This is from the editor of io9 a very interesting web site on cutting edge culture,design and ideas. Viral Journalism and the Valley of Ambiguity 12 Once you've worked as a writer and editor in the world of social media for a decade, the way I have, you start to notice patterns. For example, there are some stories that will never go viral, even if they are brilliant in every measurable way. That's because they lie in the "valley of ambiguity," which is sort of like the uncanny valley for viral journalism. If a story is circulating in social media, even if it's a fancy character study for the New Yorker or incisive cultural analysis for the Atlantic, it's always chasing the viral tornado. Before the 21st century, stories became popular because people talked about them in other publications, or shared magazine and newspaper clippings with friends. Today, stories become influential if people share them on social media like Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, and Twitter. In most cases, nobody is going to read a story if nobody shares it. This leaves a lot of writers and readers wondering why the hell some stories go everywhere and some never make it past three likes on Facebook. Here is one theory, based on my own anecdotal experiences and those of many other people I've talked to in the industry. It's not a scientific theory, and you'll notice that the diagram I have used to illustrate it is something that began on the back of a napkin. Still, I think it can help us make sense of the way that virality has changed journalism in the 21st century. Viral Journalism and the Valley of Ambiguity SEXPAND RELATED Where Memes Really Come From Though history will probably remember Richard Dawkins as the activist who spearheaded a new atheist movement, there is something far more famous and… Read… Basically, there are two kinds of stories that tend to go viral. On one side of the diagram, you can see the most obvious genre of viral story: the meme, or the single, simple unit of information that we share because it's funny or makes us feel good. The purest version of the meme online is the LOLcat, usually just a picture with a caption, which is the perfect pick-me-up bit of portable content. What the LOLcat shares with self-help guides and human interest stories is an invitation to credulous enjoyment. TED videos, often seasoned with cheery platitudes, become viral for the same reason that grumpy cat pictures do. They don't ask us to think critically — just to enjoy, or be amused and enlightened without the time-consuming labor of skepticism and doubt clouding our clicks. Why do we want to share these stories? Because in some sense they are not open to interpretation. You don't have to worry whether your friends will wonder why you shared this – it's obvious. The same goes for viral journalism on the other side of my chart. These stories, like explainers, how-to guides, Mythbusters-style debunkery, and truth-telling investigative journalism, are in some ways the opposite of a stupid video or a LOLcat. They are about truth, rather than amusement. But in fact, they go viral for exactly the same reason LOLcats do. They are not open to interpretation. In fact, the main goal of a lot of these stories is to clear up confusion the way Nate Silver did during the election in his analysis of polling. A how-to story is all about leading you through a process without getting you lost. A hard-hitting investigative report that uncovers a nugget of genuine truth is the ultimate viral hit. It's a story that promises we can at last know exactly what has happened, or how to feel about something. We want to share these stories because they appeal to our urge to have the definitive explanation of what is true and right. To share a story is in part to take ownership of it, especially because you are often able to comment on a story that you are sharing on social media. If you can share a piece of information that's an absolute truth – whether that's how to uninstall apps on your phone, or what the NSA is really doing – you too become a truth teller. And that feels good. Just as good as it does to be the person who has the cutest cat picture on the Internet. So that leaves us with the stories that don't make it. These are the articles and essays that have fallen into the valley of ambiguity – reports on important scientific findings with difficult-to-interpret results, political news with a long and tangled back story attached, and opinion essays that require us to account for points of view that may be unfamiliar or strange. There is no satisfaction in knowing that the Higgs boson has sort of been found, but sort of not. And nobody wants to risk alienating friends with a piece of opinion writing that might or might not be offensive – you're not even sure. Who wants to share a story that can be misunderstood? Nobody wants to take ownership of a political article where there is no truth – only further information, and complex developments that even experts can't agree on. It's not that we don't want to be the bearers of bad news. In fact, plenty of stories that go viral are nasty, negative and mean. We just want to share stories that make us seem like we know something. Most of all, we don't want to say something that we didn't intend. And that is the danger with any story that falls into the valley of ambiguity. We can't be sure how people will take it. We don't want to risk our reputations on a story that can be taken more than one way. More than anything, the fear of a smeared reputation is what creates that dip in virality. Sharing a story means that in some sense we stake our reputation on it. That's why sharing a story is not the same thing as enjoying a story, reading a story, or even learning from a story. I know for certain that there are plenty of stories that get read, but not shared. I have seen the statistics on io9's back end. But when we measure a story's success by virality, which is what we must do in the age of social media, the content of our popular culture changes. We measure success by what people aren't afraid to share with their neighbors, rather than what people will read on their own. Annalee Newitz is the editor-in-chief of io9, and this is her column. She is also the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive A Mass Extinction.

This is an excellent look at the heat a real reporter has to deal with, who tries to accurately report, doing her job well from the excellent American media company (NPR) National Public Radio: A Fair And Balanced Look At Mara Liasson by November 07, 2013 5:12 PM National political correspondent Mara Liasson on election night in 2012. National political correspondent Mara Liasson on election night in 2012. Stephen Voss What to do about NPR's national political correspondent ? This is a regular issue raised by some NPR listeners who object to Liasson's second role as a contributor to Fox News. They say that she, like Fox, tilts to the right. "Would you please consider letting Mara Liasson go?" wrote listener Michael Duba in what is typical of the several complaints that come in almost every time Liasson does a story. "Her affiliation with the Tea Party channel and willingness to just go along with whatever is said by others on the fake news shows she appears on has ruined whatever small remaining shreds of credibility she had left." Joan Jones, of Madison, Wis., wrote, "If Ms. Liasson wishes to be respected, I suggest that she refrain from using Republican or 'Tea Party' talking points in her reporting. In her reporting on the Affordable Care Act in particular, you are obligated to go beyond the talking points to get to the truth of an issue." I have followed Liasson's work closely for the last 10 weeks, through four of the most ideologically and politically contentious minefields imaginable. These were the considerations to attack Syria, the government shutdown, the threat of debt default and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. As a national political correspondent, Liasson filed frequently on each. I also have looked at some of her contributions to Fox, where she is called on as an outside political expert. My conclusion on Liasson's work is simple: Applaud her. I find that her NPR stories were straightforward and based on solid reporting. Her Fox contributions were the same. She was smartly analytical, but did not take a position on issues or veer into opinion. Just as important, she did not tilt or load her characterizations of political figures such as President Barack Obama or Republican leaders. Much of the complaints about Liasson, it seems to me, are really about Fox. The complaining listeners do not like Fox's rightward stance, and especially the incendiary views of some of its prime time talk show hosts such as Bill O'Reilly. They tar Liasson by association. The criticism is partly an extension of the three years ago. Whatever you may think of how NPR handled that case, it is very different from this one. Williams did much outright opinion commentary; Liasson is strictly a reporter. NPR's senior vice president for news,, stood behind Liasson in a note to me, saying: Mara is a first class reporter. She has a keen understanding of national politics and does a beautiful job helping our audience make sense of what's unfolding in Washington and across the country. As for her Fox appearances, we reviewed this issue when we were re-writing NPR's ethics guidelines in 2011 and early 2012. We think Mara's TV appearances are fine. There too, she does a very good job sharing her knowledge, insight and reporting expertise. We view this as an opportunity for a broader audience to benefit from NPR's editorial depth. One concern about any NPR reporter appearing in another news outlet is whether she or he is put in a potentially compromising position. As NPR's : ...[W]e refrain from appearing on television discussion shows where the format is designed to produce heated, highly political debates. We go on TV to talk about our reporting and the news of the day, not to offer opinions (with the obvious exceptions of our music, arts and books critics — and, if any are hired, news commentators). If asked to offer opinions when on the air, we rely on our reporting and offer context — citing, for example, what public opinion polls signal about how an issue is playing rather than our personal opinions. From what I could see, Liasson was not put in positions by Fox interviewers that violate the handbook, though I acknowledge that my review of her Fox work was limited. Some liberal listeners of NPR may not want to hear what Jones above calls "Tea Party 'talking points.'" Listeners are right to be concerned about the uncritical reporting of misleading claims and half truths made by any political group. But Liasson is a political reporter whose job precisely is to report and analyze political maneuverings. Others at NPR are the experts on issues such as Syria and health care, which they dissect in other stories. This is not to say that political stories should not add context on issues, and many of Liasson's stories did. Liasson in all her reports was a remarkably cold-eyed analyst. Going back to the Syria coverage, for example, she : President Obama has had a tough year. He failed to pass gun legislation; immigration reform has stalled in the House. He barely escaped what would have been a humiliating rejection by Congress on his plan to strike Syria. Just this week, his own Democrats forced Larry Summers - the president's first choice to head the Federal Reserve - to withdraw. This might seem negative about Obama, but it is a fair and accurate summary of events. She is hardly kinder to Republicans. She came back in the same story to note "Republican chaos" over the government shutdown and threatened debt default. "The president is on firmer footing with the public who may not like Obamacare, but don't want it repealed or defunded," she said, reporting what polls show. She concluded: "President Obama is willing for now to let the Republicans flirt with the unpopular and dangerous possibilities of a government shutdown and a debt default." in August, Liasson said of the president's reversals over Syria that "this is a box entirely of President Obama's own making" — a harsh judgment perhaps, but again a true one. In October, , she said during the government shutdown that now it was the Republicans who were in a "box they've gotten themselves in." All this is not what some critics and I call "false equivalence": giving all sides equal time, even those who are demonstrably wrong. It is accurate analysis that captures the flailing on both sides as they maneuver for political advantage or try to avoid political blame. Or look at how Liasson on the Republican charge that Obama is to blame for the debt crisis because of his unwillingness to negotiate with them: Well, let's be very, very specific about what the president has refused to negotiate on. He said he would absolutely not negotiate around the debt ceiling. He said Congress has already spent the money. It's their job to raise the debt ceiling so we can borrow the money to cover the bills that they've already incurred. He said he will certainly not negotiate about Obamacare in terms of defunding it or delaying it. But he has said that he would negotiate over the budget. Remember, every time we've gotten up to this brink in the past, we've talked about the grand bargain, where the president would agree to cut entitlements and Republicans would agree to raise some kind of tax revenue. Those talks have always fallen apart, but the president said he's still ready to cut entitlements if Republicans are ready to raise revenues, which they say they are not. Of Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who led the most extreme position of those willing to accept a default on the nation's debt, Liasson reported: It's hard to believe, but I think Ted Cruz, who's been the leader of the stop-Obamacare-at-any-cost caucus, the guy who stood on the floor for 21 hours in the Senate, he has actually come out of this a political winner. Not with the media, not with his Republican establishment colleagues who consider him an annoying grandstander, but certainly with the Tea Party base of the Republican Party, the people who make up the Republican presidential primary electorate - his stock has soared. And you can see that Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, who are the other two senators who are considering running for president in 2016, they have been standing with Cruz all along. This is not Republican cheerleading. It is clear, tough and accurate reporting. The first day that Americans could sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act could have been an opportunity to stake out a position. Instead, Liasson this way: Obamacare is not only the law of the land, it's also, as of today, a practical reality for millions of Americans. But as a political issue, it's far from settled and won't be anytime soon. She was addressing the political question, as opposed to analyzing the rollout of the act itself. But the political story is an important one and part of the rollout — and her job is to examine and explain the politics of such issues. A week ago, , Liasson confronted the revelation that some Americans were seeing their old heath care policies canceled as a result of the Affordable Care Act, in contradiction to what Obama had repeatedly promised — "period," he emphasized. "But that's just not true, in every case," Liasson said flatly and accurately. But then she went on to put the whole issue itself in the sort of admirably fair context that has been missing in so much of the debate: But that's just not true, in every case. What we're talking about here is about 5 percent of the population who are in the private individual market. They don't get their health care through their employer, or through Medicare or Medicaid. And some of them - we don't know how many of them - are seeing their plans canceled when their 12-month contracts come up because their plans don't meet the new standards for coverage in the Affordable Care Act. Now, some of these people are going to have to pay a little more; some of them will pay less. The White House says in the end, more people will end up with better coverage and in some cases, cheaper coverage because of the subsidies. But the fact is, the Affordable Care Act is a disrupter. This is why the White House wanted this rolled out after the president was re-elected. And the problem is that the president raised expectations. He went out and said the website will be as easy to use as buying a plane ticket on Kayak. He said your insurance won't change, if you like it. But health insurance is very complicated. There are premiums, and there are deductibles, and there are co-pays; and the law affects different people in different ways. So for every positive anecdote, you can find a negative one. The president made it sound so simple, and those promises are now coming back to haunt him. She added a coda the next day on that is about as insightful and honest as you can get: Well, he's got to fix the website; that's the first thing. But in a year from now, when we have the 2014 elections — and this will be the first time that there will be electoral verdict on the actual health care law. It's always been theoretical; you know, what people think about the law without the law being in effect. This time, it's on the ground. People are going to be able to touch it and feel it and experience it. He has to hope that the kinks are ironed out and that net — net — people think this law is a good thing for them.

And via The Tyee:Canada drops to 20th spot in world press freedom index By Crawford Kilian Published October 10, 2013 03:45 pm | 5 Comments Canadian press freedom has fallen from 10th in the world to 20th, according to a new report from Reporters Without Borders. As a result, Jamaica now has the highest press freedom in the Americas. According to the World Press Freedom Index 2013, Finland continues to enjoy the world's greatest media freedom for the third year in a row. Following it are the Netherlands and Norway. At the bottom of the index are Turkmenistan, North Korea, and Eritrea. The report saw the US rise 15 places, to 32nd. "Its previous year's fall," the report said, "was due to the fact that the crackdown on the Occupy Wall Street movement did not spare reporters in the field. "Canada, on the other hand, fell 10 positions to 20th, losing its status as the western hemisphere's leader to Jamaica (13th). This was due to obstruction of journalists during the so-called 'Maple Spring' movement and to continuing threats to the confidentiality of journalists' sources and internet users' personal data, in particular, from the C-30 bill on cyber-crime." According to the Press Freedom Index on the RWB website, the top ten countries this year are Finland, Netherlands, Norway, Luxembourg, Andorra, Denmark, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, Iceland, and Sweden. Canada now ranks between Namibia and Belgium. Australia is in 26th place, the United Kingdom in 29th, and the US in 32nd. While the report praised Israeli media freedom, "the Israel military's targeting of journalists in the Palestinian Territory" pulled it to 112th place. Japan's ranking fell sharply to 53rd, "affected by a lack of transparency and almost zero respect for access to information on subjects directly or indirectly related to Fukushima. This sharp fall should sound an alarm." Crawford Kilian is a contributing editor of The Tyee. - See more at: http://thetyee.ca/Blogs/TheHook/2013/10/10/Press_freedom_index/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=111013#sthash.EnwNcPkJ.dpuf

Fair and balanced hooie

I Love the quote from Graham Greene "Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism."

A Free Press and the 5th

This following article is a specific American instance, however, similar dilemmas face reporter all over the world. As a free press is essential to a free society a journalist must have access to information and especially hide information that the electorate requires to give informed consent, and make informed selection in the voting process. The Reporter's Fifth Amendment Paradox Posted by samzenpus on Monday September 09, 2013 @12:39PM from the no-information dept. Bennett Haselton writes: "The ongoing case of New York Times reporter James Risen -- whom the U.S. Department of Justice wants to force to testify against one of his sources for leaking classified CIA information -- brings up a more general question about the Fifth Amendment: Why are criminal defendants allowed to remain silent, but not third-party witnesses like Risen?" You'll find the rest of Bennett's story below. In my last article about the Fifth Amendment, I tentatively made the argument that I couldn't see a principled reason why defendants should be able to refuse to answer the question of whether they committed the crime or not. My argument was that you're perfectly entitled to keep information private that is none of anybody's business -- you ought to be able to say, "It's none of your beeswax where I was on the night of the murder" -- however the fact of whether you committed the murder or not, is everybody's business, and I didn't see why the state shouldn't be able to make you choose between saying "Yes, I committed the murder," or "No, I didn't." (If you think the state would then try to convict you of lying if they were determined to railroad you, then my answer would be: If the state is going to railroad you anyway, they can convict you of the murder regardless of whether or not you say you're innocent, so that's not an argument in favor of the right to remain silent. I addressed this and several other counter-arguments in the original article.) However, the argument I'm making this time is different. I'm saying that regardless of how you feel about the Fifth Amendment granting criminal defendants the right to remain silent, there's no consistent argument that would support giving defendants the right to remain silent, that should not also apply to third-party witnesses. Here's the basic paradox: Suppose Bob may have committed a crime, and Alice is known not to be an accomplice but appears to have been a witness. If the courts ask both Bob and Alice the same question -- "Did Bob do it?" -- and both of them refuse to answer, then Bob's right to remain silent is protected under the Fifth Amendment, but Alice can be sent to jail -- despite the fact that Bob may have been guilty, but Alice is innocent! To me, that sounds crazy. (As explained at Findlaw and elsewhere, generally third-party witnesses can be required to testify in a way that defendants cannot. Witnesses can only plead the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if they believe that by answering they could incriminate themselves. If it's generally agreed that a person is a third-party witness who was not guilty of any wrongdoing themselves, they can be forced to answer.) In my first article arguing that defendants should not have the right to refuse to answer "Yes" or "No" as to whether they committed a murder, I wasn't sure of the conclusion, and I invited readers to submit arguments as to why I was wrong (I called the article "Seeking Fifth Amendment Defenders", after all, not "Let's Abolish The Fifth Amendment"). I'm still weighing the arguments coming in, and haven't decided what I believe. However, I'm more sure about the point I'm making this time: that there's no principled, consistent reason to give defendants the right to remain silent but not third-party witnesses. This is after talking to multiple lawyers, law students, and law enforcement officers and asking for any argument to the contrary. There are two counter-arguments that I've received multiple times, that deserve a response: "The defendant's rights as a presumed-innocent citizen have to be protected until they're actually convicted." This is absolutely an important principle in a free society, but generally those "rights" refer to rights that free people have as well, and that are preserved even if you've been arrested -- for example, the right to free speech and the right to be presumed innocent, are all rights that the general public enjoys as well. Insofar as the Fifth Amendment says you have the right to refuse to answer questions about the particular incident that got you arrested, that's a right that innocent third-party witnesses don't have. Even in the most progressive societies, generally speaking criminal defendants don't get more rights than the public. Why should they get that special right in this case? Maybe there's an argument why, but you'd have to at least make that argument. So all the talk about protecting the rights of a criminal defendant, is valid, but it misses the point: Why shouldn't we also give the same rights to a third-party witness who we know is innocent? "It would be very difficult to prosecute many cases without compelling testimony from third-party witnesses." This is true -- particularly in the cases of reporters like Risen, who refuse to divulge their sources' identities, so all you have is the option of compelling the reporter to testify, when you don't even know the defendant's identity yet. However, that's really an argument that if you had to choose between having the ability to force defendants to testify, and having the ability to force third-party witnesses to testify, you would choose the ability to question third-party witnesses, simply because there are often more of them and sometimes they're available even when the defendant isn't. But that's not an answer to my question, which is: Is there an argument from moral or legal principles as to why the defendant is allowed to remain silent but third-party witnesses are not? Obviously, we don't actually have to choose between requiring defendants to answer and requiring third-party witnesses to answer. If we place more importance on giving courts the power to gather information, we should empower them to question third-party witnesses -- but wouldn't that argument also apply to requiring answers from the defendant? On the other hand, if we place more importance on individual liberty, we could grant the right to remain silent to defendants who are presumed innocent -- but shouldn't we grant that same right to third-party witnesses that we know are innocent? The argument that "it would be too inconvenient to prosecute cases if we couldn't require answers from third-party witnesses", is a bit like saying that if we had to choose between the courts having the power to force Eskimos to testify, and having the power to force non-Eskimos to testify, we would choose having the power to force non-Eskimos to testify, just because there are more of them. But obviously that's not a principled argument as to why we should be able to require answers from non-Eskimos but not from Eskimos. Of course, many people's sympathy for James Risen might stem not from the fact that he's a third-party witness (to the crime of leaking information), but from the fact that his supporters are sympathetic to the cause of the anonymous leaker, who was exposing what he believed was a corrupt government. (Risen's book is subtitled "The Explosive Book on the Abuse of Power of the Bush Administration", always a way to get fans.) If James Risen knew the identity of someone who had raped and killed a child, but had gone to jail for refusing to name the suspect, probably a lot fewer people would be hailing him as a hero. But that hypothetical just makes the argument from the opposite direction: If we instinctively feel that third-party witnesses to a murder can be forced to answer questions about what they saw, why can't we make a suspect (who is, after all, a special case of a "potential witness") answer questions about what they know as well? Our courts' current stance on the "right to remain silent" -- that it can be claimed by criminal defendants, but not by innocent third-party witnesses -- seems so absurd to me that I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think it's an example of groupthink, an assumption that we accept because we're immersed in it, but that few people would ever come up with on their own if they were working from first principles about balancing liberty vs. the rights of the state. Here's what I mean by that: Suppose you had been raised in a world that was identical to our own, except that our rights under the Fifth Amendment were inverted, so that innocent third-party witnesses could refuse to answer questions, but criminal defendants could at least be required to answer "Yes" or "No" as to whether they committed the crime. My hunch is that that, instead, would seem natural and sensible. You wouldn't scratch your head and say, "Wait, that seems wrong -- it should be the defendants who should have the right to remain silent, not the innocent witnesses." By contrast, suppose you had been raised in the world that was identical to ours, except that portions of the First Amendment were inverted -- so that we could write any political arguments that we wanted to, but the government demanded prior approval of any fictional stories that we wanted to publish. I would hope that to many people, this would seem like a nagging contradiction, and over time more and more people would point out this inherent hypocrisy and call for restrictions on political thought to be abolished. That's because I think the First Amendment guarantee of free speech is something that can be derived from first principles about individual liberty -- if you want to write something and someone else wants to read it, and neither of you is harming anyone else in the process, it should be nobody else's business, period, full stop. And I just don't see a compelling argument from first principles in support of our current interpretation of the Fifth Amendment -- that we can make third-party witnesses answer questions, but not require the same of a criminal defendant. Regardless, a court has already ruled that James Risen can be made to testify, and barring a successful appeal, he may choose to go to jail rather than reveal his source. The judge writing the ruling against Risen made an interesting slip-up, though, when he wrote: The reporter must appear and give testimony just as every other citizen must. But of course "every other citizen" does not have to give testimony -- if the defendant is ever identified, they won't have to. And that's the inconsistency that I find hard to explain.

This is from the Tyee one of Canada's cutting edge online magazines that covers among other things environmental and social concerns in the West of Canada. Bill Tieleman is on it always. Spot the Political Weasel Words Keep elected officials and the journalists that cover them honest by calling out these slippery lines and clichés. By Bill Tieleman, Yesterday, TheTyee.ca Politician What other political platitudes can you think of? Politician photo via Shutterstock. Related The English Speaker's Guide to Political Journalese How to decipher the noise of political clichés. How to Talk to a Conservative about Climate Change A growing body of social science offers ways to dig the debate out of the 'left-wing ghetto.' The Elements of BC Liberal Style Upon study, the language of the ethnic outreach memo tells us much about the party's inner mind. Read more: Politics, Media, Sign Up for the Tyee Newsletter go Crash Davis: "You're gonna have to learn your clichés. You're gonna have to study them, you're gonna have to know them. They're your friends. Write this down: 'We gotta play it one day at a time.'" Ebby Calvin LaLoosh: "Got to play... it's pretty boring." Crash Davis: "'Course it's boring, that's the point. Write it down." -- Bull Durham, 1988 Ever heard awful, boring, clichéd words coming from the mouths of politicians and journalists? Of course you have -- practically daily if you watch television news and political panels! Even the revered Peter Mansbridge, veteran anchor of CBC's The National, will regularly throw out one of the laziest questions in the media lexicon: "What do you make of this?" Well, I make that it's a classic cliché that abdicates the interview entirely to the person asked. But it's hardly the only terrible turn of phrase. For example, has any cabinet minister in recent memory "resigned" because of their role in something gone wrong? No. Instead we hear weasel words like this, after the BC Liberal ethnic outreach scandal earlier this year: "When mistakes occur, and they do, we must confront them and take responsibility for them. I've talked to [John Yap], and he has agreed that he is going to step aside from cabinet," Premier Christy Clark told media in March. "Step aside?" Is he square dancing? Will he step back inside shortly? No, Yap resigned, but don't expect the truth to be told. Unless, of course, a politician is desperately trying to sound sincere in interviews. "To tell you the truth" and "to be honest" or "to be frank" are other classics -- because isn't the politician already supposed to be telling the truth? B.C. Deputy Premier Rich Coleman is a master, getting two clichés into one short sentence. "I think, quite frankly, the proponent here didn't do a great job of that, to be honest with you," Coleman said in 2011 while referring to a proposed mine. No one is immune Other annoying pseudo-aphorisms include the catchphrase "but at the end of the day," a signal that after blathering on for ages, a politician or journalist is about to finally, mercifully come to some conclusion that often contradicts what they've previously said. No less an admired columnist as Chantal Hébert is not immune to using a cliché as a journalistic crutch. Writing on federal Conservative challenges in June, Hébert uncorked this one in the Toronto Star. "With ongoing investigations into Senate spending, the upper house will almost certainly continue to give the government more than its share of headaches between now and the 2015 election," Hébert wrote. "But at the end of the day it is the abrupt loss of a chief of staff with a central role in the operations of the government that falls in the potentially more lethal category of political injuries," she concluded, cliché confirmed. Of course, if you are constantly concocting clichés there's only one thing to do -- promise to end the practice "on a go forward basis"! Otherwise, to be honest, at the end of the day, you may have to step aside. [Tyee]

You should read this good in depth report on the first female editor at the New York Times here . http://magazine-directory.com/Newsweek.htm "Good Jill, Bad Jill The Queen of the New York Times by Lloyd Grove.

This is not really a good thing to do I think, however I have just discovered this blogger and find the site and the content very good and thought you might want a look and then regularly check it out. FAIR BLOG Jul 24 2013 Nate Silver Didn't Fit In at the New York Times Because He Believed in the Real World By Jim Naureckas 26 Comments Nate Silver Nate Silver (photo: JD Lasica) In retrospect, Nate Silver's move from the New York Times to ESPN is not too surprising; there's really not too much to say about electoral polling in non-election years, whereas sports (which are what got Silver interested in number-crunching to begin with) generate statistics all year every year. And Silver's new employer is going to let him write about whatever interests him: political forecasting as well as sports, along with economics, say, or the weather (Guardian, 7/22/13). (Hopefully not too much about the weather.) I did find New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan's comments (7/22/13) on Silver's departure interesting; Silver "went against the grain for some at the Times," as the headline of her post put it. Sullivan wrote: A number of traditional and well-respected Times journalists disliked his work. The first time I wrote about him I suggested that print readers should have the same access to his writing that online readers were getting. I was surprised to quickly hear by e-mail from three high-profile Times political journalists, criticizing him and his work. They were also tough on me for seeming to endorse what he wrote, since I was suggesting that it get more visibility. Sullivan doesn't detail what kind of complaints these journalists had about Silver's work–which is perhaps an indication that she didn't find it too persuasive–but around that time, shortly before the 2012 election, well-known media figures from a variety of outlets were making a fairly consistent critique. Here was the Washington Post's Dana Milbank (FAIR Blog, 11/5/12): There's Nate Silver, a statistician-blogger at the New York Times, who predicts with scientific precision that President Obama will win 303 electoral votes and beat Romney by 2 percentage points in the popular vote…. The truth is anybody who claims to know what is going to happen on Election Day is making it up and counting on being lucky. And MSNBC's Joe Scarborough (FAIR Blog, 11/2/12): Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they're jokes. And the Times' own David Brooks (FAIR Blog, 11/2/12): If you tell me you think you can quantify an event that is about to happen that you don't expect, like the 47 percent comment or a debate performance, I think you think you are a wizard. That's not possible. The thing is, Silver didn't think you could use polls to project the outcome of elections because he had a mystical faith in the power of polling–rather, he had looked at a large number of pre-election polls and found that they had a consistent correlation to the results on Election Day. But this kind of empiricism is weirdly frowned upon in journalism circles; the pundits denouncing Silver as a joke or would-be wizard in 2012 seemingly didn't even bother to go back and check how he had done in 2008. (He had called all but one state, Indiana, correctly.) This is what I like to describe as the difference between objectivity and "objectivity." Objectivity is the belief that there is a real world out there that's more or less knowable; the "objectivity" that journalists practice holds that it's impossible to know what's real, so all you can do is report the claims made by various (powerful) people. The chief benefit of "objectivity" is that it means you will never have to tell any powerful person that they're wrong about anything. If someone comes along and tells you that, no, there are ways to figure out what's actually happening with the world, and simply repeating without question what interested parties claim to be happening is not a very helpful approach, that's going to be, as Sullivan put it, "disruptive." That's what I think she's really getting at when she says, "I don’t think Nate Silver ever really fit into the Times culture and I think he was aware of that." Filed Under: Election, New York Times, Polling Tagged With: ESPN, Margaret Sullivan, Nate Silver ← Not Much Diversity Among Media's 'Stay-at-Home Dads' Maddow Tells the Story of ALEC and Gun Laws–But Leaves Out One Character → About Jim Naureckas Extra! Magazine Editor Since 1990, Jim Naureckas has been the editor of Extra!, FAIR's bimonthly journal of media criticism. He is the co-author of The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error, and co-editor of The FAIR Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the '90s. He is also the co-manager of FAIR's website. He has worked as an investigative reporter for the newspaper In These Times, where he covered the Iran-Contra scandal, and was managing editor of the Washington Report on the Hemisphere, a newsletter on Latin America. Jim was born in Libertyville, Illinois, in 1964, and graduated from Stanford University in 1985 with a bachelor's degree in political science. Since 1997 he has been married to Janine Jackson, FAIR's program director. You can follow Jim on Twitter at @JNaureckas. Profile Sign in with Twitter Sign in with Facebook or Name EmailNot published Website Comment Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. 26 Replies 25 Comments 0 Tweets 1 Facebook 0 Pingbacks Last reply was 1 hour ago Snowshoe 2 days ago Not fitting in is a badge that Silver should wear with pride. Blair Houghton 2 days ago Judith Martin fit in with the Times' culture, and the Bush43 White House used her credulity and the paper's credibility to start an illegal war. So, they should be ashamed of that. No Difference 2 days ago Interesting FAIR blog post. Naureckas quoting a NYT journalist commenting on quotes by other NYT journalists on their opinions on Nate Silver. Any chance we could get a FAIR blog entry on the quality of Sullivan's own work, or perhaps an entry about the work of those "top" NYT journalists who have opinions on Nate Silver? Third- and fourth-hand criticism chains don't compel me very much. Buffalo Reader 2 days ago I was amazed when Margaret Sullivan was hired by the NYT. She led an increasingly complacent Buffalo News. While the paper's fiscal performance was reasonable, its content continued to decline under her tenure. Apparently, not pushing people to get actual facts, but just regurgitating press releases and quotes is what passes for journalism. I guess it's much more convenient, it's much easier to hold whatever opinion you want when you don't bother to check reality. Jim Naureckas 2 days ago No Difference: Did you know that we've written more than 500 blog posts on the New York Times? Not to mention Extra! articles, Action Alerts and CounterSpin broadcasts. rinicook 2 days ago ESPN win! NY Times loss! Political prophet sails on… Eric Werner 2 days ago I am aware of Silver only since the last presidential election. If he is a crackpot and has been a lucky guesser, these are not evident in his methodology (http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/methodology/). And he has background in sabermetrics, which concerns mathematical/statistical analysis of baseball and is an academically respected subject (usually taught at the advanced undergraduate or graduate level in math departments). So if his critics have not informed themselves of his political forecasting methodology and have not based their concerns about his work on this information (and especially if they have not at least made serious inquiries into his methodology), it is or should be embarrassing to them and their employers. The reference/link above is very recent and so maybe Silver has not published his ways until now? But that he has at least practical experience with sabermetrics is not news and should at least indicate that he might be more than those critics mentioned in Naureckas' article think that he is. I am not suggesting that his political methodology is an extension of sabermetrics. frozenmonkey 2 days ago Name names, Margaret Sullivan. Who are these three "well-respected" "high-profile" Times political journalists criticizing Nate Silver and his work, that readers might reassess them. Donald 2 days ago I would love to see Silver do a statistical analysis on how often the aforementioned pundits that were talking out of their asses were categorically wrong. Perhaps correlate that with their pay. jackalope 1 day ago It is a scientific fact that you can never be so wrong as to endanger your job if your wrongness is in support of power. Nate's situation proves that you can never be so right as to keep your job if what you're right about is in opposition to the power your employer represents. Joe Irvin Conover 1 day ago Interesting … Joe Irvin Conover 1 day ago Always take the national "media" with a large grain of salt. WiZaRd 23 hours I think we all should follow Silver's gift of prophecy and go against the status quo of conformity. The brainless pundits and think tanks of the Far Right can go roast themselves in a lava pit!! Richard Friedman 23 hours Thing is, most people, and especially journalists, do not understand statistics the way Nate (and any professional statistician) does. Yet they use polls, and report on polls without taking into account any inaccuracies or questionable data the way Nate does. I think the NY Times reporters who complained were afraid of losing their mystique and cred, which was mostly unearned anyway. Glad to see that Nate has found a home where he doesn't have to call it "journalism". Marxo Grouch 22 hours What Milbank, Scarborough, Brooks, et al, are also conveniently ignoring is that Silver repeatedly said that his predictions were not intended to be missives directly from the Oracle. He freely admitted that if it was 99% to 1% on any issue, that still meant that the 1% could happen. Which means that, along with having a better grasp of science than those twerps, he also has a better sense of humility. Jeff Thompson 22 hours The New York Times and it's readers are poorer because the culture at the Times didn't fit Nate Silver's objectivity. Not the other way around. Jeff Thompson 22 hours Most of what goes for campaign reporting has to do with the "horse race" aspect. Conveniently, it's a good way to keep readers interested in the race. And for the election that Nate Silver covered, he paid a lot of attention to the electoral college, not the latest polls on undecided likely voters. So while the election may have looked fairly close from the polls of undecided swing voters, the electoral college was pretty well wrapped up in favor of Obama. If there's a culture in the media, it's to get more readers and viewers, not to be accurate. Elliot Linzer 22 hours I will miss Nate Silver. I just finished reading his book, "The Signal and the Noise." His approach was completely scientific and rational. He was able to apply his statistical analysis to almost every topic imaginable, from baseball to poker, chess, daily weather forecasts, the stock market, and everything up to national elections. This is a major loss for the New York Times and its readers. Kevin Cahill 21 hours It's a big loss for the NYT and for its readers. The real problem is that most journalists don't like numbers. Many are bad at math and never learned any science. That's one reason why we burn more coal than uranium warming the planet and causing an epidemic of lung disease. PaulForChange 21 hours Nate Silver was too scientific in his analysis. You can't use science to justify a prediction if it goes against "conventional wisdom". Thank god he was correct. William Barclay 20 hours Definitely the NYT's loss. This is really a bad decision on the part of the powers that be at the NYT. I and my wife will continue to read the NYT (we live in a suburb of Chicago – that should be enough to tell you why we need an actual newspaper instead of the Chicago Tribune or Sun Times). However, we will certainly not expand to a 7 days sub as the NYT keeps asking us. Bruce Rosen 18 hours Queer, isn't it, who's the straight shooter?! Liz 7 hours The reason journalists don't like Silver is because they need to keep the electoral horse race going during an election, or they are out of a job! This "neck-and-neck" coverage, even when unjustified, keeps folks reading those news sources! michael e 2 hours Love to hear what he thinks about the peeter tweeter repeater in New York.If he picks him to win all you Dems should jump out the window.Dont worry we wont be far behind michael e 1 hour ago As far as Obama….I felt if any candidate could make a dent in the 99% black vote he would get….it would be over.I think Silver knew that that would not change no matter what.Like mississippi in the 50s where a black man would never receive any white votes and a white man would get 99% of the votes from whites.Woman under the age of 30 hurt Mitt.They bought that he hates woman …as silly as that sounds.The percentage of fools who believed this president really never changed either.So was it really a surprise?only to people like me who can't understand an unqualified man who has never succeeded at anything being voted in as top dog.I remember when he said he would not let Detroit go bankrupt and a lib friend thumped the table.To me it was just a blatant lie.But like Weener(who may still win) no lie matters to the ever growing left.And I suppose you deserve what you get.Problem is is i dont!If only you would look at the results that some of these legislators have accomplished and vote on that basis……but Im whistling in your grave yard.You simply can;'t or wont.I left the Dems long ago.Republicans last few years.Entrenched washington one like the other.The tea party is an honest American movement to hold legislators to the fire.If they fail they are gone.Right or left.As long as you on the growing left…people lied to ,and on the government dole more and more continue to vote without thinking,you WILL become a forgone conclusion Rebecca Rens 1 hour ago Nate Silver saw correlations and is a smart young fellow. I applaud his work and I don't care if he fit in at the "Times" among the older writers. I look forward to reading what he will be writing at ESPN.

Have to thank Jeff Jarvis at Google+ for this excellent little essay on one of the key controversies in Journalisms now:Jeff Jarvis Shared publicly - 5:46 AM #StainedGlass There are no journalists, there is only the service of journalism. Yes, I know that in condensed form, that may sound like a parodic tweet. But please consider the idea. Thanks to the Snowden-Greenwald NSA story, we are headed into another spate of debate about who is and isn’t a journalist. I’ve long said it’s the wrong question now that anyone can perform an act of journalism: a witness sharing news directly with the world; an expert explaining news without need of gatekeepers; a whistleblower opening up documents to sunlight; anyone informing everyone. It’s the wrong question when we reconsider journalism not as the manufacture of content but instead as a service whose goal is an informed public. Why must we define a journalist? Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan felt compelled to because the newspaper took it upon itself to decide who may wear the cloak, because of debates about Glenn Greenwald as an advocate, and because of questions of law. Her wise and compelling conclusion: “A real journalist is one who understands, at a cellular level, and doesn’t shy away from, the adversarial relationship between government and press – the very tension that America’s founders had in mind with the First Amendment.” Sadly, we don’t often see that definition of journalism played out from TV or the Beltway or especially the overlap of the two. John McQuaid felt the need to ask why Greenwald is driving other journalists crazy. He concludes that asking who is (and isn’t) a journalist is often “a prelude to delegitimizing their work and what they have to say. It quickly devolves to tribalism.” Read: journalists v. bloggers. Sigh. God help us, Dick Durbin felt empowered to propose that legislators should decide who is (and isn’t) a journalist, though in truth they already are when it comes to deciding who is protected by shield laws. But I certainly don’t want government licensing (or unlicensing) journalists. All that discussion in just a few days. All that rehashing a question that has been asked and not answered — or answered all too often and in too many ways — for years. Enough. Journalism is not content. It is not a noun. It need not be a profession or an industry. It is not the province of a guild. It is not a scarcity to be controlled. It no longer happens in newsrooms. It is no longer confined to narrative form. So then what the hell is journalism? It is a service. It is a service whose end, again, is an informed public. For my entrepreneurial journalism students, I give them a broad umbrella of a definition: Journalism helps communities organize their knowledge so they can better organize themselves. Thus anything that reliably serves the end of an informed community is journalism. Anyone can help do that. The true journalist should want anyone to join the task. That, in the end, is why I wrote Public Parts: because I celebrate the value that rises from publicness, from the ability of anyone to share what he or she knows with everyone and the ethic that says sharing is a generous act and transparency should be the default for our institutions. Is there a role for people to help in that process? Absolutely. I say that news organizations should first help enable the flow and collection of information, which can now occur without them, by offering platforms for communities to share what they know. Next, I say that someone is often needed to add value to that process by: * asking the questions that are not answered in the flow, * verifying facts, * debunking rumors, * adding context, explanation, and background, * providing functionality that enables sharing, * organizing efforts to collaborate by communities, witnesses, experts. So am I just rebuilding the job description of the journalist? I’m coming to see that perhaps we shouldn’t call it that, for it’s clear that the word “journalist” brings a few centuries’ baggage and a fight for who controls it. These functions — and others — need not come from one kind of person or organization. Well but what about the legal question? Shouldn’t we at least have a definition of journalist so we know who is protected by a shield law? No. For that also defines others who are not protected. Those others are sometimes called whistleblowers and instead of protecting them, our government is at war with them and what they share: information, information about our government, information about us, information that will help us better organize ourselves as a free society. No, we should be discussing this question — like others today — as a matter of principle: protecting not a person with a job description and a desk and a paycheck but instead protecting the ideals of a transparent government and an informed society as necessary conditions of democracy. I’m speaking next week before the third World Journalism Education Congress. I was planning to ask them to challenge our industrial age assumptions about the relationships, forms, and business models of news and to reconsider what and how we teach journalism. I was also planning to suggest that if they call their programs “mass communication,” they should change that, since the title itself is an insult to the public we serve. For as Jay Rosen taught me long ago, sociologist Raymond Williams teaches: “There are in fact no masses; there are only ways to see people as masses.” No more. Now I’m wondering whether we should discuss the idea that we’re not journalists and even trying to define a journalist — to fence in the functions and value of the role to a particular job description — is limiting and ultimately defeats the greater purpose of informing society. So what are we? We are servants of an informed society. We always have been. [This post with links: http://buzzmachine.com/2013/06/30/there-are-no-journalists-there-is-only-journalism/ ] Show less 5613

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I know you have all been waiting for this news:Fact: Journalism Is The Sexiest Profession Whether you agree with their “coverage” or not, we can all agree that it’s stinkin’ hot. Photo evidence presented with appalling captions.Check it out for yourself here>http://www.buzzfeed.com/omrirolan/journalism-is-the-sexiest-profession-fact

In the days to come we as reporters will need all the tools that we can get. This is a first feeble attempt:(This is not just the present administration but seems to be an American, Canadian, British trent of government restriction, using the terror threat,the fear threat to restrict and destroy freedom. They won. How Journalists Can Protect Themselves From the U.S. Government By Dan Gillmor | Posted Wednesday, May 15, 2013, at 5:42 PM White House press secretary Jay Carney has recently faced questions related to the Justice Department's subpeona of two months of Associated Press journalists' phone records. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images It is beginning to dawn on America's journalists—a group predisposed, in aggregate, to admire and vote for Barack Obama—that the president and his administration are becoming a clear and present danger to the craft they practice. The Obama Justice Department's collection of vast phone records from the Associated Press, hot news in the past two days, has news people in a tizzy if not a fury. They are right to be angry, if a bit hypocritical given news organizations' widespread indifference to civil liberties breaches that don't affect them so directly. The AP records collection—by most accounts aimed at identifying a leaker inside the government—is an escalation of the administration's unprecedented war on leaks, a war that has made journalists a secondary but no less real target of surveillance. Once they get over being shocked, shocked at the administration's increasingly obvious antipathy toward what they do, American journalists will have to face up to the changed conditions in which they operate. They will have to take many more precautions as they do their work—especially when it comes to the absolutely essential work of finding government whistleblowers. The alternative is being almost entirely neutered, because no whistleblower in his or her right mind today should have much trust in journalists' ability to prevent discovery. The need to beef up journalistic security has been clear for some time. Last year, believable allegations surfaced that Chinese hackers, with likely ties to the Beijing regime, were hacking major news organizations' servers, prompting a flurry of countermeasures that may or may not be working. More recently, hackers apparently tricked their way into getting the AP's main Twitter passwords and then made bogus posts, including one that briefly whacked the financial markets. There were two key lessons for journalists here: a) be certain that they keep their accounts with third-party services under strict control and b) question whether they could afford the blowback from using third-party services that do not themselves employ up-to-date security practices. Now it's time now for U.S. media companies and individual bloggers alike to recognize that they live in an environment in which their own government—not to mention criminal or corporate hackers—may well be using all of the tools at its considerable disposal, legal or not, to spy on them. They will increasingly need to practice their craft here at home as if they were independent journalists or dissidents living under an authoritarian regime. Unless they and their sources are taking extraordinary precautions, journalists should take for granted that most mobile carriers will hand over pretty much anything the government wants, pretty much anytime it asks. This is true of most Internet service providers as well, in part because many the same companies that provide voice-based telecom services. Security experts have been urging journalists—and all of us who value privacy and safety—to think much harder about how we harden our communications against intrusion in general. We can't plan for every contingency, and we have to understand that if a powerful nation-state like this one is willing to break laws and/or work in secret it can get to things others cannot. But we can adapt to various threats. I asked the ACLU's Christopher Soghoian for some advice a year ago, for an article in Columbia Journalism Review, and he offered a several essential suggestions beyond the ones he'd previously made in a New York Times op-ed. For example, he advises against using phones for any conversations with endangered sources unless both sides are using untraceable prepaid devices. He urges folks to use virtual private networks, which encrypt information, but notes that governments (and others) can in many cases still know who's talking to whom. In general, he told me, talk in person if at all possible. Some journalists have taken worthwhile steps. In a noteworthy current example, The New Yorker just launched a "Strongbox" service, which will give sources an anonymous way—if they use it right—to send information to the magazine's journalists. The service leverages the Web-based Tor network, which anonymizes traffic. Every news organization that wants to do its job properly should put systems like this in place. Meanwhile, journalists can find a variety of useful security information from organizations like the Committee to Protect Journalists, which has focused mostly on threats abroad. CPJ's "Journalist Security Guide" is a great place to start.* Two days after the AP phone records handover was made public, the White House tried some damage control. It urged Congress to pass a so-called "reporters shield" law, even though no such proposal has never achieved critical mass in Washington. It might help—a little—if it becomes law. But the administration has pressed for a "national security exception" that, given its record, would be liberally applied. The reality is that journalists need to help themselves, in the United States and everywhere else. We need what they do, and their work is increasingly at risk.

Our world is changing so fast and in a blink everything is lost. Have you read 1984? Well, with great speed, we are arriving. Danger! Obama’s War on Journalists His administration’s leak investigations are outrageous and unprecedented. By Emily Bazelon|Posted Tuesday, May 14, 2013, at 6:32 PM Attorney General Eric Holder has overseen more leak investigations under Obama than were pursued under Bush Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images Attorney General Eric Holder has said that he doesn’t want the Obama administration’s leak prosecutions “to be his legacy.” But he has also trumpeted the cases—six and counting—in response to criticism from Senate Republicans. “We have tried more leak cases—brought more leak cases during the course of this administration than any other administration,” Holder said before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year. This shouldn’t be a source of pride, even the fake point-scoring kind. In light of the Justice Department’s outrageously broad grab of the phone records of reporters and editors at the Associated Press, the administration’s unprecedented criminalizing of leaks has become embarrassing. This is not what Obama’s supporters thought they were getting. Obama the candidate strongly supported civil liberties and protections for whistle-blowers. Obama the president risks making government intrusion into the investigative work of the press a galling part of his legacy. Here’s the official excuse, from the Justice Department’s letter to AP today and from the daily White House press briefing: “The president feels strongly that we need the press to be able to be unfettered in its pursuit of investigative journalism,” press secretary Jay Carney said. “He is also mindful of the need for secret and classified information to remain secret and classified in order to protect our national security interests.” That sounds like a perfectly reasonable balancing, but in practice, it’s not. Between 1917 and 1985, there was one successful federal leak prosecution. The Obama White House, by contrast, has pursued leaks “with a surprising relentlessness,” as Jane Mayer wrote in her masterful New Yorker piece about the prosecution of Thomas Drake. Of Holder and Obama’s six unlucky targets, Drake is the guy who best fits the whistle-blower profile: He gave information to a Baltimore Sun reporter who wrote “a prize-winning series of articles for the Sun about financial waste, bureaucratic dysfunction, and dubious legal practices” in the National Security Agency. After years of hounding, the case against Drake fell apart, and he wound up pleading guilty to one misdemeanor. No jail time. Advertisement The Drake prosecution started under President George W. Bush. So did the leak prosecution of Jeffrey Sterling, the former CIA officer charged with disclosing information about Iran to James Risen of the New York Times. But Obama’s Justice Department has also launched its own prosecutions, as the AP probe underscores. As Scott Shane and Charlie Savage pointed out last year in the New York Times, it was in 2009, the first year of Obama’s presidency, that DOJ and the director of national intelligence created a taskforce that “streamlined procedures to follow up on leaks.” At the same time, the increasing prevalence of electronic records made investigations easier. The result, as Shane and Savage write, is that while the Justice Department used to be “where leak complaints from the intelligence agencies went to die,” now they are being kept alive. Nor is there a law or a Supreme Court reading of the Constitution to kill them. Timothy Lee lays it out nicely on Wonkblog so I don’t have to: You don’t have a right to protect information that you give to someone else. That’s what the Supreme Court thinks phones calls are—the act of dialing. This could apply to the content of email that lives in the cloud—Gmail! Journalists get the benefit of a rule the Justice Department has made for itself, supposedly to prevent interference with the First Amendment–protected work of reporters. The rule says that the attorney general has to approve the demand for records, and that DOJ lawyers have to take all the other reasonable steps they can before drawing up a subpoena, and then write it as narrowly as possible. But the AP probe, and other examples of surveillance of reporters, show that the rules only mean so much. In Tuesday’s letter to the AP, Deputy Attorney General James Cole said that in this case, DoJ “undertook a comprehensive investigation, including, among other investigative steps, conducting over 550 interviews and reviewing tens of thousands of documents, before seeking the toll records at issue.” But that doesn’t really tell us whether this ordering up of phone records was a valid response to an egregious leak that breached national security, or another Drake affair. The AP thinks the Justice Department wants to know how it reported a story in May 2012 about the CIA’s foiling of a plot by al-Qaida’s Yemen affiliate to plant a bomb on a plane. Here’s the story. The AP said at the time that it actually held off publishing for a week, in response to White House and CIA requests, “because the sensitive intelligence operation was still under way.” The government knows things I don’t, of course, but reading the story now, it’s hard to see a threat to national security in the content—it’s just not all that detailed. Whether a leak threatens national security is clearly not the standard Holder and his department are using. And the problem is that the standard is up to them. The 1917 Espionage Act, the basis for most of these cases, was written to go after people who compromised military operations. Back in 1973, the major law review article on that statute concluded that Congress never intended to go after journalists with it, or even their sources. Since then, legal scholars have proposed various ways of narrowing the Espionage Act—University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone wants to limit the law’s reach to cases in which there’s proof that a reporter knows publication will wreck national security without contributing to the public debate. But Congress has done nothing of the sort. Wouldn’t it be nice if the Republicans who are indignant over the AP investigation got serious about reform? Somehow, I doubt it. Instead, with a Democratic White House leading the charge, it’s hard to see who will stop this train. NEXT ITEM IN WEIGEL× Read the Audit of the IRS's Political Scandal Sign up for MySlate to follow all Weigel stories. 922 436

Take a look at this from the New York Times. Change is happening so fast that the cool cutting edge news sources of last week or last year are now sources of ridicule. The major T.V. news outlets in the U.S. have degenerated into a silly joke with their self ejaculated exclusives. Comedy sites,social net works and word of mouth are now the real source of important news. No oversight from what we used to call intelligent educated and experienced editors. Turning the Tables on the News Media Tease By NOAM COHEN Published: April 28, 2013 Much like a friend who can’t let you get to the punch line of a joke without getting there first, the Twitter feed @HuffPoSpoilers takes away the fun of the teasing headlines that The Huffington Post sends out about its articles. On Thursday, for example, when The Huffington Post posted on Twitter, “City council may consider making rifle ownership mandatory,” the HuffPoSpoilers Twitter feed included that original tease and appended the following: “City = Craig, CO (pop. 9,000).” Or on April 4, when it posted, “ ‘Mad Men’ star hints at season six surprises,” HuffPoSpoilers wanted it known that the star was not Jon Hamm or Elisabeth Moss but Ben Feldman, who plays the copywriter Mike Ginsberg. And then there is that deflating feeling produced when a post promising “3 foods that will give you amazingly smooth skin,” is explained simply with “Avocado, honey and sugar.” Twitter, with its strict 140-character limit, may not be great for capturing the nuances of complicated social changes but it seems ideally suited to a particular form of snarky journalistic criticism that grows brick by brick, post by post. HuffPoSpoilers uses example after example to expose the habit of sending out overpromising headlines. Similarly, the Twitter feed @NYTOnIt has sent out more than 400 posts, prompted when a trend article from The New York Times seems too obvious or too generic — for example, distilling an article about a study of Internet use among older people as, “GUYS, older folks don’t use the Internet as regularly as younger folks, and The Times is ON IT.” Other targets include articles about the arrival of fall, the use of staplers, and how night stands are becoming more crowded. (In November, The Times enlisted Twitter to have the account more clearly identified as a parody of The Times, not part of The Times, which led to its briefly being taken down.) Another style of journalistic criticism is more of a group effort — like the now nearly four-year-old hashtag #slatepitches. This acts as a clearinghouse for over-the-top “story ideas” that would seemingly fit the counterintuitive spin that Slate magazine favors, along the lines of, say, why Kobe Bryant’s injury would be good for the Lakers in the N.B.A. playoffs. (These days, however, Slate and its contributors appear to be using the hashtag to promote themselves, showing that perhaps the worst thing is to be ignored on Twitter.) A more esoteric example of such Twitter mockery was the flurry of posts with the hashtag #BBCobituaries, which allowed fans of the cult movie “Withnail and I” to object to how one of its stars, Richard Griffiths, was identified by the BBC in an obituary. Mr. Griffiths was identified in the headline only for his work in the Harry Potter movie franchise, rather than for his turn as Uncle Monty in “Withnail.” On Twitter, this emphasis was compared to writing, say, “Marilyn, ex wife of Arthur Miller, dies,” or, “Bicycle shop owners Orville and Wilbur Wright have passed away.” The message got through to the BBC, and the headline now begins, “Potter and Withnail Actor. ... ” The creator of HuffPoSpoilers, Alex Mizrahi, says his Twitter feed came as a spur-of-the-moment reaction to reading the post “Guess who is the highest-paid celebrity” in August. Rather than guess, Mr. Mizrahi, 30, from Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, looked up the answer — Oprah Winfrey, $165 million in 2011 — and added it to the Huffington Post message. He quickly got 10 followers and remembers being excited. “It kills me that there is a 40- or 50-character tweet where they could easily put in more information but choose not to, such as the person involved or the country,” he said in a telephone interview on Friday. “I understand they want people to read,” he added, but he said it was hard not to feel toyed with when a headline is sent out like this one on Thursday: “1 dead 20 injured as chef mistakes pesticide for sauce.” You think, he said, “Oh my God, that might be New York,” when, as HuffPoSpoilers revealed, this happened in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China. On Wednesday, for a reason he can’t really explain, the Twitter feed suddenly got enough attention to cascade, with more than 11,000 followers as of Sunday — Mr. Mizrahi says he knew it was a big deal when he stumbled on HuffPoSpoilers in the feeds of people he follows. (He does not identify himself as the creator of the Twitter handle, but it was not hard to discover who it was.) Mr. Mizrahi works freelance trying to link social media to entertainment — and, in that way, his experience creating an online phenomenon could actually fit on his résumé. But he acts, he says, “out of love,” simply to register his dislike of a practice that is not limited to The Huffington Post. “The Huffington Post wouldn’t have three million followers if people didn’t like the content and like the articles and like what they are producing,” he said, “but people like me get annoyed by their cryptic tweets that don’t tell you anything, or just obvious click bait.” Thus far, Huffington Post has not changed its tactics on Twitter, but it did give some publicity to those who would mock it. The very brief article about HuffPoSpoilers on Thursday says, “We don’t know who’s behind this account but it made us laugh, so we’re sharing it with you too.” Of course, Huffington Post also promoted that article on Twitter: “@HuffPoSpoilers ruins every tease-filled tweet from @HuffingtonPost for you.” That message left Mr. Mizrahi at a bit of a loss. All he could append was, “can’t ruin this one.” A version of this article appeared in print on April 29, 2013, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Turning the Tables on the News Media Tease.

Pew-"State of the Media"

This can only lead to dictatorship:Via Slashdot-"Jack Mirkinson reports that Pew Research Center's annual "State of the Media" study found that, since 2007, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC have all cut back sharply on the amount of actual reporting found on their airwaves. Cheaper, more provocative debate or interview segments have largely filled the void. Pew found that Fox News spent 55 percent of the time on opinion and 45 percent of the time on reporting. Critics of that figure would likely contend that the network's straight news reporting tilts conservative, but it is true that Fox News has more shows that feature reporting packages than MSNBC does. According to Pew MSNBC made the key decision to reprogram itself in prime time as a liberal counterweight to the Fox News Channel's conservative nighttime lineup. The new MSNBC strategy and lineup were accompanied by a substantial cut in interview time and sharply increased airtime devoted to edited packages. The Pew Research examination of programming in December 2012 found MSNBC by far the most opinionated of the three networks, with nearly 90% of MSNBC's primetime coverage coming in the form of opinion or commentary."

A New Journalism: Sources are the life blood of excellence in Journalism. Where are they? How do you find them? Here is one new example from the Guardian: How Brown Moses exposed Syrian arms trafficking from his front room Leicester-based blogger's monitoring of weapons used in conflict has been taken up by media and human rights groups Matthew Weaver guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 March 2013 15.23 GMT Jump to comments (35) Eliot Higgins, aka Brown Moses, encounters a new video from Syria from matthew weaver on Vimeo. Eliot Higgins has no need for a flak jacket, nor does he carry himself with the bravado of a war reporter. As an unemployed finance and admin worker his expertise lies in compiling spreadsheets, not dodging bullets. He has never been near a war zone. But all that hasn't stopped him from breaking some of the most important stories on the Syrian conflict in the last year. His work on analysing Syrian weapons, which began as a hobby, is now frequently cited by human rights groups and has led to questions in parliament. Higgins' latest discovery of a new batch of Croatian weapons in the hands of Syrian rebels appears to have blown the lid on a covert international operation to arm the opposition. And he's done it all, largely unpaid, from a laptop more than 3,000 miles away from Damascus, in his front room in a Leicester suburb. Behind the tulip-patterned lace curtains, among the discarded toys belonging to his toddler daughter, a new video has just popped into his inbox. It appears to shows Croatian weapons, believed to have been smuggled to Syria with the collusion of the west, in the hands of jihadi fighters, who are increasingly leading the fight against Bashar al-Assad's government. Higgins' weapons-spotting eye is immediately drawn to two tubes next to a large gun. The detail suggests that any US attempts to vet which groups get such arms are failing. Pointing at the screen, Higgins says: "Those are rocket pods for the M79 Osa Croatian rocket launcher. And what's even more interesting is this YouTube channel belongs to Ansar al-Islam, which is a jihadi organisation. That group shouldn't be getting those weapons." Higgins, 34, has no training in weapons, human rights research or journalism – he dropped out of a media studies course at university. But his work is being taken up by everyone from Amnesty International to the New York Times. He is amused to be referred to as a weapons expert. "Journalists assume I've worked in the arms trade," he says, "But before the Arab spring I knew no more about weapons that the average Xbox owner. I had no knowledge beyond what I'd learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo." Higgins initially operated on chatrooms and comment threads under the pseudonym Brown Moses. His online avatar – taken from one of Francis Bacon's paintings of a screaming pope – was often the first to appear in the comments section on the Guardian's daily Middle East live blog. Each day he would do verbal battle below the line with online trolls, conspiracy theorists and fellow Arab spring obsessives. The name Brown Moses, taken from a Frank Zappa song, has led to confusion about his identity. "It makes some people think I'm black and Jewish – I've even been racially abused. I've been accused of all sorts of things online: CIA, MI5, MI6, Mossad, Bilderberg group." Partly to avoid such suspicions, he no longer conceals his identity and has emerged into the open, where he is being hailed as something of a pioneer. The conflict in Syria has been extremely difficult and dangerous for conventional media organisations to cover. But the slew of YouTube footage from citizen journalists has opened up a new way of monitoring what's happening for those such as Higgins who are dedicated and meticulous enough to sift through it. "Brown Moses is among the best out there when it comes to weapons monitoring in Syria," says Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch, who worked with Higgins to document the use of cluster bombs in Syria. He represents an important development in arms monitoring, which used to be the domain of a few secretive specialists with access to the required and often classified reference materials. "He'd be the first to admit that he is obsessive compulsive in his attention to details. He gets his facts right, and has become an indispensable resource." Eliot Higgins, blogger on syrian weapons Eliot Higgins at home. The New York Times veteran war reporter CJ Chivers, author of The Gun: the story of the AK47, says fellow journalists should be more honest about the debt they owe to Higgins' Brown Moses blog. "Many people, whether they admit or not, have been relying on that blog's daily labour to cull the uncountable videos that circulate from the conflict," he says. Chivers acknowledged that Higgins was on to the Croatian arms story weeks before the New York Times. He and Higgins then worked together to develop the story, with Chivers rooting out extra details about how the weapons were financed. In a blogpost about the genesis of the report, Chivers wrote: "Thank you, Eliot, for your patience, and your fine eye, and for creating an opportunity for merging new and old forms of reporting into a fresh look at recent events." Higgins goes through about 450 YouTube channels from Syria every evening. The list includes uploaded footage from activists, rebel brigades and Islamist groups, as well as from Assad supporters and state TV footage. "If EastEnders isn't on I get straight on the laptop. On a good night when nothing much has been posted, it will take me an hour and a half, but I've been looking more closely recently." Recent activist footage claimed to show the remains of a Chinese-made cluster bomb at the scene of a bombing. Drawing on his online network of fellow weapons-spotters and translators, Higgins established that it was in fact a bicycle pump. "If I started putting out rubbish I'd know about it pretty quickly, because of the audience that follows me," he says. "The success of the blog feeds the compulsion," Higgins says. "If I had the chance I do it for 16 hours a day. When I'm sat on a bus I'll be checking Twitter looking for footage of planes being shot down. When cluster bombs were first used I couldn't sleep. It was about midnight and I saw this video of these bomblets spilt on the floor with their casings. I had to research it. You have to be first and you have to be right." Since then, Higgins has put together a database of 491 videos of cluster bombs being used across Syria, together with map references and details of the type of weapons used. He has had more time to do this since being made redundant from his day job last October. The organisation he was working for lost a government contract to house asylum seekers to the security firm G4S. "None of my jobs have been relevant to the work I'm doing now," he says. "The closest I got to Syrians was telling asylum seekers where they were being picked up. The advantage I've got is time and the fact I've been going through them for a year or so." Higgins' wife's job behind the counter at the local post office helps pay the bills. "My wife sees me doing all this work and thinks I should be getting paid for it. But I'm doing it because I see stuff that isn't being reported in the mainstream media and want to record it." He says his approach is no substitute for traditional war reporting but it can help tell the story. "This can't replace journalists on the ground," he says. "They take amazing risks and do an incredible job. But this work can direct them. "I don't think many people would have picked up on Croatian weapons in Deraa because there weren't journalists in that area. It may never have been noticed. It was only because I was on the lookout for interesting looking rocket launchers." What we have learned about Syrian weapons via Brown Moses • Cluster bombs were first spotted by Higgins in summer of 2012 and used extensively used from October. The Syrian government denies they exist in Syria, but Higgins has developed a database of almost 500 videos documenting the use of cluster bombs, which are banned in most countries. • Reports of DIY barrel bombs being thrown out of helicopters were initially dismissed as "baloney" by a Russian military expert. Extensive and clear footage unearthed by Higgins suggests otherwise. • The proliferation of shoulder-launched heat-seeking missiles known as Manpads. Most recently Higgins has documented Chinese-made FN6 Manpads in the hands of rebels fighting around Aleppo. • A cache of weapons from the former Yugoslavia was first noticed by Higgins at the start of this year in the hands of rebel groups fighting in the southern province of Deraa. The weapons were financed by Saudi Arabia with the knowledge of the US, subsequent reports alleged.

The Evil That Is Mythic Belief

Journalists must carefully check what they pass along as truths. Dr. pass along myths the same as anyone else:Reality Check: 5 Risks of a Raw Vegan Diet Misconceptions of the philosophy of the raw vegan diet include the claim that raw foods are detoxifying and contain more "life energy" By Christopher Wanjek and LiveScience 2 inShare Exotic, organic vegetables on display at a Hertfordshire farmer's market in the U.K. Image: Wellcome Images On the road to good health, there are many forks. Some paths, such as vegetarianism or the Mediterranean diet, have considerable science supporting them. Others, such as the vegan or plant-based diet, which shuns all animal products including eggs and dairy, are winning converts. And then there's a new offshoot, the raw vegan diet, which deems cooking to be unnatural and unhealthy. An increasing number of celebrities — most recently, tennis sensation Venus Williams — swear by this diet as the best way to prevent and reverse diseases and to stay young and vital. Testimonials from ordinary folks are endless, boasting advantages along the lines of having more energy, better skin, improved relationships with woodland creatures and so on. But on your road to good health, the raw vegan diet would likely be a U-turn. If you are already vegan or vegetarian, you have nothing to gain and much to lose by going totally or even mostly raw. Even doctors who prescribe and live by a vegan diet caution their patients against attempting a raw diet. The reason? You would greatly reduce the types of foods you can eat. And you would do so in vain, because most of the raw vegan principles are based on misconceptions about human nutrition, and work counter to good health. [7 Medical Myths Even Doctors Believe] This article addresses five such principles that are either half true or completely false. What is raw veganism? First, a primer: Raw veganism is a plant-based diet that involves no cooking. No food is heated above 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius). Foods are eaten fresh, dehydrated with low heat or fermented. A core tenet of the diet is that heating food above 104 degrees not only diminishes its nutrients, but also makes the food toxic and less digestible. In raw vegan parlance, cooking is killing. Many raw vegans speak of "live" foods versus "dead" foods, and they aren't talking about sushi, so fresh it still wiggles. Live or uncooked foods are said to be filled with vital life energy. In this way, raw veganism is an extension of the vegan appreciation for animal welfare, with the added spirituality of a life force, called chi or prana. Dead or cooked foods are said to be depleted of their life energy, as well as most of their nutrients. Juicing and blending "green smoothies" often are key elements of this diet. Now for the misconceptions: Misconception #1: Cooking destroys nutrients Sure, raw foods can be nutritious. But cooking breaks apart fibers and cellular walls to release nutrients that otherwise would be unavailable from the same raw food. Cooking tomatoes, for example, increases by five-fold the bioavailability of the antioxidant lycopene. Similarly, cooking carrots makes the beta-carotene they contain more available for the body to absorb. Soups are full of nutrients that would not be available in a pot of raw carrots, onions, parsnips and potatoes. [Science You Can Eat: 10 Interesting Facts About Food] Cooking can also reduce certain chemicals in a vegetable that inhibit the absorption of minerals, including important minerals like zinc, iron, calcium and magnesium. Cooking spinach makes more iron and calcium available from its leaves, for example. Admittedly, some nutrients are lost in cooking, such as vitamin C and certain B vitamins. But "plants are so excess in nutrients that even this breakdown is insignificant in practical terms," said John McDougall, creator of the McDougall Program, a vegan-friendly, starch-based diet.

What is wrong with this story? This is a big danger in Journalism especially were the writer of the story and the writer of the headline are different people. This happens when the writer is the same person as well.January 8, 2013 Daily Newsletter NEWS CES 2103: Toyota Unveils an Autonomous Car, But Says It’ll Keep Drivers in Control The carmaker discusses research that could make cars autonomous and eliminate traffic fatalities.