Media Re:public

On Sunday, August 31, Anne Kilkenny wrote an email about Sarah Palin’s track record in Wasilla, Alaska, where Kilkenny lives. By Friday, there were over 3,000 results on Google for Kilkenny and her email. That night, Kilkenny was being interviewed by National Public Radio and everybody else.

This is another moment that proves the power of the internet to carry a message from a very small point to the entire world. For those of us who like the idea of democracy with a small “d”, it is a light in the darkness of mass media consolidation and it affirms the role of the citizen observer in the complex process that generates popular news.

Three factors sent Kilkenny’s note on its rocket ride to prominence. First, Palin is a major political figure who is largely unknown. Her own jet-fueled ascendance to the national scene created a public that is hungry for any information about her. As a Wasilla resident, Kilkenny was in an unusual position to provide information.

Second, Kilkenny’s email, while even-handed, ultimately was critical of Palin. The bloggers and groups that oppose McCain had an incentive to spread it around as widely as possible. It furthered their political goals and it played off of the emotional energy of deeply held belief.

Third, and perhaps most revealing, Kilkenny’s email was based on a large number of verifiable facts. It discussed the debt burden of Wasilla before and after Palin’s term in office. It contrasted investments in a sports center, which Palin supported, with investments in waste water treatment, which Palin did not. It showed nuances in Palin’s position on abortion and creationism. Kilkenny was doing the work of a reporter.

At the same time, she spoke clearly about her bias. She praised Palin’s strengths and criticized what she saw as her weaknesses. She is no fan of Palin and acknowledging that added to the general sense of authenticity.

Kilkenny gave every reporter and news reader a leg up; a place to begin doing research on Palin and a starting point in forming an overall picture that might or might not match Kilkenny’s conclusions.

She also affirmed an emerging role for citizens in the journalism process. It is a role that lies between objective reporting and pure opinion. Non-journalists can be invaluable when they use their own eyes and ears to report what they see; they rarely deliver on that promise, generally for two reasons. I have found that most citizens worry that they are not up to the task of producing objective journalism. Worse than that, they believe that if they are going to throw their words into the public arena, they must be an advocate for something. It often seems that what they know best is the glib certainty of the Op-Ed page or the stridency of a letter to the editor.

Kilkenny took a third route. She provided many clear facts that can be verified or disputed by others. She attempted to be even handed. And she acknowledged her biases. These are the qualities in citizens that newsrooms ought to nurture and develop. It’s in their own interest to do so.

Kilkenny represents a huge opportunity for newsrooms working on hundreds of stories in hundreds of communities. All they have to do is take two steps: 1. Identify the kind of stories for which citizens are positioned to offer useful reporting. 2. Adapt themselves to take in that citizen material and use it in a way that fits with longstanding journalistic traditions. If newsrooms pull this off, they will establish a new social contract between themselves and the public – a new social contract that can breathe new life into the news we all rely on.

Image: caribou barbie, via flickr
originally uploaded by Sterin.

Can’t wait to finish my current draft and join my Berkman partners in crime fun cutting edge media research Ethan Zuckerman, Hal Roberts and Bruce Etling in playing with Google’s amazing new Google Insights for Search, which allows you to compare the interest in certain search terms from specific regions in for example Russia.

Meanwhile,  admiring the creativity of the folks at the Guardian for including this hysterical LOLBush series under World News. Now, back to writing.

Scary must-read column by Michael Bush from this morning’s Ad Age email reports that “19% of the 252 chief marketing officers and marketing directors surveyed said their organizations had bought advertising in return for a news story” and quotes the CEO of the company that did the study saying “I’m not saying it’s a huge problem,” Mr. Hass said. “But 19% of senior marketers saying they do it constitutes a problem.” Never mind that if 19% admit that they do it, how many might actually be doing it??

If you care about the credibility of the online media, you’ll think the problem is huge. Read the whole article to find out how many marketing people said the marketing industry as a whole is not following ethical guidelines in the new-media realm, it’ll send chills down your spine. Besides educating the public to be more skeptical, as Dan Gillmor recommends, is this more the problem of the PR industry failing to live up to a code of ethics? Or the failure of the traditional and/or online media who accept these deals, failing to live up to their own standards? Which is easier to do something about?

Public Relations Society of America Member Code of Ethics 2000 – “Preserve the free flow of unprejudiced information when giving or receiving gifts by ensuring that gifts are nominal, legal, and infrequent.”

A Bloggers’ code of Ethics (from Cyberjournalist.net) “Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests and resist their pressure to influence content. When exceptions are made, disclose them fully to readers.”

American Society of Newspaper Editors Statement of Principles “Journalists must avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety as well as any conflict of interest or the appearance of conflict. They should neither accept anything nor pursue any activity that might compromise or seem to compromise their integrity.”

See also links to many journalism ethics codes from traditional media groups, helpfully collected by ASNE.

*Disclaimer: I have friends who work or have worked in PR who are wonderful and honorable people. Just as I know at least one honest real estate agent, who also happens to be a journalist, book author, and an occasional blogger, (and no, I get no kickbacks for promoting her stuff, she’s just a friend whose work I enjoy and you should too) I’m sure that there are many other good folks in PR, who know the extent of the truth behind the stereotypes of their industry and will therefore have the good sense not to be offended by this headline.

Image: Handshake-Money
Uploaded to Flickr by A. www.viajar24h.com

UPDATE 8/8/08 – If you only read one thing about this story, go directly to John McQuaid’s excellent wrap-up analysis. The short version is that ABC’s Brian Ross has given an interview making clear that the whole thing was a lot less sinister than some of us worried.

About 3 million Americans were watching as you reported that the deadly Anthrax sent to politicians and journalism organizations could be traced to Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons program. You were given this information by people you had reason to believe had access to the investigation and who insisted on anonymity. Telling the understandably terrified American people in the weeks after 9/11 that Iraq might be behind the Anthrax attacks clearly helped make the Bush administration’s case for war in Iraq. So, what do you do when you learn your anonymous sources were lying to you and you in turn were lying to your audience?

In an interesting test of whether online-only media can challenge the powers-that-be, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald makes a case that ABC News was deceived by sources whom it promised anonymity about the source of the 2001 Anthrax attacks and in turn deceived its massive audience, helping make the case for war against Iraq. My fellow Fellow and Center for Citizen Media founder Dan Gillmor, of Arizona State University and NYU’s Jay Rosen are leading a charge to get ABC to answer these charges and reveal who was using them to perpetrate this deadly manipulation of public opinion? They have come up with the following three questions that they want ABC to answer. What will it take to get ABC to respond? Here are Dan and Jay’s questions:

Three Vital Questions for ABC News About its Anthrax Reporting in 2001

1. Sources who are granted confidentiality give up their rights when they lie or mislead the reporter. Were you lied to or misled by your sources when you reported several times in 2001 that anthrax found in domestic attacks came from Iraq or showed signs of Iraqi involvement?

2. It now appears that the attacks were of domestic origin and the anthrax came from within U.S. government facilities. This leads us to ask you: who were the “four well-placed and separate sources” who falsely told ABC News that tests conducted at Fort Detrick showed bentonite in the anthrax sent to Sen. Tom Daschle, causing ABC News to connect the attacks to Iraq in multiple reports over a five day period in October, 2001?

3. A substantially false story that helps make the case for war by raising fears about enemies abroad attacking the United States is released into public debate because of faulty reporting by ABC News. How that happened and who was responsible is itself a major story of public interest. What is ABC News doing to re-report these events, to figure out what went wrong and to correct the record for the American people who were misled?

There’s lots more to read: Glenn’s original posts Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News and Journalists, their lying sources, and the anthrax investigation, are followed up today with Additional key facts re: the anthrax investigation, which includes links to much of the follow-up, including John McQuaid declaring the blogosphere officially “aflame.” Jay and Dan’s excellent posts exploring the journalistic implications (and follow-ups via Twitter here.) Comments threads on the Blotter, the website of Brian Ross’ Investigative Unit are calling for ABC to investigate.

I absolutely agree that ABC should explain how this story came to be, but am withholding judgment on whether and how their sources should be named based on that investigation. On the not so black-and-white front, people I respect who’ve worked with Brian Ross on other stories give him a lot more credit for journalistic integrity and the ability to admit mistakes than Glenn Greenwald does, which leads me to hope that demanding an investigation doesn’t become a personalized witchhunt. But I’ll be watching to see what it takes to get the attention of ABC News, or its parent company Disney.

“At Disney, each of us is responsible for upholding our excellence and our integrity. This means acting responsibly in all our professional relationships, in a manner consistent with the high standards we set for our business conduct.”

– Bob Iger
President and Chief Executive Officer (from Disney’s corporate site)

Note: Very light blogging in August as my writing energy goes into wrestling with my white paper in progress. I fear only one of us will survive this epic battle.

Images: Mickey Mouse dressed up for the holidays by Zengrrl via Flickr.

Great challenge for citizens or journalists – get Speaker Nancy Pelosi to explain in detail why she doesn’t think even one of the three dozen transgressions described by Denis Kucinich in House Resolution H. Res. 1258: Impeaching George W. Bush, President of the United States, of high crimes and misdemeanors is an impeachable offense.

Democrats.com is offering a prize of up to $1000 to the first person to get the answer on video or audio tape.

The timing is perfect – Pelosi’s headed out on a book tour. The only quibble I have is the stupidity of limiting eligibility to “progressive citizens or journalists,” which they define as “To qualify as a “progressive” citizen or journalist, you must be active with a known progressive group or news organization or website (including Democrats.com). Your activity can be as limited as volunteering or posting comments.” Why would reporting by a right-wing, moderate or apolitical citizen not be worth having? For that matter, by this definition, posting an angry comment on democrats.com complaining about this dumb rule would automatically make you eligible.

Thanks to Jay Rosen for tweeting this.

Image: Nancy Pelosi at 30th Anniversary of Silicon Valley Leadership Group, June 2, 2008.
By Orin via Flickr

Is Amnesty International a media organization? Should they (or any other activist non profit organization) aim to be one? Dan Gillmor has started a great discussion on his blog about this. He says we should be finding ways to get human rights, environmental and other advocacy organizations that do large amounts of in-depth research and reporting, especially in other countries. In a discussion of business models for foreign here at Berkman yesterday, Ethan Zuckerman said that doesn’t really help solve the problem of how to get more international news to the US public, because in the end that just means Human Rights Watch will be going to the same funders as Global Voices projects for support. But I agree with Dan that getting the work of what he calls the “almost-journalists” to a broader public in a format that is based on journalistic principles is well worth doing. In a sense of course, that’s what we get when a journalist covers a report by the International Crisis Group. But NGOs have long been frustrated by how hard it is to get the media to pay attention to their issues and many are now producing not only nice-looking reports, but online articles, blogs, audio, video, and multimedia. But those materials, which range from basic to quite complex productions, don’t get the added credibility or the increased attention they would have if they reached the audiences of a trusted journalism brand, whether a newspaper, broadcaster or native-online publication.

UPDATE: I’m embarrassed to have forgotten to mention Public News Service here which seems to be doing exactly the thing I describe below, using a pool of money from nonprofits to produce and distribute radio stories that are created by professional journalists. They were languishing in my list of interesting groups to investigate more, which I will do, and write about them in a post to come.

So I believe it would be helpful if there were a way for advocacy groups to spend some of their outreach money not begging journalists for attention, but funding organizations to hire journalists who will pay attention but will also be fact-checked and edited and whose work will be included in publications/programs/platforms that reach a general audience rather than one that is seeking out information on the issue in question.

This is exactly what is happening when a group like the Iraq Afghanistan Deployment Impact Fund gives NPR a grant for “Three-year support for expanded international, national and local news and feature coverage on the impact of deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan on American military personnel and their families.” But that is a) not as accessibly transparent as some of us would like and b) benefits only one well-funded nonprofit and one media outlet. What I want is a pool from many organizations that would fund reporters from many different media.

Top video in nonprofit/activism this week on Youtube: highlights of Al Gore’s speech on climate change. Number of views as of this writing: 79,109

Number of people who watched 60 Minutes on CBS on July 20, 2008: 8.3 million people (from TV by the numbers)

No joke – if you have created media of any kind (from the rules: “Print, radio, TV and online journalists, photojournalists and bloggers from any country are invited”) since September 15 2007 (and through 15 Sept 2008) that is about human rights and could be used to illustrate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, you have a few weeks left to compete for one of THIRTY (30!) all-expense paid trips to Paris. Please help get the word out! If you’re more media consumer than producer, think of the most compelling media about human rights you’ve read, heard or seen recently and forward the link to the author. If none of your regular media sources seems to have mentioned human rights recently, forward it with a note asking why. Information about the contest is available in English, French, Russian, and Spanish.

Actually, my talented colleagues Wendy Seltzer, Geoff Goodell and Steve Schultze did the very eloquent telling of the FCC that their proposal to give away spectrum to be used for “family-friendly” Internet, accomplished by network-level filtering of potentially harmful content, which I wrote about a few days ago, is wrongheaded on many fronts:

— it mistakenly treats the Internet like a broadcaster, which denies the Internet’s essential nature as a space for creation, collaboration and innovation;
— it will stifle both competition and innovation in important areas;
— it is in conflict with the FCC’s own policies promoting openness and neutrality; and worst of all,
— it violates the First Amendment (oh that!), suppressing large amounts of speech

That’s the supershort version, if you have time to be really enraged about this (and you should!) you can read the whole comment on the FCC website, in docket 07-195. And sign up for Berkman’s mailing lists, where news will surely be posted as it appears.

Update: My fellow fellow Harry Lewis has a lovely post on the absurdity of the proposed rule.

Image: Free Speech
Uploaded on May 1, 2007
by mellowbox

Tags: FCC, pornography, censorship

Two conversations today shifted my feelings about a couple of the metaphors we use a lot to talk about media and journalism:

First, the media “ecosystem,” a term some of my colleagues love and that I have resisted, with support from fellow fellow David Weinberger, including in his presentation at our March event. I felt “ecosystem” sounded too neat, too organic, too rational, to represent the messy forces at work in the media environment. In a discussion yesterday I was convinced that other people don’t get that from the word, that they think of ecosystems that can be out of balance, polluted, on the verge of collapse. So, with the idea that the multiple media ecosystems include dangerous jungles, toxic Superfund sites and great barren deserts, I’m cautiously giving the word a chance.

The second opening I’m considering is for the vegetable metaphors: usually “eat-your-spinach journalism” or “the broccoli on your plate.” This came up a lot in LA, and like Adrian Monck, I didn’t like it much. I found the implication that the challenge is to “sugar-coat the broccoli” (a disgusting image) or as Ethan more appetizingly says “make broccoli au gratin,” adding just enough cheese sauce (cheese may be cheap processed America, as in gratuitous of pictures of distressed children, the expensive artisanal (Abomination! Word Press just tried to tell me the correct spelling of that word is ‘artisinal’ the end is near) goat cheese of powerful storytelling).

Now I’ve decided the problem is not the metaphor itself, but with the implied attitude toward broccoli and other healthy vegetables, that even those of us who know we need to eat them would eat mostly potato chips and chocolate cake if we could. I think we need to give both broccoli and people more credit. Like the healthy school food movement, we need to have a positive attitude, making sure the people who prepare and serve the broccoli are passionate about vegetables and eager to share their love with others, not trying to force the kids to eat soggy overcooked frozen broccoli because it’s their duty. And we need to include the education part, where kids learn what spinach looks like growing, how to cook it so it tastes good. It’s repeatedly worked in school cafeterias. So maybe we should be looking for the Alice Waters of journalism? Oh could someone please also write the equivalent of Fast Food Nation about the media to shake people up about what’s in their journalistic lunch bag?

Photo: Broccoli
Uploaded on April 19, 2005
by Tzatziki

We want to support the programs we love.
We want to support the people who might produce programs we might love in the future.
We don’t want to save public broadcast stations just because they are transmitters that used to be the only way we could get these shows, but we do want to support stations that create and support communities.
We want to be able to donate money for podcasts, individual shows and stations.
We want to do this in ITunes and on the IPhone and in other places too.
We want to support stations to produce shows we don’t care about, because other people might be interested in them.
Some of us (OK, exactly one of us) don’t mind pledge weeks, but want additional options for supporting podcasts.

We all hope that this little picture
will help us do what we want.

That’s the “Relbutton,” “rel” being short for “relationship.” The Relbutton was one of the hot topics at the first workshop of Project VRM, which I was lucky enough to attend some of yesterday and today. Sadly other commitments interrupted, so I missed some sessions, but I did make sure to be at the session on VRM and Public Media, which is where we reached the above conclusions.

VRM is Vendor Relationship Management, the alternative to CRM, Customer Relationship Management. As someone who only learned what CRM was when learning about its replacement, I believe that VRM will eventually need a less geeky, less reactive, more assertive name like BISS (Because I Say So), but that will come.

In the meantime, VRM is a wonderful set of concepts and projects-in-progress about giving consumers control, even consumers who are getting something for free. Hence the excitement about the public media and the Relbutton. The button will let us as listeners/viewers/readers say: “Hey, I am interested in this story/podcast/program/series/station/website and I would like to support it in some way, on my terms, when and how it’s convenient for me.”

Once every public media distribution platform is outfitted to accept Relbutton input, you’ll be able to use the Relbutton to build whatever kind of relationship you want to establish with them, whether it’s donating $5 once or $50 monthly or getting on a mailing list or learning that the station needs in-kind donations of something you have a garage full of. If the object of your desire isn’t set up (the technical term is “VRM-compliant”) yet, the Relbutton will collect and escrow this information and send the producers a message to let them know that they are missing out on your love.

Those of us who don’t love pledge week can hardly wait for the VRM gang to make this real. Stay tuned.