taking a break

Press conference will be on hiatus for a while, until the next semester of “critical issues” and a new set of relevant issues and reporting that relates to them.  In the meantime, the cache of articles, links, and media analysis resources should provide a good site to use should you have occasion to do media literacy or other critical examination of journalistic issues.  Excellent case study examples will be posted here and on my faculty website.  Have a great holiday break!

the news/advertising divide

Newspapers have traditionally kept the line clear between editorial and advertising, with recent scandals at the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post attributed to unseemly connections between the two.  The Dallas Morning News will have some of its section editors in sports and entertainment report directly to sales managers.  Although for now, the news departments will not follow this route, the pattern seems clear enough once the precedent is set.  As the Times analyst Richard Lopez-Pena reports:

Loren Ghiglione, a professor of media ethics at the Medill School ofNorthwestern University, said the need to sell ads had always helped shape news coverage — papers have created or eliminated entire sections on that basis — “but this does seem to me to take it to a slightly different level. It strikes me as at least creating a perception issue,” he said, “when you have, in effect, sales managers managing news personnel.”

tiger woods and the publicity machine

Golfer Tiger Woods has gone into a publicity lock-down, declining to speak with law enforcement investigators about his early morning accident near his home.  This tight control over information, which celebrities grow accustomed to when managing their personal images, doesn’t work so well when scandal ensues and the power over the story shifts away from those involved (as sports columist George Vecsey argues)

This tactic works fine at golf tournaments and any time he has a product to push. He appears when he is good and ready, and is just blandly helpful enough to give a few snippets of quotes to the waiting world. He’s a green-jacketed master at it.

The satellite vans are already encamped near the Woods home, and in the absence of a story from the subject other stories will be promoted–decidedly not under the control of the subject.

new forms of news

The Global Post provides news to a number of U.S.-based news partner organizations.  As one of many forms in the new journalism eco-system, the ideological dimension is unclear from the mission statement’s reference to an “American voice.”

We are proud to be an American news organization with a decidedly American voice. We also intend to seek out and tell the truth as we find it. To quote the great American newsman and foreign correspondent Edward R. Murrow, we aspire always to report the news “without fear or favor.”ege

This approach would seem to be an historical parallel to the early telegraph-based origin of the news wire services.  Like those outfits that were obliged to be “objective” in order to sell product to an uncertain final user, Global Post avoids the need to tailor the reporting to the niche of the news partner.  An “American voice” would seem to appeal to any U.S. news organization.

Japanese news clubs

The Japanese have long used a system for newsgathering based on “kisha” clubs, journalist associations that place themselves in government ministries as a formal installation.  This kind of tight relationship between journalist and source became a form of mutual backscratching insiderism.  Now with foreign journalists pressuring the clubs for access, the system is breaking down–although the reasons kisha reporters give for restricting the definition of “who is a jouranlist?” can be comical:

He also noted that the club had opened up slightly in the past decade by allowing the big American and British financial news agencies to join. But he said the press club wanted to ensure that people posing as journalists did not get in and disrupt proceedings.

“What if someone tried to commit suicide or burn themselves to death at a press conference? Who would take responsibility for that?” Mr. Furuta asked.

U.S. journalists share the same tendencies of mutual backscratching with high-level officials;  it’s just not institutionalized as in Japan where it’s easier to notice and make fun of.  Professionalism means control, and sometimes that control can be over issues that are not relevant to the core societal mission.

ATTENTION ALL J310′ers!

This blog is something I do to support the class and our topical discussions, and i’m pleased to see it’s been getting a ton of traffic recently.  Few, however, have taken advantage of the comment feature or other feedback, so please let me know if there’s an article that strikes your interest or links you have for posting.  I am curious to know what you’re thinking.

Obama’s Chinese reception

Understanding Chinese press control is not always as simple as saying it’s free or not free.  President Obama’s trip to China is a case in point, during which he granted interviews to certain Chinese news organizations –including one the president hoped would be a little freer in covering his remarks.  But his experience with his remarks on censorship being blocked showed that the Chinese pay particular attention to high profile figures when they make remarks that are sensitive to the communist party–as indicated in the Times recent visit coverage.

Moreover, this week showed that the Chinese authorities were determined to oversee the shaping of Mr. Obama’s public image here. They rejected a White House request to nationally broadcast Mr. Obama’s town-hall-style meeting on Monday in Shanghai, and carefully screened and coached questioners. One student said that she and other participants underwent four days of “training” beforehand and that they were ordered not to ask about Tibet. Mr. Obama’s news conference with President Hu Jintao on Tuesday was broadcast nationwide, but no questions were allowed.

Chinese press freedom, to the extent it exists, is least likely to be found in these prominent moments, but rather in the more informal social spaces provided by new media and the millions of “netizens” functioning as citizen journalists.

claims in context

One of the common criticisms of mainstream journalism is the lack of historical context.  Stories seem like they came out of nowhere without any sense of how we got there.  Historical context is particularly valuable concerning claims that have been made before, and proven wrong in light of hindsight.  Columnist Nick Kristoff considers a number of claims made about health care issues in news accounts concerning programs like Medicare and Social Security.  

Indeed, these same arguments we hear today against health reform were used even earlier, to attack President Franklin Roosevelt’s call for Social Security. It was denounced as a socialist program that would compete with private insurers and add to Americans’ tax burden so as to kill jobs.

Daniel Reed, a Republican representative from New York, predicted that with Social Security, Americans would come to feel “the lash of the dictator.” Senator Daniel Hastings, a Delaware Republican, declared that Social Security would “end the progress of a great country.”

YouTube meets NPR

In yet another stab at trying to bring the world of citizen journalism into contact with NPR and other professional news gathering sites, YouTube announces a new service:  ”YouTube Direct.”

When users go to the Web sites of Politico or The Chronicle, for instance, they will be able to upload to YouTube and flag their video for review by the publication’s editors, who will have the ability to approve or reject the submissions.

the media business

If you don’t read anything else in the Times, the Monday business section on media issues should be a must for “critical issues in journalism.”  On opinion-oriented cable news, MSNBC is called progressive but not partisan.  Partisan means supporting the party no matter what, while non-partisan, ideological means critiquing even like-minded partisans:

While much attention has been paid to the feud between the Fox News Channel and the White House, the Obama administration is now facing criticism of a different sort from Ms. Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other progressive hosts on MSNBC, who are using their nightly news-and-views-casts to measure what she calls “the distance between Obama’s rhetoric and his actions.”

Elsewhere, signs of the fluid definition of “journalism” are found in a couple of interesting places:  (1) the decision of Chicago prosecutors to go after Northwestern University student reporters (because that’s now increasingly where real journalism is happening) and (2) the Secretary of the Treasury inviting financial bloggers to a round-table discussion, another example of the Obama administration’s sophistication when it comes to adapting to new media realities.