Reportage Medialog

It takes a riot to get Australian news into the world media.

This week we even made SF Gate’s World Views with the unflattering headline: “Australia’s Leb Bashings” the other piece in the column this week was on the international reaction to the US torture policy - fine comapnion pieces:

War, bombings and torture in other places are the routine stuff of headlines, but this past weekend, sun worshippers at Cronulla Beach in Sydney, Australia, got a taste of a different kind of violence — the homemade kind. Reportedly provoked by assaults about a week ago on two lifeguards at the beach by youths described as being of “Middle Eastern appearance,” Sunday’s race riots involved what papers called “thousands of drunken youths.” (BBC/Daily Telegraph/Courier-Mail)

A number of commentators have compared the situation in Cronulla with the recent riots outside Paris. But Gary Sauer-Thompson makes a key distinction:

The race riots at Cronulla on the weekend bring the Australian Right into the foreground. The riots can be connected to what recently happened in France. I agree with Andrew Norton over at Catallaxy that the Cronulla violence is similar to the most recent Sydney riots at Macquarie Fields and Redfern. In both the French and Sydney cases the base economic issues are clear: poorly educated young people fuelled by anger, dispossession and booze/drugs, low incomes and poor job prospects, turning tribal.

However,what happened Cronulla is also different from the events in France. Cronulla turned tribal and became racist, without the police or the political authorities fueling racism, which is what happened in France.

The other key distinction is that the media in both countries have behaved very differently as the Australian Media section reported on Thursday:

French media had a rather novel ethical approach to covering the recent Paris race riots after the images reached saturation point: they simply stopped showing them.

Incensed critics have labelled the move censorship, accusing the French media of political biases and an over-inflated sense of power. Yet others have seen the move as an indication that the media — a powerful social force — could also possess a social conscience.

“We have a unique situation in France at the moment. Because events have been continuing for some weeks, we have the time to consider the impact of our reporting,” says Antonin Lhote, chief editor at Canal Plus, one of France’s privately owned television stations.

“Often when we film something, we are unaware of its impact until later. Our job is simply to witness.

“But here we have the unique opportunity to consider what the images mean and whether they should be shown.”

The difference, Lhote says, is that the station has decided not to show the images it obtains for fear of spreading what he calls a

contagion through the thoughtless dissemination of the images.

“It’s not about the violence,” he says. “Iraq, Tel Aviv, Pakistan … these are all much more violent images. But they are news. This is not news; it is a show. We know there can be a perverse relationship between young men and the media, and they are giving us beautiful pictures … things burning, people running around in the night, it looks wonderful. But what we want to do is draw the distinction between spectaculars and news.”

Any article that begins: “How big are blogs? Bigger than Jesus. Bigger than sex” sounds like it’s going to be yet another blogsploitation spiel. However Daniel Rubin’s article in the Philadelphia Inquirer is a pretty good summary of major blogging trends.

If 2004 was the year blogs entered the language (so says Merriam-Webster), then 2005 was the year they found their voice. Mainstream media embraced blogs, corporations embraced blogs, spammers embraced blogs.

It was a time of great convergence, with indie blogs joining together to capture audience and advertising, as brand-name media shed their institutional voices to go unfiltered where the readers were.

I think it is this friction between the institutional adoption of blogs and their original independent impulse that is one of the most interesting things about the current evolution of the blogsphere. Lee Rainie, director of the Pew internet project makes the point that we are in a key transitional moment:

“The mainstream media opened its arms to bloggers in crisis moments in all sorts of ways,” Rainie says. “We have entered this melding stage of thinking… . We’ve been through anger and fighting. Now we are in the wary-embrace stage. At some point, it will be wholesale endorsement.”

The question becomes will it be endorsement of the form or endorsement of the ethos of the blogsphere.

The Sydney Morning Herald produced one of the earliest mainstream experiments with Margo Kingston’s webdiary. It was a genuine evolving space with a commitment to diversity and discussion that became a community for negotiated discussion not just a bullitedn board. For reasons that still remain unclear Kingston was shafted and had to go independent. She has now retired from the blogsphere, even though others have continued her project.

The Herald has replaced her with The Contrarian which like many mainstream media blogs is a traditional column with a comments facility

The real change will come when mainstream media realise that blogging is a new way of relating to content not just a new way of disseminating it.

There’s been lots of speculation about Katie Couric leaving her successful morning spot on the Today show and replacing Dan Rather as CBS’ main news anchor. This raises many interesting questions about the nature of journalism and the development of celebrity journalists. The New York Times reports:

Reports of her impending flight from “Today” to sign on as Dan Rather’s successor as evening-news anchor at CBS have dwarfed most other talk in the television-news business, even the official designation this week of Bob Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas as the anchors of ABC’s newscast, succeeding the late Peter Jennings.

Rumors have floated out of CBS and elsewhere about potential offers of $20 million a year for seven years, and about some unusual window in Ms. Couric present contract that would allow CBS to snatch her up this month, long before her deal ends on May 31. But in an interview yesterday Ms. Couric herself dismissed most of that - especially the rumor of a contract window, which she said was false.

“Obviously my contract is up in May; that’s the one thing that is actually true,” she said. “I am in the process of figuring out what I want to do.”

She did not deny that CBS News might be in the mix of that decision. “I am really fortunate and flattered that I have some opportunities, a variety of opportunities,” she said. “I am trying to make a thoughtful decision while being in the middle of this media spotlight, which I am trying to ignore.”

Couric herself notes that “her personality” suits the Today show format, but maybe the changing nature of news also demands a new type of anchor:

“Every day I get jazzed about this show,” she said. And she acknowledged that “Today,” which asks her to take on roles as varied as interviewing victims of terrorist bombings and singing duets with Bette Midler, is a show that fits her many talents

“I do think my personality in many ways seems tailor-made for this format,” she said. But she added that she believed the broader television news business was changing. “People don’t want to see robo-anchors regurgitating whatever is on the teleprompter in front of them. They want people to be natural, people who feel things, who react to things.”

Those comments may be music to the ears of Leslie Moonves, the CBS chief executive, who has openly discussed his desire for a news anchor who would break the old “voice of God” model of network news.

So will she be getting “jazzed” for the CBS news and what might this mean. One satire site considers the possibilities:

Good evening. I am Katie Couric and here is tonight’s news.

Another car bomb went off in downtown Baghdad today, marking a further escalation in the violence that has plagued Iraq over the past two and a half years. There is still no official word on how survivors of the bombing feel about the upcoming Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes baby.

Ellen Gray from The Philadelphia Daily News asks whether Couric’s statement that she wants to be taken seriously as a journalist is compatible with her prospective $20million deal with CBS:

For all I know, Couric feels the same about her work, and views that $20 million as just a sign of respect, which is how many well-compensated people view their salaries, assuming they’re getting enough to pay the mortgage and care for their families decently.

The problem, though, is that $20 million starts to sound like real money, even in a business where they throw it around pretty freely….

Will it be the news-gathering capabilities of CBS News, an operation that’s at least as important to an anchor’s credibility as whether he or she dresses up for Halloween?

Or will it be Couric herself, who for $20 million a year might not be able to say no to CBS honcho Les Moonves’ apparent hopes for a brighter, more entertaining half-hour, one that’s probably not going to guarantee her a mention in the same breath with Walter Cronkite?

She speculates that perhaps Couric should negotiate down in terms of money but up in terms of control if she really wants to take on the mantle of “serious”. Gray ends with an amusing take on this:

Instead of demanding respect in the form of money, she could trade away a few million for control - and win real respect.

As they might say on those credit-card commercials:

“Reading the news a half-hour a night: $8 million.

“Contributing to ‘60 Minutes’: $5 million.

“Never having to interview another runaway bride or ‘reality’ show castoff: Priceless.”

For a long and serious look at the anchor wars check out David Blum’s recent New York Magazine featureand the Chicago Tribune’s take on Couric

Comedian John Doyle (Roy & HG) had some pretty feisty things to say about the state of the Australian media in his Andrew Olle lecture.

Declaring at the outset that his journalistic credentials were “none” ….He railed against proposed changes in media ownership laws that would allow players to own radio, newspapers and TV in the same market.

He also called for more funding for ABC drama, and criticised media companies for focusing their spending on improving systems of delivery.

“In the end, delivery and delivery systems are meaningless. Content is all that matters. Rubbish is still rubbish, be it on an old 21-inch black-and-white HMV or in high definition through the digital set-top box.”

Doyle said the only places to find diversity were at the ABC or SBS. The commercial news services were exact copies of each other, he said; he had seen Seven’s Today Tonight and Nine’s A Current Affair air the same story at the same time on the same night.

In the end its hard to argue with these broad brush conclusions but why was he up there in the first place. It doesn’t help our understanding of what’s happening in the Australian media to have a comedian with no qualifications get up and make a series of generalisations. Using Doyle as a brand personality to give this lecture is indicative of the very lack of serious news and current affairs culture that he is decrying.

Andrew Olle probably liked a laugh but if the lecture in his honour is supposed to be about the media why not get someone who knows what they are talking about.

Although Judith Miller is out of jail nothing much new is known about why she decided to go there in the first place. We do now know that the source she was supposedly protecting was I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. But as even her own paper reports the sudden direct release from confidentiality by Libby seems to be an offer that has been on the table all along. Her lawyers spoke to his lawyers well before Miller was incarcerated and according to the Libby camp they gave “unequivocal” permission for Miller to testify. Miller says she needed direct confirmation which came in a recent phonecall with Libby. This seems rather odd: you’d think they could have had that phone call a few months back.

Miller’s other requirement was that she got a deal with the special prosecutor limitting her testimony to questions on her conversations with Libby about Palme. This is the type of deal that a number of other reporters got from Fitzgerald, so again it seems like this could have all been worked out a long time ago.

The irony is that a number of reporters, including Time’s Matt Cooper who nearly did jail time like Miller before coming to an arrangement with his source Karl Rove, have already testified about their conversations with Libby so Miller’s testimony is unlikely to add any new dimensions to the case.

As one rather wry reporter asked Miller on her release: “What about the perception that you spent 85 days dancing on the head of a pin?” Indeed.

But an article in today’s Washinton Post gives us a fresh perspective on the inquiry. Jim VandeHei and Walter Pincus speculate, based on conversations with lawyers involved in the case, that special prosecutor Fitzgerald may be getting ready to change tactics.

If formal charges cannot be laid under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act then he may bring general charges of criminal conspiracy.

Under this legal tactic, Fitzgerald would attempt to establish that at least two or more officials agreed to take affirmative steps to discredit and retaliate against Wilson and leak sensitive government information about his wife. To prove a criminal conspiracy, the actions need not have been criminal, but conspirators must have had a criminal purpose….

One source briefed on Miller’s account of conversations with Libby said it is doubtful her testimony would on its own lead to charges against any government officials. But, the source said, her account could establish a piece of a web of actions taken by officials that had an underlying criminal purpose.

Conspiracy cases are viewed by criminal prosecutors as simpler to bring than more straightforward criminal charges, but also trickier to sell to juries. “That would arguably be a close call for a prosecutor, but it could be tried,” a veteran Washington criminal attorney with longtime experience in national security cases said yesterday.

If this is the case the focus of the inquiry may finally shift from Miller’s questionable heroics to the heart of the matter: the deeply troubling behaviour of the Bush/Cheney Whitehouse.

Bush is being criticised for not acting fast enough and for a lack luster, even humorous, speech when he first addressed the plight of New Orleans. The New York Times has become increasingly strident in its editorials over the last few days:

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.

Bush doesn’t seem to have either a natural sense of compassion or even a natural political instinct on these occasions when symbolic leadership is most needed. Either Clinton or Reagan would have acted immediately and made us feel that they were involved personally and politically with the crisis. This symbolic act of the leader is of such importance and has real impact on the course of actual events by creating a buoyant atmosphere for recovery. But there is a difference between a genuine act of symbolic leadership, which requires engagement, reflection and action and a staged media event. Increasingly it is difficult for both politicians and the public to distinguish between the two.

A story has just emerged about how deliberately the Bush team stage managed the tour of the crisis zone. Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu has just released a statement:

“But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast – black and white, rich and poor, young and old – deserve far better from their national government.

This has been reported by the wires and some blogs but doesn’t appear to have been picked up by the mainstream press yet.

It is confirmed by at least one report from a viewer of a German news service who says the German account of Bush’s tour differed markedly from the CNN account:

There was a striking dicrepancy between the CNN International report on the Bush visit to the New Orleans disaster zone, yesterday, and reports of the same event by German TV.

ZDF News reported that the president’s visit was a completely staged event. Their crew witnessed how the open air food distribution point Bush visited in front of the cameras was torn down immediately after the president and the herd of ‘news people’ had left and that others which were allegedly being set up were abandoned at the same time.

The people in the area were once again left to fend for themselves, said ZDF.

Technorati Tags: Bush and Katrina

A new survey has shown that 51% of US journalists use blogs editorsweblog reports:

According to the latest Annual Euro RSCG Magnet and Columbia University Survey of the Media, 51% of journalists, combared to 11% of all US internet users (according to eWeek), are using weblogs regularly and 28% rely on them for their daily reporting. By contrast, only 1% of journalists believe in their credibility. The study is based on responses of 1,202 journalist from the US and other countries worldwide (no further details regarding the other countries given on Euro RSCG Magnet ). Of journalist who reported using blogs 70% use blogs for work-related tasks: they use blogs to find story ideas, researching and referencing facts, finding sources and uncovering breaking news. However, only few journalists post on blogs or have their own blogs. “Such activities might be seen as compromising objectivity and thus credibility.”

Steven S. Ross, associate professor at Columbia University and a partner in the study said on Euro RSCG Magnet: “As blogs continue to gain in popularity, quality and influence, it is becoming imperative that journalists and journalism students continue to integrate blogs, especially blogs that cover technology, into their reporting practices. A number of credible and influential Weblogs – such as Scobleizer, Gizmodo, and Boing Boing – provide an invaluable trove of research, story ideas, and other information that current and future journalists would be remiss not to leverage in their reporting.”

The low general score on credibility contrasted with the high level of use is fascinating. I believe it shows the coexistence of two competing paradigms currently at work in the media sphere. The credibility issue is one firmly rooted in traditional understandings of objectivity while the use of blogs is rooted in a new multimodal journalism practice that is still trying to formulate an appropriate epistemology.

Technorati Tags: blogging and journalism

There has been some angry reaction to Arianna Huffington’s speculations about Judith Miller’s motives, that I quoted in my last entry. Richard Cohen in the Washington Post thinks it’s “ugly”:

The fury at Miller is ugly and does journalism no good. Whatever her politics, whatever her journalistic sins (if any), whatever the whatevers, she is in jail officially for keeping her pledge not to reveal the identity of a confidential source. (If that’s not the case, then we don’t know otherwise.) That pledge is no different than the one Bob Woodward made to Mark (Deep Throat) Felt.

While Huffington’s column was pure speculation (a reasonable activity for a columnist) it did attempt to do something that Cohen in his cheerleading does not do. Those, who like Cohen, want to beatify St Judith as the patron saint of confidential sources are making the same mistake that Miller herself made in her disastrous WMD reporting: they are not paying enough attention to motive.

If Miller is as good a journalist as her supporters are making out then she would never have been tricked into believing Amhed Chalabi’s furfies about Saddam Hussein’s weapons stash, she would have asked the simple questions about Chalabi’s motives and reliability as a source.

Those who speculate that there is more to the Miller case than meets the eye are only using their well honed journalistic instincts because the bare facts as they stand do not make sense. Every other journalist called upon by the special prosecutor has found a way - an ethical way - around jail time. Rove and numerous other White House sources have come forward, so she can’t be protecting them - and why would she protect a political source who was trying to use her to manipulate public opinion anyway? Unless of course she was more complicit in that manipulation than she cares to admit.

The reality is that no matter what facts finally emerge it seems that Miller’s pledge is indeed very different from “the one Bob Woodward made to Mark (Deep Throat) Felt.” This is necessarily so because the world of politics and the world of journalism has changed so markedly that the simplicity of the old codes no longer seem to work in such a straightforward manner.

It seems that the American Society of Journalists and Authors has thought more carefully about the Miller case than Cohen. The board of the organisation decided to reject the recommendation of their First Amendment Committee that Miller be given a Conscience in Media award. According to Editor and Publisher the decision was made because the board felt that “Miller’s career, taken as a whole, did not make her the best candidate for the award” and because of “divided opinions on the board over whether her recent actions merit the award.”

The earlier vote by the First Amendment committee had been narrowly in favor of giving Miller the award and was not made without internal controversy. One member Anita Bartholomew resigned in protest, writing in her letter of resignation:

“The First Amendment is designed to prevent government interference with a free press. Miller, by shielding a government official or officials who attempted to use the press to retaliate against a whistleblower, and scare off other would-be whistleblowers, has allied herself with government interference with, and censorship of, whistleblowers. When your source IS the government, and the government is attempting to use you to target a whistleblower, the notion of shielding a source must be reconsidered. To apply standard practices regarding sources to hiding wrongdoing at the highest levels of government perverts the intent of the First Amendment.”

Arianna Huffington has posted an interesting alternate scenario of Judith Miller’s involvement in the Plame scandal in her latest Alternet column. Although Huffington sources her scenario only vaguely, to something “floated in the halls” of the Times building, it does provide a credible reading that makes sense of Miller’s heroics in a situation where many other journalists have found ethical ways around an outright refusal to testify.

It’s July 6, 2003, and Joe Wilson’s now famous op-ed piece appears in the Times, raising the idea that the Bush administration has “manipulate[d]” and “twisted” intelligence “to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” Miller, who has been pushing this manipulated, twisted, and exaggerated intel in the Times for months, goes ballistic. Someone is using the pages of her own paper to call into question the justification for the war — and, indirectly, much of her reporting. The idea that intelligence was being fixed goes to the heart of Miller’s credibility. So she calls her friends in the intelligence community and asks, Who is this guy? She finds out he’s married to a CIA agent. She then passes on the info about Mrs. Wilson to Scooter Libby (Newsday has identified a meeting Miller had on July 8 in Washington with an “unnamed government official”). Maybe Miller tells Rove too — or Libby does. The White House hatchet men turn around and tell Novak and Cooper. The story gets out.

This is why Miller doesn’t want to reveal her “source” at the White House — because she was the source. Sure, she first got the info from someone else, and the odds are she wasn’t the only one who clued in Libby and/or Rove (the State Dept. memo likely played a role too)… but, in this scenario, Miller certainly wasn’t an innocent writer caught up in the whirl of history. She had a starring role in it. This also explains why Miller never wrote a story about Plame, because her goal wasn’t to write a story, but to get out the story that cast doubts on Wilson’s motives. Which Novak did.

Murray Waas provides some good commentary in Prospect (and more in his blog) on the Fitzgerald’s Plame Inquiry. He notes how reporting on an investigation about self serving anonymous leaks is now being driven by another series of what seem suspiciously like self serving anonymous leaks.

The unnamed lawyer also told both the Times and the Post that it was Novak who first broached the subject of Plame with Rove, with Novak saying that he had heard that Plame worked for the CIA. Both newspapers quoted the attorney as saying that Rove responded, “I heard that, too.”

The coverage underscores the secrecy surrounding Fitzgerald’s grand-jury investigation. The few leaks that constitute public knowledge of the investigation’s progress have largely come from one side: the defense attorneys’. And what they have to say is oftentimes self-serving, misleading, and in some cases untrue. Their all-too-willing collaborators have been the nation’s leading newspapers.