Author: Hans Eisenbeis

If you missed us on MPR this morning, you could probably catch us in their audio archives.

One thing we wanted to talk about, when we were on the topic of media credibility, was this: This morning, the Strib broke the news early that undercover officer Gerald Vick was legally drunk (well, he was loaded, actually) when he was murdered last week. Naturally, an undercover cop can’t sit around drinking O’Doul’s if he’s trying to establish credibility. The terrible irony here is that, as any beat cop will be glad to tell you, around 90 percent of the people they deal with on a regular basis as a part of doing their jobs have serious alcohol issues. The vast majority of street-level crimes are committed by people under the influence of one intoxicant or another.

But what we wanted to dwell on for a few moments was the almost certain backlash that will come at the Strib for publishing this nasty bit of posthumous dirt. Our point of view is that it is most certainly legitimate news, and touches on broader issues of interest to the general public. But it can’t make the Strib or its reporters look very good, aspersing the good name of an honored cop so immediately in the wake of Vick’s, er, wake.

And we are reminded, again, of Ombud Kate Parry’s somewhat pandering approach to the idea of better serving readers–that is, “building trust” among new readerships. The fact is that the truth is very frequently an unpopular commodity, and one of the reasons the public assumes journalists are unethical cretins, whereas the truth is just the opposite, generally speaking. We think reporting hard truths is valuable to the community–it’s what newspapers are supposed to do. But we wonder what Kate Parry will make of the inevitable flood of mail accusing the Strib of urinating on the grave of a public hero. Will she read this as successfully “building trust” and “servicing” the Strib’s beloved readership? We think this is what is normally referred to as a “good teaching moment,” and we’re sure she’ll rise to the occasion.

Tim McGuire, ever the genteel former editor of the Star Tribune, weighs in today from the chitlins circuit of academic punditry with yet another defense of the newspaper industry’s prospects for the future. (Yes, officially everyone now has had his or her say; no, newspapers will not die. They have survived TV, radio, telephones, palm pilots, fax machines, XY-Write, sliced bread, the internal combustion engine, homebrewing, and even the internet. We expect they’ll survive a while longer. For the record, we think Tim is basically right about one salient fact–newspapers still enjoy massive profit margins, and they should stop whining about doing what any other industry would do–reinvest some of that margin into evolving the product. Our approach would be to hire more and better reporters and expand the breadth and depth of–ready for this?–the reporting.) We only met McGuire once, and merely noticed that he is a snappy dresser. We also noticed that he spent much of his career trying to evolve the newspaper to his own somewhat quirky specss–if we recall correctly, wasn’t he the guy who reorganized the newsroom into “teams,” installed mood-enhancing medititative bubblers, and implemented a pro-active plan to stop using Native American names for professional sports teams? These sorts of “investments” in the future of newspapering seemed alike a good idea at the time, but most would say they are now safely obsoleted in the past.

John Tierney’s op-ed earlier this week suggested that news organizations are playing into the hands of terrorists by reporting, or at least overreporting and sensationalizing, their terrorist acts. We’ve been saying the same thing for months now. It’s not a comfortable thing to say—that too much information is a bad thing—but we must acknowledge that terror is the only weapon terrorists have, and the modern mass media is the only delivery vehicle they have, in their efforts to affect real change (or chaos).

More important, Tierney touches very briefly on the real problem with reporting these sorts of things. It is one thing to help cultivate the fear that is the goal of these murderers, it is another to help them in the process of recruiting even more to their ranks.

By way of example, Tierney mentions how Rudy Giuliani manipulated the press during his tenure as mayor—Giuliani ordered police officials to stop meeting news deadlines in press conferences and press releases. This had the palliative effect of helping New Yorkers believe their city was not quite as dangerous as the local news seemed to be portraying it every night. In some senses, one could argue that he was helping the public “get real” about the negligable odds of being victimized on the mean streets of Manhattan. Needless to say, New York actually became a safer place during that time, and crime decreased dramatically (or at least it was displaced to the borroughs—that’s the standard, mandatory line for liberal Rudy-hating city-dwellers, anyway).

This all connects opaquely but directly with Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point.” Recall that Gladwell discussed the “broken window” theory of crime under Giuliani (which has since been adapted in almost every major city in the nation); he also discussed suicide cults in Southeast Asia. Suicide, as extreme as it is, can be a fad just as virulent as Hushpuppies or Urban Vinyls.

The point is that media coverage of terrorist acts, particularly suicide bombings, helps sustain the cult of suicide among Islamic fundamentalists. One thing non-Islamic westerners cannot understand is this apparent erosion of the most fundamental human value we all assume is inherent to the species—the sanctity of human life itself, and the universal compulsion to protect our children. Islamic fundamentalists, with the help of modern media, have managed to break through that barrier, and their children are lining up to kill themselves (and anyone else they can get close to) in the service of God and dogma.

It is probably the most frightening development in the history of human consciousness, and the media is the machine that is planting its seeds.

In this populist age, it is always assumed that scientific polls of the public should automatically gainsay the wonks and policy-makers. The poll is the modern media’s Torah—the numbers are scripture, and everything else is commentary. The implication of today’s “Minnesota Poll” at the Star Tribune seems to be that, since most Minnesotans do not favor same-sex unions, those who do support them should stop trying to push them through.

That is an easy assumption to make, particularly if you feel strongly about representative government’s accountability to the majority public that elected it. It is a special trick, and a great public disservice, to constantly poll people in order to record their discomfort with homosexuality. We wonder how many polls in the antebellum South (hell, the New South) would have showed a clear majority’s discomfort with the idea of free slaves.

On the other hand, isn’t it interesting that no one around the Twin Cities dares to mention the words “stadium” and “referendum” in the same breath anymore? That’s because every poll that has ever been conducted suggests that a powerful majority of Minnesotans rejects the idea of a public contribution to a new professional sports stadium.

It is normally called leadership, and it is how positive social change takes place over time. Despite appearances, it’s not just for billionaires.

The last great spat among high-profile media folks was between James Woolcott and Kurt Andersen. Today, the sparks are flying between Jack Shafer and Michael Wolff.

We don’t have strong preferences for a winner, although we have a couple of peanut-gallery-type observations to make. Shafer is by far the more thorough and accountable reporter, Wolff is the better writer. Neither is a particularly sympathetic character, and therefore neither can possibly come off very honorably in a clash of egos. To the credit of both, neither is afraid to take their whacks at sacred cows—and having undergone a slowish process of canonization themselves in the past five years, each is now mooing the protests of the whackee. (This is new territory for Shafer. Recall: he is the doyen of Slate, the would-be editor-in-chief who probably deserved Michael Kinsley’s job more than Jake Weisberg did, but probably had his fill of being management back in his Washington City Paper days; Wolff, who has received many well-deserved whacks over the years, inexplicably landed at a columnist’s desk at New York magazine. He is a writer who’s single victory in the meritocracy was a tepid, trendy book about his failure as an internet mogul… come to think of it, we can’t recall a better example of someone in media who has so dramatically failed upward his whole public career.)

You can call a reporter or a media critic just about any name in the book, and he’ll take it as a compliment (something about being “old school,” or “hard-bitten” or a “stogie-smoking leathershoe” and all that nonsense), but don’t ever accuse him of being lazy. Aside from running violently against the nap of our perpetual martyr complex, it smacks of an ethical violation. And no one is more sensitive about ethical violations than a journalist.

Jack Shafer has been banging on about how terrible he thinks PBS news is—in particular, we recall his cheap shots at Lehrer’s News Hour. His main problem seems to be that it makes him sleepy. There’s no pleasing Shafer, apparently—because if it’s not a spectacular ethical lapse in the showers with Biill O’Reilly, then its the transgression of being too tweedy and unsexy. For our part, we like the thoughtful, civilized, literate News Hour. It is the efforts to update the program salaciously—particularly by employing blowhards like Brooks and Shields—that ultimately are the weakest elements in the program. Maybe it could stand an infusion of quirkiness—God knows, a show like Almanac is spilling over with little else—but this is hardly a deal-breaker. We like News Hour just fine the way it is; it’s the only TV news we can stomach, even if we have to shut our eyes when Ray Suarez is onscreen (to believe its really him).

We disagree with Shafer’s thoughtful piece at Slate this week on defunding and decommissioning the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. His is a cogent and pursuasive argument (although seemingly designed to steer me into a late morning nap—hey, live by the sword, die by the sword, Jack) that politicians tampering with media is a bad thing. And yet, at the same time, he claims that the partisan lens is as good as any through which to view the world. By way of example, Shafer writes:

“Now under Moyers polled conservatives for their views, while the Editorial Report mostly reiterates the Wall Street Journal editorial-page line. Yet editorial “balance” is not what either show needs—both benefit from looking at current events through ideological lenses. I’d rather watch a Miele soak cycle than view either program sanitized to CPB charter standards.”

Aside from Shafer here revealing himself to be a domestic snob (Miele? Good God, man, that’s no way to curry populist outrage), this strikes on a growing consciousness among readers, editors, and media critics that the whole conceit of “balance” in reporting is silly and itself has a skewing effect. One fine Times letter-writer described equal-opportunity journalism as “pitting a saint against a horse thief and saying ‘only time will tell,’” which is the neatest metaphor we’ve heard in connection with this issue of tit-for-tat sourcing.) This all sounds like a red herring, as far as we’re concerned. Sure there are egregious examples, but it is hardly a trend, and we figure that when it does happen, it probably happens for all the right reasons.

We think the CPB provides for a constant, annual checking mechanism each time funding comes up—resulting in the usual articles in publications like the Times and Slate. Ultimately, funding is nonpartisan—or at least bi-partisan. Yes, in contentionous times where there is a tyranny of the majority, there are good reasons to worry that “balance” is merely a federal bludgeon to bang PBS programming firmly to the right of center, but the government’s involvement is a guarantee of a certain amount of transparency that does not exist in the commercial media world.

It is no accident that the whole world outside US borders (and much of it within US borders) still considers the gold standard of news not ABC, NBC, or CBS—but the publicly funded BBC. What is the closest thing Americans have to the BBC, not in terms of funding, but in terms of quality, balance, authoritativeness, and substance—the American standard by which all others are measured, every time someone grinds out a study of journalism standards and practices? It is NPR and PBS.

We think Lehrer is a fine example of high-quality journalism and we feel confident that the News Hour can be entrusted to weigh balance against fairness. Part of the job of broadcasting the news is the wisdom to lay out the facts and analysis in a considered way which clearly points to the truth while ackowledging any lingering, legitimate doubts—not from the flat-earthers or the creationists but from thoughtful, serious dissenters with substantive evidence for a contrary interpretation of the facts.

Apropos of Monday’s article in the Times that “print is here to stay”: We would rather read a magazine or a book on paper. The quality of most newspapers (and, to be fair, a good many magazines) resonates well with the populist qualities of the internet. In our experience, most newspaper articles do not demand a deep read, where the reading experience would be enhanced by a premium medium. Companies that produce a lot of low-quality print—simple, dumbed-down narratives, quick-hit info-blurbs, ads for sexual services, the general infantilization of mass print media—had better worry about the internet. Raw information, service journalism, even broad-band advertising campaigns are infinitely reproducible, and they work fine in an infinite-reproduction medium like the internet. This sort of information gains or loses nothing by being on a web page, pasted into an email, or even queued to the color laser printer. This is as close to raw text as language can be, and there is no reason why the medium should have a significant impact on the reading experience. The instant, low-cost, low-impact world of the web is the perfect vehicle for this kind of reading.

Conversely, high-quality print has nothing to worry about. Hardcover novels aren’t going anywhere, for the simple reason that no one wants to read them on a computer screen. Alternatively, plenty of people are reading newspapers solely online (this sometimes gets us into trouble!)—the better to avoid the hassle of recycling a lot of paper that lives and dies without a living human being ever setting eyes on it.

In other words, the old cliche that no one likes to read a lot of text online is only partially true. If it’s good text that you really want to wrap your mind and your lap around, you want to see it on paper, freed from its delivery device. If you want to get in and get out with some useful information, the web is your medium. Or you can read standing up in the bookstore.

We think this truth is demonstrable on a simple, mechanical level. As computers and desktop publishing have advanced, the letter form itself has gotten better, clearer, and stronger—on the printed page. Isn’t it interesting that the gold standard for resolution on paper has risen into the stratosphere—say a minimum of 300 DPI, but why not shoot for 1000?—while the tools for creating that sort of photo-realistic resolution have stayed the same? In other words, computers are still operating in a paradigm of print: If the ultimate output is going to be on paper, then it had better look as close as possible to the real thing (i.e. letter press, or plate printer.) This is a bit like using a sharp chisel to do work that looks as if it were done with a razor blade, because the basic resolution of the CRT screen (and its flat-screen equivalents) has not changed. It is still woefully low, at 72 dots per inch. Newer operating systems like Mac OS X have tried to anti-alias the edges of letter forms—the better to make letters and words on your screen look as if they are the resolution of a printed (even letter-pressed) word, but without actually increasing the resolution of the hardware itself. So no matter what trickery is used to amp up their appearance online and onscreen, they cannot have the same look and feel as printed words on paper until there are some dramatic breakthroughs in screens and screen resolution.

It’s like audio. If all you want is a phone number, hearing a prerecorded message over the phone is just fine. If you want to hear Beethoven’s Seventh, you might prefer a CD, a stereo, and some good speakers.

Can you build circulation and still sell a readership to advertisers? That would seem to be what newspapers are trying to do more and more these days, as circ money is slowly laundered into advertising revenue. That means old-guard dailies like the Star Tribune are caught between two worlds—the mass audience and the niche enthusiast. On the one hand, you like to believe that everyone in the greater metropolitan region should be interested in reading “The Newspaper of the Twin Cities” regardless of age, sex, political pursuasion, or high school hockey team. On the other hand, there seems to be a strong compulsion to change the newspaper itself to appeal to certain “underserved” readerships—presumably in an effort to add raw numbers to the circulation line, while improving the complexion of your readership. (More women! More suburban Republicans! More disposable income! More soft-focus enterprise stories about relationships and eating disorders!)

One could certainly make the argument that to capture those coveted exurban readers, you’re going to lose your core city readers. More than one person has identified this as the dread disease afflicting the Pioneer Press at present. While the Strib is one of the very few dailies in the country to actually grow in circulation in the past year, all of their other numbers are down—suggesting that they may be reaching a point of diminishing returns in stretching the rate base and aspiring to attractive new readerships.

Last Sunday, we were interested to read the Strib’s new ombud, Kate Parry, who feels very strongly that editors should get out of the building and meet some readers. She’s of the energetic opinion that the Strib must evolve in order to better reflect the values and needs of the community, and to comport with certain scientific studies about readers. In other words, she is very interested in how the Strib can grow its business. (Which makes her sound less like a reader advocate, and more like a stooge for the advertising department, but that’s probably just our bad attidude talking.) That all may sound good in theory, of course—what could be wrong with “interfacing” with the public? Building trust? Establishing credibility? But rather than worry about directly servicing the “needs” of readers, why not focus on the simple values of traditional newsgathering? For example, reporting hard truths tends to build credibility. Fully reasoned, civilized, and well-written opinion tends to build trust. Why are traditional newspapering values not enough to establish what is needed by newspaper readers today?

We were especially interested to read the comments of Anoka-area readers as expressed in a little get-together organized by Parry. She writes, “Eleven very frank, funny, smart readers had accepted my invitation to have supper and talk about their lives to help this newspaper improve its coverage.” In particular, we were compelled by the words of Kate Lasota, a junior at Spring Lake Park High School. According to Parry, Lasota “explained how urgent it was for editors to think about readers her age. ‘You’re going to want to hook my age group right now by directing a few things towards me, some things I want to hear and read about. Because as I go off to college it’s going to be, “Which do I want to read?” I have that choice and you want my business.’”

Now what could the Star Tribune do to capture that elusive, desirable business—the powerful, demanding, well-fed, chic, center-of-the-universe, eighteen year-old, suburban high-school student? In other words, how can the Star Tribune conform the news of the day to appeal to more young people who have such a clear view of themselves in their thrones high atop the attention economy? (Or is it the bottom?)

Perhaps this is precisely the problem—chasing a reader instead of chasing the news. Perhaps Kate Parry could hold another seminar in which she returns the favor to her Anoka readership by empanelling a group of editors and reporters who can describe what news is and why it is important and why all intelligent members of a civil society should value it—precisely for its refusal to pander to any particular reader.