Media Rhetoric Journal

That’s another over-promising headline for you. Here’s what caught my eye: What Journalists Need To Know About Libelous Tweets. And here is the lede:

Rumors that CNN had suspended Piers Morgan due to the News of the World phone hacking scandal spread on Twitter earlier this month, sparking an important discussion about whether journalists need to verify information before tweeting.

Why would this spark such a discussion. Isn’t it painfully obvious?

I have long argued that operating as a custodian of facts with a discipline of verification is essential to journalism. What that means is: If you do not have that stance and practice that discipline then you are not practicing journalism. I don’t care if you’re getting a paycheck from a news organization or not.

Journalism is not simply writing up current events. It’s not punditry (i.e. unreported opinion). It’s not gossip. It is a very particular thing that emerges when one operates as a custodian of facts with a discipline of verification while pursuing a very particular purpose. Other communicative endeavors may also operate with this stance and discipline. Academic writing certainly should. That doesn’t mean academic writing is journalism. It simply means that this stance and discipline are essential to more than journalism. Perhaps this: This stance and discipline are essential to the gathering and dissemination of any information that we would hope an audience would take seriously (that information being useful to some purpose).

Verify tweets?

Does the person tweeting consider himself a journalist producing journalism for the primary purpose of offering an audience civically useful information (and/or, in the case of professionals, giving citizens the information they need to be free and self-governing)?

Then, hell yes, you verify before tweeting.

Technorati Tags: Journalism, Media Ethics, opinion journalism, Rhetoric

My essay for the American Political Science Association conference and the Journal of Poverty & Public Policy — a case study in reporting about poverty — is coming along nicely. The conference is in early September. I began the writing phase last week.

I found myself wanting to come up with something practical.

I have written/published these academic essays concerning journalism:

• the ethics of pre-primary presidential campaign coverage
• the role of identity in the ethics of writing ombudsman columns
• the politics of community improvement programs
• the ethics of identity in who is a journalist
• the structural biases of journalism
• the shifting definition of “losers” in the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

All of these essays had their beginnings here on Rhetorica, either as blog essays (re: bias and campaign coverage) or as questions I asked of my readers (re: ombudsman and “losers”). All these essays share something with many other essays written by professors in the humanities and social sciences: There is very little here that can be put to immediate use.

That’s OK on one level: Our primary purpose is to try to come to some understanding of how the world works and why it works that way from the points of view of our various disciplines. But it’s not at all satisfying from another role we academics should play — the role of public intellectual.

Take my primary campaign essay for example. It began as a blog essay entitled The Press-Politics of the Presidential Primary Process. My writing on this topic for Rhetorica and for an academic audience created an idea for the improvement of political journalism: Tell a different story; tell the story of citizens’ experiences with governance.

Simple, right? Just change your whole point of view.

But that’s what professors so often do. We come up with stuff that has very little practical application because the institutions we hope to influence do not want to be influenced. The collective mind of an institution wants to survive and reproduce itself. Telling a different story of politics would change the entire game — a game that the establishment of journalism is very happy with as it is (despite occasional grousing on the pages of the Columbia Journalism Review).

That’s not to say “tell a different story” isn’t important or shouldn’t be used to improve political journalism. This is a change in point of view that would improve the ability of journalists to fulfill their primary purpose and come close the meeting the demands of their press-politics mythology. I stand by it as necessary, but I suffer no delusions that anything will ever change in regard to it.

With this new essay I set myself to a practical challenge: Say something interesting about how journalism (using the Springfield News-Leader as a case) covers poverty and point the way to better practice without costing the newspaper time, money, space, or personnel. In other words, take away the usual excuses for not making a change. These are, by the way, really good excuses. Much of what we all know would improve journalism costs the very things today’s corporate product has so little of:  time, money, space, or personnel.

Since I am studying one newspaper, I did a little field research and met with the editor, David Stoeffler. We’ve had two conversations about this essay, one formal and one informal. Those conversations have led to a breakthrough. Based on my examination of two months worth of issues of the News-Leader, I think I have discovered something that hits all the hot buttons.

Well, you’ve read this far, and this is where I leave you hanging. The conference is September 1-4. So I must have this thing written by 31 August. That’s when I’ll tell Rhetorica readers all about it.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Journalism, Politics, Rhetoric

One of the first things I wrote for The Rhetorica Network almost ten years ago was the Media/Political Bias page. It’s still a work in progress, yet it has brought me and this weblog more attention that anything else I’ve written.

You will find the latest mention in Brooke Gladstone’s new book The Influencing Machine. It is a graphic, non-fiction book about the media. Here’s one of my panels in the chapter about bias:

Last fall I did a segment with Ms. Gladstone for On The Media about crisis reporting. We were chatting before the recording began, and she told me that I was in her forthcoming book. I made some wisecrack about hoping the artist drew me in a properly heroic fashion. And now you can see the results.

Now compare to the real things. Pretty close I guess

I’ll start reading the book soon and write a review. A quick flip through it demonstrates that despite its graphic approach the book is thoroughly serious. Hmmmmm… do I have an anti-graphic book bias?

Oh, never. There’s nothing about a graphic approach that suggests a lack of seriousness. We’re still talking words here. But more, just take a look at the panel above. Notice what you can read in drawing. The hunch of my shoulders and the tilt of my head suggest that I think I’m stating the obvious but am baffled why no one seems to get it. I’ve got a steady hold on that rocking boat of bias and a steady gaze because, by gum, I just know I’m kinda sorta in the ballpark with this whole bias thing. And, perhaps, the hunch of my shoulders also betrays my being disconcerted that my little gem of obviousness — everyone’s little gems of obviousness in a rolling sea of motivated obviousness — is making Ms. Gladstone hurl.

Technorati Tags: Culture, Journalism, media bias, Rhetoric

In case I have not been clear over he years, I think the essential practice of journalism is the discipline of verification (re: Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2001, 2007). Any communicative endeavor that would be called journalism by any persons who would call themselves journalists (pro or am) must be based on the discipline of verification: the checking and double-checking of facts with multiple sources.

There’s an old saw in journalism education used to hammer home this discipline:

If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

That assertion is a beautiful expression of the discipline because it 1) demonstrates its seriousness, and 2) disallows the shirking one’s responsibility even though the quality of the information may be obvious and/or difficult to verify.

This morning I read a Reporter’s Notebook column in the Springfield News-Leader from which we can tease another expression of the discipline. Not a replacement of the time-honored expression, but an attention-getter just the same.

If your grandmother says she was a bounty hunter, check it out.

And this is exactly what reporter Jess Rollins did.

Mags allowed her license to expire in 2005, a detail I learned from checking records at the Missouri Department of Insurance, Financial Institutions and Professional Registration. (I always check records of sources I interview but I admit a hint of guilt in checking out the validity of my own grandmother’s story.)

While he plays the line for a smile, I’d bet sawbuck that he actually did it.

You see, Jess was a student of mine at MSU. He took my introductory course. Now I don’t want to be making any claims of having much to do with his professional success. But I will say that I do try to impress upon all of my students in all of my journalism classes that the discipline of verification is the essential skill of journalism. If you want to be good, be good at that.

But more, if you want to do important work that fulfills the primary purpose of journalism, be good at that.

That primary purpose (also from Kovach & Rosentstiel): To give citizens the information they need to be free and self-governing.

Technorati Tags: Journalism, Rhetoric

I’m working on a conference essay for the American Political Science Association. I have a question (or a bunch of them). Perhaps Rhetorica readers can help me.

Does one serve an audience by treating it as an object of reporting?

This question brought me to a stop as I was considering my topic — a case study in how a newspaper covers the poor (especially the working poor) in a town with a high percentage of its population working minimum-wage service jobs and living below the poverty line. If the primary purpose of journalism is to give citizens the information they need to be free and self-governing (Kovach & Rosenstiel 2007), does this suggest that such information is the same for all socio-economic levels?

What kind of journalism do the working poor need? What kind of journalism do the working poor want? What kind of journalism makes any particular group visible to the audience in the way that group understands itself? What type of journalism leads to political/economic visibility and efficacy?

To see where I’m going with this, check out these quotes from Herbert Gans from a Q&A at the Nieman Journalism Lab:

Multiperspectival news reporting is more diverse. It seeks news about other subjects that are newsworthy for the variety of audiences in the total news audience; it obtains news from many other sources, including ordinary citizens, and it reports a variety of political, ideological, and social viewpoints (or perspectives).

Here’s my favorite example. Poor audiences need business news like everyone else, but not about investing in the stock market or the latest newsworthy acts, legal or illegal, by corporate bigwigs. They need to know about the businesses in which they can afford to shop and the ones that will hire them, as well as the charitable and public agencies that can help them when they are jobless and in need.

…

I find the idea of journalists as representatives [of citizens] intriguing, in part because the U.S. is an upscale democracy, the politics of which is dominated by corporate campaign funders and the upper-middle-income population that votes and participates more actively than the rest.

As a result, U.S. politics does a poor job of representing the remainder of the citizenry, especially those earning below the median income and various numerical minorities.

Journalists are not elected officials and they cannot be political representatives or advocates but they can represent people in a variety of other ways, for example by turning their experiences and problems into news, and by asking politicians and other authoritative sources questions to which unrepresented and poorly represented citizens need answers.

Technorati Tags: Journalism, Rhetoric

The spring semester is winding down, and that means that Ozarks News Journal has reached the end of its first school year in publication. I publish the site for my JRN378 Multimedia Journalism class.

Publishing on the server of the College of Arts & Letters at MSU presented certain difficulties — mostly technical/procedural. As the deadline to get a site running rapidly approached, I made the decision to publish ONJ myself (including paying for it) using the same hosting company I use for Rhetorica and Carbon Trace. No big deal as far as I’m concerned except that my kiester is on the line if anything goes wrong.

I’m very pleased with the work ONJ reporters did this year. They did what I wanted them to do most: Take the site seriously as a news organization. Not long after our coverage schedule began, I could hear them on their cell phones in the ONJ newsroom talking to sources and referring to themselves as reporters for Ozarks News Journal.

Reality is the best teacher. My job is to push them into it.

The ONJ reporters have one more feature package assignment to do before the semester ends (deadline 2 May). And they will continue to write their blogs through 4 May.

So what happens this summer? Well, I’ll be doing some blogging for the site. We have an audience now, so it’s important not to let ONJ simply go dark for three months. Further, I need to stay ahead of the curves — and, yes, there are several. A transparency curve. A web journalism curve. A how-do-I-use-the-latest-new-tool curve. The social media curve.

Furhter, any ONJ reporter is welcome to continue contributing. I hope some of them will do so.

Each student will complete a synthesis paper assignment in which they assess their work and what they think they learned. But just as important, they will tell me where this thing needs to go. I’ll be paying very careful attention to their comments and suggestions. They are the future of journalism. They understand that the web (and multimedia reporting and story-telling) will largely be that future. I see very few students now in our print/internet journalism track who assume they will be going to work for print-only news organizations.

We cover a lot of bases in the Department of Media, Journalism & Film. One of them is web-tech skills. A group of students is doing a project for one of our web classes to develop an ONJ iPhone app and a new WordPress theme designed to meet our needs and look snazzy.

So things are moving forward rapidly.

Once again, I’ve arrived at the point in a post in which I ought to actually discuss what the headline promises. And once again, I’m bailing out. I don’t know what it all means yet. This I do know: If students continue to improve the site (and their reporting), ONJ will soon become an important news organization in Springfield. Our public affairs focus — following from our university mission — will give us a unique and complementary niche here. Then, I think, we’ll be in a position to learn something.

Technorati Tags: Journalism, multimedia journalism

During our recent WikiLeaks panel at MSU, I made a comparison between the transparency of WikiLeaks and The New York Times. I said that WikiLeaks does a better job of explaining its reportorial and editorial processes. I believe that to be true largely because the Times makes it difficult to find information about how its journalists report and present the news.

This morning, Arthur S. Brisbane, the Times’ public editor, makes a good argument for transparency and suggests the Times do the hard work of creating a searchable record of its policies — especially now that the Times is creating a converged, interactive, multimedia news product. Brisbane concludes:

The Times has a good set of policies. It should double down on its commitment to high standards by organizing them into a reader-friendly format and then trust its audience — which is now a paying audience both online and in print — to readily access these important principles and rules. Will some abuse the privilege? Inevitably so. But elevating the dialogue with committed readers is worth the price to be paid.

On the local level, the panel discussion prompted News-Leader editor David Stoeffler (he was on the panel) to write about transparency in his column this morning. He used a large number of his column inches to begin explaining the process. I hope this leads to a public discussion and, finally, a list of policies published on the News-Leader site.

As mentioned on Rhetorica on Friday, I gave a talk to college journalists this week about blogging as journalists. And I received some of the usual questions about the dangers of opinion and of appearing biased, i.e. appearing to have a point of view when the audience expects objectivity.

No. The audience does not expect the impossible. What citizens expect is exactly what Stoeffler wrote about this morning:

We often have information — legally — we choose not to publish, or that we publish in ways that protect the innocent. It might be as simple as withholding the name of a crime victim, or perhaps the identity of an undercover law enforcement officer.

The first step, though, involves simply getting the information regardless of sensitivity: Good journalists want to know things; sometimes things that others would rather we not know.

Once we have it, we need to verify its authenticity and accuracy, plus gather other information to put it in the right context.

Sometimes, the source of information has an ax to grind — a reason to want someone else to look bad. It doesn’t mean the information is less authentic, but we need to understand the motivation of the source and keep the appropriate distance so we don’t get caught up in their agenda.

After verifying and putting things in context, we write our stories and then we’re ready to publish. We make sure we know the legal ramifications, but often times it is the ethical considerations that take precedence.

We earn your trust through careful, truthful reporting, and by our honesty and integrity. We know sometimes we fall short of your expectations.

This is a general description of the objective process of reporting (in the context of sensitive information). Objectivity is dead; it was never really alive. Or, rather, it was badly misunderstood as stance instead of process.

Public policies are important. I understand the trepidation of the Times’ editors as explained by Brisbane. But I reject it as old MSM thinking. News organizations ought to want citizens to hold them to account for their stated standards. News organizations ought to want this because it brings citizens into the process. Transparency engages citizens. And transparency fulfills the primary purpose of journalism: To give citizens the information they need to be free and self-governing.

Liberation for everyone!

Technorati Tags: Journalism, Media Ethics, opinion journalism, Rhetoric

The Missouri College Media Association is holding a conference in Springfield today sponsored by journalism students at MSU. I’m giving two talks (from the program):

Blogging For Journalists: Bringing an Audience, Bringing a Brand

The presentation will acquaint participants with two important reasons to begin blogging while in school: today’s news organizations want you to come prepared with an audience and a brand. The session will also discuss best practices.

Everyone is Now Multi and Meta

This presentation introduces multimedia skills and theory for web publication. Special attention will be paid to the Ozarks News Journal site — a multimedia journalism project at MSU.

I’ve prepared a short Prezi for the first presentation. You may see it here. For the second, I’ll be using ONJ as a source of examples of what to do and what not to do — we manage both

What’s kinda cool — given my first talk today — is that Rhetorica turns nine years old later this month (I mistakenly claimed nine years last year … duh). That makes it one of the oldest, continuously-published weblogs in the world. And if you count (which I do) my early proto-blog Timeline (part of the old Presidential Campaign Rhetoric 2000 site — a student project of mine – archived here), then that makes me one of the longest running bloggers in the world. None of that is a claim to expertise. I’ve simply been around long enough to be a curiosity.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Journalism, multimedia journalism, Social Media

If you’re in Springfield, be sure attend  our panel discussion at MSU entitled  WikiLeaks: A Discussion on Media Ethics. It is sponsored by the Department of Media Journalism and Film.

• Date: 28 March
• Time: 1:00 to 3:00 p.m.
• Place: 313 Plaster Student Union

You’ll find the official website here on Rhetorica.

Here’s a link to the flier.

For those of you who cannot attend, please consider following our live blogging of the discussion on the official website. The live blogging will be interactive, so you can post questions and comments as the discussion unfolds.

Technorati Tags: Journalism, Media Ethics

I have no sympathy for people or organizations that get punked. The latest examples are the Governor of Wisconsin taking a fake phone call from a fake Koch brother and an NPR executive taking a meeting with a merry band of O’Keefenicks.

These pranks are not journalism. These pranks offend journalistic ethics beause, at the very least, they require misrepresentation.

But, just as surely, these pranks are news because they create news — real news.

Tip: If you are a politician, news media person, entertainer, or other person in the public eye, you are a potential victim of punking, so be ready.

In order to be ready, one must consider the rhetoric of punking:

1. Punkers are motivated by partisan politics. Punking is a political tactic — an act of political theater.

2. The punker intends to catch the victim doing or saying something embarrassing and stereotypical for the purpose of proving that the victim (or victim’s organization) is nefarious.

3. The punker creates a rhetorical situation that encourages the victim to misidentify an exigence and the kairos necessary to handle the exigence. (This doesn’t mean the data is illegitimate.)

4. The punker creates an elaborate enthymeme for the audience so that it accepts the ethos of the victim as situated rather than invented for him/her by the punker. (See qualifier above.)

5. The rheme (a unit of rhetoric) the punker relies on is narrative; the punker creates a plausible story that creates the rhetorical situation and draws the victim into an exigence. The punker also allows the narrative to become increasingly implausible as the victim is drawn further into the trap. A really good punker creates a “too late” moment in which the victim crosses a point of no return — the source of the most important artifact of punking: the incriminating sound-bite. (We all must, however, be wary of “too late” moments created by disingenuous editing rather than actual punking skill.)

None of that is surprising. It’s standard, frat-boy stuff.

Understanding it in political and rhetorical terms is just the first step in defending against punking.

The larger, and perhaps more interesting, point is that we now live in an age in which punking is easily accomplished and disseminated. And there appears to be no reason whatsoever not to try it. Just avoid breaking laws, and you’re good to go.

The best defense: A damned sensitive bullshit meter and the willingness to check out people before you talk to them. It also wouldn’t hurt to have the kind of personal values that eschew name-calling, demonizing, and incivility. I mean really — a Muslim group wants to give $5 million to NPR? You couldn’t see that one coming? Geez…

Technorati Tags: Journalism, Media Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric