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.

TV political news "reporting" has failed.

It's long been clear that there is little political news being presented to the American public through television. It's a bit of a surprise to realize just how simple the problem is, but it is explained easily and briefly by Steve Benen at the Political Animal.

In recent years, the media has created a truly bizarre dynamic -- news consumers who want to hear a bunch of politicians make a lot of claims can watch television news interviews, and news consumers who want to know if those claims are accurate can go online.

At that point, television news stops informing the public, and simply becomes literally nothing more than a conduit for talking points and pretty pictures. Viewers who want to learn accurate information about current events are told they must go elsewhere -- it's not CNN's job to tell you the facts; it's CNN's job to tell you what "both sides" think about the facts.

So the so-called "political news" from television is nothing more than a Jerry Springer show consisting of "He said. She said" presented without context or history that would provide any perspective.

The Journalism schools apparently love this failed system, and so do the lying politicians. No one else does.

National Public Radio website is becoming more text journalism oriented

NPR is bringing its unique form of journalism to the web, according to the New York Times.

At a time when those of us who love newspapers are finding them shrinking almost before our eyes, it appears that journalism is not dead. Instead it is finding other methods of taking good reporting from the news sources to the interested public. As a part of this, National Public Radio is expanding its online presence and focusing on presenting stories more in text versions.

CIA, FBI battle over questioning of Zubaydah

I only just stumbled on this article in "Radar" by Charles Kaiser. Essentially he describes the ABC news story by Brian Ross on the effectiveness of waterboarding Zubaydah as a single-source crock, presenting the views of ex-CIA man John Kiriakou who wasn't even a witness to the events.

Kaiser refers back to the Story published in Vanity Fair last July by Katherine Eban which rather fully described the capture and questioning of Zubaydah, and points out that it contradicts Brian Ross' story on ABC at every turn. But for some odd reason, the ABC story never mentions the prior Vanity Fair story.

From Charles Kaiser at RADAR:

It turns out that ABC's amiable source is at the center of an all-out war between the CIA and the FBI over which agency actually got the terrorist Abu Zubaydah to talk—and whether or not any of the CIA's coercive techniques were useful, or totally counterproductive. But Brian Ross never mentioned that. Here are some of the discrepancies between the ABC and the Vanity Fair versions:

• The FBI says that after Zubaydah was shot during the effort to capture him, he was stabilized at the nearest hospital. There, the FBI questioned him, using its typical rapport-building techniques. An FBI agent showed him photographs of suspected al Qaeda members until Zubaydah finally spoke up, blurting out that "Moktar," or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, had planned 9/11. He then laid out the details of the plot. According to Eban, "America learned the truth of how 9/11 was organized because a detainee had come to trust his captors after they treated him humanely"—exactly the opposite of what ABC reported.


• ABC's CIA man says he was the first person to speak to Zubaydah when he came out of his coma, and he learned nothing useful from him before he was waterboarded. The FBI says no CIA man was present when Zubaydah first started to talk.


• Vanity Fair says Zubaydah's cooperation actually evaporated "with the arrival of the CIA's interrogation team."


• According to Eban, after Zubaydah clammed up, the CIA was left to conclude that Zubaydah would talk only when he had been reduced to complete helplessness and dependence.

Kaiser also points to the Washington Post article by Walther Pincus and Dan Eggen that lays out the facts of the capture and interrogation of Zubaydah.

It looks like the real story is that ABC and Brian Ross either screwed up badly, or were used by the CIA in a public disagreement with the FBI, or ABC and Brian Ross have other reasons to publish pure disinformation as fact. The ABC report reports as fact things that no one else does, and they do not appear to have any confirmation.

Of course, the CIA kept videotapes of the entire interrogation, so we can learn which it the truth very easily. Except, of course, the CIA and much of the Bush administration concealed those tapes until they convinced someone in the CIA to destroy them. But now, even if someone who is aware of what was on those tapes tells his story, it is still just "he said; he said" with no likely confirmation possible.

Can you spell "Obstruction of Justice?"

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. ]

Journalistic professionalism and complaints from the blogosphere

According to Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, complaints from the blogosphere are useful only if they drive traffic to Newsweeks' site. The fact that the links are about really poor journalistic practices are irrelevant. Good journalists should get both left and right blogosphere commenters equally irate resulting in increased traffic. Nothing else matters.

Do journalism schools teach that the only thing that matters in good journalism is equally balanced anger and complaints from the right and the left along with high traffic? Who knew?

Oh, boy! Michal Moore tells Blitzer "Why don't you tell the Truth to the American People?"

Wolf Blitzer interviewed Michael Moore, intending to discuss the movie Sicko. Naturally, Blitzer brought in a hack who picked irrelevant nits about the movie, and Michael Moore simply went off on Blitzer.

A nicer job could not have been done to a more deserving person. [*] Check it out. It will bring joy to your heart.


[*] OK. There are a lot of other incompetent interviewers passing themselves off as journalists who deserve equal treatment, but few who deserve it more.

The PR case for and against Libby debunked

Carol D. Leonnig, reporter for the Washington Post, has today published an article debunking five myths about the exposure of Valerie Plame Wilson as a covert CIA officer. This is a shocking publication. Doesn't Ms. Leonnig understand that mere reporters of the mainstream media (her own Washington Post foremost among them) exist only to publish the spin of powerful political players and must never, never, never commit the gaffe of (shudder) debunking the spin their betters at public relations firms? It makes you wonder if she shouldn't turn in her communications degree in journalism.

In any case, here are five myths that have been repeatedly spread since "Scooter" Libby was convicted. Ms. Leonnig is much to polite to call them what they are - lies and bamboozlements:

1. Valerie Plame wasn't a covert operative.
   
   
2. Karl Rove would have been indicted in the Plame case if it hadn't been for all the destroyed evidence.
   
   
3. Libby didn't leak Plame's identity.
   
   
4. Bad press doesn't get under Cheney's skin.
   
   
5. The White House would fire any administration official who leaked classified information about Plame.

When you read those bamboozlements, go read the explanation for each that Ms. Leonnig has published. Each is quite revealing, and each fits with the real evidence that has been published - mostly in the back of newspapers where no one will see it. You know, some page like, Oh, maybe Page B-03. Somewhere in the guts of the paper and out of sight. Just a number I chose at random as an example - or maybe the page this article was published on this morning.

I can't help but wonder if either the misplaced Fred Hiatt (Editor - Editorial Page) or the similarly misplaced Debra Howell (Omsbudsman) at the Washington Post have read her article. It certainly doesn't support the obfuscations they have been publishing in the same newspaper. I suspect she waited until they had each left the building before submitting this article for publication.

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.

Has anyone read "First Post?"

This is not an on-line news source that I am familiar with. I was looking at my own blog, and there was a paid google ad at the top for an article Is Osama bin Laden dead from Typhoid?, so my curiosity get the better of me. I checked out the article and then went to the home of First Post to see if I could find out more about it. All I can say so far is that it is slickly produced, appears British (with a URL ending in UK), and has several articles on subjects that interest me. Osama bin Laden and Paul Wolfowitz.

The Osama article was first published September 23, 2006. I had to go to page 2 to find that. You'd think that there would be confirmation or disconfirmatiion since then, but I have seen neither.

Just wondering what is behind "First Post." Anyone know?

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.

Why the press does not tell how bad Iraq really is.

The American Journalism Review has interviewed people in news organizations to find out what the limitations are on obtaining stories. The journalists who remain spend large sums of money on security and rarely are able to contact knowledgeable sources. Even so, they give more accurate information than the Coalition forces or John McCain present.