Too Much Secrecy: Press Ask The Court To Open Up Bradley Manning Court Martial

from the how-we-got-into-this-mess dept

As the case against Bradley Manning moves forward, the government is doing what it always seems to do: trying to keep everything secret. However, over 30 news organizations have now asked the armed forces appeals court to open up, allowing public access to motions, briefs and written rulings associated with the case. The military’s response has been that the only way the press should be able to access such documents (which are regularly available via things like PACER in the civilian court system) is through filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which can take a long time, and are all too often ignored. Of course, it’s the over aggressive attempts to keep information secret that may have resulted in this case even existing in the first place, as Manning allegedly believed that the over-classification of documents was harming US interests.

This Court should find that such an arrangement is uncon-stitutional. More than thirty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized a presumptive right of access to criminal proceed-ings. See Richmond Newspapers, Inc. v. Virginia, 448 U.S. 555, 573 (1980) (plurality opinion). As discussed below, the Court has reiterated its holding repeatedly, and the nation’s military courts have applied the same reasoning to extend this right of public access to courts-martial. Amici recognize that various interests, including the need to protect national security information, may justify sealed records in certain circumstances. They do not, however, general-ly justify complete secrecy. In fact, previous disputes about claims of national security have been litigated in the open: “Briefs in the Pentagon Papers case and the hydrogen bomb plans case were available to the press, although sealed appendices discussed in detail the documents for which protection was sought.”

Hopefully the court recognizes the significant public interest here and makes such documents public by default.

Filed Under: bradley manning, docket, foia, freedom of information, journalism, secrecy
Companies: wikileaks

How The Press Misinterprets Scientific Studies

from the dream-recording-machines dept

There’s an absolutely awesome comic by Jorge Cham of PhDComics (which you should read whether or not you’re a PhD student) about the science news cycle, in which a nuanced scientific result showing a slight correlation is turned into a causal relationship by the press, leading to a flat out frenzy of others in the press who don’t even bother to understand what the original research was about.

Click image to see full version I’m reminded of this particular comic as the folks at On the Media point us to a story, told by Moran Cerf at The Moth (my favorite storytelling operation), about how, as a grad student, he got some research accepted for publication in Nature, the top of the top in terms of scientific journal prestige. His rather interesting research was about sticking electrodes in patients brains during brain surgery, having them think of certain things, and being able to have a projector project an image of what they were thinking. Cool, right? You can watch the video to see what happened once the press got hold of the story.

In case you can’t watch the video, the short version is that Cerf had put together a short video about the research, and at the very, very, very end, when talking to a colleague about how this kind of research might advance in the future, the research mentions something about studying and recording dreams. Now, nothing in the actual research is about studying or recording dreams, but… the BBC picked up on this part of the story, and then everyone picked up on this part of the story, and things only got worse from there. And no matter what Cerf did, everyone was just focused on these claims about dream recording — even to the point that director Chris Nolan asked him to come on tour in a discussion about the movie Inception.

You can see the original Nature story here, followed by the BBC piece that focuses on dreams, even though that’s not in the actual research. At least it admits that such things are far, far away. Others in the press weren’t so careful. There are plenty of other such reports, but my favorite may be Metro in the UK that claims we’re on the “brink” of recording people’s dreams, despite that not being even close to true. For what it’s worth, it appears some sources, such as Reuters did not parrot the dream recording angle, but plenty did.

It’s a pretty good reminder that, especially when it comes to scientific research, you really shouldn’t believe everything you read.

Oh, and as a random aside, while this story from Moran is entertaining, it does not come close in entertainment value to this other story that Cerf told at a different Moth event about his life as a bank robber. Seriously. No matter what you’re doing today, find ten minutes to watch this next video:

Filed Under: brains, journalism, moran cerf, science, storytelling

WSJ Still Hasn't Corrected Its Bogus Internet Revisionist Story, As Vint Cerf & Xerox Both Claim The Story Is Wrong

from the how-do-you-correct-a-story-that's-almost-entirely-wrong? dept

We recently discussed a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by its former publishers, L. Gordon Crovitz, in which he made some fantastically false claims about the origins of the internet. What was noteworthy was that while the WSJ got the story so totally wrong, lots of others, including bloggers, leapt into the fray to explain why Crovitz was wrong. Almost everyone he sourced or credited to support his argument that the internet was invented entirely privately at Xerox PARC and when Vint Cerf helped create TCP/IP, has spoken out to say he’s wrong. And that list includes both Vint Cerf, himself, and Xerox. Other sources, including Robert Taylor (who was there when the internet was invented) and Michael Hiltzik, have rejected Crovitz’s spinning of their own stories.

Basically, anyone and everyone is telling the WSJ that it got this story totally and completely wrong. You might think the WSJ would start making some corrections. Instead, it’s made one single correction:

That was a pretty minor correction, involving Crovitz being confused about how to understand how blockquotes work in HTML. But what about all of the other factual errors, including whoppers like saying that Tim Berners-Lee invented hyperlinks? Of course, considering the very premise of the article and nearly all of its supporting factoids were in error, it raises questions about how you do such a correction, other than crossing out the whole thing and posting a note admitting to the error (none of which has yet been done). Given the widespread discussion online about these errors — both in blogs and in traditional media, it seems like the company’s silence about the whole thing is just making the problem worse. Why won’t the WSJ step up and issue a real correction on all of the errors?

Filed Under: arpanet, corrections, errors, history, internet, l. gordon crovitz, parc, vint cerf
Companies: xerox

When WSJ Flunks Internet History, Blogs Step In To Educate

from the but-we-need-to-support-newspapers dept

We hear over and over again from traditional reporters how we need to “protect” newspapers and how, as newspapers fail, no one can step in and replace them — especially not “new media” like blogs. In fact, we’re told how newspapers are “trustworthy,” but blogs are “amateurish” and prone to hyperbole and errors. It’s a common story told over and over again — especially by those supporting the idea of paywalls and the like. In fact, we wrote about yet another such example just recently. And yet… it seems that we just as frequently hear about newspapers making big mistakes, and blogs stepping in to correct them.

Today’s example involves the supposedly venerable Wall Street Journal, who posted a column by former publisher L. Gordon Crovitz, trying to claim that the internet was really invented by private companies, without much government support. Except, of course, that’s false. Ridiculously false. Thankfully, we had blogs to step in and debunk many of the factual errors made by Crovitz. Quickly into the breach stepped Steve Wildstrom at Tecpinions, who pointed out that Crovitz’s version of history was way off and then Tim Lee at Ars Technica, who went even deeper in showing how Crovitz mangled the history.

Among the many, many errors in Crovitz’s piece were the claims that Tim Berners-Lee (no relation to Tim Lee above) “invented hyperlinks.” He did no such thing. He invented the web, which came long after hypertext and hyperlinks were well known and well-established. He also tries to downplay Arpanet, and worst of all pretends that because Vint Cerf (with Bob Kahn) invented TCP/IP, that it shows it was done without the government’s help. He, of course, leaves out that both were employed… by the government. It also plays up the importance of ethernet, invented at Xerox PARC. This was a big deal (and I even have a photo of the first ethernet connection that I recently took on a tour of PARC), but that was for local networks and not “the internet.”

To be fair, this is the opinion pages, not the reporting pages, but the WSJ is supposed to have a pretty high bar for getting facts right, isn’t it? And I would assume that applies to the opinion pages as well. Of course, what’s interesting is that Crovitz has a history of this kind of thing. A couple years ago, we wrote about another piece by him which misattributed a quote of mine to someone else’s and then took three days or so to post a correction. This Crovitz piece has added one correction at the time of my writing this, but only for (another) misattributed quote (Crovitz apparently didn’t realize that he was quoting a blog post by Tyler Cowen quoting someone else and attributed it to Cowen). Everything else is still in there.

Of course, even more ironic in all of this is that Crovitz helped found Journalism Online — one of the leading companies pushing newspapers to set up paywalls, arguing that newspapers need people to pay, or all good reporting will go away. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s not limited to either newspapers or blogs. I don’t mean to pick on Crovitz or the WSJ in particular here (even though the mistakes in his piece were both plentiful and easily cross checked). It’s just that the idea that newspapers have some sort of “lock” on factual, objective reporting — whereas newfangled “blogs” are chock full of misinformation — is an inaccurate position. Yes, there’s plenty of misinformation spread on various sites, but the same thing shows up in “traditional” media too. The point is that the wider ecosystem seems to be pretty damn good at highlighting those mistakes (even if the WSJ is then very slow to correct them).

Filed Under: blogs, history, internet, journalism, l. gordon crovitz, reporting

Healthcare, Journalism, And The Mad Dash For 'The Scoop'

from the getting-back-to-insights dept

As you may have heard, when the Supreme Court came out with its ruling on healthcare, CNN and Fox News jumped the gun and incorrectly reported that the Court had struck down the individual mandate. Fox News corrected the mistake pretty quickly. CNN took a bit longer (and spread the false “breaking news” story far and wide). The whole thing even had President Obama confused for a little while.

It was, of course, also great for late night television. People are referring to this as cable news’ “Dewey defeats Truman” moment, while others are arguing that “breaking news is broken.” Of course, being a part of the “blogging” world which is often accused by “old media” types of publishing untrue things… there is some element of schadenfreude in being able to see it made clear that the mainstream media is often no better at publishing incorrect things. Of course, some tried to flip this around, and suggest that the problem actually came about because of “new media” thinking around things like “process journalism,” though there’s a strong argument that reporting before reading something isn’t process journalism, it’s just bad journalism (i.e., process journalism is about reporting things as additional news comes out — but in this case, the news was out, the problem was people reporting it before reading it).

A few years ago, uber-blogger Mike Arrington said something that has quite a lot of truth to it: to get attention as an online media player, you generally have to be first, funny or insightful — and being first is often the easiest, so lots of people concentrate on that. It’s the chase for “the scoop.” Being funny is powerful, but very, very difficult. And… being insightful takes a lot of time and effort, and is no guarantee of attention. Generally speaking, our goal here has never been to be first with news (in fact, we often wait for others to publish so that we can link to their reports in what we write up). Personally, I like that much better. Focusing just on “the scoop” may be good for traffic in the short term, but especially for big stories like this one, I’m not sure how much value it creates in the long term.

Of course, the realities of gaining traffic often support the quick “scoop” over deeper insight. For example, Reddit — a potential major firehose of traffic these days — has its algorithm designed to reward quick, early votes, meaning that longer, thoughtful, insightful pieces almost have no chance, because by the time people have read and thought through them, it’s “too late” to have the votes really count.

Some will argue, of course, that this is just a sign of the “bad” side of the internet: valuing quick, dirty and sometimes wrong reporting over longer, more thoughtful work. But I’m not convinced that’s true. Again, there are plenty of historical examples of this in pre-internet times as well — with Dewey Beats Truman being just one of many such examples.

Instead of just mocking those who messed up, or using a bit of confirmation bias to insist that it shows how awful things are in this “real time era,” I’d be much more interested to see if we could have a discussion on how to change the incentives. How do we better reward insight and thoughtful commentary over the quick hit-scoop? Is it possible? And, if so, what needs to be done?

Filed Under: first, healthcare, hot news, scoop, scotus, traffic
Companies: cnn, fox news, reddit

Pointless Journalist Fight: Who Gets Credit For Tweeting A Story First?

from the get-over-yourselves dept

One thing I always find particularly silly in the mainstream media is when they claim “exclusive” on a story. News is not “ownable,” and the second someone gets a story out, that news is out there and the facts are available to anyone else. So every time I see publications claim “exclusive!” it makes me laugh. It may be exclusive for a few seconds, at best. But, old school journalists seem to get really really picky about those things, as evidenced by this particularly stupid argument over who gets “credit” for a story. It seems that the NY Times and Reuters both had reporters working on the story, and the NYTimes tweeted the news out about 26 seconds before Reuters did — but the Reuters reporter is still demanding credit — first claiming (incorrectly) that he tweeted it first, but then noting (correctly) that they published first. The simple fact is that no one cares, other than a couple of journalists. No one keeps score, and no one owns the news. After all, if we have to go back to the “original” source, then wouldn’t it be the person the story is actually about?

Filed Under: facts, pointless, twitter fight
Companies: new york times, reuters

New York Times Adapts Open Source Mini-Game For Some Meta-Journalism

from the more-than-just-a-gimmick dept

By now you’ve probably caught a link or two to the New York Times’ layout-obliterating mini-game embedded in an article about so-called “stupid games”. The article itself is an interesting (if slightly long-winded) history and mild (if slightly self-indulgent) condemnation of the “dark side” of hyperaddictive games from Tetris to Angry Birds, and while I don’t agree with much of the message, I’m glad to see it’s garnering quite a bit of attention for this clever idea to illustrate the point by including a distracting game right there on the page.

The Nieman Journalism Lab got some details on how the game was created, including the fact that it’s a fairly simple adaptation of another open source game. Jon Huang, the man behind the NYT version, sounds like a guy who really understands and embraces the potential of open sharing:

“I give all the credit to the guys behind Kick Ass. They’re a really excited pair of 18-year-old twins in Sweden,” Huang told me Wednesday. “I love that’s how the Internet works these days.”

Kick Ass is the open source game that made the Times’ interactive possible. It’s essentially a bookmarklet that allows you to wreak havoc on any given site you find yourself on. It was a perfect fit for the the theme of Sam Anderson’s Sunday magazine story, which examines the rise of games like Angry Birds, Plants vs. Zombies, and others that inhibit a world very different from what we might traditionally think of as regular video games.

They also rightly praise Huang and the NYT for their creative use of technology and multimedia to enhance journalism—though, it seems worth pointing out that the more the game enhances the message of the article, the more it paradoxically weakens it as well: by using a completely pointless but addictive game found on github to improve a story, they’ve proven that such toys can have uses beyond what is immediately apparent.

Filed Under: gaming, multimedia, open source
Companies: new york times

Free For The First Time In Decades, Libyan Media Struggles To Define Itself

from the when-the-shackles-come-off dept

The Arab Spring sparked plenty of discussion about the roles that social media, mobile devices and other technologies can play in toppling oppressive regimes. But there’s another aspect to events in the Middle East that should prove enlightening to those interested in the role of media: what happens afterwards? In Libya, there is suddenly press freedom after 42 years of censorship and government control, and it has led to the appearance of countless new newspapers, websites and TV and radio stations, all working to build a journalistic landscape essentially from scratch. As an article in Global Post reveals, the result is understandably somewhat chaotic:

“We are yet to see even semi-professional reporting,” said Jamal Dajani, the regional vice president for Internews, an international media development organization.” TV reports are dominated by unfocused footage and “amateur standups,” he says. “There are no standards on presentation. Long reportage and news packages are jumbled together like a mixed cocktail.”

I find that comment interesting because it echoes some of the criticisms leveled at blogs and online media in the western world. The key difference is that while amateur journalism here has been able to draw upon the resources of traditional media as it develops, in Libya there is no such support structure:

A year ago, Libya’s entire newspaper industry consisted of only six government-run papers. Television and radio were completely state-owned and international news was heavily censored. Dajani described it as a “one-man media” operation designed to promote former leader Muammar Gaddafi and his family.

[…]

The former regime’s repression left little chance for most journalists to develop core skills. Even those considered professionals did not have the chance to work in any real capacity as journalists.

As Dajani put it, trained Libyan reporters have been “paralyzed” for the past four decades and in the eyes of the new generation they now have “zero credibility.” The new landscape has emerged largely through the efforts of unskilled but enthusiastic amateurs.

It’s too early to know what will emerge from the post-revolution chaos, but the big question is whether the press will establish its independence—which isn’t guaranteed just because the government was toppled:

While government censorship has been almost nonexistent under the new system, Internews has expressed concern about “self censorship” and “public pressure” to omit information that may be deemed “against the revolution.”

[…]

At the outset of the revolution, free and fair media was a major demand. Unsurprisingly, the media that emerged in the rebel territories took on the identity of the revolution, promoting those devoted to the cause.

As the new government and constitution begin to take shape, Libya’s media has failed to shift from advocacy to neutrality.

I think “neutrality” is a dangerous term when it comes to the media, because too much emphasis on remaining neutral leads to sterile he-said-she-said journalism, where reporters don’t feel the need to judge the veracity of opposing positions as long as they give them equal airtime. I prefer the standards of transparency, fairness and accuracy: having an opinion is okay, as long as you are upfront about it and open to changing it, and as long as you don’t intentionally ignore facts that conflict with it. But this is the good thing about having an open landscape with a wide array of voices: these standards are naturally encouraged, because when one source violates them, others are quick to call them out. As Libyans’ focus shifts to the upcoming election, it’s likely that the self-censorship will decrease, and the fierce competition in the media will begin to improve the quality throughout.

Filed Under: journalism, libya, media

No That Won't Backfire At All: Questionable Story About Obama's Daughter Disappears From The Web

from the rampant-speculation dept

Generally speaking, the press has something of an implicit agreement that they don’t use underage Presidential offspring in politically tinged stories. For obvious reasons, it’s considered to be a pretty cynical move. Of course, if they actually do something newsworthy, it might be a different story. This afternoon a bunch of stories started appearing, talking about how President Obama’s daughter Malia was traveling in Oaxaca, Mexico as part of a trip with some classmates (and 25 secret service agents). This story was reported on by the AFP wire service, and some tied it to the fact that the State Department recently issued a travel advisory urging Americans to stay away from parts of Mexico. Not surprisingly, some picked up on this story to suggest some sort of… something. Double standard? Hypocrisy? Of course, the details suggest this really was not much of a story. If you actually read the State Department warning, it makes it clear that there is no warning in place for Oaxaca — so this trip doesn’t appear to go against that warning.

It seems likely, then, that the AFP decided to pull back the story once someone pointed that out, but the story is now rapidly disappearing from a variety of online publications (big and small), leading to questions and easy political points about how the story is being “scrubbed.” Google News listed about 27 versions of the story when I looked, and later, following the links, I found almost every single one of them was flat out gone. In most cases, they were replaced with a 404 (including The Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Australian) or sometimes just redirecting people to a front page (Huffington Post and International Business Times). The only version I still found up was at TurkishPress.com, but it might not last very long.

Now, I tend to think that using the President’s underage kids for a political story is generally a low blow and not particularly nice, but if there is something newsworthy happening, it should be fair game. I also think that, from the sound of it, this story got blown out of proportion by those who didn’t bother to actually read the details of the destination or the State Department’s specific warning which notes no problem at that destination.

But, having said all that, simply having the article disappear completely, rather than putting up a correction or an explanation of what happened, simply fuels both the conspiracy theories and the interest in the story. It’s exactly the wrong way to go about dealing with the situation. There are a variety of possibilities here. The administration may have asked the press to pull the story, which would only generate more interest in the news. The AFP, upon realizing that it shouldn’t have posted the story, may have issued a kill order/retraction of sorts. Or perhaps there’s some other reasoning. But there are good ways to handle these situations and ways that are guaranteed to backfire. Simply making the articles disappear is pretty much guaranteed to backfire and generate more interest in the story, even if it’s a total non-story. Replacing the original story with a “hey, we thought this, but we got it wrong,” would have been much more effective.

Filed Under: corrections, journalism, malia obama, online, press, stories, streisand effect

Journalism Opportunities Aren't Drying Up, They Are Just Changing

from the best-of-times-worst-of-times dept

Philip Trippenbach, a journalist and game designer who now works in public relations, responded on his blog to a letter from a recent J-school graduate seeking his advice on finding full-time journalism work. This is something a lot of would-be reporters struggle with: the market is in such a state of flux, and legacy news outlets are doing so little hiring, that the “traditional” career paths for journalists have all but disappeared. But as Trippenbach explains in his response, that doesn’t mean there are no opportunities — they are just very different:

Make no mistake: traditional, platform-based journalism is being crushed, and its dust will blow away on the winds of the internet. I know this is a melodramatic way to put it, but it’s an important point to make. Newspaper, television and radio journalists now are all in the position of itinerant bards at the advent of the printing press.

The good news is that there’s never been a better time to be a journalist. The bards have disappeared, but we still sing, and we still spread news. Just so, the digital sphere is growing fast as the blast front of an explosion. Good skills in writing, producing video and audio are more important than ever. They just need to be couched in an understanding of sharing and search – the air and water of the internet. There’s no use writing if your content can’t be shared or found. A mediocre piece optimized for social sharing will beat a piece of beautiful content without links every time. So you need to intuitively understand the answers to two questions:

1. What makes people share stuff? Will they want to share this? How will they share it, when they find it?
2. How do people find stuff? How will people find this? What will they be looking for?

There are those who decry this trend, and fear that social- and SEO-based journalism will ruin the profession and its standards, but that’s taking a dim view of things. Though there will be publications that pursue sensationalist headlines over sober coverage, that’s no different than the situation in traditional media, where less-reputable outlets do the same thing. Journalism is inevitably a battle for attention, whether it’s on the newsstand or in your Twitter feed, and there will always be those who choose the quick-and-dirty route. The challenge for a new generation of journalists is to mesh their values and ethics with the reality of how news spreads in the modern world — it won’t always be easy, but good journalism never is.

In a similar open letter, this time directed at people who currently work in journalism but fear for their future, Terry Heaton takes things a step further by saying it’s all about the personal brand:

If you haven’t already done so, now is the time to begin building and refining your personal brand. The good thing about this is that you’re in charge, so you get to pick and choose how and how much you are promoted in the world of personal media. It’s not necessarily the size of the fish in the pond that will succeed tomorrow, although that’s always a nice advantage. What will be important is your niche and how valuable you are within that niche. This will produce value to the people who will want exclusive or first crack at the content you’ll create, regardless of the financial structure available. If aggregation and curation are the filters for media consumption downstream (they are), your place in the queue matters much more than which corporate brand you represent. You control this through the quality of your work and attending to the marketing of yourself. You can’t blame anybody else for success or failure here.

[…]

This is incredibly important for you, because, like it or not, we’re moving to a scenario where you very likely won’t be employed directly by a media company. You’ll work as an independent contractor and sell your work in a variety of ways.

I’ve never been a huge fan of all the “personal branding” talk, because it seems like marketing lingo for something that should be obvious: a journalist’s reputation matters. That has always been the case, as has the fact that many of the most successful journalists are freelancers who trade on that reputation (especially in the world of magazines). The real change is that now journalists have far more tools at their disposal to help establish that reputation, and the barrier to begin doing so is much lower. They can start a blog, they can tweet, they can participate in comments and forums. Of course, so can everyone else, which is why finding a niche is so important.

It’s not unlike the situation in music, or books, or video games, or any of the other industries that have been so fundamentally disrupted by the internet: the gatekeepers don’t get to call the shots anymore. For both new and established journalists, this means they have to take their careers into their own hands, but it doesn’t invalidate every lesson learned in J-school or the newsroom. The media industry is in a state of flux, but many of the things that make a good journalist haven’t really changed — the power and the responsibility have just shifted to the journalists themselves.

Filed Under: journalism