What is interesting to me about this example is that the Internet makes material of this nature much more available for scrutiny. We normally only get to see the result - not the outtakes and the mistakes. I’m quite certain that the footage shown here would not be broadcast by Fox News. I don’t know if Fox broadcast any footage from this interview, but I have found no mention in the comments of anyone claiming to have seen it on air. I believe what we are seeing is material taken from a satellite feed of raw footage being sent to a facility where Fox edits and prepares it for broadcast. I don’t know how accessible this kind of material is today - I had easy access to it in the seventies through the satellite receiver where I worked - but a TV cameraman who comments on the YouTube video thinks the same and has some penetrating observations. (Sorry no direct link - it currently appears on the 2nd page of comments to the video):

From a former broadcast news cameraman:
First of all, kudos to this Father for continuing to represent himself and his beliefs in the face of a farce, masquerading as a reporter. No one should have the right to slander people the way this “reporter” is, and then tell people he is fair and balanced. I know, then the news will seem boring, but I’m not afraid of that; what are YOU afraid of?
For those of you who think this video is fake, you’re mostly wrong. In my opinion, the video is what we call a feed, uploaded via satellite and recorded (presumably) by the producers of some Fox program in a different locale, probably the O’Reilly show. It has a Fox logo poorly keyed in the corner, but at that stage of the production, I’m not sure why. It’s obviously and unabashedly edited, but there seems to be no attempt to hide that. I think we all need to watch out for reporters who incite us and encourage us to draw false conclusions. This guy is a classic, and he really does give his best effort to twist the words of his subject. Too bad for him, he met his match. I wish the entire interview feed had simply been posted, so we could maintain more objectivity. I’m not afraid of the simple truth, just those who package it falsely on either side of the fence.
I wish so much we, as a nation, could stop throwing stones (through the media), and have an intelligent, fair discourse about public policy. Our future is truly at risk, due to the inability of our mainstream media to maintain objectivity.

The next step is to check the web site presenting the YouTube video to work out what kind of organization it is. The answers are not far away. Right next to the clip are the words: “Psst… stop the Fox News virus from infecting the media” Click their ‘About’ link and you get this:

Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films are at the forefront of the battle to create a just America and we want you to join us. Using cutting-edge new Internet video campaigns, Brave New Films has created a quick-strike capability that challenges corporate media with the truth and empowers political action nationwide.

From delegitimizing Fox News as a news source and Impeach Gonzales to Real exposés about conservative candidates and a War on Greed, our groundbreaking online political campaigns are exploding the old model of grassroots politics. Using YouTube, bloggers, mobile phones, and strategic partnerships with national networks and local activists, we are reaching millions and getting results.

So we are dealing with an organization which we can see supports views opposite to those of Fox News and actively wants to discredit the network. The cameraman commenter’s professional eye picks up that the footage has been edited and that even the Fox logo may have been clumsily added. O’Reilly is mentioned a couple of times in the audio so I agree it probably is Fox. Whatever has or has not been done, the implication is clear - Brave New Films is unlikely to show us anything that puts Fox in a good light. The biggest difference I see is that Brave New Film’s agenda is more open than Fox’s. One thing I think is that the Internet has done is expand the ideological bandwidth of political debate. Traditional media have to stay within a narrower ideological range and at least pretend to be reasonably objective. Put another way, using the Wikipedia definition of advocacy journalism I used in my previous post we are seeing the difference between frankly open advocacy  as  “distinct from instances of media bias and failures of objectivity in media outlets which are attempting to be or which present themselves as objective or neutral.”

Still, whatever may have been left out, it is obvious that the Fox reporter is well practiced at using bullying tactics to try to provoke his interviewee into providing material he can use. Father Pfleger clearly is acutely aware of the game being played and is trenchantly uncooperative. Still, before the Internet, the best he could hope for was to avoid giving the media anything they could use. One slip, and you’re toast. Otherwise, as in this case, they just don’t show the footage. While it’s an unequal contest dealing with a reporter asking loaded questions, Father Pfleger’s Wikipedia article does show that he is an experienced activist who has been burned by the media before. Nonetheless, whether one agrees or disagrees with Father Pfleger, I think his refusal to be used is admirable.

While confrontational tactics can be a legitimate technique to bring out issues, journalists cross a line when they actively try to provoke a reaction for a partisan purpose while pretending to simply report news. ‘Fair and balanced - we report, your decide.’ Ironically, both Pfleger and Wright went on to say things that forced Obama to distance himself from them without any help from Fox News. Another aspect of TV   that makes this kind of tactic so effective is that once the media have the footage their agenda needs, neither the facts, nor the real person involved,  matter. As it turned out,  Bill Moyers later interviewed Wright on PBS and edited out some of the Reverend’s more controversial remarks. Moyers’ agenda was the opposite of Fox’s, but he was quickly exposed. Reverend Wright himself in a speech to the National Press Club on Aril 28 complained of the edits and supplied what had been omitted. Here the Reverend Wright is defending his use of the phrase “God damn America.” which, I believe both the Fox reporter and Father Pfleger are indirectly referring to in the clip.

And if you saw the Bill Moyers show, I was talking about — although it got edited out — you know, that’s biblical. God doesn’t bless everything. God condemns something — and d-e-m-n, “demn,” is where we get the word “damn.” God damns some practices.

And there is no excuse for the things that the government, not the American people, have done. That doesn’t make me not like America or unpatriotic.

So in Jesus — when Jesus says, “Not only you brood of vipers” — now, he’s playing the dozens, because he’s talking about their mamas. To say “brood” means your mother is an asp, a-s-p. Should we put Jesus out of the congregation?

When Jesus says, “You’ll be brought down to Hell,” that’s not — that’s bombastic, divisive speech. Maybe we ought to take Jesus out of this Christian faith.

Wright brings up two other Moyers’ edits in the course of his remarks. The complete transcript is here on Fox and if you don’t trust them it is also here at the New York Times. I found it interesting to read because Wright comes across to me as a man with a different world view than either the liberal or conservative media would like to portray him. Basically, neither were that interested in what he really had to say because as Obama’s pastor he was more useful as a political cudgel. What I think is going on here is that the agenda precedes the news gathering and only material that supports the agenda makes it past the ideological filter. I believe this kind of behavior has become the norm and partly explains why it is easy to get media to accept fake photographs or footage. Richard Landes’ analysis of the al Durah footage is not a conspiracy theory for exactly this reason. That Palestinians deliberately set out to create footage damaging to Israel is no more far fetched than Fox News setting out to create material damaging to liberal politicians. Or PBS setting out to support their side of politics.

Stoss bases his discussion of  accountability journalism on an article Fournier wrote last year. He concludes that Fournier  isn’t talking about journalistic accountability, but rather means holding others in positions of power accountable to what the journalist ‘knows to be true’. Here is Stoss’ summation.

Accountability journalism is about holding politicians accountable to the personal conclusions of reporters. It is about reporters getting the opportunity to call it as they see it, liberated from the need for equal treatment of all sides, weasel words, and even the pressure to accept politicians’ statements at face value.

Curious, I went to Fournier’s original article and found it couched as a set of guidelines for reporters on how to do accountability journalism. His opening paragraph gives a  sense of where he is coming from.

Katrina made a believer out of me. I had always known that The Associated Press played a role in holding public officials accountable, but it took a killer hurricane and an incompetent, arrogant government response to make me realize this is no mere role. It’s an obligation, a liberating one at that.

He goes on as he starts. This advice on how to handle sources is probably the low point:

 Play to their vanity. Tell them how smart you think they are and you just want to “pick their brain.” Whether you quote them or not (in some cases: especially if you don’t quote them), sources will feed you insight that you can claim as your own. (emphasis in original)

Fournier seems full of self importance and  evidently blind to the implications of the different nature (many to many) of the networked media of the 21st century. He reminds me very much of my visit to the Newseum in Washington DC where you could be forgiven for coming away with the impression that the press alone is the sole guarantor of freedom of speech. To put it as charitably as I can, I think Fournier is saying that the press needs to be more aggressive in its role as watchdog and not pussyfoot around pretending to be neutral and balanced when the reporter feels there is important truth to be told. He gives an  example of what he means and explains that it is somewhere between straight news and outright opinion - calling it “news analysis”.

March 2, 2005:

WASHINGTON (AP) _ President Bush vowed, “We are fully prepared.” Mike Brown barked orders. Weather experts warned of a killer storm. The behind-the-scenes drama, captured on videotape as Hurricane Katrina roared ashore, confirmed Americans’ suspicions of government leaders: They can run a good meeting, but little else.

These are not “opinion pieces” or editorials. They are the conclusions of an impartial observer who understands the context that drives news events. They are built on facts and solid reporting. And they are written under the banner of “AP News Analysis.” AP writers have been doing this for years, and we’re getting better at it every day.

The next thing I did was look up ‘accountability journalism’ in Wikipedia. There was no article, but the disambiguation page led me to an article on Advocacy Journalism which seems to me to more accurately describe what Fournier is talking about.

Advocacy journalism is a genre of journalism that intentionally and transparently adopts a non-objective viewpoint, usually for some social or political purpose. It is distinguished from propaganda, in that it is intended to be factual, and is usually produced by private media outlets (as opposed to governments). It is also distinct from instances of media bias and failures of objectivity in media outlets which are attempting to be or which present themselves as objective or neutral.

Just for the record I don’t think Accountability Journalism as used by Fournier is an intellectually honest term. However, further digging unearthed that the term  is currently being used  within the profession for getting away from the neutered kind of neutrality that simply reflects a series of claims without making any distinction among them. In my previous post I detailed how TV has long gotten around that difficulty dishonestly by keeping the words arguably neutral while making their real point by emotionally manipulating the viewer through the video portion of the medium.  In any case Fournier is not alone is seeking a new approach that isn’t entirely one sided like muckraking or unbalanced activism and also not shackled by the pretense of neutrality. NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen has an extensive discussion of this trend and uses the term ‘accountability journalism’ at his blog Press Think. Here he defines what he means in terms of the work of the frankly liberal blog Talking Points Memo.

Josh Marshall’s TPM Media operation is a new media newsroom that does political reporting in the same space as the big providers. Marshall believes in accountability journalism, sticking with stories, digging into public records for information, getting to the bottom of things, verifying what you think you know, correcting the record when you get it wrong.

TPM marries these traditional virtues to open expressions of outrage, incredulity marking certain political figures as ridiculous or beyond the pale, and the informed display of political conviction. These make it obvious to any reader of Talking Points Memo that Marshall is a liberal Democrat skeptical of the Bush agenda, though not a dogmatic one. His is the transparency route to trust and success in political journalism.

I notice there is quite a bit more journalistic accountability in Rosen’s definition of the term and also that he cites unfavorable criticism of his post from the other side of politics.  ( In my experience Jay Rosen gets the importance of blogs and pays attention to them - he correctly criticized me for the way I handled a post of his  on Newmediatheory here.  Just practicing accountability journalism folks)

Here is Rosen’s citation of  Protean Wisdom being critical of his post:

Jay Rosen uses an offline essay by Walter Pincus to argue that the media should be more transparent about its politics.  That Rosen holds up the hypocritical Josh Marshall as a model of integrity, or holds up Keith Olbermann as “another” example (there may be some intentional ambiguity by Rosen on this point) – while ignoring counter-examples to be found on the Fox News Channel or the Excellence in Broadcasting network — is annoying.  Nevertheless, urging journalists to admit that they are participants in the public square is a healthy notion, so RTWT.

Linking to that response takes intellectual accountability seriously too. Rosen’s article raises many issues in the debate about the limits of neutrality and the need for greater transparency  beyond the scope of this post. It really is worth reading the whole thing to get a good sense of the internal debate. However, I’m interested in what may be happening here from a media theory point of view. What I see is the media adapting, indeed being forced to change by the changing media environment. Less than half the American population think the media are politically unbiased. Pretending to be ‘fair and balanced isn’t working any more. Not for Fox. Not for NPR. The country’s flagship newspaper the New Your Times is hemorrhaging money and its stock price tanking. Newspapers generally are facing severely shrinking revenues. So to compete the the press is adopting a more aggressively and openly opinionated style. Even also ran MSNBC is evidently  being provocative and gaining viewers (finally). I’d note that they are acting more like blogs, which are intentionally transparent about their opinions. So partly accountability journalism  is about survival, but I believe it is also about trying to regain control of the narrative.

I think all the mass media will  survive in some form even if newspapers are feeling the pinch hardest right now,  but I don’t think they will regain the monopoly over the narrative that they held when they exclusively controlled the means of production. That is, the presses, and the broadcasting facilities. TV and the role it played with Vietnam, and Wategate, more than any other medium,  made journalists think they were exclusively in control. They could derail wars and humble Presidents - just in case you hadn’t noticed. With their pictures they could control what we believed was actuality and with their words tell us what to think. Cronkite signed off with “…and that’ s the way it is.” and we believed him! Edward R Murrow, his predecessor, signed off with the far more humble: “Good night and good luck”. Ironically the kings and princes of the Renaissance were keenly aware of the threat to their power created by the printing press and immediately moved to control Getenberg’s invention with censorship. After a long struggle, freedom of the press became one of our most cherished principles, but many of today’s press - like that new chap at AP - seem unaware of the implications of programs like Wordpress and Movable Type. The mass media still have a strong effect on public opinion, but they have already lost trust and respect.  There seems to be an underlying assumption in much of the discussion within the profession - which the copious links in Rosen’s piece open up - that it is possible to regain that paradise of  power and control that I think Fournier finds so liberating.

I’ll be writing more about the book after I’ve had a chance to read it. What I want to do right now is call your attention to another video of Shirky at the same conference in which he talks about an idea he has had since finishing Here Comes Everybody. The idea is an intuitive leap -  a stab in the dark about why human beings are putting so much time and energy into activity on the net. Why, for example,  I’m sitting here writing this and why you are reading it - along with all the other people pouring energy into the cloud of connections that make up the Internet.  It is a tentative answer to the question of where all that energy is coming from. I wont spoil it by trying to retell Shirky’s story - he does it brilliantly and is entirely engaging. It is a bit over 16 minutes long. You know where he is going after 4 minutes, and YouTube splits the same talk into two 7 minute segments.  So watch as much as you can. The full length and better quality version is here on Blip TV. If you have trouble with that or  a smaller chunk of time the two YouTube segments are here and here.

I will say this however. It is easy to get carried away with techno optimism when we start to get a handle on all the positive things that can come out of new technologies and media. But change on this scale always comes at a cost. We know the industrial revolution created huge social disruption, the consequences of which we still are arguing about. I get as excited as the next person about unexpected additions to our social capital like Wikipedia or Linux. But there is also destruction of social capital. Countless spammers and hackers are beavering away even as others do good works. More seriously, child pornographers are ruining the lives of children, and media emirs are supervising  beheading videos. There is positive and negative, good and evil.

As regular readers will know, I don’t trust Fox News or the BBC or any of the others either in that I believe that television itself can’t be trusted because it is,  by nature,  a form of drama.  It roots go back to Greek theater and the oral tradition. Writing was invented - among other reasons- to ensure accurate record keeping - to freeze the slippery nature of truth in oral culture. (For example,  clay tablets with lists of material to keep accounts accurate.) Using television as the primary vehicle for news has blurred the cultural and ethical lines between artistic and literal truth for past fifty years, because the visual portion of TV can be used to artificially construct - by framing and editing  - what is perceived and experienced as actuality. Meanwhile,  the verbal portion can carry on describing the visual element as if it were an neutral mirror of reality in the established style of reasonably objective journalism citing sources etc.  But the visual  portion is not often edited to get at literal truth - as in sports replays - but for emotional impact. Remember this is drama.  Unlike print or radio journalism where the verbal portion has to carry the emotional message as well as the informational content, with TV the verbal portion can maintain emotional distance and more effectively pretend to neutrality. Radio and print propaganda that tries to convey dramatic emotion immediately gives itself away because it sounds bombastic. The internet is undermining TV’s credibility as a news source, as in the present example, because it gives anyone with an interest in the subject the opportunity to document and publish their objections. We are not just left impotently shouting at the TV - we can blog about it. Speaking of documentation, I can’t embed CNN’s video, but I can link to it here. Off you go. Its 2:42 long and this post wont make much sense without it.

The posts by Yaakov Ben Moshe deal in detail  with the central issue that Wedeman breaches basic journalistic ethics so as not to offend Hamas and the Palestinians in order to retain access. CNN’s Eason Jordan admitted that CNN did much the same thing in Saddam’s Iraq to maintain access.  However, I want to analyze this footage in a different way. I want to look at the broad emotional meaning of each scene in the context set by the reporter. In other words, I want to shift the primary focus to what your gut and heart are receiving while Wedeman is telling your brain what you are seeing and what to think about it. I would label the emotional content of each scene as follows.  Your take may vary, but I doubt that you will find the sequence emotionally neutral.

23 secs - wrecked office shots - emotion=violation and outrage

11 secs middle aged man talking e=  empathy with victim

13 secs Children on playground equipment e= childhood innocence

21 secs Israeli spokesperson with flag e= officialdom speaks -  the accent is from central casting.

10 secs Woman in headscarf speaks e= empathy with offended innocence

20 secs Wedeman by exterior door e=neutral

5 secs middle aged man man with racks of clothes e=mild foreboding

5 secs of man talking e=financial fear

16 secs small boys dressed as Islamic fighters acting on stage e= horror or approval - dependent on allegiance

13 secs Israeli police arresting people ending with soldier with gun e= escalating anxiety to fear

6 secs cleaning up the wrecked office e=violation again

3 secs Israeli streets scenes with soldier and policeman e= ominous threat

I would summarize the overall emotional message of the story as: ‘Israel is a bully’. The intellectual crux of the story is reached, appropriately just before the end, when Fatah’s view that Israel may have over used its power is reported. Despite the patchwork of footage the story is emotionally and intellectually coherent at that moment.

For me the more general problem with this sequence of pictures, just like most sequences on TV news, is that they put the audience through an emotional process that fools the viewer into accepting a highly manipulated series of visuals as a real experience of the events depicted. We accept it as a real experience because it is a real experience - just not of the events depicted. Instead it is a real experience of TV. If I seem to be torturing the obvious let me give you an example of what I mean. In an amateur 9/11 video  of the dust cloud from the collapse of one to the Twin Towers taken from inside a  shop looking out the glass store front a woman screams in terror as the dust cloud roils by. She was having a real experience along with the others in the shop. We are sitting on our butts watching TV. Part of us knows we are in no danger - so we don’t scream. But part of us reacts and experiences and remembers it like it was real. This phenomena is part of all mediated experiences. For example, I think we all notice the shift in our consciousness that follows being lost in a book or coming out of a movie theater. With TV news stories like the one under discussion our critical faculties are routinely bypassed with emotional manipulation designed to create a distorted view of the subject at hand. Sometimes intentionally and consciously as I feel in the case of Wedeman’s story. But sometimes against the ideological bias of the news organization. I noticed in 2004 that in its reporting of the Iraq war, Fox News’s emotional message carried by pictures of bomb devastation and burning America military vehicles was much the same as CNN’s or the BBC’s. Part of the problem is the medium itself. Reporters and editors will go for the drama every time in large part because that’s where the ratings, and the money, are.

I’ll finish this post with a story my father used to tell of how insidious mediated experience can be because it sneaks by our intellectual immune system much like the aids virus. In the 1930s my parents were friends with a Jewish couple who had escaped Germany too late to bring out their money but early enough to have brought out some of it in the form of fine German linens. After dinner they would sometimes sit down by a short wave radio and listen to Hitler, their Jewish friends providing a running translation. They reported they still found themselves carried away by Hitler’s spellbinding oratory, even agreeing with him,  despite knowing better.

(Photo from Augean Stables)

I have spent considerable time in Zimbabwe and have some feeling for the place. The woman involved is the wife of an opposition politician and clearly understands media and how it works. Still, I seriously doubt that she is a professional deceiver like the Pallywood cameramen or the media emirs of al Qaeda in Iraq. Essentially she is an amateur, and yet she made the front page of the NY Times by subterfuge. She even got them to take the fauxtograph. Part of why she could play the NY Times like a violin is because anyone who watches television regularly  understands how the media works - and has some idea how to fool them. I put portable TV units in the hands of Australian primary school kids in the seventies and they immediately started to do stand up news reporting on events at their school without any coaching. Because kids see TV from infancy,  an important part of the media dynamic is the dynamic of the playground. Everyone learns how to manipulate situations by claiming injury and injustice - as in ‘he’s picking on me’. Any parent or teacher quickly learns to be skeptical of such claims - why are reporters and their supposedly experienced editors and fact checkers such mugs?

I don’t think it is just incompetence, but part of a larger Western cultural pattern of putting political agendas ahead of objective observation and reporting. In my experience as an academic I noticed a closely related shift in professional culture. By the seventies having a social agenda was part of university teaching and the older emphasis on discovering truth had somehow slipped into the background. Indeed truth itself became decidedly unfashionable is some quarters, but that is another story. With the best will in the world, it is not always easy to tell when research slips into advocacy and ones’ own desire to support an argument obscures contradictory evidence. I recall in graduate school in the late sixties that a head of department let it be known that only research that produced positive results was acceptable.  I think something similar has happened with journalism.  Reporters are often people with an agenda in search of stories to support that agenda. In today’s climate, it is hard to imagine Western reporters going to Zimbabwe  looking for stories to support Mugabe. But unlike news from Iran or Israel Zimbabwe is unlikely to seriously effect  politics in the West.  There is something else driving the apparent credulity of these particular reporters.

I think part of the problem is the appetite for emotionally compelling material. Even conservative  print organizations like the NY Times must find such material to compete - particularly with television. On the one hand, it is television that schools entire populations in what is compelling viewing and on the other, pressures other media forms - even the staid NY Times - into finding ways to grab visceral attention. I don’t think this explanation is adequate to understand a Charles Enderlin who at the very least was too ready to accept the word of his Palestinian cameraman and go to air with the al Durah footage when he had to know it was explosive. But I do think modern journalists - even good ones - are easy marks for a story that fits into well established expectations and ideologies and has an strongly shocking element.  In this case the deliberate abuse of an infant for purposes of political terrorism - is ready made to manipulate emotions and draw attention. So, sadly,  the NY Times finds itself in the business of ‘hight minded’ tabloid journalism.

It should not be beyond the capacities of journalists to spot such fraud  and even more experienced editors to demand verification when they sense something might be not as it seems.  Most people can sense when they are being manipulated but not always. Instead of viewing the blogsophere as a problem because it is pretty good at spotting when the MSM has been taken for a ride, they should see it as a fact checking resource. I’m guilty as the next blogger of a bit of triumphalism when a blogger beats an established icon like the NY Times  to the punch, but part of the new rules of the Internet media environment is that all sorts of real experts are watching and they are in a position to publish their observations. I noticed this phenomena again in connection with yesterday’s post on the photoshopped Iranian missile launch. A blogger with a different set of skills - that of a former intelligence officer - in this post at In From The Cold,   raises all manner of questions about all the photos of the launch that came out of Iran. Without making any definitive claims he raises the possibility that all of the photos of the launch we have from Iran may have been manipulated in some way. In other words what initially looks like a single altered photo to cover up a missile that failed to fire, all the photos may have been doctored to mislead and obscure.

In another take Errol Morris of the NY Times argues in an opinion piece entitled Believing is Seeing about  the Iranian fauxtographs makes the point that the Iranians have gained from all the attention and that the scary image is what will be remembered. True or false that is what will stick and I agree. He tries to further argue that all this contributes to what he sees as a phony build up to war with Iran by the Bush administration. I’ll take a pass on that one, but I will take him up on trying to imply that the Colin Powell used fauxtography in his famous UN speech about WMD leading up tht Iraq war.

Are we on the brink of another war? I remind myself that the war in Iraq started with bellicose posturing and photographs. At the United Nations, Colin Powell displayed several photographs of Iraqi sites showing incontrovertible evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Of course, we now know that this incontrovertible visual evidence was false. We don’t need advanced digital tools to mislead, to misdirect or to confuse. All we need is a willingness to uncritically believe.

Morris doesn’t state the claim explicitly - in a discussion of fauxtography  he indirectly implies it in a way that I believe is intellectually dishonest. I have seen absolutely no evidence that the CIA or anyone else in the US government doctored photographs to make the case for war with Iraq. The problem was one of interpretation, not Photoshopped evidence. Morris’  drive by tactics seriously detract from what I believe is a valid point - that scary images even when proven phony - leave the public with the same primary emotional message. In a word terror.

I love the smell of fauxtography in the morning and I will believe that the Grey Lady is really interested in exposing it when she beats Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs to the punch. Well done..again..Charles and hat tip Augean Stables and to Charles at LGF for the image.

But there’s more. One could take away the lesson that a tiny percentage of photographs and more generally motion footage is fake and miss a larger point. All visual material we see on news outlets is to some extent manipulated. We see only the angle the camera operator chose - still or motion - and in motion we almost never see the footage that is edited out. Even with no intention to lie choices are made by necessity and the criteria that drive choice are normally artistic, cultural, ideological, and commercial -  and only secondarily  accuracy or truth.

As any camera operator knows, even you dear reader, the camera always subtly or not so subtly changes what is before it. We all recognize that the photographic image is not the same as the thing itself. What we are often pursuing is verisimilitude - the appearance of truth. The press has learned long ago to pursue and sometimes improve -  by whatever technology is available - the images it presents to us as true. In this case the Iranians not the press are the not so artful dodgers, but it is at a minimum amusing that the French were the ones initially taken in.

Amusing because of the far more serious case of the al Durah affair - allegedly documenting the killing  of a Palestinian boy by Israeli troops in 2000 - in the French media progressively exposed over the years  as something other than what is purports to be. In a recent post at Augean Stables Richard Landes, the key figure in exposing Pallywood - the routine production of fake news footage in the Middle East,  documents the slow unraveling:

Like many such “public secrets,” this tale does not wear well over time. (The French call them secrets de Polichinelle, secrets like pregnancy that will, eventually, out.) What I did not expect, was how often the defenders of al Durah would reveal the nature of these dysfunctions I was trying to chronicle and explain. Now Larry Derfner has added his text to the dossier of self-revelatory texts that explain so much about the al Durah affair.

To understand the specifics of Landes’ argument with Derfner and others you will have to read Landes’ entire post - The “Public Secret Dossier“, but what I want to point to here is that the idea of a ‘public secret’ - or from a slightly different perspective - the elephant in the room - is often directly and openly referred to by the people most involved in trying to keep it secret. Here is Landes again further along in the same post discussing a 2003 article by Adam Rose:

Perhaps Rose had not seen the interview that Esther Schapira did with a PA TV official who explained why his team had inserted a picture of an Israeli soldier, firing rubber bullets at a riot caused by the al Durah footage, into the al Durah footage in order to make it clear that the Israelis intentionally targeted the boy in cold blood. His justification was strikingly similar to Rose’s:

These are forms of artistic expression, but all of this serves to convey the truth… We never forget our higher journalistic principles to which we are committed of relating the truth and nothing but the truth.

There it is - self revelatory, naked. It’s not the news,  it’s artistic expression.  The rock group the Eagles sang in the seventies: It’s the same old murder move - they just call it the news.  Some of it - most notably al Durah because of the historical consequences -  is fraudulent, but all photographically derived news is artistically manipulated to maximize the dramatic and support the point being made verbally. The most impactful images get published - the less dramatic and the inconsistent material goes in the bin. As important as it is to expose the dishonesty of a few; it is also critical to recognize that it is in the nature of photography that artistic choices are always made that ‘frame’ the truth even as the real world gives birth to it.

My friend Charles (with hat) and myself in front of the Newseum. There is no doubt about its leading theme - that’s the First Amendment writ six stories high at the left. (Photos by Charles’ wife Joy)

My main interest in the Newseum was to see to how they had dealt with the impact of the Interenet on journalism. The short answer is that they either didn’t or only very superficially. Mostly I was stuck by the attitude of self congratulation that permiated the exhibits. To paraphrase a former Secretary of Defense the Newseum is trying to cope wtha 21th century media environment by lionizing journalism’s 20th century achievements. The first critical review of Newseum I found was The News Mausoleum by John Podhoretz. He reacts in much the same way:

This half-billion-dollar enterprise is not really a tribute to an important idea or a celebration of a basic human freedom. It is, rather, the news industry’s tribute to itself.

Historically speaking, this attitude is of relatively recent vintage. It may, in fact, be an artifact of the rise of the same highly profitable monopoly newspapers and shared-monopoly television networks that were so profitable and consequently grew so powerful that they gave the members of their news force reason to believe they were not just working stiffs—the general attitude of newspapermen throughout most of the preceding era—but akin to a democratic nobility.

I can’t take you to the Newseum to see if you see this attitude too, but I can take you to the Newseum Website where their press page is filled with universally laudatory quotes from, you guessed it, journalists. This one catches what I think the Newsuem would like its visitors to feel:

“If you can leave the Newseum without a sense of respect and gratitude for the principles undergirding the news business, you’re more jaded than I.” — Helen Lounsbury, Bay City (Mich.)Times

And this comment deals with the public’s negative view of journalism the same way I felt the exhibits at the Newseum do - acknowledging the negative only to push it quickly aside.

“At a time when journalists are reeling from scathing rebukes and public skepticism about their profession, the gleaming Newseum is poised to become a welcome reminder of all that’s good about the business.” — Jessica Meyers, American Journalism Review

Joy enjoying the spectacular view from the top floor balcony of the gleaming Newseum. (Photo by daughter Christine)

Podhoretz continues:

The immodesty of this idea led many newspaper professionals of the late 20th century into a category error. They came to confuse the significance of the subjects they were covering with the act of covering them. Proximity to the news made them a species of news. They wrote about government; therefore, they were equivalent to the government in importance. They reported a war, and their act of reporting a war came to loom as large as the war itself. Today, the death of a journalist in a war zone is assigned vastly more weight than the death of a soldier.

Edward, Charles and Joy’s son, views a memorial to fallen journalists that includes a truck spattered with bullet holes

This error is very much in evidence in the Newseum. Its grandest displays are giant artifacts. On the third floor, there is an East German guard tower attached to a slab of the Berlin Wall; on the first floor, there is a huge twisted piece of metal that was the World Trade Center’s broadcast antenna. These are remarkable to behold and to contemplate, and they encourage one to reflect deeply on totalitarianism, Islamofascism, and terrorism. But what is important about them, what is thought-provoking about them, has absolutely nothing to do with journalism or with journalists; it has to do with actuality. If anything, the unearned grandiosity at work in the news business is one of the key elements behind the deep and abiding disdain that the American people have come to harbor for it.

A graffiti covered section of the Berlin Wall with Edward and daughter Christine

The broadcast tower from the World Trade Center

Podhoretz’s assertion that the Newseum and journalism itself commits a category error by mixing actuality with reporting strikes a deeper chord with me. It is eerily familiar because it is the central error we all make- journalists and audience alike - with TV. In the older, verbally dominated media - newspapers and radio - the reality being reported on has a separate existence from the act of reporting. With television reporting, the pictures take the place of actuality. Actuality is reduced to what the cameraman frames and the film editor chooses to include. The words no longer carry the main message about an independent reality outside the control of the reporter; they merely support what we see on the screen. We get a complete media package - a closed world - from which actuality has been partly or even entirely excluded. No wonder the media has an inflated view of itself - they have become gods. They don’t just report reality - they create it.

An actual statue of Lenin set against a photograph of same - reinforcing the equivalence of photography (still in this case) and actuality. Those familiar youngsters are real too of course. Trust me.

To its credit the Newseum does address the issue of popular distrust of the media with an exhibit and a five minute movie that at least acknowledges honestly that the media are in serious trouble with their audience. The issue is portrayed as a small, but important problem, in an overwhelmingly, successful enterprise. The problem is reduced to being a case of the occasional bad apple like Jason Blair who simply made stuff up, was caught and duly fired. No mention is made of the power of the Internet to out baloney like the presentation of word processed documents in 2004 as originals from the seventies known as Rathergate or the ongoing al Durah affair in France involving the outtakes of a France2 report that cast doubt on the ‘actuality’ of the death of a young Palestinian that helped spark the Intifada in 2001. In the five minute Newseum film, news anchors from Fox to PBS discuss the issue of public doubt seriously with their usual, above it all, aplomb. The result is superficial because the Newseum treatment doesn’t engage the structural changes brought about by the Internet that have significantly altered the power relationships of the news business. Today anyone with a computer can challenge the veracity of the media gods and create a firestorm of criticism that further undermines their credibility. Some of this material on the Internet is highly credible. Some of it dubious and openly agenda driven. It is messy but it isn’t going away and the media will not regain control over their own public image any time soon.

Finally, when it comes to directly addressing how the Internet is changing the rules of of journalism the Newseum minimizes the issue by including small references to bloggers and news aggregator Matt Drudge as if they were curiosities. More tellingly an exhibit on the Virginia Tech shootings, when CNN used cellphone footage from a student witness, presents the use of such a novel source of material as if the established media were still the only outlet for such footage and journalists the only people competent to authenticate it. There is no hint of the obvious - that the student could have put the footage up on his own blog or chosen WikiNews as his outlet subject to authentication by other bloggers and even the established media. They get to participate too. Given my Netcentric prejudices I am not too unhappy because at least the Internet has a toehold at the Newseum. There is nothing to prevent the Newseum from creating exhibits in the future adding to our understanding of Internet journalism as its impact becomes impossible to marginalize.

Right before I hung up, I asked for the “official grounds” for my dismissal, figuring the information might be important later. At first they repeated the line about not writing anything outside of CNN without permission, but HR then made a surprising comment: “It’s also, you know, the nature of what you’ve been writing.”

His real sin - he infringed on CNN’s monopoly on the narrative. Bottom line - they no longer own it. They can fire him but they can’t shut him up. He gets it purrfectly. They don’t get it at all.

The network never considered for a minute that new media might behave differently than television — that the regular rules might not apply.

And that’s the problem.

As far as CNN (and to be fair, the mainstream TV press in general) believes, it still sits comfortably at the top of the food chain, unthreatened by any possibility of a major paradigm shift being brought to bear by a horde of little people with laptops and opinions.

As I never tire of saying, McLuhan predicts that when the media environment changes the paradigm shifts and the rules change. He also predicts that those locked into the old paradigm remain spectacularly unconscious of how the world created by the new technology works. It is doubly spectacular that during the First Gulf War, CNN and Peter Arnett did to CBS news exactly what Chez and the Net are now doing to CNN - and to be fair, the entire established media.

Eric S Raymond, the philosopher of the open source movement, tells us that when everyone has access to the source code bugs get found, and fixed fast, while proprietary software companies deny there is a bug for six months - or sometimes forever. By extension when everyone has access to the narrative, those who controlled it find themselves exposed, confused, and making lots of mistakes. No one knows how it will all end, but things are going to change er..spectacularly.

Please read Chez Pazienza’s whole story and his follow up post here. It is the most fair and balanced a savaging of spectacular stupidity as I have ever read. And he just lived through it.

But we face significant challenges. And that overall challenge right
now is radical Islamic extremism, which is hydra-headed. And I think
that challenge is going to be military, diplomatic, intelligence, and
ideological. We’ve got to do a better job in the use of cyber space.
Osama bin Laden, just in the last two weeks, has got messages out to
billions of people to recruit, motivate, and instruct radical Islamic
extremists.

McLuhan says that it takes a long time for awareness of a new media environment to to enter general awareness. When Richard Landes put on his Media as a Theater of War conference in Israel in 2006 he found that bloggers were very aware that the media environment had shifted radically (they were living it) while Israeli politicians that attended were not. The politicians saw the world where the established media held absolute control of ‘the narrative’ as unchanged - they didn’t get it. Other candidates for the US presidency may get it too - I just haven’t heard them speak on the issue. If anyone has encountered this kind of insight into the media environment from other candidates please comment.

There is a second aspect that McCain points to that I think is extremely important - the negative potential of the networked media environment. Asked about the effect of the Net on radical Islam McCain responds:

That’s because they’re getting on the Internet, they’re getting — they’re feeding on each other. They’re getting a radical message from the Imams, and then this cyberspace is getting — is having significant effects. Look at the effect that it’s having on pedophiles. Internet child pornography is one of the greatest evils that is afflicting the world today, and it’s because of the Internet. So we’re going to have to understand this new technology and this new information world we’re in and do a lot better.

The man is clearly groping with the issue - trying to come to terms it, but he has gotten to the point where he is beginning to generalize - to see the larger pattern. I’m a technological optimist, but I know better. I naturally respond to Eric S Raymond’s explanation of why in some, not all, ways the open software development model (Linux) is more effective than the proprietary model used by Microsoft. But I know very well that the frustration that Bill Gates encounters when trying to compete with Linux arises from the same structural base (the Internet) as the West’s attempts to cope with the networked insurgency of al Qaeda or child pornographers. Or the dilemma faced by a friend recently who discovered his 12 year old daughter presenting herself as an 18 year old on multiple Facebook and Myspace sites. The new media environment can be used for good or ill and I have no postmodern relativist compunctions in seeing some of those uses as clear evils. It is perhaps instructive to note that Carl Jung would be utterly unsurprised to see the human shadow alive and well on the Internet. Or that a student of literature like McLuhan would point out that these negative aspects of human nature have been explored in Western literature going back to the Iliad.

It seems to me that a useful theory of media has to explain the dark side of new media environments as well as the positive side in the broadest possible terms. Last night my son was talking about the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. He talked about how technological optimism got out of control and created the Web 1.0 tech bubble, but that now instead of public companies with no absolutely understanding of how to make money crashing we have privately held companies with better business plans but still vulnerable to over optimism and self delusion. He thinks that we could be seeing dot bomb 2.0 in the making. Perhaps or perhaps not, but the human forces set lose are recognizably the same ones that fueled the Dutch Tulip craze in the 17th century just as the 13th century Children’s Crusade should tell us something about the contemporary Muslims who think it is an act of high morality to throw away a medical education trying to blow up an airport.

Crossposted at Yankeewombat 

Peter Magnusson is engaged in a project to try to pin down Quality on the Web. He points to the crux of the matter thus: “on the Internet, everybody can see if you’re an idiot, they just can’t do much about it.” He does not disclose exactly what he is trying to do about it because he trying to develop a commercial product. Given that he is a software engineer I will presume that he is working on a computer program that will help us find the good stuff and avoid the bad. It is a brief and engaging explanation of the problem so if the topic is important to you, please read it all. It is full of high quality references and ideas and clues to the scope and nature of the problem. For the more casually inclined here is a brutally edited summary of Magnusson’s basic thesis:

Various flavors of moderation, participant editing and/or voting, and variations of reputation systems are being used today to leverage the crowd without falling victim to it’s vices.

But history would teach us that this isn’t so simple. Past efforts to tame the crowd, to encourage and coerce it to only yield “good” results (in some sense), have met with limited success. The dilemma lies in the subtleties of group behavior.

So today there are multiple efforts to define sets of checks and balances. But these easily become complex, and they also easily become essentially a political system.

In a political system, being right or wrong doesn’t matter, all that matters is staying in your position of influence. When your rating/voting system becomes a social group, then social dynamics and organizational psychology kick in. And they quickly become a game of social position, not of optimizing the quality of the result. Anybody who has worked for a large organization knows exactly what I’m talking about.

And that, in a nutshell, is the key challenge for the next generation of online discourse. We must find a better way.

Bloggers and readers of blogs will recognize what Peter Magnusson is talking about too. Because he uses the word ‘quality’, I am personally reminded of Robert Persig’s book Lila which, while a novel like his earlier and better known Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, is primarily a philosophic treatise on ‘quality’. I don ‘t know if Peter Magnusson will find a philosophic discussion of ‘quality’ helpful, but his project makes me wonder if I should be using Persig’s ideas about quality in developing a media theory. While Persig’s basic argument - that quality is more fundamental than our usual division of the world into subjects and objects - is well beyond the scope of this post, it should still be understandable to say that he divides the world into two kinds of quality - static and dynamic. Dynamic quality takes many forms but for this discussion he is talking about genuinely new and creative phenomena. By static quality he means the structures, rules, institutions etc. by which we learn to preserve the good, dynamic quality, things we create. Static quality often gets a bad rap from lovers of dynamic quality because it sometimes stifles creativity or dynamic quality. But without it we can’t preserve progress. Breakthroughs just dissipate in the absence of structure. Persig further argues we need both kinds of quality and introduces the idea of ’static latching’ to explain why. The idea is taken for the ratchet and pawl:

When the gear turns forward the pawl prevents it from turning right back and losing the gain.

In Persig’s terms Magnusson is making the case for static latching when he says:

Enthusiastic though we all are about the notions of long tails, the
wisdom of crowds, and emergent behavior, the reality is that the
quality of online discourse has progressed little from the days of
ARPANET mailing lists, USENET FAQs and The Well in 1980s. Good
structure still requires editors, good content still requires writers,
and good discussions still require moderators.

Long tails, the wisdom of crowds, and emergent behavior all refer to dynamic quality. Editors, moderators and more particularly the rules they apply create static latching. Can those rules be expressed as algorithms and made into computer programs that help us sort the wheat from the chaff? I hope so. For example, I use the Akismet spam filter on this blog and it catches thousands of comment spam messages. It lets a few through and when I mark them as spam it learns to recognize them as such, not just for me, but for all Akismet users. It turns the numerous victims effectively against the spammer. Identifying the positive is a much harder task and I have little idea how Mr. Magnusson will proceed, but I think there is evidence that we have already developed some positive static latching strategies in our software tools.

The obvious example is the success of Linux and more particularly of its creator Linus Torvalds in managing - that is successfully applying static quality principles - to the project as he went along. In addition to previously known software engineering static quality procedures like well documented code Torvalds has managed to keep the project thriving through building a social structure that has kept the Linux development community not just together, but handling enormous increases in complexity without bogging down. Eric S. Raymond in his The Cathedral and the Bazaar (available here or free online here) puts forward a compelling description of the structures that have made open software development successful. In Persig’s terms it is worth noting that the discovery that these social structures could apply to an alternate model of software engineering was in itself an outbreak of dynamic quality.

I believe some, not all, of the lessons learned by the Open Software community may apply to the development of better quality discussion on the Internet. Already a new form of civil society has become available on the Net for those who actively seek it out. I recently blogged about it here. One obvious problem is usually referred to as the echo chamber effect on the Net. That is, people just reinforcing each other’s opinions and not developing any new thinking. When a discussion becomes predictable it has become too static - there is no dynamism in it and it goes nowhere new. But the opposite goes nowhere either and for good reason. You don’t try to run a cop’s bar and a biker’s bar on the same premises. Or if you do you must apply Wyatt Erp’s static quality rule of making them check their guns. Kidding aside, I noticed the term BOF (Birds of a Feather) in Peter Magnusson’s post and that tells me he is probably thinking about this problem too. BOF is a usage that developed at computer conferences for informal interest groups that spring up to discuss a particular topic. Such a group draws people because the exchange is at least potentially fruitful. I notice something similar draws me to particular blogs and threads on the net. I have to agree sufficiently to feel it worthwhile engaging. In my experience the range of views has to be narrow enough so that there is the possibility of productive interchange. It will be interesting to see if there is any way to take the measure of that productive aspect -distinguish between the echo chamber and the BOF group - such that it can be identified by a program.

Another area of difficulty I see that Persig’s two kinds of quality illuminate is the problem of people gaming any program that humans can invent. It helps to remember that dynamic quality is always a moving target. For example, a little over 100 years ago my great grandfather, OJ Gude, created a successful advertising company by using electric light bulbs in outdoor advertising. That was then. Today, my son and daughter in law are trying to build a successful Internet advertising business they call Local Na8ion. The limitations and opportunities for using lighting in outdoor advertising are relatively well known and therefore quite static compared to the opportunities in Internet advertising. So Peter Magnusson has set himself a very difficult task because he is trying to pin down something that is by its nature very dynamic. He is trying to bell the cat. What happens to me is that just when think I have ‘belled the cat’ I hear a kitten mewing somewhere in the underbrush.

Crossposted atYankeewombat.