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

Over at the National Post, Matt Gurney recently stated that "Facebook groups are just about the dumbest way to advocate a political cause." His comments echo those of a number of pundits and politicians who give online activism – and Facebook groups in particular – short shrift.

For a variety of reasons online activism is discounted as not being “real” politics. Well, Facebook isn’t going to remake politics, but it does matter – something the explosive growth of the 150,000 person (and rising) group Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament and the first anniversary of the anti-coalition Facebook campaign offers us a chance to reflect on. So here are three lessons on online activism for the Prime Minister, the news media and the rest of us.

What a week this has bene for Facebook!
David Eaves here in the Globe makes 3 good points:

1. There are 150,000 members of the Prorogation Group - a built in audience and multipliers for any good story that follows - leverage is available

2. Joining a Facebook Group is easy - builds a bigger group than marching and you march to get an audience anyway don't you? Easy makes FB more attractive as a political amplifier as the PM of Britain said in his interview with Mark Z last week

3. FB groups are rallies - they make it very very hard to hide poor decisions in politics

Why is the mainstream media so spineless and not showing us this? The real news is gathered today by the so called "amateurs" like this or by the beyond the pale organizations such as Rolling Stone.

This footage is breathtakingly disturbing - it is all new as far as I am concerned - have you seen anything like it? What if this was on the news every night - what would happen?

Then ask why we don't see this........?

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.

It is easy to give up hope right now. But for all my Doom Saying - I am very optimistic.

This video will show you why. It is the basis of a book I am writing where I do my best to show that we as a species may be living through the stages of development that a person will.

It is our relationship with Food primarily that drives each stage - with help from our prevailing use of energy and our communication system.

My call is that we are ending our Narcissistic Teen Age and entering the New Parent Age where we Partner with Nature to create the best future of our children.

I was lucky and spoke second - what was amazing was that nearly every talk that followed - none had spoken to each other before - made the point of using Nature as our guide.

For example:

• The 6 employees in "dining services".  (Dining services!)

• The 4 employees in the "office of the CEO"  (I'm a CEO.  How come I don't have 4 people in my office?  Oh, wait, I have 12 people in my office.  The whole editorial team!)

• The 17 employees in IT.  (What do these 17 folks do, exactly?  Maintain Microsoft Office?  These aren't the folks who build and maintain the web site, by the way. There are another 10 of those.)

• The 19 employees in accounting.

• The 21 employees in manufacturing and distribution (M&D).

• The $102 million the company spent last year manufacturing, distributing, mailing, and managing circulation of the print magazine.  It's worth noting that this was actually a lot less than the the company made from selling the magazine ($80 million) and advertising in the magazine ($70 million).  If there's good news here, in fact, it's that even factoring in the $29 million cost of editorial, the money taken in from the magazine ($150 million) was more than the cost to produce it ($131 million).  Well, unless you count advertising and marketing ($19 million).  And corporate overhead ($55 million).

• And then, yes, the 92 employees in print editorial and the 18 employees in online editorial, and the rest of the publication's 379 employees worldwide.

Here are the detailed financials.  And here's the relevant employee chart from the book:

Isn't this fascinating! Here is the real root of the Print vs Online debate - the costs of the old system. Bloat Bloat Bloat.

I see 3 big areas here. The key to the kingdom is the online - But IT are in charge and they hate this. They are the people who tell you why not. Note the online folks at Newsweek are subservient to IT.

What is the real role today of IT? Is it not to have the most robust network? It is not to have a unique impenetrable kingdom.

What is the world of "Online" - it is to have the most flexible architecture and to embody the editorial context into this.

Then you can rebuild your editorial staff to work in the new global online context - you can curate masses of citizen content and have millions of stringers.

So in the process you can lose the magazine.

Newsweek have a great brand that could really help make this shift. As a citizen how would you feel if your story was in Newsweek?

So how are you doing? What are you really spending your money on? Spending it on killing your media business or in saving it?

The Maddow Blog is one of the more ambitious attempts to date by an MSNBC star trying to rise above the low expectations of the genre.

"We felt like we had an audience that was very wired," said Ms. Maddow. "But we weren't providing a really hospitable environment for them."

Late last year, an opening came up on Ms. Maddow's show for a new segment-producer head. After some discussion, Ms. Maddow and her team decided they'd rather spend the money on someone  who would focus primarily on the Web. Eventually, they hired Laura Conaway, a former Village Voice editor who more recently had been working for the star-crossed NPR-for-young-people show The Bryant Park Project. (The former host of the BPP, Alison Stewart, is married to Bill Wolff, the executive producer of The Rachel Maddow Show). 

Ms. Maddow said that she had long admired Ms. Conaway's work at the BPP, which had a lively Web presence. "We decided to take away resources from producing the TV show in order to hire Laura," said Ms. Maddow.

Over the course of several months, Ms. Maddow and her team worked with people at www.msnbc.msn.com to create a staff blog with a look, feel, and metabolism significantly different from the portal's typical template. The result is a blog that is a distinctive looking mix of political news, liberal analysis, embedded videos (often to non-MSNBC footage), and links to recommended articles.

Currently, Ms. Conaway is the most frequent contributor to The Maddow Blog, which also features the bylines of five or six other staff members on the show, including Ms. Maddow, Mr. Wolff, and web producer Will Femia. "I want people who work on this show to feel like they have a place to write directly under their own name," said Ms. Maddow. "It doesn't all have to be me."

Ms. Maddow said that she thinks of the blog as a way of capturing, sharing, and enhancing the rollicking conversation that goes on among her staff on a daily basis as they prepare for that night's show. Rather than serving as a distraction or as a perfunctory obligation, said Ms. Maddow, the new blog has already begun to provide fodder for the TV show.

"The blog has ended up being an engine for the show," said Ms. Maddow. "It's a new way to collect information. We post every morning a bunch of stuff we're reading to get ready for the show. People get on-line and point us to new stuff. We've had a lot of story ideas for the show generated by people commenting on the blog."

Ms. Maddow said that so far the major concern of the digital folks--that the text-based re-design would result in a drop in the substantial number of people coming to the old Web site to watch segments from the show--hasn't materialized.

"We've done fine," said Ms. Maddow. "We haven't paid a price in terms of overall video clicks. That hasn't suffered. And we're able to do all of this additional content that is, for me, rewarding and rewards the show in terms of ideas."

"We also do just some dumb stuff on there," said Ms. Maddow. "It's a good place to be goofy."

Laura was the heart and soul of Bryant Park who attracted a fiercely loyal group of stringer fans (Me included). She did the same at Planet Money. Now she has helped Rachel Maddow do the same for her show.

This is not a coincidence. It is all about Laura's natural sweetness and her inquiring mind. It has nothing to do with tools and has everything to do with who she is as a person.

It's not about the tools - it's about the human element.