in the outcome, and thereby make the peaceful transfer of power possible.

Earlier in the modern era, journalists covering election campaigns had been able to assume the existence of a stable system, and therefore focus on the contest itself. That doesn’t work for 2020. For it is by no means guaranteed that we will have a free and fair vote. Journalists have to plant their flag on the sacred ground of legitimate elections, and help defend it against all threats. Threat modeling can assist with that project. And that is my argument for its adoption by the big national news providers.

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