Scientific Journal Gets Hoodwinked

The journal Materials Today in its July/August issue is running an opinion piece about "evidence" that Thomas Edison was involved in the murder of a rival. But a closer read shows that the victim was more likely Materials Today. This is a post I did a couple of days ago on my photography blog (as the topic was movie technology), but I thought that people here might find it interesting.

How To Turn Off Someone Doing You A Favor

A press inquiry email list called helpareporter.com lets journalists mention story ideas to those who might might have sources or information available. It costs nothing and is generally useful. Peter Shankman, the PR person who runs it, has posted an interesting interchange with someone who signed up for the service and, apparently, took umbrage at the welcome auto response.

Quite a hard-assed reaction, eh? I wondered about this willingness to "share with reporters" and went to her site. I eventually found what a viatical settlement was, after some poking about. But, my, much of the site to me radiates irritation and unpleasantness. For example:

This website has more than 200 pages of free information. More information is available through our books, many of which can be borrowed from your local library. Please do not contact us for additional free information. We have neither the time nor the resources to allow us to respond -- and we do receive many inquiries each week. However, when there are a number of questions on the same issue, such as "Should Investors Pay Premiums?" we will publish a Special Report.

And how is she supposed to hear the questions when she's telling people not to ask her questions, just to buy the book? Jeez.

Reporters May Be Getting China-Tibet Story Wrong

It's tough to cover a story of unrest when you can't get into the country in which it's happening. So far as I know, only one western journalist - an Economist correspondent - was officially in Tibet, and, paradoxically, he was pretty much left alone. But everyone seems to be falling into the biggest form of bias that journalists have: the desire for a neat and compelling narrative that simply explains what they are seeing. I think that may be why everything about the protests in Tibet are framed in a little-guy-versus-big-guy politics. But that may be only a small part of the story.

I'm on a mailing list run by a risk management consultancy, and someone well versed in how geopolitics, policy, and economics interact, who just returned from China, had a different view. This person said that the driving cause was inflation in China making it difficult for people to buy food, including monks. Also, the actions are supposedly spreading from the provinces to Tibet. Although Tibet gets a lot of attention, there have allegedly been food riots across China, most of which go unreported.

The expert then went on to say that food inflation had sparked not only the actions in Tibet and, apparently, people killed in Chinese grocery stores as they tried to buy cooking oil, but there have been food riots in "West Africa, Mexico, Morocco, Yemen, Guinea, Uzbekistan, Senegal, India, Indonesia, Cambodia and Burma." Good lord, that is a scary thought. There have been crop problems in a number of important food producing countries, and the economics of oil and the financial markets is driving up inflation and diverting crops to create ethanol.

If inflation, and the skyrocketing food prices that results, are becoming such a problem, you'd hope that journalists would start to cover the issue. So long as we're hearing only the tidy "political unrest" story, we don't learn what might actually suggest a solution, or at least a real explanation.

Newsweek's Evan Thomas on Press Objectivity

I find it a partial relief when a major journalistic figure like Evan Thomas of Newsweek decides to say that the press has biases. It's like hearing a small town politician admit that the water seeping up from the ground really is a broken water main, and not excess condensation. Unfortunately, Thomas takes some what might seem the most palatable and understandable prejudices as the only ones. He rattles off what the mainstream media's realprejudices are:

The mainstream media (the "MSM" the bloggers love to rail against) are prejudiced, but not ideologically. The press's real bias is for conflict. Editors, even ones who marched in antiwar demonstrations during the Vietnam era, have a weakness for war, the ultimate conflict. Inveterate gossips and snoops, journalists also share a yen for scandal, preferably sexual. But mostly they are looking for narratives that reveal something of character. It is the human drama that most compels our attention.

I won't argue that the media does have these biases. They're part of story structure, and so the stock in trade of the working reporter. Do you think a gardener would be disinterested in an interesting plant?

But to claim these as the only prejudices is laughable. Look at the following passage from his own article:

Politicians have long known how to go over the heads of the press to the public. Had the voting franchise been restricted to reporters, neither Richard Nixon nor Ronald Reagan would have been elected president. Much of the Fourth Estate regarded Nixon as a thinly packaged autocrat, Reagan as a dumb nuclear cowboy. Both presidents were re-elected in landslides.

Thinly packaged autocrat and dumb nuclear cowboy? That's not weakness for war, gossip, or character-revealing narrative. That's unbiased prejudice toward people with a political or intellectual bent for which you don't care. I remember one editor at a major publication turning down a story idea that involved people who went target shooting in costume because "I don't really like guns."

How about the support of JFK in the 60s? He was glamorous, witty, attractive, charismatic - and he liked the press. There's another form of press bias: they want to be around the people who seem to reflect the impression they want to exude. In other words, these are people who often are suckers for flattery and blandishments. He addresses this slightly, but unsatisfactorily at the end of the article:

It is true that reporters are susceptible to flash and charm; like most cynics, they are romantics in disguise. JFK and the early Bill Clinton were bound to get better press than insecure Richard Nixon or earnest Al Gore (who for some reason hides a raucous sense of humor). Right now, Obama and John McCain are popular with reporters. But if the usual laws of press physics apply, the media will turn on both men before Election Day. The blogs and the talk-show hosts will rant. The voters will take it all in (or not). And then make up their own minds.

Yup, I'm sure the press will turn just like it did with JFK ... oh, wait, it didn't, really.

Another form of bias is when the journalistic community largely becomes slaves to social fashion. Thomas essentially notes this, without calling it a form of bias, when he recounts some of the ping-pong back and forth between toady and antagonist, the reporting about WMDs and Iraq being a collective nadir.

In other words, there is tremendous bias in the media, because the media is made up of fallible people. To address the issue is important for journalists, but to try to package it in a form that doesn't taste bad is to continue the worst bias of all: that of a warped self-image.

W. Thomas Smith And Journalistic Practice

There has been significant "coverage" of the problems in the National Review blog entries from Lebanon of W. Thomas Smith. And, to be fair, I'll note that Tom is a friend of mine. However, when I look at all the charges and counter-charges, I find a number of highly disturbing things floating to the top.

First, there is no doubt that Tom Smith screwed up in some big ways - and I've said that to him personally. Blog entries must be just as seriously pursued as something for a print magazine, and you need to take all precautions because the haste can push you into making errors. So saying that something was "just" a blog entry was a poor approach. Normally, you'd have an editor at least, and possibly multiple editors and fact checkers helping to prevent mistakes from occurring. While a writer must take total responsibility for his or her work to approach it professionally, the publication also must take responsibility. Instead, the National Review web editor has apparently written everything off as being the mistake of trusting a "freelancer." But what does that mean? Do staff people gain a measure of infallibility the moment they take staff positions? Didn't the editor have a responsibility to ask about the sources of information? Has she tried pushing all responsibility off on Tom because she didn't want to raise the question of what her position in all of this was? Why didn't she ask about the sources as the posts were going up? Wasn't she acting as an editor at all?

Certainly when you have sources that are likely to be biased and that probably aren't authoritative, you cannot put together a collection of observations and state them as fact. Tom should have stated what sources he used - or even if one had to be unnamed (and I don't know if that would have been true), mention that there was such a source. But let's be realistic about the state of journalism, which is one of my concerns about all this. Many, many stories state information as "fact," even if the reporter did not see them first hand. The more grounded reporting might use terms such as alleged or supposed or claimed. But there are many stories where reporters will check with multiple sources and then use the information as though it were fact. I'd be greatly surprised if some of the Middle East-based journalists who are pointing fingers at Tom didn't do the same. In fact, by effectively saying, "I check with my sources and they said it was nonsense, so he must have made it up," they are treating what sources tell them as indisputable revealed truth. This is a disaster in the making. Is the only difference whether someone's sources are for or against Hezbollah?

Look at the chain of logic: a reporter says, "I never heard this, and neither did my sources, so it cannot be true." So how could tens of thousands have been killed in Rwanda over the three weeks before there was any media coverage? Weren't there journalists in Africa who had Rwanda as part of their beats, and shouldn't their sources have known? Or, using the same logic, did the massacres never happen for those three weeks because the journalists didn't hear about them? It's the semantic equivalent to the philosophical question of whether a tree falling in a forest, far away from everyone, actually makes a sound. Why didn't business journalists see the dot com crash coming? (I know of some that did, by the way, but most business publications at the time didn't want to hear anything negative because, well, all those experts, with their own motivations, said everything was ducky.)

More pointedly, why didn't the Middle East correspondents report that Hezbollah forces were massing near the Israeli-Lebanese border last year, before the war broke out last year? Logic tells us either a) they did know and said nothing, in which case their motives are highly suspect, or b) they didn't know and yet such a massing could happen anyway. Either the assumption that they would have to know is wrong, or their integrity is questionable, but in either case, journalists' not knowing about something is hardly proof that it couldn't have happened, no matter how "obvious" you'd think it would be. (Frankly, troops massing at a border should be a whole lot more obvious than a few thousand armed militia wandering around a city of between 1 and 2 million people, depending on the source you use.)

Finally, the mainstream press seemed to jump onto this story and make sweeping statements without having the information to back it up. I saw pieces on The Atlantic's web site, CJR's web site, and elsewhere say that Tom had been fabricating. At face value, the worst someone could accuse Tom of is being highly sloppy. But fabrication? That has carries the implicit meaning of knowingly making something up. I saw a column that Howard Kurtz wrote for the Post where apparently he used some quotes from things Tom wrote but never even stated that he has tried unsuccessfully to reach Tom for a direct comment. Is this how journalism is supposed to work?

Again, I know Tom and like him. Yet, I don't mean this as a defense of what he did, or didn't, do. Instead, I'm questioning the approach that the mainstream press has used in this story as a case in point of how much of what we read should be strongly questioned. The results were at least as sloppy as Tom's worst mistakes, and, in my opinion, far surpassed them in recklessness.