All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Hate to break it to you, but you're not going to get the tried-and-true examples of media "wretched excess" critique here today.

Too easy. If that's what you're in the mood for, why don't you try here or here.

Nah, today we're looking at the Curious Case of Andrew Meyer, the University of Florida student who was tasered at a John Kerry event yesterday. As of this writing, it's been covered in 502 different news Web sites – or at least the news-related sites that Google News steers people towards – including the Agenzia Giornalistica Italia. (Don't know about you, but the AGI is the source I turn to when American college students are electrocuted by the police.)

And yes, truth be told, it's posted prominently on the CBSNews.com homepage.

According to the Associated Press story:

GAINESVILLE, Fla. - A University of Florida student was Tasered and arrested after trying angrily and repeatedly to ask U.S. Senator John Kerry about the 2004 election and other subjects during a campus forum. Tuesday morning, a judge ordered the student released from jail on his own recognizance.
Videos of Monday’s incident posted on several Web sites show officers pulling Andrew Meyer, 21, away from the microphone after he asks Kerry about impeaching President Bush and whether he and Bush were both members of the secret society Skull and Bones at Yale University.

But rather than have this be a piece about Media Overkill, it's more a post about how the existence of video transforms a lower-case story into a higher-case STORY. In the case of some knuckleheads online, video alone makes them a story. And it's a phenomenon that completely predates YouTube, though YouTube has definitely ratcheted it up.

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In today’s New York Times, columnist Paul Krugman takes the media to task for its coverage of Campaign 2008 thus far:

In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday.
Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the “gaffe of the night?”

Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit … Back to the debate coverage: as far as I can tell, no major news organization did any fact-checking of either debate. And post-debate analyses tended to be horse-race stuff mingled with theater criticism: assessments not of what the candidates said, but of how they “came across.”

Even though it’s strident and partisan, Krugman has a point. How many people know about Fred Thompson’s inconsistent views about abortion, against the number of people who know he has a wife who may or not “Work the pole.” Quick show of hands: Anybody out there who doesn’t know which candidate has a costly coif?

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The fog of war got a little cloudier yesterday in Baghdad. Footage from outside the Green Zone was already difficult enough to come by for American correspondents – they've had to rely in large part on Iraqi journalists in getting the reality on the ground — but now a recent piece of legislation prohibits anyone taking pictures or video of bomb sites. Policemen are now firing their weapons into the air in order to ward Iraqi photographers away.

The Guardian reports today that "Iraqi police removed photographers from the site of bomb blasts that killed at least seven people in central Baghdad yesterday in the first use of a controversial new policy restricting media access."

According to the Associated Press, the new policy is “aimed at preventing journalists from inadvertently tampering with evidence needed for investigations, protecting the privacy and human rights of those wounded and keeping insurgents and militias from keeping track of their success rate.”

What this new approach neglects is that information can be a double-edged sword. The very same footage that insurgents use as propaganda can inform less radical Iraqi citizens of the extreme and unsettling measures being used against Americans and, in many cases, their own countrymen. Additionally, contrary to the concerns about insurgents keeping score, video and photography can be important in keeping them from inflating their own statistics – with this new ban freeing them to create false “success” stories. (The privacy rights and tampering concerns are more legitimate, but they could be mostly resolved if Iraqi police adopted procedures similar to those used by American police.)

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It's notable that the latest development to push the Virginia Tech story forward is a debate over whether or not media outlets should have aired the video and pictures that last moved it forward.

All three newscasts led last night with a note about the growing controversy over the media's choice to run materials from Seung-hui Cho's self-glorifying manifesto. On the "Evening News," anchor Katie Couric opened the show by saying this: "A lot of reaction today to that video message from the Virginia Tech shooter – angry reaction aimed at news outlets, including this one, for airing portions of it. CBS News plans to use this video only on a limited basis, and only when we feel it's necessary to tell the story."

The vast majority of the emails I've received have condemned CBS and other media outlets for showing the video, and today brings a fresh round of stories on criticism of media outlets for doing so. One typical missive in the Public Eye inbox begins like this: "Airing Cho's video was inappropriate, unnecessary and malevolent. Sometimes network news staffs need to think less with their wallets and more with their heads."

One aspect of the debate that's been largely lost in all this is the fact that we're not seeing a large portion of the materials Cho sent to NBC News. As Jack Shafer noted in Slate, "Cho mailed NBC News about two dozen QuickTime videos, of which the network has aired only a handful." The network has also held back some of Cho's photos and writings. Shafer characterizes this decision as "odd restraint," stopping just short of calling on NBC to release the whole shebang. "If you're interested in knowing why Cho did what he did, you want to see the videos and photos and read from the transcripts," wrote Shafer. "If you're not interested, you should feel free to avert your eyes."

Another side of this debate that's gone missing – and I say this with nothing but respect and sadness for the Virginia Tech victims and their loved ones – is a sense of perspective. In the neighborhood of 200 people were killed in a single day this week in Iraq, a fact that has been treated as little more than a footnote in the flood of Virginia Tech coverage.

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When it comes to television, even television news, everyone likes to talk about ratings. The performance of the Katie Couric helmed "Evening News" has been closely watched; the latest piece on the topic, in the LA Times today, takes stock of the show's ratings five weeks into Couric's takeover of the anchor chair.

But you can't calculate ratings the way you used to. More and more people are watching video on the Internet, and there is a growing consensus that web video is the future – Google's $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube, a company with no earnings, certainly makes for a compelling Exhibit A. Now, according to the Wall Street Journal, "the race is on for research firms to figure out a standard way to measure audiences across different media" – including, in addition to the Web, platforms like iPods and mobile phones.

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Much of YouTube’s success has burgeoned from circulating videos of a more humorous nature (take the substantial viewership of Connie Chung’s recent rendition of “Thanks For The Memories” during the final installment of her now defunct MSNBC program, for example.) But, as we noted earlier this week, the site is also fast becoming a worthwhile compendium of news reports and video commentaries about the conflict in Israel and Lebanon. The Washington Post's Sara Kehaulani Goo today takes a more detailed look at the site’s success on that front, while raising some of the issues that are often associated with such efforts in citizen journalism. “Although the amateur videos provide an appealingly intimate account of what's happening on the ground,” writes Goo, “it can be difficult to determine authenticity. The videos are often posted under pseudonyms or screen names that do not contain e-mail addresses.”

It’s a question that surrounds much of the information now readily available on the Web -- it’s raw, intense, but is it authentic? Reliable? Of course, outlets like YouTube aren’t – and do not purport to be – news outlets. And the site is up front about noting that it doesn’t monitor video content, “though it prohibits videos that are violent,” writes Goo.

In that sense, video clips like these certainly expand the landscape, but they have their limitations. One veteran journalist noted his concerns about the value of the “new Internet world” in an interview published in today’s USA Today. NPR analyst Daniel Schorr told Peter Johnson that the unfiltered nature of the new media like means fewer stories will be suppressed since “you can always have a blogger who gets the story out.” On the other hand, “what we have here is a medium in which there is no publisher, no editor, no anything. It's just you and a little machine and you can make history. I find that scary. Nobody should get into print or on the air without some kind of editor. I have an institutional belief that nobody can be above having a good editor.”

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As more and more television news reporters contribute to their networks’ Web sites by writing or blogging about their stories, a growing Web audience is motivating newspapers to provide what has normally been the purview of television news – video content. At least that’s the case at The Washington Post, which is shipping digital cameras to its bureaus, hoping to eventually have them at every foreign bureau. Washingtonpost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady told The Washingtonian that about 50 Post reporters are currently carting cameras in the field and video reports are already showing up on the Post Web site.

With fewer people buying the dead-tree versions of newspapers and more turning to the Internet for news, it’s no surprise that newspaper Web sites are exploring all the options available on the Web to distribute their content -- just as telelvision outlets have expanded into more written stories on their sites. So the question becomes … how much of a threat does video on newspapers' Web sites pose for television?

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If you get your news from more than one source (as most people with access to the Internet and TiVo likely do) the significance of the Associated Press’s scoop on videos and transcripts of several Bush Administration teleconferences immediately before and after Hurricane Katrina might have become a bit confusing.

While The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times featured front page stories:

Washington Post: Video Shows Bush Being Warned on Katrina: Officials Detailed a Dire Threat to New Orleans

Los Angeles Times: Bush Is Warned on Katrina in Video: Footage of a briefing full of dire predictions renews criticism of the government's response

New York Times readers wouldn’t have stumbled upon the story until A16, indicating it was somewhat less important. Their angle was also quite different: “Unaware as Levees Fell, Officials Expressed Relief,” read the headline. The lead refers to a transcript from the day Katrina hit, noting that it “shows that hours after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, federal and state officials did not know that the levees in New Orleans were failing and were cautiously congratulating one another on the government response.” That seems a far cry from the lead in the LA Times and Post stories, which read much like that of the Associated Press...

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If you get your news from more than one source (as most people with access to the Internet and TiVo likely do) the significance of the Associated Press’s scoop on videos and transcripts of several Bush Administration teleconferences immediately before and after Hurricane Katrina might have become a bit confusing.

While The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times featured front page stories like this:

Washington Post:Video Shows Bush Being Warned on Katrina: Officials Detailed a Dire Threat to New Orleans
Los Angeles TimesBush Is Warned on Katrina in Video:
Footage of a briefing full of dire predictions renews criticism of the government's response.

New York Times readers wouldn’t have stumbled upon the story until A16, indicating it was somewhat less important. Their angle was also quite different: “Unaware as Levees Fell, Officials Expressed Relief,” read the headline. The lede refers to a transcript from the day Katrina hit, noting that it “shows that hours after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, federal and state officials did not know that the levees in New Orleans were failing and were cautiously congratulating one another on the government response.” That seems a far cry from the lead in the LA Times and Post stories, which read much like that of the Associated Press...

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This week's bad news for President Bush – these days it seems that a week doesn't go by without some bad news for the president – is that the Associated Press has obtained a video of federal disaster officials warning Bush about the potentially disastrous impact of Hurricane Katrina before the storm hit the gulf coast. (Video here.) As liberal bloggers have been gleefully pointing out, the video contradicts Bush's claim that he didn't "think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees" in New Orleans. (Conservatives, meanwhile, argue this is no big deal, since Bush was told the levees could be "topped," not breached.)

According to Editor and Publisher, questions are now being raised about how the AP got the video. The New York Times account includes this section:

While transcripts of other videoconferences before and after the storm hit were provided to Congressional investigators months ago, the Aug. 29 video and transcript could not be found by FEMA officials. Employees at a regional FEMA office in Atlanta found a tape a few days ago, and a transcript was delivered to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, officials said.

The only real speculation I've come across as to the identity of the person who leaked the tape is that may well have been embattled former FEMA director Michael Brown, who appears on the tape voicing concerns and comes out of this looking relatively good. "I'm glad it's coming out because despite the media reports and the general perception that I was a dummy that didn't know what I was doing, I knew exactly what I was doing," he told WUSA. Still, there is no evidence tying Brown to the leak.

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