H/t Jim Romenesko.
Category: Journalism
So, Now That We Have a Week of “Scandals”………
The Obama administration has come out in favor of a media shield law that they had previously tried to delay and kill:
Under fire over the Justice Department’s use of a broad subpoena to obtain calling records of Associated Press reporters in connection with a leak investigation, the Obama administration sought on Wednesday to revive legislation that would provide greater protections to reporters in keeping their sources and communications confidential.
President Obama’s Senate liaison, Ed Pagano, on Wednesday morning called the office of Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and asked him to reintroduce a version of a bill that he had pushed in 2009 called the Free Flow of Information Act, a White House official said.
The bill would create a federal media shield law, akin to ones most states already have, giving journalists some protections from penalties for refusing to identify confidential sources in federal law enforcement proceedings, and generally enabling journalists to ask a federal judge to quash subpoenas for their phone records.
………
The top Democrat on the committee, Representative John Conyers of Michigan, noted that he had sponsored a version of the Free Flow of Information Act that passed the House twice when it was under Democratic control. He said he would reintroduce his version, too, and he said he hoped that Republicans — who until recently had called for more aggressive investigations of leaks — would support it.
The version the Obama administration is seeking to revive, however, is the one that was chiefly sponsored by Mr. Schumer, which was negotiated between the newspaper industry and the White House. It was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee in a bipartisan 15-to-4 vote in December 2009. But while it was awaiting a floor vote in 2010, a furor over leaking arose after WikiLeaks began publishing archives of secret government documents, and the bill never received a vote.
In a statement confirming that he would reintroduce the legislation, Mr. Schumer referred to the controversy over the subpoena of A.P. calling records, saying: “This kind of law would balance national security needs against the public’s right to the free flow of information. At minimum, our bill would have ensured a fairer, more deliberate process in this case.”
So, they are supporting the fake bill that they and Chuck Schumer drew up a while ago in an attempt to kill Conyer’s real reform.
Same sh%$, different day.
Hed of the Day
PLAGUE of SEX CRAZED MONSTER GRASSHOPPERS to hit East Coast
From El Reg, of course.
This Sucks
The Boston Phoenix has just shut down.
Boston’s alt-weekly is no more.
Bradley Manning Speaks
Somehow or other, the Freedom of the Press Foundation managed to get a tape of Bradley Manning’s statement to the court:
The court-martial proceeding of Bradley Manning has, rather ironically, been shrouded in extreme secrecy, often exceeding even that which prevails at Guantanamo military commissions. This secrecy prompted the Center for Constitutional Rights to commence formal legal action on behalf of several journalists and activists, including myself, to compel greater transparency. One particularly oppressive rule governing the Manning trial has barred not only all video or audio recordings of the proceedings, but also any photographs being taken of Manning or even transcripts made of what is said in court. Combined with the prohibition on all press interviews with him, this extraordinary secrecy regime has meant that, in the two-and-a-half years since his arrest, the world has been prevented, literally, from hearing Manning’s voice. That changes today.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), the group I recently helped found and on whose board I sit, has received a full, unedited audio recording of the one-hour statement Manning made in court two weeks ago, and this morning has published that recording in full.
The full audio:
Glenn Greenwald (link) is correct. The level of paranoia and secrecy is truly bizarre, and when juxtaposed with his pretrial torture (really, that’s what it was), the intent is clear, to create a precedent which criminalizes much of what constitutes investigative journalism.
This Explains a Lot About Bob Woodward
The author of a biography on John Belushi compared his understanding of the life, and death, to Bob Woodward’s account, the book Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, and finds the Washington Post scribe’s account to be bizarrely inaccurate.
Tanner Colby is not suggesting that Woodward fabricating anything, but rather that he is completely incompetent when it comes to putting the facts he has in an accurate context:
A little more than a week ago, during an interview with Politico, Bob Woodward came forward to claim he’d been threatened in an email by a “senior White House official” for daring to reveal certain details about the negotiations over the budget sequester. The White House responded by releasing the email exchange Woodward was referring to, which turned out to be nothing more than a cordial exchange between the reporter and Obama’s economic adviser, Gene Sperling, who was clearly implying nothing more than that Woodward would “regret” taking a position that would soon be shown to be false.
A rather trivial scandal, but the incident did manage to raise important questions about Woodward’s behavior. Was he cynically trumping up the administration’s “threat,” or does he just not know how to read an email? Pretty soon, those questions tipped over into the standard Beltway discussion that transpires anytime Woodward does anything. How accurate is his reporting? Does he deserve his legendary status?
I believe I can offer some interesting answers to those questions. Thirty-one years ago, on March 5, 1982, Saturday Night Live and Animal House star John Belushi died of a drug overdose at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles—which, bear with me a moment, has more to do with the current coverage of the budget sequester than you might initially think.
………
Twenty years later, in 2004, Judy Belushi hired me, then an aspiring comedy writer, to help her with a new biography of John, this one titled Belushi: A Biography. As her coauthor, I handled most of the legwork, including all of the interviews and most of the research. What started as a fun project turned out to be a rather fascinating and unique experiment. Over the course of a year, page by page, source by source, I re-reported and rewrote one of Bob Woodward’s books. As far as I know, it’s the only time that’s ever been done.
………
Wired is an infuriating piece of work. There’s a reason Woodward’s critics consistently come off as hysterical ninnies: He doesn’t make Jonah Lehrer–level mistakes. There’s never a smoking gun like an outright falsehood or a brazen ethical breach. And yet, in the final product, a lot of what Woodward writes comes off as being not quite right—some of it to the point where it can feel quite wrong. There’s no question that he frequently ferrets out information that other reporters don’t. But getting the scoop is only part of the equation. Once you have the facts, you have to present those facts in context and in proportion to other facts in order to accurately reflect reality. It’s here that Woodward fails.
………
Woodward also makes peculiar decisions about what facts he uses as evidence. His detractors like to say that he’s little more than a stenographer—and they’re right. In Wired, he takes what he is told and simply puts it down in chronological order with no sense of proportionality, nuance, or understanding.
………
Of all the people I interviewed, SNL writer and current Sen. Al Franken, referencing his late comedy partner Tom Davis, offered the most apt description of Woodward’s one-sided approach to the drug use in Belushi’s story: “Tom Davis said the best thing about Wired,” Franken told me. “He said it’s as if someone wrote a book about your college years and called it Puked. And all it was about was who puked, when they puked, what they ate before they puked and what they puked up. No one read Dostoevsky, no one studied math, no one fell in love, and nothing happened but people puking.”
Here is the money quote:
Whenever people ask me about John Belushi and the subject of Wired comes up, I say it’s like someone wrote a biography of Michael Jordan in which all the stats and scores are correct, but you come away with the impression that Michael Jordan wasn’t very good at playing basketball.
It’s not that Woodward is a manipulator with a partisan agenda. He doesn’t alter key evidence in order to serve a particular thesis. Inconsequential details about rehearsing movie dialogue are rendered just as ham-handedly as critical facts about Belushi’s cocaine addiction. Woodward has an unmatched skill for digging up information, but he doesn’t know what to do with that information once he finds it.
My thesis about Woodward, and I’ve thought this for a while is that he’s kind of a big Hoover* for information, but he needs someone who can connect the dots to create actual meaning.
As I have followed Woodward’s solo career, I have increasingly given more credit to Bernstein.
*The vacuum cleaner, not the former FBI director.
He Didn’t Tweet a Picture of His Penis to a Football Player’s Imaginary Penis, So it Does Not Matter………*
This explains why the media has largely ignored the revelation in the latest release of the Federal Reserve’s meeting minutes from 2007, which is that Timothy Geithner was leaking changes to the discount window to the big banks ahead of their official release:
In the summer of 2007, as storm clouds gathered over the world’s financial system, then-New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner allegedly informed the Bank of America and other banks about the possibility the U.S. central bank would lower one of its critical interest rates, according to a senior Fed official.
Jeffrey Lacker, the head of the Richmond Fed, originally raised the allegation during a Fed conference call in August 2007, and he stuck to his 5-year-old claim against the current U.S. treasury secretary in a statement provided to Reuters on Friday.
“From conversations I had prior to the video conference call on August 16, 2007, I was aware of discussions among a few large banks about borrowing from their discount windows to support the asset backed commercial paper market,” Lacker said in the statement. “My understanding was that (New York Fed) President Geithner had discussed a reduction in the discount rate with these banks in connection with these initiatives.”
The folks at Zero Hedge were the first ones to notice this, and they nail it when they say, “[J]ust when we thought our opinion of the outgoing Treasury Secretary and former NY Fed head Tim Geithner, whose TurboTax incompetence is now legendary, couldn’t get lower, it got lower. Much lower.“
Here is the pertinent section from the transcript of the August 16, 2007 conference call:
MR. LACKER. If I could just follow up on that, Mr. Chairman.
CHAIRMAN BERNANKE. Yes, go ahead.
MR. LACKER. Vice Chairman Geithner, did you say that [the banks] are unaware of what we’re considering or what we might be doing with the discount rate?
VICE CHAIRMAN GEITHNER. Yes.
MR. LACKER. Vice Chairman Geithner, I spoke with Ken Lewis, President and CEO of Bank of America, this afternoon, and he said that he appreciated what Tim Geithner was arranging by way of changes in the discount facility. So my information is different from that.
CHAIRMAN BERNANKE. Okay. Thank you. Go ahead, Vice Chairman Geithner.
VICE CHAIRMAN GEITHNER. Well, I cannot speak for Ken Lewis, but I think they have sought to see whether they could understand a little more clearly the scope of their rights and our current policy with respect to the window. The only thing I’ve done is to try to help them understand—and I’m sure that’s been true across the System—what the scope of that is because these people generally don’t use the window and they don’t really understand in some sense what it’s about.
They also note that there was a sudden and unexplained jump of 50 points (4%) in the S&P 500 in just 1 hour. (Note that they also make a compelling circumstantial case that Geithner’s schedule indicates that he leaked this information)
BTW, as ZH also notes, the Fed’s 5 year delay in the release of records means that Geithner has outlasted the statute of limitations.
Awfully convenient, nu?
We won’t have a fix to our financial system until Geithner, and his mentor Robert Rubin are under criminal investigation for what they dud.
*Not my words, but a slight reworking of sentiments expressed by JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Just Go Read Matt Taibbi
He is on fire when writing about the nature of the bank bailouts:
………
Through behavior like this, the government has turned the entire financial system into a kind of vast confidence game – a Ponzi-like scam in which the value of just about everything in the system is inflated because of the widespread belief that the government will step in to prevent losses. Clearly, a government that’s already in debt over its eyes for the next million years does not have enough capital on hand to rescue every Citigroup or Regions Bank in the land should they all go bust tomorrow. But the market is behaving as if Daddy will step in to once again pay the rent the next time any or all of these kids sets the couch on fire and skips out on his security deposit. Just like an actual Ponzi scheme, it works only as long as they don’t have to make good on all the promises they’ve made. They’re building an economy based not on real accounting and real numbers, but on belief. And while the signs of growth and recovery in this new faith-based economy may be fake, one aspect of the bailout has been consistently concrete: the broken promises over executive pay.
………
The implications here go far beyond the question of whether Dimon and Co. committed insider trading by buying and selling stock while they had access to material nonpublic information about the bailouts. The broader and more pressing concern is the clear implication that by failing to act, federal regulators have tacitly approved the nondisclosure. Instead of trusting the markets to do the right thing when provided with accurate information, the government has instead channeled Jack Nicholson – and decided that the public just can’t handle the truth.
………
So what exactly did the bailout accomplish? It built a banking system that discriminates against community banks, makes Too Big to Fail banks even Too Bigger to Failier, increases risk, discourages sound business lending and punishes savings by making it even easier and more profitable to chase high-yield investments than to compete for small depositors. The bailout has also made lying on behalf of our biggest and most corrupt banks the official policy of the United States government. And if any one of those banks fails, it will cause another financial crisis, meaning we’re essentially wedded to that policy for the rest of eternity – or at least until the markets call our bluff, which could happen any minute now.
Other than that, the bailout was a smashing success.
Seriously, just go read, and then scream at your congresscritters.
Do Responsible Gun Activists Even Exist?
I’m sure there are a few responsible gun owners out there, but the Gun Nuts With Small Penises™ crowd seem determined to show that there is no such thing as a responsible gun owner:
A suburban New York newspaper that ignited a furor by publishing the identities of thousands of residents who hold gun licenses has hired armed security to guard its staff after receiving an intimidating e-mail, a police report said.
Among a “large amount of negative correspondence” that White Plains, New York-based Journal News has received since publishing permit holders’ names was one e-mail in which the sender “wondered what would get in her mail next,” according to a Clarkstown, New York, police report obtained by Reuters on Wednesday.
The editor, Caryn McBride, told police the newspaper hired a private security company whose “employees are armed and will be on site during business hours,” the report said. The guards are protecting the newspaper’s staff and Rockland County offices in West Nyack, New York.
Police told McBride the e-mail did not contain an explicit threat that could compel authorities to take action against the sender. The menacing e-mail was reported to police on December 28.
Let’s see what happens here.
You have an argument over gun control.
The people gun control advocates call gun rights advocates dangerous and crazy.
The gun control advocates respond by threatening the lives of gun control advocates.
QED, gun control advocates are dangerous and crazy.
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Wanker of the Day
Brendan Nyhan, who seems to think that fact checkers should put their thumbs on the scale so they can condemn the standard political fibbers and the pathological liars in equal numbers.
Read the exchange in the comments between him and Dan Froomkin, where the latter eviscerates Nyhan for his dumb-ass “a pox on both their houses” bullsh%$.
Shame on the Columbia Journalism review for publishing this crap.
This Should Not be a Surprise
The inestimable Murray Waas uncovers the fact that Wall Street’s “favorite private eye” engaged in a systematic spying and character assassination in support of Alan Stanford’s Ponzi scheme:
In 2006, Allen Stanford had yet to be identified as the mastermind of one of the largest and longest-running Ponzi schemes in U.S. history, but he faced mounting pressure.
Federal securities examiners were pushing for an investigation into his investment operation, which tens of thousands of soon-to-be victims had entrusted with nearly $7 billion. Some of the Texas financier’s own employees were threatening to tell authorities what they knew about his fraud.
Stanford was so concerned that a former senior State Department official named Jonathan Winer might expose his colossal con game that he ordered an investigation into Winer’s private life, according to Stanford’s previously secret records obtained by McClatchy.
Kroll Inc., an international corporate intelligence firm that Stanford had retained for over a decade, obliged. Tom Cash, a Miami-based a managing director of Kroll, soon informed Stanford in an email that he was looking into whether Winer’s ex-wife was a lesbian, according to the internal documents obtained by McClatchy.
………
They looked into the sexual orientation of Winer’s ex-wife, and Stanford used the information collected to blackmail regulators, politicians, and journalists.
What’s more, it worked:
SEC examiners concluded as early as 1997 that Stanford was running a massive Ponzi scheme, agency records show. But Stanford was able to stall the opening of any formal inquiry for a full decade, much like the man behind the only bigger U.S. Ponzi scheme, Bernard Madoff.
The biggest whopper told by Kroll, when a representative says that “its employees had no clue they were helping to conceal the second-biggest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history.”
No, they were told to collect information so that Stanford could blackmail people, and it’s clear from the emails from Stanford that this was what he charged them to do.
Sorry, but that dog don’t hunt.
Even if they did not have specific information about Stanford being a fraud, they had to have known from what he wanted that he intended to use this information for to extort silence from people.
H/t Felix Salmon.
Word!
Grace under pressure
In protest of increasing management interference in the news (primarily of the right wing variety) two co-anchors on stations WVII and WFVX in Bangor, Maine, announced their resignations on the air, and later cited excessive management interference in the news process:
Citing a longstanding battle with upper management over journalistic practices at their Bangor TV stations, news co-anchors Cindy Michaels and Tony Consiglio announced their resignations at the end of Tuesday’s 6 p.m. newscast.
Michaels and Consiglio, who have a combined 12½ years’ service at WVII (Channel 7) and sister station WFVX (Channel 22), shocked staff members and viewers with their joint resignations Tuesday evening.
“I just wanted to know that I was doing the best job I could and was being honest and ethical as a journalist, and I thought there were times when I wasn’t able to do that,” said Consiglio, a northeastern Connecticut native who broke in with WVII as a sports reporter in April 2006.
Not everyone was shocked by the on-air resignations.
“No, that was unfortunate, but not unexpected,” said Mike Palmer, WVII/WFVX vice president and general manager. “We’ll hire experienced people to fill these positions sooner rather than later.”
Neither reporter had told anyone of their decisions before Tuesday’s newscast.
“We figured if we had tendered our resignations off the air, we would not have been allowed to say goodbye to the community on the air and that was really important for us to do that,” said Michaels, the station’s news director, who has spent six of her 15 years in Bangor’s radio and TV market at WVII.
Both Michaels, 46, and Consiglio, 28, said frustration over the way they were allowed or told to do their jobs — something that has been steadily mounting for the last four years — became too much for them.
For what it’s worth, Mike Palmer, the aforementioned general manager, got some national ink in 2006, when he issued an edict forbidding any coverage of anthropogenic climate change until, “Bar Harbor is underwater.”
The fact that they surprised management by quitting on the air is telling. They knew that the could not trust them.
Big surprise that one of the stations is a Fox affiliate.
H/t A Siegel at the big orange Borg.
Stewart Misses the Point
Jon Stewart faults his own journalistic chops on l’affaire Petraeus:
Yes, he interviewed Paula Broadwell, and did not pick up anything untoward, but so did a lot of people.
What he has is enough self-awareness to realize that he missed a big story.
It could be worse. Robert MacNeil, formerly of the MacNeil/Lehrer report, on November 22, 1963, at Dealy Plaza, he ran into a man, and asked where he could find a phone.
The man he ran into was Lee Harvey Oswald.
Journalists don’t have any more senses than the rest of us, and Jon Stewart has an almost unrivaled ability to call out bullsh%$ in a clear and concise matter.
I do think, and Jon Stewart would agree, that it’s f%$#ed up that a comedian is arguably one of the finest journalists on cable today, but we are living in a f%$#ed up world.
Greek Journalist Acquitted
Costas Vaxevanis, who was persecuted prosecuted for publishing a list of Greeks with large Swiss bank accounts, has been acquitted:
A Greek journalist who published the names of more than 2,000 of his compatriots who held Swiss bank accounts was acquitted on Thursday in a case that touched a nerve over the role of tax evasion in the country’s debt crisis.
The trial of Costas Vaxevanis, editor of the weekly Hot Doc magazine, had aroused international concern and intense interest among Greeks hit by the impact of the country’s economic collapse and angry at the privileges of the elite.
He could have faced up to two year years in prison on charges of violating data privacy laws that Vaxevanis said were politically motivated and the result of politicians protecting an “untouchable” wealthy class.
His speedy arrest and trial following publication of the “Lagarde List” at the weekend – so named for Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund – touched a nerve in near-bankrupt Greece, where rampant tax evasion is undermining a struggle to cut public costs and raise revenue under an EU/IMF bailout deal.
It also enraged many who are already furious over the failure of consecutive governments to crack down on the rich while years of recession have wiped out a fifth of economic output and hammered middle-class living standards.
As the old saying goes, “A fish rots from the head.”
Former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson notes, in situations like this, the first priority really has to be breaking the grip of the corrupt elites has over society and over the economy.
That is not going to happen, because the Greek leadership is incapable of doing this, and the corrupt elites in the rest of the EU do not want someone telling regulators where the bodied are buried.
I Bet Those Log Cabin Republicans Feel Stupid Now
Yesterday, I said that the Log Cabin Republicans were idiots for believing that Mitt Rmoney would sign ENDA, which would outlaw workplace discrimination against gays.
Well if you are a gay Republican and think that Romney is going to protect your job from bigots, the news that he actively prevented sane sex parents from being listed on their children’s birth certificates:
It seemed like a minor adjustment. To comply with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling that legalized gay marriage in 2003, the state Registry of Vital Records and Statistics said it needed to revise its birth certificate forms for babies born to same-sex couples. The box for “father” would be relabeled “father or second parent,” reflecting the new law.
But to then-Governor Mitt Romney, who opposed child-rearing by gay couples, the proposal symbolized unacceptable changes in traditional family structures.
He rejected the Registry of Vital Records plan and insisted that his top legal staff individually review the circumstances of every birth to same-sex parents. Only after winning approval from Romney’s lawyers could hospital officials and town clerks across the state be permitted to cross out by hand the word “father” on individual birth certificates, and then write in “second parent,” in ink.
………
Romney expressed similar beliefs during a speech in 2005 to socially conservative voters in South Carolina, as he was beginning to be viewed as a serious candidate for president.
“Some gays are actually having children born to them,” he declared.”It’s not right on paper. It’s not right in fact. Every child has a right to a mother and father.”
Why on earth do gay Republicans think that Rmoney will protect them in the workplace if he wants to deny them basic rights as parents?
Seriously, Mitt Romney just sold you the Brooklyn Bridge.
BTW, as a note, Murray Waas wrote this, and I’ve always been impressed by his journalism, and he got this story despite attempts to cover this up:
In a preliminary response this month, the Department of Public Health withheld most of the documents because they reflected conversations between lawyers working for the state and “are therefore exempt from disclosure by the attorney-client privilege.” The Globe subsequently obtained many of the documents from a source who requested anonymity.
Here’s a piece of advice if Murray comes calling about a story, tell him the truth, because he’ll get it anyway.
Murray Waas is now officially on my list of “People I Do Not Want to Piss Off”.
Megan “Math is Hard” McArdle Is Worse Than I Thought
Due diligence, what due diligence?
I’ve always thought of her as a partisan hack, but it turns out that it’s worse than that. She is yet another bit of Koch brothers bought and paid for AstroTurf:
Megan McArdle is a Koch-trained conservative activist working as a business journalist and pundit. She earned her MBA from the University of Chicago, received journalism training at the Kochs’ flagship libertarian think-tank, the Institute for Humane Studies, and has used her position at The Atlantic and, most recently, Newsweek/ The Daily Beast, to run cover for and promote Koch interests and the Republican Party agenda. In early 2009, a GOP outfit backed by the Kochs hailed McArdle for her “leadership role in … re-branding the Republican party.” McArdle continues to conceal the extent of her deeply conflicted relationships with the Koch influence-peddling machine.
There is a line between being a hack, and being a wholly owned subsidiary of the Koch brothers.
If you hire someone while they are paid agents of an entity that they cover, you are making the integrity of your news organization a joke.
I have made the same argument about NPR’s religion reporter, Barbara Bradley Hagerty, who interestingly enough is the sister of the multi-millionaire owner of MCardle’s employer The Atlantic, David Bradley. (The world is weird that way)
There are some good people at The Atlantic, but even before these revelations, it was clear that giving McArdle a megaphone was a blight on the magazine.
I’m Impressed
Egypt’s President Mohamed Mursi has issued a decree ordering that journalists who have been detained under Egypts media laws must be released:
Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi issued a decree barring the detention of journalists awaiting trial, the state-run Middle East News Agency reported, citing presidential spokesman Yasser Ali.
In response to Mursi’s action yesterday, Egypt’s public prosecutor ordered the release of Islam Afifi, editor-in-chief of the independent newspaper Al-Dostour, MENA reported, citing Deputy Prosecutor General Adel el-Saeed. He was freed late yesterday, the Associated Press reported.
Egyptian journalists and rights groups have described the prosecution of Afifi, whose newspaper has been critical of the Muslim Brotherhood, as a benchmark of press freedom under Mursi and the most aggressive action by Islamists against what they portray as biased media coverage.
This was not something that I would have expected, but my guess is that he he is much more forward looking in his views of free speech and society than the generals we have been backing all these years.
But I think that we will still see a full court press from the usual suspects at the Council for Foreign Relations screaming “Islamist”.
It Appears that McClatchy Employes the Only People Who Practice Journalism in Washington, DC
Because it appears that the rest of the Washington press corps(e) allow administration officials to dictate and re-edit their quotes:
To our staff and to our readers:
As you are aware, reporters from The New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg and others are agreeing to give government sources the right to clear and alter quotes as a prerequisite to granting an interview.
To be clear, it is the bureau’s policy that we do not alter accurate quotes from any source. And to the fullest extent possible, we do not make deals that we will clear quotes as a condition of interviews.
With the government trying to do more of the public’s business in secret, the demands that interviews be conducted off the record is growing. While it puts us at a disadvantage, we should argue strenuously for on-the-record interviews with government officials.
When they absolutely refuse, we have only two options. First, halt the interview and attempt to find the information elsewhere. In those cases, our stories should say the official declined comment. Second, we can go ahead with the interview with the straightforward response that whatever ultimately is used will be published without change in tone, emphasis or exact language.
The fact that McClatchy is alone in taking such a position is troubling, to say the least..
H/t Taylor Marsh
I Wonder if This Will Effect Coverage of Outsourcing
Romenesko is reporting on a This American Life story about how a local news service is using overseas reporters and having them use aliases in order to conceal the fact:
The latest “This American Life” looks at hyperlocal content provider Journatic and interviews Journatic writer-editor Ryan Smith, who reveals that the company uses fake bylines for its Filipino writers — or did, until “TAL” blew the whistle on them.
Smith tells TAL’s Sarah Koenig that “when I ended up looking at the names on a lot of the stories [he edited], the names on the stories that were published weren’t the ones that I saw had written the stories.”
One piece, for example, had the byline of “Ginny Cox,” when the story was actually written by Gisele Bautista in the Philippines.
Producer Koenig says: “Looking at the computer system that the company uses to manage its stories, it seems that when Gisele worked on this real esate story, there was a button called SELECT ALIAS, and when she clicked on it, she had a choice: she could either be Ginny Cox, or Glenda Smith.
Journatic and the Chicago Tribune’s TribLocal have used other fake bylines for stories written by Filipino writers, including Jimmy Finkel, Carrie Reed, Jay Brownstone and Amy Anderson.
Romenensko (and apparently TAL), are focusing on the journalistic ethic issues of fake bylines.
I’m actually more interested in the effect that this will have on the coverage of outsourcing and moving overseas that we see from the mainstream media.
I have always felt that one of the conceits which gave us generally laudatory coverage of moving jobs overseas was the conceit that reporting could not be outsourced.
Now that they know that it’s their jobs on the line, I wonder if the tenor of the stories will change.