Introduction
When
the score is a cacophony, we must face the music!
by Maireid Sullivan
June 2024
On rights and responsibilities of citizenship— political accountability, public health, and economic justice: Investigative Journalists, Whistleblowers, and Citizen Journalists champion egalitarian political principles by bringing corrupt individuals to justice and by holding to account those who would undermine public interests.
Who will receive credit for contributions to public accountability and transparency?
When scholars wish to validate a new finding or insight they seek credit for their contributions via peer review in professional societies and journals, and proceed to try to convince universities to publish their findings. Whereas, in politics, secrecy oaths are fundamental to maintaining control of the ‘party line’. When public policy standards and laws are broken, every effort is made to prevent public discovery of failed internal mechanisms. Most public servants earn tertiary degrees or diplomas to prove that they understand academic peer review methodologies, yet they are often prevented from meeting those standards in government administration, or prevented from receiving credit for their contributions when they reveal a failure of internal oversight, hence ‘whistleblowers’ and investigative journalists must step into the role of insuring accountability and transparency, and peer review, in the public interest.
When
the score is a cacophony, we must face the music!
There are times when we are expected to take sides. Those times often present hard choices that carry great risk with no predictable outcome - and require great courage. While critics condemn 'the targeted nature and the irresponsible revelation of unredacted identities' others appreciate and support the courageous work of 'public intellectuals' exercising freedom to conduct themselves honestly. |
". . . the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”
- Mark Twain, (1835-1910), The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories
Overview
"The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it."
– Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) ‘The Critic as Artist' from Intentions (1891)
2011
A Free Irresponsible Press:
Wikileaks and the Battle over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate (PDF),
by Yochai Benkler, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law review, 2011,
Jan 1, Vol. 46, pp. 311-397
Excerpt
"[I]t is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muckrake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the muck-rake, speedily becomes, not a help but one of the most potent forces for evil.
There are in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man, whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, business, or social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform or in a book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful."
- Theodore Roosevelt, The Man with the Muck-rake, 14 April 1906
Wikileaks was born a century after President Theodore Roosevelt delivered the speech that gave muckraking journalism its name, and both hailed investigative journalism and called upon it to be undertaken responsibly.
In 2010, four years after its first document release, Wikileaks became the center of an international storm surrounding the role of the individual in the networked public sphere. It forces us to ask how comfortable we are with the actual shape of democratization created by the Internet. The freedom that the Internet provides to networked individuals and cooperative associations to speak their minds and organize around their causes has been deployed over the past decade to develop new, networked models of the fourth estate. These models circumvent the social and organizational frameworks of traditional media, which played a large role in framing the balance between freedom and responsibility of the press. At the same time, the Wikileaks episode forces us to confront the fact that the members of the networked fourth estate turn out to be both more susceptible to new forms of attack than those of the old, and to possess different sources of resilience in the face of these attacks. In particular, commercial owners of the critical infrastructures of the networked environment can deny service to controversial speakers, and some appear to be willing to do so at a mere whiff of public controversy.
The United States government, in turn, can use this vulnerability to bring to bear new kinds of pressure on undesired disclosures in extralegal partnership with these private infrastructure providers.
The year of Wikileaks began with the release of a video taken by a U.S. attack helicopter, showing what sounded like a trigger-happy crew killing civilians alongside their intended targets. ...
...
CONCLUSION
A study of the events surrounding the Wikileaks document releases in 2010 provides a rich set of insights about the weaknesses and sources of resilience of the emerging networked fourth estate. It marks the emergence of a new model of watchdog function, one that is neither purely networked nor purely traditional, but is rather a mutualistic interaction between the two. It identifies the peculiar risks to, and sources of resilience of, the networked fourth estate in a multidimensional system of expression and restraint, and suggests the need to resolve a major potential vulnerability— the ability of private infrastructure companies to restrict speech without being bound by the constraints of legality, and the possibility that government actors will take advantage of this affordance in an extralegal public-private partnership for censorship. Finally, it offers a richly detailed event study of the complexity of the emerging networked fourth estate, and the interaction, both constructive and destructive, between the surviving elements of the traditional model and the emerging elements of the new. It teaches us that the traditional, managerial-professional sources of responsibility in a free press function imperfectly under present market conditions, while the distributed models of mutual criticism and universal skeptical reading, so typical of the Net, are far from powerless to deliver effective criticism and self-correction where necessary.
The future likely is, as the Guardian put it, “a new model of co-operation” between surviving elements of the traditional, mass-mediated fourth estate, and its emerging networked models. The transition to this new model will likely be anything but smooth. ...
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Philosophy
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2015
What Western journalists could learn from Buddhism
by Dr. Mark Pearson, Professor of Journalism and Social Media,
Griffith University, Queensland, Australia
Interviewer: Richard Aedy, 3rd September 2015
MEDIA Report: ABC Radio National, Australia
Summary
It's not enough to sign up to a list of media ethics if you don't have a strong moral framework underpinning it all. And Western journalists might find some useful ideas in the mindfulness philosophy of Buddhism.
See full transcript and podcast HERE
The Eightfold Path is one of the Four Noble Truths:
"The four truths therefore identify the unsatisfactory nature of existence, identify its cause, postulate a state in which suffering and its causes are absent, and set forth a path to that state."
|
 Mark Pearson: The basic eight points are:
1. Right understanding
2. Right aspiration or intention
3. Right speech
4. Right action
5. Right livelihood
6. Right effort
7. Right mindfulness
8. Right concentration
Now, each of these was actually spoken and then written in Buddhism as a means for training monks in spiritual integrity, but they are very easily adapted to one's life [and] also to journalism, as a moral code. It's basically saying, firstly, do you have the right understanding of the situation and with journalists that means research; it means have you really paused to explore this; have you spoken to enough people?
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The Public’s Right to Know
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"We need to work far more closely with industry, politicians and the media. None of these groups are the enemy, they are part of the group that will sort out these problems, and if we don't work with them there is no way we will ever beat it." - Matthew England, Professor and Laureate Fellow, Centre for Marine Science & Innovation, University of New South Wales, ABC Science Show, 8 June 2013 (Transcript) |
"When journalists are silenced, democracy and human rights suffer."
- Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom
2019
Spy agency ASIO makes submission to press freedom inquiry –
but keeps it secret
Peter Greste, of Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, urges spy agency to be transparent and make an open submission
The Guardian, 7 August 2019
Spy agency Asio is being urged to make a public submission to a parliamentary inquiry into press freedom, as the government considers whether changes are needed to national security laws to protect journalists. ...
Media companies, including News Corp, Nine and the ABC, have used their submission to the inquiry to urge the government to unwind the criminalisation of journalism and add safeguards such as a right to front court and contest applications for search warrants against reporters. >>>more
2018
"A role for journalists, if not as gatekeepers, at least as curators."
Scientists Aim To Pull Peer Review Out Of The 17th Century
By Richard Harris
NPR, February 24, 2018
Excerpts:
Another concern is that today scientists are judged primarily by which journal publishes their work. The greatest rewards tend to go to scientists who can get their papers into major journals such as Science, Nature, and Cell. It matters less what the actual findings are. . . .
And if a top journal reviews a paper and decides not to publish it, the scientist needs to start the process of getting to print all over again — which is a waste of resources. "Science moves slower because research isn't available immediately," O'Shea said at the meeting. "To me, those are big problems."
One way forward is to encourage scientists to make their work publicly available on the Internet before it has been peer-reviewed or accepted in a journal. Biologists are starting to do that, using a preprint server called bioRxiv. Physicists have been doing this for years.
Peer review can come later, Eisen says. In fact, he's putting together a system that will facilitate that, and it's set to debut this summer.
"What we want to see happen next is to allow the scientists who are reading papers [as part of their normal work] ... to review them," he says.
As he envisions it, "you post a work, people comment on it, you update it, and if it gets better through that process, that's great — now you've produced something good," he says. "If, through the process of review and assessment, you and the community realize the work wasn't right, it just sorts of fades and you mark it as such. And I think we'll all be better off if that happens."
Notably, it will change the incentives for publication. . . . >>> more
2014
Is the 'phenomenon' of "citizen journalism" under threat when objectivity is a precondition of journalism?
History of Citizen Journalism
by Donald Matheson, February 25, 2014
Professor of Journalism, University of Canterbury New Zealand
Excerpt from Introduction:
Citizen journalism’s rise is paradigmatic of how journalism and the media are evolving. A history of citizen journalism—also sometimes called network journalism, participatory journalism, Web 2.0 journalism—is therefore also a chronicle of shifts in the nature of news, the authority of professional media producers, the media business, the shape of public debate, and the technologies of social life more generally. That history divides broadly into two threads, one about change and one about continuity. >>> more
2011
How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory-
Rolling Stone, June 9, 2011: Tim Dickinson reported on Roger Ailes (1940-2017), the man who advised every American Republican president since Richard Nixon: "The onetime Nixon operative has created the most profitable propaganda machine in history. Inside America’s Unfair and Imbalanced Network. Quote: 'He was the premier guy in the business,' says former Reagan campaign manager Ed Rollins. 'He was our Michaelangelo.' ... The network, at it's core, is a giant soundstage created to mimic the look and feel of a news operation, cleverly camouflaging political propaganda as independent journalism." >>>more
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“Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. ... Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. ... "Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.”
Paulo Freire, (1921-1997), Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970
UCSC Free Download:
2005, 30th Edition (pdf) |
New Ideas on Self-Publishing
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| 2017
BOOK BIZ | Goodman's Plan for Indie Stores
By John Tepper Marlin, May 31, 2017
Peter Goodman's term as board chair of the Independent Book Publishers Association is coming to an end. He has written a full-page swan song…
Goodman says that the problems with the existing system include these four:
• Big publishers have a winner-take-all mentality.
• Lesser-known authors have trouble finding a publisher to bet on them.
• Meanwhile, people with some name recognition (for whatever reason) are recruited to author books, regardless of their ability to generate new ideas or write well, while the real talent is paid off for anonymous ghost-writing.
• Lesser-known writers are discouraged by the lack of support or opportunity to sell their books under their own name.
Goodman calls for a modern Indie Bookstore with the following characteristics:
1. Community driven. TLC for the consumer.
2. Totally wired and plugged in with kiosks for buying books.
3. Based on Print On Demand (POD), with books printed in less than 10 minutes.
4. Multimedia oriented — you can buy e-books, movies, music. WhatEVER.
5. Participatory, a gathering place. Workshops, etc. The Espresso machine right in front. Starbucks and bookstacks, the Barnes-and-Noble coffee-shop model. Walk in and you will find some of the same welcoming embrace as in a coffee shop or a well-run modern public library. Be a bookstore where local writers can leave their books for sale, either offset-printed and cheaply bound, or available as a POD book.
6. No returns! The return policy is a killer for indie publishers. This will limit the books that the bookstore will buy, but it also means that the authors won't suffer when the books come back.
Goodman doesn't pretend this model will happen without some serious changes in the industry. He is asking for a concerted effort to make it a reality. Indie publishers and unknown writers should not have to rely on Amazon. It's not good, he says, for the growth of our culture.
After thoughts
I spoke with a writer for the French equivalent of Publishers Weekly. He said the big problem in the book business is the loss of diversity. Amazon now has 80 percent of the digital book business and 50 percent of the total book-publishing industry, and that is not healthy. It is dangerous.
There is a glimmer of hope in the Indie Book business, as some self-publishers have done very well for themselves. >>>more
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From "Free Press' to Investigative Journalism
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~
1949
Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), founded in 1949, with headquarters in Prague, Czechia, is a United States government funded media organization that broadcasts and reports news, information, and analysis to countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Caucasus, and the Middle East. Wikipedia
- Press Room
- Journalists, in alphabetical order, cover Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijani, Balkans, Bosnia, Brussels, Bulgaria, Czechia, Georgia, Hungary, Iraq, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Poland, Macedonia, Moldova, North Caucasus, Pakistan, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Syria, Turkey, Tatarstan, Tajikistan, Tashkent, Ukraine, Uzbekistan.
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1960s
"The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."
- Gloria Steinem (b. 1934-), journalist and CIA Agent
THE FEMINIST WAS A SPY by Markos Kounalakis, Oct. 29, 2015, University of Southern California Centre on Public Diplomacy
Excerpt: ... Steinem spoke openly about her relationship to The Agency in the 1950s and ’60s after a magazine revealed her employment by a CIA front organization, the Independent Research Service (Hayden, 2014, The Nation).
While popularly pilloried because of her paymaster, Steinem defended the CIA relationship, saying: “In my experience The Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable.” ... Long before the formalized concept of soft power, Steinem personified and promoted abroad the vigor and progressive nature of the U.S. youth movement.
~
1985
Reporters Without Borders (RWB) aka Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF), was founded in Montpellier, France, in 1985, registered as a non-profit organization in 1995, with headquarters in Paris, France.
RWB/RSF is an international non-profit and non-governmental organization with the stated aim of safeguarding the right to freedom of information. ...
RWB/RSF works on the ground in defence of individual journalists at risk and also at the highest levels of government and international forums to defend the right to freedom of expression and information. It provides daily briefings and press releases on threats to media freedom in French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Persian and Chinese and publishes an annual press freedom round up, the World Press Freedom Index, that measures the state of media freedom in 180 countries.... Wikipedia
~
2001
Truthout
About:
Executive Director Ziggy West Jeffery and Editor-in-Chief Britney Schultz.
Truthout works to spark action by revealing systemic injustice and providing a platform for progressive and transformative ideas, through in-depth investigative reporting and critical analysis. With a powerful, independent voice, we will spur transformations in consciousness and inspire both policy change and direct action. For more on our editorial approach, please read “Remaking Media in the Pursuit of Justice” and
“A Call to the Media: Let’s Go Beyond ‘Preserving Democracy.’”
~
2001
Wikimedia Foundation
About:
The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia and our other free knowledge projects. We want to make it easier for everyone to share what they know. To do this, we keep Wikipedia and Wikimedia sites fast, reliable, and available to all. We protect the values and policies that allow free knowledge to thrive. We build new features and tools to make it easy to read, edit, and share from the Wikimedia sites. Above all, we support the communities of volunteers around the world who edit, improve, and add knowledge across Wikimedia projects.
"When I first created Wikipedia back in 2001, the internet was a very different place. Only seven percent of people worldwide had a broadband connection, and more people spent time building personal websites than getting their news online. I knew what I wanted to create: a free encyclopedia, written by volunteers, for everyone …" - Jimmy Wales, 2020
~
2002
The World Press Freedom Index (WPFI) is an annual ranking of countries compiled and published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) since 2002 based upon the organisation's own assessment of the countries' press freedom records in the previous year. It intends to reflect the degree of freedom that journalists, news organisations, and netizens have in each country, and the efforts made by authorities to respect this freedom. Reporters Without Borders is careful to note that the WPFI only deals with press freedom and does not measure the quality of journalism in the countries it assesses, nor does it look at human rights violations in general.
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2010
Independent Australia
Founded by David Donovan (accountant, journalist, lawyer),
Independent Australia is a progressive journal, supporting freedom and justice for individuals, and getting to the truth. IA opposes governments of the country beholden to vested interests. Our main editorial focus is on federal politics, democratic government, the environment, human rights, Australian identity, Indigenous issues, world affairs, economics, finance, health, law and the justice system.
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2011
The Conversation - Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Who we are: The Conversation Australia and New Zealand is a unique collaboration between academics and journalists... working together, supported by a team of digital technology experts. Our professional editors turn knowledge and insights from academics into easy-to-read articles, and make them accessible to readers like you.
All our work is free to read and free to republish under Creative Commons. We do this as a not-for-profit company guided by a clear purpose: to provide access to quality explanatory journalism essential for healthy democracy.
We place a high value on trust. All authors and editors sign up to our Editorial Charter [Global Editorial guidelines pdf]. Contributors must abide by our Community Standards. We only allow authors to write on subjects on which they have expertise. Potential conflicts of interest must be disclosed... >>>more
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2011
Media Reform Coalition
About:
The Media Reform Coalition’s story starts back in 2011. This was when the Leveson Inquiry into the culture and ethics of the British newspaper industry was launched, following revelations that the News of the World had hacked the phones of victims of crime. A group of academics who were working on the Spaces of the News research project set up the Coordinating Committee for Media Reform – later renamed the Media Reform Coalition (MRC). This brought together academics with over 30 pressure groups to engage with the Inquiry and other areas of media policy.
Over 2011 and 2012, the coalition produced five written submissions for the Inquiry and gave oral evidence. MRC produced Time for Media Reform: Proposals for a Free and Accountable Media, based on our submissions, and our policies were adopted by the Trade Union Council, with the endorsement of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and the broadcasting union BECTU. >>>more
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2012
James Curran's Rally speech
Media Reform Coalition News, May 2012
Excerpt:
We need a policy that shrinks the power of media moguls to set the terms of public debate. ...
- First, we need to curb overall media concentration: no company should be allowed to control more than 15% of the revenue of the core media industry. This is such a minimum demand, proposed by Enders, that it should be utterly un-contentious across the political spectrum.
- Second, we need to limit control over sub-markets, such as the national news market. >>> more
~
2012
Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF)
Global Non-profit Non-governmental organization
FPF protects, defends, and empowers public-interest journalism in the 21st century.
About:
Our goal is to ensure that all news organizations worldwide recognize that digital security is a critical press freedom issue in the 21st century. To protect journalists, their sources and their audiences, it is imperative that newsrooms use best-available security tools and practices, including encryption of sensitive communications and materials, anonymization of sources, and distribution of news through secure and censorship-resistant channels. >>>more
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2015
Free Press
"I was left with the impression that Wikipedia got in just before the deadline, so to speak." - Robert McChesney, Professor of Communications, University of Illinois and cofounder, in 2003, of the media reform organization Free Press.
Robert McChesney: We Need to Advocate Radical Solutions to Systemic Problems
By Mark Karlin,
January 4, 2015, Truthout
Robert McChesney, a leader in challenging the corporate media’s role in degrading democracy, carries on this fight with Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First Century. In the book, he makes an urgent and compelling argument for ending communication monopolies and building a post-capitalist democracy that serves people over corporations.
Excerpt
Mark Karlin:
In a Truthout Progressive Pick of the Week interview in 2013about your book, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy, you reflected profound pessimism about the capture of the internet by large corporations – and the evolution of net consumers into marketing “products.” Is the trend of the co-option of the web by a few large corporations accelerating?
Robert McChesney: Whether the process is accelerating is a difficult question to measure or to answer. That the process exists and that it is the dominant fact about the internet is not controversial. Barring radical policy intervention, the domination of the internet by a handful of gigantic monopolists will continue and remain the order of the day. After Digital Disconnect was published, I had a meeting in October 2013 with Sue Gardner, who was then the person in charge of Wikipedia. Sue told me that it would be impossible for Wikipedia or anything like it to get launched by then, because the system was locked down by the giants and privileged commercial values. I was left with the impression that Wikipedia got in just before the deadline, so to speak.
>>>more
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2016
Michael West Media
Michael West Media is an independent media publisher covering the rising power of corporations over democracy.
We are non-partisan, do not take advertising and are funded by readers. Our investigations focus on big business, particularly multinational tax-avoiders, financial markets and the banking and energy sectors.About Michael West.
Michael
spent two decades working as a journalist, stockbroker, editor and finance commentator before striking out on his own in July 2016.
After eight years as a commentator with The Australian and another eight years with the Sydney Morning Herald as a journalist and editor, Michael founded this website to focus on journalism of high public interest.
West is a Walkley-award winner and Adjunct Professor at the University of Sydney’s School of Social and Political Sciences.
~
2017
Launch of the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker -
thoroughly illustrated nonpartisan news website and database.
About
A database of press freedom incidents in the United States — everything from arrests of journalists and the seizure of their equipment to assaults and interrogations at the U.S. border. The Press Freedom Tracker documents incidents across the country, involving national, state and local authorities.
"The groups involved in this site came together to launch the Tracker in 2017 because we realized that in the midst of a tense climate for press freedom, there was no central repository for shared data. There was no single place to find the number of journalists arrested in a given year or the number of leak prosecutions. This site set out to change that, and, in doing so, serve as a resource."
>>> more
~
2017
Columbia University report:
New Website Will Track Press-Freedom Violations
James Jaffer, Fall 2017, Columbia Magazine
On August 2, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University joined more than twenty other organizations in announcing the launch of the US Press Freedom Tracker.
Created by the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the nonpartisan website aims to comprehensively document press-freedom violations in the United States committed by national, state, and local authorities, as well as by private individuals. These might include: journalist arrests, assaults, border stops, camera and equipment seizures, and surveillance orders.
The Knight First Amendment Institute, a nonprofit established by Columbia and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to defend freedom of speech and of the press in the digital age, serves on the site’s steering committee. The institute is led by Jameel Jaffer, a prominent civil-liberties lawyer. ... >>>more
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2019
Democracy's Watchdogs
Melbourne, Australia
Democracy's Watchdogs is a non-profit organisation that educates, provides resources, and celebrates the role Australian investigative journalists play in enhancing democratic processes. The website, https://democracyswatchdogs.org, has video interviews with current and former investigative journalists, their career timelines, books and documentaries and a section with additional resources for students and questions to stimulate classroom discussion. The organisation also conducts a national competition for the best investigative stories by university journalism students.
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2022
Wikimedia Foundation
Maryana Iskander was appointed Chief Executive Officer on 3 January 2022.
About:
"Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge."
The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia and our other free knowledge projects. We want to make it easier for everyone to share what they know. To do this, we keep Wikipedia and Wikimedia sites fast, reliable, and available to all. We protect the values and policies that allow free knowledge to thrive. We build new features and tools to make it easy to read, edit, and share from the Wikimedia sites. Above all, we support the communities of volunteers around the world who edit, improve, and add knowledge across Wikimedia projects.
~
2024
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ)
ICIJ announces new alumni members to honor former reporters’ contributions
A special "honorary alumnus" category of ICIJ membership has been created for ICIJ founder Charles Lewis, who becomes an alumni alongside four of his peers., Nov. 6, 2024
Excerpt:
“Even after a reporter retires, it’s rare that they can ever fully step away from journalism — for these ICIJ alumni members, it’s often baked into their DNA,” said ICIJ member Francisca Skoknic, who currently chairs ICIJ’s Network Committee. “It’s important that we continue to find ways to draw on their expertise, while also acknowledging the impact they’ve had on our profession.”
The reporters being honored as alumni today are:
• Chuck Lewis (United States), a former ABC News and CBS News 60 Minutes producer, best-selling author or co-author of six books, and the founder of two Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit news organizations.
• Bill Birnbauer (Australia), an investigative reporter and senior editor at The Age and The Sunday Age newspapers for more than three decades, who has authored multiple books and produced television documentaries.
• Julio Godoy (Guatemala), one of Guatemala’s top investigative reporters who was forced to flee the country in 1990 after facing down violent attempts to silence him, including being kidnapped and having his newspaper office bombed.
• Pete Carey (United States), a multi award-winning former investigative and business reporter for the The (San Jose) Mercury News.
• Charles Onyango-Obbo (Uganda), a veteran reporter who has written for a variety of publications in Uganda and the region and whose work has been honored with numerous awards. . . . |
Yellow Journalism
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Definitions:
Quoting W. Joseph Campbell, professor of communication at American University, Washington, D.C.
W. Joseph Campbell is an American writer, educator, historian, media critic, and blogger. He has written seven solo-authored books, the latest of which, Lost in a Gallup, examines polling failures in U.S. presidential elections. The book was published in 2020 and has been praised as “well-written, impressively researched, and detailed,” as a “fast-moving narrative history,” and as a “bracing reality check.”
Campbell’s work also includes the award-winning, media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong (University of California Press, 2010, 2017). Getting It Wrong inspired critics to refer to Campbell as
“the man who calls journalists on their own B.S.” and “the master of debunk.”
He also is the author of the well-received, The Year the Future Bega, 1995, (University of California Press, 2015) and The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms (Routledge, 2006).
[Here’s his summary of the 10 myths dismantled in Getting It Wrong]
Wikipedia Overview
Excerpt
W. Joseph Campbell describes yellow press newspapers as having daily multi-column front-page headlines covering a variety of topics, such as sports and scandal, using bold layouts (with large illustrations and perhaps color), heavy reliance on unnamed sources, and unabashed self-promotion. The term was extensively used to describe certain major New York City newspapers around 1900 as they battled for circulation.[4]: (156–160) One aspect of yellow journalism was a surge in sensationalized crime reporting to boost sales and excite public opinion.[5] Mott, Frank Luther (1941) American Journalism. p. 539)
Frank Luther Mott identifies yellow journalism based on five characteristics:[6] "U.S. Diplomacy and Yellow Journalism, 1895–1898"Office of the Historian. US State Department.
1. scare headlines in huge print, often of minor news
2. lavish use of pictures, or imaginary drawings
3. use of faked interviews, misleading headlines, pseudoscience, and a parade of false learning from so-called experts
4. emphasis on full-color Sunday supplements, usually with comic strips
5. dramatic sympathy with the "underdog" against the system.
Origins: Pulitzer vs. Hearst
(Hearst in San Francisco, Pulitzer in New York)
Etymology and early usage
The term was coined in the mid-1890s to characterize the sensational journalism in the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. ...
On Yellow Journalism, American University School of Communications, Professor W. Joseph Campbell, former professional journalist, "reported from Europe, West Africa, and Asia and from across North America.
He is the author of five books, his latest, Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism -
Library of Congress lecture:
Summary
W. Joseph Campbell discusses his new book on the ten greatest misreported stories in American journalism. ... "debunks 10 prominent media-driven myths—well-known tales about the news media that are widely believed and often retold but which, under scrutiny, prove to be apocryphal or wildly exaggerated."
Google Books scan: Professor Campbell's Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, Westport: Praeger, 2001, ISBN 0-275-96686-0
Extract
Turn to the editorial page of any American daily newspaper. If that paper has covered a controversial issue recently, you will likely find a letter complaining about the paper's sensa-tionalistic “yellow journalism.” How did that term, coined in 1897 to deride the mass circulation dailies of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, become a commonplace of popular press criticism? What does it mean to call a newspaper “yellow,” and why has that label stuck?
Such are the questions addressed by the American University professor W. Joseph Campbell. He aims to debunk the hoary myths that haunt historical and popular accounts of yellow journalism. He wants to settle arguments about who originated the term, who read yellow papers, and whether Hearst actually sent Frederic Remington a telegram promising to furnish a war if the illustrator stayed in Cuba and furnished the pictures. Campbell starts with an operational definition. A newspaper could be described as yellow if it featured multicolumn headlines; covered a variety of topics, including sports and society, on the front page; used illustrations, color, and bold layouts; relied on anonymous sources; and shamelessly promoted itself.
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Fake News
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Excerpt
It has long been said (ostensibly by Benjamin Franklin, but we can't be sure) that "democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."
My fellow lambs: It's good to be in Memphis and find you well-armed with passion for democracy, readiness for action, and courage for the next round in the fight for a free and independent press.
I salute the conviction that brought you here. I cherish the spirit that fills this hall and the camaraderie we share today. All too often the greatest obstacle to reform is the reform movement itself. Factions rise, fences are built, jealousies mount - and the cause all believe in is lost in the shattered fragments of what was once a clear and compelling vision...
We have to find other ways to ensure the public has access to diverse, independent, and credible sources of information.
- That means going to the market to find support for stronger independent media; ...
- It means helping protect news gathering from predatory forces.
- It means fighting for more participatory media, hospitable to a full range of expression.
- It means building on Lawrence Lessig's notion of the creative common and Brewster Kahle's Internet archives with its philosophy of universal access to all knowledge. >>>more
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Hyperlink 'rot'
2021
What the ephemerality of the Web means for your hyperlinks
By John Bowers, Clare Stanton, and Jonathan Zittrain
May 21, 2021, Columbia Journalism Review
Excerpt
Hyperlinks are a powerful tool for journalists and their readers. Diving deep into the context of an article is just a click away. But hyperlinks are a double-edged sword; for all of the internet’s boundlessness, what’s found on the Web can also be modified, moved, or entirely vanished.
. . .
The data set of links on which we built our analysis was assembled by Times software engineers who extracted URLs embedded in archival articles and packaged them with basic article metadata such as section and publication date. We measured linkrot by writing a script to visit each of the unique “deep” URLs in the data set and log HTTP response codes, redirects, and server timeouts. On the basis of this analysis, we labeled each link as being “rotted” (removed or unreachable) or “intact” (returning a valid page).
Two Million Hyperlinks . . .
See an extended version of this research, as well as more information about methodology and the data set:
The Paper of Record Meets an Ephemeral Web
AN EXAMINATION OF LINKROT AND CONTENT DRIFT WITHIN THE NEW YORK TIMES
By John Bowers, Clare Stanton, and Jonathan Zittrain, for Harvard University, May 17, 2021
"The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition,
but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."
- American Astrophysicist Carl Sagan, (1934-1996),
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, (1995)
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