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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You hear about the rise of “citizen journalism” and it might occur to some as a distinctly American idea. The empowerment, the democratization, the individuality and (yes) the whole ‘American Idol’-maybe-this’ll-get-me-on-TV angle.

Like what Jose Antonio Vargas wrote in the Washington Post the other day:

Fact is, independent of the candidates, voters -- you -- are interacting with the 2008 presidential election at an unprecedented level because of the Internet, YouTubing, Facebooking, Wikipedia-ing, et al. So why not call yourself a journalist and cover the campaign, too? Whether or not we MSMers like it, the loose, undefined, evolving cadre of CJs are here to stay.

All this pounds home the thought that Citizen Journalism is as American as apple pie, right?

Well, yes, but there's more to it than that, as evidenced by the fact that Agence France Press has jumped into the movement.

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This post has been updated. --MTF

Criticisms of the White House press corps come fast and furious in MediaLand and Blogistan. (From accusations like they’re ‘an extension of the Clinton spin machine’ to its ‘meekness’ in covering the Bush presidency.) But very rarely do they come from the White House press corps itself.

Until this week.

ABC’s White House correspondent Martha Raddatz was the subject of a Washington Post profile by Howard Kurtz on Monday, where he detailed her ventures to Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan.

A few paragraphs in, Raddatz tossed a bit of grenade at her friends and colleagues in the White House press corps – or, at the very least, the position of White House correspondent – when she said:

"I'd probably go crazy if I had to stay every second at the White House and not go out and be a reporter," she says by phone from Pakistan. "I don't want to be a stenographer.”

From this writer’s vantage point, Raddatz seemed to be implying that covering the White House was not quite the same as what she thought it mean to “be a reporter.”

Needless to say, this wasn’t taken well by some of those she sits with in the White House briefing room.

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“People say that young people get their news from Jon Stewart and myself and other late-night people, but I think they wouldn’t get the joke if they didn’t know some of the news already.

"I think those studies are a little off.”

Stephen Colbert, “Meet The Press” online interview, sounding strangely familiar

You think “Meet The Press” and you think stalwart Inside the Beltway folks. Broder. Novak. Dowd. The usual suspects.

You don’t think Bill Cosby. (For the 3,000 broadcast, by the way. Thanks, FishbowlDC) And you really don’t think Stephen Colbert.

And yet, there was Bill Cosby this past Sunday – along with Harvard Medical School Professor Alvin Poussaint, M.D. – discussing his new book and America’s ongoing discussion of race for the entire hour.

Then it was reported that Stephen Colbert will be appearing this week to discuss, this writer presumes, his new book as well as his decision to enter the South Carolina presidential primaries – in both parties.

What gives?

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We’ve got people consuming less media. We’ve got people consuming more diverse media.

Remember when media wasn’t diverse or consumed or any of that? When it was just, um, books? (You know, back when we use to trudge uphill seven miles through the snow to get to school. Both ways.)

Well, sorry, but there’s some bad news about those, too. According to a study that came out today from the Associated Press and IPSOS, roughly one in four Americans didn’t read a book last year:

One in four adults say they read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and seniors were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year — half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn't read any, the usual number read was seven.

So this is a ‘bad news’ story, right? Something about apathy and attention span and all that? Not according to Dr. Michael Gross, Associate Vice President at Ipsos and a glass-half-full sort of fellow.

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"The relationship between the President and the press is a unique relationship, and it's a necessary relationship. I enjoy it. I hope you do. As I say, sometimes you don't like the decisions I make, and sometimes I don't like the way you write about the decisions. But nevertheless, it's a really important part of our process."

-- President Bush, at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new briefing room this morning, befriending the filter.

We here at Public Eye believe that Independence Day is a day to reflect on many things: how fortunate we are to be Americans; how come old-school entertainment like fireworks still does something for us; why baseball games struggle to get under three hours – can’t we make a rule that wriststraps can only be adjusted once per at-bat? Nomar, we’re talking to you – and why journalism isn’t just a Paris Hilton-style diversion, but a vocation.

Given the fact that we’ll be taking tomorrow to celebrate America’s birthday – despite the Declaration of Independence being signed on July 2nd (there’s the factchecker in us again) – we wanted to commemorate the occasion. And not only with some ground beef on a grill and a chance encounter with an adult beverage, but with our favorite quotes/aphorisms/mottos/one-liners about journalism, freedom of the press and all the sort of stuff Charles Foster Kane tossed in his Declaration of Principles.

So without further ado, we present to you a list – yes, a list – of 10 of our favorite quotes about The Fourth Estate. Feel free to work any or all of them into your bar-b-que plans for the holiday, and pass them off as though they were on the top of your head all along. We know you will anyway.

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I suggested in this space on Friday that a new technological innovation could increase the ‘watchability’ of presidential debates – Pop Up Politics. The concept, admittedly ripped from VH-1’s “Pop Up Video,” would supply a little bubble next to a candidate when their rhetoric stretched or mischaracterized their previous stances on an issue or vote. (The other innovation I suggested – cutting off the debate right in the middle, with an old Journey song blasting – doesn’t seem to go over so well.)

The way I figured it, Pop Up Politics would be a very useful gimmick to provide real-time fact checking – even if it was seemed susceptible to bias claims from one side or the other.
So it was very good to see no less than the Associated Press coming forward to stress the need for a similar concept: “Accountability Journalism” in Campaign 2008. (Not quite “Pop Up,” but hey, it’s the staid AP.)

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Questions about the war in Iraq continue to divide America. What’s going on, exactly? Is there good news that we aren't getting? Why can’t we make even an educated guess about the effectiveness of the “surge?”

The bad news continues to come unabated -- last week’s headlines blared about May being the deadliest month in years – and the fog of war endures, despite our efforts to make sense of what's happening on the ground. At last night’s Republican presidential debate, Rudy Giuliani made this point about the surge:

And I'd just like to ask, I'd just like to ask one question I didn't get to ask before, when you said, if General Petraeus comes back in September and reports that things aren't going well, what are we going to do?

But suppose General Petraeus comes back in September and reports that things are going pretty well. Are we going to report that with the same amount of attention that we would report the negative news?

Giuliani’s media criticism occurred on the same day that the Associated Press held a panel discussion about Iraq in which AP Iraq Bureau Chief Steven R. Hurst said this:

It’s hard to give a very positive report of what’s going on in Baghdad right now for a number of reasons. I think, first and foremost, the United States puts a great deal of hope that the so-called troop surge would start having an effect. Immediately after it was announced, there was a significant drop in violence, in February and March, but that lasted a very short time. Now, we’ve seen a number of people being killed there, which is sadly the Baghdad story right now.

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