Author: Dan Kennedy

How graphic?

The Phoenix’s Adam Reilly flags a post on Wonkette, of all places, that includes a gallery of extremely graphic photos taken after the assassination of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto. Wonkette’s Megan Carpentier writes:

These are pictures of real violence, and of the horrible things people all over the world will do to one another, and it isn’t conveyed by seeing the reaction of another person.

But though Carpentier imagines that the U.S. media won’t touch such images, the New York Times today offers a narrated slide show containing many of the same pictures, taken by John Moore of Getty Images. It’s not quite as grotesque as Wonkette’s raw feed, but believe me, you’ll get the idea.

My own instinct is to show everything as long as it’s newsworthy. Obviously these pictures are. (I’m refraining from posting one only out of copyright concerns.)

Among other things, seeing the true horror of yesterday’s attack provides a context for the polite Pakistani man who called a BBC radio program and told the shocked host that he thought Bhutto’s assassination was a good thing, since it would open the way for a new generation of political leaders.

Corrections and blogging standards

The New York Times’ Virginia Heffernan, blogging at The Medium on NYTimes.com, recently wrote that neo-Nazis were portraying Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul as one of them. She didn’t check with Paul. Hence the lengthy “Editor’s Note” that now precedes the item.

As it turns out, this is interesting fodder for a consideration of blogging ethics. If Heffernan had contacted neo-Nazi groups, gotten their version of events, and then failed to do the same with Paul, well, that would be an obvious journalistic lapse. But that’s not what she did. Instead, in classic blogger style, she pointed to accounts elsewhere, particularly in Little Green Footballs, which, as she notes, has a reputation for being “rigidly empiricist.”

Which means that I’m not sure how I come down on this. I don’t think any blogger believes you should have to verify independently everything you link to as long as you’re linking to a reasonably reputable source. On the other hand, there’s no question that the New York Times can do a lot more damage to someone’s reputation than Little Green Footballs. So perhaps the standard does need to be different.

There’s also the matter of how blogs root out stories. This became a subject for discussion at a New England News Forum conference at Southern New Hampshire University recently, as we pondered Talking Points Memo’s efforts to determine whether or not Mitt Romney had ever said he would never appoint a Muslim to his Cabinet. (As we now know from the Martin Luther King Jr. story, you would first have to figure out how Romney defines “never,” “appoint,” “Muslim” and “Cabinet.”)

TPM has been doing it open-source-style, putting half-vetted stuff out incrementally and letting the story emerge over time in a very public way. It’s a fascinating methodology, and one quite different from the closed-system model used in traditional journalism. But it can be pretty devastating to someone’s reputation if it turns out to be untrue — a position taken at the conference by, among others, David Tirrell-Wysocki, an Associated Press executive who’s also the executive director of the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications in Manchester, N.H. From the “running notes”:

“I’m held accountable,” said Tirrell-Wysocki. “But who is holding the blogger accountable? That’s the downside as I see it.” He said blogs are akin to the conversation at the doughnut shop: “It’s what people are talking about.”

Essentially that is what LGF is doing, preceding its post on Paul by saying, “Take this one with a grain of salt, please,” but then laying out the accusation. Heffernan’s post is equally skeptical, as she concludes that “maybe it was only a matter of time before Paul got roasted on his own spit, i.e., the Internet.” Now Heffernan is getting roasted on the Internet, too.

Don’t you love Comcast?

Sometime within the past few months, C-SPAN2 and ESPN Classic disappeared from our cable package, which is as basic and non-digital as you can get. This morning I took a walk down to our local Comcast office and asked why — and was told two untruths in two minutes:

  1. It was the fault of “Senator Markey” that C-SPAN2 was gone. Well, I have no proof to the contrary, but I’d say the idea that Massachusetts congressman Ed Markey was somehow responsible for a regulation that had banished C-SPAN2 from my basic Comcast line-up approached zero.
  2. The same guy told me that ESPN had discontinued ESPN Classic. Hmmm … uh, wait, here are today’s listings.

Comcast’s Web site continues to say that both stations remain in the basic line-up. In reality, C-SPAN2 is up in the 200s somewhere, and I would need a digital cable box to get it. Fortunately, if I want to watch it, I can do so online.

Cross-ownership and new media

Ten years from now — maybe a little sooner, maybe a little later — we’ll receive what we currently refer to as “television” through a thick Internet cable. As with today’s Internet, we will theoretically have an infinite number of choices. Rupert Murdoch (and, yes, I am convinced the man is going to live forever) may own nine of the 10 most-viewed video sites. But anyone will be free to start his or her own video operation, whether it’s the major metropolitan news site in your region (we may still be calling them “newspapers,” but strictly for nostalgia purposes) or the sort of community-minded folks who today volunteer at local-access cable television outlets.

As long as we can preserve net neutrality, such a mediascape is almost certain to come into being. And, at that point, there will no longer be a rationale for regulating the media. For some 80 years now, the FCC has regulated the content and ownership of over-the-air television and radio stations because of a very simple principle of physics: there is only so much broadcast spectrum available, and therefore it makes some sense to make sure that spectrum is used in the public interest.

Since the Reagan years, though, the FCC, with an occasional assist from Congress, has been moving away from its regulatory mission. The Fairness Doctrine and the equal-time provisions no longer exist, and corporations are allowed to own many more properties, both locally and nationally. Most famously, this led to the situation in Minot, N.D., a few years ago, when a train accident led to a deadly outbreak of poisonous gas — and there was no one at the local Clear Channel station to get the word out. (I should note that the story is at least partly apocryphal.)

Last week FCC chairman Kevin Martin led an effort to loosen ownership rules still further, allowing one company to own both a newspaper and a television station in the same city, an arrangement known in the trade as “cross-ownership.” The reaction to this has been remarkably low-key. Maybe it’s because Martin’s proposal is cautious and complicated: it would only apply to the 20 largest cities in the country, and it would pertain only to one of the smaller TV stations in a given market. Maybe it’s because he simultaneously proposed new limits on cable companies. Or maybe it’s because the news business is in such a diminished state that critics are accepting of, or at least apathetic toward, what they once would have railed against. I might fall into this category; and I find myself half-agreeing with Martin that allowing television and newspaper operations to combine might result in more and better journalism.

To be sure, some are vehemently opposed to this. Media-reform advocate Robert McChesney’s group, Free Press, is unleashing a campaign to overturn the loosening of the cross-ownership ban. A group of journalism-school deans, represented locally by Alex Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard’s Kennedy School, wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times arguing that “we do not believe that the market can be absolutely trusted to provide the local news gathering that the American system needs to function at its best.”

New-media cheerleader Jeff Jarvis wrote a post for his Buzz Machine blog claiming that the j-school folks just don’t get it. Now, I agree with Jarvis in part. I don’t like either Martin’s or the deans’ suggestion that the news content of broadcast operations should somehow be monitored and regulated. I do not lament the demise of the Fairness Doctrine or of equal time, and would prefer that the FCC limit itself to breaking up monopoly ownership. By ensuring local, diverse ownership, you don’t need to regulate content.

But Jarvis bases his argument on the belief that local television news is essentially worthless, which simply isn’t true. Yes, it could be infinitely better. But, certainly on breaking news, local newscasts keep newspapers on their toes. Let a media company that already owns a newspaper in a given city to add a TV station to its holdings, and you might have better, deeper journalism in both the paper and on television. Or you might just get more cost-cutting.

Overall, Jarvis’ tone suggests that because technology is breaking up the mediascape as we know it anyway, then we should let creative destruction take its course. Well, maybe. But economists like to talk about a “soft landing,” a way of managing a recession so that it causes as little human damage as possible. A soft landing for the news business as we know it wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

As I pointed out in a response to Jarvis’ post, FCC regulation was directly responsible for the golden age of television news in Boston. In the early 1970s, the FCC stripped the Boston Herald Traveler of its licenses for Channel 5 and a radio station. That allowed a community group to purchase Channel 5 and transform it into WCVB-TV, the most highly regarded local television news operation in the country during the 1970s and ’80s. Unfortunately, the investors eventually cashed in, and today Channel 5 is not much different from other corporate-owned stations. But that’s hardly an argument for deregulation. If anything, it’s an argument for requiring local ownership.

There’s no question that the FCC’s few remaining rules governing ownership seem increasingly archaic. Consider what the New York Times Co. has been able to do around here. In addition to the Boston Globe, it owns the Worcester Telegram & Gazette; nearly 14 percent of New England Sports Network; and 49 percent of Metro Boston. It also has a content-sharing arrangement with New England Cable News. (I’m only talking about media holdings. Let’s not forget that the Times Co. owns 17 percent of the Red Sox.) Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell, who has long lusted after a radio station, must wonder why it’s OK for the Times Co. to amass that much concentrated power in Eastern Massachusetts while FCC rules prevent him from making a move that would be important to his survival but that would be relatively trivial within the overall scheme of things.

Let me bring this up to date. We live in an era when some of the best news video appears on newspaper Web sites — when WashingtonPost.com, for instance, can win an Emmy. At some point very soon, the platform is going to become irrelevant. But that time hasn’t come yet, which is why I’m skeptical of what Martin is trying to do by loosening the cross-ownership ban. Let’s not get too far ahead of the technology.

News for sale

Here’s something from a story in today’s New York Times about a new advertising campaign for Ritz crackers that would have stirred outrage 10 years ago but that, today, sadly, seems like business as usual:

The “Ritz. Open for Fun” campaign may fly, or it may thud, but one thing is certain: It will be hard to miss. Starting at dusk on Monday, light projections scattered across Manhattan will show Ritz crackers merrily bouncing in and out of a box. Anyone at home watching “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” on ABC will see local newscasters asking celebrants to describe their idea of fun — with a Ritz logo on the screen.

And, of course, there will be commercials.

Sounds to me like the commercials will be redundant.

The multimedia journalist

I’ve set up class blogs for the two courses I’m teaching this spring — Reinventing the News: The Journalism of the Web and Journalism Ethics and Issues. I expect I’ll be putting a lot of energy into those sites over the next few months. If you’re interested in what we’re talking about, I hope you’ll bookmark them or add them to your RSS reader.

I’ve already posted to Reinventing the News, using two examples from today’s Boston Globe to show that print journalists are now routinely stretching themselves with video and audio. Reinventing the News will also feature student blogs once the semester begins.

Bernstein bites back

Defenders of Mitt Romney are very excited about a story by the Politico’s Mike Allen reporting that two women actually saw the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Michigan Gov. George Romney marching together in Grosse Pointe in 1963. As well they should be. “I remember it vividly,” says one alleged eyewitness. “I was only 15 or 20 feet from where both of them were.”

But memories play tricks. And David Bernstein of the Boston Phoenix, who broke this story on Wednesday, says contemporaneous news coverage makes it clear that while Romney was marching on behalf of King’s agenda in Grosse Pointe, King himself was hundreds of miles away, speaking at an AFL-CIO gathering at Rutgers University.

Bernstein is withering in his contempt for the Romney campaign’s dumping this stuff on the Politico, writing, “Those facts are indisputable, and quite frankly, the campaign must have known the women’s story would eventually be debunked — few people’s every daily movement has been as closely tracked and documented as King’s.”

This is not a small mistake for the Mittster. As Bernstein noted in his original story, Mitt Romney had claimed not just that his father and King had marched together, but that he had personally observed it. And in a devastating piece in the Boston Globe on Friday, Michael Levenson noted that Mitt had on at least one occasion gone quite a bit further, telling the Boston Herald in 1978, “My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit.”

Nor is Washington Post columnist David Broder likely to say anything helpful to Romney. Broder co-authored a George Romney biography in the ’60s in which he reported the claim that the elder Romney and King had marched together. But here’s what the Post had to say earlier today:

The Romney campaign initially cited a 1967 book co-authored by Washington Post staff writer David S. Broder, which stated that Romney “marched with Martin Luther King through the exclusive Grosse Pointe suburb of Detroit.” But the book did not provide a source for the event, and Broder told The Post that he cannot remember where he heard the information.

What an astonishing muddle the Republican presidential campaign is now in.