Author: Dan Kennedy

Godwin’s law, the speaker and the Concord Monitor

Click to watch video at Patch.com

(This commentary is also online at the Huffington Post and at the New England First Amendment Center.)

Godwin’s law came to New Hampshire earlier this year. And Speaker of the House Bill O’Brien is retaliating against the Concord Monitor in a manner that may violate the First Amendment.

For those unfamiliar with the phrase, Godwin’s law — first espoused by Mike Godwin, a lawyer and veteran Internet free-speech activist — pertains to the tendency of online debate to devolve into Nazi analogies. As Godwin put it some years ago, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

Maybe it’s the Internet effect, but the Nazification of real-world political debate has been under way for some time now. And so it was in mid-May, when state Rep. Steve Vaillancourt, a Republican, grew frustrated with what he saw as efforts by Speaker O’Brien, also a Republican, to silence him. So Vaillancourt directed a toxic remark at O’Brien: “Seig Heil.” He was ejected from the chamber and forced to apologize.

Enter Mike Marland, who draws editorial cartoons for the Concord Monitor. He depicted O’Brien with a Hitler-style mustache, holding a razor. The caption: “If the mustache fits …” You can see the cartoon here, along with a commentary by Monitor editor Felice Belman. Despite having written an editorial taking Vaillancourt to task for his Third Reich-style outburst, Belman defended Marland’s cartoon in defiance of Republican demands that the paper apologize:

When Marland submitted the O’Brien cartoon, there was significant discussion here among the senior editors and our publisher about whether to put it into the paper. In the end, we are not Marland’s censors. He is entitled to his view of the speaker, and his views are his own. This cartoon was harsh, no doubt. But it seemed on point, given last week’s circus. In fact, several Monitor letter writers have made a similar point — in words, if not images.

There matters stood until last Friday, when O’Brien held a news conference in his Statehouse office — and banned two Monitor reporters from attending. Concord Patch editor Tony Schinella, who was among those covering the event, wrote that the reporters, Annmarie Timmins and Matt Spolar, “were told they weren’t invited and were held at bay at the door.” Schinella also shot video of the reporters being turned away (above), and of O’Brien refusing to answer a question as to why he wouldn’t let them in. (Timmins’ own video of the encounter makes for must-see viewing as well.)

O’Brien’s spokeswoman later released a statement: “When the Concord Monitor proves they have chosen to become a responsible media outlet, we’ll be happy to invite them to future media events.”

As the Monitor put it in an editorial, “It’s hard to know which is more startling: a politician attempting to pick his own press corps or the notion that a politician — or a politician’s mouthpiece — gets to decide what constitutes ‘a responsible media outlet.’ Are these people new to this country?”

Now, depending on your point of view, you might think O’Brien’s behavior was either boorish or principled. But perhaps you wouldn’t question his right to do it. Indeed, even the Monitor editorial included this: “There’s nothing requiring O’Brien to let the Monitor into his press conference.”

In fact, though, O’Brien may well have been interfering with the Monitor’s First Amendment right to cover the news.

Several decades ago, a similar situation unfolded in Hawaii, where an aggressive reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin named Richard Borreca butted heads with the mayor, Frank Fasi. Fasi decided to ban Borreca from regularly scheduled news conferences at his City Hall office. The Star-Bulletin went to court. And in the 1974 case of Borreca v. Fasi, U.S. District Court Judge Samuel King ruled that Fasi had to open his news conferences to all reporters. King wrote:

A free press is not necessarily an angelic press. Newspapers take sides, especially in political contests. Newspaper reporters are not always accurate and objective. They are subject to criticism, and the right of a governmental official to criticize is within First Amendment guarantees.

But when criticism transforms into an attempt to use the powers of governmental office to intimidate or to discipline the press or one of its members because of what appears in print, a compelling governmental interest that cannot be served by less restrictive means must be shown for such use to meet Constitutional standards. No compelling governmental interest has been shown or even claimed here.

Judge King made it clear that no member of the press was entitled to special privileges. If the mayor wanted to grant interviews to some reporters but not others, that was his prerogative. If he refused to answer a reporter’s questions, that was within his rights as well. But he could not discriminate against some members of the press when scheduling a formal, official event such as a news conference.

The parallel between the Honolulu and Concord situations is pretty obvious, though it’s impossible to say whether a different court would come to the same conclusion nearly 40 years later. In a commentary published by the Monitor, Steven Gordon, a lawyer, argued that O’Brien’s action may well have been an unconstitutional abridgement of the paper’s free-press rights.

I just hope Speaker O’Brien comes to his senses and realizes that the Monitor was well within its rights to run the Hitler cartoon no matter how much he may wish it hadn’t done so. He, on the other hand, has no right to discriminate against a media outlet he doesn’t like.

Following up on Journatic and GateHouse

GateHouse publications and websites in Massachusetts. Click on map for interactive version at gatehousemedia.com.

The Journatic story keeps spreading. Today David Folkenflik summarizes what we know so far for NPR’s “Morning Edition,” bringing the tale of outsourced local news and fake bylines to many millions more listeners than those who first heard about it on “This American Life.” And Folkenflik has more on GateHouse Media’s decision to replace Journatic with a similar in-house operation — minus the fake bylines, which Journatic itself has said it will stop using.

There have been a few other developments as well. Among the more interesting is a post written by Mathew Ingram for GigaOm, who took issue with critics of Journatic by arguing that the real problem was a resistance to new ways of doing things. Ingram writes (the links are his):

Critics of the Journatic model, including Mandy Jenkins of Digital First Media and Anna Tarkov at the Poynter Institute, seem to want newspapers to continue to produce hyper-local community journalism in the traditional way, with reporters based in the community writing traditional stories. But given the kinds of financial pressures on the newspaper industry, that may simply not be viable for outlets like the [Chicago] Tribune or GateHouse. That’s not to say they shouldn’t devote resources to those communities, but it does mean that looking at alternative models for some kinds of content makes sense as well.

When Tarkov and I debated the issue with Ingram on Twitter yesterday, his first response was, “If I am defending anything, @dankennedy_nu, it’s the idea of experimenting with new ways of doing journalism. Is that bad?”

The problem is that there’s new and there’s new. The low-cost nonprofit, online-only model being tried in places like New Haven and San Diego, rebuilding local journalism through neighborhood reporting and civic engagement, is new. Hiring people in the Philippines to write news briefs for your local paper under Anglo-sounding bylines — well, that’s new, too. Not everything new should be embraced.

Also on Thursday, Tarkov had a follow-up that included a memo to the Journatic troops from chief executive Brian Timpone.

And speaking of memos, I received from a trusted source a memo from David Arkin, vice president of content and audience for GateHouse Media, explaining GateHouse’s decision to stop using Journatic and to replace it with something similar in-house. GateHouse owns more than 100 community newspapers in Eastern Massachusetts, though none had any Journatic content imposed on them. The full text of the memo follows:

All,

You may have read recently in industry trade publications that GateHouse Media has ended its relationship with content-producer Journatic.

Journatic creates local content like news briefs, calendar items and submitted education content such as honor rolls for newspapers. We started working with Journatic more than a year ago and had been using the service at nearly 30 GateHouse newspapers.

Since we didn’t use the service at all of our papers, we never communicated our partnership with this vendor to the company.

As you likely have read on Poynter and other blogs this week, we have decided to end the relationship with Journatic and build a similar service with central corporate staff for the newspapers that were using the Journatic service. We are in the process of ramping up a 10-person team that will produce this content for the newspapers.

We decided to end the relationship with Journatic for a few reasons:

— Journatic had trouble providing the kinds of content that our newspapers really needed. They provided a lot of content but weren’t successful in choosing the right kind of calendar items and news briefs.

— We spent too much time centrally and locally addressing errors with their content.

— We discovered we could produce process-oriented content that our newspapers really wanted at a more economical price than Journatic.

We have been working on this move for several months. The news this week that Journatic put fake bylines on stories reaffirmed our decision to leave, but a decision to end the relationship had been made months beforehand.

Bringing the service in-house has helped target the kind of content newspapers really want, and we’re making good progress toward cleaner copy. Producing that content centrally takes great coordination and communication, something we can manage better than a vendor.

We support Journatic’s model, which is to take process-oriented content out of newsrooms to allow our newspapers to focus on high-quality original reporting. We believe handling that community content centrally will put us in a better position to achieve a higher level of enterprise reporting at our newspapers.

Our goal is to transition all newspapers currently using Journatic to our centralized group by August and to ensure the service we’re providing is excellent. After that we’ll evaluate whether the service could be implemented at more GateHouse newspapers.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Thanks,
DA

David P. Arkin
Vice President of Content & Audience / GateHouse Media, Inc.

My source, a GateHouse insider, analyzes Arkin’s memo thusly: “From my perspective, there is a very narrow subset of stuff that could be assigned to a Journatic-type operation that could potentially free up my time for more worthy pursuits. The key to Arkin’s statement, of course, is the degree to which the intent of contracting with a service like Journatic or building a similar operation in-house is to free us up for more enterprise reporting, multimedia, social media, etc., rather than just to ‘decrease the surplus population.’ Time will tell, I suppose.”

Exposing the “‘pink slime’ journalism” of Journatic

If you care about local news, then you must listen to a report on “This American Life,” broadcast last weekend, that exposes a scandal whose importance can’t be overstated.

The story is about a company called Journatic, which produces local content for newspapers using grossly underpaid, out-of-town reporters — including cheap Filipino workers who write articles under fake bylines.

And how great is it that “This American Life,” damaged earlier this year when it was victimized by fake journalism, has now exposed fake journalism elsewhere? Here is the Chicago Tribune — a major Journatic client — lecturing “TAL” on journalism ethics earlier this year.

After you listen, be sure to read the detailed back story, written by Anna Tarkov for Poynter.org.

Unfortunately, the broadcast aired just a few days before the Fourth of July, at a time when few people were paying much attention to the news. I hope it has the impact that it should.

The star of the “TAL” segment is a journalist named Ryan Smith, who kicks things off with a  killer anecdote. Smith tells producer Sarah Koenig that he drew an assignment to write a story about a “student of the week” for the Houston Chronicle. He called the principal, who suggested he swing by the school the next day.

Smith told him he’d rather do it by phone, but he didn’t tell him the reason: he was actually some 1,000 miles away.

Both Koenig and Tarkov interviewed Journatic chief executive Brian Timpone, who apologized for nothing and spewed forth a torrent of rationalizations and excuses: the fake bylines were to protect employees from lawyers; the Filipinos don’t actually write stories (they do); there’s no value to having reporters live in the community for routine local coverage such as police-blotter news and budget updates; and Journatic is providing coverage to communities that would otherwise have none.

Well, none might be preferable to the “‘pink slime’ journalism” (Smith’s felicitous description) that Journatic produces. Moreover, if the Chicago Tribune uses Journatic stories in its hyperlocal coverage in order to suck advertising money out of pizza shops, funeral homes and other businesses, it becomes that much harder for would-be entrepreneurs to start their own local news sites.

Since the “TAL” story broke, we’ve been learning more about who’s using Journatic material. The Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Sun-Times have all made use of Journatic, and are now in various degrees of renouncing it.

Of more local interest: so has GateHouse Media, a national chain that owns more than 100 papers in Eastern Massachusetts — mostly weeklies, but also some dailies, including the Patriot Ledger of Quincy, the Enterprise of Brockton and the MetroWest Daily News.

According to a follow-up story by Tarkov, Journatic copy never made it into GateHouse’s Massachusetts properties. But the debt-ridden corporation is now setting up its own Journatic-like operations in Boston and in Rockford, Ill. Who knows where those honor rolls, obituaries and police logs will be coming from? (The blog post I’ve linked to suggests the centralized operations will be limited to design and layout. Tarkov’s story, though, references 10 “content providers” who will be based in Rockford.)

The media-reform group Free Press has mobilized over the Journatic revelations, with Libby Reinish summarizing the findings and Josh Stearns offering some advice on how to tell if what you’re reading is the real thing. Inevitably, Free Press has started a petition drive as well.

Unfortunately, the forces that make something like Journatic possible are very real. It’s expensive and labor-intensive to do local journalism right, and the crisis that has befallen the newspaper industry in recent years has made it that much harder. But this is truly beyond the pale. Even Patch, with its top-down, cookie-cutter approach, has journalists in each of its communities.

Ultimately, though, the solution will come from the bottom up, community by community, as is already the case with enterprises such as the New Haven Independent, the Batavian and dozens of others. Have a look at Authentically Local, an umbrella group of independent local sites organized by Debbie Galant, the co-founder of Baristanet in northern New Jersey.

Another potentially interesting experiment in local journalism will get under way later this year. The Banyan Project, begun by veteran journalist Tom Stites, will launch a test site in Haverhill to be called Haverhill Matters. The secret sauce is cooperative ownership, similar to a credit union or a food co-op. You’ll be reading more about Banyan at Media Nation in the weeks and months to come.

At one point in the “TAL” broadcast, Koenig says to Smith, “You are so fired.” It is perhaps a sign of how little the Journatic folks care about their reputation that, in fact, he hasn’t been. In an email to Jim Romenesko, Smith says it’s been business as usual, and that he’s received new assignments from his editor, who recently relocated from St. Louis to Brazil.

“I’m going to work the rest of the week,” Smith wrote, “and then resign.”

What’s at stake in the Tierney-Tisei race

Richard Tisei

As David Filipov puts it in his front-page Boston Globe story today, “It was a good week to be Richard R. Tisei.”

Indeed. U.S. Rep. John Tierney, a Salem Democrat, is in meltdown mode over claims by two of his brothers-in-law that he was well aware of the family’s illegal gambling enterprises. The story was broken on Thursday by Julie Manganis of the Salem News, who reported that Daniel Eremian fingered the congressman just after receiving a three-year federal prison sentence. On Saturday, the Globe’s Michael Levenson got a second brother-in-law, Robert Eremian, to whack Tierney.

Tierney is scheduled to meet with reporters later today to say once again that they’re lying. Could be a tense Fourth of July cookout for the Tierney-Eremian clan tomorrow.

But it’s still too early to know whether Tisei, a Wakefield Republican, former state senator and Charlie Baker’s running mate in the 2010 gubernatorial election, will be able to capitalize on Tierney’s woes.

Tisei is a moderate and a genuinely nice guy. I covered him in the 1980s when he was beginning his political career and I was a reporter for the Daily Times Chronicle of Woburn. Back then, reform-minded Republicans like Tisei were occasionally able to work with Democrats and have an effect in the Legislature. Those days are long gone.

I ran into Tisei at the town pancake breakfast in Danvers this past March. Same guy — personable, greeting everyone. He seemed to be having a good time. Obviously he is an enormous improvement over William Hudak, the extreme right-winger who ran against Tierney in 2010. As an openly gay man, Tisei will not be able to excite the social-conservative crowd; but that’s a crowd that you could fit into the phone booth these days. (For you young’uns, this a phone booth.)

I also covered Tierney’s congressional campaign for the Boston Phoenix in 1996, when he unseated Republican incumbent Peter Torkildsen two years after losing to him. Tierney has always struck me as sharp and quick, if not especially warm.

The question is, do such atmospherics matter, and will Tisei be able to take advantage of Tierney’s troubles? The U.S. House of Representatives, more than any other elective office, is an institution where the color of your jersey matters more than who you are.

If elected, the first thing Tisei is going to do next January is vote for John Boehner as House speaker. Last Thursday, Tisei popped up on NPR to say that, yes, he voted in favor of Romneycare, but that he would vote to repeal Obamacare because, well, you know.

We all wish it were otherwise, but party identification is very close to the only thing that matters in Congress. I suggest that folks in the Sixth District figure out where Tierney and Tisei stand on the issues that matter to them and vote accordingly. You’re choosing how you wish to be governed — not whom you want living next door.

Will heads roll after CNN meltdown? Should they?

Three quick items on the Supreme Court’s decision to (mostly) uphold the Affordable Care Act:

1. I was watching CNN while waiting for the ruling in the mistaken belief that the other cable nets would only be worse. I must admit, listening to Wolf Blitzer and John King trying to backtrack from their whopper made for riveting television. Will heads roll? Should they? People make mistakes, but good grief.

2. Wish I could remember who wrote this, but yesterday I read an analysis that attempted to prove Justice Anthony Kennedy would vote against the individual mandate. So far, so good. But the writer went on to argue that since it was unimaginable Chief Justice John Roberts would come out on Kennedy’s left, that was the end of Obamacare. Personally, I think Roberts looked into the abyss and saw there was no bottom.

3. I thought this was a good time to recycle what I wrote about garcinia cambogia extract for the Guardian after the ACA was approved in 2010. The law isn’t perfect, but it’s an enormous improvement over the status quo. It was — and is — a BFD.

Image via JimRomenesko.com.

Brown’s reasons for rejecting debate make no sense

Tom Brokaw

This commentary is also online at the Huffington Post.

What we were talking about, in case U.S. Sen. Scott Brown’s diversionary tactics led you astray, was a televised debate, held before a neutral audience, to be moderated by Tom Brokaw. Everything else is baloney.

As you no doubt already know, Brown made two demands that had to be met before he would agree to a debate with his Democratic rival, Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren.

The first was that Vicki Kennedy, president of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute, which would sponsor the debate, refrain from endorsing a candidate for “the duration of the Senate race.”

The second was that the debate be carried only by local media outlets and not by “out-of-state cable networks with a reputation for political advocacy” — clear reference to the liberal outlet MSNBC, which had been mentioned as a possibility.

Both demands were ridiculous because they were irrelevant. But when Vicki Kennedy rejected the first of those demands, that was enough for Brown to say no.

(At this point I suppose I should include a non-disclosure: I’m not related to those Kennedys.)

Brown might have been able to make a reasonable case for asking Vicki Kennedy not to endorse until after the debate. But demanding that she refrain for “the duration” was just silly. If the media consortium that includes the Boston Globe schedules a debate, will Brown insist that the Globe not endorse? And what will Brown say if the Boston Herald, as is its wont, puts together its own debate? Surely he won’t ask the paper to withhold its all-but-certain Brown endorsement.

As for MSNBC, the debate organizers could prevent the channel from carrying it live. Afterwards, though, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz and company would be free to show clips and comment on them whether they had carried the full debate or not. The fair-use provision of the copyright law guarantees that — not to mention the First Amendment.

And why did I say the debate would be held before a neutral audience? Because you can be sure the Brown and Warren campaigns would insist on equal numbers of partisans in the audience. So the Kennedy Institute’s sponsorship isn’t an issue, either.

I know some observers have questioned Brokaw’s alleged liberal bias. But since that hasn’t been raised by the Brown campaign, we have to assume he had no problem with Brokaw as moderator. When Brokaw moderated a debate between Barack Obama and John McCain in 2008, he seemed mainly interested in making sure neither candidate exceeded his allotted time. Liberal or not, Brokaw has earned his status as a fair-minded journalist who can be trusted not to throw the debate to either candidate.

It’s also hard to figure why Brown suddenly has a problem with Vicki Kennedy or the Kennedy Institute, given that he took part in a debate with Martha Coakley two years ago that was co-sponsored by the institute without setting any preconditions. As Herald columnist Peter Gelzinis points out, it was only a year ago that Brown couldn’t say enough good things about the late Ted Kennedy’s widow.

Globe columnist Scot Lehigh thinks Brown’s demands were “reasonable,” and he gives the senator credit for sticking to them. Yet Lehigh doesn’t tell us what Brown could possibly gain by failing to take part.

As my Northeastern colleague Alan Schroeder, an expert on political debates, puts it, “They’re making such an ­effort to portray Brown as someone with bipartisan credentials who can work with Democrats, and yet here’s this relatively mild example of cooperating with a Democrat, and they’re balking at it.”

Boston Phoenix political columnist David Bernstein wonders if Brown is trying to curry favor with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, which has had its own issues with Vicki Kennedy.

Who knows what Brown and his advisers are thinking? Their political astuteness is generally beyond question. Maybe this will prove to be a smart move. Right now, though, it looks like a rare misstep, especially curious given that Brown initially made the Warren campaign look flat-footed with his rapid acceptance of several debate invitations.

My own bias is in favor of as many debates as possible, regardless of the venue. For instance, I don’t understand why Warren won’t say yes to WBZ Radio (AM 1030) talk-show host Dan Rea, who is conservative but is as fair as they come.

The candidates really don’t have anything better to do. How would we prefer they spend their time? Making television ads? Attending fundraisers? Of course not. They should spend as much time as possible side by side, talking about the issues. It’s not always the most edifying experience, but it’s better than any conceivable alternatives.

Photo (cc) by Michael Kwan and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Shuffling the deck at WGBH Radio

WGBH Radio (89.7 FM) has announced some changes to its schedule that suggest station executives are planning to up the ante in their competition with WBUR (90.9 FM) for the news-and-information audience on public radio.

Disclosure for those who don’t know: I’m a paid contributor to WGBH-TV’s “Beat the Press,” and appear occasionally on the radio station as well.

The most significant move is that “Eric in the Evening,” the daily jazz program hosted by Eric Jackson, is being cut back and moved to Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 9 p.m. to midnight. It’s a shame, but I suspect not many people listen to terrestrial jazz radio in the age of Pandora.

The individual one-hour local talk shows hosted by Emily Rooney and Callie Crossley will be melded into a two-hour block called “Boston Public Radio” that will be hosted by Crossley on weekdays from noon to 2 p.m. Crossley will be joined by Rooney, Kara Miller, Adam Reilly, Jared Bowen and others. “Boston Public Radio” will be rebroadcast Monday through Thursday from 9 to 11 p.m.

Two NPR staples are notably absent from the line-up: “Fresh Air” and “The Diane Rehm SEO Services Show.” (Update: The original schedule sent by WGBH had nothing listed for 10 to 11 a.m. Turns out that’s when “Diane Rehm” will be broadcast.)

The full text of the WGBH press release appears after the jump, supplemented by a few additions emailed in response to an inquiry. Continue reading “Shuffling the deck at WGBH Radio”