Our convention-al media

PEOPLE ALWAYS ASK the editor how many work in the newsroom.
Oh, about half, goes the old joke.
The Columbia Journalism Review’s Justin Peters wrote a cute send-up on the 15,000 reporters at the Democratic National Convention.
Most are wearing bad suits.
A thousand are drunk, which Peters says is as it should be.
Many don’t have credentials, can’t find the credentialing office, are complaining about lack of floor passes and are smugly criticizing others in the media who have no business crowding the place up.
Those are right.
But an exception not mentioned in CJR is Asa Eslocker with his ABC-TV camera crew. Denver police arrested Asa – roughly, it sounded like – and used language not too delicate for the reporter’s ears but not likely to be heard from the DNC podium.
Cops said the network crew was blocking a hotel’s private sidewalk.
ABC said the journalists were looking into corporate lobbyists and wealthy fat cats at the convention.
Oh, what a lovely reason to get busted. Waytago, Asa.

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MANY OF THE convention-going journalists are doing it for funsies, no doubt.
Bloggers had an extraordinary welcome.
But professional news organizations can spend $50,000 a reporter and up covering presidential campaigns. Convention town hotels and bars and restaurants and whatever else can be hidden on expense vouchers eat up a bunch.
So why do it, asks U.S. News & World Report.
Its Whispers column quotes Mark Potts, a media blogger at RecoveringJournalist.com, suggesting the media instead do community journalism – my phrase, not his.
Let Associated Press and the big syndicated news operations blow their dough, says Potts. And spend the money instead on covering city hall or local schools and the like.
Well, I’d spend the money on the presidential campaigns. But I suggest the “community” approach, because that implies relationship journalism.
Make the candidates’ health care platforms a local story. Explain what the two hot wars are doing to the home front. Tell the local economy story in Obama and McCain terms the hometown crowd can feel.
All we need to know about the conventions – except for the odd story an Asa Eslocker might get arrested for – can be seen on the television tube as it happens.
Relating politics to the local media audience — priceless, as the commercial says.

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MARK SALTER wrote books with his and boss’s John McCain’s name on them.
Now he’s writing the senator’s acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination.
His muse is Peggy Noonan, the hit speechwriter of the George H. W. Bush presidential years, according to Newsweek.
The McCain candidacy is derivative. It’s based on the ongoing war in Iraq, the tax policies of the current president Bush and the trickle down economy from as far back as Ronald Reagan’s days but as dried up for Americans as Death Valley
Two of Salter’s books with McCain – Hard Call and Faith of My Fathers – are workmanlike, readable prose. But they are not dream-inspired like the two published works of Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic opponent.
The Republican writing team will need more than the Noonan mojo and the campaign leftovers of past Republican years.

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THIS IS A credentialing society.
We don’t seek education for its own sake. We earn degrees and diplomas to get our ticket punched for entering the middle class mainstream.
The odd result is bored, tired, ennui toward life instead of the genuine liberal arts and sciences joy of discovery about the universe and all that’s in it.
It’s the same with journalists who seek the political convention credential and then sit on it.
They have a nasty habit of reporting in the “here we go again” fashion slouch.
But the unfolding DNC show in Denver – and with any luck the RNC convention to follow – don’t live down to the conventional view of blah-boring.
The aroma of American renewal is in the air.
And any journalist who can’t smell those roses had just as well join the drunks spotted by the CJR observer at the convention.

The love of plaintalk vs. hated editorspeak

God made copy editors. So love-hate relationships would agitate newsrooms.
Desk hounds can save your butt. They also can make you and your reader question the whole enterprise of journalism.
When I sat on a copy desk, naturally, we could do no wrong. Then I moved to reporting. I learned to insert a small error in everything I wrote. That way a copy editor could triumph over the “find” and move on instead of repeatedly reworking my story in agonizing self-justification.
“An Elegy for Copy Editors” on the editorial page of The New York Times reminds me of past ways and of the future of journalism. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/opinion/16mon4.html?ex=1371355200&en=4871a499fb7ba4b7&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
The elegist Lawrence Downes had visited the Newseum, our industry’s shrine to itself in Washington. He searched in vain for a niche of tribute to copy editors. The death rattle of the copy desk foreshadows the obituary for print journalism.
Machines and those who operate them without time to get form and content completely right are lapping the bypassed word-checkers many times over in the relay race that is news delivery. The self-correcting blogosphere doesn’t seem to mind that much about accuracy.
The NYT elegy laments the decline of newspapers and of readers. Budget cuts lop the heads off the copy editing headline writers. Those guardians of credibility in word use and fact and meaning and readability no longer provide quality control. So publishing declines more, costing it more readers in the industry’s downward spiral.
Newspapers are shrinking or eliminating “multiply redundant levels of editing that distinguish their kind of journalism,” the elegy recounts. Layers of editing no doubt applied themselves to that very article for publication on the editorial page of The Times.
Yet what a weak sentence!
The word “redundant” doesn’t need or want the modifier “multiply,” as if to say, “redundantly redundant.”
The eye stops and stares at “multiply.” Does he mean the verb “to increase?” Or does the writer mean the opposite of “singly?”
See. I told you I used to be a copy editor.
Elegiac language is not the way people speak, a goal of the popular press in every era when volume matters.
The ambiguity actually proves the thesis in The Times where a copy editor should have prevented the reader from pausing in mid-sentence. Too many pauses produce too few readers.
But the passage also reveals too much deference to editors with their arcane ways and too little attention to readers with other ways to get information.
Even bloggers know to use plainspeak.
Print writers and their copy editors violate the Hippocratic Oath by first doing harm when they make the language more austere and not more readable.
Let’s not lament old ways too much while we improve ways to communicate.
Meanwhile you may take for granted any error you read here is inserted intentionally just to see if you could catch it.

This just in: Government discovers rumor!

Can’t fool Washington. It’s just slow on the uptake.
Word-of-mouth is humankind’s oldest form of communication.
Dame Rumor flies, wrote ancient poets such as Virgil. Truth is a pedestrian.
The feds were bound to get around to investigating that hare and tortoise race.
The Securities and Exchange Commission wants Wall Street to stop spreading false information.
Lots of luck with that.
Those turkey buzzards of day trading, the short sellers, make a living from bad information and misinformation and disinformation. They borrow stock at a high price to sell low and pocket the difference.
The shorters naturally benefit if gossip hurts a company on the Exchange while they hold its paper.
Speculation flitted right behind rumor out of Pandora’s box.
Journalism could tell federal regulators all information is baseless until verified.
But fact-checking is a tedious process that suffers when a reporter is close to deadline and when the financial world is in near panic mode as it is lately.
So we shouldn’t be cynical either about editors’ stern warning to authenticate or the SEC’s crackdown on illegal trading practices.
Realism simply tells us rumor mongering is a never ending story, with us always.
The wagging tongue as way-of-life is how vast numbers of non-readers of newspapers and non-watchers of TV are getting their news these days. Much of the news actually is commentary if not downright gossip.
Abandon all hope for straight poop as you enter the blogosphere. Yes, this blog is an outpost in the vastness of cyberspace too.
That’s why you see my name, my picture, my bona fide credentials listed – the stuff of credibility, the eternal enemy of rumor.
Trusted sources: That’s what professional journalism is all about, regardless of media platform.
The government might defeat rumor in the marketplace. Not likely. But it might. The weapon would be instantly available truth, denial, explanation to counter every whisper.
But that would require government, corporations and the financial world to be quick with credibility too.
Every reporter knows those institutions trade in deception and withheld information and controlled flow of news.
So short sellers and average citizens take rumors for granted.
Credible journalism can’t. That’s why there’ll always be a market for honest reporting.
Uphill battle that it is with Dame Rumor whispering in your ear.

Sen. Gramm’s Ph.D. economy goof while 'helping out' Sen. McCain proves public, press, politicians need a common language

Let’s drop the word “economics” in favor of “quality of life.”
Public, politicians and media might get it right then.
Sen. John McCain’s Republican quest to be president is but the latest to foul up. He did it through a stand-in, former Sen. Phil Gramm.
We’re but a “nation of whiners,” said that Ph.D. in economics. Gramm claimed we’re only in a “mental recession.”
Insert funny comment here: Maybe it’s the professor who has the receding mind…he taught at Texas A&M, so maybe this is an aggie joke gone bad…or as Barack Obama, leader of the Democratic presidential camp commented, “America already has one Dr. Phil.”
We don’t need a shrink to know we can’t buy or sell houses, afford fuel and food, meet the hidden tax of rising college tuition, find a job in some cases or get a raise in others.
John McCain still thinks trickle down works, corporations will save us out of the goodness of their hearts and oil policy means greasing the palms of petro execs yet again.
He’s a goose egg on money matters. So he uses Gramm to tell him what to think. But no one told Gramm how to speak.
To be fair we lack a common language about finances. An egghead looks at the numbers, the institutions, the science of capitalism and sees the engine running right along.
The people see only the result and feel the engine running them down.
Reporters don’t translate between the two opposites, which is why God invented journalism – so media would communicate.
When the Gramm-McCain gaffe broke, that’s all the story was. Media treated it as yet another misstep in the political pasture full of language cow patties.
In journalism we call this a daily process story, because it lacks context.
An enterprising reporter covering Gramm-McCain could have, might have, should have included news of the whole day: \

• The federal government is stepping up to support the two mortgage holders that account for half the nation’s mortgages, which add up to $12 trillion.
• Banks are in the tank.
• Gas isn’t, because of costs, which won’t quit with President Bush drawing a military bead on Iran.
• Food expense is tied to fuel.
• Goalposts for retirement keep moving because of all of above.

We’re not whining, Dr. Gramm. We’re living life and enjoying it less. We’re also reading the papers.
We’re just not reading the right story. It would put two and two together, linking screwy political views, the public’s disconnect from brainy economists and daily living.
No more petty political items. No more campaign gotchas. No more disconnects.
Media need to change the language: It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the quality of life.
Then we would no longer be a nation joined asunder by so many misunderstandings about the meaning of money.
That’s one thing we all have in common, money, but commonly not enough.

Karl Rove, Wes Clark and "swiftboating"

I was skeptical from the minute I heard Wesley Clark dissed John McCain’s service record.
Sure enough. Another case of media quoting out of context.
These political days, you have to stay in skeptic mode 24-7.
The columnist Paul Krugman wants to blame Karl Rove, the man who surgically removed the civil tongue from the body politic.
It’s tempting. The Roveblitz career started with screwing up Alabama politics, especially in the state judiciary. Then the smear, innuendo and truth twists gave us an All America era that will require two more eras for un-spinning.
You can’t resume civility with the speed of a swiftboat.
Krugman lays out the connection between that dirty political operation of four years ago and how the McCain GOP presidential camp used the Wes Clark interview for a fake scandal. It’s a good column on the dirty dealing. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/04/opinion/04krugman.html?ex=1372910400&en=0e1bedcbb66a5840&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
But these tricks wouldn’t work if the hair trigger media didn’t rush to Web or air or print with the latest phony tittle-tattle. The emphasis is on gotcha and quicky.
The Rovian world is brought to you by its sponsor, shoddy journalism.
Those of us who teach the old fashioned brand of balanced reporting sometimes worry whether jobs will await our graduating students. Actually we ought to figure out a way to get practicing journalists back into our schools for refresher courses.
What General Clark, the hero of Kosovo as NATO commander and the West Point valedictorian and the Rhodes Scholar and the wounded Silver Star soldier of valor in Vietnam, actually said of John McCain’s also heroic military service was that it didn’t necessarily prepare him for the presidency.
McCain believes the totality of his lifetime in public service, including time in Navy jets and as a Hanoi POW, does prepare him. And that’s what the voters will decide in the contest against the Democrat, Barrack Obama. Since Obama didn’t serve at all in the military, the better comparison may be over judgment rather than uniform.
Quick trigger journalists and the pols who load their guns want to impact the outcome. It is the judgment of the Republicans and of McCain to use those rapid fire techniques.
The best way in the old school of press and politics would be to squeeze off a round of truth after checking the safety for facts rather than to fire from the hip with a jerk of the finger at the first glimpse of a target.
Context is everything. Clark was talking about strategic foreign policy thinking vs. Top Gun fingers on a joy stick.
I read one of his books, Waging Modern War. Impressive, thoughtful, prophetic. He also wrote Winning Modern Wars.
I interviewed Clark on the speaking tour he took in 2000 to position himself for a Democratic presidential run, which he has tried without success.
He’s an engaging, bright, even brilliant person who takes care with words and actions. Clark modeled the mantle of intelligent military statesman most people now view wrapped around the also talented frame of General David H. Petraeus, our best bet for getting out of Iraq with at least a small amount of honor.
So if one of those guys isn’t qualified to talk about strategic qualifications as better preparation than tactical assignment, no one is.
Now the sad thing is reporters will always throw the non-incident incident about Clark and McCain into “background” like a repeating rifle. That will be a pity if it costs future American public service the mind and talent of this strategic thinker, Wesley Clark.
Bad journalism is the gift that never quits giving.

Press agentry is the rough among the diamonds

Never trust anyone who uses “paradigm” in a sentence -- the instant sign of a phony.
So I agree with that one piece of advice from Sally Stewart, a communications consultant who wrote Media Training 101. She also gives eight rules to “Ace a Press Interview” in a Wired magazine how-to.
Talk from notes, know your interviewer, know you’re on the spot, know you’re talking to an enemy who hopes you trip up, expect pressure and so forth.
Odd. I don’t see anywhere in Sally’s list where you should tell the truth. The plain, simple, statement of fact made with knowledge and sincerity would be a thing of uncommon beauty in press interviews.
Public relations is the fork in the road not taken by journalism. PR seeks a persuasive goal. Reporters quest ever onward for the elusive approximation of truth.
The late R. W. Apple, extraordinary raconteur and remarkable reporter for The New York Times, once told a teaching colleague of mine they were not in the same business. The professor taught public relations.
Would that it were so, Johnny! The relationship is more like parallel universes. They often merge, because press agents and The Press often find they need each other to do their separate jobs.
Departments of media relations can make necessary connections between reporters and principals, usually hoping for a desired slant. In worst cases the press spokesman is treated as the ultimate source, guaranteeing the spin gets out there.
In my world of journalism, truth is the best defense. Veracity may be the unavoidable last refuge of scoundrels in PR.
A former State Department spokesman and normally no scoundrel at all, told me he never lied to reporters. He simply made sure he had no knowledge on hot, sensitive subjects. He felt “clean.” I felt uncomfortable with his strategically planned ignorance, an avoidance of hard truth.
I suppose the truth, like a gemstone, shouldn’t come to the surface easily. Candor, authenticity, fact would all lose value.
In the long wait for truth certain, we examine its substitute with skepticism.
That’s how I view Sally Stewart’s advice to the interviewed.
Then again, if she had advised them to be truthful, she'd have to call her recommendation a paradigm in public relations.
Automatically we couldn’t trust what she said.

Keep Tim’s name at work

Tim Russert deserves a living memorial from journalism.
The testament should endure much longer and more meaningfully than the on-air shrine of NBC’s coverage about his passing.
Despite the network’s backlashing critics, no one honestly can be surprised by the broadcasters’ excess on behalf of their Washington bureau chief and moderator of the best political talk show.
Instead of, “If it’s Sunday, it’s Meet the Press,” the slogan could be, “If it’s NBC, here’s another tribute to Tim.”
There’s a simple reason for the immoderation about the moderator. NBC did it because it could. And his many friends and colleagues did it, because they wanted to.
So let the longest running wake on television play itself out. By general agreement the Russert name is too good for his colleagues to wear out.
I know I don’t let the first day of the week pass without watching Meet the Press. I also watch ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos for contrast. And I finish the Sunday papers-on-the-air with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer who claims the best political team in the business.
Maybe the cable crew does deserve ranking in the group category.
Tim Russert was the tops in singles for good reasons: He asked questions. He asked them well. He asked them only after research.
Perhaps that’s not a lost art in journalism.
But the nation blundered into the Iraq War behind our unquestioning press corps. The Bush-Cheney cat got the tongue of White House reporters on all sorts of policies that will take long years to reverse. And community print and broadcast media lack the chutzpah of the blogosphere when seeking the bottom of local, state and regional issues that matter.
I’ve witnessed reporters read a press release and pose an inquiry on the text so the utility, business, police or public official could ever so politely parrot the official statement back for camera or steno pad.
Fear of appearing rude, contrary or uninformed intrudes: Don’t stand out in the crowd.
Well, Tim Russert must have cared about country, about the civic conversation and about the future more than he cared about smooth talk. He wasn’t abrasive as ABC’s Sam Donaldson in his heyday or as rantingly partisan as the skulk from the Fox hole or as blandly scattershot as Jim Lehrer’s NewsHour on PBS or as politically poetic as Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation.
He was the studious case detective armed with the facts and merely asking the politician to account for the record so different from the latest statement. He had the tape or the film clip or the transcript as back-up.
Tim Russert was the master of the question.
So we should honor him by putting his name into the professional language.
From now on a question shall be called a “Tim.”
And the act of questioning with factual support shall be called “Doing a Russert.”
It’s a fitting memorial.