Journalists Join the Dark Side

NBC News correspondent Dan Abrams

(Photo from whereistheoutrage.net)

Veteran journalist and former NBC News legal correspondent Dan Abrams is jumping ship after 15 years in the industry and moving to the private sector. His newly formed media consulting firm, Abrams Research, is actively recruiting working journalists, bloggers and radio and news personalities as "media experts" to advise their corporate clients.

In a New York Times article, Abrams said there is "an enormous number of very talented, experienced media professionals around the world who would be ready, willing and able to advise businesses on media strategies" and bragged that in just five days, Abrams Research received over 600 applications, many of them household names in journalism.

Having endured the treachery of home town heroes as a sports fan, I understand loyalty only goes so far and sometimes you need to think with your wallet. As the economy worsens, journalists, especially print journalists, aren’t going to pass up the opportunity to make some money on the side as consultants. The real problem here is that instead of defecting completely, they’re becoming double agents, cutting through the spin as journalists during the day and helping companies dish it out as consultants by night.

In his Gawker post "Dan Abrams’ Ring of Media Informants," Ryan Tate sums up the issue at hand: "But a general magazine editor, or blogger… really should not be getting paid to answer questions about how a publication — like, say, his — might cover something when he may well have to decide how to cover that very thing a short time later, with the added complication of having been paid/bribed by the subject."

Abrams insists that his company's ethics guidelines include "a ban on full-time journalists consulting with companies in their area of coverage." But consultants need to be familiar in the area they’re advising on. This becomes a difficult line to toe: an expert must be familiar enough with a topic to know what they’re talking about, but also be sure that they will not to be asked to cover it.

Conflict of interests aside, I’d say it’s impossible to be a media consultant for corporations and a good journalist at the same time. Call me naïve, but hopefully a good journalist is motivated by the belief that a healthy and free press is important to a democracy and a public service to the electorate. A media consultant, on the other hand, helps companies skew media coverage to their favor. It views media is a tool to increase business. Aren't these two attitudes mutually exclusive? Could they both exist in one person?

According to former Washington Post VP Ben Bradlee, a good reporter has "got to love what they're doing; they've got to be serious about turning over rocks, opening doors. The story drives you." This type of doggedness only graces those who actually believe in what they’re doing. I think it's safe to assume that those journalists applying to Abrams Research don't fit into this category.

Back to the Filter...

(A collage of retired military members working now as analysts on various newscasts. Photo courtesy of the New York Times)

The NY Times had an elaborate front-page look (over 5,000 words!) at a potential conflict of interest between an NBC analyst and opinion writer and the war on terrorism. This is the follow-up to the original story the paper ran in April about the same topic: the use of military analysts by the mainstream media and their relationships with the government and their personal investments in military conflicts.

The paper's latest report's particular focus is on General Barry McCaffrey. Currently, he is an analyst for NBC and a writer. What's the catch? He serves on various boards with direct ties to the military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He sat on the advisory council of Veritas Capital (a company that acquires contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan), was a chairman of Global Linguist (a group that worked out a multi-billion dollar deal to provide translation services in the war-torn areas) and has consulted for Defense Solutions, a military contracting organization. (Thanks, Politico.)

On his own personal website, McCaffrey does list some of his associations. But not all. In particular, he doesn't mention his relationship to the second largest contracting firm in Iraq: Veritas Capital, or his clients. And on NBC, the organization has never once mentioned any of these potential conflicts of interest.

In December of 2006, when the bi-partisan Iraq Study Group advocated for a 2008 withdrawal from the country, General McCaffrey couldn't have been clearer in his dissent for the finding. On NBC, he said, were the US to leave Iraq, the country would be a "Pol Pot's Cambodia." McCaffrey also rejected the idea that the White House was too isolated and that in fact, Cheney and Bush were both still objective and alert to the conflict.

The question here is: is McCaffrey voicing his very public opinion about the war on terror and his advocacy for a prolonged military presence there because he believes it's what's best (he's showed up almost 1,000 times on NBC over the course of the conflict!), or on the flip side, is he looking for the quick buck that's assuredly going to him as the US continues to fight?

Perhaps the bigger problem here, is that the NY Times has been practically the only major member of the media that has covered this story. Politico (it's where I came across this information), to its credit, has reported on each of the Times's two long pieces. But where's the rest of the media? Senator John Kerry has called their response to the story "deafening."

So, if I've got it correctly...NBC (and others) is using military analysts with clear stakes in Iraq and Afghanistan to provide us with their opinions about the war. No one's talking about who these people are connected to. And other news organizations aren't even covering this story. In fact, big-shots like Brian Williams and Steve Capus, president of NBC News, have even defended people like him and their impartiality.

This isn't good news for us, that's for sure. Isn't this what Noam Chomsky's so worried about---who's talking to who and why (aka sourcing)?

Rise of the Celebrity

This week Roger Ebert rants on Chicaco Sun Times, about how the AP degrades newspaper film critics by making them write about celebrity gossip. What better way to drive up ratings for the dying newspaper than feature Justin Timberlake's dog walks?

He asks, why bother with antertainment beat at all, if all the audience wants is the juicy celebrity in every aspect of the media? Ebert quotes:

The CelebCult virus is eating our culture alive, and newspapers
voluntarily expose themselves to it. It teaches shabby values to young people,
festers unwholesome curiosity, violates privacy, and is indifferent to
meaningful achievement. One of the TV celeb shows has announced it will cover
the Obama family as "a Hollywood story." I want to smash something against a
wall.                                                                        photo courtesy of jackbook.com
                                                                                            Palin the celebrity.

One may ask, why is the actor or actress' personal life more interesting to cover than the movie that they are star in? The movies storyline, cinematography, and their acting abilities seem to be trivial compared to the tabloids. More to the point, the celebrity culture is infantalizing readers, says Ebert. he says, "it is about the failure of our educational system. It is not about dumbing-down. It is about snuffing out."

Take the 2008 presidential campaign, for example. If the election was a movie, then everything that led up to it, seemed more or less like tabloids on the celebrity candidates. if you think about it, what really made Palin's character? Her infinite number of scandals like how her campaign spent more than 150K on her clothes or her teenage pregnant daughter have driven enough traffic for both presidential candidates alone. According to PEJ's news index, 24% of the newhole consisted of Palin as the VP candidate. So feeding the public infantalizing news may be boosting sales. But it is driving entertainment and even politics down the drain?

HuffPo Hits Jackpot, Makes Promises

SNL Does Arianna Huffington

After experiencing stellar traffic growth -- 474% since September 2007 -- Huffington Post has scored a new investment to the tune of about $20 million, paidContent.org and Times UK are reporting.

In the Times UK story, it is suggested that the new funds will go toward developing various United States local news sections, as well as more investigative journalism projects. While admirable in theory, I don't think anyone is looking at a site like HuffPo for any substance. Yet.

As the Paid Content posts states, "HuffPo’s real daily value is in its aggregation and the spin on it, and investigative, while admirable, will not bring in the dollars needed."

And while sites like HuffPo and Drudge are certainly invaluable for a frantic link-jumper and news junkie like myself -- and obviously thousands more during up-t0-the-second election coverage -- but why can't there be a balance between journalistic fast food and the fresh grown organics? The quick links and off-the-cuff commentary are the main pull, sure, but why not use those ad dollars and large investments for the bettering of the field. Imagine the stories Perez Hilton could bankroll.

New investigative outlets like the well-funded ProPublica and the budding Real News Project have a solid ideological basis of unadulterated journalism for the people, but they lack a hook. It is exactly the vaguely trashy, quite unabashedly partisan voice that HuffPo provides that can make long form, expensive investigative journalism and local news once again a viable business option.

Notes on a Scandal

I think it's time to think about what we are seeing or to turn our eyes away.

(Courtesy of Wired.com)

It wouldn't be earth shattering to suggest that people love scandal, but in the latest New York Review of Books, Mark Danner writes that the scandal filling our airwaves today is not the same scandal we once loved.

Historical scandals, like Vietnam and Watergate provided an neat and tidy arc of revelation, investigation and catharsis for the public. Journalists would break the story before the press, Congress, courts and American people would step in to "construct a story of grim truth that citizens can in common accept." Upon the creation of this truth, a sentence could be handed over, shame and wrongdoing purged; life can return to a state of relative normalcy and grace once more.

While this once reigned true, Danner believes that scandal reigns in today's society for a different reason. We are in an age of perpetual scandal and "Scandal is our growth industry," he declares. Once a means of release, the state of permanent of "frozen" scandal has since presented itself to the media as a point of metastasizable, perpetual public interest. "The gift that never stops giving," "unpurged and unresolved," scandal transforms from a political reality to a commercial fact.

But scandal is nothing more than a myth, he says. Calling on images of power, media and the masses as forces of justice and rectification: as soon as we are alerted, there is no wrongdoing is too difficult to overturn. This is the selling point for the media.

Danner hypothesizes:

The obstacle to this natural self-cleansing of our political life can only be the people's ignorance. For if they know, and the corruption and scandals persist--well, how can the people be good? No, what must be missing then--so the myth implies--is clarity, revelation. What is missing is the gatekeepers of our ignorance whose duty it is to draw the curtain back from scandal and show the people everything, thereby starting the polity on the road to inexorable justice. Information is all. 

A wise mass media has noted that perpetual scandal can give them the soul power of expiation: in order for society to be cleansed, they must let us know where to begin. The natural sense of good that once proved central in scandal has been rendered irrelevant without information--information only the press can provide, that is. And so, once happy mythmakers, journalists have been reduced to scandal-mongering; scandal, after all, denotes success.

Scandal is cheap, easy and enduring. Complicated plots feed the "verbal slash and parry" that dominate televisions while providing room for subplots and spinoff stories. Tapping into an unending scandal releases an endless stream of news, and for those of us stuck in the past, it offers hope of societal cleansing. Unfortunately, that may be nothing more than an illusion.

Perhaps this past week’s resurgence of Eliot Spitzer and Ashley Dupree prove a relevant example. Caught in an unfortunate position last spring, the two have been dragged along by the media. Months and months later, we are still on the edge of our seats, listening to justifications and watching for missteps. While Spitzer and Dupree could, at this point, remain out of site, the media keeps dragging them into the spot light in hopes of letting their story play out into “something one can stand on either side of,” or better yet, “Something we can live with.”

So in the age of Frozen Scandal, Spitzer and Dupree will never be written off as wrongdoers; and guilt will never be definitely proven and shut but instead continually spun into new lessons to be learned. “Can you not hear the wheels of scandal spinning?,” Danner asks, “It is the music of our age.” We can't avert our eyes, but what we are seeing is no longer clear.  The media, the “gatekeepers of our ignorance,” are no longer drawing the curtains to expose and clear away scandal, but covering up what could be a dystopian stasis with a phantasmal and unending blanket of scandal.  Does the comfort we seek in scandal result only from a pataphorical truth? It's time to ask for more--or maybe to simply turn our eyes and look for ourselves.

Obama must move to the center - smart advice or media myth?

Obama and his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, a moderate Democrat and a usual-suspect around Washington 

(Photo from Chicago Tribune)

In this myth-debunking article, Huffington Post’s media critic Norman Solomon takes the mainstream media to task for advising Obama to steer to the right during the first years of his presidency. He cites a San Francisco Chronicle article that said political observers say Obama “must tack toward the political mainstream to avoid miscalculations made by President Bill Clinton, who veered left and fired up the 1994 Republican backlash.”

Solomon explains they have their history wrong. After his election, President Clinton actually did drift to the center: once elected, he changed his position on gay rights in the military and quickly rescinded his nomination of leftist law professor Lani Guinier after clamoring from the right. After waging a “put the people first” campaign, he stacked his economic positions with private-sector bigwigs and passed NAFTA, a corporate fairytale of a trade-agreement. Nonetheless, the myth remains that it is imperative for a Democratic president-elect to move to the right or they’ll have a mutiny on their hands. Democrats may have been crushed in the Senate races two years later, but it wasn't because Clinton was too liberal.

Solomon says that “warning Democratic politicians against being ‘liberal’ or moving ‘left’ remains a time-honored -- even compulsive -- media ritual” and predicts that the media will again propagate this myth and be pleased with Obama for not lurching to the left as he fills his positions with experienced Washington and corporate mainstays.

Surprise, surprise, The New York Times remarked that from the looks of his early staff and cabinet picks, Obama “is planning to govern from the center-right of his party [and] surrounding himself with pragmatists rather than ideologues.” Instead of nailing Obama on not delivering the “change” he promised, they praise him for assembling a politically dynamic team. The headline says it all: “Obama Tilts to Center, Inviting a Clash of Ideas.” Unfortunately, it looks like Solomon may not be far off the mark.

Though the media are acknowledging Obama’s moderate movements, it’s discouraging to see that they are convinced a candidate cannot remain true to his campaign promises without committing political suicide. The media shouldn’t praise a candidate who’s been peddling change for playing it safe and so far, Obama has received too few slaps on the wrist.

A Skeptical Blog

Courtesy of Babble.com

My interest in the offshore drilling debate introduced me to the work of John Tierney, who often disputes scientific studies published in the media. For example, Tierney’s most notorious article, “Recycling is Garbage,” argues that recycling is not cost effective and philosophically unsound. In 1996, this article probably lifted guilt off the shoulders of millions of people who don’t recycle.

In a sense, he works against the fear-mongering news media described in Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear. Part of this book argues that America’s culture of fear comes from the media, which “bombard us with sensationalistic stories designed to increase ratings.”


But unlike Glassner’s extensive study of the media and surveys from various universities, Tierney’s articles use a “less-than-thorough glance at the research,” according to Daniel Luzer who writes for Polite.

In reference to his arguments for offshore drilling, I’ve found his use of facts to be questionable. For example, in “Global Warming vs. Offshore Drilling,” Tierney dismisses drilling opponents’ fear of oil spills by citing a study from 2003: ““only 1 percent of oil that entered the U.S. waters during the 1990’s came from extraction operations […] it amounted to only 3 percent of the total […] oil as entered through natural seepage from the ocean floor” (italics added).
This reference to a 2003 study regarding statistics of the 1990’s eliminates our consideration of the environmental damages caused by Hurricane Katrina two years after the study. Because the more intensive storms of this decade occurred after the study, the information regarding the 1990’s almost seems irrelevant.

While it’s true that recent oil spills from storms have not impacted the environment as extensively as they did forty years ago, the concern for oil platform damages is not a small worry. When Fernbank science center’s geologist, Dr. Bill Witherspoon reviewed this article, he said, “The 3 percent figure sounds obscenely high to me considering how much oil has been produced. That is an enormous quantity of poison loosed on the environment over time.”

Tierney also uses the idea that statistically, most spills come from tankers bringing oil to the coast, not from platforms off the coast. However, oil platforms built far off the coast rely on such tankers to transport oil from the wells to refineries on land. This statistic might actually include tankers that operate in conjunction with oil platforms, so the increased number of platforms off the continental shelf could remain just as risky as foreign tankers.

I can’t review a huge amount of Tierney’s writing in one post, but for more fact checking, visit Krum’s thoroughly researched blog post on the TierneyLab.

This post reviews Tierney’s skepticism from recycling to global warming, but it leaves out his take on the fuel debate. I’ll forward my thoughts to Krum for his insights.