Is A.I. the future of journalism? I hope not.

I'm a day late this week, but today is a holiday here in the US, so it's a Monday that feels like a Sunday. So I'm calling it good. 

How many fingers am I holding up?
lipsky | Deposit Photos

This past week, the Chicago Sun-Times copped to running a bogus feature article recommending books to read this summer. The article was written by a freelancer for King Features, a company that regularly distributes material like features and comic strips to newspapers. It has been in business since 1915. 

The article was included in a supplement called "Heat Index" -- a 50-ish-page filler "magazine" meant to fatten a paper's page count while causing no extra work for the news staff. Wherein lies the problem with this particular article: the freelancer kind of ran out of time to do it properly, so he had A.I. generate it. And then he didn't fact check it. His editor at King Features didn't fact check it, either. Neither did anybody at the Sun-Times (nor presumably did anybody at any other papers that ran it, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, according to The Atlantic, which interviewed the freelancer in question). But while the authors cited in the piece were real, the books that are supposedly coming out this summer by them are not.

The articles I've seen about this mess mostly focus on the fact that staff attrition at newspapers around the country have left the business ripe for this kind of thing. Of course that's true. But there's another danger underlying this obvious conclusion, and it relates to the credibility of the news media as a whole.

Once upon a time, people in the news business prided themselves on being purveyors of Truth, their work consisting of factual reporting, as unbiased as it's possible for a human endeavor to be. It's bad enough that conservative media have made a career out of making stuff up and calling it "news the lamestream media doesn't want you to see!!!1!!1!!!" And it's worse that even liberals are berating papers like the New York Times and The Washington Post for publishing editorials that don't reflect reality as they see it. But now newspapers are letting A.I.-generated dreck past their gatekeepers.

It reminds me of back in the '80s when infotainment became a buzzword in broadcasting. Infotainment programming blurred the line between news and entertainment, to the point where TV news has become more about entertainment than informing its viewers. Owing to the tyranny of the clock, broadcast news has always been less substantive -- by which I mean less detailed -- than a newspaper article. But with papers now beginning to lean on A.I. to generate content, whether because of staff shortages or time crunches or cheapskates in the front office, it's going to be harder to trust what we read in the paper as true.

Journalism already faces a credibility problem. Using A.I.-generated crap without having a human vet it is just going to make it worse. 

I hope newspaper owners wake up and realize that relying on chatbot-generated nonsense is not going to improve their bottom lines, and that they're supposed to be providing a service to the community, not just padding the pockets of their owners.

It may be a vain hope. It may be too late to save the news industry. But I hope not.

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These moments of bloggy news criticism have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Fact check everything!

The ongoing demise of the old journalistic hegemony.

 

One of the most interesting sidebar stories to come out of the Democratic National Convention last month -- to me, at least -- was about complaints from mainstream journalists that they were kind of given short shrift this year. In their view, the Harris campaign gave preference to social media influencers: meeting with them separately; giving them opportunities for access to the candidates at the same time that mainstream outlets were complaining that the candidates hadn't given any interviews yet; and so on.

Asawin Suebsang covered the convention for Rolling Stone, and he wrote about this kerfuffle last week: 

Much of what I witnessed and heard about during my time in Chicago reinforced my preexisting beliefs that far too many so-called elite members of my profession — national political media scribes who fancy themselves as speaking truth to power, but more often just speak words to financially destructive Google algorithms — are mollycoddled hogs who are doing everything they can to fail to meet the enormity of this moment.

"There were times," he goes on, "I thought I had been teleported back to 2010, when we as an industry were debating how to treat bloggers." And he relates how "multi-lanyard-wearing, sweat-flecked envoys of the U.S. media elite berat[ed] the lowest-level convention volunteers to let them into their seats at once" when security cut off access to the press section due to overcrowding on Thursday night: 

I would be naming names at this point, if I could tell you with certainty who any of these people were, other than the fact that their respective demeanors suggested that they were accustomed to bellowing: "Do you know who I am?"

All this, he says, in an atmosphere where "much of the mainstream political press has been (correctly) programming its audience to believe this year's race is not a normal presidential election, and then too many in that media elite get upset when the public points out that they're covering it like a normal presidential election...".

Amen, brother, amen.

Alert hearth/myth readers know of my journalistic background, and of how I've been gradually coming around to the realization that the business has changed radically since I last sat before a microphone to deliver the news. I mean, I knew the business was changing; that's a big reason why I got out. But the coverage of Donald Trump from 2015 on has made it abundantly clear to me that journalists now see themselves as stars first, deliverers of eyeballs to advertisers and ad dollars to shareholders second, and purveyors of truth third, if at all. Here we are, at another inflection point in the history of our country -- the third election in a row in which democracy is threatened with extinction in the United States -- and these people in my previous profession are all butthurt about their privilege.

Honestly, it doesn't surprise me that the Harris campaign is stepping around them to get its message out. Political influencers command huge audiences, and they're inclined to give favorable coverage to the campaign -- unlike the mainstream folks, who call it hard-hitting journalism when they fall for every made-up controversy promulgated by the other side.

About that: I saw a comment not long ago, although I don't remember where now, from someone in the news business who was asked why journalists aren't talking about Trump's age and obvious decline, the way they did President Biden's. The newsperson's answer? The Democrats have to make an issue of it first -- then they'll cover it.

That's utter bullshit. In no universe ever has a real journalist passed up a story because nobody else was talking about it.

I'm appalled at the state of political journalism today. C'mon, you guys -- do better. Our nation's continued existence -- as well as your continued relevance -- depend on it.

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These moments of bloggy journalistic exhortation have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe! And be sure to vote!

How to get rid of a boss: a case study.

So let's say that at your latest staff meeting at work, the Big Boss tells everybody on your team that you're getting a new supervisor. Oh, and by the way, your old supervisor was offered a brand-new position in the organization, but instead of taking it, she quit.

Now, you and your colleagues have heard some things about this new supervisor, none of them good. He has some sketchy behavior in his past -- unethical and possibly even illegal. You also know that he's a crony of the Big Boss, and that B.B. has been padding the C-suite with several of his cronies over the past few months -- in an effort, B.B. says, to make the company more profitable. But your company is no stranger to putting principles ahead of money; that's the way it has done business over many decades. And you and your colleagues sure as hell don't want to work for this sketchy new supervisor. So what do you do?

Welp, if you're the Washington Post newsroom, you assign an investigative team to run a bunch of stories about the shenanigans in your new supervisor's past so that he'll quit before he even starts the job. 

And it worked! On Friday, it was announced that Robert Winnett would not be joining the Post as its executive editor, after all. 

As a former journalist, I've been bemused by watching this unfold. Winnett was hired away from the London Daily Telegram by the Post's new chief executive officer and publisher, William Lewis. Both Lewis and Winnett are British. Both are White. They had worked together in the past, at the London Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times.

But British newspapers have been known to play fast-and-loose with certain practices that are considered highly unethical to American journalists. From the link above, here, in a nutshell, is the dirt on these two guys:

A Post investigation published Sunday revealed Winnett's connections to a confessed con artist turned whistleblower who has admitted to using illegal methods to gain information for stories in Britain's Sunday Times...

The New York Times also reported that Winnett and Lewis had based some stories on stolen records, and raised new questions about a payment made to obtain information that led to a 2009 investigation into government corruption, which shook the British political establishment and led to several officials' resignations.

The Post story goes on to note, "Paying sources for information is considered unethical in most American newsrooms. So is representing oneself as anything other than a journalist to gain confidential information as part of newsgathering..."  

The way Winnett's predecessor was shown the door also rankled among the newsroom staff. Sally Buzbee was the first woman hired as executive editor at the paper, which won three Pulitzer Prizes this year. But Lewis decided she had to go anyway. He offered her a position heading up a brand-new division at the Post covering service news and social media -- which, to be honest, sounds a lot like kicking the little lady out of a man's job and sending her back to editing the women's page. Instead, she quit. 

And now Winnett isn't coming. But it's okay -- Winnett wasn't supposed to transition into the job until after the election this fall, anyway. In the interim, Lewis had hired Matt Murray, a former Wall Street Journal editor, to run the newsroom, and then helm the new division when Winnett came on board. Now I guess Murray will be the executive editor for the forseeable future. 

But never mind that. Don't you wish you had the power at your job to publicly embarrass your incoming supervisor and his boss by publicizing their sketchy pasts?

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These moments of bloggy just deserts have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

All that panicking for nothing.

lineartestpilot | Deposit Photos

I thought about writing about Memorial Day today, seeing as how it's that weekend, and explain why thanking a vet is not the proper way to observe the day. But Facebook reminded me that I'd already done that post back in 2017. 

Instead, I guess I'll write about the debt ceiling mess and how the media made it worse. (It's a political post. Sorry, y'all.)

Just so we're all up to speed (if you're already up to speed, skip down past the first break): Several months ago, the speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, caved to his Looney-Tunes Caucus and announced that the House wouldn't approve an extension of the debt ceiling unless President Biden agreed to cut the deficit -- and further, the LT Caucus wouldn't approve either tax hikes or cuts in military spending. 

Biden told them he wouldn't negotiate over the debt ceiling because Congress had approved three debt ceiling extensions under the former guy without a peep, and to call him when they had a budget proposal.

(This is where I explain that the debt ceiling is about paying bills we've already accrued, and the proper place to talk about narrowing the deficit is during budget negotiations.)

That's where things stood for months, with McCarthy accusing Biden of stonewalling and Biden basically saying he refused to negotiate with terrorists. (I'm paraphrasing, you understand.) Then, somewhat miraculously, House Republicans managed to pass a budget bill. It was so extreme that it wasn't even going to get a hearing in the Senate, but it gave Biden a starting point for talks. So for the next few weeks, more public posturing ensued while aides met behind closed doors to hammer out a compromise. Biden and McCarthy announced the deal last night.

Others have done a far better job than I ever could of summarizing the main points of the deal. (Click the link if you want to read about them.) The big takeaway, from the commentary I've been reading, is that Biden's move was genius. He essentially got the LT Caucus to agree to a budget deal months earlier than it otherwise would have; moreover, it's the sort of compromise that Congress would have ended up with anyway, given that the GOP controls the House and the Democrats control the Senate, both by only a few votes. And we won't have to deal with this debt ceiling nonsense again until after the next presidential election.

So why all the Hair on Fire Theater? Keep reading.

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I've been in an Alfred E. Neuman kind of mood ("What, me worry?") about this debt ceiling kerfuffle, ever since I heard Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell say we were not going to default on the debt. That told me that the crazies in the House could do whatever nutty stuff they wanted, but the Senate would never go along with them. Not that the Senate doesn't have its share of crazies, mind you, but the leadership of both parties there were determined to be adults.

Anyway, because of that, I've been kind of an objective observer of the shenanigans. And I am not proud of the way the news media have conducted themselves.

Longtime hearth/myth readers know what a shocking statement that is for me to make. Back when the former guy first ran for president, lots of people were criticizing the media for covering him as if he were a normal candidate, and that it helped him get elected. For years, I stood firm, explaining how it was literally journalists' jobs to present all sides objectively and let readers/listeners/viewers come to their own conclusions. Then last year, I backtracked, coming down on the side (at long last) of the media not just covering the horse race, but telling the actual truth.

The media failed to tell the actual truth during the 2016 election. They failed again during the 2020 election. And with this debt ceiling mess, they've failed again. Every day since the negotiations began, there have been breathless sidebars: What would a default do to our country's sterling debt rating? How jittery are other countries becoming about America's inability to pay its debts? If a deal isn't reached in time, which Americans would suffer first -- and how? (Super old people, according to that article, and pretty much right away.) 

On and on and on it went. Scaring people. For eyeballs for their ads.

Okay, that's not a hundred percent true. It's a huge story, but a tough one to cover -- reporters weren't allowed to sit in on the negotiations, for obvious reasons -- and it went on for weeks. So assignment editors had to get inventive, dreaming up angles they hadn't covered yet, just so they'd have something new to say every day. 

But the cumulative effect was to make readers/listeners/viewers even more anxious than they already were. Fear and anxiety attract eyeballs, sure. But shouldn't the media also be in the business of allaying fear and anxiety when there's nothing to be afraid of? Why didn't McConnell's comments get more play? (The Hill reported them -- in the 19th paragraph of this story. Newsweek played them a little higher -- in paragraph 13 here.) Why didn't anybody explain what it meant? Didn't anybody feel a responsibility toward telling the actual truth?

The question now is whether the media will do the same thing during their 2024 election coverage -- even after all the criticism and public hand-wringing -- and fail to tell the actual truth again. 

Stay tuned, I guess.

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These moments of no-worries blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe -- and don't take any hair-on-fire reporting at face value.

The problem might be in your TV, after all.

Here's that serious post that I was going to write last week but ran out of mojo. And in it, I'm going to admit that I was wrong.

maxxyustas | Deposit Photos

For the past six plus years, I've been banging the drum about how serious journalists shouldn't take sides. Report on all sides of the story, I've been saying, and let the audience sort it out. It worked for Edward R. Murrow, I said -- he reported dispassionately on Sen. Joseph McCarthy, simply showing him in all his Red-baiting glory and allowing his viewers to draw their own conclusions. When McCarthy realized Murrow was on to him, he targeted the journalist, as I noted in another post: "[T]he senator got mad at Murrow and accused him of being a Communist himself. Why didn't Murrow call him out as a liar? Because in attacking Murrow, McCarthy showed his true colors. Murrow didn't do editorials. He was a journalist. His method was to give McCarthy just enough rope to hang himself." It worked. Public opinion soon turned against McCarthy -- not before ruining a lot of lives, particularly in Hollywood, but it did turn.

I learned about Murrow and his role in bringing down McCarthy in journalism school in the 1970s. Journalism, we were taught, had a critical First Amendment role; it was the marketplace of ideas, where all sides aired their views. The lesson we journalism students took away from the Army-McCarthy hearings, as well as from the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, was that if journalists did their job and presented all sides objectively, people would figure things out on their own

I believed it. For decades, I believed it. I don't believe it anymore.

Margaret Sullivan served for many years as media columnist for the Washington Post. Her job involved critiquing the way the news media, including her own paper, covered the stories of the day, and in many cases how they could have done it better. She has a book coming out this fall -- a sort of memoir of her decades in the newspaper business. And in a piece in the Washington Post Magazine last weekend, she wrote about how the Trump presidency changed her view of how journalists should cover him. For many decades, she too believed in traditional journalism and the marketplace of ideas. But now she writes: "As [former President] Trump prepares to run again in 2024, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the lessons we’ve learned — and committing to the principle that, when covering politicians who are essentially running against democracy, old-style journalism will no longer suffice."

Journalists can no longer simply repeat what newsmakers say. Discernment was always part of the job -- if the sales manager asked you to do a story about his big account, you didn't do it unless there was an actual news angle. But at certain levels, particularly in day-to-day political reporting, the idea was to tell people what the guy said, and then tell what his opponent said, and your responsibility pretty much ended there. 

As Sullivan says -- heck, as we've all seen -- Trump saw how it worked and capitalized on it. He spewed endless bilge, and news managers covered every second of it because his bilge drew eyeballs for their advertisers. Journalists should have called him on his bullshit a lot sooner than they did. Even now, six years down the road, I see too many euphemisms in stories about the guy. Baseless claims. False this or that. Why don't they just come right out and say he's lying? 

I suppose one reason is that news organizations are skittish about being sued for libel. But another thing I learned in journalism school is that the first defense against a charge of libel is the truth. The lies Trump and his minions tell have been disproven many, many times over. It's clear they're lies -- not falsehoods or baseless whatevers.

Moreover, it's not like Trump didn't know the 2020 election results were legit. Many of his advisors told him so. So did members of his family. He even admitted it in private. And yet he has continued to lie in public that the election was stolen from him. Maybe it was because he didn't want to think of himself as a loser. Maybe he wanted to keep the grift going so his supporters would continue to send him money. Maybe both, and more.

Sullivan's point is that if Trump runs again, things have to be different: "I’m convinced that journalists — specifically those who cover politics — must keep a sharp focus on truth-seeking, not old-style performative neutrality. Does that mean we throw objectivity out the window? Of course not. We should be resolutely objective in the sense of seeking evidence and approaching subjects with an open mind. We should not, however, resort to taking everything down the middle, no matter what." Simply handing  each side a microphone isn't going to be enough: "We should be thinking about what coverage serves the public best."

She also criticizes traditional political coverage -- reports on the latest polls, stories based on "conventional wisdom", "campaign in disarray" articles, and the like -- as a distraction from the bigger picture that a chunk of one of our political parties seeks to end democracy.

That doesn't mean playing favorites or going soft on the other party, she says. What's required is for journalists to make a habit of putting their reporting in context: "They shouldn’t just repeat what’s being said, but help explain what it means."

Another thing I learned in journalism school is that every news story should answer six questions -- the famous five Ws and an H: who, what, when, where, why, and how. It's the why that Sullivan is addressing here: We need not just the facts, but the truth, in context. Trump and his supporters will howl about the unfairness of it all -- but they'll howl regardless. Journalists must do it anyway. Our democracy is on the line.

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These moments of bloggy truthiness have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe! And get out and vote!

Local news takes on the Supreme Court. Will it win?

In broadcasting, one mundane but essential task is to check your sound level. It involves speaking into the microphone at approximately the volume you intend to use when you're on the air, while eyeballing a little meter in front of you to adjust your mic level. 

An analog meter features a graduated scale, soft to loud, with a pointy indicator that bounces with your sound level. The scale is mostly black, but it has a section in red on the far right end. The idea is to keep the pointer bouncing mostly in the black, with occasional peaks in the red zone. If the pointer swings all the way to the right and stays there, your mic is way too loud. The technical term is "pegging the needle."

As it happens, it's also an apt description for a ruling that came out of the Supreme Court this week. 

Stolen from Facebook | Creator unknown

No, not that one; that was last week. This week's travesty came in the case of Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. You can read a pdf of the ruling here. But basically, the majority opinion, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, reverses a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision. The appellate court had held the Bremerton, WA, school district was correct to discipline its high school football coach, Joseph Kennedy, in 2015 for staging public prayers at midfield after the team's football games. The Supreme Court says the disciplinary action violated Kennedy's First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

The problem with the ruling is that Justice Gorsuch gets nearly all of the facts wrong. This column by Danny Westneat in the Seattle Times explains how Kennedy wasn't engaging in "a brief, quiet, personal religious observance," as Justice Gorsuch claims. In fact, Kennedy had made a big deal out of praying at the 50-yard line -- and he'd been incorporating prayer into team workouts as a motivational tool all season. Players weren't required to participate in the postgame prayer rallies, but of course eventually all the players did, at least partly due to fear that Coach wouldn't let them play as much if they didn't participate. (Y'all have been to high school, right? We all know how that works.) Eventually, Kennedy held a news conference before the school's homecoming game, announcing he would give his post-season prayer. He got a lot of press out of it -- Good Morning America even interviewed him -- and as a result, it wasn't just the players out there with him after that game; more than 500 spectators left the bleachers and jumped fences to join them on the field for his 15-second "quiet, personal religious observance."

The general opinion is that the court reinvented the facts here in order to have an excuse to overturn Lemon v. Kurtzman. In that 1971 opinion, the court laid out a three-pronged test to determine whether something violates the First Amendment's "establishment of religion" clause. We do not have a state religion in the United States, and it's unconstitutional for a public employee to promote a particular religion as if we do. In an objective reading of the facts, that's what Kennedy did -- he promoted Christianity, hard, with his very public prayer meetings. But the conservatives on the current court wanted to strike down Lemon, and Kennedy's case was a handy vehicle.

That's scary for those of us in America who aren't Christian. But that point has been made elsewhere. My point is different.

I've opined here before that local journalism matters. Six years ago, I wrote about how just ten companies control a frightening percentage of the news and information business. Three years ago, I cited figures indicating that one in five local newspapers ceased publication between 2004 and 2018; that decline has continued since then. 

Why do I keep making a big deal about local journalism? Because without it -- without local newspapers like the Seattle Times -- there would be no way, when public figures on the national stage lie, for us to learn the truth. 

Support your local independent journalists, guys. They're going to become more and more vital as we bring our country back from the brink.

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These moments of scrappy independent blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed and boosted! And subscribe to your local paper!

Journalism isn't going to save us.

Tama66 | CC0 | Pixabay

Brace yourselves: This post is going to be political.

When the movie All the President's Men came out in 1976, I was in college, majoring in journalism. I admit that I came away a bit starry-eyed about the profession I was aiming for.

In the movie, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman play Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose work went a long way toward bringing down President Richard Nixon and his corrupt administration. The movie opens with Redford, as Woodward, sitting through a routine court arraignment -- the sort of thing a young reporter might be relegated to by an editor looking to fill a few column-inches with details of local burglaries. Woodward comes to attention, though, when he realizes the prisoners are charged with breaking into the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. And they have ties to the CIA.

Woodward is teamed up with Bernstein, and together they follow the trail to the highest reaches of government. Everything you know about Watergate -- from the Plumbers to Deep Throat to Nixon's resignation -- all of it began in June 1972 with Woodward paying attention at a nothing arraignment of crooks involved in a third-rate burglary attempt. Two years later, Nixon resigned.

As a journalist, Woodward and Bernstein were, if not my idols, then certainly icons I looked up to. Investigative journalism seemed like a noble profession.

Oh, how times have changed. Here we are in 2019, increasingly aware that our current President is a crook. The Mueller Report has detailed ten counts of obstruction of justice against him, and strongly suggests, without coming right out and saying it, that the House of Representatives ought to begin an impeachment investigation.

But where has the press been? Where's our latter-day Woodward and Bernstein?

As it turns out, a lot of what Special Counsel Bob Mueller detailed in his 400-plus-page report had already been in the news. But as the Washington Post's media columnist, Margaret Sullivan, wrote in a column today, journalism is a different business now. In 1972, we had a very small number of national news outlets doing daily journalism: ABC, NBC, CBS, and a few national newspapers, mainly the Post and the New York Times. Cable news hadn't been invented yet, much less talk radio, podcasts, or blogs. If you watched the national news on television, you watched Harry Reasoner, John Chancellor, or Walter Cronkite. There wasn't anybody else.

Fewer choices made it easier to be a news consumer -- and to trust what you were being told. Now, as Sullivan says, we're subjected to "a polluted firehose blast of information mixed with disinformation." Sure, the TV networks sometimes toed the government-issued news line a little too closely back in the day (as one example, a lot of Americans today don't understand that the people who are coming here from Central America are fleeing political unrest that our foreign policy caused). But nowadays, it's hard to figure out who to believe. Especially when the President routinely calls the news media liars and "enemies of the people." (Not to put too fine a point on it, but dictators including Hitler, Stalin, and Mao have used the same phrase to undercut popular trust in news reporters.)

At the local level, newspapers are going under at an unprecedented rate. More than one in five closed up shop between 2004 and 2018, and those that remain often don't have the resources to cover their localities the way they should be covered. Investigative reporters like Woodward and Bernstein are usually among the first to get the ax.

The reasons for these changes are many; it would take a book, if not several, to detail them in-depth. The point is that journalists aren't going to play the same role in bringing down the current corrupt administration as they did during Watergate. Even impeachment looks dicey. Our best hope for justice is probably the ballot box next year.

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Apologies for the political rant. I'll talk about Treacherous Ground next week -- it's politics-free, I promise.

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These moments of wistful blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

On press freedom and Julian Assange.

And why the two are pretty much mutually exclusive. At least in this case.

Gerd Altman | Pixabay

Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks -- a shadowy organization that calls itself a publisher. He has been holed up in Ecuadorian Embassy in London since August 2012, avoiding extradition to Sweden to face sexual assault charges that have since been dropped. As you have probably heard, on Thursday Ecuador withdrew its protection of Assange, allowing the London Metropolitan Police in to arrest him. He faces trial on the bail-jumping charge in London -- but his biggest concern is whether England will extradite him to the United States, where an indictment was unsealed on the day of his arrest, charging him with conspiring with convicted spy Chelsea Manning to hack into a Pentagon computer.

Ecuador has given a number of reasons for rescinding the sanctuary it extended to Assange for seven years -- among them that he didn't wash often enough and he didn't take care of his cat. (The cat, we are told, was relocated to friends of Assange's months ago.) Perhaps the biggest reason, however, was their claim that Assange continued to direct WikiLeaks' activities from inside the embassy, using a cell phone he wasn't allowed to have.

There has been quite a hue and cry amongst Assange's supporters and others, saying his arrest and potential prosecution in the U.S. will have a chilling effect on press freedom. The New York Times has gone so far as to say that "most of what he does at WikiLeaks is difficult to distinguish in a legally meaningful way from what traditional news organizations, like The New York Times, do every day: seek out and publish information that officials would prefer to be kept secret, including classified national security matters, and take steps to protect the confidentiality of sources." And these same people say that prosecuting Assange for that type of activity could lead, down the road, to charges against any journalist who publishes government secrets -- thereby weakening the press freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment.

But Assange isn't charged with publishing any government secrets. He's been charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion -- in other words, he's accused of helping Manning break into that computer at the Pentagon in March 2010. Manning, who was working as an Army intelligence analyst, had already given WikiLeaks hundreds of thousands of classified documents, including information on conditions at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. According to Assange's indictment, Manning was having trouble cracking a password that would have helped her access more documents, and provided the partial password to Assange; Assange later told her in a private message that he was working on it.

It's true, as a number of news outlets have opined, that investigative journalists thrive on leaks of documents and information that they shouldn't otherwise have access to. The classic example is the Pentagon papers, in which Daniel Ellsberg got hold of classified documents indicating the Johnson Administration had ramped up the Vietnam War and lied to the American people about the extent of our involvement there. The New York Times began publishing the papers in 1971, but the Nixon Administration issued an injunction against the paper -- whereupon the Washington Post picked up the baton and began publishing its own series of articles. Nixon sought an injunction against the Post, too, but a D.C. judge -- and quickly thereafter, the Supreme Court -- ruled against the administration. The ruling was hailed as a victory for press freedom. (The 2017 movie The Post tells this story better than I ever could.)

So what's the difference between Julian Assange on one hand, and The New York Times and the Washington Post on the other?

Here's what it comes down to for me: In 1971, the newspapers didn't actively help the whistleblower. Assange did. If the charges against him are true, he actively assisted Manning with attempting to break into a Pentagon computer. He didn't just publish the stuff Manning handed him -- he tried to help her get more. That has nothing to do with the First Amendment. That's not investigative journalism. That's espionage.

WikiLeaks has published secret documents that have blown the lid off of a number of questionable incidents. In some cases, it has been a force for good; in others, its motives have been iffy. But in no case should WikiLeaks be disseminating documents it broke the law to get hold of -- and if it has, then whoever was involved in breaking the law should go to jail.

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These moments of journalistic blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

The Fourth Estate.

So there's this phone app called HQ. It's a daily online quiz where they give away real cash money if you can correctly answer a bunch of multiple-choice trivia questions. The kids got me into it, and for a while we were playing every day. Sometimes the questions are easy for them because they're young; sometimes they're easy for me because I'm not so young.

Anyway, one day, one of the questions was something along the lines of, "What is the Fourth Estate?" Easy peasy for me -- it's journalism. The kids told me later that they'd never heard of the term before. That's when I realized I'd never heard it until I went to journalism school.

Just in case you've never been to journalism school, I will explain: The news media are the fourth check-and-balance on the U.S. system of government. The other three "estates" are the three branches of government you're familiar with from civics or history class: executive, legislative, and judicial. Journalists are not part of the government -- and that's what makes them so valuable. Being outside the system, they can report objectively about what's going on inside the system; they don't have to keep anybody in any branch of government happy in order to keep their jobs.

With me so far? Okay. That brings us to this meme, which I have seen in a couple of different forms recently on Facebook:

I agree with the spirit behind the quote, but I'm not sure I agree with all of its implications. Because it is, in fact, the journalist's job to quote them both -- and if someone says it's not rain, but drizzle, they should be quoted, too. All sides should be presented. It's the news consumer's job to figure out which one is true.

I've talked about this before on the blog, in connection with the Keystone XL pipeline. In that post, I mentioned Edward R. Murrow, who went up against Sen. Joe McCarthy of Minnesota, a demagogue who pursued a personal vendetta to ruin everyone he didn't like by claiming they were Communists. Murrow devoted several episodes of his news show to McCarthy, explaining his methods objectively. He didn't hurl invectives or call Sen. McCarthy a liar; he simply showed his viewers what was going on and allowed them to draw their own conclusions.

Once the shows aired, Murrow had reason to attack McCarthy; the senator got mad at Murrow and accused him of being a Communist himself. Why didn't Murrow call him out as a liar? Because in attacking Murrow, McCarthy showed his true colors. Murrow didn't do editorials. He was a journalist. His method was to give McCarthy just enough rope to hang himself.

The framers of the Constitution realized how important a free press would be to our nation; that's why the First Amendment guarantees us freedom of speech and of the press. But for the Fourth Estate to do its job most effectively, news consumers have to be aware of all sides of the issue. They cannot be expected to decide what's true when presented with just one side of the story. They definitely cannot be expected to know what's true when they're constantly being told that the journalists at major news outlets -- people who believe strongly in their role as part of the Fourth Estate -- are purveyors of fake news and enemies of the people.

On July 20th, New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger met with President Trump at the White House. The meeting was supposed to be off the record, but the President tweeted about it this weekend anyway. Trump said the discussion centered on "the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media."

That prompted Sulzberger to break his silence. In his statement, he said, "I told the president directly that I thought that his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous." And he said, "I warned that this inflammatory language is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence." (You may recall that five people were killed in a mass shooting at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, MD, last month. Police say the shooter didn't like something the paper had published about him.)

President Trump doesn't appear to care. In a speech last week to veterans, he told them, "Just remember: what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening." Don't believe the journalists, in other words; believe only me.

I've talked about gaslighting on the blog before, too. You may recall I said that the gaslighter's ultimate aim is to convince his victim that the only person telling the truth is the gaslighter.

Feel free to draw your own conclusions.

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These moments of Fourth Estate blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Life moves pretty fast.

Alan9187 | Pixabay CC0

Did ya miss me?

You all know how reliable I am. If I'm going to take a week off, I always tell you. Right? But for the past two Sundays, I've been a lousy correspondent. Last Sunday, I was out of town (and very busy the day before, putting the finishing touches on the first draft of Maggie on the Cusp). But I have no excuse for missing the May 7th post. It just...happened.

I guess I could blame fatigue. I had plenty to be tired about: I'd won Camp NaNoWriMo the previous weekend, and was also finishing a shawl. We've had plenty of weird weather -- some days as hot as July, some as cold as March -- and the air conditioning in our apartment building has often been broken on the hot days. And for some inexplicable reason, I decided to sign up for Irish lessons -- the language, that is -- and the first class was May 4th.

But there's also been this thing going on down the street from my day job. Stories have been coming out of the White House thick and fast since Inauguration Day, but lately the pace has sped up, with new revelations hourly. It's hard to keep up -- even for someone like me, who used to make a living by keeping an eye on dispatches from two wire services at once.

In the midst of this week's tsunami of revelations, the Washington Post ran a story called "Trump is mirroring Nixon's final days." That headline pulled me up short. See, I remember Watergate. The congressional hearings occurred while I was in high school; some teachers had TVs in their classrooms and would watch the proceedings between classes.

Here's the thing: The Watergate break-in occurred on June 17th, 1972, and President Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974. That's a span of about two years. (Wikipedia has a timeline of events leading up to Nixon's resignation.) Compare that with the timeline for President Trump's troubles: It's been barely a year since the Democratic National Committee announced its server had been hacked and the job pinned on Russian intelligence sources. (Journalist Bill Moyers is keeping a timeline of events relating to Russian influence on the 2016 presidential election.) And Trump is already mirroring Nixon's final days?

Part of the difference, of course, is the style of the two men. But another part of it is the speed at which news is disseminated today. Back in the '70s, newspapers and television news operations each had only one deadline per day. Cable news wasn't a factor -- CNN didn't go on the air until 1980. If you had a scoop, you had to wait hours before you could get it out to the public (and hope nobody stole it from you in the meantime).

Contrast that to today, when cable news is on 24/7 and newspapers release stories online at all hours of the day and night. Journalists can begin building on each other's scoops within minutes, and can release new details immediately -- and we mere mortals viewing the news on our smartphones can share them seconds later.

The danger is that we may all burn out. Lately I have my phone in my hand almost constantly, and I'm pretty sure that's not a good thing. And it's going to get worse before it gets better; the special counsel is just beginning his investigation.

Maybe this is a good time to recall the immortal words of Ferris Bueller.

Thanks, Ferris. I promise to put down my phone and look around once in a while.

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These moments of speedy blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

The rise of the citizen journalist.

Roberto Ferrari | Flickr | CC 2.0

I am never going to turn this into a blog about politics; teh intarwebz are already chock-full of 'em. But one thing I've noticed this week -- amidst all the social media accounts of the horrific events in Baton Rouge, Minneapolis, and Dallas -- is how citizen journalism is playing a larger and larger role in informing us.

Most of you know that I used to be a broadcast journalist. I got out of the business in the late 1990s for a number of reasons, but a big chunk of it involved the changes I was seeing in the industry. The line between news and entertainment was blurring, as news organizations began chasing ratings instead of telling viewers/listeners/readers what they needed to know. At the same time, the lines between objective reporting and commentary had also become less clear.

And the industry was consolidating. When I began working in broadcasting in the early '80s, there was a whole host of network-level radio news outlets: CBS, ABC, NBC, Mutual News, NPR, the Associated Press, United Press International, and I'm probably forgetting some. By the time I got out, UPI was toast. Westwood One had bought NBC Radio News and Mutual News, combined them into one shop, then combined that with CBS Radio News (which is how I lost my last radio job -- the Mutual/NBC newsroom in Washington, DC, was shut down when the networks were consolidated at the CBS studios in New York).

Along with the consolidations came new scrutiny of the bottom line. In the name of maximizing shareholder profits, news staffs were trimmed to the bone, and surviving staffers -- just like survivors of downsizings everywhere -- were expected to do more with less.

One way news operations did that was to develop the concept of citizen journalism: this idea that a regular Joe with a phone could call his local newspaper or broadcast station and report on a fire or whatever in his neighborhood. It seemed like a win/win for the corporate bean counters: the paper and/or the station would get the story without having to pay a reporter to go out and get it. So what if Joe wasn't a trained journalist?

Then came YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook -- places where people were encouraged to share photos and videos of things that interested them. At the same time, smartphones began to proliferate, to the point where nearly everyone had a video camera in his or her pocket. And an interesting thing happened: almost by accident, social media stepped into the real-news void the bean counters had created.

When congressional Republicans shut down official broadcasts of the sit-in at the Capitol last month, the protesting Democrats turned to Twitter to get the word out. When Alton Sterling was killed by police in Baton Rouge last week, it was a group called Stop the Killing that filmed the incident and uploaded it to social media. Then, when Minneapolis police shot and killed Philando Castile, his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, uploaded her video of the aftermath to Facebook. And Facebook was the venue again for live videos of the shooting incident in Dallas that left five officers dead.

What I find interesting is that in most of these incidents, it's not bystanders doing the filming; it's the people directly involved. It's the people I, as a reporter, would have interviewed after the fact: "What did you see? How did you feel?" Without the reporter, there's no buffer. What we're getting now is visceral and raw, and in real time. First person, present tense.

This is corporate media's worst nightmare. Not only do many people now view them as untrustworthy -- a direct result, by the way, of recasting news as commentary/infotainment -- but now their customers don't need them at all. The critics will wring their hands over whether social media ought to be entrusted with the sacred task of deciding what's news -- it's already begun -- but it's too late for that. They're not going to be able to stuff this djinni back in the bottle. And they have only themselves to blame.

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These moments of bloggy commentating have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Confessions of a marketing skeptic.

So here we are, in week two of my test run for sharing my blog posts as Facebook Notes. It seems to be as good a time as any to make a confession: This is basically the only marketing-type thing I've done for my books in months. Why? Because I have an innate suspicion, bordering on irrational fear, of anything that has to do with marketing.

There, I said it. And I apologize in advance to my friends who work in marketing, because the rest of this post is going to be about why this is so.

For starters, I came up through journalism. It's hard to believe now, but in those days journalists thought themselves above any involvement with filthy lucre. Yes, we did our jobs and got paid for them -- but we were supposed to be discerning about the topics we covered. If we were asked to write about a new store or a new product, it had better have something more interesting going on than just being new. It had to be unique, or very nearly so. The redevelopment of a decrepit retail block? We're in. A mac-and-cheese box whose perforated, thumb-sized "open here" button actually worked? We'd like to talk to the inventor. A product that would keep one's shoes from coming untied during the course of a day? We'd be all over that. (Am I the only grownup who has trouble with her shoes? Even if I double-knot my Keens, they untie themselves in a matter of hours.)

Anyway, the point is that we had standards against running stories that amounted to unpaid infomercials. (That's one big reason why so many news releases end up in the trash: the hook is too weak. If there's no real news in your news release, it's going in the circular file.)

Sometimes it was someone from the sales department who would try to sell us on doing a story on his/her client's new something-or-other. Unfortunately for the client, the same rules applied: No hook, no story. And "cool new store in town that's going to buy a lot of advertising from us if you put it on the news" was, unfortunately, not a hook. Sorry/not sorry.

From news, I jumped into the simple living movement. And among that movement's tenets -- besides downsizing your life and reducing your footprint on the earth -- is keeping an eagle eye on your discretionary spending. Don't buy something just because your neighbor bought one; analyze your spending habits and stop buying stuff you don't need; buy the store brand if the quality's the same; kill your television; and so on. These things were pretty much second-nature to me, as my parents grew up in the Great Depression. And I never made a fabulous salary in radio, so I was doing a lot of them anyway, out of necessity.

Fast-forward to today: I've let up on simple living and I no longer work as a journalist. But I still have the sort of inquiring (all right, maybe cynical is a better word) mind that asks what's so new about this thing and do I really need to spend money on it.

And yet here I am, writing novels, which are pretty close to the top of the "stuff no one needs" pile, and asking complete strangers to take a flyer on them. Karma sucks.

Plus, to get my name out there so that people will know about my books, marketing is a necessary evil. But now I'm doing business with people whose messages I've spent decades resisting, and I am skeptical of all of them. Will Marketer X give me the return on my investment he/she claims? (Doubtful, in most cases.) How much is Marketer Y relying on me to get the word out about the promotion I'm paying him money for? (Crowdfunding sites, I'm looking at you.) Why does Marketer Z insist that I must use a particular blogging platform/book distributor/etc., even though other marketers argue for a different one? Whose pockets are being lined by all this advice, and how?

Last fall and winter, I put a fair amount of time and money into marketing, and didn't get much in return. There are a number of reasons why I've pulled back since then, the Denver saga being one of them. But I'm not planning a big push for any of my books this fall -- despite the fact that A Billion Gods and Goddesses will be out in the next week or so, and I expect to release a Pipe Woman's Legacy set for Kindle just before Thanksgiving.

Which is why I'm counting this blogging experiment as marketing. It's another avenue to get my name out there -- and a fairly unique one right now. And it's free.

Anybody else feel the same push-pull about marketing that I do, or am I the only one?

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These moments of skeptical blogginess have been brought to you (on multiple platforms!) , as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.