News-Record.com

I haven't blogged in a while, partially because my role here at the N&R was changing so often and partially because I didn't think I had anything worthwhile to say. But Al Tompkins at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies posted a column today that really punched one of my buttons: open government records. In particular, he focused on cases in which court records, normally open in every state, are being sealed for what turns out to be no good reason.

In some of the cases he cites, prominent individuals most likely benefited from the case sealings. And newspapers have been fighting back in several communities, suing for access to the records.

And because such cases often are considered of interest only to journalists, they're writing about the subject in plain language meant to explain why everyone should care about this violation of law. A Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press article on the Seattle Times' work cited by Tompkins shows just how plain, and focused directly on the reader, the language could be:

The first story, for instance, starts like this:

Four years ago, a lawsuit was filed in King County Superior Court, alleging that a medical device was unsafe. A woman using it wound up in a coma. You'd probably like to know: What's the device? Does anyone in my family use it? Unsafe how?

But you can't know. You're not allowed to know.

The newspaper also wanted to be upfront with readers about its involvement in the cases.

That first story ended this way:

"We start filing motions tomorrow. We'll let you know how it goes."

I do not know whether the problem exists here, or, if it does, to what extent. If it did and we knew, I do not know whether we could devote the resources to documenting it that the Seattle Times did there in King County, Wash. But I would like to think we'd do everything in our power to see to it that the public's legal business, carried out in courts supported by our tax dollars, would be done in public. Secrecy breeds favoritism. Favoritism breeds injustice.

At least 144 journalists gave money to politicians between 2004 and the start of the 2008 campaign, MSNBC reports.

We deal with a lot of grays in this bidness. This is not one of them.

The home page for the Washington bureau of the McClatchy newspaper chain (which owns The Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer of Raleigh, among others) now has a new slogan: Truth to Power.

Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, et al., act as if there is some invisible force so strong that it keeps them from even trying to achieve this goal. But then, that's TV for you.

You probably don't recognize the name Nick Ut.

But you'd recognize his work.

(h/t: Apostropher)

Digby at his Hullabaloo blog runs down some of the things wrong with American TV journalism. It's lengthy but well worth reading.

If you're tired of reading about buxom dead celebrities, and I certainly am, go read this.

And reflect, please, not only on its substance but on the ways and means in which it is coming to the attention of at least a small fraction of the American public.

Everyone who has ever had to put up with an uninformed (or lying) bureaucrat to try to get public records, anyone who has ever had to twiddle her thumbs through the litigation of a public-records lawsuit whose resolution comes long after the records' news value has evaporated, will get at least a mild kick out of the luck involved in this story.

(Hat tip: John McCarthy at Florida Today, via the NICAR-L listserv.)

For the 23 years I've been in newspaper journalism, I've tried very hard to be accurate, and not just in reporting. Following my late father's advice, I've tried to avoid prediction completely. When that wasn't possible, I tried to base any predictions on incontrovertible facts and as rational an interpretation of those facts as possible. And when that wasn't possible, I predicted as conservatively as possible, so that if I was going to be wrong, at least it wouldn't be by much.

Dad's advice has worked for me. I sleep well, I can look at myself in the mirror without flinching about anything but my complexion, and I am able to live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.

Unfortunately, however, I'm going to have to un-inurn my dad and beat him over the ashes that used to be his head with this article. Because following his advice turns out to have been precisely the wrong approach.

Somebody had probably better tell JR, too. But break it to him gently, OK?

COROLLARY: (courtesy Athenae): "Everything important in the last six years has been discussed entirely by crazy people."

So former New York Times reporter (or Bush-administration mouthpiece) Judith Miller was actually presuming to lecture the rest of us this past weekend on journalism ethics.

It is to laugh.

Now, to be absolutely, positively, scrupulously fair to Miller, she's quite right about increasing levels of secrecy, and corresponding decreases in the levels of freedom, in this country. In fact, the country's voters spoke rather loudly last Tuesday to the effect that they get that and want to do something about it.

But I had to laugh at this:

Miller said the American media, however, give the federal government reason to doubt its motives and competence each time it is discovered that an article is plagiarized or gossip is reported as fact.

The blurring of entertainment and news and the relaxing of journalistic standards can be seen in online bloggers who are critical of people without giving them an opportunity to respond or who don't post corrections when they learn that what they have posted is wrong, she said.

"I'm worried about bloggers," she said. "(A post) starts as a rumor and within 24 hours it's repeated as fact."

While she advocates a federal shield law to protect mainstream journalists from divulging their sources, she doesn't favor extending that to bloggers who don't follow the standards and ethnics of the journalism industry.

Still, she wouldn't restrict a blogger's right to publish online. She said some bloggers have been invaluable in uncovering government flaws.

"I'm glad to welcome them as long as they agree to the standards," she said.

Tell me, Miss "I was proved f------ right": What exactly are the standards?:

On September 7, 2002, Miller and Times reporter Michael R. Gordon reported the interception of metal tubes bound for Iraq. Her front page story quoted unnamed "American officials" and "American intelligence experts" who said the tubes were intended to be used to enrich nuclear material, and cited unnamed "Bush administration officials" who claimed that in recent months, Iraq had "stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb."[4]

Miller added that "Mr. Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war." Although Miller conceded that some intelligence experts found the information on Iraq's weapons programs "spotty," she did not report specific and detailed objections, including a report filed with the US government more than a year before Miller's article appeared by retired Oak Ridge National Laboratory physicist, Houston G. Wood III, who concluded that the tubes were not meant for centrifuges.

Shortly after Miller's article was published, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld all appeared on television and pointed to Miller's story as a partial basis for going to war. Subsequent analyses by various agencies all concluded that there was no way the tubes could have been used for uranium-enrichment centrifuges.

Miller would later claim, based only on second-hand statements from the military unit she was embedded with, that WMDs had been found in Iraq. (NYT; April 21, 2003) This again was widely repeated in the press. "Well, I think they found something more than a smoking gun," Miller said on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. "What they've found is a silver bullet in the form of a person, an Iraqi individual, a scientist, as we've called him, who really worked on the programs, who knows them, firsthand, and who has led MET Alpha people to some pretty startling conclusions." This story also turned out to be false.[5]

On May 26, 2004, a week after the U.S. government apparently severed ties with Ahmed Chalabi, a Times editorial acknowledged that some of that newspaper's coverage in the run-up to the war had relied too heavily on Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles bent on regime change. It also regretted that "information that was controversial [was] allowed to stand unchallenged." While the editorial rejected "blame on individual reporters," others noted that ten of the twelve flawed stories discussed had been written or co-written by Miller.[6]

Miller has reacted angrily to criticism of her pre-war reporting. In a May 27, 2004 article in Salon, published the day after the Times mea culpa, James C. Moore quoted her: "You know what," she offered angrily. "I was proved f------ right. That's what happened. People who disagreed with me were saying, 'There she goes again.' But I was proved f------ right." This quotation was originally in relation to another Miller story, wherein she indicated that trailers found in Iraq had been proven to be mobile weapons labs. That too was later shown to be untrue.

So tell us, Judy: Is it OK if the bloggers lie the country into a war, like you did, as long as they correct their misspellings?

Actually, strike that. I'll tell you what: In the unlikely event we who are still in the business of trying to report stuff instead of making stuff up need your advice, we'll beat it out of you. Otherwise? Just. Shut. Up. Our jobs are hard enough as it is.

• Libel is libel, irrespective of whether it appears in a newspaper or on the Web.
• Unflattering but factually accurate reporting about someone is not libel, despite what the people on this jury think.

I don't often make predictions, by the way, but I'll make one in this case: The verdict will be overturned in its entirety on appeal, the entire judgment thrown out. The jury admits that the reporting was accurate; all else is sound and fury, signifying nothing even though it was extremely embarrassing (and no doubt terrifying) to the plaintiff. I haven't read the entire case file, but on the basis of this news article it looks as if the judge should have swatted this claim out of the park on summary judgment.

(Also, to gauge the jury's intellectual candlepower, note that although jurors concede that the plaintiff's name was on the jail log AND that the jail log was a public record, they couldn't agree on the invasion-of-privacy issue. In other words, at least one person thought that publication of the guy's name under those circumstances constituted a valid tort claim. Jayhawk, please.)

In the United States we do not, except in cases of national security, punish people for the publication of true but unflattering material. For those of you new to the country, that's one of the many things that lead us to think of ourselves as the good guys.

If you're ever attacked while we're covering a story together, I will help you.

Steve Safran, managing editor of Lost Remote, writes Perspective's obituary.

... courtesy of Fox News' John Gibson, and edited for length:

Ned Lamont = Pol Pot

But, hey, at least it's fair and balanced.

TO: House Speaker Dennis Hastert
FROM: Lex
DATE: 29 June 2006
RE: Your little temper tantrum

Yo, Self-Serving Fat Boy: Before you get your panties in a wad over The New York Times (and The Wall Street Journal, don't forget, although for some reason defenders of the administration always do) "disclosing" a program whose existence was only slightly more secret than the fact that the sky is blue, you might want to have a word with one of your friends:

No one would have mentioned his name at all if President George W. Bush hadn't singled him out in public. Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, West Point '76, is not someone the Army likes to talk about. He isn't even listed in the directory at Fort Bragg, N.C., his home base. That's not because McChrystal has done anything wrong—quite the contrary, he's one of the Army's rising stars—but because he runs the most secretive force in the U.S. military. That is the Joint Special Operations Command, the snake-eating, slit-their-throats "black ops" guys who captured Saddam Hussein and targeted Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.

JSOC is part of what Vice President Dick Cheney was referring to when he said America would have to "work the dark side" after 9/11. To many critics, the veep's remark back in 2001 fostered his rep as the Darth Vader of the war on terror and presaged bad things to come, like the interrogation abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. But America also has its share of Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls "the shadows." And McChrystal, an affable but tough Army Ranger, and the Delta Force and other elite teams he commands are among them.

After the Zarqawi strike, multinational forces spokesman Gen. Bill Caldwell refused to comment on JSOC's role, saying, "We don't talk about when special operating forces are involved." But when Bush revealed to reporters that it was McChrystal's Special Ops teams that had found Zarqawi, Caldwell had to gulp and say (to laughter), "If the president of the United States said it was, then I'm sure it was."

Just sayin'.

Now, don't we have some terrorists to catch and an executive branch to oversee? Why, yes, we do. So put the Constitution down, hand me your scissors and go do your freakin' job.

Oh, and Denny? Last time I checked that Constitution, you worked for me and not the other way 'round, so I don't give a flying flip at a rolling doughnut what you "expect."

It's tempting to write off the controversy over The New York Times' reporting on surveillance of financial transactions as utterly meaningless. So tempting. And yet ...

I do not mean to say the Times did anything illegal, even though that's what the president and vice president have been saying. Quite the contrary: Although classified, the program had been no secret at all, and if you doubt me, then take the word of one of the president's own counterterrorism experts:

"There have been public references to SWIFT before," said Roger Cressey, a senior White House counterterrorism official until 2003. "The White House is overreaching when they say [The New York Times committed] a crime against the war on terror. It has been in the public domain before."

(UPDATE: Additional background here from former banker TBogg and his banking commenters on just how widely known (outside the U.S.) SWIFT and its capabilities are.)

That being the case, it's a little unclear why the program was classified in the first place, although that classification is consistent with the administration's policy of decreasing public access to the workings and records of government -- a policy that predates 9/11.

It also raises a question: Do the president and vice president not know the Times (and the Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal) did nothing wrong? I don't know. And if they do know it, then why are they saying what they're saying? I don't know that, either. (UPDATE: Media critic Dan Kennedy hazards a hypothesis:

The White House and its defenders also give the game away by refusing to differentiate between the NSA no-warrant wiretapping program -- obviously illegal, given that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires warrants -- and the SWIFT program, which appears to be on more solid legal ground.

By lumping them together, folks like U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., make it clear that they're only interested in scoring points against the media.

(Why score points against the media? To energize their voting base for the fall elections, if in fact "scoring points against the media" is what they're trying to do and they aren't honestly mistaken.)

What I do know is that the incident has sparked a wave of pro-administration protest that the Times, the reporters and senior editors should be prosecuted for espionage, if not treason. Some commenters are even calling for vigilantism, as in this post at the Powerline blog, the one that took credit for taking down Dan Rather:

It is unfortunately past time for the Bush administration to enforce the laws of the United States against the New York Times. The Times and its likeminded media colleagues will undoubtedly continue to undermine and betray the national security of the United States until they are taught that they are subject to the same laws that govern the conduct of ordinary citizens, or until an enraged citizenry decides, like Bill Keller, to take the law into its own hands and express its disagreement some other way.

Nice First Amendment you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it.

Well, I would remind the Powerline boys, secure in their Minnesota law offices, of a couple of things.

First, they've been wrong on pretty much every legal issue involving the administration to come down the pike. (UPDATE: There's even a law about this, to go along with those of Murphy and Godwin, called Ezra's Law, coined by Ezra Klein: "Powerline ... has no bleeping idea what they're talking about at any given moment.") They don't deal in law on their blog; they deal in stroking some very paranoid fantasies.

Second, this is North Carolina. Down here, even the journalists carry guns.

Y'all have a nice day.

So Charlotte Observer reporter Michael Gordon and photographer Todd Sumlin just happened to be down at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, this past weekend, doing a feature on the prison's commander (who's from Kings Mountain, 45 minutes or so west of Charlotte), when three inmates hanged themselves.

Gordon, surprise, acted like a reporter: He filed a story. (And at least two others on succeeding days.)

As a reward, he and Sumlin were kicked off the base, and reporters from the Los Angeles Times and the Miami Herald who had arrived to cover the suicides also were ordered to leave.

Pentagon spokesman J.D. Gordon (whose relationship, if any, to Michael Gordon is not characterized), speaks out of both sides of his mouth on this incident. He told the trade magazine Editor & Publisher, "We are not into content management. The issue was that other media were threatening to take us to court." But the same spokesman also said Gordon's reporting had caused "controversy" and added, "He was doing a hometowner [i.e., an article on someone famous by a newspaper in that person's home town], a hometowner takes one day. You would think that a man allowed down for a whole week would be a bit more gracious about it. Have the good grace and class to leave."

Leaving aside the dubious assertion that a decent hometowner necessarily can be done in a day, how dare reporter Gordon do his, you know, job and all?

It would seem that Bumgarner, the prison commander, also suffers from a failure to understand the source of the problem:

But inside the detention facility, military leaders started clamping down on discipline and security in what they say is an effort to stop another round of suicide attempts already being planned.

"Right now, we are at ground zero," an emotional prison commander, Col. Mike Bumgarner told his officers at his [Monday] morning staff meeting.

"The trust level is gone. They [prisoners] have shown time and time again that we can't trust them any farther than we can throw them. There is not a trustworthy son of a ... in the entire bunch."

With that, Bumgarner, a Kings Mountain native, ordered his staff to assess and curtail existing policies on detainee clothing, meals, recreation time, prison lighting and discipline. He ordered more frequent patrols in the cellblocks. He said existing rules on detainee behavior must be enforced quickly and fully.

"If a brother [a term used both by U.S. troops to refer to Muslim prisoners and by male Muslims generally to refer to themselves] covers up a window with a sheet or blanket, you give him an order and then you go get him ...," Bumgarner said.

Later in the day, the colonel said the tougher restrictions would stay in place for the foreseeable future.

"Once I get a better read of things, I can manage a better balance of their quality of life with the security of this facility."

I'm all for more frequent patrols to prevent suicide. But the rest of it? Let's see: Suicide = betrayal of the commandant's trust. Degrading the quality of life of hundreds of prisoners -- in a facility where quality of life is already so bad that five United Nations experts have called for its closure -- is justified because of the suicides of three and the alleged planning of suicide of several more. Quality of inmate life and facility security constitute a zero-sum game.

And war is peace and ignorance is strength.

And it ain't just Bumgarner and Gordon:

"These men are smart, creative and committed, and they have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own," Guantanamo Bay commander Rear Adm. Harry Harris said Saturday during a news conference in Miami.

"We have men who are committed to al-Qaida and the Taliban. They were captured on the battlefield. They are continuing their fight against us here."

Yeah. And suicide is just a good PR move.

In fact, none of the three had been charged with a crime, although they'd been held for more than two years with little access to lawyers or courts. And at least one was going to be released soon, although he hadn't been informed of that fact.

Since Pentagon spokesman Gordon feels up to telling us how to do our jobs, I'm going to tell tell him how to do his: Stop treating prisoners so badly they come to see suicide as preferable. Stop violating international law. And stop whining about the media when your problems are a direct result of your organization's behavior.

(Full disclosure: I've got family and friends who work at the Observer, but I don't know either reporter Gordon or photographer Sumlin.)

I noted a few weeks back that Time magazine had let go the award-winning reporting pair of Donald Barlett and James Steele, apparently because it didn't want to pay them what they were worth.

Time appears to have an interesting concept of "worth." It apparently had no problem paying $4 million for pictures of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's new baby. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen estimates that that money could've kept Barlett & Steele on the Time payroll, with research help, for another 10 years.

Anyone who wants to argue that this makes sense even in business terms is welcome to get in touch with me right after pictures of the baby become, on their own, a bestselling book. I won't be holding my breath.

So apparently "leading Democrats" are worried about Bill and Hillary Clinton's marriage and sex life ... and this "news" is considered fit for big-deal treatment on the front page of The New York Times in light of Hillary Clinton's rumored 2008 campaign for president.

I'm not a huge fan of either Clinton, but this is just ridiculous.

I'll tell you something else, too: A misjudgment this big, a misuse of resources this colossal, is not just the work of a single (no pun intended) reporter.

No, to screw up this big, I'm betting some of the most senior editors at the Times had to get involved.

I also must assume that, in the interests of fairness and balance, we have the dubious pleasure of looking forward to examinations of the marriages and/or dating lives of every other major presidential candidate, plus, I would think, stories checking to see whether single senior administration officials are hewing to its doctrine of abstinence before marriage and how their doing so, or failure to do so, is likely to affect their job performance.

Gawd. No wonder our industry is in so much trouble.

UPDATE: Someone alert The New York Times! Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is wandering the Capitol doused in gorilla testosterone!

Buried at the end of The New York Times' article on Time Inc.'s new managing editor was this woeful bit of news: Donald Barlett and James Steele have been laid off.

(Disclosure: I had the pleasure of hearing Jim Steele speak at the American Press Institute in 1990 but otherwise do not know either man.)

You probably won't recognize the names. But this would be worse than the San Francisco 49ers cutting Joe Montana in the prime of his career in a salary-cap move.

Barlett and Steele won two Pulitzer Prizes in 26 years at the Philadelphia Inquirer before moving to Time magazine in 1997. There, they won two National Magazine Awards. "America: What Went Wrong," their serial examination of flaws, and huge gifts to political contributors, buried within the 1986 tax-reform act, was so well-received that it was turned into a paperback book that spent an amazing six months atop The Times' paperback nonfiction bestsellers list. It did so not only because of its absolutely bulletproof reporting, backed by hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents, but also because of its clear, blunt language, much of which remains accurate today:

Worried that you are falling behind? Not living as well as you once did? Or expected to?

That you are going to have to work extra hours, or take a second job, just to stay even with your bills?

That the company you have worked for all these years may dump you for a younger person?

Or that the pension you have been promised may not be there when you retire?

Worried, if you are on the bottom rung of the economic ladder, that you will never see a middle-class lifestyle?

Or, if you are a single parent or part of a young working family, that you will never be able to save enough to buy a home?

That you are paying more than your fair share of taxes?

Worried that the people in Congress are taking care of themselves and their friends at your expense?

You are right. Keep worrying.

For those people in Washington who write the complex tangle of rules by which the economy operates have, over the last twenty years, rigged the game -- by design and default -- to favor the privileged, the powerful and the influential. At the expense of everyone else.

Shed no tears for Barlett and Steele; they'll land on their feet, I'm sure. But the kind of journalism they produced -- powerful, influential, galvanizing -- is difficult and expensive and, accordingly, becoming more and more rare. We're now in an era in which a business model that will support even routine journalism online, let alone the kind of grand-slam reporting that B&S produced, hasn't yet surfaced or been created.

And the American people have less opportunity, as a result, to learn about ways in which the system is being rigged.

The Hill magazine reports today that Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have cut a deal with Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., to hold hearings on the National Security Agency's warrantless-wiretapping program.

Specter had sought a requirement that the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court be asked to rule on the legality and constitutionality of the NSA program. But he now says he's dropping that requirement in favor of one that would allow the FISA court to rule only if a plaintiff with legal standing (that is, someone who claims to have suffered actual damage and isn't just asking for an opinion on the legality of the program) appeals to the court. As a practical matter, this change creates all sorts of roadblocks against the likelihood that the FISA court would ever get the chance to rule on the program.

So: If the administration is so confident that the program is legal and constitutional, why is it so reluctant to let the FISA court review it? Remember, one FISA judge already has quit in protest over this very program. Lawyer Glenn Greenwald asks the same question:

One would think that if [administration officials] really believed that they had the clear-cut legal justification for warrantless eavesdropping which they claim to have, they would be eager to have a court rule on this issue so that this unpleasant controversy -- with all of these mean-spirited and utterly baseless allegations of lawbreaking -- can finally be put to rest. And yet, time and again, they do precisely the opposite: they desperately invoke every available measure to prevent any judicial ruling as to the legality of their behavior.

Without the provision which was originally "demanded" by Sen. Specter, it is basically impossible for any plaintiff to ever challenge the legality of the NSA program. In very general terms, in order to have standing to bring such a suit, a plaintiff would have to prove that they have been specifically injured by the warrantless eavesdropping beyond the injuries of an average citizen. But the program is secret and there have been no investigations into it. As a result, nobody knows whose calls have been intercepted without warrants.

Therefore, any would-be plaintiff would be immediately trapped in the type of preposterous, bureaucratic Catch-22 in which American law specializes and which the Bush administration is eager to exploit -- namely, since nobody knows whose conversations have been eavesdropped on, nobody could ever make the showing necessary to maintain such a lawsuit, and since the administration claims that all such information is highly classified, the evidence necessary to make that showing can never be obtained.

Greenwald also makes this interesting point:

It is always worth noting that nothing in any of these bills immunizes the administration from being held accountable for its previous and ongoing violations of FISA. These bills simply render legal on a going forward basis warrantless eavesdropping. They do not make these programs retroactively legal.

Thus, absent any legal defense that a court will buy (and those offered so far by the program's defenders -- that the authorization to use force against 9/11 terrorists and/or the president's inherent warmaking powers make the program legal and constitutional, FISA itself and the Fourth Amendment be damned -- have appeared pretty weak), the administration remains guilty of multiple felony violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, subject to both criminal prosecution and civil liability.

In related news, BellSouth is denying that it has provided bulk customer phone records to the NSA. Interestingly, however, it has not asked USA Today to retract or correct its earlier report to the contrary.

Is it telling the truth? I don't know. It might well be telling the complete truth. Or it might be engaging in a little Clintonian parsing -- agreeing, for example, to let the NSA install its hardware and software on its system ... or not trying to look too hard for any covert attempts by NSA to do so. Again, I do not know. My point is that BellSouth's statement does not completely shut the door on its participation in the NSA program. The article notes, for example, that while the company denies having a contract with NSA, it doesn't answer the question of whether it has a contract with NSA's government parent, the Department of Defense.

More questions ....

UPDATE: In this Atlanta Journal-Constitution article (annoying free registration required), BellSouth's denial is a bit broader and more emphatic:

BellSouth spokesman Jeff Battcher said Monday that the company had, in the days since the report, conducted a review of the allegations. Ackerman, Battcher said, did not approve an NSA request to give out records.

"We can find no instances where Mr. [CEO Duane] Ackerman has been asked to give any information to the NSA," Battcher said. "He has not signed off on it because he's never been asked."

In fact, Battcher said the company was not aware it had received any requests from the NSA. "To the best of our knowledge, we cannot find where we've ever gotten a request," he said.

On the other hand, the story goes on to say, if the government didn't approach BellSouth, that might have been because it didn't need to:

BellSouth's rebuttal adds another twist to a still-developing story. But it does not mean the overall gist of USA Today's account — that a huge database was collected — is incorrect.

Indeed, BellSouth is a different kind of carrier than AT&T, Verizon and Qwest in a crucial way: BellSouth does not own an international or nationwide long-distance network. When a caller in, say, Atlanta dials someone in Seattle, the call travels mostly over non-BellSouth lines. To obtain a record of such a call, the NSA would not need BellSouth. They could get it from the owner of the network, such as AT&T.

Curiouser and curiouser ....

Just because it seemed relevant. (All emphasis added; my comments in italics.)

§50.10 Policy with regard to the issuance of subpoenas to members of the news media, subpoenas for telephone toll rec&chyph;ords of members of the news media, and the interrogation, indictment, or arrest of, members of the news media.

Because freedom of the press can be no broader than the freedom of reporters to investigate and report the news, the prosecutorial power of the government should not be used in such a way that it impairs a reporter's responsibility to cover as broadly as possible controversial public issues. This policy statement is thus intended to provide protection for the news media from forms of compulsory process, whether civil or criminal, which might impair the news gathering function. In balancing the concern that the Department of Justice has for the work of the news media and the Department's obligation to the fair administration of justice, the following guidelines shall be adhered to by all members of the Department in all cases:

(a) In determining whether to request issuance of a subpoena to a member of the news media, or for telephone toll records of any member of the news media, the approach in every case must be to strike the proper balance between the public's interest in the free dissemination of ideas and information and the public's interest in effective law enforcement and the fair administration of justice.

(First, note the presumption that a warrant is required to seek these records. These regs were promulgated in 1980 -- after FISA was enacted but before the Patriot Act. Is there any case law that would supersede the warrant requirement? And if the FBI is relying on so-called National Security Letters (NSLs), which are basically administrative rather than judicial subpoenas, is there any case law on the constitutionality of this procedure? Finally, doesn't "the public's interest in effective law enforcement and the fair administration of justice" include an interest in knowing about illegal government activity, even if exposing that activity is, itself, at least nominally illegal? -- Lex)

(b) All reasonable attempts should be made to obtain information from alternative sources before considering issuing a subpoena to a member of the news media, and similarly all reasonable alternative investigative steps should be taken before considering issuing a subpoena for telephone toll records of any member of the news media.

(Again, note the presumption that a warrant is required to seek telephone records. Note also the requirement that other avenues be exhausted first. Has this requirement been met in any/every ongoing investigation involving journalists' phone records? -- Lex)

(c) Negotiations with the media shall be pursued in all cases in which a subpoena to a member of the news media is contemplated. These negotiations should attempt to accommodate the interests of the trial or grand jury with the interests of the media. Where the nature of the investigation permits, the government should make clear what its needs are in a particular case as well as its willingness to respond to particular problems of the media.

(Is there any evidence this requirement has been observed? Any at all? -- Lex)

(d) Negotiations with the affected member of the news media shall be pursued in all cases in which a subpoena for the telephone toll records of any member of the news media is contemplated where the responsible Assistant Attorney General determines that such negotiations would not pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation in connection with which the records are sought. Such determination shall be reviewed by the Attorney General when considering a subpoena authorized under paragraph (e) of this section.

(So this "monitoring" of journalists' phone-call records required the attorney general himself to sign off on it. Good to know. Did he? -- Lex)

(e) No subpoena may be issued to any member of the news media or for the telephone toll records of any member of the news media without the express authorization of the Attorney General: Provided, That, if a member of the news media with whom negotiations are conducted under paragraph (c) of this section expressly agrees to provide the material sought, and if that material has already been published or broadcast, the United States Attorney or the responsible Assistant Attorney General, after having been personally satisfied that the requirements of this section have been met, may authorize issuance of the subpoena and shall thereafter submit to the Office of Public Affairs a report detailing the circumstances surrounding the issuance of the subpoena.

(f) In requesting the Attorney General's authorization for a subpoena to a member of the news media, the following principles will apply:

(1) In criminal cases, there should be reasonable grounds to believe, based on information obtained from nonmedia sources, that a crime has occurred, and that the information sought is essential to a successful investigation—particularly with reference to directly establishing guilt or innocence. The subpoena should not be used to obtain peripheral, nonessential, or speculative information.

(It was, remember, the purported leaking by CIA employee Mary McCarthy that got all this started. And yet the CIA itself has said she was not the source of the leak. So why are journalists' records still being trolled? Could it be to seek "peripheral, nonessential or speculative information"? -- Lex)

(2) In civil cases there should be reasonable grounds, based on nonmedia sources, to believe that the information sought is essential to the successful completion of the litigation in a case of substantial inportance. The subpoena should not be used to obtain peripheral, nonessential, or speculative information.

(3) The government should have unsuccessfully attempted to obtain the information from alternative nonmedia sources.

(4) The use of subpoenas to members of the news media should, except under exigent circumstances, be limited to the verification of published information and to such surrounding circumstances as relate to the accuracy of the published information.

(Has anyone involved in the purported "investigation" of leaks paid the slightest attention to this requirement? I'm aware of no evidence that they have. -- Lex)

(5) Even subpoena authorization requests for publicly disclosed information should be treated with care to avoid claims of harassment.

(Eh. If they want something we've published, they can go to the library or Nexis like everyone else. -- Lex)

(6) Subpoenas should, wherever possible, be directed at material information regarding a limited subject matter, should cover a reasonably limited period of time, and should avoid requiring production of a large volume of unpublished material. They should give reasonable and timely notice of the demand for documents.

(I infer from this paragraph that blanket hoovering of phone records is not permissible. -- Lex)

(g) In requesting the Attorney General's authorization for a subpoena for the telephone toll records of members of the news media, the following principles will apply:

(1) There should be reasonable ground to believe that a crime has been committed and that the information sought is essential to the successful investigation of that crime. The subpoena should be as narrowly drawn as possible; it should be directed at relevant information regarding a limited subject matter and should cover a reasonably limited time period. In addition, prior to seeking the Attorney General's authorization, the government should have pursued all reasonable alternative investigation steps as required by paragraph (b) of this section.

(Absent information of which I am unaware, the government appears to be 0-for-the preceding paragraph. -- Lex)

(2) When there have been negotiations with a member of the news media whose telephone toll records are to be subpoenaed, the member shall be given reasonable and timely notice of the determination of the Attorney General to authorize the subpoena and that the government intends to issue it.

(What negotiations? What subpoena? -- Lex)

(3) When the telephone toll records of a member of the news media have been subpoenaed without the notice provided for in paragraph (e)(2) of this section, notification of the subpoena shall be given the member of the news media as soon thereafter as it is determined that such notification will no longer pose a clear and substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation. In any event, such notification shall occur within 45 days of any return made pursuant to the subpoena, except that the responsible Assistant Attorney General may authorize delay of notification for no more than an additional 45 days.

(The government might be off the hook on this one, but only because one of its own people blew the whistle to ABC News. -- Lex)

(4) Any information obtained as a result of a subpoena issued for telephone toll records shall be closely held so as to prevent disclosure of the information to unauthorized persons or for improper purposes.

(h) No member of the Department shall subject a member of the news media to questioning as to any offense which he is suspected of having committed in the course of, or arising out of, the coverage or investigation of a news story, or while engaged in the performance of his official duties as a member of the news media, without the express authority of the Attorney General: Provided, however, That where exigent circumstances preclude prior approval, the requirements of paragraph (l) of this section shall be observed.

(i) A member of the Department shall secure the express authority of the Attorney General before a warrant for an arrest is sought, and whenever possible before an arrest not requiring a warrant, of a member of the news media for any offense which he is suspected of having committed in the course of, or arising out of, the coverage or investigation of a news story, or while engaged in the performance of his official duties as a member of the news media.

(j) No member of the Department shall present information to a grand jury seeking a bill of indictment, or file an information, against a member of the news media for any offense which he is suspected of having committed in the course of, or arising out of, the coverage or investigation of a news story, or while engaged in the performance of his official duties as a member of the news media, without the express authority of the Attorney General.

(k) In requesting the Attorney General's authorization to question, to arrest or to seek an arrest warrant for, or to present information to a grand jury seeking a bill of indictment or to file an information against, a member of the news media for an offense which he is suspected of having committed during the course of, or arising out of, the coverage or investigation of a news story, or committed while engaged in the performance of his official duties as a member of the news media, a member of the Department shall state all facts necessary for determination of the issues by the Attorney General. A copy of the request shall be sent to the Director of Public Affairs.

(l) When an arrest or questioning of a member of the news media is necessary before prior authorization of the Attorney General can be obtained, notification of the arrest or questioning, the circumstances demonstrating that an exception to the requirement of prior authorization existed, and a statement containing the information that would have been given in requesting prior authorization, shall be communicated immediately to the Attorney General and to the Director of Public Affairs.

(m) In light of the intent of this section to protect freedom of the press, news gathering functions, and news media sources, this policy statement does not apply to demands for purely commercial or financial information unrelated to the news gathering function.

(n) Failure to obtain the prior approval of the Attorney General may constitute grounds for an administrative reprimand or other appropriate disciplinary action. The principles set forth in this section are not intended to create or recognize any legally enforceable right in any person.

(Treat criminal journalists the same as noncriminal journalists criminal nonjournalists. But don't be using criminal charges to retaliate for reporting on illegal government activity. Remember, using government-secrecy rules to cover up a government crime is itself a crime. -- Lex)

[Order No. 916–80, 45 FR 76436, Nov. 19, 1980]

As I read this, I think the government has a serious problem on its hands. But I Am Not A Lawyer®, nor do I play one here on The Lex Files. So: Anyone got any legal citations suggesting that what the government is doing is, in fact, legal and consistent with existing rules and policy?

UPDATE: Via LizardBreath at Unfogged, we find more evidence that the administration might have stepped into a bucket of something warm and brown.

The FBI's National Security Letters -- the administrative (rather than judicial) subpoena-like documents mentioned above -- appear to be governed by Title 18, Section 2709, which says in pertinent part:

(b) Required Certification.— The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or his designee in a position not lower than Deputy Assistant Director at Bureau headquarters or a Special Agent in Charge in a Bureau field office designated by the Director, may— (1) request the name, address, length of service, and local and long distance toll billing records of a person or entity if the Director (or his designee) certifies in writing to the wire or electronic communication service provider to which the request is made that the name, address, length of service, and toll billing records sought are relevant to an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such an investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely on the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States; and

(2) request the name, address, and length of service of a person or entity if the Director (or his designee) certifies in writing to the wire or electronic communication service provider to which the request is made that the information sought is relevant to an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such an investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States. (emphasis added -- Lex)

Is the administration willing to try to prove -- in court, if need be -- that whistleblowing leakers and the reporters who rely on them are engaging in "international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities" and not "activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States"?

I'm skeptical it would try and even more skeptical that it would win if it did.

Says here that 7 out of 10 journalists were accused of bias last year.

The other three must've been out on disability.

So Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., had himself a wreck and offers this defense: "I wasn't drinking. I was high." Or, you know, words to that effect.

I don't know about D.C., but here in N.C., you can get a DWI even if you haven't had a drop to drink, if you have taken medication of any kind that has impaired your ability to drive. (The "I" in DWI stands for "impaired," not "intoxicated." True fact, as Mark Sutter would say.) You'll want to remember that the next time you have a cold.

And if that's the case in D.C. as well, then by all means the district should prosecute Kennedy. (Or even if it's not the case, if prosecutors can prove Kennedy was, in fact, drinking, although I suspect we've lost the chance to get a definitive answer on that question. And why is it that this particular Congresscritter appears to have gotten special treatment from the police?)

But here's what I don't get (and neither does Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and TPMmuckraker.com): Why are the networks making such a big deal about this ... and ignoring bigger things going on?

The simple fact is that when you have an alleged driving under the influence or sleep-driving story and it involves a Kennedy, the press is going to be all over that. What's new.

But here's what does get my attention. There's another pretty tawdry story that's out there -- one about members of Congress getting sauced up at rollicking parties and set up with hookers by crooked defense contractors in exchange for help bagging pricey defense contracts.

That's pretty salacious too. You'd expect the press to be all over it. As [TPMmuckraker.com staffer] Justin reported yesterday, the legendary Watergate Hotel has already received mulitple subpoenas from federal investigators investigating the hotel's role in 'Hookergate'. So this thing's for real.

Yet, I'm not seeing any morning show's running with it.

And, while the Kennedy story is 'newsy' it doesn't really have any greater policy implications. And the public trust implications are minor. The Wilkes-Watergate-Hooker story, on the other hand, is both. It's salacious, which the press loves. And it's also directly tied to crooks ripping off taxpayers, probably allowing our service members abroad to have shoddy equipment or defense dollars going to worthless projects.

So, [TPMmuckraker.com is] the Kennedy case. But why the silence [except, he later notes, on last night's NBC Nightly News] on the much bigger scandal bubbling up out of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee?

Cricket, cricket ...

Why indeed? Honestly, I don't know the answer. I mean, normally, a story about an (allegedly) impaired Kennedy would trump a policy story on TV news. But doesn't the hooker angle trump that? I mean, c'mon ... Congresscritters, hookers, bribes ... what's not to love, even for TV news?

UPDATE: CIA director Porter Goss resigns, and The Wall Street Journal explains how that might be related:

The agency also has been drawn into a federal investigation of bribery that has sent former Rep. Randall "Duke" Cunningham to prison. Just this past week, the CIA confirmed that its third-ranking official, a hand-picked appointee of Mr. Goss, had attended poker games at a hospitality suite set up by a defense contractor implicated in the bribing of former Rep. Cunningham. Friday, people with knowledge of the continuing Cunningham inquiry said the CIA official, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, is under federal criminal investigation in connection with awarding agency contracts.

Unrelatedly, the Journal's Web site, much of which is normally behind a subscriber pay wall, is totally free at the moment in celebration of its 10th anniversary. They've done many, many things right on that site, so go check it out.

The online magazine Slate's media critic, Jack Shafer, has a thoughtful article up on government secrecy in the age of government crime:

Every time the Bush administration cracks down on openness, it creates new sources for journalists inside the bureaucracies. Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, says the strategy of decertifying the press works only if you can block the press from obtaining alternative sources of information. That's something the administration hasn't been able to do, says Blanton, citing the blockbuster stories about the Bush's secret prisons, secret torture programs, secret rendition operation, warrantless wiretaps, and so on.

Blanton attributes such scoops to a "revolt of the JAGs," his shorthand for the recent round of whistle-blowing by career civil service and career military officers. It's not that these whistle-blowers oppose secrecy, he notes, giving the example of the FISA court, which issues secret warrants. In the 20-plus years of FISA warrants, not one has been leaked because most everyone respects the FISA process. The establishment of FISA was publicly debated in congressional hearings, which demonstrated the need for such a court, but one that operated under legal limits.

He contrasts the public FISA process with the secret machinations of the "torture lawyers" - Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, John Yoo, et al. - whose primary goal is to enhance presidential power. In the minds of many honorable government employees, the expansion of presidential power in the post-9/11 era lacks basic legitimacy, making it vulnerable to leaks.

By "lacks basic legitimacy," of course, he means, "is nowhere rooted in, and frequently violates the letter as well as the spirit of, the Constitution, federal statutes and/or treaties." And, remember, using classification to conceal a crime is, itself, a crime.

I don't care who's doing it; behavior like that is un-American by definition.

It has come to my attention that some people think this is funny:

(There's a real company out there making these, but I'm not going to link to it.)

Memo to anyone who takes this the least bit seriously: This is North Carolina, son. Even the journalists are armed.

Y'all have a nice day.

I've touched on this before, but Mindy McAdams discusses the issue again in the context of what bloggers can contribute to the public good.

TO: Bill Bennett*, Sandy Carmany, and everyone in between who's concerned about government leaks.
FROM: Lex
DATE: 4/19/2006
RE: Government leaks

If y'all spent half the time cracking down on government that you do trying to crack down on government leaks, this would be a better country. Specifically, when a leaker is leaking about actual or potential violations of law by the government, were I you I'd be a lot more concerned about the violations of law by the government than any possible violation of law by the leaker.

I'm not saying every leaker should get a free pass -- even those whose intentions appear on the surface to be most honorable often are acting out of a complex mix of motives, not all of them admirable. But, folks, leaks do not occur in a vacuum. Most commonly, they occur because the public good is being harmed, a political advantage is being sought, or both. And it behooves public officials to worry first and foremost about possible harm to the public good, and in particular, about violations of law by our government, which acts with our consent and on our behalf.

Certainly, the media have obligations, too: to weigh, fully and fairly, the harm done by publication of leaked information against the harm done by withholding it; to consider what legal obligations they might have; and so forth. Not every leak clearly merits publication. For that matter, not every leak pertains to something that's arguably newsworthy. And anytime anything is leaked for purely political reasons, that fact should be treated as news in itself.

But government officials, elected or appointed, need to keep the public good uppermost in their minds. That means keeping their priorities in order and their eyes on the ball.

*And don't even get me started on the unintentional humor that abounds when our so-called betters presume to give us moral instruction, especially when they want to back it up with calls straight from the V.I. Lenin playbook.

When I was at Davidson (1978-82), I didn't work regularly for the school paper. Oh, I contributed an op-ed or two, and because my radio shift on Wednesday nights ended while the paper was being laid out in a room adjacent to the studio, I occasionally did a little layout and pasteup. But for almost my entire undergraduate career, I worked full-time in radio, first at the campus radio station and then at a Charlotte commercial station. If I'd wanted to work for the paper as well, I'd've had to sacrifice a few things. Like sleep. And classes.

If Davidson had any kind of class on journalism or the media while I was there, I don't recall it. This isn't surprising; Davidson was and remains a rigorous liberal-arts college that aims to prepare people for varied careers and productive citizenship far more than for any particular kind of job. (The joke among us English majors who were trying to find jobs during the '81-'82 recession was that "I'm a real people person!" was code for, "I'm graduating from a very good school but I'm not going to have a single marketable skill!")

Still, I was pleased to learn (via Romenesko) that the school now has a seminar, "Critical Issues in Mass Media," being taught by Jennie Buckner, a former editor of The Charlotte Observer. And, not surprisingly, the seminar has a blog, Pressing Matters, to which students contribute.

A quick glance at the blog posts, which mainly take the form of short essays, shows that the students are looking at some of the biggest issues we're wrestling with, such as bottom-line pressure. At first glance, I don't see anything about more engagement with our audience in a news-reporting partnership (i.e., for lack of a better term, "citizen journalism"). But the class is still in progress and so, I presume, is the blog.

I'm glad the school is bringing its liberal-arts approach to bear on the news media and the challenges they face. I applaud the school for offering the course and Buckner for being willing to lead it.

And just in case anyone's still wondering whether the so-called mainstream media hold a monopoly on ethics, I bring to your attention two items.

The first I would consider a journalistic misdemeanor, I guess:

Over at the Cincinnati Enquirer's online site, Cincinnati.com, there's a blog about Iraq written by military staffer whose job is to generate positive news about U.S. efforts to rebuild Iraq.

Grandma in Iraq is the title of the blog, written by Suzanne M. Fournier, a Public Affairs Officer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The posts are largely upbeat. "Everytime [sic] an Iraqi contractor bids on a reconstruction project. . . it is a sign that democracy is winning here," reads one. "I am confident we'll have another banner year of success for the benefit of the people of Iraq and democracy in the Middle East," another says.

Cincinnati.com identifies "Grandma" as "Suzanne Fournier of Alexandria, grandmother of 15, [who] posts from Iraq, where she is stationed with the U.S. Army Corp. [sic] of Engineers." It makes no mention she's a flack.

In her posts Fournier doesn't conceal her day job, but she doesn't trumpet it, either. In reading her 50 or so posts currently online, we could find only one where she explicitly states, "I do public affairs[.]" In a handful of other posts, she makes passing references such as, "I just put out a press release."

In general, I think it's fine for a newspaper or Web site to have anyone blogging for it that it wants, as long as that person isn't lying, fabricating and/or plagiarizing. (For obvious reasons, each individual site also should consider how well or poorly any particular blogger might help the site achieve whatever its goals are for its content.) However, in fairness to readers, any possible conflicts of interest the blogger might have must be fully disclosed. That didn't happen here, although the evidence that there was any deliberate attempt to deceive readers is thin at best.

Our second example is much more serious -- not only a journalistic felony, but possibly a real-life felony as well.

A New York Post Page Six staffer solicited $220,000 from a high-profile billionaire in return for a year's "protection" against inaccurate and unflattering items about him in the gossip page, the Daily News has learned.

In two 90-minute meetings, characterized by a shocking breach of ethics, Jared Paul Stern, a fixture on the city's gossip scene who also edited Page Six The Magazine, asked for a series of payments from Ron Burkle, the managing partner of Yucaipa Cos., a conglomerate with interests in supermarkets, celebrity clothing lines, and media.

It was all a setup, a sting monitored by law enforcement, including the U.S. attorney's office and the FBI, who are now investigating the extortion attempt. The meetings, on March 22 and March 31, were videotaped.

The shakedown began with a series of e-mails sent last month by Stern to Burkle.

It reached a boiling point more than an hour into the first meeting after Stern outlined various ways Burkle could buy protection on the gossip page.

An exasperated Burkle finally said, "How much do you want?" after Stern said he could control coverage by Richard Johnson, the column's chief writer, and his staff. "Um, $100,000 to get going and then you could get it to me on a month-to-month, maybe like $10,000," replied Stern.

"Okay, that's a great deal," said Burkle, the subject of numerous Page Six items including a "date" with supermodel Gisele Bundchen, meetings with other women and a nasty breakup with a longtime lover.

Aside from blackmail being a felony and all, the only thing I can find wrong with this scenario is that, as Will Bunch observes, we in the newspaper bidness have unconscionably neglected it as a possible revenue stream.

JR already has addressed the self-serving unsigned editorial splashed on the front page of State Rep. Earl Jones' Greensboro Times. But inasmuch as I contributed some of our Project Homestead coverage and edited much of the rest, I'm taking the additional step of inviting Rep. Jones to point out, in all our Homestead coverage, a single example of "false allegations," "deception," "publishing false and misleading information" or "sloppy, questionable and racially charged bias [sic] journalism."

I issue this invitation because the Times' lengthy, unsigned, front-page diatribe, and Jones' bylined "Publisher's View," fail to identify a single one and are, themselves, riddled with factual errors. Those errors begin, as JR noted, with the headline claim that Homestead has been "cleared" and continue right through to the end, where the article claims that JR was "hired" in 1999. (He was already here when I was hired here 19 years ago.)

I could be wrong. It's certainly possible that we've made mistakes in our coverage. If we have, we'll correct them. So I await his getting in touch.

But as I wait, I'm confident that if we'd made any mistakes of the type Jones alleges, someone, somewhere, would have brought them to our attention before now.

In the comments to my previous post, Roch Smith suggests that the N&R would gain readers if it would stop ignoring important stories. (For the record, not being involved right now in day-to-day journalism, I'm not in a position to do anything one way or the other about coverage of the issues he raises.)

It sounds simple. But how do you define "important," and who decides?

I raise those cautionary questions after reading this column by Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat:

As I look back at the year in news, it's clear I should have focused more on people having sex with horses.

That's the conclusion I reach after reviewing a new list of the year's top local news stories [as determined by counting Web-site hits]. ...

The story last summer about the man who died from a perforated colon while having sex with a horse in Enumclaw was by far the year's most read article.

What's more, four more of the year's 20 most clicked-upon local news stories were about the same horse-sex incident. We don't publish our Web-traffic numbers, but take it from me — the total readership on these stories was huge.

So much so, a case can be made that the articles on horse sex are the most widely read material this paper has published in its 109-year history.

I don't know whether to ignore this alarming factoid or to embrace it.

Wow. So that's the secret.

We here at the N&R embraced the notion, sort of, in today's year-end roundup of the idiotic, the ironic and the just plain weird, taking note of antiabortion activist Neal Horsley's public confession that he once had sex with a mule. The Washington-state horse-sex item was in the original version of our roundup but got cut for space. (The draft I started with this year was about four times as long as the version we published, which is par for the course -- there's never any lasting shortage of weird news.)

Westneat continues:

There's not much on the so-called "issues" we're always implored to focus on, such as transportation or education. Nothing on the big campaign topics of the year, such as the monorail or gas tax. And nothing on this paper's major investigations or in-depth series.

So there's the thing: Do we give readers what they say they want? Or do we give them what they actually click on? And are the lists the same in print and online, or do online readers go for the weird and fluffy while print readers go for the substantive?

And how, short of monitoring your eyeballs, can we tell?

Everyone has his/her own ideas, including the pseudonymous Athenae at the group blog First Draft, who takes a couple of items from Jim Romenesko's newspaper-industry blog at Poynter and whips them into a to-do list for the industry:

[Many newspapers' efforts to attract young readers are] like desperate parents dyeing their hair pink and listening to their kids' CDs in a futile and sad attempt to get their kids to like them. Personally? ... I don't want my parents to be just like me. I want my parents to be my parents, to do things I need parents to do, like set a good example, provide food and shelter, and teach me about the world.

Here's some resolutions: Stop sucking. Stop running front-page features on flip-flops and the Sopranos and The Passion of the Christ. Stop cutting your newsrooms in half because you only pulled a 20 percent profit last year. Stop acting irritated that your readership isn't what it used to be. Nothing's what it used to be. Stop saying you have no money for journalism and sending your ad sales execs to Jamaica as a reward for meeting quota. Learn to wiki? How about learning to FOIA? Do the little things: Local official giving you a hard time? Request his travel reimbursement records. Tell the story you don't think is a story because it's always been that way, or because everybody does it. Stand up to power and when [politicians] whine that you're mean, buy yourself a beer and send me the bill, because that kind of mean is defined in the real world as your job. ... No fear or favor. No backing down. Not. One. Inch.

So, which of these items, if any, should we put on our action plan for 2006?

Knight Ridder, the nation's second-largest news chain, has retained an investment bank to start the bidding after its largest shareholder pressured the company to sell itself or sell off papers to boost its stock price.

I said at the time that the likeliest outcome from a journalistic standpoint would be enormous damage to the quality of news coverage in the 31 communities served by Knight Ridder papers (Philadelphia has two).

I still think that. But Jay "Pressthink" Rosen, taking time from finishing a book to guest-post over at Arianna Huffington's group blog, says it doesn't have to be that way:

Here is my own solution: a community buyback plan, explained in these eleven points. I am told it's impossible and will never happen. And that's probably true. But no one has any better ideas, so here goes...

* Knight-Ridder announces that rather than sell to another big company or get bought, it has another plan: to break itself up. It will sell all 32 newspapers it owns to local buyers who will pay a premium for the opportunity to own the local daily. If no such buyers are found to exist, there is no transaction. The plan is called the Main Street Strategy to distinguish it from Wall Street thinking.

* The goal of the plan is to maximize shareholder value. That means a total price equal to or better than what shareholders could be expected to realize from any of the options commonly talked about today in the industry and the press: takeover by another newspaper company, purchase by a private equity firm, or cutting quality further in order to halt the erosion in market share (the current strategy.) A second goal is to improve the probability that quality journalism will happen in the future in the 31 towns where Knight-Ridder operates newspapers.

He further elaborates on this plan in the nine remaining points. (Mark Fitzgerald, editor-at-large for the trade magazine Editor & Publisher, comments on the plan here.)

The truth? This isn't the way the business of newspapers normally works. But it would come closer to maximizing shareholder value than the status quo does, and it might even outperform the "normal" business transactions likely being envisioned by KR and its largest shareholders. Besides, what has "normal" gotten us except declining circulation, declining quality and a whole bunch of lost jobs?

If you have friends in Charlotte, Columbia or Myrtle Beach who care about quality local journalism and have some capital to invest, you might want to send them a link to Rosen's post. Even if Rosen's plan has zero chance of being implemented, I think it's long overdue that we had a national conversation about the benefits and costs of quality local journalism. The 31 Knight Ridder communities seem as good a group of places as any to start.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis offers a variation on Jay's plan here. While "tougher" from a business standpoint than the Rosen plan, it strikes me as even less likely to take place. And given that I give the Rosen plan roughly zero percent chance of taking place, that's saying something.

(A modified version of this post I left at MediaCenter's Morph blog)

If you don't work in the newspaper business you might not have heard, but we haven't exactly been having a good year from the standpoint of circulation, and next year might well be worse.

One of the tidbits from this news that deserves a bit of amplification and discussion is the fact, mentioned by several newspaper executives, that papers are, and/or should be, intentionally reducing circulation in some areas by dropping "marginal" circulation -- circulation in areas they find unprofitable or that advertisers find unattractive.

This isn't new. The News & Record stopped selling papers at the beach a long time ago, for example, for the simple reason that it couldn't make money on them.

But newspapers face increasing competition from more tightly targeted media, and online advertising that values actual click-throughs over theoretical readers. To compete, newspapers must target the readers that advertisers really want, not just anyone who might subscribe to or pick up a paper.

Looking at things strictly from a business standpoint, I find these decisions perfectly rational. But looking at things strictly from a journalism standpoint, I find these decisions worrisome, the more so when I hear other people in the industry talking about the need to write stories that appeal more to the people our advertisers are trying to reach -- people, primarily young people, with lots of disposable income.

Here's a real life example. Last week, we published an article on applying for help with your heating bills. A friend with a background in marketing said to me that we shouldn't have reported and written that story: "The people who need that information aren't reading the paper." Or, put another way, the people advertisers are trying to reach aren't interested in that story.

I question whether that's consistently the case either way, but for the purposes of this discussion let's assume it's true. What are the moral ramifications of a decision not to report such stories? Does, or does not, the paper have an obligation to look after the needs of the poorest and weakest in our society, even if those folks aren't subscribers and/or are of no use to advertisers? And if not, who will?

What do you think?

So does Terry Heaton, commenting after the recent Online News Association annual conference:

While I agree ... that there are individuals within the mainstream trying to innovate, I just cannot believe that real change will come from within. This is not some wild belief that I carry; it's based on my day-to-day experience in dealing with people in media companies, especially those in high places. The essential problem is that there just isn't time for the "story as old as business itself." We cannot play "business as usual" in the face of these types of disruptive technologies.

The constant anthem expressed in this blog is that collapse will come upon the mainstream like a thief in the night and that one day soon, these same high placed executives will wake up and everything will be gone. You may think I'm overstating that (because, after all, they're still making a lot of money), and that's fine. I think what's happening in our culture is far bigger than most people realize and that our economy is a lot weaker than most suspect. I would love to be proven wrong.

I have been guilty of flaming the fires that separate, and I accept any criticism that comes along about that. In real life, I'm much more into bringing people together than in dividing people. The anger and passion expressed here isn't intended to be personal. But mass media is dying, and I have a lot of friends embedded in the bowels of the ship who deserve a seat on the lifeboats. Every day that goes by in which legacy media companies refuse to invest time, energy and resources into new business models is another day with the lifeboats firmly attached.

Not just new content or new forms of content, but new business models. As the old fable has it, we can be the ant or the grasshopper, and if we choose to be the grasshopper, the ant will be neither able nor inclined to feed us when winter comes.

And winter is coming.

Journalism is being held at gunpoint this morning.

The largest stockholder in Knight Ridder Inc., the nation's second-largest newspaper chain, has given the chain an ultimatum: put itself up for sale or auction off its "financially struggling" flagship publications (primarily, newspapers in Miami and Philadelphia). Otherwise, investor Private Capital Management said, it will pursue a hostile takeover of the company.

No one knows at this point who will win this dispute, but no matter who wins, readers of the chain's newspapers (including those in Charlotte, Columbia and Myrtle Beach) are going to lose, at least in the near term.

On a list of 167 countries around the world, where would you expect the U.S. to rank in terms of press freedom? Top 20? Maybe even Top 10?

Try 44th. And that's down steeply from 17th in 2002, says Reporters Without Borders, which has conducted the rankings annually since 2005.

Who ranks ahead of us? Several former Soviet client states, for starters, including the Baltic states and much of Eastern Europe. I wonder whether that's because they suffered so much, for so long, under government censorship that they are less tolerant of anything that might look like its return.

Even South Korea, governed mostly by authoritarians since the end of the Korean War, ranks 10 spots ahead of the U.S. One important reason why is the success there of the citizen-journalism effort OhMyNews.

Could the flowering of citizen journalism here help restore the U.S. to the upper reaches of the press-freedom rankings? (And, yes, I am aware that the question assumes that such a restoration would be a Good Thing.)

While Jay Rosen finishes a book, guest blogger Ron Brynaert uses Jay's Pressthink blog to ask, and answer, a darned good question: "Does The New York Times have a learning disability?"

One of my former employers, Freedom Communications, found itself in a tad of hot water earlier today after several bloggers noticed that an editorial in at least four different Freedom newspapers, two of them here in North Carolina, and was presented unsigned and uncredited at each, meaning the reader likely would infer that the piece had been written by someone on the staffs of the respective newspapers. (In fact, it originated at the Colorado Springs paper and was republished at the other three.)

Some of the bloggers (mostly liberal) who raised a stink about the deceptive republication did so in part because they disagreed with its substance, but its substance is not relevant to my point.

I don't know how common the practice of republishing editorials in that manner at Freedom papers is. I seem to recall its happening during the time I worked for the Freedom papers in New Bern and Gastonia (the papers implicated in today's kerfuffle are in Kinston and Jacksonville, N.C.), from late 1985 to early 1987, but I don't recall its happening often.

In a way, there's a certain logic to the practice, inasmuch as Freedom dictates a strongly libertarian editorial viewpoint and expects all its newspapers' editorial pages to do the same. So, from a philosophical standpoint, the editorials are almost literally interchangeable: If one Freedom newspaper thinks, as in this case, suspending the wage requirements of the Davis-Bacon Act in areas recovering from Katrina is a good idea, the others are likely to think pretty much the same thing, differing, if at all, on only minor points.

Moreover, once you get past the Orange County Register, the Colorado Springs Gazette and the Mesa, Ariz., paper, Freedom papers get pretty small pretty quickly. If you figure that most editorial pages run, say, two or three unsigned staff editorials a day, that means you'd have to come up with roughly 14 to 20 pieces a week, and almost no Freedom paper has enough staff to generate that many pieces consistently. So, if your duties include coming up with content for the editorial page of a Freedom newspaper, you almost inevitably are going to have to look outside your building for some, perhaps much, of your editorial content, and that's even before you cross the gutter to the op-ed page.

But the issue here is not one of resources or editorial philosophy, but of honesty, of being straight with the reader. Absent some internal corporate ban on the practice, there is absolutely nothing wrong with one Freedom paper's republishing an editorial written by the staff of another Freedom newspaper ... as long as the source of that editorial is identified. The republishing papers didn't do it, and that's where they erred.

My friend David Allen, who rages against the dying of the light over at the Institute for Creative Thoughtcrime, e-mailed the Kinston paper earlier today, asking why the source of the editorial hadn't been properly identified. He shared the response he got with me:

About the editorial "Mandated wage levels would raise recovery costs" that appears in The Free Press today, it originated in the Colorado Springs Gazette, a newspaper that is part of the Freedom Communications group, as is The Free Press. Due to the fact that we have one editorial writer here -- me -- and that I have many other responsibilities, I sometimes fall back on editorials generated by other Freedom newspapers. They express the libertarian point of view that is consistent in The Free Press and that runs through all newspapers in the group. Besides, an editorial is the opinion of the newspaper, not necessarily of the writer. In that respect, its [sic] something like debating. If any of you have a different opinion of Davis-Bacon -- and I suspect that may be the reason I'm hearing from you rather than your concern for diminished ethics in journalism -- you're welcome to spell it out in a letter to the editor. Patrick Holmes Associate Publisher/Executive Editor The Free Press Kinston, NC

I don't know Mr. Holmes, but I understand that he probably got a ton of hostile e-mail after some of the most-read liberal blogs in the country reported on this. But here in the age of blogs and media transparency, his answer isn't going to cut it. You address the issue raised, not whatever you think the motive behind raising the issue might be. In this case, the issue is being honest with your readers. With all due respect to Mr. Holmes, The Free Press was not honest with its readers on this issue and needs to change its policy ... and the mindset that led to it.

For one thing, Sen. Richard Lugar's proposal wouldn't protect bloggers. And maybe it's just me, but I think having the federal government decide who's a journalist and who isn't is not a great idea. And that's effectively what would be going on.

My definition: journalism is something you do. If you gather information with the intent to distribute it publicly for the benefit of that public, you're committing journalism, pure and simple. And if anyone is entitled to the benefits of a shield law, then everyone who commits journalism is entitled to the same benefits, at least insofar as their acts of journalism are concerned.

... because Pennsylvania state Sen. Vincent Fumo, a politician who has been lit up by the Philadelphia papers, is now trying to prevent looming cuts in news jobs at those papers:

"I’d rather withstand the intensive media scrutiny and criticism that I have from the Fumo Desk at the Inquirer, than have that desk eliminated. I think if I would let my heart rule, I would probably be dancing around with glee [at the cuts]. But I truly believe what I say, that without a free press you don’t have a free society."

He's even contacting other politicians and trying to meet with the publisher in an attempt to save the jobs. "My doing this is like Nixon going to China," he said at a news conference. More like Alice going through the looking glass, I think -- and I mean that in the nicest possible way.

Never mind that the papers seem intent on going ahead with the cuts, and never mind that the papers' accepting help from a politician to keep people employed (in News or any other department) would raise all kinds of ethical questions. I'm just stunned to find a politician left, particularly one who has been the subject of unflattering coverage, who a) understands the role of a free press in our society, b) thinks it's worth fighting for and c) isn't ashamed to say so. Well, OK, maybe not stunned. Maybe just refreshed. But still.

Just read the whole thing.

Erstwhile N&R guest columnist Paul Chesser, who hit a national audience last month with a column in The Washington Times, reaches an even bigger audience with this column in The Washington Post (thanks to Phred for pointing it out).

I first became aware of the existence of Hank Steuver when I stumbled into a session he led at the 1999 National Writers' Workshop in Atlanta. I'd never read a word he had written up to that point, but I walked out of there a diehard fan. At the time, IIRC, he was writing for the Austin American-Statesman in Texas; soon thereafter, he joined The Washington Post's Style section, which is the most appropriate venue in American newspaperdom for him, if in fact there is an appropriate venue in newspaperdom for him, which I wonder about.

Asked, as other Post staffers have been, to write a critique of the Post, he went all meta and critiqued the act of critiquing newspapers. If you ever think I might have gone and swallowed way too much Kool-Aid over this whole open-source journalism/Very Local Journalism/Town Square thing, please know that I'm also reading things like this Steuver piece as a bracing tonic to keep from going off the deep end. Also? It's funny, particularly the ending, and it's not very long, so even you have time to read it.

News & Record reporter Allison Perkins has been spending some time in Iraq. This week she and I had three telephone conversations on her trip, which was primarily to report on a Greensboro-based Marine unit now stationed west of Baghdad. The audio files from our telephone conversations are now up, both as streaming audio and as podcasts for download, here.

I wasn't exactly prepared to be the person talking with Allison, so I didn't have a list of questions to ask her and was pretty much just winging it.

The sharp-eyed (or sharp-eared) among you also will notice that the quality of the production ain't the greatest. (Herb Everett is our resident News podcast expert, but he has been on vacation this week.) That's OK; I think what you'll hear will whet your appetite for the stories, photos and video Allison will begin filing this weekend from Kuwait.

Paul Chesser, whom readers with long memories might recall as an occasional guest contributor to our Religion pages in the mid-1990s, reaches a nationwide audience today with a guest column in The Washington Times defending the careful, judicious use of anonymous sources to expose government wrongdoing.

I'm not a huge fan of anonymous sources in stories. I've tried to avoid them and have required my reporters to try to do the same. But sometimes, there just is no substitute.

Why'd New York Times reporter Judith Miller go to jail rather than give up a source? So we would still be free to continue reading news like this, apparently:

A senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the White House now says its official position is not to comment on the case while it is under investigation by a federal special prosecutor, said Mr. Rove had gone about his business as usual on Monday.

Can you imagine what would have happened to the country if the Times hadn't used an anonymous source to provide that information??

There's quite the debate going on within the journalism community as to whether New York Times reporter Judith Miller should have been jailed for refusing to testify to a grand jury. I say yes on substantive grounds, no on procedural grounds. Let me explain what I mean below the jump, for those who care.

UPDATE: See the update at the bottom of the jump.

I'm actually working on other things today, but Diane Lamb, ace director of our News Research Center, just sent me a copy of an e-mail containing some potentially interesting/useful news resources, which I'm happy to reproduce here (if I can get the HTML to work):

• Wikipedia
• Wikinews
  
• Europhobia
• Robin Grant at
  Perfect.co.uk
• technorati of course
• geepster's Google Maps of
  the explosions
• London
  Underground
• Guardian Live
  Blog

More Americans think Rush Limbaugh is a journalist than think Bob Woodward is.

Now, don't get me wrong. Woodward's been living off Watergate for 30 years, even as he has gotten sucked farther and farther into the out-of-touch and just-plain-ignorant vortex of permanent DC media. Much as I appreciate his Watergate coverage, for most of the time since then he has been way too inside-baseball for the good of his readers.

But Rush? Is a documented liar who doesn't even claim the title of journalist for himself. Although, to be fair, I should point out that he's also a drug addict.

Looks like I'm gonna need bigger scissors. Although I suppose it's possible that my head will just explode on its own.

UPDATE: Oops. Violated my own First Rule of Reporting on Polls: Always read the methodology. From Jerome Armstrong at MyDD:

Limbaugh's name ID is at 82% in this poll, while Woodward's is at 47%, entirely accounting for the similarity this poll supposedly finds. By a two to one margin, people who know who Rush Limbaugh is do not think he is a journalist. Also, by nearly a two to one margin, people who know who Bob Woodward is think he is a journalist.

So we haven't moved completely into an alternate universe. Whew.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: As commenter Kerry Sipe points out below, it's Bill O'Reilly, not Rush Limbaugh, who has better "journalist" numbers than Bob Woodward. In my haste I put Rush in O'Reilly's place. Maybe it's just time for my own little Emily Litella moment.

My friend and former co-worker Giles Lambertson, currently associate editor of the Wilson Daily Times, apparently is laboring under a misimpression. In his Sunday N&R op-ed column (not online, unfortunately), he wrote:

The theory [driving newspapers', and particular the News & Record's, emphasis on local news] is that hometown people have less interest in the events occurring outside a newspaper’s circulation area than they do events closer to home.

I can't speak for the industry, but that's not the theory here at the N&R. The theory is that people have less interest in getting news of those events in their printed N&R because 1) we don't have any staff devoted to getting it and 2) by the time the paper lands on the doorstep every morning, much of that news, arriving as it does via our wire services, is 18 to 24 hours old. Put another way, they can get that news via the Internet from many of the same sources the N&R relies on, and more besides, and they can get it much sooner from the Internet than from us.

We have to use our resources as efficiently as possible to give readers what they need and want, and sometimes the cost of doing those things we must do, or that only we can do, is not to do things other outlets can do better and/or faster. If that means linking to a competitor sometimes, so be it. The point is to be the place where you can find stuff, not to be the place that provides it all. Nobody has that much money.

We journalists are frequently criticized/dismissed as "arrogant."

To many of us, much of the time, this is mystifying in that we honestly feel we have little or nothing to be arrogant about. (And that's often true.)

Sometimes, we come across as arrogant when we're simply being a little too open about our pride in our jobs. No one likes a braggart, even when the braggart can back it up.

But sometimes we are arrogant. And Andrewe Cline, whose Rhetorica.net blog has carved out a rich niche in the area of journalism's institutional biases, points to some examples and explains why they arise and why they are wrong, particularly in the age of citizen news media.

We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them that national is better than local.

We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them to elevate investigative reporting over solid day-to-day reporting. (I would argue that the most solid day-to-day reporting IS investigative in at least some senses.)

We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them that journalists have more First Amendment rights than [other] citizens.

We teach students to be arrogant when we fail to teach them that the public always knows more than they do.

"Deep Throat," the key source for The Washington Post's Watergate coverage and the most famous anonymous source in journalism history, has been unmasked as W. Mark Felt, a top FBI official at the time.

I was 13 when the Senate Watergate hearings, led by North Carolina's Sam Ervin, captivated the nation, and I recall my friend Randy Fullington and I watching some of the hearings on his basement TV. But I don't recall ever hearing Felt's name, then or later, even though lots of people were fingering him. (In contrast, a co-worker's husband who fancies himself a Watergate expert pronounced yesterday, "I've been saying it was Mark Felt for years." And, for all I know, he has.)

The confirmations of Watergate reporter Bob Woodward and then-Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee aside, Felt makes a plausible Deep Throat: As the FBI's No. 2 guy, he certainly had access to information, and with then-FBI Director Patrick Gray, a political appointee, destroying evidence at White House direction, Felt had a plausible motive: to protect the FBI, where he had spent a long career.

Felt himself apparently remains ambivalent about his role -- a feeling that, in my own experience, is fairly common among sincere whistleblowers -- but it's interesting to note that, 31 years after Nixon's resignation, the only people who appear to have a flat-out problem with his role are those firmly encamped at or near the right-wing lunatic fringe. Watergate-convict-turned-evangelist Chuck Colson described himself as "personally shocked" upon learning Deep Throat's identity. He added, "When any president has to worry whether the deputy director of the FBI is sneaking around in dark corridors peddling information in the middle of the night, he's in trouble," a statement that nimbly dodges the question of whether the president in question is supposed to be in trouble. Colson, who, I'll grant, has done admirable work rehabilitating convicts, still doesn't get it. He adds, "There were times when I should have blown the whistle, so I understand his feelings. But I cannot approve of his methods."

Yo, Chuck, here's a clue, no charge: When somebody else steps up to do what you know you should have and didn't, you not only are wrong to criticize him, you not only have no moral or ethical basis for even questioning him, you have an obligation to go apologize to him and beg his forgiveness for making it necessary for him to do what he did. And until you do, I don't want to hear another freakin' word out of you, particularly on the subject of who is and who is not a professional.

Former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan, who would make an excellent jackboot model, called Felt a "traitor." So, um, Felt's a traitor to an administration that was a traitor to America. Ohhh-kay, Pat. Nice logic, there.

Here's the deal, folks: When you take a government job, yeah, you work for a particular supervisor, you work for a particular agency, you work for the government in general, but you REALLY work for the people. It is to them, not those in between, that you owe your highest loyalty. The Nixon admininstration was brought down, and rightly so, because a few people like Mark Felt understood that principle. Would that more government employees at all levels did so today.

UPDATE: Strange, albeit probably not that important, but as of 4:30 p.m. today, The New York Times had published nothing containing any comment from its recently retired op-ed columnist and former Nixon speechwriter, William Safire.

Exhibit A.

His argument is so obviously flawed on so many levels that it's not even worth the time to rebut them. Suffice to say that this piece is like one of Bill Gates' right-hand people announcing that computers are bad.

The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash., reports serious allegations, including allegations of sexual abuse, against that city's mayor. The newspaper's investigation, three years in the making, involved hiring a computer forensics expert and former U.S. Customs Service agent "who has helped law enforcement agencies identify pedophiles online ... to confirm that [Mayor Jim] West was the man behind several online identities and to confirm the accounts of the real men" with whom West allegedly had communicated, the paper's editor tells readers.

The word "explosive" gets overused when people talk about news stories, but this one qualifies.

This project goes far beyond the kind of undercover work that ABC did years ago in its investigation of Food Lion, a case that resulted in a landmark lawsuit tried here in Greensboro. Even among long-timers I've exchanged e-mail with, you have to go back decades to find anything that comes close: in this case, a bar opened by Chicago Sun-Times journalists to "sting" corrupt city officials there.

Read Spokesman-Review Editor Steven Smith's note on the coverage. Read the coverage itself. And then ask yourself (and answer in the comments): Were the allegations worth checking out? Did the Spokesman-Review prove its allegations? And even if it did, did its methods cross the line of ethics, in your view? Why or why not?

Stephen Waters, publisher of the Rome (NY) Daily Sentinel, announces his own paper's venture into reader-reported journalism. (Waters also has a personal blog and is a frequent commenter at Jay Rosen's PressThink blog.)

How much of what passes for "news" is really public relations? A lot, says Paul Graham in this interesting column that explains how top-flight PR work benefited his company ... but also led him to look at mainstream news coverage with a lot more skepticism.

Having worked in PR in New York before I entered newspapers, I can say that he's got it basically right. And now that you know what to look for, feel free to point out examples of mainstream news coverage that looks to you like the work of a PR firm.

On a journalism-ethics e-mail list to which I subscribe, Patrick Thibodeau, an ex-daily newspaper writer who is now a tech writer, posted the following, which I reprint here with his kind permission:

Can a working reporter write an interesting blog without compromising their ethics?

I don't see how, unless they want to write really boring content, which is why North Carolina's News & Record experiment can't succeed.

An AP story recently offered a report about the newspaper's 11 staff written blogs. The AP reporter described it as an "audacious online experiment." But the reporter blogs are the opposite of what the best blogs are about; instead of provoking readers with sharp opinion and cogent analysis, the reporter blogs are as thrilling as a comfortable slippers. It is copy about nothing; wordy news briefs.

It's not for lack of talent. This is a good newspaper with solid news writers as capable as any. I'm sure News & Record reporters could write stinging blog copy. That's not the issue.

But how can a reporter write a blog that's worth reading and not violate core ethical guidelines? They can't express opinions about the people they cover. They can't take sides. Even if they ask sharp questions, these questions -- out of the context of an interview -- may be taken as opinion. Satire and skepticism? Probably out of the question, unless you rewrite a newsroom's ethical code.

I quickly responded to the list (no hotlinks in my original e-mail):

So I'm either dull or unethical. THERE's a helluva choice.

For the record (no pun intended), two of our blogs are written by editorial staffers, who have shooting licenses as far as opinion goes. A third is our daily letters to the editor, with comments enabled on every letter. And if the blogs generate compelling online dialogue, as frequently happens on our K-12 education blog, what does it matter if the original posts aren't stinging?

A couple of other related thoughts:

-- "Worth reading" is a subjective judgment.

-- I'm the only one of our bloggers who has been blogging any length of time, and my N&R blog at this point is primarily intended to keep readers abreast of what progress we're making in our transition to an open-source, multimedia news operation. It's not intended at this point to offer stinging analysis (though I've done that a time or two, on such subjects as Sinclair Broadcasting Group and a local city councilman's criticism of the N&R). As our writers find their footing, I think you'll see the blogs evolve.

-- As blogs become more a part of what news organizations do, I suspect that some ethical standards will evolve to take blog culture into account. Sure, it's odd to see a working journalist express an opinion on a blog ... but it's equally odd, for now, to see the subject of the post respond and for an online dialogue to develop. Still, that's part of what "news as conversation" entails, it's going to become more common, and as it does I think you'll see both journalists and audiences adapting to it. For now, most working newspaper journalists who blog are playing it fairly safe, and rightly so ... but then, standards for "safe" are evolving, as well. To take just one example, torture as an instrument of government policy used to be beyond the pale; any journalist criticizing it would never be criticized in return. But now the practice is considered appropriate in some quarters, meaning that that same criticism is no longer "safe."

-- Finally, keep in mind our goal: the transition, which I mentioned above, toward an open-source, multimedia news operation that remains a viable business as well. That transition was the point of the AP article; the blogs are intended to be simply one means, among many, toward that end. (Jay Rosen's most recent "Pressthink" post, "Laying the Newspaper Down to Die," examines the conditions that he, and we, think make this transition necessary.) The point isn't for our blogs to succeed. The point is for our transition to succeed, with or without the blogs, because or in spite of them.

I'll be happy to answer any other questions or address any additional concerns anyone has.

A newspaper in Wisconsin is charging people for the right to hang out with the newspaper's executives, a practice described in other contexts -- Washington, say, -- as selling access.

My longtime friend and former co-worker Forrest Brown, now a page designer at The Charlotte Observer, has a very funny, and very true-to-life, account of what buyers would be getting for their money if the Observer sold access to him.

I get paid in part to read blogs. The only thing weirder than that would be to charge someone to watch me do it. Not that I wouldn't entertain the notion -- particularly if I got a cut. We're still wrestling with the whole notion of what the Public Square's business model ultimately will look like, and I think the only appropriate position to take at this point is that nothing is off the table.*

*(If your Irony Alert isn't buzzing, please get it checked. Just sayin'.)

They can help prevent international incidents.

If you have a hankering to do your own reporting, one of the basic tools in your toolkit will be federal and state open-records laws. The critical importance of those laws is being recognized by news organizations nationwide this week during what's being called, the current weather notwithstanding, "Sunshine Week."

Now, I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one here at The Lex Files. But I've had to deal with open-records and/or open-meetings issues every month, if not every week, for my entire 21-year newspaper career, so I know a little.

It's important to remember that the Freedom of Information Act, the open-records legislation you're most likely to have heard of, applies only to federal records and only to executive-branch agencies, not Congress or the courts. North Carolina law applies to state/county/municipality records.

North Carolina is blessed with one of the country's better laws regarding open records in that, at least in theory, it presumes that state and local government records are open and recognizes only a few exceptions to that general presumption. What happens in practice is sometimes different, which is why the N&R has filed more than a few open-records lawsuits during my time here.

We do that not only for our benefit but also for yours: North Carolina law properly makes no distinction between a reporter for a major news organization and John/Jane Doe who walks in off the street. And if bureaucrats jerk around the N&R, with its high-dollar, white-shoe law firm on retainer and its reputation for being willing to sue, over public records, how much worse will they treat Mr. or Ms. Doe when one of them comes in to see records on, say, the development being planned for their neighborhood?

Below the jump, I'll list a number of links and Web resources relevant to open records. As more of our readers begin to contribute to the conversation that news in Greensboro is becoming, I expect, and hope, that these resources will become even more commonly used. Let the sun shine in! In government, sunshine has killed far more bad ideas than good ones.

NiemanWatchdog.org, a Web site that exists to suggest questions that journalists ought to be asking, is taking suggestions for questions to ask Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corp. (parent company of, among other things, the Fox television empire), when Murdoch addresses the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention in Washington in April. If you've got a question you'd like Murdoch to answer, you can submit it here.

If esoteric humor about how an esoteric subspeciality of newspaper journalists do their jobs doesn't appeal to you, go ahead and skip this post.

* * *

Ahem. In the unlikely event anyone's left ...

For those who don't know, "computer-assisted reporting" refers to database analysis, spreadsheets, mapping and other computer-related tools used by journalists to report and illustrate stories. It originated years ago when PCs in the newsroom were still pretty rare. In the 14 years I've been involved with it, it has gotten a lot more common, but it still has a bit of mystery to it for a lot of journalists. Accordingly, those who are familiar with it often commiserate over common problems -- story-idea reach that exceeds technical grasp, bureaucrats illegally withholding or grossly overcharging for government data, bosses who don't know anything about the methodology and don't care to learn, etc., etc.

All this is by way of background for the following ditty, penned by Neil Reisner of the Miami Daily Business Review on the occasion of his learning that a story required yet another electronic service his office doesn't have. It's sung to the tune of "If I Only Had a Heart" from "The Wizard of Oz":

I would whisk away the data
It really wouldn't matta
Wouldn't care about the cost
Oh the stories i'd be gettin'
I'd be beatin' all the bettin'
If I didn't have a boss.

Now that you've picked yourselves up off the floor, where you collapsed in a heap from laughing so hard you sprung a rib or three, we'll move on. Thanks.

Todd at Monkeytime has a post up about Thompson, but I'm less interested in your reading that than I am in showing you the illustration.

Mainstream media coverage of the 2008 -- no, that's not a typo -- presidential campaign already has begun, and journalist-turned-rhetorician Andrew Cline says the early indications are that news coverage isn't necessarily going to be any better than it was last time around.

... I'll take the oath, too:

I swear that I have never taken money -- whether directly or indirectly -- from any political campaign or government agency in exchange for any service performed in my job as a journalist and/or blogger.

So that's settled.

Dear Ms. Gorham:

As someone whose work occasionally elicits reader wrath on subjects a lot more weighty than whose football team is better, I read sportswriter Paul Gattis' column with some interest.

I think your follow-up column, well-meaning as it might have been, was the same type of response as that of football officials who never see, and penalize, the guy who throws the first punch, only the guy who retaliates.

After 21 years in this bidness, almost all of that in hard news reporting on subjects that can involve a lot of emotion, I'd like to think I have a pretty thick skin. But I've noticed something else going on: The nature of the criticism these days is much more personal, and much more vicious, now than when I was starting out. And while I'm happy to try to address just about any substantive problem a reader or other customer might have -- or, if I can't do it, to try to find someone who can -- I'm tired of putting up with baseless personal abuse and simply won't do it anymore. And because I try not to ask the people I supervise to do things I wouldn't do, I've told my reporters that they don't have to do it, either.

Moreover, as thinkers a lot more learned than I have observed, a threat to a newspaper's credibility is a direct attack on its net worth, given that a large majority of a paper's market value is tied up in "good will," a financial term-of-art that includes how honest readers and advertisers think a paper is. As a manager at my paper and for my corporation, I no longer let unfounded attacks on our competence OR integrity pass unchallenged. To do so would be a disservice to our shareholders as well as my co-workers and the community we serve.

And think about this: We hope and expect readers to believe that we are on their side. But if we won't fight for ourselves, why should they believe us when we say we'll fight for them? (Do not be misled by the fact that this argument has recently been advanced by certain prominent Democrats in a purely political context. I've been saying it, about newspapers, longer than they have, and I've been a registered Republican since 1978.)

I won't argue that Gattis' column was perfect. The cold logic of his column, fine as it was, was undermined by the tone in some places.

But neither will I ignore the fact that that tone stemmed in significant part from baseless and unprovoked attacks on his character and integrity. I just wish you hadn't ignored that fact as well. But you did, and in addition to the small and invisible but very real hit on your bottom line, whatever trust you might have accumulated in your newsroom up to now also has taken a hit -- one from which it might never recover.

Sincerely,

Lex Alexander

"Crisis," like so many other words, used to have a definite, concrete, commonly understood meaning. Nowadays, it has taken on a postmodernist, if not Alice-in-Wonderland, tinge and means whatever its user wants it to mean.

For example, if you read most newspaper articles and watch TV news, you probably think that Social Security is in a "crisis" and might not be there for our children and grandchildren.

The fact is this: If we do nothing at all to Social Security, and even if the economy grows at an average annual rate of only 1.9%, Social Security will be in perfectly fine shape until 2042 (and well beyond that with only modest changes). And if the economy does grow at such a slow average annual rate between now and then, any retirement investments in private accounts likely would be devastated.

I'm not saying privatization is a good or bad idea. I don't know the answer to that question. But I do know that a lot of people who ought to know better are throwing around the word "crisis" as if Social Security were in immediate or medium-term danger. It is not. And if the facts are readily available, one must assume either that these people either haven't checked the facts or have some other reason for saying things that are so blatantly untrue.

So: no Social Security crisis. But Medicare and the government's general fund, on the other hand .... well, I'll just let economist Brad DeLong lay it out for you ...

UPDATE: Social Security would remain fully funded for the duration of its 75-year planning calendar if the amount of income subject to FICA withholding is increased from its current level, roughly $87,000, to about $110,000. This change would affect only the top 15 to 20 percent of wage-earning households while eliminating any need for benefit cuts. Just an observation, not advocacy.

Via Steve Rubel, here's a comparison of the professionals' account of a New York subway fire with a blogger's account. Do you like one better than the other? Why?

You might recall back in October, when Sinclair Broadcasting Group was planning to air the anti-John Kerry film "Stolen Honor." I wrote a long post then with background on Sinclair, including speculation from Jay Rosen, chairman of the journalism department at New York University, that Sinclair might be trying to do something totally different: not a broadcasting company involving itself in politics but a (Republican) political empire that just happens to own a lot of TV stations.

Now, there's a new datum supporting that hypothesis: Clear Channel has picked Fox News Radio as the primary source of news for its news and talk stations.

Another family-owned newspaper, that is: In this case, the Herald-Sun in Durham.

I don't want to overly romanticize family-owned newspapers. Many of them, historically, have been just as bottom-line-fixated as chain papers, and some have been even more corrupt in terms of how far they would go to shape or cover up news to benefit local interests. But in this case, the Rollins family, from what I can see from the outside looking in, appears to have been a good and ethical steward of the paper in a very tough, very competitive news environment.

One thing I would take with a grain of salt, however, is this bit from newspaper-industry analyst John Morton:

The Herald-Sun has a reputation as a solid, well-run newspaper, said John Morton, a media analyst and president of Morton Research in Silver Spring Maryland.

"It's always had good management and it does a good job," he said.

Readers may not notice a big difference in the newspaper, at least at first, Morton said.

"What they're buying is what the Durham paper built up over the years," he said. "They'll be careful not to diminish it by cutting it one way or the other."

A friend of mine claims that Paxton will gut the Herald-Sun like a fish and that the Raleigh-based News & Observer will make another big push into Durham, further damaging the paper's finances. Certainly, with absentee ownership, the Herald-Sun will be vulnerable. And we love competition in the news bidness, but historically, this kind ends with lots of people losing their jobs.

Mark Glaser of Online Journalism Review wants someone to start the media company he would like to work for. In a guest post at Jay Rosen's PressThink blog, he talks about what such an organization might look like and how it might function. Because he talks a lot about emphasizing the needs of the consumer/reader/viewer, I thought I'd throw out some of his bullet points to see whether you, the reader, think this, or something like it, might be a news organization whose work you would like to see:

A news outlet that creates new content, aggregates the best outside content, and makes sense of everything, presenting it in a clear, simple format for the consumption of everyone.

A company founded on the values of serving the public and allowing the public to serve journalism by participating in all discussions of mission and direction.

A company that answers directly to its readers and consumers and doesn't talk down to them from editorial ivory towers.

A company that is focused on the value of journalism, the practice, and not only of marketing and stock dividends.

A group of like-minded people who are willing to start from scratch and build a new way of doing smart, groundbreaking citizen journalism. Not too amateur, not too professional but something in between.

A company that is flexible and knowledgeable, with people who "get it" and understand how they can tap the latest technology to improve the craft of journalism -- and help it survive. These new journalists would blend the research done online via search and databases, the production process of a content management system, the community involvement of bulletin boards and wikis, and the delivery mechanisms of RSS, blogs and mobile platforms. Rather than teach old dogs new tricks, employ techno-literate people from inception. The "everyone gets it" company.

A commitment to provide more transparency for all writers and editors, including political leanings, conflicts of interest and other details that will help readers know who they are. A balance of privacy for journalists with the public's need to know who they are and where they come from.

A staff and board of advisers of englightened media people and bloggers such as Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen, Elizabeth Osder, Susan Mernit, Matt Welch, Howard Owens, Robert Cox, Steve Rubel, John Battelle, James Lileks, Bob Somerby, Dan Gillmor, and many others who walk the talk.

A company where journalists follow the spirit of the rules and ethics of journalism -- and not the letter, as fundamentalists would.

A company where people realize that the Web audience is potentially global and therefore work together to create stories and packages that cross national and cultural boundaries.

A place where news will be a conversation and not a one-way lecture. Where the readers will also report, edit, fact-check and photograph the world around them.

Some news organizations, including this one, are doing some of these things now, or moving (comparatively) rapidly in that direction, but his whole point would be to accelerate that movement to, basically, instantaneous change.

I'll leave it to you readers to say whether this is something you'd like. As a working journalist, however, I'd say it looks awfully attractive.

Our parent company's flagship publication, The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, has dropped the columnist Michelle Malkin from its op-ed roster. The Pilot's ombudsman, Marvin Lake, explains why.

Malkin has a long history of poorly supported polemic, as journalist David Neiwert and others can document. Moreover, her recent book, "In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror," was thoroughly debunked by Eric Muller, a UNC law prof, and Greg Robinson (details here) before it even was published. This was about an order of magnitude harder to do than smoking out whatever the truth, or "truth," was about the documents in Dan Rather's National Guard story about George W. Bush, and M&R pulled it off in roughly the same period of time, and yet it has gotten nowhere near the attention in the blogosphere that the Rather case got.)

One final note: Some commenters have suggested that a Pilot editorial writer's comment, quoted in Lake's column, that Malkin is an "Asian Ann Coulter" was a gratuitous reference. I think not, in the limited sense that her ethnic background was at least tangentially relevant to the argument she was making about internment in her book. Otherwise, I think her ethnicity has much less to do with her gig, and her performance, than the facts that she and Coulter are both, in no particular order, conservative, female, easy on the eyes and apparently willing to say damn near anything they think might get people's attention, regardless of its factual basis or lack thereof.

Tom Shales of The Washington Post has written the kind of piece you almost never see anymore in a mainstream news publication, even from a columnist: a 190-proof rant so biting and yet so right that I'm certain the editor who approved running it fears for his job even today. The subject/target: FCC chairman Michael Powell, a martinet whose arrogance and pusillanimity stand out even in a profession, government, whose hallmarks they are. Take it from this ex-broadcaster: Shales couldn't have gotten this any more right with a radio-controlled thermonuclear device, although I'd have paid good money to watch him try.

I can only add that if this were a just nation, bureaucrats like Michael Powell would be beaten and driven across the landscape like extras in "Conan the Barbarian."

Score another one for bloggers: Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Federal Communications Commission and discovered that the record $1.2 million indecency fine levied by the agency against Fox TV for an episode of "Married by America" resulted from a grand total of three original complaints.

Three. That's not a typo.

I had more to say about that in my personal blog, but for the purposes of this blog, let me echo something else Jeff says:

You, too, can report on government through Freedom of Information Act requests. It is incredibly easy. And it is your right.

All I did was go to this FOIA page on the FCC's site and fill out a basic form. And look what came back to me: A story reporters didn't bother getting when they wrote about this FCC action.

[He inserts an image of the letter he received.]

If an agency has to copy more than a certain number of pages (100 in this case) or spend more than a certain number of hours on a request (two here), they will charge you. But you have the opportunity to say how much you're willing to pay when you file the request. [Addendum from Lex: You can ask the agency to waive the fees when you believe dissemination of the information you request will "primarily benefit the public"; such requests typically are granted.]

You can go to any government agency and to local government as well and file such requests. You want to know about your mayor's expense account? You want to see how other agencies use your tax dollars? File an FOIA request.

The Freedom of Information Act isn't meant for reporters. It's meant for citizens ... and now citizen journalists. So use it.

I agree with Jeff, but let me add a couple of caveats.

First, the Freedom of Information Act applies only to federal records, and only executive-branch records at that. (It doesn't help you with Congress, in other words.) If you want to keep an eye on the mayor, etc., as Jeff suggests, your own state's open-records law probably is what governs access to the relevant records. North Carolina is blessed with one of the country's more public-friendly open-records laws, I'm happy to say. But if you're not from 'round here, the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press has info on all 50 states' laws here.

Second, not to discourage you, but I speak from painful experience when I tell you that many FOIA requests don't get filled anywhere near as quickly or productively as Jeff's did.

Still, the FOIA is for you as much as it is for the N&R, just as the First Amendment is. Indeed, fewer than half the FOIA requests filed each year come from working journalists. So go to it.

And if you stumble across a good story, by all means, get in touch.

In case you're ever tempted to look on journalism as a glamorous profession, keep in mind that no one can guarantee that you won't ever spend 15 minutes in a department-wide meeting arguing about the suitability for publication of a single 2-letter word.

Doug McGill, former New York Times reporter and current blogger, takes on journalistic objectivity in this guest essay at Jay Rosen's PressThink blog.

For more than a century, objectivity has been the dominant professional norm of the news media. It has at its heart the noble aim of presenting indisputable facts upon which everyone in society can agree, and build upon towards the goal of a better society. Unfortunately, the ideal of objectivity has in practice in today’s newsrooms become a subtle but powerful means of self-censorship. It’s a conglomeration of contradictory practices that serve the purpose of rationalization as often as investigation. It has become a crutch for journalistic practices that work against civic aims.

It is not any disagreement with objectivity in its ideal sense that I am expressing; but rather that, when I compare the ideal of objectivity to the observed practice of it, I see a great gap. I also believe that journalism’s failure to serve the public interest, which has been so pronounced in recent years, is in large part traceable to the breakdown of the norm of objectivity as a practical and ethical guide.

It is natural that the breakdown has occurred. Think of all the contradictory goals that journalists today are asked to serve in the name of objectivity. They are supposed to be neutral, but still to grab attention in a crowded media marketplace. They are supposed to be impartial, yet also crusading. To be a clear and unbiased conduit for the facts, and yet also to “follow their nose”--a clear call to the use of individual moral conscience--to get the facts. My own personal experience as a reporter was that as time went on it became harder and harder for me to reconcile these contradictions.

The uncorrupted ideal of objectivity, in the sense of reporters driving to dig out verified facts and present them fully and fairly, is indispensable in journalism. Unmasking its nefarious twin -- an omnipresent and abused pseudo-objectivity – is what I would like to do.

The Denver Post has endorsed George W. Bush for president. This is not surprising. What is surprising is the language of the endorsement editorial:

Typically, in the case of an incumbent, our endorsement calculation would begin this way: Are we, as Coloradans, better off today than we were four years ago?

In a word, no. Since 2001, Colorado has lost more jobs than we've gained, and the ones we've gained pay less than the ones we've lost. We pay less in taxes, but our household and medical expenses have skyrocketed. Ninety thousand of us have lost our health coverage. Washington is ringing up record deficits and sticking the next generation with the bill. In Iraq, Colorado-based military units and reserves are deployed in a hostile environment for questionable purpose and uncertain result. ...

It's no secret that we part company with the president over many issues. Two glaring sore spots are his obsession to cut taxes even while piling up record deficits, and his mishandling of all things Iraq. He squandered global good will by taking a "my way or the highway" approach to matters of global warming, international law, Iraq weapons inspections and ultimately the Iraq invasion. He bows to corporate preference in matters of energy and environment, and his education funding levels leave far too many children behind.

Kerry has infused the 2004 campaign with energy and gumption, offering fresh ideas on health care and sensible plans for our tax structure. His are the superior proposals on environmental protection, on stem-cell research and judicial nominations. Sure, we've seen Kerry bend to the political winds over his long career, but we wouldn't mind one bit if more Washington politicians would reconsider their past judgments and ideological certainties. Kerry's growth on the campaign trail gives a glimpse of his potential. ...

The president sent U.S. forces into Iraq 18 months ago to oust Saddam Hussein, but with no plan to handle any subsequent resistance. Vice President Dick Cheney said Iraqis would greet the invasion force as liberators, quite a miscalculation, and there was no Plan B. Coalition forces have been unable to defend Iraqi oil assets from insurgent sabotage. It's hard to believe the United States could have done a worse job planning for a new Iraq. ...

I'm cherry-picking, of course. But even in context, this is not the kind of language one expects to see about Candidate X in an editorial endorsing Candidate X. I'm not saying an endorsement should omit all negative description of the endorsee (or any positive description of the opponent, for that matter), but this editorial seems especially conflicted when one considers that voters are being given the clearest distinction between the two major-party candidates since the Reagan-Mondale contest of 1984.

Guys, if you're going to endorse somebody, endorse him. Otherwise, you're wasting your readers' time.

UPDATE: Wow. Looks like Denver agrees with me. The Post reports that it received more than 700 responses to this editorial and adds, "Every letter we received was critical."

The Wall Street Journal is all in favor of the power of the market -- except when it's used to enforce shareholders' rights.

Let's see: The SEC's enforcement arm has been inadequately funded for at least a decade. The current administration wants to make it harder for shareholders to sue management. And I'm supposed to take the Journal seriously when shareholders use the only other tool at their disposal to object to propaganda disguised as news -- not because of the content, but because of the damage it's doing to their investment?

That scritching sound the Wall Street Journal's editorial board is hearing is me playing "My Heart Bleeds For You" on the world's smallest violin.

So last week, Jon Stewart, the host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," appeared as a guest on CNN's political-argument show, "Crossfire." You really have to see the video to get the full gist; the transcript just doesn't convey things like the look on co-host Tucker Carlson's face as Stewart, in the wonderful words of blogger Nancy Nall, "cuts out Tucker Carlson's heart, shows it to him, then eats it slowly." (That's a metaphor, for the easily alarmed.)

Dave Winer, who has forgotten more about blogging than most people will ever know, sees Stewart's take as, at least in part, the complaint of a dissatisfied customer and asks:

Wasn't he a customer saying he wasn't satisfied with the service?

Should journalists listen to their customers? (I don't mean advertisers, I mean the people who read, listen to, or watch their reports.)

Should they try to give them what they want?

If not, why not?

Would journalism get better?

Some journalists say they give the customers what they want, but I wonder about that.

If they were, wouldn't they have to listen to customers?

I think Stewart was saying he was dissatisfied with the program hosts' product, but I also think he would argue that "customer" inappropriately casts the relationship between him and "Crossfire" in commercial terms. Rightly or wrongly, he believes "Crossfire" and its network ought to be doing more to provide the citizens of a free republic with the information they need to govern themselves and that it is instead engaging in political theater for purely entertainment purposes.

Nonetheless, the question is valid: Should journalists listen to their customers? And the answer is: of course. And the N&R often does that very well, I think. For example, a few years ago our delivery goal for weekday morning papers was 6 a.m. for the last paper. But reader research suggested that so many people are commuting such long distances or otherwise starting their days earlier that we needed to move that deadline up at least 30 minutes, to 5:30 a.m. And so we did.

But saying that we should listen to customers is not synonymous with giving customers everything they want.

For one thing, if we gave customers everything they wanted, we'd go broke. And having been in business for 114 years or so, we've gotten kind of accustomed to being in business and would like to remain so.

For another, because we can't give customers everything we want, we have to prioritize. And for a newspaper's news department, local news and public-service journalism need to be at the top of the priority list, in my humble opinion, for both practical and philosophical reasons.

The practical reason: We can do local news and public-service journalism better than any other mass medium. In classical economic terms, we have a competitive advantage in these areas.

The philosophical reason: We have a constitutional duty to provide that service, and providing it well and in quantity is the kharmic payback we owe for industrywide profit margins a couple of multiples of the national industrial average. (Again, this is me talking, not the N&R.)

Those two priorities must remain priorities, I think, even when customers tell us they want other things. That doesn't mean we won't run national or world stories on the front page from time to time, and it doesn't mean we're going to kill our sports and features sections to devote those resources to news. But it means that in a less-than-stellar economic climate in which hard decisions are forced upon us, that's where the bulk of our resources must continue to go.

Now, within that framework, there is wide latitude for a newspaper to take the wishes of its readers into account. And we use reader research and other tools to try to do that -- to focus on subjects readers say they want more coverage of. We also try to respond to tips we get. Historically, the N&R's ambitions always have exceeded its resources, and it gets a little frustrating some days when we have six great story ideas to pursue and only three available reporters, but we do the best we can with what we have. More importantly, we use that sense of frustration to help us keep from getting complacent.

Blogs, among other virtues, are one more way we can listen to customers -- to get story tips, feedback on stories, and information on what's going on in the community and what the community considers important.

And as leader of the paper's enterprise/investigative team, I'm always particularly interested in tips on good stories. We might or might not be able to pursue the story, but I'm definitely willing to listen.

UPDATE: Journalist-turned-rhetorician Andrew Cline thinks "The Daily Show" serves its customers well and that "Crossfire" does not. To put it mildly.

OK, maybe not to the death. And, well, maybe not a cage match, seeing as they don't make cages for abstract concepts.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Which is funny because, where blogging is concerned, I'm running behind.

The so-four-days-ago big news in the political blogosphere is the so-called "Halperin memo," written by ABC News Political Director Mark Halperin on Friday to his staff and later obtained by Drudge. Since I couldn't read the memo in the *.jpeg file that Drudge posted, I'm relying on Drudge himself to have transcribed it accurately -- dangerous, I know. But if he's correct, the memo, complete with typos, said:

It goes without saying that the stakes are getting very high for the country and the campaigns - and our responsibilities become quite grave

I do not want to set off (sp?) and endless colloquy that none of us have time for today - nor do I want to stifle one. Please respond if you feel you can advance the discussion.

The New York Times (Nagourney/Stevenson) and Howard Fineman on the web both make the same point today: the current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done.

Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win.

We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn't mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides "equally" accountable when the facts don't warrant that.

I'm sure many of you have this week felt the stepped up Bush efforts to complain about our coverage. This is all part of their efforts to get away with as much as possible with the stepped up, renewed efforts to win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions.

It's up to Kerry to defend himself, of course. But as one of the few news organizations with the skill and strength to help voters evaluate what the candidates are saying to serve the public interest. Now is the time for all of us to step up and do that right.

This memo was seized upon by Drudge and other conservatives as "proof" of liberal bias at ABC. Whether you agree with that assessment likely depends upon whether you agree with Halperin's assertion that "the current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done." But that's not the issue I'm highlighting here.

Halperin goes on to say: "We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn't mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides 'equally' accountable when the facts don't warrant that. ... It's up to Kerry to defend himself, of course. But as one of the few news organizations with the skill and strength to help voters evaluate what the candidates are saying to serve the public interest. Now is the time for all of us to step up and do that right."

Sentence fragments and all, Halperin has hit on a crucial principle here: News organizations have a duty to provide a free people with the information they need to govern themselves. That goes beyond reporting what each candidate says to attempt to determine which of them is speaking the truth, or is closer to it.

Here's where journalism and postmodernism collide -- and where, in my personal and humble opinion, the national news media largely have failed the American people in recent political campaigns. You would think that journalism would be more attracted to objective, verifiable facts, but the national media in recent campaigns have taken an almost insanely postmodern approach to political claims. (Now, I might have gone to a nice liberal-arts college and majored in English, but I do not care for postmodernism -- not in life and certainly not in journalism -- and have said so on several occasions.) And as a result, a free nation is being denied critical information it needs to govern itself.

Because, postmodernism to the contrary, everything doesn't necessarily depend upon your point of view. Some candidates' factual claims are measurably, objectively true or false. And a news media worth a damn will assess those claims as carefully and thoroughly as possible and report which claims are accurate and which are not. Even if it takes people. Even if it takes time. Even if it takes money.

Moreover, it will not, out of some misguided sense of "fairness" or "balance," treat factually unequal claims equally, nor will it treat all candidates' offenses as equally bad when, in fact, some are much more serious and much more indicative of a candidate's suitability for office than others. That's the journalistic equivalent of claiming that 2+2=5. (That's also the significance of the bolded passage above, which I bolded because when Drudge posted his announcement about the memo, this is the part he did not include. Anyone just reading Drudge's page who had not waded through the *.jpeg or read Drudge's transcription would have missed an important qualifying phrase.)

Halperin's memo obviously was written in haste, but that is the larger point he is making, and he's absolutely, positively right.

As for his claim that "the current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done," that's an objectively verifiable or disprovable statement. If that's what he thinks, and if that thinking is guiding ABC News' coverage of the presidential race, then ABC News needs to marshall its evidence and lay it out before the electorate. And anyone who disagrees, in the national media or in Blogworld, ought to do the same.

I don't write about national politics, so I won't be covering tonight's debate between President Bush and Sen. Kerry. (Given my fatigue level, I might just tape it and go to bed early.)

But I've covered such a debate before, in 1988, when George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis met at Wake Forest University. Afterward, I got my first and what I hope will be my last exposure to Spin Alley, the place where each candidate's backers gather immediately after the debate to "spin" the results to journalists. The only good thing about the experience was that there was free food and beer.

There are so many problems with the whole notion of Spin Alley that I hardly know where to begin describing them. Fortunately, Jay Rosen of PressThink already has done so. He also reports the heartening news that at least one reporter for a major media outlet, Adam Nagourney of The New York Times, won't even be attending the debate in person but will be watching it on TV in Washington, so as to play hooky from Spin Alley. I wish every journalist would do the same.

In fact, I wish every voter would do the same, because Spin Alley isn't set up to benefit voters or the news media or anyone else except the candidates. Indeed, turn off the picture on your TV and just listen to what the two candidates say. Then, once the debate ends, turn off the TV and think back on what you heard. Which candidate's arguments were more factual? (You might want to spend some time online with Google to determine who was telling the truth and who wasn't on any particular subject.) Which candidate's argument was more logical? Which candidate sounded better prepared? Given the stilted format -- more joint press conference than debate -- it might be tough, but give it a shot.

Then, when you've done all that? Come to your own conclusions. Trust your own judgment. You're a citizen in the greatest republic in history. Spin Alley is not qualified to tell you what to think, so don't even give it the chance.

Via Romenesko, here's one college student who gets it:

... the journalistic ideal of balance, while noble, too often gets in the way of truthfully reporting a story. Framing news in terms of two supposedly equal but opposing viewpoints ignores the reality that the facts are not always balanced between parties, and thus legitimizes factually inaccurate opinions. Daily Show "correspondent" Rob Corddry's satiric definition of a reporter's role makes these problems clear: "My job is to spend half the time repeating what one side says, and half the time repeating the other." Instead of repeating each side's claims, mainstream media need to start reporting the reality.

Unlike some of my peers, I've never tried to claim a privileged status for working journalists. I think there's a reason that the framers of the Constitution didn't really define "the press" when they included freedom of the press in the Bill of Rights: In the society they envisioned, I think, they figured that at some point almost any/every citizen might have to function as a journalist.

That's not to say there aren't some boundaries. Andrew Cline, a journalism professor and rhetorician at Southwest Missouri State and the publisher of the excellent Rhetorica blog, frequently talks about the "discipline of verification" involved in journalism. In practical terms, he says, "You don't write what you can't prove."

An essential part of proving or disproving a factual claim is knowing what questions to ask, and among the bigger failings of journalists who have covered the White House in my lifetime (I was born during Ike's second term) is their reluctance to ask the kinds of questions that truly hold government leaders accountable to the people who elect them. In fact, some days I've thought anyone off the street could ask better questions than the group that bloggers of both the Left and the Right frequently refer to as the White House Press Corpse.

Well, earlier this week, that's basically what happened: The whitehouse.gov Web site held an "Ask the White House" session with the president's communication's director, Dan Bartlett, and in one way or another, almost all the questions were seeking to hold the administration accountable for something or other:

OK, now that the 15-foot potatoes are out of the way, journalist and documentarian Bill Moyers reflects on the state of journalism and the challenges facing it. He's not very optimistic.

A profound transformation is happening here. The framers of our nation never envisioned these huge media giants; never imagined what could happen if big government, big publishing and big broadcasters ever saw eye to eye in putting the public’s need for news second to their own interests -- and to the ideology of free-market economics.
Nor could they have foreseen the rise of a quasi-official partisan press serving as a mighty megaphone for the regime in power.

On Friday, a commenter at this post on Editor John Robinson's blog raised this question: Why risk having an incomplete story out there?

The context was the N&R's reporting on Mayor Keith Holliday's new race-relations initiative. The commenter was taking issue with JR's defense of our having published the story when we learned of it, rather than waiting until today's news conference, as the mayor had requested.

It's not clear to me whether the question was rhetorical. But whether it was or not, it's a good question and it deserves an answer.

The fact is, we risk having incomplete stories out there every day. And we do it for several reasons. In no particular order: