Media Nation

You don’t often hear a confrontational interview on NPR, and “All Things Considered” co-host Robert Siegel is hardly the first person you’d think of as someone who might break the mold. So I was surprised and impressed yesterday when Siegel, in that polite way of his, sunk his teeth into the unsuspecting secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, and resolutely refused to let go.

You can hear the entire segment by clicking here and selecting “Listen.” As you will learn, Siegel devoted most of the interview to badgering Chertoff about why planning for Katrina had been so inadequate, when people on the ground (that is, in the water) are likely to see some relief and – most important – when folks at the convention center, a scene of third-world desperation, are going to be rescued.

Here is the toughest exchange:

SIEGEL: We are hearing from our reporter – and he’s on another line right now – thousands of people at the convention center in New Orleans with no food, zero.

CHERTOFF: As I say, I’m telling you that we are getting food and water to areas where people are staging. And, you know, the one thing about an episode like this is if you talk to someone and you get a rumor or you get someone’s anecdotal version of something, I think it’s dangerous to extrapolate it all over the place. The limitation here on getting food and water to people is the condition on the ground. And as soon as we can physically move through the ground with these assets, we’re going to do that. So –

SIEGEL: But, Mr. Secretary, when you say that there is – we shouldn’t listen to rumors, these are things coming from reporters who have not only covered many, many other hurricanes; they’ve covered wars and refugee camps. These aren’t rumors. They’re seeing thousands of people there.

CHERTOFF: Well, I would be – actually I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don’t have food and water. I can tell you that I know specifically the Superdome, which was the designated staging area for a large number of evacuees, does have food and water. I know we have teams putting food and water out at other designated evacuation areas. So, you know, this isn’t – and we’ve got plenty of food and water if we can get it out to people. And that is the effort we’re undertaking.

After bringing the interview to a tense close, Siegel turned to reporter John Burnett, who had seen the convention-center disaster first-hand. (You can listen to Burnett here.) Burnett began with this:

BURNETT: Let me clarify for the secretary and for everyone else what myself and … just drove away from three blocks from here in the Ernest Morial Convention Center. There are, I estimate, 2,000 people living like animals inside the city convention center and around it. They’ve been there since the hurricane. There’s no food. There’s absolutely no water. There’s no medical treatment. There’s no police and no security. And there are two dead bodies lying on the ground and in a wheelchair beside the convention center, both elderly people, both covered with blankets now. We understand that two other elderly people died in the last couple of days. We understand that there was a 10-year-old girl who was raped in the convention center in the last two nights. People are absolutely desperate there. I’ve never seen anything like this.

It was a devastating response to Chertoff’s cavalier suggestion that Siegel was rumor-mongering. Not surprisingly, at the end of Burnett’s report, Siegel announced, “And later this afternoon Secretary Chertoff’s spokeswoman called to say that after our interview with the secretary of homeland security, he received a report confirming the situation at the convention center. And he says the department is working tirelessly to get food and supplies to those in need and also to save lives.”

I’m going to cut Chertoff a little slack here. He can’t know everything that’s going on, and certainly the Department of Homeland Security isn’t nearly as responsible for hurricane relief as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is getting ripped for the way it has (or hasn’t) responded. It was both decent and politically astute of him to have his spokeswoman call NPR to acknowledge the suffering at the convention center.

Still, other than President Bush, Chertoff’s the highest-ranking federal official dealing with disaster. NPR’s member stations are dependent on federal tax money, which makes NPR itself vulnerable to political attack. In that context, Siegel deserves credit for taking such an aggressive stance. Chertoff came off as surprised, defensive, arrogant and uninformed. We never would have heard that side of him if Siegel had contented himself with blandly allowing the secretary to run through his talking points.

I just finished four days of orientation at Northeastern, so my apologies in advance for passing this one off. My receiver: Mark Jurkowitz, who, if you haven’t seen his Media Log yet, has some excellent links following up the racial implications of Katrina coverage. The essential link is to the emotional comments of photographer Chris Graythen.

Romenesko has got a few links up on a simmering controversy over the devastation in New Orleans. When hungry people grab food from abandoned grocery stores, are they responding rationally to unusual circumstances? Or are they looting?

Incredibly, this Boing Boing item suggests that the difference in at least one case may depend on whether the person is white or black: a white couple is described as “finding” food, whereas a black man had apparently grabbed his goodie bag by “looting” a store. As you will see, the two pictures are remarkably alike.

Yes, we’re talking about two different news agencies, and as the item itself notes, we have no way of knowing whether there were circumstances that might justify such labeling. But it’s hard to disagree with Romenesko letter-writer Christina Pazzanese, who says, “Perhaps these photos will stimulate a media ‘gut check’ as we race to tell the stories of the thousands who lost their lives and livelihoods.”

Last night I was watching CNN when I saw some folks – I don’t remember their race – described as “looters.” They were walking out of an abandoned grocery store with what appeared to be food and other essentials. (And yes, I realize there is real looting going on, too, but that’s not what I’m talking about.) What’s happening in New Orleans is horrible, and is likely to get worse. Editors need to stop and think about how they describe people who find themselves in a desperate situation.

ThinkSecret.com, one of the Apple rumor sites being sued by Steve Jobs, has some fun with the New York Times’ story today on Apple’s supposedly imminent announcement of an iPod-capable cell phone. To wit:

THINKSECRET: The phone, the Times said, will allow users to “listen to the songs, presumably through headphones,” as opposed to listening to them through salami sandwiches, as originally presumed.

By the way, I’ve rediscovered Aaron Swartz’s New York Times Link Generator, which allows bloggers to create Times links that won’t expire. For some reason I had misplaced it. So if you don’t read this post for a couple of weeks, the link to the Times story should still work.

I’ll be attending orientation events for new faculty members at Northeastern this week. In fact, I’m on campus right now, posting this from a public computer. So expect little blogging this week.

I just turned on a Blogger feature called “word verification.” Now, if you want to leave a comment, you will be prompted to enter a sequence of characters – which, presumably, you will not be able to do if you’re a spammer buzzing through people’s blogs automatically. You will still be able to log in anonymously. So let’s hope it works.

If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the trailer for Martin Scorsese’s Dylan biopic, “No Direction Home.” The bad news: it’s all about the ’60s (again!), and the quotes you hear floating over the video sound like the usual clichés. (“There is an American collective unconscious, and Bobby somehow tapped into it.” Ugh.) The good news: Dylan seems fully awake in the interview snippets, and the concert footage of “Like a Rolling Stone” is a killer.

Don’t try watching this without broadband.

“I can’t believe I saw him die right in front of me” begins Boston Herald photographer John Wilcox’s story today about taking pictures of a man shooting up in the Boston Public Garden and then watching him keel over. It’s a stunning story – accompanied by an even more stunning online picture gallery. This is must-see journalism.

Given that this is the Herald, the inevitable comparisons will be made to last October, when the paper ran a graphic, color photo of Victoria Snelgrove’s bloody body outside Fenway Park. As I predicted, Herald publisher Pat Purcell later apologized.

Wilcox’s report, though, is nothing like that. The front-page photo, though dramatic, isn’t graphic. And though I don’t have today’s print edition and thus can’t see how it was played inside, every photo in the online gallery is newsworthy without being exploitative.

This was a self-inflicted public death, and it’s not a bad idea to show people as directly as possible what drugs can do. As Wilcox writes, “The men I photographed in the park yesterday didn’t look like back-alley junkies. They were clean and dressed like working people. One of them was wearing a roofing company shirt.” In other words, this could happen to someone you know.

After Matter: (Thanks for the phrase, Jay Rosen.) Adam Gaffin has a roundup of commentary on Universal Hub.

His thoughtful response to my critique is in the comments section, here. No disrespect to the other Steve, whose comments are also worth reading.

Steve Outing of the Poynter Institute has a piece in Editor & Publisher on how technology is being used to open up the editorial page. Every one of the ideas he mentions is worthwhile, from the Seattle Post & Intelligencer’s “virtual editorial board,” to blogs by editorial writers, to offloading worthwhile material onto the limitless space of the Web.

Still, I find the mentality expressed in this excerpt problematic:

OUTING: Editorial pages can open up to more voices by giving them space on the Web. If four people submit Op-Ed pieces on, say, a controversial local land-use plan, then all four can run. A logical approach in a print/online publishing environment is to choose the best for print publication and then refer to additional public Op-Ed essays online. Or, the print Op-Ed page can serve more as a table of contents to what’s published online, with abstracts of each of the four articles and Web addresses for the full articles.

It’s the same space issue with letters to the editor, of course. The online editorial page frees letter writers up from the old tyranny of editorial-page editors. For instance, at the Post-Intelligencer, the policy is that an individual can only have a letter published once every three months in the print edition. Yet for the letters areas of P-I Web site – and the same goes for submissions to the Virtual Editorial Board – a prolific letter writer can be published every day.

What this means is that in time, the editorial page of a printed newspaper becomes a highlights page for a much richer presentation of viewpoints and opinion on its respective online area. Interesting, thoughtful and lengthy conversations on important issues can be boiled down and summarized in print – a “Cliff’s Notes,” if you will, of the full issue discussion online. Online = depth. Print = a quick read.

What is the idea of a daily newspaper? To me, the idea is to present a coherent compilation of the news. In putting together that coherent picture, the editor’s most important job is deciding what to leave out. You want to help the reader who can only give you 15 minutes to navigate through a complicated news-scape, while at the same time providing depth to those who can spend an hour.

But even a newspaper’s most devoted readers need to know that there’s an end – that, at some point, intelligent editors have decided that enough is enough, and that any more would represent a diminishing rate of return. What Outing favors, by contrast, could easily turn into a situation in which the print newspaper declines in importance while the Web edition morphs into a bottomless pit.

The Web provides limitless space. But that doesn’t absolve editors of the responsibility to respect their readers’ very limited time.