Year: 2005

One of the problems with reading the news online is that it’s more difficult to effectively browse a newspaper’s content. Aside from the odd phenomena of online editors screwing with headlines and decks to make them shorter or hipper or whatever it is they’re trying to do, a web page just doesn’t offer the same facilities for easy browsing. We haven’t looked deeply into it, but the general paradigm seems to be this: The architecture of information online tends to be suited to search and recovery. Generally, that means the best web pages are designed to facilitate you finding something you know or suspect is already there. (Corollary: general interest, web-only “magazines” died slow, uninteresting deaths when the tech-bubble burst five years ago. Slate and Salon are the exceptions that prove the rule.)

The impression we take away from having cancelled our home subscription two years ago to the Newspaper of the Twin Cities, is a troubling one. If you only take your news from the web, you begin to have an indistinct sense of scale on news stories, a random congeries of anecdotal stories driven by momentary impulses and obsessions, a sort of roadmap of links that trace the circuits of your own prejudices, preconceived notions, and moral politics (link, incidentally, a result of browsing our way through the real-world Sunday Times, one paper that still decorates our doorstep. Still, reducing the input by one daily newspaper has saved our back considerably. Recycling is a bitch; we save the Times to start the grill.) The more or less organic structure of content, dictated mostly by chronology, creates the impression that all stories are created equal.

Like we say, online editors probably should bear some of the blame for thinking too literally about information equations. (Everything is just a link away! A shallow, instantly “drillable” website is also a flat website, with no peaks or valleys.) But there is something about the newspaper itself that encourages a general sense of purpose and direction, a heirarchy of information, a page-to-page path through the garden. Websites are not–maybe cannot be–nearly as inviting or as favorable to browsing. As a result, even a crappy paper is better than a great website. When we have more time and feel less fragmented, maybe we’ll consider this more closely. Maybe not. Maybe we’ll just keep paddling blindly around in the little backwater that results fom our own particular trickle valve.

Despite appearances, we’re not particularly bothered about all this chatter regarding the Rove-Plame affair, partly because we’re supposed to be finishing the new issue, you know, putting all the frosting and chopped nuts and confetti on the long-johns here at the doughnut shop. But we noticed an interesting thread over at Romenesko, relative to Mike Miner’s thumb-twiddling at the Chicago Reader. Miner asks why reporters have not done the job of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald–that is, why haven’t reporters themselves discovered and publicized the name of the person who leaked Valerie Plame’s name.

The answer to that is pretty simple, aside from the obvious legal tools that Fitzgerald has to compell witnesses or, say, throw them in jail. (Summarized nicely here, by Aaron Clemens.) Considering that whoever leaked her name knew or should have known that he was committing a federal crime, not a lot of people have the spine or the stomach to go on the record (or even off the record) with such an allegation without dramatic and unimpeachable evidence. That same trepidation affects reporters, and it should. Unless you can prove that Karl Rove is the man you think he is, you run a pretty serious risk of libel. The stakes don’t get a lot higher, though blog-nation loves to play fast and loose with the facts, and frequently turns innuendo into accepted, wife-beating truism. (We’ve stopped holding our breath waiting for the first high-profile libel case to emerge from something someone wrote on a blog… Here in the U.S., it’s relatively hard to win a libel or slander case when it involves public or political figures, which is as it should be, even if it explains Rush Limbaugh’s savings account. We guess it has to do with the fact that so few blogs seem to warrant being taken seriously, present company included, naturally.)

The other element of all this that we find compelling, that no one seems to be writing about, is its meta-media quality–on some level, if you want to get your tinfoil hat out and talk about media conspiracies, it is possible to discuss it under the rubric of political bias, and it might take you in some interesting directions. Time magazine, by caving into the judicial system and Mr. Fitzgerald, might actually be playing to its liberal bias, because it has facilitated the publication of what appears to be Leaker Number One’s name–Karl Rove, who also happens to be Blue America’s Most Wanted. (We dislike him as much as anyone, probably more. But last time we checked, libel law does not stop applying when your intentions are pure and your politics are noble.) Journalists have got themselves into quite a lather over Time’s decision–are they protesting a little too loudly?

No, we think generally they are sincere, even if the New York Times appears to be working overtime (like our managerial friends over there at the Strib) to convince the world of its political neutrality by erring on the side of the right (maybe even going so far as to take pains to use Republican accounting methods in its circulation department). While we like to play both sides of the issue for our own entertainment and edification, we basically agree with our friend Chris Lehmann: No matter what you may think of Judy Miller’s work, she is chilling in the cooler for simply trying to get on with it. She can’t very well repair her tarnished reportorial credentials in an orange jumpsuit and bunny slippers, can she.

But we wonder whether this whole thing really will deflate the courage of other potential anonymous sources the way people are saying it will. Maybe so. How often are these sources breaking the law–or at least bending the rules–to speak to reporters? Probably more than you might think. Cripes, coffee-jerks at Starbucks have to sign confidentiality agreements these days, and unless you are explicitly authorized to shill for your company, there’s a pretty good chance you’re violating some contract somewhere.

Last night, we enjoyed Dan Cohen’s little chat at Raking Through Books about anonymous sources, and we found some closure. Cohen suggested that the real beacon of hope in press-source-public affairs has been and will continue to be the U.S. Supreme Court.

A little background: Cohen sued the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press for violating their confidentiality agreements with him, after he attempted to pass along damning information about a political rival. And the case rose all the way to the USSC. The Men (and Woman) in black ended up siding with Cohen, and said that the press is not above the law when it comes to verbal contracts, no matter what they may say about First Amendment protections.

Now, where we found some closure–at least so far as how Cohen’s case is related to present difficulties, or how he sees it to be, anyway–is that the First Amendment does not necessarily apply when it is being used to shield illegal activity, civil or criminal. (The comparison to yelling “fire” in a theater is inexact, but informative.) Naturally, Cohen sides with the decision of Time editor in chief Norman Pearlstine, who in all modesy and righteousness asserted that Time could not hold itself above the law to protect an anonymous source who had apparently broken the law in opening his mouth. (By contrast, Cohen had NOT broken the law–he had merely made public documents available to the local papers.)

So it is Cohen’s belief that the Supreme Court in both cases recognized that a law had been broken, and that that violation needed redress, and the First Amendment could not be used to impede that redress.

Cohen does not hold the press in very high regard, especially the local press. In fact, he gets real exercised thinking about the arrogance of the local daily papers. This is undoubtedly a function of having spent ten years of his life trying to extract justice from them for breaking their agreements and more or less ruining his public life. We’re not sure we agree with Cohen when he describes the press as self-styled “Gods who walk the Earth entirely above the law.” That applies to almost all corporations of a certain size and profit margin. But Cohen’s slightly odd blind spot, developed, we think, as a result of his own redemption from bitter, dirty political hardball, is what could have been a more pointed attack on the liberal bias of the local papers, particularly the Star Tribune. He mentioned it, but he could have made considerably more hay.

It may be more or less obvious that, through various machinations, the Strib is trying to shed the albatross of lefty bias that has for so long defined the community it patronizes. But back when Cohen was a GOP operative, it is almost unthinkable that his effort to cultivate a cheap smear against a respected governor (actually respected governor’s running mate) would not have generated its own backlash at the papers conservatives love to hate. We cannot, for the life of us, understand why he didn’t mail his public documents anonymously, and patiently wait to see if either paper picked up on the story. Cohen expresses astonishment that the local papers turned HIM into the story. “That would be like Ben Bradlee telling Woodward and Bernstein, ‘The real story here is Deep Throat. Let’s publish his name!”

Well, not exactly, no. But here’s where the allusion is interesting: Imagine what the Washington Press, or the Weekly Standard, or The National Review would have done with the snitching of Mark Felt. Maybe you begin to get the idea what the pre-McClatchy Star Tribune would have done with some public documents cheaply smearing a beloved Democratic politician. You might also speculate why those idolatrous right-wing institutions are presently as quiet as a Convent on Good Friday, with regard to Mr. Rove.