All Blog Posts from Public Eye

The definition of “who is a journalist” is a great and vexing intellectual exercise we have here in 21st century MediaLand.

But Tom Keane, a Boston freelancer, has an easy answer for all of us: Everybody!

According to his op-ed published in the Boston Globe yesterday:

Someone for whom reporting is a full-time profession? Someone working for an established media organization? Or anyone?

I think it should be anyone. If you report, investigate, or opine - even part time - then you're doing journalism. That's not to say that every blogger's work is necessarily as good as that of traditional news organizations.

I can understand Keane’s train of thought on this. And am all for “Power to the People.” After all, the new media environment defies definitions and boundaries – whether you’re a ‘citizen journalist’ or someone posting sensitive information anonymously online – and the media beast is an omnivorous one.

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Want to know the future of Internet news? (The fact that you’re reading Public Eye leads me to think you might have considered it.)

Predications come cheap, but here’s a new one: You know now a lot of web browsers – or sites, even, like Google Maps – have a function where you can zoom in or zoom out, according to a sliding scale? Imagine being able to do that for the “weight” of your news content.

Michael Wolff has a fascinating read in the upcoming issue of Vanity Fair, where he discusses how, historically, each new medium has created its own version of news. – and that we’re still waiting for how the Internet is going to “do” news. He talks about how software types and media people have regular conference calls to try to wrap their heads around the future of online news.

Yet I understand that these incredibly unresponsive people may well possess untapped magic that, if they wanted to, could make for all sorts of wondrous tricks which might save the news.

"What about a sliding bar?" Mike Wu, a software engineer, offers just a little grudgingly. "Like from hard to soft news. So you can set it where you want to?"

"Really? From serious broadsheet to scandalous tabloid?" I wonder if this plasticity is miraculous or ludicrous. "From Ben Bernanke to Paris Hilton. And could this work, from unreconstructed crypto-Fascist religious right to loony absolutist left?"

"If we get the algorithm right."

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The Information Revolution – Fought To a Draw:

Wired magazine reported on a study suggesting that us Americans aren’t a whole lot more up on current events than we were back in 1989.

More than a decade after the Internet went mainstream, the world's richest information source hasn't necessarily made its users any more informed. A new study from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press shows that Americans, on average, are less able to correctly answer questions about current events than they were in 1989.

While it’s surprising to us that Americans can’t name Vice President Dick Cheney as readily as people used to know Vice President Dan Quayle, in Americans defense we’re more aware of political facts like “Who is the Speaker of the House?” and “Is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court conservative, moderate or liberal?”

And sure, “Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” viewers score higher than CNN and Fox News viewers, but they didn’t even ask Public Eye readers. We know you’d ace the quiz.

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The theatrical release of "A Mighty Heart" – the story of Daniel Pearl's kidnapping and murder – has called to mind many Americans' first encounter with the grainy terrorist videos from non-descript locations that have become a grim, regular reminder of current affairs. But we're kidding ourselves if we think that the stereotype of low-tech tools and old school propaganda is the reality in Iraq and elsewhere. A new study from Radio Free Europe/RadioLiberty today makes clear that we're not merely dealing with an occasional fuzzy hostage video:

Iraq's Sunni insurgency has developed a sophisticated media campaign to deliver its message over the Internet through daily press releases, weekly and monthly magazines, books, video clips, full-length films, countless websites, and even television stations. Part of the target audience for insurgent media projects are mainstream Arabic-language media, which often amplify the insurgent message to a mass audience.

The study is harrowing in its details. According to the Washington Post's coverage of the study:

"Top 20," produced by Ansar al-Sunnah, is a compilation video of attacks on U.S. forces, presented as a greatest-hits competition among "insurgent brigades" for footage of the most spectacular attack. It is made with the express intention to encourage "healthy" rivalry among cells of fighters.

"It is very fast-paced and clearly aimed at the video game generation," says [study author Harold] Kimmage, who is an Arabist and a regional analyst for the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which broadcasts into Iraq.

From this pop culture-esque highlight show to more traditional media, it looks as if the Al Qaeda and other terrorist factions are have all the media niches covered. The battle for hearts and minds has gone online and multimedia – and the more the rest of us know this, the better.

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If every blogger in the United States who insulted institutions like organized religion or public figures like President Bush was tossed into prison, well, we'd have quite an overcrowded prison system. And we wouldn't really have much of a democracy, either.

In Egypt, however, after a five-minute court session, a blogger was sentenced to four years in prison for insulting Islam and insulting the country's president, Hosni Mubarak.

According to BBC News, "Egypt arrested a number of bloggers who had been critical of the government during 2006, but they were all subsequently freed."

And while the prospect of "Internet addiction" here in the United States might generate an amusing story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, in China, your parents might send you to rehab for it.

As countries like South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam have taken legislative measures to limit the amount of time teens spend online, China has gone far further than just banning youths from Internet cafes – the government is helping to fund eight inpatient Internet addiction rehab facilities across the country.

Few patients (from ages 12 to 24) are at one facility willingly. "Most have been forced to come by their parents, who are paying upward of $1,300 a month -- about 10 times the average salary in China -- for the treatment," writes the Washington Post. Treatment entails "a tough-love approach that includes counseling, military discipline, drugs, hypnosis and mild electric shocks."

Last week, we took a look at the "Ambush Porn" story that made the "Evening News." A new study claimed that 34 percent of kids between 10 and 17 have inadvertently viewed pornography online, and I cautioned that the media should be careful not to sensationalize these kinds of topics.

Well, here we go. We came across a report in the Tucson Weekly about a story on KGUN Channel 9 that offered up this setup: "The Internet: You take one wrong turn, and you have gone from looking for a puppy to straight-up pornography involving women and men."

I'm not sure what kind of puppy the KGUN folks are looking for, but even if it's a Cocker Spaniel, that's one hell of a wrong turn. Later in the story, the Weekly reports, anchor/reporter Jennifer Waddell talked about gay men using the Internet for sexual encounters, proving her point by holding up folded papers that she said were police reports for "sex acts in public."

"Something kinky happening at construction sites, shady screenings at the airport and public promiscuity in Tucson parks," Waddell said, according to the Weekly. "X-rated photos. Men posting porn--some married, some not--trying to snag a hookup with other men. Trading photos for dirty deeds in the desert." The story prompted complaints from gay rights groups, who accused the station of stigmatizing gay men.

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If you're like most Web users, you likely won't read too much further beyond this sentence. I could be held personally accountable for this, of course, but I'm not going to do that to myself. The more likely reason is that you, like most of us, probably have an Internet attention span akin to that of a small insect. Or a highly rambunctious 2-year-old.

At least as far as writer Dave Cohn is concerned, whom we discovered via Mediashift. He has dubbed this malady "Internet Multitasking Syndrome."

(Do not WebMD-search that term. It is not medical. Cohn made it up and he is not a doctor.)

John Suler, author of The Psychology of Cyberspace, explained the typical scenario to Cohn this way: "After hours starring at a screen, flipping between web pages and information outlets, people can develop a feeling of anxiety, stress and a decrease in mental performance. There are limits to how much information one person can process."

In other words, you've got 37 windows open and you're Instant Messaging four of your pals, listening to iTunes, watching YouTube, writing an e-mail, posting a comment on some blog and reading the Wall Street Journal.

So, really, you're not paying attention to any one thing.

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The Internet: So Hot Right Now: In case you haven't heard, new media is being taken very seriously in campaign 2008. AdWeek speaks to some campaign media folk who spell out just how seriously: "This part of the campaign is no longer going to be the ugly stepsister," said John McCain's media director. But that doesn't mean old media is entirely getting the shaft. One former Hillary Clinton Senate campaign staffer said television is still very much in the game: "It is still a TV business. TV still puts the politician in front of people, and their personality and image are more controllable. That is the advantage over all other media."

Going All 'SAO' On The Press: You might have thought there was some kind of official standard set by reporters in referring to an anonymous source as a "senior administration official." You'd be wrong. As The Politico's Mike Allen writes in his explainer on the origins, uses and abuses of the term, "the answer to how someone gets to be a senior official is: It depends." And from whence did this overused term come? Allen taps CBS News' Bob Schieffer, who said it evolved from "senior American official," a term used to describe those close to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the early 1970s:

"'Senior American official' would say things that Henry Kissinger couldn't be quoted on, but he laid out what was happening and what the other side was going to have to do and other things that would have been awkward if Kissinger had been quoted as saying them. It sort of ballooned, and then you'd get back to Washington and you'd wind up with 100 people in a room and you'd have some official come in and brief as a 'senior administration official.' It's been abused for a long, long time."

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Libby Juror Saga, Act Two: Rejoice, Washingtonians and news junkies -- the jury for the Scooter Libby trial has been chosen. And it after much huffing and puffing over potential jurors' potential conflicts of interest, the final pool reflects quite a wide range. In particular, it includes a former Washington Post reporter – who also happened to be a neighbor to Tim Russert and an employee under Bob Woodward. Both of those men are expected to be witnesses in the case. Other members of the jury are not so plugged in to the Washington political scene, reports the AP, such as "a travel agent who only looks at newspapers for the sudoku puzzles" and "a hotel sales agent who described herself a 'master of all things pop culture, but nothing related to current events.'"

The Candidates' Chicken And Egg Problem: Candidates not named Clinton or Obama are also getting stepped on, laments Howard Kurtz this morning. Especially people like New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (yes, he announced this weekend) – who comes equipped with several convenient storylines, like his Hispanic heritage. "That means he should be getting as much 'would be America's first' publicity as the possible first woman president and first black president." Unfortunately, the governor "barely registers in the polls," and therefore, he barely registers among journalists, who "care only about Hillary and Obama at the moment." A political catch-22, says Kurtz: "How do you get media attention when you're nowhere in the polls, even though if you got some media attention, you'd probably rise in the polls, thereby warranting more media attention?"

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I’m likely not shocking anyone by noting that the Internet offers a venue in which rumor and speculation can spread further and faster than it could 10 years ago. One prolific rumor in the blogosphere recently – is Fidel Castro dead? St. Petersburg Times media critic (and one-time PE “Outside Voice”) Eric Deggans took note on his blog of the buzz lately, wondering why at least some discussion of the rumor’s existence hadn’t yet seeped into mainstream coverage, as such “blogosphere buzz” stories often do. “The benefit of such stories are,” writes Deggans, “they can introduce the rumor to your audience without requiring you to verify it -- since you're talking about the rumor itself and its impact. Crafty, eh?” Of course, the real challenge of good reporting is checking out a rumor and determining if it’s actually true before you report it. But in this age of a much more prolific rumor mill on the Web, what are the challenges that reporters face? When do reporters have an obligation to simply address something unsubstantiated on the air, if only to note that it’s unsubstantiated?

Monday is the 10-year anniversary of a story that was enveloped in a whole lot of speculation at the time – much of which surfaced on the still young Internet. It was the July 17, 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800, which ended up being one of the most investigated crashes in aviation history. Correspondent Bob Orr covered the story from the beginning until the conclusion of the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation four years later, which determined that the probable cause of the plane’s explosion was a spark – likely from a short in the plane’s wiring -- that ignited the airliner’s center fuel tank. Throughout the years that Orr covered this story, and continuing today, there are those who question whether the explosion was the result of something else – a missile, friendly fire from the U.S. navy, a terrorist bomb.

It became known as the “grassy knoll in the sky,” Orr told me, primarily because “we spent more time knocking down rumors and false leads,” than in any story he’d covered before then.

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