From the Washington Post: The traditional way of reporting on a president is dead. And Trump’s press secretary killed it.

File this under commentary, but the author - Margaret Sullivan - makes an interesting point about the changing relationship between the media and the presidency under Trump.

- Click here for the article.

Official words do matter, but they shouldn’t be what news organizations pay most attention to, as they try to present the truth about a new administration.

White House press briefings are “access journalism,” in which official statements — achieved by closeness to the source — are taken at face value and breathlessly reported as news. And that is over. Dead.

Spicer’s statement should be seen for what it is: Remarks made over the casket at the funeral of access journalism.

As Jessica Huseman of ProPublica put it: “Journalists aren’t going to get answers from Spicer. We are going to get answers by digging. By getting our hands dirty. So let’s all do that.”

She’s right. So was Tim O’Brien, executive editor of Bloomberg View and a Trump biographer, who urged journalists to remember that the White House briefing room is “spoon-feeding and Trump is a habitual fabulist.”

There’s a deeper story here, beyond a single briefing, no matter how memorable. Saturday made clearer than ever that President Trump intends to make the American media his foremost enemy.

During his first official visit to the CIA, Trump once again attacked the media, as he did throughout the campaign as he blacklisted news organizations and called reporters “scum.”

Journalists shouldn’t rise to the bait and decide to treat Trump as an enemy. Recalling at all times that their mission is truth-telling and holding public officials accountable, they should dig in, paying far more attention to actions than to sensational tweets or briefing-room lies — while still being willing to call out falsehoods clearly when they happen.

For more:

- What is "access journalism?"
-- The Price of Admission: Andrew Ross Sorkin’s debut and the limits of access journalism.
-- 'Access journalism' ... and the Silicon Valley reporter.
-- So Long, “Access Journalism” — & Good Riddance?

- Who is Press Secretary Sean Spicer?
-- Wikipedia: Sean Spicer?

- What is a White House Press Secretary?
-- Wikipedia: White House Press Secretary.

- Who is Washington Post reporter, and public editor, Margaret Sullivan?
-- Wikipedia: Margaret Sullivan.

- What is a public editor?
-- Wikipedia: Public Editor.

From 538: How I Acted Like A Pundit And Screwed Up On Donald Trump - Trump’s nomination shows the need for a more rigorous approach.

In 2305 today we looked at Nate Silver's bad call during the primary. Along with most other political observers, he discounted Trump's viability as a candidate for the Republican nomination. Here he tries to figure out what he got wrong and why. He calls himself a "data journalist" which suggests that his approach is rigorous and needs to be adjusted if proven faulty. Here's what he came up with.

- Click here for the article.

. . . I’m going to proceed in five sections:

1. Our early forecasts of Trump’s nomination chances weren’t based on a statistical model, which may have been most of the problem.

2. Trump’s nomination is just one event, and that makes it hard to judge the accuracy of a probabilistic forecast.

3. The historical evidence clearly suggested that Trump was an underdog, but the sample size probably wasn’t large enough to assign him quite so low a probability of winning.

4. Trump’s nomination is potentially a point in favor of “polls-only” as opposed to “fundamentals” models.

5. There’s a danger in hindsight bias, and in over correcting after an unexpected event such as Trump’s nomination.

Major court cases about freedom of the press

This is a list from the Bill of Rights Institute.

- Click here for it

I'm not aware of court questions regarding who qualifies as a journalist - I'll keep looking.

Does the free press clause protect the people who videotaped Planned Parenthood?

There is nothing new about undercover reporting - and the pervasiveness of recording equipment seem to make everyone a journalist of sorts, but does that means the constitutional protections apply broadly? What are the implications of this?

- Slate has an article on the subject: Is an Anti-Abortion Activist With a Camera a Journalist?

Here's a chunk of its text:

. . . “the gathering and publishing of information doesn’t instantly make one a journalist, just like the sharing of legal information doesn’t instantly make one a lawyer or knowingly hypothesizing about an illness doesn’t make one a physician. In the latter two examples, the focus is on education, proof of knowledge, and the government’s own line-drawing in licensing lawyers and doctors. There is no government-issued license to practice journalism.” She argues that it will be left to us, the reading public, to draw the lines that courts and legislatures have struggled to clarify: “Unbiased consumers of information could well know journalism when they see it. These consumers believe in some publishers more than others because the publishers’ work is reliable and ethical and truthful, often or mostly published without bias or ideology. And that’s very similar to the way journalism has been defined in a traditional sense, long before we all became publishers.”

In other words, it’s entirely possible that even while Daleiden attempts to argue that what he did—or at least what he now says he was doing—is genuine journalism, there are real risks to the rest of us in allowing him to make such broad claims. We aren’t merely risking our privacy and our livelihoods by allowing anyone with a camera and an inextinguishable fantasy to call himself a reporter. We are courting the possibility that his nihilistic and cynical view of the profession could someday become the norm.

The videographer's problem seems to be the fraud he engaged in to get the footage. That does not seem to be covered by the First Amendment. The privileges reporters get seem to extent primarily extend to their ability to not have to testify about confidential sources.

The Supreme Court established this privilege in Branzburg v. Hayes.

- Click here for the decision.

From The Dish: The Rise Of The Robo-Journalists

The previous post asked whether constitutional protections existed for newspaper articles written by an algorithm.

This post describes the algorithm in question.

Here's a link to the story:

A shallow magnitude 2.7 earthquake aftershock was reported Monday morning four miles from Westwood, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The temblor occurred at 7:23 a.m. Pacific time at a depth of 4.3 miles.
A magnitude 4.4 earthquake was reported at 6.25 a.m. and was felt over a large swath of Southern California.

According to the USGS, the epicenter of the aftershock was five miles from Beverly Hills, six miles from Santa Monica and six miles from West Hollywood.

In the last 10 days, there has been one earthquake of magnitude 3.0 or greater centered nearby.

This information comes from the USGS Earthquake Notification Service and this post was created by an algorithm written by the author.

The program used to generate it was called Quakebot.

Ken Schwencke, a journalist and programmer for the Los Angeles Times, was jolted awake at 6:25 a.m. on Monday by an earthquake. He rolled out of bed and went straight to his computer, where he found a brief story about the quake already written and waiting in the system. He glanced over the text and hit “publish.” And that’s how the LAT became the first media outlet to report on this morning’s temblor. “I think we had it up within three minutes,” Schwencke told me.
If that sounds faster than humanly possible, it probably is. While the post appeared under Schwencke’s byline, the real author was an algorithm called Quakebot that he developed a little over two years ago. Whenever an alert comes in from the U.S. Geological Survey about an earthquake above a certain size threshold, Quakebot is programmed to extract the relevant data from the USGS report and plug it into a pre-written template. The story goes into the LAT’s content management system, where it awaits review and publication by a human editor.

Computer programming is now a useful skill for journalists apparently.

More leak investigations . . .

Another leak investigation by the Obama Administration has surfaced leading to questions about whether these are justified, and whether the administration is creating a "chiling effect" on the media by zealously investigating them.

The latest involves a Fox News reporter who was alleged to have received classified information in 2009 from a source in the State Departments that was obtained from a source inside North Korea. It stated that " North Korea was likely to respond to United Nations sanctions with more nuclear tests."

The Washington Post details the facts of the case here.

NPR goes further and discusses the constitutional implications of the fact that the leak investogation goe beyond the person who leaked the information, but the reporter as well. This is unusual. This has the potential to criminalize what reporters do: talk to sources and report on what government does. The search warrant issued to authorize the search of the reporter called him a co-conspirator.

Naturally journalists are getting nervous, but the Obama Administration is arguing - as presidents do - that free press rights must be balanced against natonal security needs - in this case to secure and maintain a source inside a hostile nation. Click here for a discussion of that balance.

A couple reporters argue that the reporter in question was a bit of a bonehead - his tradecraft was sloppy and easy to investigate. And the story he reported was not especially interesting.

Justice Department secretly obtains telephone records of journalists in order to find who leaked classified information to AP reporters.

This story in the Guardian last year about a foiled plot to blow up a jet bound for the US included classified information. The Justice Department subpoenaed the records in order to find the source of the leak, but the AP is now arguing that the investigation is too broad and goes far beyond what is necessary to uncover that specific leak.

Its the latest conflict between a executive branch focus on national security and the secrecy alleged necessary to obtain it, and the media's effort to maintain press freedoms.

For background:

- Under sweeping subpoenas, Justice Department obtained AP phone records in leak investigation.

- Here’s the story the AP suspects led to sweeping Justice Dept. subpoena.

- Justice Dept. Defends Seizure of Phone Records.
- Leak Investigations Are an Assault on the Press, and on Democracy, Too.

- Spying on The Associated Press

Will the decline in the number of people working in the media create problems for the viability of democracy in the US?

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press have released their latest analysis of the state of the media in the US: The State of the News Media 2013. Perhaps the simplest message it is sending is that declining revenue has lead news providers to layoff reporters and editors and has allowed public and private agencies - news makers - to take their messages directly to the public. This allows them to by-pass the critical filter that the news media generally provides.

Increasingly the news we receive is formulated by those normally covered by the news. They have a greater ability to shape how we think about news events. Public relations professional now have more influence than reporters, which negates the traditional role that the media is meant to play in a democracy. Instead of making evaluations of public matters based on objective information, the information we receive will be purposely biased in favor of the interests sending the information out.

From the report's overview:

. . . so far, this trend has emerged most clearly in the political sphere, particularly with the biggest story of 2012—the presidential election. A Pew Research Center analysis revealed that campaign reporters were acting primarily as megaphones, rather than as investigators, of the assertions put forward by the candidates and other political partisans. That meant more direct relaying of assertions made by the campaigns and less reporting by journalists to interpret and contextualize them. This is summarized in our special video report on our Election Research, only about a quarter of statements in the media about the character and records of the presidential candidates originated with journalists in the 2012 race, while twice that many came from political partisans. That is a reversal from a dozen years earlier when half the statements originated with journalists and a third came from partisans. The campaigns also found more ways than ever to connect directly with citizens.

There are signs of this trend that carry beyond the political realm, as more and more entities seek, by various means, to fill the void left by overstretched editorial resources. Business leaders in Detroit, MI, for example, have created an organization to serve as a kind of tour guide to journalists with the goal of injecting more favorable portrayals of the city into media coverage. The government of Malaysia was recently discovered to have bankrolled propaganda that appeared in several major U.S. outlets under columnists’ bylines. A number of news organizations, including The Associated Press, recently carried a fake press release about Google that came from a PR distribution site that promises clients it will reach “top media outlets.” And recently, journalist David Cay Johnston in writing about a pitch from one corporate marketer that included a “vacation reward” for running his stories, remarked, “Journalists get lots of pitches like this these days, which is partly a reflection of how the number of journalists has shriveled while the number of publicists has grown.” Indeed, an analysis of Census Bureau data by Robert McChesney and John Nichols found the ratio of public relations workers to journalists grew from 1.2 to 1 in 1980 to 3.6 to 1 in 2008—and the gap has likely only widened since.

Drone Journalism

We had some fun - maybe a bit too much fun - going off on drone courts in class last week (you know who you are). Kinda like people's court, but with drones.

So this caught my eye: Brace Yourselves, Drone Journalism Is Coming.

Drones are used to monitor across vast expanses of land such as agricultural farms and wildlife reserves. The police uses drones for reconnaissance missions or for border security. Even Hollywood covertly makes use of drones in its evergreen quest for more jaw-dropping and immersive scenes.

The benefits for journalists are evident too, especially for those who are in the field, like many science journalists. Journalists can use drones to report on disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires. Having an above-the-ground view may give journalists a better perspective of the extent of a disaster. By making use of sensors attached to drones, journalists can measure numerous parameters such as radiation levels in inaccessible areas. An environment journalist may also be keen to use drones to collect specimen such as polluted water samples while an exploring nature journalist can use them as communication relays so that they can touch base when reporting from remote areas.

Drone journalism appears to make so much sense that two universities in the US have already incorporated drone use in their journalism programs. The Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska and the Missouri Drone Journalism Program at the University of Missouri both teach journalism students how to make the most of what drones have to offer when reporting a story. They also teach students how to fly drones, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations and ethics.

Things happen fast don't they?

Richard Cramer, RIP

The NYT has an obituary of a journalist who produced one of the better account of a presidential campaign. His name was Richard Cramer, and the book is What it Takes: The Way to the White House.

Just in case you want a copy:

The Hack List

At the end of each year, a Salon writer lists the major media hacks, a hack defined as someone who produces low quality, high volume material intended to boost sales and to express a client's political opinions.

He's in the process of building this year's list (click here for his entry on MSNBC - number 8 on the list), and provides links to recent efforts. Here's 2010 and 2011.

Number one is Politico (click here for its website).

Are reporters taking Twitter too seriously?

Brendan Nyhan takes campaign reporters to task for giving too much - or any - attention to superficial news events like the etch a sketch comment about Romney or the recent claim that his wife has never worked a day in her life. He is especially concerned that reporters pick up rumors sent via Twitter as being true without fact checking.

He says we are the silly season.

Perhaps all of this is fostered by technology that allows for messages to get out quickly and business models that depend on this speed - regardless of whether it is accurate.

From CPJ: Getting Away With Murder

The Committee to Protect Journalists details the number of journalists around the world who have been killed, and the countries that are uninterested in investigating the cases and punishing the killers.

It releases the numbers in its Impunity Index, with Iraq leading the list.

The killings have a purpose:

CPJ research shows that deadly, unpunished violence against journalists often leads to vast self-censorship in the rest of the press corps. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Mexico, where unsolved journalist murders grew for the third consecutive year. Fear of retaliation has driven some journalists to report crime news under pseudonyms on social media websites. But even those sites do not provide refuge: In September 2011, the decapitated body of Maria Elizabeth Macías Castro, a Mexican journalist who used social media to report crime news, was found alongside a computer keyboard and a note from a crime group claiming responsibility.

Bloggers are not protected by shield laws

In 2301 we covered shield laws, which are laws that give "reporters some means of protection against being forced to disclose confidential information or sources in state court." These laws recognize that a principle role of the press is to shine a spotlight - for the benefit of consumers - on activities that otherwise would not be covered. This creates a dilemma. Sometimes a report might focus on illegal activity, which prosecutors might wish to investigate, and we might as a society wish to be investigated. But we would not have been aware of the activity had the reporter not been able to guarantee confidentiality to his or her sources.

So the right to information (which of course is not clearly stated anywhere in the Constitution, just inferred as being part of the freedom of the press) can come into conflict with the responsibilities of the executive branch - law enforcement - to enforce the laws passed by the legislature. This is a great example of the balances that have to be struck between the competing needs of society - in this case the need to be informed versus the need to be protected from criminal activity.

Journalists, by being members of the press, are the agents that dig up and distribute information about societal issues, serve a privileged function since they provide information for us to chew on, but a recent case in Montana points out a consequence of technological change. Remember that journalists have a privileged status because they are members of "the press" people in a position to distribute information - but since most people own computers, or other devises that send out information, we can all be journalists in a sense.

Or can we?

In the case, a woman who calls herself an "investigative blogger" and has blogged repeatedly and negatively about a financial firm she is upset with, has lost a libel suit. The court ruled that Montana's shield laws did not apply to her. She is not a journalist.

Expect an appeal to the Supreme Court. As with the GPS case we discussed over the fall, the Supreme Court continues to wrestle with the impact our hyper communicative, digital environment has on the application of Constitutional principles.

- Montana Shield Law Protects Anonymous Commenters.
- Federal judge: Montana blogger is not journalist.
 

Is Horse Race Journalism Unfairly Maligned?

The political press is commonly criticized for simply focusing on the horse race aspect of presidential campaigns and ignoring policy proposals and other aspects of it, but here is a defense of that approach. This type of jouranism may be necessary in the early stages of a campaign - the invisible primary (or the money primary) - when many decisions regarding which candidates should run and who will work and provide monetary support for them are done out of sight.

. . . primary elections are different. A primary campaign, and especially its early “invisible” period, can be understood as a time when party leaders—in other words, “insiders”—talk to, and argue with, each other about who their standard-bearer should be. Many factors go into that choice, from perceptions about electability to petty personal considerations. But the argument is, in large part, a contest over who wields power within the party, and what sort of values and goals the party wants to prioritize.
 

Thoughts on Media Bias

If you have the stamina, this is a terrific analysis of a book which purports to measure liberal bias among journalists. It also touches on the ideological bias of various other institutions and professions, and perhaps most important, how we determine whether they are in fact biased. How does one measure bias?

Is Tabloid Journalism Really Journalism and is it Entitled to Protection?

Andrew Sullivan weighs in and provides a nice video debate on the subject.

How Accurate are Media Forecasters?

A study finds out.

“The Freedom ... of the Press,” from 1791 to 1868 to Now — Freedom for the Press as an Industry, or the Press as a Technology?

From the Volokh Conspiracy, a post that should help next week's 2301 discussion of the Freedom of the Press. The author discusses the original issues associated with teh freedom of the press:

“[T]he freedom ... of the press” specially protects the press as an industry, which is to say newspapers, television stations, and the like—so argue some judges and scholars. “The Press Clause singles out the press as an institution entitled to special protection under the umbrella of the First Amendment.” And this argument is made in many contexts: election-related speech, libel law, the journalist’s privilege, access to government property, and more.

The four Citizens United v. FEC dissenters, for instance, asserted that “[t]he text and history” of the Free Press Clause “suggest[] why one type of corporation, those that are part of the press, might be able to claim special First Amendment status.” Therefore, the dissenters argued, restrictions on the Free Speech Clause rights of non-press entities can be upheld without threatening the special Free Press Clause rights of the institutional press.

Likewise, Justice Stewart famously argued that the Free Press Clause should be read as specially protecting the press-as-industry, because “[t]he primary purpose of the constitutional guarantee of free press was ... to create a fourth institution outside the Government as an additional check on the three official branches.” Justice Powell likewise reasoned, referring to the press-as-industry, that “[t]he Constitution specifically selected the press ... to play an important role in the discussion of public affairs.”

Justice Douglas similarly argued that professional journalists are constitutionally entitled to a privilege not to testify about their sources, because the press-as-industry “has a preferred position in our constitutional scheme.” And some lower courts have indeed concluded that some First Amendment constitutional protections apply only to the institutional press.
....

Here's the full article.

Edward Bernays and the Rise of Public Relations

Something must be in the air, but some commentators -- Glenn Beck among them -- have focused attention on Edward Bernays, held to be the father of the public relations industry, if not modern adversing in general. A month back the Economist ran an article on Bernays and one of his predescessors, Ivy Lee, who figured out how to persuade the public to think one way about a dominant issue. This is handy if you are a vested interest that needs to deal with a crisis:

Lee observed that the rise of national newspaper chains and syndicated journalism in America since the 1880s, combined with the extension of the franchise, had profoundly changed society. Now, for the first time, there was something that could accurately be called “public opinion”, a shared consciousness and conversation across the country—and it was to be feared. Lee noted how the emerging mass media were acting as the conduit for the anti-capitalist message of Progressivism, the liberalising reform movement that peaked in America in the early 20th century. He realised not only that it was essential for businesses to counter this message, but that the same conduit could be used to spread pro-business sentiment.

His idea, blindingly obvious now but a novelty then, was to send newsdesks a stream of statements putting the mining bosses’ case and rebutting allegations against them. These, as well as the statements he put out the same year on behalf of a railway following a train crash, are now sometimes described (with a bit of spin) as the first press releases. . . The sentence regarding public opinion is especially important. I want my 2301s especially to read through this since we will be digging into how interest grousp anbd parties form and communicate, and of course, public opinion in general, soon enough.

To give you an idea of how effective they can be, here's a classic scene from Mad Men.

You might want to think about this and peruse through some presidential campaign ads.