Don't say I didn't tell you so:Sunday, Jan. 8, 2012 SUNDAY TIMEOUT Fukushima lays bare Japanese media's ties to top By DAVID MCNEILL Special to The Japan Times Is the ongoing crisis surrounding the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant being accurately reported in the Japanese media? Official lines: Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano on April 17, 2011, during his first visit to Fukushima after the disasters triggered by March 11's Great East Japan Earthquake. KYODO PHOTO No, says independent journalist Shigeo Abe, who claims the authorities, and many journalists, have done a poor job of informing people about nuclear power in Japan both before and during the crisis — and that the clean-up costs are now being massively underestimated and underreported. "The government says that as long as the radioactive leak can be dammed from the sides it can be stopped, but that's wrong," Abe insists. "They're going to have to build a huge trench underneath the plant to contain the radiation — a giant diaper. That is a huge-scale construction and will cost a fortune. The government knows that but won't reveal it." The disaster at the Fukushima plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) again revealed one of the major fault lines of Japanese journalism — that between the mainstream media and the mass-selling weeklies and their ranks of freelancers. The mainstream media has long been part of the press-club system, which funnels information from official Japan to the public. Critics say the system locks the country's most influential journalists into a symbiotic relationship with their sources, and discourages them from investigation or independent lines of analysis. Once the crisis began, it was weekly Japanese magazines that sank their teeth into the guardians of the so-called nuclear village — the cozy ranks of polititicians, bureaucrats, academics, corporate players and the media who promote nuclear power in this country. Shukan Shincho dubbed Tepco's management "war criminals." Shukan Gendai named and shamed the most culpable of Japan's goyō gakusha (unquestioning pronuclear scientists; aka academic flunkies). Meanwhile, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper's well-respected weekly magazine AERA revealed that local governments manipulated public opinion in support of reopening nuclear plants. The same magazine's now-famous March 19, 2011, cover story showing a masked nuclear worker and the headline "Radiation is coming to Tokyo" was controversial enough to force an apology and the resignation of at least one columnist (though the headline was in fact correct). Others explored claims of structural bias in the mainstream press. Japan's power-supply industry, collectively, is Japan's biggest advertiser, spending ¥88 billion (more than $1 billion) a year, according to the Nikkei Advertising Research Institute. Tepco's ¥24.4 billion alone is roughly half what a global firm as large as Toyota spends in a year. Many journalists were tied to the industry in complex ways. A Yomiuri Shimbun science writer was cited in "Daishinsai Genpatsu Jiko to Media" ("The Media and the Nuclear Disaster"; Otsuki Shoten, 2011) as working simultaneously for nuclear-industry watchdogs, including the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry (sic). Journalists from the Nikkei and Mainichi Shimbun newspapers have also reportedly gone on to work for pronuclear organizations and publications. Before the Fukushima crisis began, Tepco's advertising largesse may have helped silence even the most liberal of potential critics. According to Shukan Gendai, the utility spent roughly $26 million on advertising with the Asahi Shimbun. Tepco's quarterly magazine, Sola, was edited by former Asahi writers. The financial clout of the power-supply industry, combined with the press-club system, surely helped discourage investigative reporting and keep concerns about nuclear power and critics of plants such as the aging Fukushima complex and Chubu Electric Power Co.'s Hamaoka facility in Omaezaki, Shizuoka Prefecture, which sits astride numerous faults, well below the media radar. Throughout the Fukushima crisis, the mainstream media has relied heavily on pronuclear scientists' and Tepco's analyses of what was occurring. After the first hydrogen blast of March 12, the government's top spokesman, Yukio Edano, told a press conference: "Even though the reactor No. 1 building is damaged, the containment vessel is undamaged. ... On the contrary, the outside monitors show that the (radiation) dose rate is declining, so the cooling of the reactor is proceeding." Any suggestion that the accident would reach Chernobyl level was, he said, "out of the question." Author and nuclear critic Takashi Hirose noted afterward: "Most of the media believed this. It makes no logical sense to say, as Edano did, that the safety of the containment vessel could be determined by monitoring the radiation dose rate. All he did was repeat the lecture given him by Tepco." As media critic Toru Takeda later wrote, the overwhelming strategy throughout the crisis, by both the authorities and big media, seems to be to reassure people, not alert them to possible dangers. By late March, the war in Libya had knocked Japan from the front pages of the world's newspapers, but there was still one story that was very sought after: life inside the 20-km evacuation zone around the Fukushima atomic plant. Thousands of people had fled and left behind homes, pets and farm animals that would eventually die. A small number of mainly elderly people stayed behind, refusing to leave homes that often had been in their families for generations. Not surprisingly, there was enormous global interest in their story and its disturbing echoes of the Chernobyl catastrophe 25 years earlier. Yet not a single reporter from Japan's big media filed from inside the evacuation zone — despite the fact that it was not yet illegal to be there. Some would begin reporting from the area much later after receiving government clearance — the Asahi Shimbun newspaper sent its first dispatch on April 25, when its reporters accompanied the commissioner-general of the National Police Agency. Later, they would explain why they stayed away and — with the exception of government-approved excursions — why they continue to stay away. Smoke signals: The leaking Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant on March 20, 2011. Critics accuse Japan's mainstream media of failing to properly report the ongoing crisis. KYODO PHOTO "Journalists are employees and their companies have to protect them from dangers," explained Keiichi Sato, a deputy editor with the News Division of Nippon TV. "Reporters like myself might want to go into that zone and get the story, and there was internal debate about it, but there isn't much personal freedom inside big media companies. We were told by our superiors that it was dangerous, so going in by ourselves would mean breaking that rule. It would mean nothing less than quitting the company." The cartel-like behavior of the leading Japanese media companies meant they did not have to fear being trumped by rivals. In particularly dangerous situations, managers of TV networks and newspapers will form agreements (known as hōdō kyōtei) in effect to collectively keep their reporters out of harm's way. Teddy Jimbo, founder of the pioneering Internet broadcaster Video News Network, explains: "Once the five or six big firms come to an agreement that their competitors will not do anything, they don't have to be worried about being scooped or challenged." Frustrated by the lack of information from around the plant, Jimbo took his camera and dosimeters into the 20-km zone on April 2 and uploaded a report on YouTube that scored almost 1 million views. He was the first Japanese reporter to present TV images from Futaba and other abandoned towns (though images from the zone, shot during government-approved incursions, later appeared on mainstream TV news programs). "For freelance journalists, it's not hard to beat the big companies because you quickly learn where their line is," Jimbo said. "As a journalist I needed to go in and find out what was happening. Any real journalist would want to do that." He later sold some of his footage to three of the big Japanese TV networks: NHK, NTV and TBS. Says Abe: "The government's whole strategy for bringing the plant under control will have to be revised. The evacuees will never be able to return. They can't clean up the radiation. Will the media report this? I'm waiting for that."

Here is another alternative for a media society:In China Press, Best Coverage Cash Can Buy Though banned in China, paying for positive news coverage is so widespread that many publications and broadcasters have rate cards listing prices. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/business/media/flattering-news-coverage-has-a-price-in-china.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2_20120404

This is a better balance and opens up a problem to a wider discussion on need to know and feel that journalism is supposed to answer. 27 Comments 20 Mar 2012 4:17 PM Mike Daisey, climate, and greater truths By David Roberts Mike Daisey. (Photo by Aaron Webb.) I wasn’t going to write anything about the Mike Daisey affair — Grist’s own editor Scott Rosenberg said what needed to be said — but the tone of the subsequent coverage, the high dudgeon and hand-wringing and self-congratulation among American journalists and commentators, has rubbed me the wrong way. So, perhaps ill-advisedly, I’m jumping in. Daisey did something as old as theater itself: manipulated facts in service of narrative. He rearranged events, put himself in scenes he never actually witnessed, and collapsed people into composite characters, all in the name of telling a gripping and meaningful story. That’s all fine, of course, if you’re just doing theater and the audience knows what it’s getting. The problem, as Ira Glass points out in This American Life‘s extraordinary retraction episode (and as New York Times media critic David Carr echoes), is that the people who went to see Daisey’s show, or heard it on TAL, were under the impression that they were hearing an exposé, a piece of personal journalism. They thought they were hearing about stuff that really happened to Daisey. And he let them think that, even encouraged them to. He shouldn’t have done that! (As usual, James Fallows puts it best.) The costs of what he did have been well-rehearsed by now. He sacrificed his own credibility and dinged the credibility of This American Life. For many, that seems to be the end of the story. But I don’t think we can ignore the fact that he also achieved something worthwhile. He produced benefits unique to storytelling — not just that he made thousands of Americans aware of Chinese factory conditions (conditions even his critics concede are dismal), but that he made them care about it, at least a little. He elicited an emotional investment in a way that American “objective journalism” has difficulty doing. Do the benefits outweigh the costs? If you could go back and erase the net effects of Daisey’s show, would you? The easy way to answer this dilemma is to pretend it isn’t one, to assert, as Max Fisher of The Atlantic does, that “by lying, Daisey undermined the cause he purported to advance.” If that’s true, of course we can condemn the entire affair with a clear conscience. But it just doesn’t strike me as plausible. The discussion over the plight of Chinese factory workers is now well underway, bolstered by pieces in mainstream media that appeared subsequent to Daisey’s show. I doubt the kerfuffle over Daisey’s personal experiences — which is mostly of interest to media nerds — is going to have much effect on that discussion. (At the very least, assertions to the contrary should be backed by some data or analysis, which I haven’t seen.) The awkward fact remains that Chinese factory workers have a moral claim on us and Daisey did real and pioneering work making us feel it. That achievement may be tarnished now, but it has not been erased. It’s worth asking how to eliminate the costs of what Daisey did, how to tell his story without inaccuracies or better to calibrate audience expectations. But it’s also worth asking how to preserve and replicate the value of what Daisey did. Journalists have been patting themselves on the back that they never make stuff up and can’t condone anyone else doing it. (Devotees of the last dozen years’ U.S. media will detect a whiff of irony here.) But they should also be asking themselves why it took Daisey to grapple with this issue seriously and create a vehicle for broader emotional engagement with it. (This is to take nothing from the great NYT investigative piece that came out after Daisey’s show.) We could start by getting past the kind of black-and-white moralism of David Carr’s question: Is it O.K. to lie on the way to telling a greater truth? The short answer is also the right one. No. Telling the literal truth is always and everywhere more important than telling a good story. So much for Hunter S. Thompson and gonzo journalism, I guess. But put that aside. Even taking Carr’s stricture as gospel, demonstrable lies — “I met an old guy with gnarled hands and showed him an iPad” when I didn’t — are an easy case. It doesn’t get us very far. There are more things under the sun than lies and truth. It’s a weird and naive notion that there is a bright line between objective and subjective, fact and opinion, reality and narrative. Post-war journalism in the U.S. has been besotted with this kind of technocratic positivism, the notion that a reporter’s job is to convey facts and that anything else is personal opinion, bias, or outright deception. But facts are not truth. Facts do not, in and of themselves, have meaning. Facts only add up to something — literally make sense — when they are embedded in some kind of framework or narrative that fits into our cultural identities and ways of seeing the world. That’s how humans are built to learn, going back to the Stone Age. So “telling a greater truth” is a thing of real value, not some theatrical pretense. Helping people understand and contextualize events, work through the meaning and resonance of the facts, is a humanistic endeavor, and in today’s fraught and complex world, there’s never been a greater need for it. Much of the mainstream media seems to have forsworn that task. But “just the facts” is a pretense. There is no such thing. If the story, the narrative framework, isn’t explicit, it’s implicit. And if it’s implicit, it usually reflects status quo interests. I see no particular nobility in that. So a lie isn’t OK in service of telling a greater truth. What is OK? How do we value the benefits of storytelling — meaning and resonance — relative to the benefits of precision and rigor? There are endless fuzzy borderline cases, bits of approximation, generalization, interpretation, or poetic license. It’s too easy to say there’s no tension. The reason this tension is on my mind has to do, you won’t be surprised to hear, with climate change. One of the striking things about climate change is that majorities of Americans accept it, on some level or other, but it is those who reject it, largely in the conservative base, who display the most intensity. They’re the ones who call their representatives and go to town halls and write letters to the editor and get in a reactionary fury over f’ing light bulbs. Why is that? One reason is that conservatives have been told a story. They have not been given science lectures by Al Gore and James Hansen, instructed on ocean pH and ice sheet volumes and parts per million of CO2. They’ve been told by their media outlets, analysts, and politicians what climate change means: It is part of the liberal plan to control your behavior and expand government. It is elite condescension, high taxes, and global governance. That’s a story that carries great emotional resonance for its audience. What story have those outside the conservative base been told? There is no such story. Or rather, there are several conflicting, obscure, half-told stories that don’t add up to anything. Americans don’t yet know how to make sense of climate change. We have access to the facts but we don’t yet understand the greater truths. That’s why it remains such an abstraction to most of the public and so absent from the passions and preoccupations of most American journalists and pundits. Daisey sacrificed accuracy for meaning. Too much journalism does the opposite. We desperately need storytellers who can give the facts about climate change life and meaning, people who can get at those greater truths. Journalists could be part of that.

And this is another great debate in Journalism. Fact or fiction actually seems a no brainer in journalism but apparently not. Take a look at this coverage from Slate on 'This American Life' and further on were fiction might fit in our world of excitement and drama: This American Life Retracts Its Apple Exposé - In a surprising turn of events, This American Life announced this afternoon that it is retracting its exposé of the working conditions at Apple’s factories in China. The show will address the retraction in this week’s episode, in which they’ll devote an entire hour to the subject. The episode will go up tonight, a couple days earlier than most episodes, which are usually posted on Sunday. They explained the decision on the episode’s page: Regrettably, we have discovered that one of our most popular episodes was partially fabricated. This week, we devote the entire hour to detailing the errors in "Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory," Mike Daisey’s story about visiting Foxconn, an Apple supplier factory in China. Rob Schmitz, a reporter for Marketplace, raises doubts on much of Daisey's story . . . Ira also talks with Mike Daisey about why he misled This American Life during the fact-checking process. And we end the show separating fact from fiction, when it comes to Apple's manufacturing practices in China. In a statement on his website, monologist Mike Daisey, whose one-man show provided the basis for the episode, explained that he was standing by his work: My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity … What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic ­- not a theatrical ­- enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations. But this is my only regret. I am proud that my work seems to have sparked a growing storm of attention and concern over the often appalling conditions under which many of the high-tech products we love so much are assembled in China. In another statement on the radio show’s blog, host Ira Glass insisted, “Our program adheres to the same journalistic standards as the other national shows … in this case, we did not live up to those standards.” But while This American Life has been putting out great work for years, the idea that it’s “essentially a journalistic . . . enterprise” seems debatable. The show frequently excerpts and reproduces fictional short stories, pieces of memoir, and stories told at storytelling events like those held by The Moth. In fact, this isn’t the first time This American Life has been the subject of an unsolicited fact-check. Writing for Slate in 2008, Jack Shafer found that a Malcolm Gladwell story from The Moth, reproduced on an episode of This American Life, was “mostly bunk.” That story recounted (supposed) personal hijinks of Gladwell’s, and didn’t take on one of the world’s largest and most admired corporations, so perhaps different standards apply. Those standards, in any case, continue to be debated. This American Life’s retraction comes amidst an ongoing debate about whether nonfiction storytellers, when they’re not calling themselves journalists, are bound to tell the truth. Creative nonfiction luminary John D’Agata has defended writers' right to fudge the truth in his book The Lifespan of a Fact, co-written with fact-checker Jim Fingal. (Dan Kois expressed mixed feelings about the book when reviewing it for Slate.) D’Agata’s book brought to mind, for many, the various partly true memoirs of the last ten years. For more on this story, head over to This American Life’s press release. To read the investigation that led to the retraction, stay tuned for Rob Schmitz’s story for Marketplace. For more on working conditions at Apple’s suppliers, read the New York Times’s special report.

This is from the very good LanguageLog Blog at http://networkedblogs.com/veD3P, and you should subscribe to it or at least keep and eye on it. Language Log HomeAboutComments policy Journalism 101: a passive fact-check March 16, 2012 @ 3:49 am · Filed by Geoffrey K. Pullum under Syntax, passives « previous post | A furious Daniel Schwammenthal at The Commentator excoriates The Economist for accusing the Israeli government of being delusional and paranoid. Asking rhetorically why there continues to be conflict between Israel and the Palestinians according to The Economist’s view, Schwammenthal adds a linguistic element to his political critique: "Violent clashes and provocations erupted whenever the peace process seemed on the verge of concrete steps forward," the Economist explains. And, as Journalism 101 courses explain, the passive voice erupts whenever the journalist is trying to obscure the truth. Violence did not spontaneously or anonymously break out, as the article suggests. And he goes on to hammer home the point that it's the Palestinians who fire the rockets. Well, it's true that Journalism 101 courses often follow grammatically clueless critics in their prejudice against the passive, and in wrongly associating the passive voice with deviousness and mendacity. But I hope there are at least some journalism teachers who can tell passive clauses from active ones. Schwammenthal evidently can't. "Violent clashes and provocations erupted" is not a passive clause. Nor is "Violence spontaneously and anonymously broke out." These are simple active clauses with intransitive verbs. I dimly recall that Language Log has occasionally raised this matter before (though not more than about 65 times, according to this list of relevant posts), so I won't belabor the point. (If I was going to belabor it, I would point out that Language Log has actually noted previous false allegations of passive clauses being used to mask Palestinian violence while emphasizing Israeli aggression.) I will just ask a question: What on earth induces people who cannot tell passive clauses from active ones to pontificate about passive syntax when attacking other writers? It's like accusing an arriving politician of luxury travel in a chauffeur-driven Lincoln Continental when he is visibly climbing out of the driving seat of a used Chevy Nova. Wouldn't you expect people to put their glasses on and actually check the make and model of the car, or look for the chauffeur? (Oh, I don't know, maybe not, in an election year.) [Comments are open. They're not, of course, but I'm just demonstrating how weird it is when people say things that you can easily see are flatly false.] March 16, 2012 @ 3:49 am · Filed by Geoffrey K. Pullum under Syntax, passives

Cutting edge Journalism: The Three Little Pigs And The Future Of Journalism www.npr.org In an action-packed, two-minute remake of the classic tale, The Guardian of London introduces us to "Open Journalism," where newsgatherers are inviting readers to participate in the increasingly raw and loud new media landscape. http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/03/05/147977288/the-three-little-pigs-and-the-future-of-journalsim?sc=fb&cc=fp

/Users/richardsonclark/Desktop/colvin22.jpg Marie Colvin Died In Syria While Exposing 'The Horrors Of War'

(NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro remembers journalist Marie Colvin, who died Wednesday in Syria.) We were exhausted after a long hot day of reporting. Tripoli had just fallen, and it was almost sunset. We pulled up to the house of Muatassim Gadhafi, one of Moammar Gadhafi's most feared and loathed sons. Even though we were all much younger than Marie Colvin, we were discussing calling it a day without venturing inside, as night was falling and, frankly, we were tired. But Marie quickly clambered up the ladder helpfully provided by local residents to scale the massive wall encircling the property. We reluctantly followed.

As I have said before, radio is not the hot media it is in North America. CBC in Canada is excellent and listed to by a large percentage of the population. In isolated rural areas of the country it is highly valued. North Americans still mostly drive cars to work and they listen to the radio while driving. Not so much on the train. The point of this being that there is an excellent 'How to' from NPR and This American Life in America:Radio: An Illustrated Guide store.thisamericanlife.org :it's a step-by-step primer on how to make a radio story. The book includes detail on where we find our stories, how to structure a story, how to do an interview, how to hold the microphone, how to edit sound, how to write a script...really everything you'd need to get started And as a PDF to download it costs $2.00 a bargain.

Great bunch of steam rising over silicon valley over the last few weeks and here is a great summary of what it is all about:Understanding the Controversy Over Silicon Valley's 'Journalism' Can you trust writers who have a financial stake in the companies they cover? CHRISTOPHER MIMS 02/14/2012 2 COMMENTS Dan Lyons, tech journalist at Newsweek (and doer of that other thing) thinks that people who write about companies in which they are investors can't be objective about them. But he couched his argument in the language of a baroquely vicious personal attack, which means the comments of every post on the subject from now to eternity are going to include at least a half dozen of those Michael Jackson eating popcorn gifs and will mostly miss the point. (His headline, for those who didn't bother to click through: "Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool") What's remarkable here isn't that a senior writer at Newsweek has picked a fight with some of America's best known technology bloggers, one the founder of TechCrunch and the other its best-known writer. After all, MG Siegler and Michael Arrington's ascension from scribes to investors has already occasioned much hand-wringing in the tech press. (Mostly because: Investors in who write about companies they invest in as if they're disinterested third parties = what?) Rather, what you should be paying attention to, after you get past all the ad-hominem attacks flying on both sides of this "debate," is the fact that Siegler's and Arrington's responses don't actually address the (admittedly, much-obscured) core of Lyons's attacks on their work: Namely, that they don't have clue one what any attempt at objectivity could possibly be for. Josh Brown sums it up nicely: "Reporters in Silicon Valley get scoops on the startups THEY HAVE THEIR OWN MONEY IN. It's hilarious, like if ESPN also owned the Lakers … Can you imagine if the anchors on CNBC were invested in an IPO and the reporters at the WSJ were shorting it? Insanity." It's easy to dismiss all attempts to put oneself at a remove from the subject of a story. After all, everyone who writes about technology has their preferences—companies we like and don't, and our tastes change over time. What the liberation from old models of objectivity brought us was an escape from the View from Nowhere— that is, the notion that we aren't all biased to begin with, or that we shouldn't disclose it. But wearing your biases on your sleeve doesn't mean you don't have them, or that talking about them is sufficient to inoculate readers against the most pernicious form of delusion there is: your own self-delusion. The temptation to mislead oneself is the reason that journalists aren't, for example, supposed to invest in companies they cover. It's a foundational rule not because people who write about corporations for a living are suckers who all wish they could make money like the industry players they cover—it's because it's too easy to rationalize away a conflict of interest when it aligns perfectly with our own advantage. Arrington at least takes a swipe at addressing Lyons's charge of bias by pointing out that he is also often critical of companies in which he invests. If I was the person that Dan Lyons says I am, I would be a psychopath. I don’t understand why he wouldn’t even consider the fact that I’m simply speaking my mind. That I’ve always just spoken my mind. That I’ve never been the type of person to not speak my mind. There’s no way to look at my record and think that I am somehow a “hack for hire.” Of course, simply "speaking your mind" is no guarantee against self-delusion, either. It seems that Arrington and Siegler think that speaking from the heart is the ultimate route to the truth, which is a fine thing to believe when you're young and naive and unfamiliar with the myriad ways that we compartmentalize our thoughts, revise our view of the past and reconstruct a present narrative that suits however we're feeling about the world and ourselves on that particular day. On one level, I admire this line of reasoning. It's writing with a voice -- and a history and a context and a face— that has revived analysis and even (improbably) the essay in the digital medium, and many of the finest practitioners of this art owe an unacknowledged debt to the deliberately self-unschooled "hacks" who first started throwing brickbats from outside what used to meaningfully be called the mainstream media. But when Siegler and Arrington are going on about how insanely jealous of their success Lyons must be, rather than answering his charge of bias, what their misunderstanding (or misdirection) suggests is that they can only imagine that a writer would be principally motivated, as they are, by what appears to be simple greed.

In Business Lie and Die

There has been an on going discussion of the outside influences on news organizations and the fact that large organizations are owned and controlled by an elite group on people. This is often seen as negative, however if that elite group of owners recognizes the value of a free press they leave editorial decisions up to their professional editorial staff. Recently we have seen that is no longer the case and we have a rabid radical right wing agenda strongly influencing editorial content. For example here is a report on what was thought of as a reputable news organization which has blatantly moved from news to fiction:http://grist.org/climate-skeptics/the-wall-street-journals-willful-climate-lies/ CLIMATE SKEPTICS The Wall Street Journal’s willful climate lies 33 BY AUDEN SCHENDLER 1 FEB 2012 6:36 AM It wasn’t surprising that the Wall Street Journal published an error-riddled op-ed about climate change last week, essentially saying it was bunk and we shouldn’t “panic” about it. We’ve gotten used to that. But what has really started to amaze me about that newspaper’s editorial page and the far right is that they now venture beyond delusion or misinformation. They lie, and they know they are lying. That’s a big claim, but how else do you account for the statement that “the earth hasn’t warmed for well over 10 years now” when it is well known by anyone working on climate that 2010 was the hottest year on record? Despite the fact that many of the authors of the article are funded by ExxonMobil through the George C. Marshall Institute, and despite the fact that none of them are leading scientists, they, and the editor of the opinion page, simply had to know that that statement was false. They may be unethical, but they are not stupid. This is new stuff. The claim of “no recent warming” has been made deviously before by taking a snapshot of an upward-sloping zigzag line graph. (If you take a snapshot of an upward zigzag, it can even appear to be going down … ) But rarely before have we seen brazen, unobscured lying in such a prominent location. Usually the lie or misinformation is gussied up just a little bit. It suggests a desperation of sorts, as Joe Romm pointed out in his masterfully complete debunking. Romm also noted that it brings up some questions. Why would anyone — spaceman, oil industry shill, editor, university professor, or simple citizen — tarnish their name by signing onto an obvious untruth? How does that help their cause? The problem is that willful lies have become the stock in trade of the extreme right. Another example, outside the climate arena, is the notion that if you cut taxes for the wealthy, and cut corporate taxes, the economy booms. Where are the economic or historical studies that say when you cut taxes for the wealthy, it creates jobs or stimulates the economy? Where are the economic or historical studies showing that cutting corporate taxes creates jobs? They don’t exist. And we have a 30-year test period showing that trickle-down economics didn’t work either. So how come people keep claiming it’s true? Another claim in the article is that “a recent study by William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls … ” Well, let’s ask Nordhaus what he thinks of that. In Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth blog he stridently disagrees with that statement: The piece completely misrepresented my work. My work has long taken the view that policies to slow global warming would have net economic benefits, in the trillion of dollars of present value. This is true going back to work in the early 1990s (MIT Press, Yale Press, Science, PNAS, among others) … I can only assume they [are] either completely ignorant of the economics on the issue or are willfully misstating my findings. A whole campaign, a whole half of the country, now believes blindly in multiple falsehoods. On climate, at least, some of the people you can blame for this are the spacemen and oil guys who signed the WSJ op-ed. But opportunities for blame abound. Should MIT sit idly by while a professor of theirs, Richard Lindzen, incorrectly says the planet hasn’t warmed in 12 years? Is that a teacher you want on your staff, a guy who’s missing something that basic, and lazy enough not to correct the record? The most guilty party of all is a fellow named Paul Gigot. He’s the editor of the Wall Street Journal opinion page. And he should be held accountable for knowingly publishing statements both he and his authors understood to be false — in particuar, the lie that the earth has not warmed in the past 12 years. Galileo would have muttered: “But it has.” And because of that, Gigot should resign. Auden Schendler is Vice President of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company. He is the author of Getting Green Done: Hard Truths From the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution (PublicAffairs, 2009).

Great idea, this:http://www.nytimesknownow.com/index.php/journalism-for-high-school-students/?utm_source=nyt&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=HSjourn

Again from the New York Times. Really get this and check out the last paragraph. Censorship is very bad and Turkey's brand is right out of 1984, however shooting Journalists as policy, in Pakistan for example, is truly evil: January 4, 2012 Charges Against Journalists Dim the Democratic Glow in Turkey By DAN BILEFSKY and SEBNEM ARSU ISTANBUL — A year ago, the journalist Nedim Sener was investigating a murky terrorist network that prosecutors maintain was plotting to overthrow Turkey’s Muslim-inspired government. Today, Mr. Sener stands accused of being part of that plot, jailed in what human rights groups call a political purge of the governing party’s critics. Mr. Sener, who has spent nearly 20 years exposing government corruption, is among 13 defendants who appeared in state court this week at the imposing Palace of Justice in Istanbul on a variety of charges related to abetting a terrorist organization. The other defendants include the editors of a staunchly secular Web site critical of the government and Ahmet Sik, a journalist who has written that an Islamic movement associated with Fethullah Gulen, a reclusive cleric living in Pennsylvania, has infiltrated Turkey’s security forces. At a time when Washington and Europe are praising Turkey as the model of Muslim democracy for the Arab world, Turkish human rights advocates say the crackdown is part of an ominous trend. Most worrying, they say, are fresh signs that the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is repressing freedom of the press through a mixture of intimidation, arrests and financial machinations, including the sale in 2008 of a leading newspaper and a television station to a company linked to the prime minister’s son-in-law. The arrests threaten to darken the image of Mr. Erdogan, who is lionized in the Middle East as a powerful regional leader who can stand up to Israel and the West. Widely credited with taming Turkey’s military and forging a religiously conservative government that marries strong economic growth with democracy and religious tolerance, he has proved prickly and thin-skinned on more than one occasion. It is that sensitivity bordering on arrogance, human rights advocates say, that contributes to his animus against the news media. There are now 97 members of the news media in jail in Turkey, including journalists, publishers and distributors, according to the Turkish Journalists’ Union, a figure that rights groups say exceeds the number detained in China. The government denies the figure and insists that with the exception of four cases, those arrested have all been charged with activities other than reporting. Turkey’s justice minister, Sadullah Ergin, last month blamed civic groups for creating the false impression that there were too many journalists in jail in Turkey. He said a new plan to enhance freedom of expression this year would alter perceptions. In court on Wednesday, a defiant Mr. Sener, looking gaunt and pale, blamed the police officials he had investigated for setting him up. “It has been 11 months that I have not been given the chance to utter a single word to defend myself,” he said, speaking to friends during a brief intermission. “I have been a victim in a revenge operation — nothing else.” The European Human Rights Court received nearly 9,000 complaints against Turkey for breaches of press freedom and freedom of expression in 2011, compared with 6,500 in 2009. In March, Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish writer and Nobel laureate, was fined about $3,670 for his statement in a Swiss newspaper that “we have killed 30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians.” Human rights advocates say they fear that with the Arab Spring lending new regional influence to Turkey, the United States and Europe are turning a blind eye to encroaching authoritarianism there. “Turkey’s democracy may be a good benchmark when compared with Egypt, Libya or Syria,” said Hakan Altinay, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “But the whole region will suffer if Turkey is allowed to disregard the values of liberal democracy.” Among the most glaring breaches of press freedom, human rights advocates say, was the arrest of Mr. Sener, 45, a German-born reporter who was working for the newspaper Milliyet at the time of his arrest. In 2010 he won the International Press Institute’s World Press Freedom Hero award for his reporting on the murder of Hrant Dink, a prominent Turkish-Armenian journalist who was assassinated in Istanbul in 2007. Mr. Sener said he believed that he was in jail because he dared to write a book criticizing the Turkish state’s negligence in failing to prevent Mr. Dink’s murder. His defense team says the prosecution’s case rests on spurious evidence, including a file bearing his name that an independent team of computer engineers concluded had been mysteriously installed by a virus on a computer belonging to OdaTV, an antigovernment Web site. He was held for seven months without charges. If convicted, he faces up to 15 years in jail. “Nedim Sener is being accused on the basis of rumors and fantasies,” said his lawyer, Yucel Dosemeci. “He is being targeted to create a culture of fear.” In late December, Turkey drew fresh criticism after the police detained at least 38 people, many of them journalists, saying they had possible links to a Kurdish separatist group. But critics say dozens have been arrested whose only offense was to have expressed general support for the rights of Kurds, a long-oppressed minority here. Over the past year, the government has been arresting prominent critics like Mr. Sener, as well as dozens of current and former military personnel, intellectuals and politicians who have been linked to what officials say was a plot to overthrow the government by an organization called Ergenekon. Four years into the investigation, no one among the more than 300 suspects charged in the case has been convicted, even though courts have heard more than 8,000 pages worth of indictments, many of them based on transcripts of surreptitiously recorded private telephone conversations. Advocates for press freedom say that the government has also moved to mute opposition by using punitive fines and by intimidating the ownership of leading media companies. In a celebrated case in 2009, the Dogan media group, a large conglomerate, was saddled with a $2.5 billion fine by the Tax Ministry for unpaid taxes. Dogan officials say privately that the real reason was that its publications had given prominent attention to a series of corruption scandals involving senior government officials. The European Union has expressed concerns about the chilling effect of the fine, which was negotiated down to about $621 million, officials familiar with the case say, as part of a tax amnesty issued last year. Now, some journalists who work for the Dogan group say there is an unwritten rule not to criticize the governing party. Mr. Erdogan, who has previously called on his supporters to boycott the Dogan group, strongly denied any political motives behind the fine. After Mr. Erdogan swept to power in 2002, human rights activists initially lauded him for expanding free speech. But after an unsuccessful attempt by the secular opposition to ban Mr. Erdogan’s party in 2008, critics say, Mr. Erdogan embarked on a systematic campaign to silence his opponents. They say the curbs on press freedom also reflect the fact that Turkey no longer feels obligated to adhere to Western norms at a time when it is playing the role of regional leader and its talks on joining the European Union are in disarray. Mr. Sener and Mr. Sik were defiant in March as police officers took them into custody at their homes before television cameras. “Whoever touches it gets burned!” Mr. Sik shouted, referring to the Gulen movement, whose members, analysts say, have infiltrated the highest levels of the country’s police and judiciary. In March, the unpublished manuscript of Mr. Sik’s book on the movement, “The Army of the Imam,” was confiscated by police officers. But the police were unable to stop its publication on the Internet, where at least 20,000 users downloaded it. While the Internet has become the main weapon against censorship, more than 15,000 Web sites have been blocked by the state, according to engelliweb.com, which tracks restricted pages. For more than two years until last fall, YouTube was banned on the grounds that some videos on the site were insulting to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. The monitoring agency last summer called on Web sites to ban 138 words, including “animal,” “erotic” and “zoo” in English and “fat,” “blonde” and “skirt” in Turkish. It is a tribute to Turkey’s still vibrant media culture that the prohibition inspired an online competition to create the best short story out of the banned words. My PS Orwell in his novel 1984 had it right and less then three decades short, gives me a shiver

Check it out wanna b's: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/12/22/magazine/the-lives-they-lived.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1

WikiLeaks as data base of information - facts for journalists. Here is a small not from slashdot:Using WikiLeaks As a Tool In Investigative Journalism | from the army-of-one dept. | posted by timothy on Monday December 19, @08:07 (The Media) | with 36 comments | https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/12/18/1929237/using-wikileaks-as-a-tool-in-investigative-journalism?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [0]Hugh Pickens writes writes "It took a team of ten reporters working two months to [1]sift through 250,000 confidential American diplomatic cables at the NY Times, but when a story idea recently came up that I wanted to research in more detail, I found Wikileaks to be a very useful and accessible tool for further investigation. First, some background: For the past ten years I have written stories about Peace Corps safety and medical issues, the Peace Corps' budget appropriations, and the work done by volunteers in their countries of service on a web site I publish called 'Peace Corps Online.' When the Peace Corps announced last month they were taking the unusual step of suspending their program in Kazakhstan and withdrawing all 117 volunteers, I decided to dig deeper and find out what was behind the decision to leave the country. First I went to blogs of volunteers serving in Kazakhstan and found that [2]four rapes or sexual assaults of volunteers had occurred in the past year and that it had became increasingly difficult for volunteers to conduct their work. But the biggest revelation was when I found [3]fourteen U.S. diplomatic cables on Wikileaks that cited elements in the Kazakhstani 'pro-Russian old-guard at the Committee for National Security (the KNB, successor to the KGB) aimed at discrediting the Peace Corps and damaging bilateral relations' with the U.S. Further investigation on Wikileaks revealed how [4]one Peace Corps volunteer had been sentenced to two years imprisonment in 2009 after 'what appeared to be a classic Soviet-style set-up.' The volunteer was only freed through the diplomatic efforts of U.S. Ambassador Richard Hoagland and the personal intervention of Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev." Discuss this story at: https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/12/18/1929237/using-wikileaks-as-a-tool-in-investigative-journalism?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting Links: 0. http://peacecorpsonline.org/ 1. http://www.neontommy.com/news/2010/12/wikileaks-and-future-journalism-interview-new-york-times-scott-shane 2. http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/pickens-writes-writes/2011/11/18/sexual-assaults-and-terrorism-are-factors-leading-peace-corps-to-suspend-program-in-kazakhstan/ 3. http://researchandideas.com/index.php?title=PCV_Anthony_Sharp 4. http://peacecorpsonline.org/messages/messages/467/4004545.html

For all writers or for that matter all creative producers the problem of plagiarism is always present. Being sensitive to crediting your sources should be an automatic part of the process of a journalist. Here, from CNN, is a long story about a smart young man who through complete fabrication ruined his life:(CNN) -- Stephen Glass, the whiz-kid magazine writer exposed 13 years ago as a serial fabricator, is telling what may be his most compelling story yet -- his own. He swears he's not making it up, and he's asking California's highest court to believe him and give him a chance. Glass, who graduated in 2000 from Georgetown's law school, works as a paralegal for a firm in Beverly Hills, California. But he really wants to be a lawyer, and he insists he's remorseful, reformed and committed to telling the truth. Others aren't so sure, which is why a bar application that usually would be a no-brainer is taking five years and counting. There is no question that Glass is brilliant, and he easily passed the bar exams in New York and California. But his budding legal career has become snagged on the jagged rocks of good character and moral fitness. The latest installment in the infamous fabulist's saga is contained in a thick file at the California Supreme Court. Opened to the public late last month, it finally offers an explanation for why Glass once felt driven to publish lie after lie, and then lie some more to cover it all up. But this case also raises some difficult questions: Can he, should he be forgiven? Is his redemption even possible? Or, once a liar, always a liar? "Maybe there are certain types of behavior you never get over," said Arnold Siegel, an ethics professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. But, he added, "The Bar has a fairly compassionate view. They do believe in rehabilitation." Adam Penenberg, the writer who first outed Glass' lies in 1998, took a more ironic view: Adam Penenberg gained notoriety when his 1998 Forbes article first revealed Glass' fabrications. "When I first learned of Glass' quest to join the legal profession, I thought, Christ, it's been 13 years. And, since when does lying disqualify someone from being a lawyer? Let the guy earn a living," he wrote for fastcompany.com. "Leave it to Glass to disgrace himself in one mistrusted profession only to apply to another." Lawyers and journalists aren't highly regarded, although they usually rank a notch above lobbyists, members of Congress and used car salespeople in Gallup's annual Honesty and Ethics survey. Nurses, teachers and doctors are considered the most trustworthy professionals. Glass' father was a doctor, and his mother a nurse, and they didn't think much of lawyers or journalists, which is a big part of his story. Glass insists he has undergone a dramatic character change, even if he looks very much the same as he nears 40 as he did at 25 -- wiry with short brown hair and glasses, the prototypical nerd. One of his psychiatrists explains that as an immature young man, Glass was so eager to succeed that his lying became compulsive, like a gambler's high. He lied and lied and lied until he lost it all. Glass and his supporters say he is now almost compulsive about the truth -- to the point where he usually volunteers that he is that Stephen Glass, and even went back to a store to return excess change he'd been given. But he shouldn't be permitted to simply gloss over his past, Rachel Grunberg, associate counsel for the California State Bar, said in an interview with CNN. "Given the egregiousness of Glass' past misconduct, that goes to the heart of what we look at -- truthfulness, honesty, respect for others." Those aren't traits magazine editor Richard Bradley associates with the Stephen Glass he knew in 1998. At least three of the pieces Glass wrote for him at George magazine contained fabrications, he told CNN. The bulk of Glass' lies were concocted at The New Republic, a small but influential magazine, where he was unmasked as a serial faker and fired. "Steve was figuring out people's blind spots -- their biases, prejudices -- including myself. He wrote pieces that benefited him at the expense of those people," said Bradley, now the editor-in-chief of Worth magazine. "I do forgive Steve, but being a lawyer is a privilege, not a right," he added. "He can be a fully contributing, valuable member of society without being a lawyer." The overwhelming evidence testifies to his maturation, reformation and rehabilitation. -- Arthur Margolis, Glass' lawyer Glass withdrew his application to the New York State Bar in 2003, when it became obvious he would be turned down. He applied to the California Bar in 2005, after he moved to Los Angeles. The bar committee declined to find him morally fit to be a lawyer; Glass appealed and the State Bar Court sided with him last year. The California Supreme Court will have the final word, having added "In Re Glass on Admission" to its docket for 2012. Everyone agrees that what Glass did in 1998 was inexcusable. But, as the State Bar Court points out, the past is not the issue: it's Glass' moral character today. The bar examiners -- the lawyers who vet other lawyers -- argue that Glass' lies were so "staggering" he hasn't done enough to demonstrate he has reformed. "Going to law school and living a normal life isn't enough," Grunberg said. If Glass "were to fabricate evidence in legal matters as readily and effectively as he falsified material for magazine articles, the harm to the public and the profession would be immeasurable," observed State Bar Court Judge Catherine Purcell, dissenting from two other judges who found Glass morally fit to practice law. Glass' lawyer, Arthur Margolis, argues that his client has indeed changed and that the sins of a callow 25-year-old won't be repeated: "He is now 39. The overwhelming evidence testifies to his maturation, reformation and rehabilitation over the past 13 years." Without a doubt, Glass knows how to tell a great story. His eye for whimsical detail and ear for the salient quote made him Washington's journalistic darling. An internal investigation at The New Republic revealed that more than half of his stories had been fudged in some way -- starting with a quote here and an anecdote there until entire stories were pure fiction. Even the notes, e-mail and voice mail messages that were supposed to back up his stories were faked. Friends and colleagues felt betrayed by the amusing but insecure boy wonder. His dream profession -- journalism -- took a credibility hit, and Glass holed up in his apartment, cringing and crying as he was hounded by reporters who were like him in so many ways -- except that they sought the truth: Why'd you do it, Steve? Part One: The Failure Glass didn't really have an answer until now, and he says it took years of psychotherapy to find it. His quasi-autobiographical 2003 novel, "The Fabulist," didn't come close to telling the story the California Bar has heard. In 2003, Glass published his quasi-autobiographical novel, "The Fabulist." He turned down CNN's request for an interview. His past attempts to explain have been viewed by some as self-serving, and so he has little to gain and much to lose by speaking out as he awaits the court's decision. Almost all of his supporters also declined to comment, as did one of his most vocal critics, Charles Lane, the former editor who investigated Glass' lies at The New Republic. Of those who know Glass, only Bradley and a former law school professor would talk to CNN; besides their words, we're left with what was said in the court papers. The thick court file reveals that Glass has won over some very smart and accomplished people who initially doubted him but now can be counted among his closest friends. They tell an inspiring story of failure, remorse and redemption, one that makes you want to believe there is good in everyone. But others who feel burned and betrayed by Glass -- as well as those whose duty it is to protect the public -- can't help wonder whether the fabulist has told his last lie. More than anything, Glass' parents wanted him, their first-born son, to be a doctor, just like his father. "It was a moral calling in my family that one becomes a doctor," he said at a bar hearing. But Glass wasn't cut out for medicine. He fainted at the sight of blood. Dissecting animals made him squeamish. (He's now a strict vegetarian.) Growing up in Highland Park, an affluent suburb on Chicago's North Shore, Glass was a standout student and a social dud. His mother kept a meticulous home. Beds were made with hospital corners and, as Glass told the court, "you could eat off the floors." Food in the refrigerator was arranged just so -- "apples on one side, oranges on the other" -- and only his mother could open the refrigerator door. But this orderly house was a pressure cooker. There were lots of rules and high expectations. As Glass' lawyers noted, almost drolly: "The family members' interactions with each other precluded dissent by the children." The parents grilled Stephen and his younger brother, Michael, on their studies, making them stand and recite answers. Stephen Glass recalled being "frozen out" by his mother when he disappointed her. "If she was upset with you, she would stop speaking to you in the house, except for the most minute things," he testified. During the freeze-outs, which could last weeks, she showered "over the top love" on his brother "so I could see what I was not getting." His father would react in a manner Glass described as "rageful, stomping around, screaming and yelling." He was an anxious kid, eager to please but always seeming to fall short. He had frequent chest pains, caused by stress. Sometimes he'd double over in pain. "It was apparent to everybody that I was just insanely worried about everything all the time," he recalled. He felt woefully inadequate and believed he was a failure as a son. At school, it wasn't any better. He was a "nerd," so bad in gym class that his parents hired a tutor to teach him how to climb a rope. My father was rageful and my mother was freezing me out. -- Stephen Glass Classmates mocked him. During a health class focusing on the dangers of teenage pregnancy, the teacher "married" him to a classmate, and they were to jointly care for a doll. The girl was horrified, and she and her parents lobbied to have the marriage annulled. He withdrew socially and sought the company of adults, eating lunch every day with his Spanish teacher. His parents worried that his lack of social skills would hurt his chances of getting into medical school. "My dad would just say to me -- it was in high school -- 'Why can't you just hold a beer when you're at a party? Like, I want you to, like, meet girls.' The court heard only Glass' version of his childhood. His parents and brother did not participate in the bar hearings. His psychiatrists say Glass has mended his relationship with his parents, but has set up "boundaries." There was no response to messages left at his father's medical offices. Glass insists he's not resorting to the abuse excuse. "It can be easy to misunderstand me and think that, when I talk about my parents and the family dynamics that occurred, that in some way I am blaming my parents or saying my parents are at fault for what I did wrong," he told the California Bar Court. "I feel that zero percent. My parents are complicated people. ... So, when we talk about this, I think it's important that I'm saying it to help explain, but not in any way as an excuse." Part Two: Shattered Glass The chest pains intensified as Glass waited to hear whether he'd be accepted by his father's alma mater. They immediately stopped when he learned he'd gotten in at the University of Pennsylvania -- with a scholarship. He enrolled in the pre-med program but also joined the college newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, over his parents' objections. They considered it "frivolous" and feared it would interfere with his studies. Glass thrived at the paper, even as he flunked organic chemistry. "This made my parents very, very, very angry. My father was rageful and my mother was freezing me out," he recalled. The future they'd so carefully mapped out for their oldest son wasn't going according to plan, and so a compromise was struck: Glass could go to law school -- "a garbage profession" in his parents' opinion -- if he enrolled in a program that also gave him a medical degree. He got into New York University but deferred enrolling to try his hand at Washington journalism. His parents considered it a "ridiculous" career move. He joined The New Republic in 1995 as an intern and immediately felt at home with a group of people he genuinely liked being around. To Glass, the weekly editorial pitch meetings felt like "a family dinner." "You would go around the table and you would announce what stories you were working on, and these were jovial meetings," he said. "There was a lot of energy and electricity in these meetings," he added, calling them "the highlight of my entire week." He was thrilled "seeing all these people that I had been reading." He desperately wanted them to like him. I ... felt very powerfully the desire to please my parents, please my editors, and to succeed. -- Stephen Glass Back at home, tensions between Glass and his parents came to a head during a Passover visit in the spring of 1996. He was proud of what he was doing and had given his parents a subscription to the magazine. "They thought this was the stupidest thing in the world. They didn't read my pieces," he said. "They just thought this is folly." He was "doing a bad job, poorly," they scolded, and his mother added a dig: "Maybe at least you're working on your social life." He took it hard: "I cried some, I know, and I had trouble sleeping, and I felt really distant from my family. I felt that I would not be a success in any way in their eyes unless I went to medical school and fulfilled those dreams and, you know, I knew that I was not suited for medical school." Not long after the Passover confrontation, Glass began fabricating articles. "The Hall Monitor" included his first made-up quote -- initially inserted as "a place holder," he said. He kept the quote in the story and was praised for it. The boy who had learned to recite his lessons for his parents soon was the star of the weekly pitch meetings. He replaced the disapproval he received at home with the praise and popularity he found at work, where he was known as "The Hub" -- always seeming to be at the center of office gossip. His fabrications mushroomed. From July to December 1996, they were limited to a few fudged quotes or anecdotes. They increased through 1997. From that December until he was fired in May 1998, nearly every article Glass wrote either contained huge fabrications or were completely made up. "I was very, very, very much wanted, and felt very powerfully the desire to please my parents, please my editors, and to succeed at this," he said. He wanted the magazine staff to love him the way he felt his family did not. One of his psychiatrists, Richard Rosenthal, told the bar that Glass' relationship with his parents, "set the stage" for his "almost addictive need for approval and success." He compared Glass' compulsive lying to behavior shown by gambling addicts: "They just want it to be over. They're physically and emotionally exhausted, and they can't lose it fast enough, they can't stop, they're just going through it as quickly as they can until there's nothing left." When the lies were discovered, editor Charles Lane fired Glass. "I was terrified and insane and anxious, and I saw my world collapsing around me. I thought that I would lose this entire family that I had built. I didn't really have this family. I was lying to them all," Glass recalled. The court file lists his final accounting: 43 fabricated articles, 36 of them in The New Republic. The others were published by: George, 3; Rolling Stone, 2, and a single freelance piece in Policy Review. He went home to his family a basket case. He talked of suicide, and his parents kept a close eye on him. And then they suggested his firing was "an opportunity to go to medical school." Part Three: Reinvention Glass returned instead to Georgetown's Law Center, where he had been taking classes at night. One of his professors, Susan Low Bloch, reached out to him. "I realized there had been a Steve Glass in my class who had done very well, so I called him and asked, 'Are you that Steve Glass who is in all the papers?' " she told CNN in a telephone interview. He said that he was, and she invited him to stop by for a talk. She saw him "as someone who just got in this whirlpool," and so she offered him a hand. Georgetown law professor Susan Low Bloch befriended Glass and later testified in his behalf at his bar hearing. "He was so remorseful and so devastated by this that it was worth my while to give him a chance to show me he could do legal research without embellishing it," said Bloch, who had clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall as a law student. She hired Glass as her research assistant. But first she made him promise to be honest with her if he couldn't find an answer "and not make something up just to please me." She never regretted taking a chance on Glass, and eventually came to trust him so much that she recommended him to two judges. She flew to California to vouch for him at his bar hearing. "I take in stray cats, too," Bloch told CNN. "I believe you don't throw people out; you don't toss them out as garbage because of a mistake." Julie Hilden also gambled on Stephen Glass. She had first seen him in the offices of Williams & Connolly, the prestigious Washington law firm where she worked for David Kendall, the civil lawyer for Bill and Hillary Clinton. It was 1998, the height of the scandal, and Glass was talking with his lawyer at the firm about how he could confirm his fabrications to the magazine without digging himself into a deeper legal hole. She walked in to get some papers signed for another case. "I looked at him and I just went, 'My God, this person is the most depressed person I've ever seen,' " she told the bar court. Two years later, a mutual friend introduced them. She was skeptical, but they started dating, putting him "on probation." If she sensed he was untrustworthy, she was gone. And then she says she "fell in love with him." In 2001, after she had moved to New York to pursue writing, Hilden woke up in a hospital emergency room and, she said, "He was instantly, immediately there." He drove from Washington to New York every weekend during her seven tough months of recovery from colitis. "He put up with me even though I was not in a great mood because I was just dead sick," Hilden told the court. During early parts of their relationship, he seemed traumatized and insecure and often woke up with nightmares. He always seemed to be looking for affirmation, which she found "a bit irritating." Now, she says, he has matured and gained confidence, and she considers him her "life partner." Their relationship wouldn't have lasted if he were not "completely honest" with her, she said. "I feel completely committed to Steve." They only reason they haven't married is one of principle: There will be no wedding until their gay friends can also get married, she said. When Hilden began dating Glass, one of her best friends was horrified. Melanie Thernstrom, a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, said she tried to talk her out of seeing him. "As a journalist, I had very strong negative feelings about what he did, as the members of my community all did." Thernstrom told the bar court. But he eventually won her over, too. "Getting to know him, I went from horrified to skeptical, and then grudging, like, 'Well, he seems nice but he probably isn't, you know, deep down. Maybe it's all an act.' " Over the years, she said, it slowly dawned on her that "he is really a wonderful person." She added, "This journey I took from horror to affirmation is one I saw every one of Julie's friends go through over the years, and there is not a single friend of hers now who doesn't feel the same way I do." She has so much trust in Glass that in 2009, she and her husband asked Hilden and Glass to be the godparents of their children, she said. Richard Bradley was editor at George magazine when Glass fabricated three stories for the publication. Glass has undergone extensive therapy -- in Washington and New York, as well as in Los Angeles, where he still sees two therapists. He long ago ended his compulsive lying, they say, but he continues to work on rebuilding his life. As part of that process, he wrote his book and about 100 letters of apology to the people he harmed with his fabrications. Bradley, who met Glass for coffee, forgives him for fudging at least three of the articles Bradley edited at George magazine. But because the apology letters came when Glass had a book coming out and was trying to gain admission to the New York Bar, Bradley considers them self-serving. He told CNN he was disappointed. "I wasn't reassured. I wanted to be reassured," he said. He wanted to hear a heartfelt apology. "There were things he could have done to show more genuine regret," Bradley added. "He could have written a memoir, not a novel." Glass' lawyers point out that if his motives were truly selfish, he would have sent a computer-generated mass mailing and kept copies. Instead, he wrote each letter out by hand, tailoring it to an individual. Friends who knew him at the time say it was exhausting and agonizing for him. After Glass and Hilden moved to Los Angeles in 2004, he applied for jobs at law firms. One of his resumes crossed the desk of Paul Zuckerman, managing partner of a plaintiff's litigation firm. He was impressed with the resume, but then he read the cover letter. "I was familiar with the story. I knew who he was. And I kind of laughed to myself and promptly deleted his resume," Zuckerman told the bar court. But then he thought about his own struggle with alcohol, and how he'd come back from the brink. "I sat there, which is unusual for me, to sit there and be reflective during the day. ... I have been a liar in my life. I myself have had some problems and have had difficulties that I've overcome, and I've been given a very big second chance, and I thought that I was being incredibly judgmental ..." He invited Glass in for an interview. "I called him mainly because I felt ... it was wrong for me to be judgmental and to throw somebody away without ever having given them a chance or ever having talked to them," Zuckerman said. Upon meeting Glass, he became convinced that he had gone through a genuine transformation. He could see the remorse in his eyes. He hired Glass on he spot, but at first watched him closely. "When I first hired him, there was no way I was giving him my Social Security number and my mother's maiden name," Zuckerman told the California Bar. "He can have that today." He advised Glass that his downfall ultimately would make him a better lawyer: "I've always found brilliance untempered by failure is purely arrogance but brilliance that has overcome failure can be truly useful to your fellow man," he said. He's glad he opened his mind to Glass' potential. Those who saw the promise in a 25-year-old fabulist may still feel the sting of disappointment and betrayal. But for Zuckerman and others who believe in redemption, the latest story by Stephen Glass is nothing short of fabulous. It's about a man transformed. "I love having him at the office, because he is like my touchstone, my benchmark for honest and proper conduct. It's like 'What would Steve do?' " Editor's note: Beth Karas, a correspondent at In Session on CNN's sister network, truTV, is a former Manhattan prosecutor. She is an inactive member of the New York State Bar.

Again the problem of definition and you is the definer:Bloggers Not Journalists, Federal Judge Rules | from the occupation-foole dept. | posted by timothy on Thursday December 08, @11:40 (The Courts) | with 313 comments | https://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/12/08/1558233/bloggers-not-journalists-federal-judge-rules?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- New submitter squideatingdough writes "On InfoWorld, Robert X. Cringely covers a recent case of a blogger accused of libel and defamation. The federal judge ruled that [0]journalists warrant more protection from libel suits than bloggers, but it is obvious from the article that bloggers' rights can vary by state, depending on the 'shield laws' in force." Reader [1]blindseer adds a link to this [2]AP article on the case, and asks "If the government can define who is part of the press, and therefore gets First Amendment protections, then where does that place the freedom of the press?" The slippery slope is a steep one; even some relatively open societies require [3]licensure for journalists ([4]visiting ones included) with [5]predictable results. (And the Labour Party would like to see a [6]similar system in the UK.) Discuss this story at: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/12/08/1558233/bloggers-not-journalists-federal-judge-rules?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting Links: 0. http://www.infoworld.com/t/cringely/bloggers-youre-second-class-citizens-now-181148 1. mailto:blindseer@earthlink.net 2. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_BLOGGER_DEFAMATION_SUIT?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-12-07-20-39-18 3. http://www.ejc.net/magazine/article/italian_freelance_journalists_protest_against_precarious_working_conditions/ 4. http://www.esteri.it/MAE/EN/Sala_Stampa/AreaGiornalisti/Guida_per_stampa_estera.htm 5. http://www.economist.com/node/14560942 6. http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-09/27/labour-party-journalism-licenses

This latest item, which follows, causes a very large dilemma. Morally and ethically which is right? It is clear, that one must try to report the news accurately to the best of your ability...but does that include breaking ethical and law codes to get, what might be a very important story, the news. Be prepared for a debate on the ethics of acquiring news. The last line.."only pedophiles require privacy" seems a stretch..would you want reporters video taping your honeymoon night? The last words you speak to your dying child,father,mother? November 29, 2011 British Inquiry Is Told Hacking Is Worthy Tool By SARAH LYALL LONDON — He admitted that he and his colleagues hacked into people’s phones and paid police officers for tips. He confessed to lurking in unmarked vans outside people’s houses, stealing confidential documents, rifling through celebrity garbage cans and pretending that he was not a journalist pursuing a story but “Brad the teenage rent boy,” propositioning a priest. After Paul McMullan, a former deputy features editor at Rupert Murdoch’s now-defunct News of the World tabloid, had finished his jaw-droppingly brazen remarks at a judicial inquiry on Tuesday, it was hard to think of any dubious news-gathering technique he had not confessed to, short of pistol-whipping sources for information. Nor were the practices he described limited to a select few, Mr. McMullan said in an afternoon of testimony at the Leveson Inquiry, which is investigating media ethics in Britain the wake of the summer’s phone hacking scandal. On the contrary, he said, The News of the World’s underlings were encouraged by their circulation-obsessed bosses to use any means necessary to get material. “We did all these things for our editors, for Rebekah Brooks and for Andy Coulson,” Mr. McMullan said, referring to two former News of the World editors who, he said, “should have had the strength of conviction to say, ‘Yes, sometimes you have to stray into black or gray illegal areas.’ ” He added: “They should have been the heroes of journalism, but they aren’t. They are the scum of journalism for trying to drop me and my colleagues in it.” Mr. Coulson, who resigned from his job as chief spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron in January, and Mrs. Brooks, who resigned in July from her job as chief executive of News International, the British newspaper arm of the Murdoch empire, have both been arrested on suspicion of phone hacking, or illegally intercepting voice mail messages. Mrs. Brooks, whom Mr. McMullan called “the archcriminal,” is also suspected of making illegal payments to the police. Both have repeatedly denied the allegations, and neither has yet been charged. Nothing that Mr. McMullan said was particularly surprising; anyone following the phone hacking scandal that engulfed News International and its parent, the News Corporation, over the summer is now more than familiar with outrageous tales of tabloid malfeasance. What was startling was that Mr. McMullan, who left his job in 2001, eagerly confessed to so much and on such a scale — no one else has done it quite this way — and that he maintained that none of it was wrong. Most people from the tabloid world have reacted to the revelations in the manner of Renault when discussing gambling in “Casablanca,” saying they are “shocked, shocked.” But Mr. McMullan veered so far in the other direction that at times he sounded like a satirist’s rendition of an amoral tabloid hack. Underhanded reporting techniques are not shocking at all, he said, particularly in light of how often he and his colleagues risked their lives in search of the truth. As examples of the dangers of his job, he described having cocaine-laced marijuana forced on him by knife-wielding drug dealers in a sting operation; being attacked by a crowd of murderous asylum seekers; and, in his “Brad the teenage rent boy” guise, sprinting through a convent dressed only in underpants to escape the pedophile priest he had successfully entrapped. “Phone hacking is a perfectly acceptable tool, given the sacrifices we make, if all we’re trying to do is get to the truth,” Mr. McMullan said, asking whether “we really want to live in a world where the only people who can do the hacking are MI5 and MI6.” No, he said, we do not. “For a brief period of about 20 years, we have actually lived in a free society where we can hack back,” he said. Journalists in Britain have traditionally justified shady practices by arguing that they are in “the public interest.” Asked by an inquiry lawyer how he would define that, Mr. McMullan said that the public interest is what the public is interested in. “I think the public is clever enough to decide the ethics of what it wants in its own newspapers,” he said. Referring to articles about Charlotte Church, a singer who told the inquiry this week of her distress at her family’s treatment by the tabloids, he said, “If they don’t like what you have written about Charlotte Church’s father having a three-in-a-bed with cocaine, then they won’t read it.” For all that, Mr. McMullan said that The News of the World had come to rely too much on outsiders to do work that could have easily been done by reporters, like conducting surveillance on potentially adulterous athletes. Also, he said, some of the investigators were incompetent. The year he became deputy features editor, he said, the department had a budget of £ 3.1 million — more than $4.5 million — to pay sources, buy stories and hire outsiders to find addresses, medical records and other information. “That was the joy of working for Murdoch,” he said. “They had that big pot of money.” Mr. McMullan, who now owns a pub and does occasional freelance work, spoke nostalgically of his tabloid career, seven years of it spent at The News of the World. He loved spiriting exclusive sources away “and hiding them from other journalists,” he said, as when he “spent two weeks locked in a hotel room with Princess Diana’s gym instructor in Amsterdam.” He also liked jumping in one of The News of the World’s stable of 12 cars and speeding away in pursuit of famous targets. “I absolutely loved giving chase to celebrities,” he said. “How many jobs can you have car chases in? Before Diana died, it was such good fun.” (Some celebrities liked it, too, he said. Brad Pitt “had a very positive attitude” about being pursued by crazed journalists in cars.) Mr. McMullan had brought along some illustrative materials, including a photograph of his surveillance van. He also briefly displayed a topless photograph of Carla Bruni-Sarkozy in The News of the World, apparently as a way to show how easy it is to obtain racy photographs. “That’s the president of France’s wife,” he said. “It’s a little early in the day for that, Mr. McMullan,” the inquiry lawyer said. Many witnesses at the Leveson Inquiry, especially victims of the tabloids, have called for a law to protect citizens from news media intrusion. Mr. McMullan said he thought that privacy was “evil,” in that it helps criminals cover up their misdeeds. Using a Britishism for “pedophile,” he said, “Privacy is for pedos.”

Here we go again, I have put some video jokes about journalism on my face book page yesterday and they are valid views of modern journalism. However on a much more important note there is this, and read my comment on the bottom:WikiLeaks wins major national Australian award for Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism. Assange: “Australian journalists are courageous, the Australian population is supportive, but Julia Gillard is a cowardly Australian Prime Minister. Assange awarded at Walkleys : World News Australia on SBS www.sbs.com.au WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been awarded for Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism at the 2011 Walkley Awards. Assange, whose pre-recorded acceptance speech was played at the award ceremony held at Brisbane and broadcast on SBS ONE, blasted the US and Australian governments for their... Go to the source for the full version. I posted something about Assange on my facebook page the other day saying that ' I though he should get the Nobel Prize along with Obama (who already got one). And that is funny because I think that Assange should get his for the same reason, kind of, that Obama got his. Obama got his on a promising future. Assange should get his on what he has already done, and the real! irony of that is that Obama is persecuting him for that and his ,Obamas, promise seems to have disappeared. We should be able to take back the award to Obama and give it to Assagne.

Shot this by my Presentation groups and thought that 'what the hell' you guys could use the gift as well:Guy Kawasaki - 3:17 AM - Public (Fri06) My Black Friday special: Buy a copy of Enchantment (paper or ebook), get a free copy of Garr Reynolds's Presentation Zen, and I'll personalize the cover so Enchantment is a special gift. So you'll make enchanting presentations, and you can give an enchanting gift. Can you beat that? http://bit.ly/jxzBAA More photos from Guy Kawasaki - Comment - Share +31 11 shares - Ana Gabi Ledo, Billy Ventura, Candice Cendaña, Fabio Gam

The Randomness of History

This is a problem that has to be addressed, and what would be your thoughts here?:The Convoluted Life Cycle of a News Story | from the ok-let's-randomly-update-this-story dept. | posted by timothy on Sunday November 20, @16:26 (Social Networks) | with 56 comments | https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/11/20/2126237/the-convoluted-life-cycle-of-a-news-story?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [0]ideonexus writes "Once upon a time, newspapers were considered the "first draft of history." Today, rather than the daily episodic updates of major news stories developing a narrative over time, we have a perpetual stream of factoids from which a story emerges. Lauren Rabaino of mediabistro details this [1]new lifecycle of a newspaper story, from tweets to blog posts to an eventual print edition, and asks What are the best standards of practice? Should news sources provide a single web address with a stream of updates, post new blog entries that link to older ones, or should they adopt a Wiki approach to the news — revising a single story with a history of revisions available behind the scenes?" Discuss this story at: https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/11/20/2126237/the-convoluted-life-cycle-of-a-news-story?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting Links: 0. http://ideonexus.com/ 1. http://www.mediabistro.com/10000words/the-new-convoluted-life-cycle-of-a-newspaper-story_b8552 Copyright 1997-2011, Geeknet, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

This tid bit is from Forbes magazine about an article in the New Yorker and now third hand to you:TECH | 11/11/2011 @ 7:51AM |95 views How To Pick Which Stories To Tell 1 comments, 1 called-out + Comment now In the Nov. 14 issue of The New Yorker, John McPhee writes an essay on how and what he writes. One of the gems in the master’s piece, and it’s a good piece, is when he gives the what. How does he choose what to write about, of all the streaming possibilities? It’s the question always asked at readings. Many writers cringe when asked. But people demand to know because it must be some talismanic thing that separates the good storytellers from the bad ones. McPhee has a simple answer to end all answers: I once made a list of all the pieces I had written in maybe twenty or thirty years, and then put a check mark beside each one whose subject related to things I had been interested in before I went to college. I checked off more than ninety per cent. Beginner’s mind, people. Beginner’s mind. My Progression as a writer, by John McPhee (Nov. 14, 2011 New Yorker, reg required)

Good News

Continuing to follow another news media controversy that of news aggregators and local news companies competing here is the latest through Tech Review from MIT: Google News: Friend or Foe for Local News Services? Research suggests news aggregators like Google drive more traffic to local sites—but not their home pages. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2011BY ERICA NAONE Audio » Google has long been a favorite scapegoat of the troubled news industry. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch famously accused the search titan of stealing from media outlets by drawing users to its aggregation service, Google News, and away from those sites' home pages. New sites often dismiss Google's claims that it helps them by driving traffic to their articles. Now, early results from Microsoft Research New England suggest that news aggregators like Google News increase visits to local news sites—providing they highlight local news stories. The issue is particularly important at a time when many newspapers are trying to end the practice of giving away news for free. Like it or not, aggregators play a significant role. According to a study by the Pew Research Center, Google News is responsible for as much as 30 percent of the traffic that goes to the top 25 news sites. As such, it's a force that can't be ignored, and the Microsoft researchers wanted to assess how aggregators actually affect local news sites. Local news outlets have struggled, particularly online, an environment that's increasingly oriented toward a global audience. For every local news experiment, such as Steven Berlin Johnson's blog service Outside.in or AOL's Patch network, there seems to be another closed newspaper, such as the Honolulu Advertiser, or signs of trouble such as those that inspired the Christian Science Monitor to move to a mostly online format. Those local news experiments online haven't done very well to date. Johnson sold Outside.in to AOL for less than $10 million. Local news sites covered by Technology Review in the past, including YourStreet and Platial, have folded or suffered long-term financial difficulties. While many have theorized that the Internet ought to help local sites by making it easier to get their voices heard, in practice, sites have struggled to find a place—and business model—for themselves. But the Microsoft results suggest there is a hunger for local news online, according to senior researcher Markus Mobius, who was involved with the project. The researchers studied data going back to 2009, when Google gave French users the ability to enter geographic information to refine the results of searches done on Google News. The Microsoft researchers got their data from Microsoft's Bing toolbar, which asks users for permission to track data about online activity. The researchers used this information to study two groups—those who added location information and those who didn't. Besides this difference, the subjects lived in the same regions and had similar news habits before the change. For the group that added local results, the researchers found a huge initial spike in local news consumption, both in terms of page views and in time spent on local sites. Perhaps more interesting, once the spike stabilized, there was a lasting effect, Mobius notes. Eight weeks after the change, the researchers found there was a 16 percent increase in the number of unique local outlets that users visited. Their overall news consumption also went up, so the new interest in local news came as an addition to previous habits. 12 (AS YOU ALL SHOULD HAVE NOTED THIS BLOG IS MOSTLY A NEWS AGGREGATOR)

Set Up Journalism

Written stories, still photos and video all can be and are set up, often before hand, to fit a pre conceived idea of a news story:Behind the Scenes: How Conflict Photographs Come To Be | from the have-you-tried-throwing-left-handed? dept. | posted by timothy on Tuesday October 11, @11:43 (The Media) | with 141 comments | https://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/10/11/1424224/behind-the-scenes-how-conflict-photographs-come-to-be?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- First time accepted submitter benro03 writes "Airing photojournalism's dirty secret, Italian photographer Ruben Salvadori demonstrates how [0]conflict photography is often staged by the photographers themselves. He spent a significant amount of time in East Jerusalem studying the role that photojournalists play in what the world sees. Ruben is about to graduate with dual majors for a BA in International Relations and Anthropology/Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel." Some commenters on the linked story defend much of what's shown as ordinary aesthetic and editorial decisions; doubtless a parallel documentary could have been shot from a few hundred yards away with an opposite slant. Discuss this story at: https://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/10/11/1424224/behind-the-scenes-how-conflict-photographs-come-to-be?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting Links: 0. http://www.petapixel.com/2011/10/04/an-eye-opening-look-at-how-many-conflict-photos-are-staged/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+PetaPixel+(PetaPixel)

This question of who should decide what is news continues. That problem of what we want to hear and see and what we need to hear and see. The challenge for a journalist is to decide what truly is important and what just light entertainment. The second challenge is after deciding, making that important news interesting, compelling even, for the consumer of that news. And so here again from the New York Times:Bits - Business, Innovation, Technology, Society September 29, 2011, 9:17 am Should Google Tweak the News We Consume? By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER Should Google play an editorial role in presenting readers with news? That question was a matter of debate at Zeitgeist, a Google conference this week in Paradise Valley, Ariz., where Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and chief executive, said that Google had a responsibility to improve media. The question came up when Ted Koppel, the longtime broadcast journalist, complained that too much news was drivel, as reporters cover the Casey Anthony trial instead of life-and-death issues in Africa. People are being fed the news they want instead of the news they need because that makes news organizations money, he said. Nicholas Thompson, a senior editor at The New Yorker, then asked Mr. Koppel if Google should tweak its algorithm to deliver people the news they need instead of entertainment-as-news. “That wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Mr. Koppel said. To be clear, Google has said many times that its algorithm presents users with the most relevant search results and does not exercise editorial control, so the question is likely to remain no more than a matter of debate. It reiterated that this week, after Rick Santorum said he thought Google should remove a dirty joke that showed up in searches for his last name. Still, Mr. Page said that Google could do a better job of getting people to focus on certain issues, though he did not address Mr. Koppel’s statement directly. “I see this as our responsibility to some extent, trying to improve media,” Mr. Page said. “If you ask anyone about how that information’s going to be propagated, what you’re going to focus on, I think it could work a lot better than it does now.” “We as an Internet community, we have a responsibility to make those things work a lot better and get people focused on what are the real issues, what should you be thinking about,” he said. “And I think we as a whole are not doing a good job of that at all.” Google has taken small steps toward editing search results for content. In February, for example, it changed its algorithm to weed out Web sites that it thinks have subpar articles and videos, like content farms, a move that affected 12 percent of search queries.

Here is some really good advice from the front lines. The New York Times gives suggestions to editors:October 4, 2011, 10:46 am The Reader’s Lament By PHILIP B. CORBETT Notes from the newsroom on grammar, usage and style. (Some frequently asked questions are here.) AfterDeadline Times readers expect nothing but the best in our writing and editing. Too often, they’re disappointed. My colleague Patrick LaForge, who oversees our copy desks, described their dismay and offered some suggestions in this memo to editors: ••• Day after day, devoted Times readers are moved to complain. “As a 35-year subscriber to The Times, I continue to be disappointed in the number of typos that have become chronic and, sorry to say, expected on a daily basis,” one reader wrote recently. “Where are the proofreaders and editors? Where are the standards for punctuation and grammar? The Times used to be the gold standard.” Mistakes in copy have been a problem since Gutenberg, but it is hard to shake the impression that we have been slipping more than usual, especially in articles that are rushed onto the Web site, bypassing some of our traditional steps. Yes, speed is important in the modern news competition. But readers still have high expectations, especially now that they are paying for online news. We get letters, e-mails, phone calls and complaints on Twitter. Readers have even been known to buttonhole editors on elevators, at cocktail parties and in the local bodega. We often respond, apologizing for our lapses and promising to spread the word. But it is hard to ease the distress of readers like the one who wrote on Sept. 14 to complain about the phrase “committee that overseas foreign aid.” Readers expect a great degree of care in any copy published under our name, wherever it appears — on the front page or an inside page in print; on the home page or deep in a small blog; on a mobile app or in a summary on Facebook. They get annoyed at typos, usage errors and factual mistakes even when we are obviously breaking our backs to get the news to them first. Sure, they can figure it out when we refer to “John G. Borehner,” as we did recently, but they get irritated. “I’ve read The Times daily for more years than I can remember,” one wrote recently. “It goes without saying that it’s the best newspaper in the world. That said, is it irony or just coincidence that now that I’m ‘subscribing’ to the paper’s digital version, the number of glaring copy-editing errors is greater than ever?” This era of news publishing has put a greater emphasis on speed, across multiple formats and platforms. Thanks to blogging and continuous updates, more people in the newsroom find themselves in the role of publishing live material. The same forces have increased the workload and distractions faced by reporters, backfield editors, copy editors and producers. It can be tempting to cut corners. You might decide, unwisely, to save some time by bypassing the copy desk. There is rarely a justification for doing so. Our policy is for every article to get at least two reads, preferably one of them by an experienced copy editor, before publication. And then you should check your work again, or have someone else check it. ••• Here are some proofreading tips culled from years of journalism tip sheets: • Break your mind-set: Read the copy out loud. Read it silently, one word at a time. Read it backward and focus on the spelling of words. Print a copy. Preview it in a different application. Change the format or the screen resolution. Justify or unjustify the type. Take a break and return to it with fresh eyes. • Use spelling checkers but don’t trust them. In particular, be aware of homophone confusion: complement and compliment, accept and except, effect and affect, oversees and overseas. • Memorize frequently misspelled and misused words. Here’s a list: http://www.yourdictionary.com/library/misspelled.html. • Beware of contractions and apostrophes: their and they’re, its and it’s, your and you’re. • After reading for content and spelling, proofread separately for punctuation. • Beware of doubled words at the end and start of a line. A doubled “that” will often slip right by if you let it. • Double-check proper names and claims of distinction (first, best, oldest, tallest, etc.). • Double-check little words that are often interchanged: or, of; it, is. • Check all the numbers, especially any reference to millions, billions or trillions. Do the math. Do the math again. • Set aside a regular time to review stylebook and usage rules. This includes backfield editors and reporters. If you don’t want someone to change your story on style grounds (and perhaps introduce an error), learn the basics and follow them. • Be aware of dates and days of the week, especially in advance copy or copy that has been held. Be aware of references to next month/last month around the time the month is changing. • Make a personal checklist of the things you tend to miss. Use it on every story. • Have someone else, preferably a copy editor, read behind you. Last of all, think of our readers — and care what they think of us. In a Word This week’s grab bag of grammar, style and other missteps, compiled with help from colleagues and readers. ••• One upon a time, the only thing that traveled faster than the speed of light was gossip. Try proofreading one word at a time. ••• LOS ANGELES — DreamWorks Animation, the company behind successful movie franchises like “Madagascar” and “Shrek,” said it had completed a deal to pump its films and television specials through Netflix, replacing a less lucrative pact with HBO. A past-tense lead sentence like this should include a time element. ••• Although political activists celebrated the change, they also cautioned how deep it would go and how fast, given that the king referred to the next election cycle, which would not be until 2015. This construction doesn’t work with “caution,” which as a verb is equivalent to “warn.” ••• Yet officials revealed this week that the State Education Department had quietly been conducting erasure analysis on some high school Regents exams for more than three years, a process that red-flagged 64 incidences of possible problems, including one that led to the ouster of an assistant principal in the Bronx. In precise usage, “incidence” means rate or prevalence: “Officials detected a high incidence of cheating.” Here, we wanted “incidents,” meaning specific occurrences. ••• He accepted a hearty handshake from Girardi, who often has received a snarl from Burnett along with the ball. Here’s what the stylebook says: adverb placement. In fluid writing, an adverb used with a compound verb should normally be placed between parts of the verb (the way normally is, a few words back in this sentence, and the way usually is, in the next example): He will usually take the opposing side. A similar rule applies when a verb like is links a noun to its modifier: Refundable fares are often expensive (not often are expensive). ••• Like Mr. McCain, Mr. Perry refused to back down, declaring that if someone opposes the policy, “I don’t think you have a heart.” And like they did to Mr. McCain, the audience quickly turned against Mr. Perry, loudly booing his position on the issue and his refusal to give an inch. “Like” is correctly used as a preposition in the first sentence, but incorrectly used as a conjunction in the second. Make it “And as they did …” ••• For the record, Octopoteuthis is the first among the spineless masses of invertebrates known to mate equally with males and females, Hendrik J.T. Hoving and two colleagues report in their paper, “A shot in the dark: same-sex squid behavior in a deep-sea squid,” published, lurid title and all, in Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biology Letters. We capitalize the principal words in the title of an article. ••• The kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard filed a complaint for damages against the federal government on Thursday, charging that its parole agents did not adequately monitor Phillip Garrido, a convicted sex offender who was on federal parole when he abducted Ms. Dugard in 1991. The stylebook is clear on this point: Use kidnapping (never kidnap, even in headlines) for the noun and the modifier, to avoid a headlinese flavor. ••• In their third debate in as many weeks, former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas engaged in a sometimes heated back and forth over immigration, health care and entitlements, their rivalry dominating a stage that included seven other candidates struggling to catch up in the race for Republican presidential nomination. Another point the stylebook is clear on: in as many. Avoid this journalese mannerism: This was the second case in as many weeks. As many as second? No. Make it the second case in two weeks. ••• His conviction came after testimony by some witnesses who later recanted and on the scantest of physical evidence, adding fuel to those who rely on the Internet to rally against executions and to question the validity of eyewitness identification and of the court system itself. We seemed to have our metaphors (or clichés) crossed here. You might add fuel to the fire (of a controversy), but you would not add fuel to the people rallying against executions. ••• As with a jigsaw puzzle, forensic anthropologists are putting together more pieces of this intense investigation, but a clear picture of the person, or people, responsible for the murders is still frustratingly unclear. Maybe this was a revision gone awry, or perhaps the writer just lost track of the sentence. But we didn’t want to say “a clear picture … is still frustratingly unclear.” ••• Whether the taxes on the rich in Europe raise enough money to close much of their budget shortfalls, they are being promoted as a step toward economic fairness at a time when governments are cutting spending on social programs like pensions, health care and education. As I’ve pointed out before, sometimes “whether” works alone, but sometimes it needs “or not.” A rule of thumb: “or not” is necessary if we mean “regardless of whether,” as we did here. ••• Mr. Cantor also recalled the conversation concerning the $50 million, and the prime minister’s support for it, and said that further monies from Congress would be “colored greatly by the Palestinians’ actions at the U.N.” No real need for the plural here, and in any case our preferred spelling is “moneys.” ••• Such rides are notoriously uncomfortable, but the Green Lantern, like its superhero namesake, comes with a little extra padding. As we’ve noted before, “namesake” (unlike “eponym”) generally refers to the receiver of the shared name, not to the giver. ••• After Deadline examines questions of grammar, usage and style encountered by writers and editors of The Times. It is adapted from a weekly newsroom critique overseen by Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards, who is also in charge of The Times’s style manual.