Constantly risking absurdity and death... er, no. That's Ferlinghetti.
Um, clearly risking IRONY without death, Dan has waded into trying to define what journalism is yet again! Thanks Dan! Don't know what I'd do without you, and I mean that seriously (having taught from and even blurbed, I think, your terrific book We the Media).
But for the irony! It's so postmodern!
From this insightful list of 22 New Rules for News, we first must talk about Rule Number 11...
I guess lists of 22 are OK then? Numerologists would tell you 11 and 22 are Master Numbers that can't be reduced, linked to both channeling IDEALISM into the planet from a higher plane (one more than 10 items) and working as a MASTER BUILDER, some kind of journalistic Freemason, I guess.
There you go, Dan. Always trying to moving things to a higher level! Lists of more than 10 items are OK. Whew! [grin]
I jokes. But some good stuff to chew on in this list of 22 items. Because Dan doesn't wade into the polemic that surrounds so much of the debate about the future of journalism (but instead has characteristically put his money where his mouth is, to work as a practical master builder of sorts for the highest kind of idealism the religion of journalism can sustain) I find it interesting picking his brain on this stuff.
Some things I agree with. Some I don't. Some are more important. Some less. Which inspired me to add my (for what it's worth) two cents.
How about a list of my 10 favorites?
First, the set-up (so it makes sense):
Dan sez:
You may have noticed – you could hardly miss it – the blizzard of anniversary stories last month about the fall of Lehman Brothers, an event that helped spark last year's financial meltdown. The coverage reminded me that journalists failed to do their jobs before last year's crisis emerged, and have continued to fail since then.
It also reminds me of a few pet peeves about the way traditional journalists operate. So here's a list of 22 things, not in any particular order, that I'd insist upon if I ran a news organization.
He's got me at Number 1, which just happened to be one of my pet peeves too, especially when I worked in TV-Land.Dan tells my friend Grayson Daughters that the "lazy and unimaginative journalists" line was added by the editorial process at the Guardian, and that he wouldn't have used that term himself. I would have! If I'd have stayed in newspapers instead of morphing into cable news, it probably wouldn't bug me so much. But if I have to see ANOTHER Coney Island hot-dog eating story, I'll barf up all the hot dogs those guys are eating.
Sad shift work, really, was what it was, for 24-hour news staffers who couldn't get those days off. I didn't mind the national election rituals. But certain non-holidays that lead to a pre-set mandatory programming mantra of cliche's could just make me run around the room screaming. Like the hurricane preparation story, as the hurricane is of course "bearing down," right before it starts to "wreak havock."
How about the Super Bowl Sunday bizarro land programming as a national holiday?
OK, maybe it isn't a refuge of "lazy and unimaginative journalists" at all. Nope, I'm sure it isn't. They dread those godawful assignments. The mandate for such "coverage" comes from on high, editorial/management, that you MUST stack a show a certain way on those cliche' days. Mother's Day. All the stories about these days have to have several invocations of "We" in them, and the on-air staff have to chuckle or sigh sadly along with the same remarks from the year before.I have to stop. I'm giving myself nightmares.
Rules 2-3 are from the glory days when citizen journalism was a bright and shiny new thing. It still has great promise, and I'll invest as much energy in it as ever, but oh boy, the rumbles I hear from the trenches. There's a lot of blogger payola not disclosed on the ground in some state and local political wars!
I love the idea of inviting the audience to contribute by admitting to known holes in a published story (Rule #3). Again, that's right up there with a professor saying "I don't know" in answer to a question in a lecture hall. All the rules of teaching say you should do it, and I've done it often myself. But the system is built on constructions of authority, and it is a radical thing to do and not without risk, to openly undermine your own authority.
I'm loving #4:
How cool would that be? To solve the problem of a lack of prominence for the placement of corrections vs. the often bold play of the original story, which had the error to be corrected.
#6 is another MASSIVE pet peeve of mine too:
Man, it is such an important goal, in theory, and so very very difficult to execute, in practice.
I don't want to wax on (as I am often wont to do), but I have a theory about why this is.
I think this is a direct result of an overt managerial de-skilling of newsrooms, particularly in a political move (pogrom) to use buy-outs and other measures to remove the most veteran non-management working journalists, over a period of decades (since late 80s). Sure, it's cheaper to keep the cheaper people. It's also very convenient for heavy-handed but invisible management influence on editorial content, if the staff is easier to intimidate and push around, always inexperienced, always on edge, always looking over its shoulder for the next layoff.
I've don't want to beat that dead horse, except to say the by-product of this, the net effect, by keeping newsrooms quite often so junior, and by a somewhat older (or deliberately younger and less threatening) management layer is that the rank and file is kept low-skilled specifically so they cannot be trusted to credibly call BS on obvious BS. In short, for the majority of the folks in the newsroom, calling out lies is at least 15 steps above their pay grade. THEY WERE HIRED TO BE STENOGRAPHERS, and to APPLY THE TWO-SIDED ASSEMBLY LINE "BALANCE" FORMULA. Blindly, and without question.
If they ever tried to get beyond stenography, their very jobs would be at risk. House lawyers would be called in, folks from Standards and Practices. It would have to go through at least 5 additional layers of copyediting before it ever made print or air, with all the non-stenography teeth taken out of it, et. cetera ad nauseum.
I've actually seen this in action, and I learned my lesson well. Thou shalt not do anything more than repeat what the officially sanctioned sources say, even when it is provably false.
So for Those Blessed Ones who find miraculously that truth-telling is within their pay-grade, USE IT! Quite a lot of us became bloggers because the famous Mainstream Media "filter" was so authoritative, lazy and risk averse, it would never allow an utterance or fact to contradict the authorities it acts as beholden medieval courtiers to.
I have seen the rank and file journalists, those for whom truth is above their pay grade, work quite sneakily from within the system to try to slip in qualifiers, or bolder sources, or seemingly innocuous incidental (yet contradictory) facts, for those readers/viewers who have the ears to listen, to allow the more astute critical thinkers to read between the lines for the hidden code that is not really allowed on the assembly line by the copyeditors. Copyeditors are often harried and overworked. They can't catch everything, and sometimes, sometimes, truth told "slant," as Emily Dickinson might call it, slips through.
Oddly, sort of like it used to under press censorship in the former Soviet Union.
Back to Dan and his list!
7. We would replace PR-speak and certain Orwellian words and expressions with more neutral, precise language. If someone we interview misused language, we would paraphrase instead of using direct quotations. (Examples, among many others: The activity that takes place in casinos is gambling, not gaming. There is no death tax, there can be inheritance or estate tax. Piracy does not describe what people do when they post digital music on file-sharing networks.)
Great idea! Didn't Orwell already think of it, some time ago? Not much progress there. Yet every reframed word is a rhetorical and political act, even if seemingly neutral. That would only be a problem with the U.S. press, which still pays lip service to an idea of neutral language (an impossibility) or communication as a transparent window pane to "facts" or "truth." If anything, "piracy" is defined by those who hold the power to stop or allow it. Just as victors get to write the history.
In regard to #8, isn't it hilarious that this long after the advent of hypertext theory, turf-guarders are still debating the viability of out-bound links? Never underestimate the power of a horseless carriage or transitional media adjustments.
9. Our archives would be freely available, with links on every single thing we've published as far back as possible, with application interfaces (APIs) to help other people use our journalism in ways we haven't considered ourselves.
I gotta add to this one. Yes, archives need to be open, BUT THEY ALSO NEED TO BE PERMALINKED! Bloggers know that links are the coin of this Google-ruled realm, but for some ungodly reason, professional and commercial publishing sites are constantly doing redesigns and either dumping all their deep archives wholesale (thumbing their nose at the Long Tail in cynical disregard for the value of their own publishing operation and history) OR MOVING THEM WITHOUT REDIRECTS, breaking all existing inbound bookmarks as being so inconsequential as to be utterly irrelevant.
My god, if that's how little they value their own archives and their place in the larger Library of Everything and History of the Internet, why should we bother to value their content at all?!
Oh man, I could really go on and on about this one. Bless the Blogosphere, for the pragmatic institution of the Permalinks. May they never break! Internet historians love you, bloggers! And since victors write history, I think it may be fair to say that bloggers could well trump MSM in the authoring of the first draft of history, simply because their archives have greater longevity than those of commercial publishing entities.
Take that, y'all!
Dan is taking another overtly political position here on #10:
10. We would help people in the community become informed users of media, not passive consumers – to understand why and how they can do this. We would work with schools and other institutions that recognise the necessity of critical thinking.
I think Stephen Colbert said it best, at the White House Correspondents' Dinner under the Bush Administration: "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."
To advocate critical thinking is to take a political position, one overtly in favor of Enlightenment rationality, for instance. I've been in academia too long to even remotely think that supposed rationality is a politically neutral act, even as much as I wish it could be.
I remember teaching at a summer high school gifted and talented program, back when our governor decided to run for president. Arkansas Governor's School was strongly focused on critical thinking and questioning, examining a broad range of 20th century theories.
Imagine our surprise to find that that focus would come under direct political attack by the Right, because of the presumed "liberal bias" of the Socratic method, opening questioning, and all those other good Enlightenment virtues. How dare we let students ask questions?! That is nothing more than indoctrinating children to become "little Bill Clinton clones!"
If U.S. journalists are supposed to be excruciatingly politically neutral, then a bias in favor of asking questions, of testing hypotheses, of seeking proof, of applying (Western) logic, is politically tilted to the left. The Right Wing in the U.S. has cast its lot with unquestioned authoritarian thinking, and in adopting stenographic journalism, the Press has also betrayed a political bias to the right.
By advocating radical things like fact-checking, truth-telling, and authority-questioning, in search of that good old reality-based universe, journalists are betraying their own political biases to the Left, as in the Enlightenment (which was profoundly political when it originally appeared as well, in the face of the enormous authoritarian power of Church and Aristocracy/State).
One could make a case that journalism as stenography might be the ONLY value-neutral, non-political endeavor, so long as mouthpieces on various sides are transcribed accurately. But like I said above, treating any mouthpiece authoritiatively, with or without a fact-check, betrays a political bias to authoritarianism, an apparently much-valued Right Wing virtue.
I think journalists need to own their political biases, and embrace them. The political polarization of our time requires taking sides, especially if the core part of your job description involves asking questions, and not being a stenographer. Those are political positions in the world as defined by the Right and Left of today.
I love #13!
13. If we granted anonymity and learned that the unnamed source had lied to us, we would consider the confidentially agreement to have been breached by that person, and would expose his or her duplicity, and identity. Sources would know of this policy before we published. We'd further look for examples where our competitors have been tricked by sources they didn't name, and then do our best to expose them, too.
Oh my, wouldn't that be wonderful? I'm not as hard-core as Dan in wanting to eschew anonymous sources (I was so profoundly influenced by Watergate, and I've also been influenced by the Watergates that didn't happen and probably should have, because Iran Contra didn't have a Deep Throat, and so on). But I do understand that just as journalism has shifted to stenography on behalf of a much better-funded PR system, so has the practice of investigative reporting with anon sources been more honored in the breach than the acceptance. The power has shifted to those who would manipulate and abuse the system.
Dan's proposal, to treat each potentially anonymous transaction as a contract that is overtly broken the INSTANT an anon claim/quotation is proven to have been used to perpetuate a falsehood, opens the door to greater exposure of the liars! Name and shame! Wow, what would this sort of an understanding do to the culture of Washington? I want to see this broadly adopted, just because I want a front row seat on the result. It would be a hoot. And then, I figure it would put an abrupt stop to the practice of abusing the off-the-record privilege, like a good Skinner-box. Very clever.
In regard to #18, there's been a lot of buzz in this area among new media journalists looking to reinvent the online genre (or just get beyond the horseless carriages) just as PR 2.0 sought to frame and contextualize with hyperlinked resources the genre of press release. I really welcome these sorts of developments.
18. For any person or topic we covered regularly, we would provide a "baseline": an article or video where people could start if they were new to the topic, and point prominently to that "start here" piece from any new coverage. We might use a modified Wikipedia approach to keep the article current with the most important updates. The point would be context, giving some people a way to get quickly up to speed and others a way to recall the context of the issue.
What I've seen talked about (and demo'ed) are core context pages, or hypermedia "hubs" that provide a non-linear baseline for online active exploration. But also, these are terrific things that some journalistic outlets have been doing from the very beginning (I'm thinking of the most amazing resource online that supports the PBS program Frontline. This is a web site that, over the years, has literally changed my life).
Danger, Will Robinson! This #19 is overtly political too, and that is still verboten in U.S. MSM.
19. For any coverage where it made sense, we'd tell our audience members how they could act on the information we'd just given them. This would typically take the form of a "What You Can Do" box or pointer.
To presume to understand what sorts of things can be "done" imply a response of advocacy, of activity. That's that deep bias that assumes activity is a neutral response. I think (facetiously) that conservatives in this country have evolved into a form of political advocacy for Do-Nothing, possibly in the interests of conserving energy, who knows? It could be a political correllary to the historical Know-Nothing political party, or maybe a form of Evolution. (woo woo!)
Even excruciatingly-screened lists of "What You Can Do," with all overt political tint milque-toasted out would still presume that certain items, like showing up at public meetings, imply participation in democratic processes (themselves products of Enlightenment thinking, in their most recent incarnation) are politically neutral. Will "Show up at a town hall meeting and yell until spit flecks stick to the corners of your mouth" be listed under "What You Can Do?" Yet this is a form of democratic participation, isn't it?
There isn't a scorpio alive who would not cheer #20. Probably this very mission is the reason I originally went into journalism, and why I still worship at its church.
20. We'd work in every possible way to help our audience know who's behind the words and actions. People and institutions frequently try to influence the rest of us in ways that hide their participation in the debate, and we'd do our best to reveal who's spending money and pulling strings. When our competitors declined to reveal such things, or failed to ask obvious questions of their sources, we'd talk about their journalistic failures in our own coverage of the issues.
#21 and #22 sort of wind down into afterthoughts, but 22 is still a magic number, so I don't mind. So long as it isn't a list of 10.
But it is still a list! Brian Clark of Copyblogger would tell you that is the cheapest SEO link bait on the PLANET! And a gazillion bloggers go right along with it, because link bait is what makes the world go round! (Not.)
I know that isn't the reason Dan did it. But I like the list, and I fell for the link bait. [grin]
And I think I quoted my 11 favorites, so I get to channel Idealism into the planet with a Master Number, and I don't have to worry about being too lazy and unimaginative to only to lists of 10!
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