RConversation

What's wrong with TV news

Nieman Reports has published my review of Bonnie Anderson's "Newsflash": "The Precarious State of Television News"

A former CNN executive, Anderson delivers a scathing critique of how and why CNN and all American TV news networks have gotten so awful.  Unfortunately, she doesn't get into alternative solutions that may be found in new social media.  My review was written in January (to meet the magazine's publishing deadline), so much has already happened since then. My concluding paragraph:

Unfortunately, Anderson’s prescription for TV journalism applies to a media world that is fast becoming extinct. But then, her book came out in late May 2004. In the Internet age, that is already ancient history. By the time this article gets edited, published and distributed, it will probably be horribly out of date, too. Maybe by then somebody will have already made some more headway towards restoring honor to audio-visual journalism—to call it TV would be way too 20th century.

I'd be interested in hearing other people's reactions to the book and to the review.

VIDEO: Daily Show on the "new journalism"

Jackson's Junction has the video of the Daily Show's segment last night on the "new journalism" featuring Jay Rosen, who was thanked for wearing pants...

(via Gawker)

UPDATE: Here's a longer version of the video, thanks to Peter at searchengineblog.

Nightline scooped by bloggers

Nightline showed up at our Berkman Thursday night bloggers meeting and shot most of our discussion. It's unclear when their story will air, but Steve Garfield has beaten them to it with a wonderfully edited video-blog. An MP3 of the whole meeting has also been posted, plus an assortment of accounts that can be found in the Berkman-Thursdays del.icio.us feed.

Schechter on Reuters Tsunami roundtable

Danny Schechter has an interesting post describing a roundtable about media coverage of the recent tsunami, sponsored by the Reuters Foundation.  Read the whole post. But here are some higlights:

- CNN's Aaron Brown boasted about how great CNN's tsunami coverage was... thanks to the existence of CNN International, which has people in place around the world, unlike the other U.S. TV nets. (Unfortunately, you can't see CNNI in the U.S., which I always thought was a tragedy.)

- That said, people from aid agencies and watchdog organizations had a number of criticisms of how the media handled the story, including:

• "the media didn't really get going on the story until the second day – after the biggest loss of life – because it didn't really understand what happened"
• "there were many inaccuracies and alarmism about the dangers of epidemics that never occurred."
• "the media coverage made it seem as if the international and US relief effort was the most important when in fact local agencies were often quicker off the mark and more impactful."
• "the saturation coverage of the Tsunami in Asia has to be contrasted with the lack of coverage of other serious humanitarian disasters like the bloodletting in Congo, or Uganda, or Malaria that rates no coverage and affects as many or more people."
• "there is a "silent tsunami" or word poverty and diseases like malaria that does not exist in the US media. The rest of the world covers these crises for the world's majority, but the US media is uninformed and indifferent.

Schechter then describes Aaron Brown's reaction:

Aaron Brown listened to all this but did not engage. He explained the problem not as a journalist out to inform but as a media personality committed to maximizing audience size.

"I deal with a "harsh reality," he said defensively. "I know eating Brussels sprouts is good for you, but I have to offer a more balanced meal and throw in some chocolate." The point: he will lose the audience if he gets into too much depth or human suffering. "

TV is a business" was the ultimate excuse. He seemed to squirm around the points as if to say,what do you want me to do guys, I work in commercial television.

I don't want to knock Brown. He was just voicing the market logic of commercial TV without perhaps realizing that it is precisely that logic that is driving so many viewers away from the tube He recognizes that he is a prisoner of the dumbed down cable environment that companies like CNN created .

This is exactly why I left CNN.  I was sick of being a prisoner of the dumbed down cable environment. 

CNN turns its back on its own

Danny Schechter describes his experience appearing on Fox news yesterday to talk about "Easongate."  His film WMD has a section asking whether U.S. forces targeted journalists in Iraq. An excerpt of his latest blog post:

I was hoping CNN might call and we reached out to Lou Dobbs and Aaron Brown to no avail.

I guess CNN was not interested in taking on this fight.

But Fox News was. Fox is always at war with CNN which it brands as a liberal network, a label CNN does not want or like. And so Fox scheduled a segment and asked if I was interested. When I told them I had a film documenting the attack on the Palestine Hotel, they were doubly interested. Frozen out by CNN and most TV networks who we bombarded with Info on WMD (save Court TV) I entered the Fox arena the way Christians were fed to the lions.

Needless to say Fox wanted to trash Eason, not the killing of journalists. They showed a very clip of my film with the sound muted but I did get to make a few points and plug the movie the best I could expect in circumstances of hostility..

Sean Hannity took some predictable whacks along with Brent Bozell but I held my ground and was still standing at the bell. I would score the round as a draw.

It was hard to shift the conversation back to the real issue – the killing of journalists and not what Eason Jordan said or didn't say – no one there seemed to know or really care in what was really a bash CNN exercise.

I got an e-mail from Fox yesterday afternoon asking me to call them. I did not respond. I have issues with CNN and the way it operates, which is why I left, but I'm not a big Fox news fan, either. Nor do I want to be used any further in an effort to bring down my former boss, for whom I continue to have a lot of personal respect (and to whom I owe a great deal career-wise), despite his unfortunate choice of words at Davos, which he has said repeatedly he did not mean. 

What makes me sick is how a lot of people are going to benefit from this whole thing personally, and in some cases financially. On the right, Hugh Hewitt gets tons of book publicity in what is turning out to be a textbook case of the "blog swarm" phenomenon his book describes. On the left, Danny has an opportunity to plug his film. Lots of bloggers are making names for themselves. Yes, there are very legitimate issues on all sides that need to be discussed. I'm not trying to deny or belittle that fact. But most of these issues are not black-and-white. Unfortunately shades of grey aren't as interesting or useful for most people's purposes.

I remain disappointed in the many journalists who have spent lots of time on the ground in Iraq, and who have failed to do anything to shed light on the substance and facts of this issue - one way or the other. I am disappointed in their editors for not assigning them stories on this issue. 

I'm especially disappointed with CNN for the way they're running away from the story, hoping it will go away. It won't. CNN has done itself more harm than good over the last several years by being horribly afraid to stand up for any particular set of principles. It tries very hard to please everybody and offend nobody - but ends up offending everybody and pleasing nobody. No wonder internal morale is low and ratings are bad.

Rony's conversation with Hugh

Rony Abovitz has answered a bunch of Hugh Hewitt's questions about the circumstances under which CNN's Eason Jordan made his remarks at Davos about U.S. troops targeting journalists. His account is consistent with what I witnessed (though as I've said, I don't have verbatim notes). Rony points out that there was a video camera there. I saw the camera too. It definitely belonged to the World Economic Forum, not any media organization, because the cameraperson had a WEF staff badge. I saw no other video cameras.  I've also checked on the ground rules for sessions held in that particular room, and they were indeed considered to be "on the record" (not all WEF events are). So releasing the recording and transcript would not violate any prior understanding with the panelists.

At the end of his e-mail discussion with Hugh, Rony concludes by saying he is not out to be part of a right-wing "lynch mob," he's just interested in the truth:

Last comment. This issue is turning into a right vs. left agenda issue, a lynch mob against Eason Jordan issue, and feeding into many different agendas. I hope that any news media (bloggers, print, major, minor) covering this can respect my original intent which was to not leave this kind of allegation hanging in the air, but to carry it through to the point where the truth is known, and known to all sides.

The WEF video would resolve the "what Eason said" component of the story. As to the other components, there must be hundreds of people around the world (soldiers, journalists in Iraq, and friends and family of journalists in Iraq) who can weigh in as to what is actually happening on the ground.

Yes indeed, it would be nice to hear from more people on the ground.

Another view on the U.S. military, journalists, and Iraq

Amid controversy over whether U.S. troops did or didn't target journalists in Iraq and what CNN's Eason Jordan did or didn't say, and as the right-wing blogs are storming against what many of them believe to be MSM (mainstream media)'s anti-military bias, comes a documentary assailing MSM from the left: Weapons of Mass Deception.  I have not yet seen it. Just the trailer and this interview on AlterNet, in which Amy Goodman interviews media critic and filmaker Danny Schechter about "fishy deaths of unembedded reporters."  The interview includes the following excerpt from the film's transcript:

Narrator: Journalists and media workers were targeted in Iraq. Was it deliberate? To keep the story on message by intimidating un-embedded journalists. How did the media in the street challenge these killings? Some were killed by so-called friendly fire. Others victims of calculated attacks, missiles, tank shells, and bombs dropped on or near journalists. Some media critics concluded it was intentional, although the Pentagon denied it. Before the war, the BBC's Kate Adey reported she was told by the Pentagon that independent journalists could be targeted.

Reporter:: The 15th floor of the Palestine Hotel was the target. A U.S. tank shelled the Palestine Hotel, which was crowded with journalists, killing two cameramen. One works for a Spanish network, and the other one works for Reuters.

Narrator: Now another incident. Look at this. An American tank on the bridge across from the Palestine hotel in Baghdad. A soldier claimed his tank was fired on. Listen carefully. There are no sounds.

Samia Nakhoul: We moved to the Palestine Hotel because the Pentagon asked our organizations to let us leave because it was a target and when we moved to the Palestine Hotel our organization told the Pentagon we were at the Palestine Hotel. So did every news organization.

Narrator: Again, minutes later no sounds were heard, no one firing at U.S. soldiers. Suddenly without provocation  –

Samia Nakhoul: We saw an orange glow, and this was the tank shell that hit our office. And you can imagine the panic, the wounded – it was me and another photographer. I can't imagine that they would target journalists. You know, I couldn't believe why would they target us? What have we done to them?

Narrator: After the war press freedom groups were still demanding a real investigation. The Pentagon's Victoria Clark told me there was a report that showed that the soldiers were acting in self-defense.

Narrator: Was there any attempt to find out the facts independently or a thorough investigation?

Samia Nakhoul: No  –  the Pentagon never interviewed me personally on it. I don't think any of my colleagues were interviewed by the Pentagon.

Narrator: Samia's organization, Reuters, demanded an independent investigation, but most media companies didn't even press on this issue. No one was held accountable. It was all passed off as an accident, the fog of war and all that.

In the interview Schechter says: "What's also outrageous is that the American media companies did not demand an investigation of this, did not join Reuters in demanding an investigation. So it just wasn't just complicity and collusion in the coverage of the war but a refusal to get involved in an effort to try to find out what really happened, what the facts were. To try to get at the truth of what happened to their own people. That to me compounds the shock of the way in which the media played the role it did." 

The film is apparently opening in New York and a few other places this weekend. Info is here.

Again, it would be useful if we could hear from more journalists on the ground in Iraq about this...

Where is the truth?

Rony Abovitz laments in a new post on the fallout over his account of Eason Jordan's comments at Davos:

I am finding it harder and harder to understand the truth on this subject. I have, and likely only can, scratch at the surface here, but there appears to be some depth and complexity to what really is a tangled web of issues that may be even more frightening when the light of day shines upon it.

Further down he writes:

In this debate and discussion I made the decision to say something - to speak out. That decision has sparked a lot of things, including some intense pressures coming from a lot of sides. But I now feel an obligation myself to not give in to any side, but to ask for, in fact to demand, an accounting of the truth.

Read his whole post. I agree with him that this is not a black-and-white issue.

The right wing bloggers have been very vocal on this story. The left and middle have been largely silent. We have yet to hear much from journalists working on the ground in Iraq. I heard back from my friend Brian Palmer who wrote:

I would have to say that I have no personal experience with this. I can tell you that I have found it difficult to get unspun soundbites/comments from folks above a certain rank, generally speaking, but that's the main kind of news management I have  encountered, not news management by bullet.

One perspective from one embedded journalist. We need many, many more - from other freelancers as well as people working for major news organizations. Rony points to this list of journalists killed in Iraq, compiled by Reporters Without Borders. But there is no info on who killed them or the circumstances of the killing.

Response from Eason Jordan

I emailed Eason Jordan to clarify what he said in the Davos panel, since I do not have a transcript or recording, and my notes are inexact. Here is his reply:

Rebecca:

Here's what's important.  First, I stressed insurgents are to blame for the vast majority of the 63 journalist deaths in Iraq.  Second, when Congressman Franks said the 63 journalists killed in Iraq were the unfortunate victims of "collateral damage," I felt compelled to dispute that by pointing out journalists in Iraq are being targeted -- I did not say all journalists killed were targeted, but that some were shot at on purpose and were not collateral damage victims.  In response to a question about whether I believed the U.S. military meant to kill journalists in Iraq, I said, no, I did not believe the U.S. military was trying to kill journalists in Iraq.  Yet, unfortunately, U.S. forces have killed several people who turned out to be journalists.  In several cases, the U.S. troops who killed those people aimed and fired at them, not knowing they were shooting at journalists.  However tragic and, in hindsight, by Pentagon admission, a mistake, such a killing does not fall into the "collateral damage" category.  In Iraq and Washington, I have worked closely and constructively with U.S. military and civilian leaders in an effort to heighten the odds of survival for the courageous journalists in Iraq.

Eason

In a follow-up email he added:

Most importantly, I do not believe the U.S. is trying to kill journalists in Iraq.  To the contrary, the U.S. military has worked hard to protect journalists in Iraq.  Nevertheless, there have been several tragic episodes in which U.S. forces killed journalists in what turned out to be cases not of collateral damage but of mistaken identity.  Feel free to paste that, too.

UPDATE: After I had already posted the above, I received the following:

To be clear, I do not believe the U.S. military is trying to kill journalists in Iraq.  But the U.S. military has killed several journalists in Iraq in cases of mistaken identity.  The reason the word "targeted" came up at all is because I was responding to a comment by Congressman Franks, who said he believed the 63 journalists killed in Iraq were the victims of "collateral damage."  Since three of my CNN colleagues and many other journalists have been killed on purpose in Iraq, I disputed the "collateral damage" statement, saying, unfortunately, many journalists -- not all -- killed in Iraq were indeed targeted.  When someone aims a gun at someone and pulls the trigger and then learns later the person fired at was actually a journalist, an apology is appropriate and is accepted, and I believe those apologies to be genuine.  But such a killing is a tragic case of mistaken identity, not a case of "collateral damage."  That is the distinction I was trying to make even if I did not make it clearly at the time.  Further, I have worked closely with the U.S. military for months in an effort to achieve a mutual goal: keeping journalists in Iraq safe and alive.