Journalism lessons from Ireland

Another podcast from Glenn and Helen, this time speaking with some Irish journalists who are here to cover the midterm elections. Money quote:

"I think growing up in Europe, or anywhere in the world, the United States is kind of this big, blank, one-dimensional surface on which you can actually project all of your fears and your dreams. And you can create your own United States because you'll always find a United States to reflect the reality that you believe in.

And part of the problem I think as a journalist - I was here for six years as our Washington correspondent - I always found that the kind of dirty secret among Washington correspondents for foreign media was, you know, you could please with the cliches. You'll always get an applause line, you know, if you get a fat, gun-toting, bible-thumping American, that kind of ascribes to what we've always been brought up to believe in.

The purpose of this trip is to show that there is a nuance, and a subtly, sometimes, even in places we don't expect to see it."

Sounds like many US journalists are apparently trained in the classical, European model of journalism. Of course, that may no longer be working out quite as well as it has in the past.

Quote of the day

Just watched (at 5:12 pm eastern time) an exchange between Wolf Blitzer and Jack Cafferty on CNN. Cafferty went on a rant about Kerry's comments yesterday. Not the comments themselves, of course, but rather their effect:

"Why is John Kerry speaking anywhere about anything? What does he symbolize when it comes to the Democratic Party? Failure. He lost the election in 2004. . .

[Howard Dean should say to Kerry:] 'Go get on your boat. Go fish. Go play soccer. Go out and commune with nature. Sit in the woods until the election is over. Please don't talk. Please don't have your picture taken. Just go away.'

He symbolizes failure. You know, watching the Democrats try to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory is a spectator sport in this country, and here they go, flirting with it again. . . Why is he talking to anybody? . . . Wait till the election is over. It's not helping."

You can almost hear him thinking, "With all the help we're giving you, how can you possibly not win this thing running away? Get out of our way, we'll take care of it." I think he's worried.

I'll look for a video link, and if I can find one will post it.

UPDATE: Welcome Hot Air readers. You might also be interested in GOP senators who are sitting on their cash (here and here), a conspiracy theorist who thinks that the government has a cloaking device, what CBS News thinks of the current Congress, or what Ted Turner had to say about North Koreans being "thin." Enjoy.

UPDATE 2: Here is a link to the transcript. The portion in question is a little less than half way down.

UPDATE 3: Don Imus has advice similar to Jack Cafferty's (via Drudge):

Regarding the contention that this was just a "joke" gone wrong, well, the only person who knows that for sure is Senator Kerry. As for the broader opinions of the military by some on the Left, though, I will direct your attention to some excellent comments by John at Power Line. Money quote:

"Why are liberals so determined to hang on to these discredited stereotypes of the past? I suspect it is because the young men and women who serve in the armed forces are a constant reproach to liberals' facile, politically-motivated pronouncements on foreign policy. Iraq is a disaster (never mind that I voted for it)! But the young men and women who are stationed there don't think so. They re-enlist in remarkable numbers; a large majority believe in their mission; and they are working hard, risking their lives, and making considerable progress on many fronts. So it's helpful for liberals to think: what do they know? They're only soldiers--they must be dumb!"

Obviously there are many people who don't think like that. But I know from my own experiences that such an attitude definitely exists.

UPDATE 4: "Mel Gibson without the booze."

This ad brought to you by the DNC

I had the TV on in the background before while I was on the computer. As you would expect for the week before the election, over the course of an hour there were candidate ads for senate, congress, some state-wide races and some local ones. I wasn't even looking at the screen a few minutes ago when a new ad started with the following voice over:

"Stepping up when the do little congress won't."

OK, must be a Democratic ad for something. It continued:

"On issues like immigration, the minimum wage, stem cell research, and the environment, states are taking the initiative, and California leads the pack."

California? I'm in New York. What candidate thinks they should mention California?

"Tonight, the Golden State's tough new laws, and what they mean for you. When Katie Couric reports from LA on the CBS evening news. See it now."

Wow. And they're surprised that no one trusts them.

How many reporters does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Jack Shafer has a very good piece today on the reaction of many journalists to job cuts in newsrooms. I think it builds nicely on some things I said in an earlier post. Shafer makes an excellent point about the number of journalists working today:

"It's hard to sympathize with the woe-is-us crowd of journalists when you learn that the number of full-timers employed by U.S. news-media organizations today has increased by almost 70 percent compared with 1971, according to The American Journalist in the 21st Century. The book doesn't even include in its census the new jobs in online newsrooms or at the business-wire upstart Bloomberg News."

After I wrote that earlier piece, I saw somewhere a similar figure for the overall growth of journalism jobs over the past few decades. Can't seem to track it down now, though.

Of course, this ignoring of the overall jobs picture is the same mistake that most of the media makes in their general economics coverage - focusing on job losses at specific companies, while ignoring more-than-offsetting job creation at other (typically smaller) firms. In that light, maybe it isn't that surprising that they ignore the journalism job figures, too.

Why does Shafer think that journalists do this?

"Why do so many journalists inflate the importance of their role in our culture? Well, dentists brag about the miracle of dentistry, don't they? I suspect that the egotistical proclamations of journalists really mask the low esteem they hold for the total product they produce. If you fillet the average daily newspaper—cutting out the sports section, the comics, the crossword, the horoscope, the opinion pages, the entertainment coverage, and the special sections devoted to home, dining, medicine, travel, cars, real estate, and TV listings—relatively little of the democracy-enhancing, life-sustaining reportage they boast about actually gets printed."

And that, in the end, has to be what hurts the most.

Brave, very brave

Other bloggers have already made similar points, but I just had to briefly chime in: under what rationale does CNN decide to show videos of snipers shooting American troops, but not images of cartoons mocking Mohammed?

"CNN has chosen to not show the cartoons out of respect for Islam."

Does it follow then that showing the video displays a lack of respect for the military? A few days later they offered a more detailed explanation:

"CNN is not showing the negative caricatures of the likeness of the Prophet Mohammed because the network believes its role is to cover the events surrounding the publication of the cartoons while not unnecessarily adding fuel to the controversy itself."

I guess they have no concern that showing sniper attacks on troops might, oh, I don't know, "add fuel" to any controversy about the war?

The point I want to make is not whether or not they should have shown the video today. Rather, I wanted to highlight that decision in the context of the earlier cartoon call.

CNN - they will speak truth to power. Unless, of course, the power threatens to kill them.

Excellent, excellent questions

"But the real problem is within the intelligence community. Selective CIA leaks are the equivalent of intelligence officials running information operations on the American public. John Negroponte and Pat Kennedy, how long are you going to allow these leaks to continue? Do you really think it healthy in a democracy for the CIA and DIA to stray from intelligence collection and analysis into politics? How many investigations have you launched? How many have concluded?" (link)

Don't hold your breath for any answers.

UPDATE: Related thoughts well worth your time can be found here.

Whither the newspaper?

Michael Kinsley tackles the state of the newspaper industry in Time:

"It seems hopeless. How can the newspaper industry survive the Internet? On the one hand, newspapers are expected to supply their content free on the Web. On the other hand, their most profitable advertising--classifieds--is being lost to sites like Craigslist. And display advertising is close behind. Meanwhile, there is the blog terror: people are getting their understanding of the world from random lunatics riffing in their underwear, rather than professional journalists with standards and passports."

For the record, I rarely riff in my underwear. What I want to concentrate on, though, is the economic situation newspapers find themselves in.

To me, the interesting thing here is that through historical accident and the nature of print distribution, the classified business and the news business became tied. There is no reason that they have to be, and - more to the point - no reason to think they ever will be again. The part of the newspaper that Kinsley wants to keep (the original reporting) has never paid for itself. It has always been supported by the fairly profitable business of classified advertising. This accidental relationship has allowed professionals in the business to delude themselves regarding what people were actually paying for.

Here's the truth that hurts: people don't apparently value the journalism that many papers produce as much as the journalists think that they should. This fact was able to be obscured for quite a while by the fact that people did value something else the newspaper provided (classified advertising) quite a bit, and tolerated the cross subsidization as a result. That subsidy relationship has now been broken, and how much most people are actually willing to pay for the news is becoming clear - not that much. That smarts if you are a reporter or editor, but then again I'm sure it also smarts if you work at GM and watch people not want to spend money on your product either. Complaining about the fact that it hurts, though, is not a strategy for future success.

Options? Assuming that the classified business is for all intents and purposes lost, one option would be to try to tie news reporting to something else that people value. Nothing likely to work comes to mind. They might also become trophy properties (as Kinsley alludes to), where rich people buy them for the ego boost and then proceed to subsidize them from their existing wealth (similar to many sports teams). Alternatively, they will have to "right-size" themselves to a level that can be supported by the people who want to read them.

On this last point, though, I am curious about what a completely "e-paper" might look like. There certainly is a market for "serious" news; the problem is that that market is a lot smaller than traditional newspapers have let themselves believe. The good news, though, is that those "serious news" consumers are a lot more technologically literate than the average population, and probably have higher average incomes as well (making them a potentially attractive online advertising demographic). Move completely online, and your eliminated costs include paper, printing plants, and a lot of the layout work. Would that be enough to support a smaller operation, but one more focused on the actual news? I don't know, but I do know that there are a lot of people around the country right now that better start thinking about it.

By the way, if you are interested in another take on Kinsley check out Ace of Spades, who has thoughts more from the journalistic aspects of the issue.

The media must hate the internet

Here are two modest examples, but the more you pay attention to this kind of stuff, the more things like this you find:

• Here the AP is caught changing titles pretty significantly in an article about some poll numbers. Ah, wishful thinking.
• Here is a different sort of problem, with CNN tailoring headlines by geography.

Listen, these two aren't the biggest deals in the world, and we'll spend time (maybe lots of time) in the future on what I think are much more serious examples of media bias, etc. That said, you just know that the new level of accountability that the internet and other resources demand drives the traditional media outlets nuts.