Kai Nagata and the evils of Corporate News

At the end of the day Kai Nagata quit his job because he wanted his voice back, he wanted the freedom to express his opinions - and I stress the word opinion - without contractual, professional or, as he makes clear, factual restraints. Fair enough. Have fun. The adults will make do without your input. No doubt there's a blog in his future.

Nagata may be articulate but it's clear he doesn't have the courage of his convictions, giving up after only a year on the job. If Canadian journalism is worth saving - if indeed it's possible to save it - we will need more people like Nagata but ones willing to stay the course for more than a few months.

Unfortunately, this essay is little more than a rant about  the state of Canadian journalism, something that could easily be deduced by picking up a newspaper or watching the evening news, where Ken and Barbie dolls abound. Ironically, Nagata's lament is simply a longer, less concise version of Howard Beale's "I'm mad as hell and I"m not going to take it any more!" rant.

The truth is that news has always been a business first and a public good second and this fact belies Nagata's assertion that he took the job with his eyes wide open.

Newspapers, magazines, and broadcast television are in the business of information collection and distribution and the current, albeit dying, business models they operate under require a constant stream of new readers and viewers. The battle for readers and viewer is a source of great pressure on all newsrooms and this has always been true where there is competition for those same readers and viewers. In short, the race to the bottom in journalism has been going on for a long time.

To quote Thomas Jefferson,, "the man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing, but newspapers." Or if you prefer, consider the term "yellow journalism", which was coined to describe the antics of newspapers in New York during the great circulation wars in the late 19th Century. It is a term long-associated with Joesph Pulitzer and I'm sure you know who he is and what he stands for. Rupert Murdoch and murdochism isn't new, it's just a variant on existing trends practiced with ruthless efficiency and determination along with the odd bribe or two or three.

The alternatives, however,  to private news or news-as-a-business are worse, news by government or news by blogosphere, which really isn't news.
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Once a newspaper touches a story the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists. Norman Mailer

The reliability of unreliable online reporting

Here is an example of how blogs posing as news and bloggers posing as reporters undermine online journalism and why we will miss newspapers in the near future.

Greg Mitchell, a blogger at thenation.com, makes note of another blog which informs the world that it is Israel's official policy to keep Gaza on the brink of economic collapse and that the Israelis have kept the United States informed of this policy. The ostensible source for this information is a diplomatic cable given to Wikileaks.

Just another news story from Cablegate.

Well, not really.

If you wandered down the rabbit hole you'd find that Mitchell's link is just another blogger, Andrew Sullivan at theatlantic.com, yammering about Israel's treatment of Gaza in a post about the evils of collective punishment. Sullivan's blog is based on a news story from Yahoo News, which in turn is just a re-post from Reuters News Service which itself is a story about story published in a Norwegian newspaper, Aftenposten.

Aftenposten "claims" it has all 250,000 diplomatic cables that Jullian Assange and Wikileaks say they have but have not released. The Reuters' story notes the information about Israel's economic policy toward Gaza  comes from a cable dated November 3, 2008. This cable must be in Aftenposten's collection because it has not been released on Cablegate (there is nothing from November 3, 2008, assuming the date has been correctly reported by Reuters, which itself is a question mark).

In other words, the entire story is based on unsubstantiated information from one newspaper which claims to have original diplomatic cables but has not saw fit to share them with the world and a newspaper that was not among Wikileaks' chosen few of so-called reliable media partners. Moreover, Aftenposten no longer publishes a English edition of its online service so to read the original report one must know Norwegian or know of a Norwegian who can read it to you.

While the Reuters' story makes the connection between the source of the cable and Aftenposten abundantly clear, neither Mitchell nor Sullivan bothered to note that the source of their information is suspect and has not been corroborated by anyone outside of a few select Norwegians.

While I fully support Mitchell's and Sullivan's right to yammer on about anything they like or that their publishers will publish, they have a duty, as serious "bloggers" or "online journalists" to question the source of the information and tell their readers where the information is coming from, just like serious journalists do everywhere else.

The reason this is important should be self-evident: online journalism is the future and the co-ability to report information and have that information fed to massive audiences means getting the information right is even more important than it has ever been. Yet what we see is the proliferation of unreliable reporting and the failure of journalistic standards. It's not whether the cable is right or wrong or whether Sullivan's opinion is right or wrong, it's about ensuring audiences understand the nature of the information so they can judge for themselves.

Self-flaggelation masquerading as journalism

The Hill Times, usually a source of sober political writing, is now reporting on the reporters covering the Helena Guergis/Rahim Jaffer story.

You know reporters are flogging a dead horse when they begin writing stories about their colleagues writing about the story and asking political commentators to comment on the story of the story. Since it's far too early for the summer silly season, this is just tepid journalism to fill space until something more interesting comes along to write about.

Call it the CNN effect, a habit the news network developed during the first Gulf War when they were forced to run interviews with reporters to fill time between bomb runs and Wolf Blitzer's bathroom breaks. There's nothing worse than watching one bubble-headed-bleach blond turning to another bubble-headed-bleach-blond or a Ken doll news anchor for insight just to fill time on a 24 hour news cycle.

On a related note, one of my pet peeves is "I" journalism, where reporters insert personal pronouns and their own perspective into a news story. A Calgary Herald reporter once did a first-person account of life as a prostitute (journalist = prostitute is hardly a stretch) where she spent an hour walking the mean streets with a couple of neighbourhood sisters. She also had two police cruisers, an undercover cop and a photographer sent to document the event a few feet away as cars rolled up and asked if she was a party girl or just waiting for the bus. In other words, she had far more protection for the two hours she spent in fish nets than most women walking the streets see in a year. Her "undercover work" did a serious disservice to the women she interviewed about life on the street, women who spend years at risk on the street from pimps and johns. These women were the the story, not the reporter's experience slumming for good copy.

Reporters should save the "I" stories and the "reporter on reporter" news copy for their association newsletters and stick to the facts.