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January 13, 2005

Who can gag the FCC?

: Now an FCC commissioner says the commission should investigate the case of Armstrong Williams to see whether laws were violated. Oh, come on. We don't need the FCC on the case (or on any case!). Williams definitely did a no-no. So did the Department of Education. So have others. What's the FCC going to do about that? Get airtime, if they possibly can.

: UPDATE: In the comments, Eileen points out:

From the article: "Specifically, Adelstein said the Buffalo case and Williams' contract could be possible violations of federal telecommunication law that requires disclosure of any payment or gift for airing any material for broadcast, like a radio disc jockey being paid to play a particular recording."

Well, by that rule, then the starlets who go on Jay Leno's show to drop plugs for cheese are violating telecom law. Hmmmmm.

Her point is valid. Yes, I'm just sick of the FCC not paying attention to its proper business (though as their own chairman has said, when they do pay attention to something, they kill it). So yes, this is a case for the FCC Anti-Defamation League.

But I do think that this is not the real avenue for investigation. It's not a telecommunications issue. It is an issue at the Department of Education over the proper and improper use of tax money.

If the FCC did go after Williams himself, I do think there are First Amendment issues: Does his mean that an author can't appear on a show without a disclaimer on the screen saying she's making money because of this? Does this mean that we have to end up with disclaimers on the screen every time a company spokesman goes on the air? It's another game of line-line-where's-the-line? It's another instance, then, of the problems you get to when government tries to regulate speech. I should have said all that before. But I also confess I now enjoy sputtering about the FCC for the sheer sport of it.

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The credibility crisis

: Journalism's credibility crisis keeps growing. From a transcript of tonights's PBS Newhour sent to me by their PR, Andrew Kohut of the Pew Center says:

When we first started our People in the Press series, we asked people, a representative sample: Does the media usually get the facts straight, or do they often get it wrong? And we found, I think we have a slide on this, we found 55 percent then saying that media usually gets the story right. The 55 percent was defined as a very low number and it was a shockingly low number. But over the years, that number has gotten lower and lower.

And at this point in time, we have a majority of people saying the media usually gets it wrong, and only 36 percent saying the media usually gets it -- the facts straight....

Back in the 1988 campaign, 58 percent said there was no media bias in the reporting. That number slowly slipped down over the course of the '90s. We got to this campaign. It was only 38 percent, both Republicans and Democrats increasingly critical and skeptical about how fairly the media is doing campaign coverage.

Frightening stats, eh?

Kenneth Smith, the interviewer, tries to blame that on Fox. But in his opening spiel of news sins, it was The New York Times, CBS News, and USA Today that were listed, not Fox. Smells like media bias about media bias to me. Closed loop.

Then Ken Auletta says, with not a hint of irony:

I think if you watch, say cable television, you see reporters moving out of their normal job as reporters to become what I would call bloviators, and so what you have is people watching them and saying, wait a second, they're not reporters, they're just expressing opinions, so how can I trust them?

Hmmm: A reporter bloviating about reporters bloviating. (And, yes, here I am bloviating about the bloviator bloviating on bloviating. I'm exhausted, how about you? More closed loops.)

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Cosi, favorite hangout of bloggers

: Yesterday, I mentioned running into a blogger in Cosi. Here's his post. And today, I went to another Cosi (prisoner of habit and the Cosi frequent-sandwich-eater-card that I am) and ran into Tristan.

: LATER: So I'm meeting Michael Totten this afternoon as he flies into Manhattan from Portland. And where do we meet? Where else? Cosi.

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Exploding TV: The network is dead. Long live the net.

: I left this comment over at Lost Remote in an effort clarify my exploding-TV belief that the big, old networks and their programming won't die. They'll just be lapped:

I don't think that network programming will die but I do think that the means of distributing it will no longer be locked into the old networks. That wouldn't happen if all we were seeing were the advent of an alternative pipe: the internet v. cable. What we will see at the same time is the growth of alternative content that will be produced at a MUCH lower cost, FAR better targeted to niche interests (the mass market is dead; long live the mass of niches), providing, as a whole, new competition to the old networks. The old networks and their programmers and advertisers will see that they can get BETTER distribution via the new, distributed network and consumers will DEMAND to get material that way -- because it puts them in control -- and so we will see the hegemony of the old, centralized network start to fall away and break apart: explode.

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Sell-side advertising: The ad that expires

: Just saw something fascinating on Slickdeals: a Dell coupon that expires after 5,000 uses. Add this to the discussion of sell-side advertising, where ads bring with them a limited budget and time.

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Dear Dan

: Jay Rosen writes a letter to Dan Rather. Maybe, coming from a respected journalism professor, Rather might actually read it. Oh, no, that's right: It comes from a blogger. Drat. Well, if he did read it, he'd get damned good advice from Jay, who says Rather should hire a blogger to not only write -- putting up the full text of interviews, as Jay suggested earlier -- but also read, letting Rather know what is being said about him and his stories so he can actually improve his reporting. Jay begins:

Dear Dan Rather: "Lest anyone have any doubt," you said in your statement yesterday, "I have read the report, I take it seriously, and I shall keep its lessons well in mind."

I still have my doubts. Perhaps these would be lessened if, for example, you had bothered to spell out which lessons you saw for yourself, and for CBS News in the review panel's report.

* Was it the lesson about the deadly consequences of dismissing criticism because you think you know the motivations of the critics?
* Was the lesson that a prudent journalist ought to fear and respect the fact-checking powers of the Internet?
* Or was it that by stretching yourself thin you had stretched thin the credibility of the very network you thought you were serving by taking so many assignments?
* Maybe the lesson is not to apologize when you think you did nothing wrong.

Jay caught on the same head-scratching quote from new/old CBS truth czarina Linda Mason that made me harumph yesterday:

The blogger is a feedback loop and fail safe device. Part of what she does is monitor the online world for what is being said about Dan Rather and his reporting. Such a person, well connected to the discussion, would have been extremely valuable to you during the twelve-day period, Sep. 8-20, 2004. After six months of your blog, statements like this from Linda Mason, your new vice president for standards:

"Dan does think he's constantly attacked. If we backed off every story that was criticized, we wouldn't be doing any stories."

would be rendered inoperative by reason of being inane.

And then comes the knockdown punch:

So I kind of resent your attitude toward your numerous critics who operate their own self-published sites on the Web. They were being more accurate than you were, much of the time.

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Used

: Ed Cone and Glenn Reynolds point to a post from former Dean web siren and campaign shaman Zephyr Teachout about "financially interested blogging."

On Dean’s campaign, we paid Markos and Jerome Armstrong as consultants, largely in order to ensure that they said positive things about Dean. We paid them over twice as much as we paid two staffers of similar backgrounds, and they had several other clients.

While they ended up also providing useful advice, the initial reason for our outreach was explicitly to buy their airtime. To be very clear, they never committed to supporting Dean for the payment -- but it was very clearly, internally, our goal.

Listen to what she's really saying there, for it is an open and honest object lesson to any blogger:

The campaign used these guys. The campaign knew that. But the bloggers didn't. The bloggers thought their wisdom was being sought out; they were paid to consult. No, they were paid to market, to flack.

Zephyr wisely says that my favorite word of the day era -- transparency -- does not deal with this. She's right. These guys were transparent about having a business relationship. I could say it's more about character and about allowing yourself to be bought but that's not fair; Matt Stoller, whom Zephyr also cites, says he's a consultant by trade and this is what he does. OK, then perhaps it's about expectations: If you are paid by an organization -- for more than just taking ads, but for interacting with that organization -- then you should not expect to be taken at face value when blogging (reporting/commenting/punditing) about that organization or its competitors. That doesn't mean you can't blog, but it clearly sets the stage. Bob Lutz, vice-chairman of GM, is blogging about GM and I know his perspective: He's being honest about Saturn needing oomph and I respect him for saying that, but I don't expect him to reveal company secrets or start ragging on Chrysler. (Similarly, in this, my personal blog, I will sometimes brag about something my employer is doing that's relevant but I will not engage in discussions about that employer's business or policies or actions because I can't be expected to have a candid discussion like that in public and if I did, what I said would be clearly influenced by my paycheck.)

Zephyr says it better:

I don’t trust the framing of anyone who is regularly writing and speaking about people they are taking money from, even if they told me about it regularly. I don’t think they have the capacity – its demanding too much of human personality – to step back and say, what are the most important issues in the world? What are the most important races? What are the debates I think our community should commit itself to?

There’s no laws on this stuff – all we have is culture. Its early enough in the self-publishing community to work on building a culture where financially interesting blogging is publicly rejected. Its also early enough to untangle the debate, so that bias (which is unavoidable) and financial interest (which is highly avoidable) are seen as completely different topics, not all moshed together in part of an old and overly catholic regime.

She's heading down the right path. But we also have to look at the distinct issue of advertising. Even though I don't take ads here (because I don't have to... yet and I'm lazy), I firmly believe that marketing will underwrite this new medium and let is flourish where it otherwise could not. I also think that corporate blogs, such as Lutz's, are a valuable addition to the greater dialogue (don't you wish Steve Jobs were blogging -- with open comments -- these days!). And I don't think Kos should stop blogging -- but I do think we need to look at the context in which we place that blogging.

: One more thing: I wish Zephyr would put her name on her blog... somewhere. I get frustrated with bloggers -- the ones who aren't trying to hide behind made-up identities -- who forget to make their names prominant. In this case, I'm trusting that Ed and Glenn know the Z in Zonkette is for Zephyr, kos cuz I didn't know that. In other cases, when I quote a blogger, I get tired of digging through three levels of hell about pages to find the person's name or how it's spelled. If you're proud of your blog, then stand on a mountain and shout it out: "My name is...."

: UPDATE: Tim Blair adds: "They should have told Markos to shut up." Well, and Kerry's campaign did cut him off -- delinked him -- after he said this. Moral to the story: Pick your mouthpieces well. It cuts both ways.

: UPDATE: Today's Wall Street Journal has a relevant column by David Wessel:

But disclosure isn't a panacea, warns Carnegie Mellon University's George Loewenstein, who works at the intersection of economics and psychology, studying how people behave.

Disclosure can "let people off the hook morally," Mr. Loewenstein said in a review of his research at last week's American Economic Association meetings. A well-intentioned doctor or stock analyst may not realize how much his advice is tainted, and the act of disclosure may offer him unjustified relief -- "a moral license," the professor terms it. In a manifesto he and a colleague published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2003, Mr. Loewenstein called for a ban on all gifts by drug companies to doctors and medical students, even small ones. Doctors' associations say gifts don't influence doctors' judgment; economists reply by asking why drug companies spend so much on marketing to doctors then.

The essence of disclosure is the hope that conflicts of interest are ameliorated by giving equal information to both adviser and consumer. If I tell you that I have a financial motive for skewing my advice, then you'll take that into account and everything will be fine. But think about it: You have a cough. The doctor says you ought to have an X-ray, and, by the way, you should know that I have a stake in the X-ray facility to which I'm referring. What do you do? Do you tell the doctor, no thanks, I'll skip the X-ray? Do you risk offending the doctor by telling him you'd rather go to a competitor's X-ray facility? Do you shrug and say the insurance company is paying for it anyhow?

In the end it is always a matter of individual integrity and trust.

See also my earlier post on Armstrong Williams as a cautionary tale for bloggers.

: LATE-NIGHT UPDATE: The Friday Wall Street Journal writes about this story here (free link). One of the reporters talked to me about it (I'm not quoted).

: Glenn Reynolds has added lots to his post and opened the comments.

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Brush with geek fame

: At MacWorld, Doc comes within a degree of separation from Robin Williams.

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