Rightwing "Investigative" Journalism is a failure

National Public Radio has recently fired its President as a direct result of the fraudulently edited so-called expose by the conservative provocateur James O'Keefe. O'Keefe is attempting to duplicate his earlierdestruction of the community organization ACORN with a video edited to the point of outright lies. But this is not just an individual with a desire to get personal publicity. This is a well-funded propaganda operation by the extreme right-wing, following in the Republican tradition of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. Steve Benen writes about the right-wing attempts at investigative journalism.

Looking back over the last several decades, most of the time, quality investigative journalism has come from mainstream news organizations and left-leaning outlets like The Nation and Mother Jones. The right, historically, has avoided this kind of work, preferring to create outlets like Fox News, National Review, and the Weekly Standard.

Whether you find those conservative outlets valuable or not, it's fair to say investigative journalism isn't part of their m.o. The Republican-friendly outlets just don't do in-depth, shoe-leather journalism to break major news stories.

Over the last couple of years, conservatives have begun taking steps to change this, bolstered by far-right financial backing. What's wrong with this? In theory, nothing. Investigative journalism can play a valuable role in holding officials accountable and ensuring transparency. If folks on the right want to do some digging and turn up malfeasance, more power to them.

The problem isn't that conservatives are doing investigative journalism. The problem is that conservatives haven't figured out how to do investigative journalism especially well.

Laura McGann had a great piece on this in the Monthly last year, noting that "conservative investigative journalism tends to produce reports that are wrong," a problem compounded by the fact that while their efforts are ostensibly about improving transparency, the far-right activism is nearly always shrouded in secrecy.

This is bound to continue, but there's no reason for the mainstream to take it seriously.

So to call what the right-wing does investigative journalism is to mistake form for actual fact. Simply to go underground and take videos is not investigative journalism. That is especially true when the raw material is edited into an outright lie.

What is most telling about the O'Keefe efforts is that they expose the fact that conservativism is based on a series of lies. It cannot stand in the face of honest inquiry and real questions, so it resorts to make up propaganda spread by its own limited lying propagand outlets such as FOX News, the American Standard, the Washington Times, and others.

So why do the mainstream news outlets buy O'Keefe's crap? Anything sourced to O'Keefe is clearly a lie. Treating it as legitimate news is to simply debase the news profession as a whole.

TPM as Uberblog! GQ gets it.

Everything I know about the disaster that is the Department of Justice under alberto Gonzales I have gotten from Talking Points Memo. That's true for you, too, dear reader, whether you know it or not. The same is true of Randy "Duke" Cunningham and Jack Abramoff. So GQ figured it out and has written an article about it. They recognize that TPM is "the prototype of what an Internet-based news-gathering organization might one day look like." Here is a key part in their excellent article:

On Gonzales and the United States Attorney debacle, TPM did beat the big boys, assuming “big boys” means all the newspapers, magazines, and television networks that ignored an enormously important story about the rule of law being systematically hijacked by political thugs. TPM dogged it for two months before the national press piled on in March. At that point, TPM was perhaps most valuable as an archive for all the other journalists getting up to speed. [Snip]

Marshall, 38, is a modest man with the thoughtful manner of an academic (he has a doctorate in history from Brown). He does not see himself as David standing alone against Goliath. He is not a zealot wielding the Righteous Flaming Sword of the Netroots. He is a journalist. He runs a journalism company that employs other journalists who produce very good journalism that is read by approximately 700,000 people who tend to be well educated (84 percent have college degrees), well paid (60 percent make more than $75,000 a year), and politically active (90 percent give to a cause or candidate). If TPM were a paper-and-ink medium, Marshall would be in the upper tier of American media: The Boston Globe, one the nation’s best papers, has a daily circulation of barely more than half of TPM’s readership.

The difference is that he happens to publish in the blogosphere, another term that deserves italics because it, too, is pointlessly broad, encompassing tens of millions of people with modems who send into the digital ether billions of words, of which very few are read by anyone other than their author. Even among its most intelligent and widely read practitioners—say, Atrios or Andrew Sullivan or Glenn Greenwald—blogging is typically a platform for opining and critiquing and excoriating, for commenting on what is already known. Marshall, though, has optimized the medium as a journalistic enterprise: Working in digital bits, TPM can report emerging stories in real time, updating at will, linking to other sources (including my GQ piece on Ralph Reed, in August 2006), weaving compelling narratives out of disparate threads. On a good day during the United States Attorney scandal, TPM posted more than a dozen updates.

“TPM is something new under the sun—it’s in part an opinion blog, but it’s also an investigative-reporting shop,” says New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “And it’s having a big influence. Josh and crew did more than anyone to break the U. S. attorneys story, they’ve played a big role in uncovering the Blackwater scandal, and more. At this point, it’s hard to see how we ever lived without something like TPM. I rely on them a lot.”

“You’re making a mistake if you’re not checking in,” says Time Washington bureau chief Jay Carney. “That’s not ideological at all: They’re good at what they do. They’re the best of a breed.”

I have known this for several years, and TPM is always the first on-line news source I check each day. I am delighted to see one of the older journalistic enterprises 'get' what TPM does.

Now, if someone can just get the New York Times and other traditional media to credit their source when they steal from TPM and similar blogs, perhaps there might be some hope for the traditional media. Not professionalism, not investigative journalism, but at least maybe some hope.

[ h/t to (of course) Talking Points Memo. ]

An analysis of journalism

What is modern journalism and how did it get this way? ePluribus Media reviews what appears to be a fascinating new book The Rise of the Blogosphere. [Online price through Barnes & Noble is $49.95 and those of us who spend $25 a year to get the member's discount only pay $39.96. Since that is over $25.00 they pay the postage. However, I am going to wait for used copies to drop in price.]

Barlow is a sharp critic of the current trends in the media, such as the presentation of news as entertainment. At the same time, he is passionate about the importance of journalism in creating an informed public debate about the policy issues that face us. As one of the early members of the ePluribus Media collective, Barlow believes web journals and blogs have an important, if not essential, role to play in shaping public opinion and giving citizens the means to take on an active role in political debate. This -- the role of the blogs and the future of print journalism -- is one of the hottest topics in the field today.

Although Barlow is a passionate advocate of citizen journalism as it is manifest online, he does not see it as a substitute for a viable press. He also rejects the contention that web journals are an essentially new form simply because they are distributed through the Internet. In this, and other ways, the book is full of surprises; it is personal, while at the same time scholarly. It's a first-hand, inside perspective on modern journalism, but not a first-person memoir. Barlow references his own experiences as a professional journalist and teacher of journalism, but delivers a comprehensive, well researched review of the history of U.S. journalism from colonial days to the present.

The book begins with a discussion of how early U.S. printers published newspapers as a way to fully realize the capacity of their presses and how they could, by becoming postmasters, run a primitive version of modern-day news bureaus. Barlow then guides the reader through the technological developments publishing has seen in the past 250 years, from the days when Benjamin Franklin was simultaneously a printer, publisher, writer, postmaster and political leader, to the development of blogs and web journals today. This growth of technology created the possibility to reach wide audiences quickly, but it also created the circumstances for the stifling development of commercial pressures on publishers.

Besides the advent of profit-driven presentation, Barlow also addresses a more recent development in journalism - the fraud of objectivity. All too often, the truth of a matter is obscured by attempts to appear "neutral" in reporting the news of the day. Giving air time to two conflicting opinions purporting to be an unvarnished presentation of fact does not meet the ideal of objective journalism; presenting both sides of an issue is always laudable, but honest journalism demands a commitment to truth.

I find that Talking Point Memo provides better journalism than any of the major media outlets - especially the New York Times and the Washington Post. {The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe both do a better job than those two. But since they are regional newspapers they are not considered competitors to those two. It isn't an issue of journalism. It's an issue of distribution.)

Journalism is changing, and with FOX in the driver's seat at the moment, it is at a nadir. The blogosphere is part of the way out, but only a part. On-line journalism will never have the distribution to the masses that will give it the cachet to dominate journalism. But it is leading the way out of the current level of utter crap that has allowed the Conservative Republicans to dominate politics.

Having not read this book yet, I am not sure what insights it offers. But something is better than nothing. This is worth a trip to the library.

Part II of the Personal Democracy Forum

Yesterday I linked over to Josh Marshall's video of Part I of the Personal Democracy Forum. Today I want to send you to Part II.

In this installment Josh interviews two more people, one is a journalism professor who is working on how decentralized citizen journalism will work, and the second is a law professor who steps back a bit from the details and describes how citizen journalism and open source software are opening society up, while big businesses since 1990 have been working hard to lock down as much information as possible so that it is not available to most people (Think Disney and the extension of the life of copyrights.)

I strongly recommend that you sit through the video. And if it starts sort of hanging up then starting again, the data is not downloading as fast as it is being displayed. The solution is to start the video, pause it, and let it download a lot before restarting it.

Watching this video is a little like seeing the future. The first interview is a nuts-and-bolts how to do it for citizen journalism using the internet, and the second interview provides a quick glimpse of how the slow innovation is lagging behind tne new technologies and the people using them. So go watch it.

Why the media failed in the run-up to the war in Iraq

The major American media institutions bought into the lies and deceptions that the White House was peddling to take America to war in Iraq in 2003. Then they spread those lies and deceptions far, wide and deep so that any effort to question them became something only a fool or a traitor to America would try.

The result was the Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld preemptive(?) invasion of Iraq leading to the quagmire that we are now told we cannot leave, because leaving Iraq means that America has lost the war there. For personal reasons of their own, admitting that the war is lost is anathema to George W. Bush and John McCain. Those personal reasons are never stated. They are cloaked in patriotism with the idea that "America" cannot lose the war in Iraq.

We also know that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, that he considered bin Laden and al Qaeda his enemies, and that he had no nuclear weapons program, chemical weapons program or biological weapons program in active or potentially active status. The UN inspection teams had it right in their reports.

Once those lies were recognized generally there have developed several new reasons for why we invaded Iraq and remain there.

• First is that we had to remove a nasty dictator. Saddam was bad, but Mugabe in Zambia is worse, as are the leaders of Sudan who are conducting genocide on the natives of Darfur - but we don't have carrier groups off either coast nor do we have troops on the ground sending back a steady stream of bodybags from either of those countries.
  
• Then there is the idea that we should be there to bring democracy to Iraq. Besides being highly paternalistic, it is something now universally recognized by thinking people that we cannot do that with armed troops. Our very presence caused too much animosity, for one thing. For another, the sectarian strife we unleashed and with the help of al Qaeda sharply increased has made democracy a dream unlikely to be achieved until far in the future if at all. Certainly it will not happen while we have troops in Iraq.
  
• Another reason now given is that if we leave abruptly things will obviously get much worse rapidly. No one bothers to explain how or why they will get worse, but somehow the conditions now must not be as bad as it can get. Again, this his a highly paternalistic view of the Iraqi people. Somehow they won't be able to sort out governing themselves unless we have our Army and Marine Corps on hand to protect their politicians. Clearly they can't make the Iraqi government we foisted on them work. How can they create one of their own? They're just Arab Wogs, right? [The insult, WOGs, apparently is an acronym developed by the British army when they were attempting the idiotic occupation Iraq after WW I. It supposedly stands for "Old Wiley Gentlemen." Looked at that way, is seems more of a compliment than an insult.]
• The other reason for not getting our troops out of Iraq seems to be that Dick Cheney and the NeoCons think that if we admit that we have already lost the occupation we will appear weak to our enemies, such as Iran and North Korea. This is what I wrote on the subject last May 30th:

  This pessimistic view is one that leaves the U.S. in a real bind. As we remain in Iraq we are being bled like a Bull in a bullfight by the picadors before the main bull fight begins. There appears no way to actually change things there in a manner that would result in real peace. But if we leave, our pullout will set off the attempted genocide of the Sunnis by the Shiites, followed by the entry of Sunni Arabs from Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc.
  
  Bush seems to have decided that Iraq can establish a national government that will be able to pacify the situation. The five months it has taken to establish a government after the last election and the fact that no decision has been made on the security positions in that government, plus the fact that the government has no real power outside the Greed Zone of Baghdad makes that an unlikely long shot.
  
  Does the term "No win situation" occur to anyone besides me?

  Nothing has changed since then except to get worse.

So now for these weak reasons our purpose in keeping our nearly depleted Army and Marine troops in Iraq has been reduced to fear of admitting that we have lost the war there, and maybe that we are afraid the Iraqis have to have use there to shoot at so they won't focus even more on each other.

How did we get to this point? The incompetence of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld has been widely discussed in great detail. The failures of the major media have been decried, but with a lot less specificity. Until now. Now Gary Kamiya has written an excellent indictment of the media and published it in Salon. [Sit through the Day-Pass. It is short, and the article is worth the trouble!]

Then follow that up by reading Glenn Greenwald's discussion of the really bad lies that ABC News told America - repeatedly - about the Anthrax attacks on Americans and the (nonexistent) connection to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. This is the second of his discussions. It includes ABC's defense of its' indefensible actions in misdirecting the American public.

Want to know how to get more investigative journalism? Try this suggestion.

Today I read Sara's post at The next Hurrah after watching the most recent "Frontline" last night, and put it together with my own knowledge of newspapers and a recent post I placed at Booman Tribune. This has been growing for a while. But I think I know how to solve the problem of the disappearance of foreign bureaus and investigative journalism.

I left this as a comment at The Next Hurrah earlier this evening.

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The Frontline last night made the point that city newspapers do most of the original reporting.

In the past they have been able to do this because they made what an economist would call "Monopoly" profits. That is, their costs of production and distribution of the newpaper (70% of costs) has been a barrier to entry for competitors.

But the monopoly profits depended on wide distribution, because the number of copies distributed determined the price of advertisements. This is why newspapers have worked so hard over the last century to reduce the number of papers in each city to one and no more. One of the last stages in this process has often been a "joint production agreement" in which there are two editorial departments, one sales department and a single production and distribution system. This usually ended when (over the last three decades or so) the evening paper bought out the morning paper.

I have watched the Houston Post be bought out by the Houston Chronicle (which, interestingly was totally owned by a foundation while the Post had been sold by the family and gone public) and the Dallas Morning News (DMN) bought out the Dallas Times Herald. This latter occurred because a new owner borrowed a bunch of money at 13 to 15% interest to buy the Herald, and in the competitive market of Dallas, could never make more than about 10% profit. In 1991 or 1992 the DMN bought out the Times Herald and shut it down, then raised their own advertising rates.

It is interesting that the DMN had purchased the local ABC TV outlet ICH 8) before the Congress passed a law stating that no one company could own both a major newspaper and TV outlet in the same market. It was by use of this synergy that they overcame the Dallas Times Herald and shut them down.

Before 1960 a major city newspaper was a money machine. They had a monopoly on want ads, local for-sale classified ads, and department store advertisements. TV came in and took the car ads and a lot of the consumer product ads. The single city newspaper was a result of TV competition. But so was the closure of all the Newspaper foreign bureaus. I am not aware of a single Texas newspaper that hadn't shut down its foreign bureaus by 1970, with the possible exception of a Mexican bureau. (Those are all gone now, also, as far as I know.) The papers depended on the AP and UPI wire services for foreign coverage, and for something really big they sent in a special reporting team.

But the TV news was setting the news reporting agenda after 1970, and once Viet Nam was over, who needed foreign news? With the news agenda set for local news, AP and UPI were in real trouble. UPI collapsed and was bought by the Unification Church (Yeah, the Moonies.) UPI, like the Washington Times, is a loss-leader for the Moonies.

These events carry us up generally to the early 90's. Then the Internet appeared and began to steal revenue from the papers and TV. Craig's List has been a Newspaper-killer. So has Career-Builder.

Economically, Investigative reporting has been a result of monopoly profits. The News media that had a monopoly on advertisement revenues has offered investigative reporting because it was a barrier to entry to competitors that could not be easily afforded by a new entry to the industry. By offering investigative reporting, a news outlet could differentiate itself from the potential and actual competitors. This was one of the "unnecessary" costs that were eliminated when competition was replaced by a monopoly. But if some organization with a different technology could start offering local news and collect advertisement revenues (TV?) they were sufficiently differentiated from the newspapers so that the investigative reporting was unimportant.

Essentially, a paper is a bunch of paid advertisements that pay for the distribution of the paper. See the "Greensheet" or whatever your local sales advertisement throwaway is. News attracts readers, and investigative journalism differentiates between news providers. The revenue is still the advertisements. But advertising rates are higher if the paper has higher circulation. The news is thrown in to increase circulation, so they can charge more in advertisement rates.

Unfortunately, better news <>= [is not equal to] better circulation.

Instead, Better News is directly related to a better reputation for useful news, which is loosely related to increased habitual reading of the newspaper [while competitive sources of news will be (probably more strongly) inversely related to habitual reading of the newspaper] and habitual reading of the paper is directly related to circulation.

Reputation for providing useful news will be strongly directly related to investigative journalism. But only over a long period of time. The stock market looks at almost nothing more than 90 days. If the stock isn't going up, then the solution is cut the costs that are most loosely related to the 90-day change in stock price. That means cut foreign bureaus first followed by investigative journalism. For anyone who has followed the history of newspapers, this is a given. [It is also totally clear to anyone who watched the "Frontline" number 3 last night and remembers the NY Stock Exchange woman who proposed that newspaper should focus entirely on in-depth local and super-local news.]

So the problem is the financial markets. They want newspapers to continue to throw off monopolistic profits like they did before 1960. Because of competition, they can't. Not and provide investigative journalism. Not as long as they are controlled by the stock market.

But notice that I pointed out in Houston that the Houston Chronicle was able to buy out and close down the (better) Houston Post. The Houston Post was on the stock market. The Houston Chronicle was owned by a foundation. Guess who could plan (and spend) long term? It was the Chronicle.

The Frontline also pointed to the largest newspaper in Florida, the St. Petersburg Times. It is also owned by a foundation, and not subject to the short-term thinking of the stock market.

A newspaper that has the purpose of making money as first priority puts a low priority on news. But a newspaper owned by a foundation can be free to place news at a higher priority than can stock owned papers.

The problem with a foundation is that it can't go to the stock market for more cash to expand.

My proposal is that we (bloggers) create a set of local foundations to provide local news and operate on local advertisements. If we do it as blogs, we do not have the costs (70% of all newspaper costs) of production and distribution. We can compete with Craig's list by emphasizing local advertisements for local clientele, and we can do most of it with volunteer labor. [Key is that fact-checking and editing must be controlled in-house by expert journalists, probably paid.]

The volunteer labor would include journalism students (organized by their teachers who control their actions and output) and other volunteers. The news would supplement the national news on NPR and Public TV, so those would be sources to coordinate with. Similar to Public TV and NPR, there could be pledge drives for contributions for capital and overhead expenses, and for support of investigative journalism. See what the blogosphere could do.

A network of such foundations could contribute to State investigative journalism foundations. The various states could contribute to a similar national foundation base in Washington, D.C. That's similar to the funding of national shows on public TV and NPR. The local news foundations would own the investigative journalism foundations and provide the individuals on the Board of Directors for the investigative journalism foundations. [This would not be similar to the Public TV and NPR organizations that can be taken over by a government - as we have recently seen.]

You may have noticed from last night's Frontline that the LA Times is making a 20% per year return on invested funds. The problem is that the competition is increasing, circulation is decreasing, as a result the revenue is decreasing, and the business side of the newspapers are trying to deal with the drop in stock prices by cutting costs.

The costs they cut are also the benefits we users of newspapers buy them for, so we are going to the competitors and their circulation is dropping even further. Newspapers aren't going to disappear, but they are getting more and more like the Greensheet. They can't afford investigative or international journalism any more.

But a 20% return to a news foundation is a high return. Those of us who want international bureaus and investigative journalism will contribute to a foundation to provide those services. [I REALLY want bureaus in South America, Central America and Mexico!]

The first step in this is to set up the local foundations. It requires legal work and the blogging software (like that of Huffington Post) followed by active organization of volunteers in each major metropolitan area. A few professional journalists (like Josh Marshall) who can edict and fact check need to be paid from day one. The investigative foundations should probably be set up very early on in each state capital and Washington, D.C.

The business side needs to also be built at the same time, so that donations are nothing more than start-up costs.

Anyway, that's my idea at the moment. Anyone who wants to get in touch with me and help set up a business plan, my email is jayray21@hotmail.com/.

Some of this is my ideas for local news and local advertisements on the internet, while a lot of it is from the way Josh Marshall has set up TPM and from the way National Public Radio and Public TV work.