Category: Uncategorized

A media manifesto

It was around 5:30 p.m. yesterday when I heard an NPR report that NBC News had obtained a video and pictures from Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech mass murderer. According to the report, NBC had turned over the material to law-enforcement officials. From what I could glean, it sounded as though the network had decided not to air it. I’ll confess that I didn’t think too deeply about it at that moment, but it seemed like the right decision.

Of course, I was wrong. Later in the evening, after I got home from a meeting, I learned from talk-show-host-in-exile Scott Allen Miller’s blog that NBC had indeed broadcast Cho’s hateful words and images. Miller wrote:

Words have yet to be invented to describe the callousness with which NBC News has re-victimized those who survived or lost loved ones in the massacre and rewarded Cho Seung-hui with post mortem television stardom. Cho’s place in history was assured by his murderous rampage, and now he’s a TV star. Even better, he’s a dead TV star. Ooooooh!

I can’t help but wonder how the families and friends of the dead and wounded reacted when they tuned in to NBC News tonight and saw Cho’s martyrdom video — not a transcript of it being read, but the actual video — in which he cursed those he was about to murder and maim.

At that point, I started flipping around the cable channels. MSNBC, CNN and Fox News all had the Cho videos in heavy rotation as Joe Scarborough, Anderson Cooper and Greta Van Susteren interviewed various experts and officials about what it all meant. This morning, the New York Times, the Washington Post, both Boston dailies and virtually every other media outlet of note have posted the video on their Web sites. So if NBC executives made the wrong call, they’re hardly alone.

But did they in fact make the wrong call? Or is the Cho video so newsworthy that it can’t be suppressed? On reflection, I would argue the latter. As I wrote yesterday, the critics of the Jamal Albarghouti video are right to lament the utter lack of context in which it has been shown, but wrong to argue that, therefore, it shouldn’t be shown.

It’s the same with the Cho video. Running it in an endless loop struck me as offensive, mainly because it was decontextualized, disembodied, displayed purely for shock value. But not to run it at all? How could any news organization withhold such explosive material about the worst mass murderer in history? Miller is absolutely right that the video further traumatized survivors and family members if they were unfortunate enough to see it. But journalists edit the news for the public, not for family members. I also think the original report on the “NBC Nightly News,” still available on MSNBC.com, was handled professionally and sensitively.

Of course, that’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of people who agree with Miller. Check out some of the comments on NBC News anchor Brian Williams’ blog:

Please, please, take the videos of Cho down….

Leading off your national newscast with the ramblings of this disturbed maniac just gave birth to God knows how many more….

You should be ashamed. While the families of those that died are trying to deal with this horrible act of violence you provide the killer with exactly what he wanted, world wide viewing of his hatred….

Oh, my god, your news cast has made me so enraged I cannot even see straight. You are glamorizing this man and his rambling by giving him a national stage for his words? What the hell are you thinking?…

I could go on, but you get the idea. And let me add this, from blogger and frequent Media Nation contributor Peter Porcupine: “By choosing to give this presentation the validation of platform, NBC has sent our nation and our heritage just one more step down a dank and violent road.”

So what, exactly, were NBC News officials thinking? Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz attempts to answer that this morning on his blog, passing along a colleague’s report on what went into the decision. Law-enforcement officials reportedly told NBC at 4:30 p.m. that airing the material would not jeopardize their investigation. NBC went with the story two hours later. Offering some historical perspective, Kurtz writes:

This was no easy decision. Not since the Unabomber demanded that the New York Times and Washington Post publish his endless manifesto has a news organization faced this kind of judgment. In this case, of course, the killer is dead by his own hand, so the only reason to publish his invective is to aid public understanding of the worst gun massacre in American history — or allow him, posthumously, to gloat.

The idea that there may be some sick individuals who’ll see the Cho video and pictures and seek to emulate him is not to be dismissed. It’s that, rather than the families’ sensibilities, that gives me the greatest pause.

Still, I think NBC made the right call. And yes, it’s possible that someday we’ll look back and see that it was a terrible mistake. But there isn’t an editor or a news director in the country who wouldn’t have done what NBC News did yesterday. I realize there are many who will say that’s evidence a twisted media culture. They might be right; I hope they’re wrong.

Update: On “Today,” Matt Lauer had this to say: “We feel strongly that this is not video that we need to run in some kind of an endless loop, and so we will severely limit the amount of footage that you’re going to see” (via NewsBusters). So why was MSNBC doing exactly that the night before?

Citizen journalism and Virginia Tech

If the tragedy at Virginia Tech has produced a media star, it is surely Jamal Albarghouti, the graduate student who captured some as-it-happened video of the gunfire on his cell-phone camera. The video was posted on CNN.com and shown repeatedly on the cable channel. Albarghouti himself has been the subject of frequent interviews.

But is Albarghouti’s bravery and striking footage an example of citizen journalism at its best? Interestingly enough, NewAssignment.Net, a virtual watering hole for the citizen-journalism movement, has given voice to some skepticism. Steve Fox writes:

Consider this: the video had no inherent news value and told no story.

It did have sounds of bullets being fired and screams.

Those were bullets that killed, maimed and injured students and faculty members. This wasn’t a video game.

Is such video responsible journalism? Are these the types of Citizen Journalists that people want to see? Are we doomed to create “citizen journalists” to play the I-patsies for cable television?

Adds John McQuaid: “What is the value of something ‘live’ if you don’t know what you’re looking at? Cable execs will disagree, but ‘live and on-scene’ is not an end in itself.”

At the Citizen Media Center blog, Dan Gillmor takes a more sanguine view of how amateur and professional journalism has come together to cover the Virginia Tech story. And at Poynter.org, Al Tompkins has an extensive roundup of how students — including some hiding under desks — got out information about shootings via text messages, blogs and online forums. “If you ever had a doubt about how important it is for your newsroom to be able to tap into user-generated content, the Virginia Tech story will change that,” Tompkins writes.

What’s at a premium in confusing breaking-news stories such as this is perspective and understanding. As Fox and McQuaid suggest, the problem with the Albarghouti video isn’t that it was produced by a citizen journalist, but that it provided no context, and only added to the confusion. It was dramatic, so CNN showed it. But news has to be about more than that.

On Monday evening, I was flipping through the cable news channels, and quickly wound up watching a documentary on U.S. soldiers in Iraq instead. Why? Well, the news value of what the cable nets were reporting could be summed up in a minute or two. The rest was filler, some of it harmless, some of it not.

CNN was showing an interview with Albarghouti — and Larry King was threatening to put Dr. Phil on. I took the threat seriously and left. Fox’s Bill O’Reilly had right-wing pundette Michelle Malkin; her presence struck me as so weirdly inappropriate that I confess I didn’t stick around long enough to hear what she had to say. On MSNBC, Keith Olbermann was actually asking someone from washingtonpost.com what effect the shootings might have on the presidential campaign. Answer: Who knows?

I also heard it “reported” that it appeared the shooter was Chinese and not a student. Of course, as we soon learned, he was Korean and was indeed a student. What on earth is the value of these unverified tidbits, shoveled out there as fast as they come in and just as likely to be wrong as right? The Politico‘s Ben Smith must wonder why he got singled out for wrongly reporting that John Edwards would suspend his presidential campaign. Smith’s screw-up, after all, was hardly unique.

I don’t entirely agree with Fox and McQuaid. Surely Albarghouti’s video has some news value. But it wasn’t the story — it was part of a much bigger story. If the video lacks perspective — and it does — then it’s the media’s fault for showing it without providing that perspective.

A Pulitzer for the Globe

Congratulations to the Boston Globe and Washington-bureau reporter Charlie Savage, who’ve won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. Savage was honored for his series on President Bush’s use and abuse of presidential signing statements, which he’s employed to sign legislation into law even while signaling that he intends to ignore it.

The prize comes at an interesting moment for the Globe, which has been downsizing its way into an almost entirely local paper. While I think that makes a lot of sense in an era when national and international news sites are just a click away, Savage’s award demonstrates that it’s important for the paper to look beyond Route 495 as well.

The Globe’s other finalist, the Spotlight Team’s “Debtor’s Hell” series (helmed by my Northeastern colleague Walter Robinson), didn’t win. Last week, though, it won the Society of Professional Journalists’ Public Service Award, itself a significant honor.

With the radio on

If you get a chance, check out Gregg Jackson and some guy named Paul, who are filling in for Todd Feinburg this morning on WRKO Radio (AM 680). They’ll only be on until noon — I caught their act while driving around Salem looking for a place to park.

I won’t attempt to describe what I heard except to say that I thought my radio might be pulling in a shortwave signal by mistake.

Science, religion and global warming

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby leans heavily on MIT scientist Richard Lindzen — and not for the first time — in arguing that global warming is nothing to worry about. Lindzen has a commentary in the current Newsweek suggesting that we should all calm down, a sentiment that Jacoby heartily endorses.

To their credit, Lindzen and Jacoby are too intellectually honest to assert something they know to be false. Neither is willing to deny that global warming is real, or that human activity is at least partly responsible. Indeed, this is how Lindzen opens his piece:

Judging from the media in recent months, the debate over global warming is now over. There has been a net warming of the earth over the last century and a half, and our greenhouse gas emissions are contributing at some level. Both of these statements are almost certainly true. What of it?

Both Lindzen and Jacoby go on to say that we should relax because global warming might be good for us. True, Lindzen does say that global warming might prove not to be as bad as current models predict. But his essential view is contained in this sentence: “A warmer climate could prove to be more beneficial than the one we have now.”

This is religion, not science — not far removed from Frosty Hardison, the guy who likes global warming because he believes it will hasten Jesus’ return to earth.

Jacoby and other conservative commentators should be careful about invoking Lindzen. The fact is that Lindzen accepts the science of human-caused global warming. Thus we are under no more obligation to accept Lindzen’s value judgments than we are those of Frosty Hardison.

Globe bites Times Co.

Kudos to the Boston Globe this morning, which runs an op-ed piece blasting the New York Times Co. for outsourcing 45 Globe jobs to Bangalore, India.

The column, by Massachusetts AFL-CIO president Robert Haynes and journalist-turned-PR-consultant Jeremy Crockford, makes the point that the Times Co. is shipping jobs overseas just as the leaders of more-enlightened companies are beginning to realize that’s incompatible with quality customer service. They write:

If it doesn’t make sense for Comcast or Dell, it certainly doesn’t make sense for The Boston Globe. Bad business decisions have dogged the Globe over the last 10 years and helped push circulation and revenues steadily downward. It’s time the paper’s owners turned to their own business pages and followed the lead of more savvy corporate thinkers. It’s time to give local people back the jobs they are sending to Bangalore.

Here is an earlier piece, on the AFL-CIO Web site, about the labor group’s efforts to stop the Times Co. from outsourcing Globe jobs.

Say goodnight, I-Man

CBS Radio has fired Don Imus. That’s perhaps a bit more than necessary (not that I’m shedding any tears), but, according to the Associated Press, advertisers were abandoning him and his high-profile media buddies were jumping ship.

New England Cable News is supposed to be dropping by Media Nation for an interview in a little while.

Update: You can watch the NECN piece here.

Welch takes no for an answer

Jack Welch now says it’s obvious that the New York Times Co. isn’t going to sell the Globe to him and advertising honcho Jack Connors. “There was a time when it would have been right,” Welch said in a speech at MIT, according to an account by Reuters. “Management has made it very clear to us that they have no interest in selling the Globe.”

This is not a big surprise. The Times Co. hasn’t budged since last fall, when Welch first made his interest known. (In keeping with the theme of the day, I’ll point out that Mike Barnicle somehow figured into all of this.) Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. apparently believes there are better days ahead for the Globe. As a reader, I hope he’s right. (Via Romenesko.)

The Mike and Don show

Mike, how can we miss you if you won’t go away?

Yesterday, Herald columnist Howie Carr wrote that former Globe columnist and current Herald contributor Mike Barnicle — identified only as “a local columnist … who … had just been forced to quit his paper for writing ‘fables'” — had once conveyed an insult to Don Imus that Carr claims he’d never uttered. That allegedly provoked an outburst by Imus against Carr’s wife that Carr claims led to an out-of-court settlement.

Today, Globe columnist Joan Vennochi alludes to Barnicle — or maybe it’s Doris Kearns Goodwin (or both) — in writing about why Imus’ well-connected friends are sticking by him following his “nappy-headed hos” characterization of the Rutgers women’s basketball team: “No one wants to give up the air time or book plugs, no matter what Imus says on the air. He forgives them their transgressions, be it plagiarism or drunken moments caught on tape, and they forgive him his.”

Just to be clear, Barnicle’s transgression was plagiarism, not drunkenness.

Meanwhile, the Herald’s Jesse Noyes and Jessica Heslam report today that Imus doesn’t have to worry about being Wally Pipp to someone else’s Lou Gehrig during his two-week suspension: He’ll be replaced by, yes, Mike Barnicle. Noyes and Heslam helpfully note that Barnicle himself once called former secretary of defense Bill Cohen, who’s white, “Mandingo” — a charming reference to the fact that Cohen’s wife, Janet Langhart, is black.

Finally, the siege continues. As you no doubt already know, MSNBC pulled the plug on Imus yesterday. Will he be able to keep his CBS Radio show? We’ll find out soon enough.