Media Nation

In a column about people whose hobby is writing letters to newspapers, the Boston Globe’s Alex Beam takes a poke at one John Zack of Hopkinton, whose blog, ZACKly Right, is devoted to making fun of the Globe. But it only takes a moment for Beam, in the course of criticizing Zack’s grasp of grammar, to run off the grammatical rails himself. Beam writes:

The site touts itself as “a spout-off space for a taxpayer that endures the nutty liberalism of the Boston Globe and the nutty liberalism of all those that need the Globe to know how they think.” Shouldn’t that read “a taxpayer who endures” and “those who need the Globe”? Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

In fact, both examples Beam cites are restrictive phrases, and though it has become customary to precede them with who, it is perfectly acceptable to use that. Here is what the American Heritage Book of English Usage has to say:

Some people say that you can only use who and not that to introduce a restrictive relative clause that identifies a person. But that has been used in this way for centuries. It is a quintessential English usage, going back to the Old English period, and has been used by our best writers. So it is entirely acceptable to write either the man that wanted to talk to you or the man who wanted to talk to you.

In other words, Beam should have resisted.

Drake Bennett, who writes for the Boston Globe’s Ideas section, says this today in his article on the pros and cons of private newspaper ownership:

What also worries many journalists is the issue of what happens when a newspaper owner exercises the prerogatives of ownership. William Randolph Hearst famously used his newspaper empire to drum up support for the Spanish-American War. The Sulzbergers were accused, most recently in a 1999 book by the journalists Alex Jones and Susan Tifft, of playing down the Holocaust in the pages of The New York Times out of concern that the paper would seem too Jewish.

Most recently? In fact, Bennett’s research should have quickly revealed that the definitive work on the Sulzbergers and the Holocaust was written by Northeastern journalism professor Laurel Leff and published in 2005. Her book, “Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper,” recently received the American Journalism Historians Association’s 2006 Award for Best Book in Media History. So it’s not exactly obscure.

Here’s what Seth Lipsky wrote about “Buried by the Times” in the Columbia Journalism Review last year:

The importance of Leff’s book is in helping us to understand what happened so that we can be faster on our feet and avoid the same mistakes now that a new war against the Jews is under way and a new generation of newspaper men and women are on the story.

Then again, the Globe never bothered to review Leff’s book.

By the way, the book by Tifft and Jones to which Bennett refers is “The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times,” expertly analyzed in this 2003 post by former Globe columnist David Warsh.

The Phoenix held its 40th-anniversary party at Avalon last night, and if this were a party column, I could go on for a few sentences with boldface names. I’ll spare you, but it was great to run into former colleagues and friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen for years.

Publisher Stephen Mindich, retiring president Barry Morris and incoming president Brad Mindich all spoke. The food was good and the bands were loud.

The paper’s 40th-anniversary supplement is online here. Of course, you can also grab one out of a big red box.

Congratulations.

More: Jon Keller, not surprisingly, puts it much better than I did. I endorse everything he says, especially with respect to Stephen and editor Peter Kadzis. Jon and I are certified old farts, but if he could get to know the current staff members, I know he’d agree that they’re every bit as good as, if not better than, we were back in the day.

David, you’ve got to read this: CommonWealth Magazine editor Bob Keough recommends a 2002 essay by former state legislator John McDonough that explains why it’s so hard — and why it should be so hard — to amend the state constitution by citizen petition. “The process for putting matters before the voters is layered with nuance, booby traps, court rulings, and intrigue,” McDonough writes. And that’s the way it should be.

Same-sex-marriage opponents — as well as a few supporters, such as David Kravitz of Blue Mass Group and Boston Globe columnist Scot Lehigh — are outraged that the Legislature failed to do its supposed constitutional duty last week by holding an up-or-down vote on a gay-marriage ban. Only a quarter of the Legislature, meeting as a constitutional convention, needed to vote “yes” in order to move it on to the next session. If it then received 25 percent again, it would go on the ballot, and would become part of the constitution if it received a simple majority.

The Legislature, of course, avoided taking a vote by approving a motion to recess — something that requires a majority, not just 25 percent. Thus were lawmakers able to kill the amendment through a parliamentary maneuver — something they’ve done on numerous occasions over the years on a wide variety of measures.

Well, here’s what McDonough has to say about that:

By collecting valid signatures equal to 3 percent of voters in the previous gubernatorial election, proponents can submit their proposed amendment to the Constitutional Convention. If at least 25 percent of senators and representatives vote, in two conventions in a row, to allow the amendment to appear on the ballot, the people vote on it in the next general election. But nothing compels the Constitutional Convention to take that vote. If the presiding officer — the Senate president — refuses to bring the matter up for action, no go, which is what happened this year to the marriage proposal. [McDonough is referring to an earlier attempt to ban gay marriage.]

That’s what I was trying to get at in this post last week. McDonough offers much more background and detail than I was able to bring to the table. Bottom line: It’s not “dereliction of duty,” as “Maverick Dem” would have it, for the constitutional convention to follow the normal and customary rules of parliamentary procedure.

The Boston Herald’s Jessica Heslam reports that WRKO Radio (AM 680), fresh off the John DePetro mess, has whacked its entire news department. Apparently the local news will be “outsourced.” (Do they cover Boston in Bangalore?) Heslam also documents the station’s plummeting ratings.

Heslam’s story follows Andrea Estes’ article in Wednesday’s Boston Globe revealing that former Massachusetts House speaker Tom Finneran is being considered for a talk-show slot at WRKO if he can beat the bogus perjury case brought against him over a redistricting lawsuit. Presumably Finneran will talk about the news — but he’ll have to tune in to another station to get it.

I haven’t seen “Borat” yet, so I endorse David Brooks’ New York Times column (sub. req.) today with some hesitation. But based on everything I know about the movie, it strikes me that Brooks gets this just right:

The genius of Sacha Baron Cohen’s performance is his sycophantic reverence for his audience, his refusal to challenge the sacred cows of the educated bourgeoisie. During the movie, Borat ridicules Pentecostals, gun owners, car dealers, hicks, humorless feminists, the Southern gentry, Southern frat boys, and rodeo cowboys. A safer list it is impossible to imagine.

Cohen understands that when you are telling socially insecure audiences they are superior to their fellow citizens there is no need to be subtle. He also understands that any hint of actually questioning the cultural suppositions of his ticket-buyers — say by ridiculing the pretensions of somebody at a Starbucks or a Whole Foods Market — would fatally mar the self-congratulatory aura of the enterprise.

I like a cheap laugh as much as anyone, so I’m looking forward to seeing “Borat.” But I’ll be thinking about Brooks at least a little bit.

We the Sheeples has a splendid takedown of James Q. Wilson’s recent screed against the media. In a lecture reprinted by the Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal.com site, Wilson blamed all the bad news coming out of Iraq on an excess of negative media reports.

Wilson goes on to argue for the legality of the Bush administration’s no-warrant wiretapping program, on the grounds that — as best as I can figure out — Wilson believes martial law was declared shortly after 9/11; offers a fictional timeline showing how the media could have lost World War II if they were anything like the treasonous vermin who populate our newsrooms today; and beats “the media lost Vietnam” canard so hard and so repeatedly that it winds up broken into tiny toxic particles by the time he’s finished.

If you want to save yourself 15 minutes, you can just read the headline on Wilson’s piece, which succeeds at capturing both its essence and its lunacy: “The Press at War: What ever happened to patriotic reporters?”

And if you’d rather laugh than scream, read We the Sheeples. An excerpt:

You can’t look at how the media covers something without looking at the reality of the something. Wilson does not do that. He wants to say that the negative portrayal of the Iraq war means the media is negative. You can’t do that without looking at the reality, which is that dozens of bodies turn up mutilated — decapitation seems to be a favorite — every single day. Not, unfortunately, to Wilson …

You’d better believe if 30 headless corpses were found in Wilson’s hometown, he wouldn’t be complaining about adverse media coverage. Perhaps the media should write about all the people who weren’t decapitated yesterday?

Fortunately for Wilson, his head is still firmly attached to his shoulders. He ought to try using it.

If the First Amendment means anything, it means that the media and citizens are free to report vigorously on — and to criticize — the actions of public officials in the course of performing their governmental duties.

And if the Supreme Court’s landmark 1964 libel decision, Times v. Sullivan, means anything, it means that public officials should not be able to sue successfully for journalism they don’t like unless they can show the news organization that published it knew it was false, or showed “reckless disregard” for whether it was true or false. This is known as the “actual malice” standard.

Which brings me to the appeal in the case of the Boston Herald and Superior Court Judge Ernest Murphy. Earlier this week the Herald reported on an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief filed on its behalf by 13 news organizations concerned about the $2.1 million verdict Murphy won against the Herald in March 2005. I have posted a PDF of the brief here (warning: it’s four megabytes). The case is now before the state’s Supreme Judicial Court.

I’m not going to review the entire case today. For that, I would refer you to this February 2005 piece I wrote for the Boston Phoenix, and to this December 2005 Media Nation post on Murphy’s exceedingly odd letters to Herald publisher Pat Purcell.

Suffice it to say that though I believe the Herald’s characterization of Murphy as a “wrist-slapping” judge who “heartlessly demeaned” crime victims was irresponsible, I also believe it was substantially true, despite a few errors by reporter Dave Wedge. And given that Wedge’s source was a prosecutor within the Bristol County district attorney’s office, backed up by D.A. Paul Walsh, it strikes me as ludicrous to claim that the Herald went to press knowing or even suspecting that its story was false. Indeed, except for a few details, Wedge’s stories were not much different from accounts published in the Boston Globe and elsewhere around that time concerning the district attorney’s unhappiness with Murphy’s perceived leniency.

The amicus brief is signed by a virtual honor roll of news organizations and journalism associations, including the Washington Post, the Associated Press, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Newspaper Association of America, the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association, the New England Newspaper Association, Dow Jones, ABC and CBS.

And though the Boston Globe is not a signatory, it’s interesting that the lawyer for the 13 signers of the amicus brief is Jonathan Albano, who has represented the Globe on numerous occasions. [Note: This section has been corrected, as I originally mischaracterized Albano’s role. The Herald’s lawyers on the appeal are Bruce Sanford and Robert Dushman.]

Much of the brief concerns a matter that will be key to determining the Herald’s chances of success: an argument that the Supreme Judicial Court should not rely on the jury’s verdict in determining whether the Herald had committed actual malice, but should instead conduct its own independent fact-finding inquiry.

But there’s also a strong section in the brief on the Herald’s reliance on official sources, and on the self-censorship that would likely result if a libel verdict based on using such sources is allowed to stand. Here’s the relevant section:

In this case, much of the plaintiff’s actual malice argument is premised on attacking the Herald for relying on information provided by a District Attorney and members of his staff about the operation of the criminal justice system in cases prosecuted by their office. If accepted by the Court as clear and convincing evidence of actual malice, the precedent thereby established would have grave ramifications for future news reporting and would undoubtedly chill speech concerning governmental affairs.

The press routinely relies on District Attorneys — and other government officials — for information about the operation of the criminal justice system. This information often concerns the manner in which judges are discharging their public duties….

A finding of actual malice in this case, involving as it does news reports originating with a District Attorney’s Office, would mean that, in the future, the press could not rely on information about important government functions obtained from a public official who holds an office of public trust without risking without risking a multi-million dollar libel verdict.

As we all know, news organizations too often take handoffs from prosecutors and call them news. That’s hardly Pulitzer-caliber journalism, but it’s a depressing fact of media life.

But to hang a “libel” sign on such a dubious practice would be a grotesque overreaction that would harm not just the Herald, and not just the news media, but the public that depends on journalism to keep it informed about the actions of its government.

The Republican blog Hub Politics wants you to know that Deval Patrick is meeting yet again with (gasp!) House Speaker Sal DiMasi and Senate President Robert Travaglini. Who does Patrick think he is — the governor-elect?

Jay Rosen expects his latest idea, New Assignment.Net, to fail. Launched several months ago with the idea of promoting open-source journalism (that is, collaborative efforts between professional journalists and unpaid citizen activists), the project will most likely fizzle out after two or three years, Rosen said yesterday at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

“I see this as a temporary burst of energy and innovation designed to be imitated,” Rosen said. “Our idea is to steal this book — steal this project.” And: “It’s not going to be the next startup sold for $1.5 billion.”

Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, is one of the leading thinkers in how the Internet will change — and is changing — the way journalism is practiced, and the way it’s perceived by the public. His Press Think blog is a must-read, and NewAssignment.Net has attracted funding from Reuters and Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist. I brought my Journalism of the Web students to Berkman so that they could see and hear the latest about where online journalism may be headed.

Rosen said NewAssignment.Net has three missions:

• To “spark innovation in open-source reporting.”
• To determine whether the “pro-am” model — that is, having professional journalists and citizen volunteers collaborate on projects — can actually work.
• To “figure out whether there can be a ‘gift economy’ for news.” There is a whole philosophy behind the idea of the gift economy, and I don’t want to oversimplify it. But if you’re thinking it means that people don’t get paid, well, that’s certainly part of it.

Open-source journalism is already working in a limited way. The Sunlight Foundation, for instance, has tapped the power of volunteers to expose such things as pork-laden earmarks that have been tucked into the federal budget.

What I find most interesting about Rosen’s idea is that he wants to figure out how to add professional journalists to the mix. Given the current economic decline of the news business, getting this right strikes me as essential both for preserving journalism’s public-service mission and, frankly, for helping the next generation of journalists find jobs. Indeed, Rosen welcomes help from journalism students.

Rosen said yesterday that NewAssignment.Net is already working on projects with Wired.com and the BBC. In 2008, he hopes to put together a collaboration with WashingtonPost.com to do an in-depth project on polling places.

The idea with all of these is that large numbers of volunteers would be asked to gather certain types of specific information to create a database that’s bigger and more comprehensive than a news organization could afford to assemble on its own. Then professional journalists would try to make sense of what the volunteers found.

Is this nebulous? Yes. I asked Rosen whether he thought such projects might lead to the creation of new types of jobs for professional journalists, rather than simply having journalists swoop in near the end to write and broadcast stories based on the data collected by volunteers.

His answer: Maybe. One of the lessons that may come out of NewAssignment.Net, he said, is that it may help journalists figure out how to make use of online “smart mobs” so that they can be better beat reporters. For example, a reporter whose beat is a particular company could assemble an online community of employees, former employees, spouses, suppliers and the like, and then make use of that community’s collective knowledge. But, as an attendee sitting next to me noted, developing sources is what we already do. (Although surely the Net makes it easier to build the kind of community Rosen envisions.)

I also asked about a news organization’s obvious need for exclusivity, as with the proposed WashingtonPost.com project. What, I asked, would prevent another news organization from making use of the data before the Post got around to reporting on it? Rosen had two answers: It wouldn’t happen; but certain things might be “kept secret for the sake of the project” when necessary.

“I think people who have a lot of ideas don’t worry about their ideas being stolen,” he said.

It’s hardly a surprise that Rosen’s answers to my questions weren’t entirely satisfying. The whole point of NewAssignment.Net is to find answers. This is a project that will be well worth following closely.

Update: The Berkman Center has posted video of Rosen’s presentation here.

Credit: Photo of Jay Rosen taken by Laughing Squid on June 24, 2006, and licensed under the Creative Commons (cc) system. Some rights reserved. Full details here.