Is there a problem with how the media works today and is this connected to why our political system seems so blocked?

There is a problem at the heart of Journalism today. The News System is not designed to advance conversation.

Journalism instead feeds on “Conflict”. News is Conflict. And of course  Conflict is news.  But in many cases, the other side of the reported “Conflict” is phony.

Look at all the phony statements in the Immigration story that have been given credence by the media!

News as it is today is not designed to build knowledge but only to tell us what happened recently. Worse, Journalists position themselves as being above the conflict as the neutral arbiter between the poles. I call this “The View from Nowhere”. Of course good debates and worthwhile conversation demands moderation. Of course there is a role for a neutral broker. But the good moderator ensures that the quality of the questions is high.This is not what Journalism does today.

So it can be no surprise that our political system then feeds into this. If you want to be in the News, you play the poles. The “Real” is opposed often to the “Fake”. So in the case of climate change, the fake is still given legitimacy. In Immigration a legitimate question is “Do immigrants lower wages” but if there is an answer to that question that is true, the untrue answer may be given equal weight. No wonder people are emotionally aroused and unsure.

So this view of the world as being all about conflict, much of it illegitimate, and all about the extremes on either side of the conflict informs our political process. So our media and our politics tend toward entropy and ritualized conflict.

Journalists do not want to make helping the nation move to a solution part of their work. They see that as “politics” and avoid it. So we end up getting stuck and we lose trust in both our media and our political system.

So what would be a better way for us?

It will help if we can see that the “View from Nowhere” is a liability.

It is the Pontius Pilate position enabling the media to wash its hands from the ethical choice that confronts it.

The View from Nowhere was thought to build trust. In reality it destroys it.

To build trust, you have to tell us where you are coming from. Not who you voted for, or your personal ideology. But what brings you to this topic? What then are you trying to accomplish? What does success then look like to you? What is your goal?

Don’t be  God or a Martian looking down upon us mere mortals. Be part of what is going on. Articulate where you are coming from and be clear about what you desire as an outcome.

So then Jay what is your advice for us at KETC?

This is how Jay opens his interview at KETC's Homeland Site - Our site on Immigration. He and Doc Searls and Euan Semple have been advising us as to how best to improve our work to offer up an alternative to the polarization of conventional media.

His advice as to what to do is on the site - please follow the link

But when I read this diatribe from Logan, I felt like I'd known Hastings my whole life. Because brother, I have been there, when some would-be "reputable" journalist who's just been severely ass-whipped by a relative no-name freelancer on an enormous story fights back by going on television and, without any evidence at all, accusing the guy who beat him of cheating. That's happened to me so often, I've come to expect it. If there's a lower form of life on the planet earth than a "reputable" journalist protecting his territory, I haven't seen it.

As to this whole "unspoken agreement" business: the reason Lara Logan thinks this is because she's like pretty much every other "reputable" journalist in this country, in that she suffers from a profound confusion about who she's supposed to be working for. I know this from my years covering presidential campaigns, where the same dynamic applies. Hey, assholes: you do not work for the people you're covering! Jesus, is this concept that fucking hard? On the campaign trail, I watch reporters nod solemnly as they hear about the hundreds of millions of dollars candidates X and Y and Z collect from the likes of Citigroup and Raytheon and Archer Daniels Midland, and it blows my mind that they never seem to connect the dots and grasp where all that money is going. The answer, you idiots, is that it's buying advertising! People like George Bush, John McCain, Barack Obama, and General McChrystal for that matter, they can afford to buy their own P.R. — and they do, in ways both honest and dishonest, visible and invisible.

They don't need your help, and you're giving it to them anyway, because you just want to be part of the club so so badly. Disgustingly, that's really what it comes down to. Most of these reporters just want to be inside the ropeline so badly, they want to be able to say they had that beer with Hillary Clinton in a bowling alley in Scranton or whatever, that it colors their whole worldview. God forbid some important person think you're not playing for the right team!

Meanwhile, the people who don't have the resources to find out the truth and get it out in front of the public's eyes, your readers/viewers, you're supposed to be working for them — and they're not getting your help. What the hell are we doing in Afghanistan? Is it worth all the bloodshed and the hatred? Who are the people running this thing, what is their agenda, and is that agenda the same thing we voted for? By the severely unlikely virtue of a drunken accident we get a tiny glimpse of an answer to some of these vital questions, but instead of cheering this as a great break for our profession, a waytago moment, one so-called reputable journalist after another lines up to protest the leak and attack the reporter for doing his job. God, do you all suck!
 

Maybe the larger story that is emerging from the McChrystal affair is the issue of why "traditional journalism" keeps missing the key stories.

The emerging answer is that Trad J is in bed with their sources and or with those that pay the bills.

This is why it is organizations such as Rolling Stone that that got not only this story but also the financial story right when the Trad organizations have missed them. It is why Michael Yon is on his own in Afghanistan. It is why - we the public - are confused about many issues that we don't have to be confused about.

No wonder fewer and fewer people read, view or trust them.

Rolling Stone’s advance of an article with controversial remarks by Gen. Stanley McChrystal about President Barack Obama’s prosecution of the war will be on the screen for days to come. Apparently the general opened up to a freelancer and held little back when it came to deriding vice-president Joe Biden and ambassador to Afghanistan Karl W. Eikenberry. Eikenberry retired from the US Army as a Lieutenant Colonel.

But war correspondent Michael Yon had begun to ask questions about the leadership in Afghanistan weeks ago.

The Washington Post said McChrystal “is quoted in an upcoming profile in Rolling Stone magazine as saying that Karl W. Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Kabul, had ‘betrayed’ him by sending a diplomatic cable to Washington last fall dismissing Karzai as ‘not an adequate strategic partner.’ The cable came as McChrystal was recommending that President Obama increase U.S. forces and ties with the Afghan government.”

Long before Rolling Stone published the story, war correspondent Michael Yon had also levied criticism at McChrystal. Yon came under fire from some milbloggers for his dispatches, and at least one military blog came close to character assassination because of what Yon wrote about McChrystal.

So where was the mainstream media? Yon has been pounding away at great personal cost for ages. The big break comes in Rolling Stone. It's sad, no pathetic that the mainstream have not been covering the war.

For many who rely on the mainstream, this will be a surprise - a gross failure of journalism in fact.

Yon, if you don't know, is entirely on his own and is funded by contributions to his site. An ex Green Beret, he has spent longer in action, as an embed, than probably any western soldier of his generation. Many thought him unhinged as he pounded away at the command issues. He was onto General Menard's failings early too.

Why? Because he cares about the troops on the ground and understands them as no other. He just cannot tolerate moral and professional incompetence in those that have the power of life and death over them.

His reward - banishment and massive attacks on his character.

It's one thing to be brave in action - adrenalin and your buddies help - it is another kind of courage when you take on the "Man" alone and without friends and support.

Now the President has to have the courage and do the right thing too.

What ought to be the ideology of the political press and how should they handle this trickiest of problems in professional practice?

I go back to the theme of my Clowns and Jokers post: “this is complicated.” I don’t think there is one answer. I would not trust any magic solution or single device. Nor do I think my answers exclusively correct. It certainly isn’t possible to pick a point on the political spectrum and say: Journalists should be Scoop Jackson Democrats or Jim Leach Republicans. But there are some things they can do.

Transition from the institutional voice to the individual journalist with a voice. This is already happening. The “voice of god,” a disembodied language in which the news came to be presented, is slowly being phased out while the opportunities for journalists to speak with voice and interact as human beings are on the rise. The symbol of this shift is the reporter who also blogs, but an even better marker is the blogger who is hired to do a job that a “straight” reporter might have done before, as with Ezra Klein covering health care reform and other wonkish subjects for the Washington Post. During the dramatic battles of 2009-10, Klein had no trouble making his views known on health care reform and reporting with credibility on the issue, a combination once thought impossible.

Gradually replace the view from nowhere with “here’s where I’m coming from.” The weakening of the institutional voice is good news for those who would like to find a better solution to the (tricky) problem of ideology in political journalism. The discovery that users want to make a connection to the people who bring them the news is also useful. These developments prepare the ground for the bigger and harder shift that awaits political journalists, which is to abandon the View from Nowhere as a means for generating trust and replace it with “here’s where I’m coming from,” which is a different—and, increasingly, a more plausible—way of generating trust.

(On this point see The Case for Full Disclosure by James Poniewozik of Time and my own post from two years ago: Getting the Politics of the Press Right: Walter Pincus Rips into Newsroom Neutrality. For a more philosophical treatment see David Weinberger, Transparency is the New Objectivity. And if you’re really interested in these issues, watch my bloggingheads.tv exchange with Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute.)

Kill the phony mean before it kills you. That the truth is probably somewhere in the middle… that if both sides think you are biased against them it probably means you’re playing it straight… that the extremes on both sides are equally extreme, deluded and irresponsible— these practices have rotted out, and the sooner they are done away with, the better footing political journalism will be on. Just as it should be routine for reporters to ask themselves, “am I showing undue favoritism here, am I slanting my account?” it should be routine to ask, “am I creating a false symmetry here, am I positing a phony mean?”

Fact checking is good journalism. Journalists should take a lesson from the success of the fact-checking site, Politfact.com. I have already written extensively about this one, so there is no need to repeat myself.

But don’t do it unless you are willing to do what Politifact does: tell us when a political actor is lying, or speaking falsely. Drop the pretense that there must be deception in equal measure on both sides of the partisan ledger—a lie for a lie, and untruth for an untruth—just because we, the journalists, need to show how even handed we are. The AP has started doing it, and as Greg Sargent reported, “Their fact-checking efforts are almost uniformly the most clicked and most linked pieces they produce. Journalistic fact-checking with authority, it turns out, is popular.”

This is telling us something.

So those are four things I would have political journalists do to break free from some of the pathologies I wrote about last week. Let me conclude by listing a few things journalists should be strongly for or against. In the same way they are strongly for and often take action on freedom of information issues, they should…

Be strongly for transparency, which means our ability to see into the house of power. It is part of a commitment to transparency that one respects what is genuinely private, distinguishing it from what is truly public.

Be strongly against opacity as a tool of power.

Be strongly for accountability in government and civil society, especially where public money, human lives and people’s livelihoods are at stake. (Does David Gregory of NBC News understand what accountability is? I don’t think so.)

Be strongly against demagoguery (that’s when a leader makes use of common prejudices, false claims and false promises in order to win power…) which means trying to raise the cost of participating in it.

I mention these things because to pretend to neutrality when they’re afoot or at stake is malpractice.

 

Is not our inability to understand what is going on key to the failure of many of our institutions today? Issues such as energy, health, education - the war against terror, the financial situation - only get more confusing.

Jay is going after what I think is a core reason for this confusion. That it the POV of the press. Who tend to see all in terms of a simple two sided dynamic - right vs wrong - left versus right etc. Like a pilot who over-corrects one way and the other - this leads to confusion and in the end collapse.

In reality these issues are complex and there are not two sides but many views - they often have root causes that are well below the surface - but the POV of "he says she says" obscures all of this.

Some times there are not "sides" at all. The truth is that the world is warming up. But the POV of 2 sides means that we are stalled in our reaction. The truth is that Peak Oil is real - but we are stalled in the hope that somehow we will always have access to more cheap oil. The truth is that human health is not dependent on access to drugs and doctors but is driven by many factors not the least diet and control - but the debate is only about drugs and access.

Worse the press claim that they are above it all. Simply not true. An issue is ownership and who pays the bills. We the reader do not pay the bills, the advertisers pay. So if the news gets in the way of the interests of the bill payer well... A journalist also protects her sources, Michael Yon has been critical of General McChrystal. The result - he is kicked out of the embed. Most journalists would not dare to be critical because it would mean the end of access. Washington and other capitals are full of journalists who depend on their contacts - but they tell us that they are unbiased. Simply not true.

What Jay is saying is that we need a healthy press and that we need better rules to have such a press. A press that can help us understand what confronts us.

What he is calling for is Transparency.

Here are the best practices I found:

Resource/mission alignment:
— The case for philanthropy is linked to editorial independence and objectivity.
— The organization solicits small donations and/or other forms of grassroots support.
— The organization’s board of directors operates on a volunteer basis.

Transparency of mission and operations:
— The organization’s financial statements are posted online.
— The organization’s major donors are named online.
— The organization has clear accountability measures for its publications.

Which nonprofits incorporate all six practices? Just a few. ProPublica was one. No surprise there; the organization was built to operate under a microscope. Given its high profile, ambition and achievement, it should set the pace.

Jay Rosen asked Jim Barnett to look for steps that a Non-Profit could make if they want to be legitimate news providers.

Jim opened with this:

"the first thing I did was ditch the idea of trying to evaluate journalism or practices within the editorial process. For example, I’d suggested the presence of an advisory board as one possible marker — but one newsroom’s advisory board may have teeth, while another’s might not. There’s no way to tell from the outside what impact, if any, that kind of structure or any other have on the final product. Plus, most criticism of nonprofit journalism goes to the question of funding — not reporting, writing, and editing."

I think that this is such a helpful set of ideas - what matters is what influences you overall. How you are funded is at the heart of that issue.

And I think Blogger is a better title.  look

Bloggers	Journalists
Writes whatever	Writes what he’s told
just post it…  Crap and all	Someone edits for typos and content
Thinks Bloggers are rebels	Thinks bloggers are rebels
Gets traffic	Gets paid
Does it for the love it	Does it for the money
Utter freedom	worries about getting fired
Adds honesty to journalism	Makes Journalism a rich compost

Yea Tom!!!

Back to the main theme: the media dares not say anything too negative about financial services firms or their government operatives lest they lose access. The private sector has learned the lesson of the Bush Administration, that the threat of freezing a reporter out is a powerful weapon. I have had some well connected readers tell of story ideas that they served up in some detail that the media would not touch out of fear of alienating their sources. This is the sort of thing that one associates with banana republics, but we have been operating on that level for quite some time.

Not surprisingly, the government and large corporations were firmly in charge of the message during the crisis (remember the gap between the MSM reporting and the anger in the populace over the TARP, which was finally noted ONLY when Congress responded to a barrage of calls and e-mails and voted down TARP v. 1.0?) and perhaps more important, in pushing the, “move past that car wreck, things are really better” message. From the Pew Research Center:

Three storylines have dominated: efforts to help revive the banking sector, the battle over the stimulus package and the struggles of the U.S. auto industry. Together they accounted for nearly 40% of the economic coverage from February 1 through August 31. Other topics related to the crisis have been covered much less. As an example, all the reporting of retail sales, food prices, the impact of the crisis on Social Security and Medicare, its effect on education and the implications for health care combined accounted for just over 2% of all the economic coverage.

Actions by government officials and business leaders drove much of the coverage. The White House and federal agencies alone initiated nearly a third (32%) of economic stories studied through July 3. Business triggered another 21%. About a quarter of the stories (23%) was initiated by the press itself and did not rely on an external news trigger. Ordinary citizens and union workers combined to act as the catalyst for only 2% of the stories about the economy.

Fully 76% of the datelines on economic stories studied during the first five months of the Obama presidency were New York (44%) or metro Washington D.C. (32%). Only about one-fifth (21%) of the stories originated in any other city in the U.S., and about a quarter of those emanated from two other major media centers: Atlanta and Los Angeles…

Once the economic situation showed some signs of improvement—and the political fights over legislative action subsided—media coverage began to diminish. After accounting for 46% of the overall news coverage in February and March, for instance, coverage of the economic crisis dropped by more than half (to 21% of the newshole studied) from April through June. And in July and August, it fell even further (to 16%). The clearest example came in cable news. Once the political battles subsided, coverage fell by about two-thirds from March to April.

Notice even Pew has fallen for the party line a bit. The stock market rally started in March. That is not a sign of economic improvement (Krugman has said something along the lines of “The stock market has predicted 20 of the past 9 recoveries.”).

So what do we have? A media that predominantly bases its stories on what it is fed because it has to. Ever-leaner staffing, compressed news cycles, and access journalism all conspire to drive reporters to focus on the “must cover” news, which is to a large degree influenced by the parties that initiate the story. And that means they are increasingly in an echo chamber, spending so much time with the influential sources they feel they must cover that they start to be swayed by them. It is less intense, but not dissimilar to the effect achieved when reporters are embedded in military units. The journalists often wind up adopting the views of the people they associate with frequently (I am sure readers will add more nefarious theories in comments, but the point here is a simple: an up the center description of what has happened to the media shows it has fallen under the sway of powerful interests).

Now how do we get to the propaganda part? Not only, per Taibbi, are we getting the view of the economy from the vantage of the bankers, as opposed to a broad swathe of the population, but we now we have the media (well, this example is that odd hybrid, an MSM blog) telling us there is no outrage. From the Los Angeles Times (hat tip JohnD):

Except for Michael Moore, whose new movie posits that capitalism is one big Ponzi scheme, the news Wednesday that banks are thriving and that Wall Street analysts are in line for big bonuses this year seemed to land with all the political weight of a dull thud.

Oh sure, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said he’ll soon hold hearings on executive pay at firms that got taxpayer bailout money, like AIG and Bank of America….

But with the Dow Jones hitting 10,000 and the economy stepping back from the precipice of last fall’s collapse, there was little of that tea-party outrage that might have been expected.

Have we moved on? Arguing that the country is now more concerned with Afghanistan and healthcare, the Wall Street Journal said of bonus outrage: “That’s so last March.”

Maybe taxpayers have simply given up on Washington’s efforts to corral Wall Street.

Now why is this sort of thing (and the media was full of more subtle versions, of happy talk re Dow 10,000 and Goldman earnings) more pernicious than it might appear?

The message, quite overly, is: if you are pissed, you are in a minority. The country has moved on. Things are getting better, get with the program. Now I saw the polar opposite today. There is a group of varying sizes, depending on the topic, that e-mails among itself, mainly professional investors, analysts, economists (I’m usually on the periphery but sometimes chime in). I never saw such an angry, active, and large thread about the Goldman BS fest today. Now if people who have not suffered much, and are presumably benefitting from the market recovery are furious, it isn’t hard to imagine that what looks like complacency in the heartlands may simply be contained rage looking for an outlet.

But per the social psychology research, this “you are in a minority, you are wrong” message DOES dissuade a lot of people. It is remarkably poisonous. And it discourages people from taking concrete action. I was surprised that some people bothered to comment on a post I put up yesterday, calling on people in the Chicago area to attend some peaceful demonstrations against the banking industry during the American Bankers Association national meeting, October 25 through 27. Some people weighed in, saying (basically) “don’t bother”.

I suppose it makes a difference whether one is old enough to remember the 1960s. Because people in large numbers got out and protested, two sets of changes that seemed impossible came about: civil rights for blacks and an end to the US involvement in Vietnam (if you read the histories, the military and intelligence experts were on the whole persuaded it was an unwinnable war, but it was seen as too costly to US prestige for America to withdraw).

And even if the effort you make narrowly is not successful (does any one person’s effort have much impact?) it breeds apathy and cynicism to suggest that doing nothing is the best course of action. If nothing else, it is better for one’s psyche to do what one can, however small, to make a difference.

Now America does not have a tradition of taking to the streets; demonstrations and rallies historically are working class affairs. But the middle class is on a path of downward mobility while the elites continue to take the cream. The widening gap might waken some impulses that have been dormant in the American psyche.

What I get most annoyed about is the constant myth of "Journalism" that is is unbiased. In reality the mass media is more like Pravda everyday.

The bias is deep and is a POV bias.

Naked Capitalism offers a strong argument for this accusation.

The more accurate assessment of what is going on is found on the blogosphere. The economy, health, warfare - powerful forces keep the lid on a real debate.

Part of this is about who owns the media, the other is about access.

Enough already. This is not CBS in the 1960's. The mass media have got the Koolaid POV for decades.