I was going to wait until later in the weekend or Monday to pose the second question, but your responses have been so intelligent and thorough to the first question it is my sense that we can move on quickly.
A rather overwhelming consensus seems to have emerged that the emphasis at Pajamas Media/Blog News Service should not be on being “fair and balanced” (judged to be inexact terms for a variety of reasons), but to be “honest and transparent.” This latter had many interesting and sometimes amusing permutations, but one I liked was that we should imitate Sgt. Joe Friday of the old Dragnet show and seek “Just the facts, ma’am.”
Of course, opinion was not completely dismissed-there is clearly a place for it, which we will get back to in a later question-but there seems to be a yearning, at least in this part of the blogosphere, for a fact-based online news service with a hard-and-fast firewall between reporting and editorializing. Many criticized mainstream media for failing to preserve that division.
The basic question is – how do we achieve this while the preserving the openness of blogs and blogging, which is their hallmark?
There are many sub-questions as well: Who makes the decisions about what is accurate? To what extent are standards different for individual blogs in our ad network and for the Blog News Service portal? (Someone has suggested we have a sticker of sorts on posts differentiating fact and opinion.) Do we need to apply particularly high standards to breaking news we might syndicate for sale to established media? If so, how do we do that given the speed necessary in those situations? Traditional editors? Committees of bloggers? A combination? Some have dreamed of creating a “Blog AP” – indeed we will try to do this – but how do we meld scrupulous accuracy with the spontaneity and freshness that make blogging what it is?
Obviously, these questions are not simple and I know I am intruding on your Memorial Day Weekend by asking you to answer some or all of them. But this is a collective endeavor and I hope something that we will all profit from on many levels.
Thanks again for your extraordinary help and as my small contribution to your holiday barbecue I will refer you to my post of last June.
If you have a policy of extensive footnoting, then the differentiation between ‘facts’ and ‘opinion’ will be obvious. The facts have footnotes. And links.
Roger,
I did some thinking in Sept. 2004 about a model that would provide for both honesty and transparency, and came up with this:
Full post is here, but that’s the essential part of it.
Do you consider an AP wire report factual? If so, follow their model, if not, I would suggest a sticker on the post, ‘just the facts mam’, and the posts must be verifiable, linked, and if necessary footnoted. I suggest fact posts be brief and maybe even just composed of ONLY bullet points to set them off from the rest — consider a different template, background color, font?
I do not consider AP wires fact, they contain some facts, but also contain a lot of opinion, spin and conjecture as well. Recently the AP said they want to make their wire reports more entertaining.
Just the facts — Brief, bullet pointed posts with a different background color would be my recommendation. Similar to this post http://michellemalkin.com/archives/002588.htm
Dear Roger,
Perhaps you might have a “survey” attached to each article. The survey would ask the reader to rate the piece as “Fact, mostly fact, mix, mostly opinion, Opinion”. Also “Liberal, Conservative, Libertarian, Socialist, Balanced”. And perhaps “corroborated by other posts, contradicted by other posts, …”
If you then match the surveys to source and author you might get some interesting insights.
It would also save you an awful lot of time trying to analyze each post. The tendency when analyzing a large number of documents is to skim for keywords rather than semantics.
Regards,
Roy
Perhaps we should follow the Fahd story through the weekend and try and discern the actual “facts” in the reporting? Did UPI have “facts” in hand when they busted the story? Did they exercise reasonable judgement in evaluating the trustworthyness of their sources? They did identify the source as being the Saudi Institute which has 501(c)(3) and appears to be an agent for democratic change in the KSA.
The death of Fahd is real “news”. If PJM were fully functioning, how should they be reporting it? What “facts” are relevant and what standard of verification is necessary to satisfy the “Joe Friday” reader?
The only thing that can be done reliably well is something like what RealClearPolitics.com does. They very often group their links (to columns and essays) by topic, since “the big news topic of the day” often leads the news. And by the time you’ve read three or four intelligent takes on a subject, from different points of view, the truth generally emerges–as close to it as weíll get.
So, I think the model is the courtroom. The test for the senior editor is the trial judge’s test: Is this probative? Is this fact based? Is this “expert” really an expert? Have both sides had their chance to take their best shot?
Some of the best blogs don’t pretend to be “objective”, and they are interesting to read. If each blogger had a pair of fellow bloggers assigned to them for the purpose of peer review and/or fisking – one from the left and one from the right – I think you could approximate “honest and transparent” in the aggregate..
Something I find useful in high-end audio magazines is seeing the reviewers periodically laying out their biases and preferences in equipment and music, and describe their listening room. Blogs usually have a link to the blogger’s bio, and that serves a similar purpose.
I think the model provided by NRO’s The Corner is a good one – when they don’t get too crazy. They don’t allow comments from outsiders, but you see the various professional writers agreeing and disagreeing with each other online during the day.
Anyway, just some thoughts.
I have an inclination to the technical solution of course (geek) but one part of the solution seems to be to look for content-significant key words or phrases (like Amazon’s statistically improbable phrases, perhaps?) and make links among those articles which contain the appropriate phrases. Then “swift boat veterans” and “501(c)3″ and “soros” would be naturally associated.
I don’t think it’s do-able to have a fact-based news service with your model, Roger. It would require lots and lots of full time editors–maybe not the fabled four levels of the LAT, but many–and this process would take away from the immediacy of blogs, which is their strength and their beauty. It would also require you guys on the editorial board to more or less give up blogging so you could check everybody’s else’s posts for accuracy!
I think you could market your blog service as ‘best of the blogs today’ just as easily as AP markets its (so-called) news. Why try to replace newspapers when you could provide a unique experience to their readers, the one that attracted all of us in the first place: transparency, fisking, commentary, and LIVE stuff from hot zones.
Bloggers who only write opinion and link to stories are naturally exempt from this discussion. At present there are only a handful of bloggers doing actual reporting, including eyewitness accounts, interviews, even footage. There are so few doing this, I don’t see editing as being real important yet.
But when you do get there, think about this: Maybe an “aging” stamp would make sense insofar as your commenters are the best fact-checkers around. A story aged 1 hour would be “breaking/developing.” A story posted and commented by 50 people might be “seasoned.” One looked at by 100,000 people over four hours might be “mature” and ready for syndication. None of this does any good, of course, unless the writer modifies his original post to reflect commenter reactions.
There is a unique third group, however, that I put Wretchard and CQ in: analytical bloggers. These are the most interesting sites currently because they apply linear thinking and logic to off-the-shelf reporting to arrive at insightful, even novel conclusions. Their kind of analysis is not possible in the MSM because it relies upon informed reader feedback and dialogue. But with strong intellects like Wretchard, fact-checking is virtually unnecessary. One either buys his ideas or doesn’t. This third group represents the competitive advantage, along with the “million-man army” of local reporters, of PJM. IMHO, of course.
Several commenters have proposed a “grading” system of some sort, a poll of readers for each article concerning factualness or whether it’s supported by other analysts or whatever.
I suspect there would be some types of posters who would find joy in hijacking a system like that.
This may be like an emerging collective of like-minded non-BS fact-seekers and truth-tellers. It may be impossible to quantify accuracy, but the blog world allows for more informal consensus to develop on who’s full of crap.
I suspect there will always be a role for a trusted editor of some sort.
Don’t think in terms of “facts”, think in terms of assertions that have sufficient support that people accept them as true.
In most cases, you can’t really write a “fact” in the sense of something guaranteed to be true. You write assertions, and provide some level of support for those assertions (ranging from zero up), which people either accept or do not accept as sufficient for them to accept that assertion.
This is one reason that I advocate the ability to comment and vote upon the status of assertions as well as automatic linking of assertions to their currently evaluated status. This allows a writer to provide support for those assertions that have not already gained wide acceptance, while also indicating when there is no need to provide such support.
Everyone becomes a fact checker, and the status of the assertion vis-a-vis the distributed knowledge of the readers is reflected in the text itself.
Is it accurate? Well, it’s accurate as far as it goes…
So, how far is one required to go to ensure complete accuracy? At best, a judgement call and, at times, perhaps an impossible standard to meet.
I would ask that those reporting not omit “inconvenient” facts nor even “insignificant” facts (I’ll be the judge of what is significant and what is not).
I would ask that source material be identified and sources be named (not always possible, I know, but those cases should be the rare exception).
I would ask that when exactitude is not possible, the reporter discloses such and explains why. In the case of fast breaking news, I would ask that the reporter be clear about what so far is verified (with appropriate sourcing links) and what is still rumor or conjecture.
As with most things, at some point, it will be necessary to rely on the judgement of others. Time will tell whose judgement is reliable and whose is not.
Humility, too. Avoid going to condemnation and outrage unless you really, really examine what you want to attack, from within that point of view. View your chosen target from a generous perspective before labeling it evil. Chill.
It’s the attitude that will inform an effort like this. Harsh language is rarely to be tolerated (he said harshly).
I think MSM has gotten in trouble partly by setting goals using words that don’t refer to anything that actually exists. Specifically, they try to be “objective.” There is no such thing as “objective.” There is such a thing as being 100% faithful to the truth, in other words seeking to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Being “objective” is what causes MSM to be unable to call terrorists, killers, and beheaders by their true names, and instead to call them radicals and insurgents. MSM believes that calling such people by their true names would be taking sides (which it would) and therefore would not be “objective.” There is no such thing as “objective”, but there is such a thing as helping a murderer by refusing to call him a murderer.
I agree with the consensus that the goal should not be to be “fair and balanced.” “Fair and balanced” appears to be another way of saying “objective.”
With regard to “honest and transparent”, I would suggest “100% faithful to the truth and documenting all facts with links” as being more specific language.
A related question is, what is our goal? Over the decades the goal of MSM has become merely to attack the government. MSM attacks the government regardless of the facts and regardless of what is good for this country. MSM therefore does a great deal of harm.
I would suggest that our specific goal should be “to help the American people, and Democratic people all over the world, lead successful lives; and to help people in non-Democratic countries find the way to Democracy and Capitalism, which have been the greatest engines for the health, well-being, and success of people yet discovered in human history.”
To clarify, I guess what I’m talking about is writing honest opinion. Some people have said that this effort should be mainly about facts, and perhaps it should, but there will be room for opinion, too. And there’s an honest approach to that, and a dishonest approach.
Calmness breeds honesty, and vice-versa.
And in the spirit of calmness, I would just like to mention that Ed Begley, Jr. didn’t honk for the troops at our counterprotest last night, the rat bastid… I guess his candyass EV car couldn’t spare the amperage…
FA,
I agree with you concerning analytical bloggers being the most interesting. I suppose that I’m still unclear as to who will be providing the “first report” for BNS. If the first report is going to be straight who, what, when, where, why and how – what will differentiate BNS from UPI? The typical bias in AP or Bloomberg wire story can be edited out in about five minutes (200 word story) – what can’t be edited is story selection. How can BNS edit story selection for 400 bloggers?
Vic’s point regarding goals is arresting. what’s the goal? Large readership for its own sake, or is the objective to do some positive good? If so, what is that good.
The answer to that question may be more important than the mechanics of editorial control.
Rick–
It would seem there has to be a funnel to channel the “hot” stories onto the blog. The format is unfortunately (and paradoxically) not as conducive to running as many stories as a newspaper, given the geographic constrictions of a computer screen. Thus the PJ/BNS must necessarily have a front page devoted only to the best of the best. (Some of these stories could be supplemented by on-the-ground reporting from particular bloggers.) But I think content selection would be almost as important as line editing/fact-checking. Take a look at Arts & Letters Daily and you can see how hard this is to do in practice.
The key, I think, besides consistency of quality, is look and feel. You can’t have a clean, Huffington Post-looking host site, and then click on a link and find yourself in some cheap Blogspot blog with an ugly template and white letters on black. It would be like one of those arcade exhibits where you have to pay $2 to get into the trailer that contains “The Man With Three Hands”–one of which is a prosthetic. In the end, you’re bound to feel ripped off.
Lots of problems to solve. But still more opportunities.
I like the idea of “just the facts ma’am”, but how do we decide what the facts are?
Today I was told that Saddam was a popular man in Iraq and that the people there had been happy with his rule and Bush is not only killing them outright, he is starving them slowly. To this young woman these things are facts, not propaganda.
So what happens when people can not decide on the facts? And who decides what it is truth?
Roger,
WARNING: MORE UNSOLICITED ADVICE
It’s your lucky day! You are going to get $0.04 out of me instead of my usual $0.02.
Here’s my other thought about structure. What I’ve heard about PJM so far is that it will be Instapundit-like plus a little proprietary content. Nothing wrong with that. But the opportunity to create a real MSM killer exists, and I don’t think you will reach it with this model.
The glue that can create the NY Yankees of the blogosphere is not eyeballs, it’s money. Easy for me to say, but consider this:
(1) Pay bloggers cash on the barrelhead for proprietary content. This will create incentives for professionalism and timeliness, among others. It doesn’t have to be much. (A quick scan of minor magazines will point to the market-clearing prices, and they ain’t much.) You would label the stories “Special to Pajamas Media” to indicate their exclusivity.
(2) Make the bloggers embargo their own work for 24 hours. After one day has elapsed, their original story goes into a sidebar and links directly to the writer’s blog. In other words, the blogger still gets the traffic, but a day later, so as not to dilute the mother ship’s initial magnetism. (You pay them cash as compensation for lost traffic/potential ad revenue.)
Now you get control, maintain site power and screen out hobbyists. You could of course, modify this for freebies, on-the-ground reports, etc. I am really talking about proprietary content.
Peer Review is an important part of the Scientific Method and should be openly invited in ‘fact-based’ journalism.
Also,suggested tag extensions for blog-based journalism:
<fact>The Sun came up in the East this morning.</fact>
<opinion>It was a beautiful sunrise.</opinion>
The Sun came up in the East this morning.
Actual fact – the earth revolves giving the illusion that the sun “comes up”.
Porkopolis,
I didn’t mean that as snark – you make an excellent point by using Wikipedia as a reference. My understanding is that Wiki is a “consensus” operation that is very “fluid”, shall we say, in its interpretations. If memory serves, there are about four hundred or so “editors” of wiki who provided its “knowledge base”. What I’ve read of it doesn’t impress me and I have no trust in it due to my perception of its slant.
No trust = No value.
I agree with previous comments that each blogger’s “voice” provides the spark that have made blogs so successful. You don’t want to dilute that. Develop a model similar to The Corner where all points of view are represented and can give more perspective to each issue. I enjoy reading an eclectic group of blogs – not because I agree with everything you say, but because you each provide different views. An LA novelist, an Army couple in Germany, a Tennessee lawyer and a Pole in Australia – that’s diversity!
Good points here…I hate to parrot the old slogan, but everything IS political. In the very selection, a fair & balanced story about Abu Graib still adds weight to the notion that it’s a large piece of the GWoT. Of course it isn’t, it’s a backwater niche insofar as the activities of the military. But it’s huge in the derived history market. It’s a pure demonstration of the fact that news is a product sold into a market. The slant is not what riles most of your regulars, Roger, is the hypocrisy and pretense about that slant.
Such as LAT trying to pretend that it reports the news: 500 words of pure politics arranged on the skeleton of some current event, including somewhere that ‘extremists disagree, of course’, and on that, claiming that it gave both sides of the story. To avoid such, you could slogan “Meddlesome but Multifaceted”?
Rick, even that the sun doesn’t ‘come up’ would be challenged by relativity. Einstein’s train analogy, something like, you walk forward in the train at one mile per hour while the train itself is going 50 miles an hour, how fast are you walking? If you say 1 mph, then the sun does indeed ‘come up’. In a way.
Some thoughts:
1. Don’t follow any MSM model. Start from scratch and let it grow by trial and error. “Fair and balanced” is for propagandists, advertising, phony journalism awards and hack journalists. Especially avoid like the plague any use of right wing/left wing, conservative/liberal dichotomy ideas. Sergeant Friday wasn’t a stylized political zombie. Neither was His Girl Friday. Labels are for cans.
2. The model should be intelligence gathering. People loved the Iraqi bloggers because they provided such intelligence, stuff that was raw and first hand and included rumor. Nobody cared whether they were “fair and balanced.” People could reach their own conclusions about what weight to give any particular piece of information they provided. Intelligence is gathered for intelligent people so that they have more information.
3. Your products are not “facts” and “opinion.” Facts and opinion are concepts used by people who claim authority of some kind. A report is not true or a piece insightful just because someone claims authority to assert that it is or has a reputation for having such authority. Don’t claim any authority. Time will tell whether you get a reputation for it.
4. Your products are information and analysis. The blogosphere has been so successful because the MSM provides too little information and because its analyses are just reorganizations of cliches by bores who have no imagination. Just provide the best, most comprehensive, information from anywhere you can get it with no warranties except that you’ve also provided enough information to judge whether the source is credible. And provide the best analysis you can find. People who are imaginative. People who actually think. Have someone start a cliche bingo game blog for the other bloggers if that’s needed to separate the wheat from the chaff.
5. Be a great portal. Otherwise, don’t worry too much about structure. It will all change as you learn more anyway. Let it evolve. Let everybody see it evolve. Avoid like the plague any internal features that rate or poll or try to create consensus or to marginalize anything.
6. Keep diverse and keep changing. Another reason for the success of the blogosphere is that it has taken readers to places they’ve never been before. Like America. New York and Washington are, not to put too fine a point on it, now a bore. Their “ink belt,” as Iowahawk puts it, has spewed forth so much self-centered, stylized crap for the national short attention span theater that everybody who isn’t pathologically addicted to it yawns now whenever more arrives. If you can find a Lileks in New York or a Wretchard in Washington, great. Otherwise, forget about it. Let Maureen Dowd ask Paul Krugman what he thinks about what the latest Howard Kurtz column said about David Brooks. Let’s hear from Minneapolis and Nashville, Barcelona and Basra, Tokyo and New Delhi. Does anyone doubt that any number of posters on this site alone have offered more interesting and insightful commentary in the last year than anything to be read in a New York Times op ed column or a New Yorker article? Just the tip of the iceberg.
7. Let the bores bury the bores. Have fun. Make history inadvertently. Let complexity work its magic.
In true blog fashion, Porkopolis and Rick Ballard solved the problem. Make an incorrect statement and it’s instantly corrected.
As for the news page, why not several categories of news:
Hard News – defined as straight statements of fact, i.e., the Saudi Royal family announced that King Fayd died at . . . link.
Blog News – defined as a probably true, but not set in concrete yet, i.e., corruption at the U.N. . . link.
News around the Blogosphere – defined as rumblings that might or might not be true. As Drudge says, developing. . . link.
Inside stuff about the various segments of our society by experts in, business, academe, the media and entertainment world . . . links
A separate page for Blogopinion with links around the world.
Main thing is to keep the home page clutter free. Lots of blogs with interesting things to say are so chockablock with colors, banners, and different fonts, it’s too hard on the eyes and the brain to sort it all out.
Handling ads creatively will also be a challenge.
I hope there will be a comments section. I find what other readers have to say almost as valuable as the original blog.
Sounds like it’ll be a lot of fun setting things in motion.
I think it’s important to explore the point about tthe essential impossibility of being objective. I learned this (and learned an important lesson about Real Life at the same time) when I was just getting started in fiction writing.
I wrote a couple of paragraphs about a character who was running for a “bus” — okay, it was actually a ballistic transport capsule on the Moon, but think of it as a bus — thinking about whether he was going to catch the next bus or have to wait, thinking about how much fun it was to be on the Moon and skimming over the floor of the bus station, thinking about the new data set coming in from the observatory at Ceres, and looking appreciatively at the good looking blonde ahead of him in line.
The observation I made, looking at it, was that I could have written the same objective events — rushing for the bus, the feeling of low gravity, the blonde — by having him worried that he’ll be late and that’ll screw up the day, complaining that he still feels unnatural trying to skip because of the low gee, annoyed that he has all that work to do, and saying to himself that the blonde was out of his league. Same events, both perfectly reasonable characters, but one’s happy and relaxed, the other unhappy and grumpy. (And both bits of exposition leaving out other things, like the temperature, that I could have chosen to describe too.)
Notice, too, that reducing the objective events you choose to describe to a set of bullet points won’t do the job of producing “objectivitty” either: you still have to choose your bullet points.
No matter what you do, what you can write, and what you choose to report when you do write, will necessarily be filtered though your opinions and your attitudes and your preconceptions. A desire to “get it right” is important, but the only solution to the groupmind of the MSM is to be as diverse as possible, and make it easy to navigate the diversity.
Oh, and the life lesson was this: I learned that if I chose to describe my own life to myself in one way or the other, I could change the way I was, too. I sort of suspect that our “selves” are a function of the way that we describe ourselves to ourselves.
Right on…even objective facts open up and drop you into your feelings about them.
Frederick, that’s a magnificent seven points–esp #3, the ‘authority’ presence. The most powerful tool of propaganda, the invisible control of ‘legitimacy’. A lot of it is attitude, I think it’s what people mean when they complain of ‘arrogance’. Humility, for obvious reasons I think, is one the virtues in shortest supply. being humble, it doesn’t ‘sell’ itself, ha!
erp,
I erred in my correction of Porkopolis . He hit on a “fact” that I happened to have been thinking about wrt the current subject. His blog happens to be one of the best of the more than 40 represented in comments in the past two days wrt to presentation of factual information. He’s keeping a good jaundiced eye on the DC hog pen and writes well.
I may have to check on glib stupidity as a trade mark.
Amen, Frederick.
Be blogs, not news.
LOL, Rick–evidently Someone Up There likes us glib stupids, He made so many of us!
So what happens when people can not decide on the facts? And who decides what it is truth?
Facts must be supported by evidence. The woman for whom Saddam was a popular and benevolent leader would be hard pressed to back up those “facts” with evidence. There, however, is much evidence to the contrary. Truth, nebulous and often conceptual, should conform to those facts supported by evidence.
News reporting should stick to who, what, when, where, how (sometimes why is appropriate, sometimes not). “Truth” for news reporters should be ever so narrowly construed. Leave the broader constuctions of “truth” to the opinion writers (and opinion not grounded by facts is worthless).
While good editing is essential for most media, it’s less so for the blogosphere which is self-correcting in real time and it should be kept to a minimum. I would not hold the Pajamas Media responsible for fact checking; each contributor is responsible for his own facts and those who consistently offer “facts” without the evidence to support them quickly will earn the obscurity they deserve. I assume that reports for the Blog News Service will not be accepted unless source links are provided. At that point the reader takes over and may then become a reporter offering evidence that supports or refutes the given “facts”.
Let’s try to refrain from a priori fine tuning. A work in progress is just that.
This seems to have been covered rather well, but I have a couple of minor suggestions.
Having been involved with it since the beginning, I’ve found that the Command Post’s model has worked rather well. Topical sections for straight news and an Op-Ed section for opinion. It hasn’t been perfect, of course, but at the times when something is really happening and a lot of people are actively posting on the site, there are always a few with the power to move a post into Op-Ed if it strays too far into opinion. You just need people committed enough to monitor the site who can, if needed, talk to the posters if there is any questionable material.
Another thing I’ve noticed is, whether you’re reading the AP or the NYT, many times the headline is the most stanted part of the story. A perfect example is the Quran reporting. Seeing headlines that say, “FBI CONFIRMS QURAN ABUSE”, would lead quite a few people to believe that the FBI had, in fact, confirmed Quran abuse. As we all know, that’s not quite what was in the actual content of the stories, but if a reader were skimming, they’d never know that.
I like the way that information is currently presented on the blogs that I visit. In fact, I now prefer this and the way it is evolving to the paralyzed paradigms that control most newspapers, magazines, and television programs. It’s quicker, it’s easier, and the emerging personalities instigate or reveal interest without having to be so personally interesting themselves. I feel that Michelle Malkin is one of the best purveyors of newsworthy items, and maybe the best instigator of mass inquiry, available through any means. I also like the way you spotlight key elements throughout the world. I feel alerted to current conditions after reading the two of you each day, but am I drawn here because I have reached a conclusion about your general character (your adherence to a creed)? Maybe some degree of that is unavoidable, I probably do feel that your are more honest than not, but I mainly show up because you are consistently interesting and your information is consistently credible. You could actually be any kind of nut imaginable and still be able to perceive astutely and write well regarding those perceptions.
The Man with his picture on the Main Page wrote:
I think this is where technology comes in. Think of each event as an incident requiring troubleshooting. It is common practice in corporations and elsewhere to set up ‘war rooms’ (virtual or otherwise) to handle the incident. I think it would be a great service for PM/BNS to offer the ability for its customer blogs to set up a ‘war room’ to facilitate the back and forth conversation on specific incidents.
Some guidelines for these ‘war rooms’ that I would suggest:
Any of your member blogs could initiate one.
The initiating blog would decide what other blogs to invite to the ‘war room’, choosing a select few or leaving it open to all.
The ‘war room’ would be viewable by the public, in realtime, but for the public to comment they would need to go to one of the participating blogs.
Multiple war rooms on the same incident would be allowed, encouraging competition and helping to ensure that those who feel left out have an opportunity to show they can do as well or better than the established blogs.
Just a thought about a way to offer tools to the blogosphere as opposed to an end product.
I don’t think it is possible to get to the full truth on a single story, unless the person writing it is wholly trusted to provide all of the facts and not just the “relevant” ones.
I also disagree with many of the people who think it is a good idea to have an editorial board consisting of highly partisan figures. That’s too much like 24/7 cable news, and they don’t get much factual said.
They’ve got to be concerned for the facts, not just the middle of two extremes.
I think with that in mind, you can do a number of things. Instead of presenting a story in singular form after deliberation, you can just let the multiple people post it all together and then each version can be read. The reader can then determine the truth from multiple perspectives.
I still don’t like that, though. Like it has been said, the great part about the blogosphere is that it is decentralized, fast, and smart. A centralized editting board will kill that.
Therefore, it is important for a couple of things to happen, since it will be impossible to simply trust the word of all the writers. If they are covering an event, there must be video with audio. Pictures aren’t enough. The whole event needs to be available to the reader as a check to prevent the twisting of the truth.
This will probably be the standard for most reporters given that most people are certainly not experts on their subjects, and it will keep them in line.
That brings up the other part though, the more expert, analytical bloggers. What kind of standard do you set for them? I think it would be a good idea to look at some news sites like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Eurasianet, places like those that use expert reporters to tell a story that is also highly analytical. They are able to go in much more depth, and they can also write editorials.
There are far too many Linda Foleys running around who apparently believe that they are not obligated to provide evidence of alleged misdeeds. The possibility that there is an outside chance of the accusation being true is sufficient to justify acting as if it is substantially proven. Sigh, the epistemological underpinnings of those who professionally report and editorialize may be our greatest concern. Is the individual able to think and follow a logical argument? Do they perceive reality via the skewed philosophical premises of postmodernism? Are they similar to the pathetically second rate Ludwig Wittgenstein who could not dissuaded by Bertrand Russell that an elephant was not in the same room with them?
David, the underlying goal of blogosphere political activity I think is not to change the dedicated leftists–beyond hope, really–but to context them, relentlessly. It helps enormously to have history and human nature on our side. The ultimate proof that we do is that the counter-argument is “Chimpy McHitler!”
Formal philosophy makes my head hurt, so I rarely read it, but to the best of my knowledge and belief, distinguishing facts from opinion is an extremely difficult philosophical question.
1) Is it a fact that George Washington was the first president of the United States? (Yes)
2) Is it a fact that Thomas Jefferson was the first president of the United States? (No)
3) Is it a fact that Thomas Jefferson was the best president of the United States? (No)
You will intuitively understand that both “No” answers are correct, but in distinctively different ways.
So now, answer this one: Is it a fact that the Earth is more than four billion years old? If your answer is “No,” is it No #2 or No #3?
Equating facts with truth is equally problematical.
I do breaking news, and I always alert my audience to that fact.
I also let them know my source(s) and there is more to come. That way, they can check my source(s).
If my source(s) is wrong, then I am wrong. I quickly go back, admit it, correct it. Voila!
I see no problem with that. If some do, I am willing to listen and learn.
I will not write “news” without sources. I always give credit and link to the source(s), also. I do try to find more than one or two.
I don’t know about the USA papers, though. I try to see what is written by people who would know. ie. bloggers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Radio Free Asia, Sudan Times, Sudan blogs, etc.
Have a wonderful Memorial Day. I have it on good faith (my Hero in Iraq) that they want us to be happy and have a good time this weekend. God bless them and you.
I don’t want you all being an online Joe Friday. I would rather you be Dirty Harry. ;o)
Some of the best blogs don’t pretend to be “objective”, and they are interesting to read.
Indeed. If anyone here thinks Misha and Charles Johnson both don’t have their own ideological conceptions, then said people are living on planets other than Earth. They are both objective bloggers in the sense that they base all their ideas on solid facts, and both are quite willing to retract their statements if their information turns out to be false (the 48 hour rule tends to minimize this, however), but they’re blogs that were founded so that they could provide an alternative ideological viewpoint.
To be blunt about it, I think trying to make a Blog AP that is so objective so as not to have any opinion, is doomed to failure. It will not work. Blogs were forged in the fires of idealism and without that base they will not even be a shadow of what they are now.
I think it’s important to explore the point about tthe essential impossibility of being objective. I learned this (and learned an important lesson about Real Life at the same time) when I was just getting started in fiction writing.
Interesting. Our experiences are similar. I am also starting to write my own science fiction novel (between wanting to blog, write sci-fi, crunching computer code at work, I barely have time to breathe) and I quickly found my own ideological prejudices working their way into my characters. And I’m OK with that. Every other author I’ve read does the same thing.
Let’s try this idea. You can have a front news site, with simple statements of fact, as has been mentioned already in this thread. Then let any blogger (left, righty, or whatever) be a part of PJ Media. Let everyone have their say.
For us righties in here, this system will, unfortunately, probably give more MSM credence to lefty blogs. OTOH, it’s going to be hard for the NYT, Bill Clinton, and MoDowd to explain away the flat out insanity of something like DemocraticUnderground.org. Assuming they join. Which if they don’t, we can still always link to them.
FRNM: Yes. That’s an important point. In some form that must happen. We had in Rathergate the perfect example of what it should look like. A Buckhead posting on Free Republic launched the swarming discussions at Powerline and LGF, which in an astonishingly short time accumulated all relevant information and diminished the range of possible speculation to the point that there was an obvious default conclusion that could not reasonably be challenged unless important new information turned up. That rare thing, something really new under the Sun, a swarming group intelligence consisting of a google-assisted group memory and the shared personal experiences and special knowledge and skills of thousands of very intelligent and well-educated people. It sprang into existence because it could focus on a real question with an answer, whether a document was a forgery (in contrast with fake questions like did the Iraq War violate international law or is evolution a fact or theory), and lasted for the moment it took to answer the question. While it lasted, it was a focused intelligence and memory in comparison with which the Harvard or Yale faculties were just collections of several thousand kindergarten children and their great libraries just warehouses for old papers.
Be a Joe Friday? I don’t think we can. In fact a great weakness of the MSM is that they try to be something they cannot, perfectly bias-free sources of pure truth. Facts are slippery things, and as physicists know, it’s difficult (impossible, really) to separate facts from the observer. The best you can do is recognise that reality and give your reader the respect of an honest and open report.
The very best thing about blogs, relative to print or broadcast columnists and reporters, is the discipling of linking to sources. Personally I’m very happy to read a summary and analysis of an interview or a press conference from an intelligent and informed observer, if he or she does me the kindness of a link to the full transcript. Where the facts are not as objectively defined as that, a link to a more first-hand report, or at least a link to whatever information this writer is working with, allows me, the reader, to make my own assessment. The writer’s insight might help me to understand things better, or perhaps, based on experience with this blogger, I trust his or her honesty and judgement, but the link must be there.
A strong discipling to offer links, add more as readers send them in, make open and honest corrections as new facts come to light, and…don’t make statements you cannot support, is enough to make PJMedia and valuable new resource.
Kyda:
One would think that the verdict was in on Saddam, but not so. To the gullible fan club that is dedicated to making Michael Moore a rich man, the truth is that Iraq was a happy place full of kite flying children and people like you and me are just “showing our ignorance” by supporting war and mayhem.
This is the really hard part. We assume that we only have to deal with providing people with facts and sources and they are capable of seeing the truth. Many are not.
The news and information consumer is part of the equation as well and I am sure that there are plenty of people out there who think Roger is working for Karl Rove.
Terrye, there’s a germ of truth behind every lie…Roger and Rove in truth do have a strong connection…they’re both “sane”. Outwardly that is.
Rick and Porkopolis, I meant no critism of either of you. I imagine we have all said the sun rises in the east when we know that isn’t strictly correct.
What I meant is the beauty of blogging is if we do mis-speak, there’s likely to be someone right behind us to set the matter straight, so blogs are really self-correcting and that’s a good thing.
I haven’t read Porkopolis, but on Rick’s recommendation, I’ll take a look.
If bank robbers are witnessed robbing a bank at 2:00 p.m. on the afternoon of Monday, March 29,XXXX.
This is a fact. That is what must be reported if it’s to be correct. It’s just that simple.
All of these abstract arguments are just that abstracts.
Roger:
Your first question has put the ball in play and I take it that the consensus is that we are tending toward an agreement that the prime requisite for a blog (or a group of blogs) is that the message must be “Honest and Transparent.” Is it agreeable that we can ask that the blogger tell The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth?
As you point out, there is a place for opinion and some of the commenters today correctly suggest that analysis from a knowledgable individual is of interest to many of us. I suggest that we defer a discussion of what might be desirable with respect to opinion and analysis and for today we concentrate on the Joe Friday part of the Second Question.
I wanted to comment today as there has been a good deal of discussion of the problem of balancing the input from the “left” or the “right.” I suggest we carefully think about that question. Can you or one of our commenters tell us what the difference would be in the truth (a fact) as it is honestly presented by one from the left and the truth as honestly presented by one from the right?
I don’t think so. Can’t we say that if there is a significant difference between a report from the right and report from the left, one of the reporter’s is not telling the truth? Before someone jumps on me, I will say that I am talking about an ideal world. In reality all of us make mistakes and sometimes report inaccurately, but it has been my experience that a blogger from the right seldom reports inaccurately in the first place, and collegial correct is almost instant.
(I think it is an important subject for another discussion on another day to inquire as to whether untruths, deliberate, ignorant, or accidental, are a characteristic of the left in general.)
I think it is worthwhile to review Kyda Sylvester’s discussion today at 10:19 AM. She seems to have expressed the “golden mean.” And Frederick, at 01:14 PM seems to me to have the perfect prescription. He says, “Be a great portal. Let it evolve.”
Let us post the words, “honest and transparent” over the lintel of the door and Frederick’s evolution will take care of itself. Whatever results will be a great portal.
Ray C.
I agree with Jay.
Links and excerpts are pretty widely used as the access to “facts.”
A blog should be reserved for explaining “what it all means.”
But, without the links the whole thing falls apart. I ignore all blogs that editorialize without providing links to the neutral text. Often times their accuracy leaves a lot to be desired.
How about this though? Many bloggers leave links as a “pretext” to providing a neutral source. Often times the links themselves turn out to be to other opinions without any reference to such.
This is a “buyer beware” business. It is not until links are actually used that one discovers the intention of the blogger.
Jay offers this advice: “A strong discipling to offer links, add more as readers send them in, make open and honest corrections as new facts come to light, and…don’t make statements you cannot support, is enough to make PJMedia and valuable new resource.”
Disipline must be self-imposed. It is what will seperate the successful from the unsuccessful. Most of the blogs I respect most are those that do not have the arrogance of the MSM.
It isn’t about being right all the time. It is the desire to make every possible effort to be, and the ability to admit mistakes readily, and make immediate and sincere efforts to rectify and repair any wrong information.
ìLet us post the words, ëhonest and transparentí over the lintel of the door and Frederick’s evolution will take care of itself. Whatever results will be a great portal.î
Amen. Letís get something straight: there is no such thing as an objective ìabove the frayî human being. It is an intrinsic impossibility. Anyone saying otherwise is just lying to themselves. Once they have bovine excremented themselves—it is often easier to seduce you into swallowing their nonsense. We can be no more than honest and transparent.
ìIf bank robbers are witnessed robbing a bank at 2:00 p.m. on the afternoon of Monday, March 29,XXXX.
This is a fact. That is what must be reported if it’s to be correct. It’s just that simple.
All of these abstract arguments are just that abstracts.î
Let me rephrase this sentence to read: ìIf terrorists are witnessed crashing airplanes into buildings on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001.î Alas, we are inevitably going to get into trouble. Journalism is not merely about the who, what, where, and when—it is also about the WHY! The last aspect throws a monkey wrench into the works. Our personal biases and philosophical underpinnings will greatly influence our interpretation of the killersí motivations.
I remember during the Gulf War, people’s view of CNN was greatly boosted because CNN, unlike all the other newsources, more or less just let the cameras roll rather than providing lots of condensed commentary. PJM should take the same approach by providing every possible detail with all possible links, even details that may seem unimportant (because readers might find something others missed). Providing maximum detail would require a hierarchical structure to the news: headline, story, details.
And it’s important to recognize those times when it’s important to simply let the cameras roll and chew up all the bandwidth/space, such as during the big moments in democratic movements. In those cases, encourage the remote bloggers to just capture everything and send it in.
Fair and balanced? Honest and transparent? I think both are missing the point.
The real influence of the MSM in modern discourse is their ability to shape the public agenda. We talk about the nomination of John Bolton because the kerfluffle over his nomination made the front pages of the Washington Post, the New York Times, and was the lead topic on the Sunday morning TV shows. A very small community of people shapes what everybody reads or views as news. The specific execution of those stories–in terms of what is expressed as fact, and what is expressed as opinion, isn’t nearly as important as whether the story makes the paper, where in the paper it is placed, and to what depth the paper goes to explain the facts.
Case in point: Hillary Clinton’s “futures trading” transaction with Tyson Foods, when Bill Clinton was the Democratic nominee to be governor of Arkansas. The vast bulk of the coverage of the story labelled it as “a complex, and somewhat obscure, transaction.” And stuffed any coverage of it deep in the back pages of the paper.
That was, in truth, completely factual coverage. To understand what had happened you had to understand the difference between a commodities trade and a stock trade; you had to understand the risk inherent in a commodities futures trade; and you had to understand the legal restrictions on letting novices make big futures trades, because of the financially disastrous consequences of losing your bet. The vast majority of the MSM mentioned the story in the midst of coverage of the presidential campaign and the Whitewater coverage, but “stuffed it” into the back pages. And dropped it. Only the Wall Street Journal (whose readers can be expected to understand the technical complexities, which were explained nonetheless) spelled out what had occurred: a very bright young lawyer who was married to the soon-to-be-governor of the state, a terminally ill commodities broker with a distinctly shady record, and the biggest corporation in the state of Arkansas figured out a more-or-less legal way to launder a whopping, six-figure payoff in the days before Bill was elected governor. Whitewater was a dodgy real-estate deal: this was out and out bribery, and just one piece of a long and cozy relationship between Tyson and the Clintons (which the WSJ proceeded to detail). (Just to keep the lawyers happy, let me re-emphasize that the transaction was structured in such a way that it passed legal muster, at least in the eyes of the Clinton appointee in the U.S. Attorney’s office who reviewed it.)
Where the blogosphere competes with the MSM is in being able to challenge what gets on the agenda. The Times, the Post, the Trib, and the Globe might decide that another such story isn’t news: but the pajamahedeen can keep a story like Rathergate on the agenda. And so long as the story is on the agenda, the natural course of the blogosphere will be to cover it from every angle: from left, center, and right; from continent to continent; and with a blizzard of links to any and everybody who sounds even the slightest bit knowledgeable on the subject.
In the “real world” of journalism, editors, publishers, and producers must decide what “fits”–into the space between the ads (as Joseph Pulitzer famously put it), or into the time between commercials. In picking the stories that fit on Page One, or the segments that make the 22 minutes of World News Tonight (disclosure: ABC News has been a client), the MSM shapes the agenda of public discourse. The blogosphere doesn’t have those limitations–that should, and hopefully will, mean that the blogosphere will substantially broaden the agenda. That’s already happening (think of Rathergate, and the number of sites reporting positive news from Iraq and Afghanistan, and the spread of democracy throughout the Middle East and Central Asia)–you will do well to focus on broadening the agenda even more.
I’m getting dizzy! All good stuff.
BUT
We’re missing something basic here. Does it matter how factual/honest/unbiased/transparent the article/blurb is
if the headline is not?
Headlines/Article heads are the portal through which the reader approaches the text. Writing a headline is an art, not a science, and more often than not represents a pov in order to encapsulate the meaning of the facts that follow.
We all have seen factual blurbs come from the AP accompanied by a shockingly biased header.
Is this unavoidable? Or is the headline an example of transparency? Through the headline one’s biases are put up front and center, boldly, with no apology?
Although many people say they just want the facts I really doubt that is what is driving the popularity of blogs – from whatever slice of the political spectrum.
Blogs are the Pamphlets of our time, and it is the qualities of the pamphlet that make them popular. Blogs make no pretence that objectivity requires neutrality, only that it requires honesty (what Orwell used to call good faith).
I think what many object to in the MSM is the pretence that the wall between op-ed pages and the news is real. The op-ed pages are often rendered insipid because they are filled with arguiment from which “facts”, or more properly, an empirical approach, have been carefully strained – almost as if there had been a demarcation dispute which was resolved by Op-ed jounalists abdicating the right to use “facts” whilst reporters abdicated the right to employ rational argument.
This pretence that the news is simply the unvarnished accurate reports made by a neutral but privilged observer, and by being neutral is therefore objective – is what most ticks people off. A disintereted pursuit of accuracy and objectivity must begin with an honest assessment of the position and perspective of the observer, who will never be granted a gods eye view, but can at best infer it from examining what a phenomena might look like from other perpectives. At the same time reporters should admit that the data of human history (which is after all what news is) are rarely the objectively quantifiable phenomena of science – as so much of the overtly political guff produced by the pseudo sciences attest.
It is this pretence which allows so many journalists to get away with the double think involved in first selecting the facts that support their worldview and then blithely insisting that their worldview is simply an emergent and objective product of the facts of the world. It is really a triple think because they simultaneously deny that their worldview may influence how the world appears whilst also denying that there is any escape from the situationlism inherent in observation so as to innoculate themselves from any challenge worldview – wich can be dismissed as being at least as equally mired in the problem of subjectivity.
PJ media should not try and become the worlds most comprehensive news ticker – stick to what makes Blogs popular and valuable – an engagement with the reader who is respected as a writer as well, an honesty about ones own perspective and a faith that engagement with other points of view is not just pro-forma, but has real value. Most of all a renewal of faith that opinion and fact are not seperate- but rather involved in a constant interplay – in a word the mandate of PJM should be the revival of enligthened empiricism.
As to how this might work in practice – I think at a minimum we need transperency about how the editorial process worked to make event x a story, whilst events a-w and y and z were not.
To take the Kevin Sites example what was frustrating was that the whole debate revolved around wether Mr Sites should have reported what he did – either absolutely or without suitable context. The editorial process that slected just this story from many days of his reporting from Falujah was the real issue, and it was, as ever, opaque.
Syl’s point about headlines is EXTREMELY important!
Not much to add from here… but, one of the most important points for me is the continuation of comments. Yes, a hard nosed and sharp eyed editor/s can keep things on the up and up in regards to fair, balanced, honest and transparent. But I see that as single/several eyes. The way I look at commenter’s is more in keeping with a fly’s eye, What is it, some 4000 different (didn’t google) perspectives. You can’t buy that type of input.
The only other thing I would add is…start small, and work your way to greatness.
I disagree that being Joe Friday should be your goal. There always will be a subjective element in any reporting. It is unavoidable, even under the best of intentions, because of the tension between focussing on the gaps or the connections.
Consider by way of example a meeting of 1,000 people with five protestors who disrupt the meeting one at a time. Which is more important? The fact that the protestors disrupted the meeting, or the substance of the speeches that they disrupted?
Or consider a generally favorable speech (the topic isn’t important) that didn’t meet the expectations of an interest group. Which is more important? The warmth of the speech, or the missing endorsement?
What about a reporter who is covering a meeting and thinks that he has an answer but nobody brings it up. What should he do? Never make his contribution? Ask about it in the meeting and report on it? Mention it in the article and hope that the decision-makers pick it up?
I think that the answer is twofold:
(a) Own up to biases. A reporter will have an axe to grind (pardon the cliche). As long he owns up to it, I don’t see the problem. Being too relativistic and non-judgmental itself is a point of view, and in my opinion it is not a helpful one because it often is dishonest and makes the writing boring and keeps the issues opaque. It also stifles solution-directed thinking. As my Constitutional Law professor asked, “Ever hear of being so absent minded that your brains fall out?”
(b) Whenever possible, post links to the prooftexts within the blogs. Post the complete text of reports that are being quoted. Post the transcripts of conferences. Post the notes taken by the bloggers. Use the blogs as a summary or an index to the source material.
There’s probably not a need for a blog AP, since there’s already an AP. And Wikinews, and others. A stable of pamphleteers is more likely.
Facts can be boring, or intriguing, and they can be powerful. Bloggers are at their most powerful when they are closing in on the facts rather than calling each other moonbats and wingnuts.
If you’re not confident that your blogging community can produce facts quick enough, you might think of some kind of device to help. Perhaps a “Call for facts” button, which allows commenters to request specific facts about a hot story.
An example:
How many people died in the rioting blamed on Newsweek?
What are their names?
Whom did they die at the hands of?
What are their names?
Who is assigned to compile the military’s report Newsweek wrote about?
When is it due?
Etc.
Still, the blogging dynamic rarely “goes to press” with facts in the “first edition.” That’s not the way blogging is supposed to work. Perhaps one of your bloggers will have a passion for critical thinking and will take it as a mission to nail down the tangible details of disputed stories. Maybe not. But if you’re going to blog, don’t edit out what makes them blogs.
As for a sticker of approval, that rasies some other questions.
How do you prove that it is FACTUAL?
Links do not prove anything other than that other websites agree with you. The truth of the facts at those sites is still in question. Of course, some sites have more respect than others. But can you link to a CNN.com article to prove the accuracy of your blog piece? Can you link to the CBS News site? NYTimes? …..
Honest and transparent. Transparent and honest and far easier than fair and balanced, at least.
Transparent requires us to be fully-funded by non-interested parties. Well, maybe not. It just means that our funding and our biases, whether or not they result from one another, will be public domain. And it means that our biases, if thats what they are, will be there for all to see.
Transparency will open us up to scrutiny. Scrutiny is only bad if we have something to hide. We should let it all hang out.
Honesty is imperative. Without honesty we are no better than the media who right now falsely claim indifference to their own opinions.
I gotta sleep. Later guys and gals!
Man, the ideas are flying tonight. There are so many in fact, that I am now blogging the comment section.
If I may…These are some ideas and questions put forth by commenters recently. None of the ideas are my own, for the record, but deserved a “round-up” so to speak:
“Some of the best blogs don’t pretend to be “objective”, and they are interesting to read.”
“Scrutiny is only bad if we have something to hide. We should let it all hang out.”
“Where the blogosphere competes with the MSM is in being able to challenge what gets on the agenda.”
“PJ media should not try and become the worlds most comprehensive news ticker – stick to what makes Blogs popular and valuable – an engagement with the reader who is respected as a writer as well”
“Headlines/Article heads are the portal through which the reader approaches the text.”
“The way I look at commenter’s is more in keeping with a fly’s eye, What is it, some 4000 different (didn’t google) perspectives. You can’t buy that type of input.”
“Own up to biases. A reporter will have an axe to grind (pardon the cliche). As long he owns up to it, I don’t see the problem.”
“There’s probably not a need for a blog AP, since there’s already an AP.”
“can you link to a CNN.com article to prove the accuracy of your blog piece? Can you link to the CBS News site? NYTimes?”
Roger L. Simon wrote;
Do you believe that yearning is unique to the blogosphere? Assume for a moment that you are successful in establishing a framework with PJ Media to provide a source of news content for the blogosphere. Are you content to let others pick up the ball and move that content into new spheres, such as podcasting? Or will there be an effort by PJ Media to build distribution channels for blogosphere content to populate all areas of the coming on-demand world?
Three simple comments:
1) There is no way your news service will have strong credibility from the start. Don’t worry about instantaneous editing. Instill trust and honesty by requiring good reviews to continue posts. (Don’t dump reporters for single misjudgments, but drop serial offenders.)
2) I grew up sitting in English, History, and other essay and analysis classes hearing that you should write as if what you were saying was fact because it was a “strong voice” or other such nonsense. If you want to be credible, you will require acknowledgment of analysis/opinion/speculation.
3) If you choose to go with a “sticker” system, take a look at Apple Insider as a possible example. Or, you could take a page from intelligence agencies and rate articles 1-5 or 1-10 for reliability. This should be the authors responsibility and subject to my first point.
Okay, three points doesn’t do it.
Final point:
You should apply some sort of metric to tag stories that everyone can see. For example, use reader feedback such as Slashdot does to give your posters positive or negative status. That method should be applied gently. A better metric would be to require authors to state their personal political affiliation and require that they not change it more than once every 6 months. In addition, show their ratio of good stories to mistaken stories.
Roger,
I tend to agree with Mark Twain: “We do not deal much in fact when we are contemplating ourselves.”
For various reasons, we’ve all started our very own blog. Therefore, the nature of every single blog is one of self-interest. Opinion will creep in, no matter how fair we each think we are.
Let the blogosphere continue to endorse or refute the facts handed out by the MSM. The blogosphere, like Vegas, never sleeps. It’s an amazing mechanism that is thriving beyond anyone’s expectations.
First of all, I took the time to read nearly every post & I can honestly say that the incisiveness of the comments was impressive. I’m honored to be part of such an intelligent, thoughtful group of opinionists.
Next, I took the time to write out answers to each of Roger’s questions.
Here’s the original post, the questions & my answers:
A rather overwhelming consensus seems to have emerged that the emphasis at Pajamas Media/Blog News Service shouldnít be on being “fair & balanced” (judged to be inexact terms for a variety of reasons), but to be “honest & transparent.” This latter had many interesting & sometimes amusing permutations, but one I liked was that we should imitate Sgt. Joe Friday of the old Dragnet show & seek “Just the facts, ma’am.”
Of course, opinion wasnít completely dismissed (thereís clearly a place for it, which weíll get back to in a later question) but there seems to be a yearning, at least in this part of the blogosphere, for a fact-based online news service with a hard-and-fast firewall between reporting & editorializing. Many criticized mainstream media for failing to preserve that division.
1) The basic question is: A) how do we achieve this while the preserving the openness of blogs & blogging, which is their hallmark?
Answer: The only way to keep this ëdivisioní of BNS trustworthy is by using objective facts in making editorial comments. An example of how NOT TO DO THIS is this: Howard Fineman wrote an article the day after the íCompromise that saved us all from the Christian Right & the Nuclear Option.í In that article, he opined on nothing more than his own wishes that the Christian Right was in decline because John McCain & the moderates had rescued us all. He didnít talk about this or that poll showing this trend. Yet itís in a supposed news analysis piece. It wasnít reporting news or opinion, it was trying to influence opinion via unsubstantiated or non-existent trends.
When bloggers opine, we should:
1) have the facts on our side;
2) be able to defend our positions logically & intellectually;
3) avoid hyperbole at all costs.
4) avoid getting personal in a nasty way. Sarcasm is ok, mean & cruel isnít.
2. There are many sub-questions as well:
A) Who makes the decisions about what is accurate?
The only íeditorsí we need should be bloggers themselves, reading the content & fact checking it.
B) To what extent are standards different for individual blogs in our ad network & for the Blog News Service portal? (Someone has suggested we have a sticker of sorts on posts differentiating fact & opinion.)
Answer: We could state in our ëMission Statementí, if we have one, that content on individual blogs doesnít necessarily reflect the views of BNS & that any material posted on the BNS portal or portals have been fact-checked by BNS editors. We should also clearly ëmarkí hard news stories with one logo ( a picture of Joe Friday, perhaps.) & a different logo for opinion and/or analysis pieces.
C) Do we need to apply particularly high standards to breaking news we might syndicate for sale to established media?
1)We shouldnít be slow in reporting breaking news but we should also clearly state that the situation is fluid & whatís fact now might be wrong 6 hrs. from now.
2) We should pledge to keep reporting using as many named sources as possible & that weíll correct any information as soon as itís discredited.
Anything less is setting the bar too low. If people know that weíre doing our best to give them the most accurate news as expeditiously as possible, they wonít punish us if information that we thought was credible turns out wrong. After all, people make mistakes. What isnít ok is when we cherry pick information & quotes to advance an agenda. If we use quotes taken in context to advance an opinion, terrific.
SIDENOTE: If at all possible, we should link to: 1) the full transcript of the person’s speech or 2) the video from the actual event.
D) If so, how do we do that given the speed necessary in those situations?
1) Use video whenever possible.
2) Use firsthand accounts if at all possible.
3) Talk to professionals on the ground rather than to their spokespeople.
E) Traditional editors? NO
F) Committees of bloggers? YES
G) A combination? NO
H) Some have dreamed of creating a “Blog AP”, indeed weíll try to do this, but how do we meld scrupulous accuracy with the spontaneity & freshness that make blogging what it is?
1) By reporting facts first, then relaying those facts to people doing news analysis as fast as possible.
2) By continuing to hold bloggers to the high standards that the blogosphere is already famous for.
3) By allowing bloggers to be creative & fresh in how they write their opinions while insisting that the facts stay the same.
I basically wanted second, or third or fourth, (whichever) fredrick’s 13 points.
I also want to add that the “fact checking” in the blog world is by other bloggers and commenters. Is there a need for additional “editors” fact checking? I am confused about this point because then we become the MSM. As someone else commented already “why?”.
Blogs are popular because they either draw interest based on their writing skills, draw like minded people to read or have been proven to be relatively good at providing facts and analysis.
Why would we change that?
I believe the word “transparent” simply means that if we state something or quote someone we link directly to it or write exactly what the person said or provide full transcripts of the interview somewhere and link to it if we are breaking it up.
This is the way to be transparent.
If you wanted to give someone “just the facts” why would you write anything besides providing a bunch of links or just typing the words “interviewed Tom Delay” and putting the entire, unedited interview on the blog?
I think we’re reaching here and should let the nature of the blog world speak for itself.
Before you begin looking for solutions, it’s important to ask the questions. What is the problem that you are trying to solve? How is your solution going to solve it?
The MSM is the way it is, not so much because it is full of ideologues, as because it is a money-making enterprise. Many seem to tacitly believe that the mission of the MSM is to convey the facts, tell the story, speak the truth. Post Watergate, an even more heroic role is imagined for the MSM: the saviors of democracy. These are not the true place of the MSM, which is simply to make money. Money is made when attention of the readers/viewers is drawn. So we have to ask: what’s in it for the writers? What’s in it for the readers?
Most writers in the MSM, the ones you’ve never heard of, are in it to make money. A few are in it to swell their egos. Almost all blog-writers, by contrast, are in it for love. This is an essential difference.
Readers are very seldom looking for facts. Mostly they’re looking for something that isn’t boring. Often they’re looking for something to stroke their egos by reaffirming their prejudices. I come to this site for example because the range of material is endlessly fascinating and because it’s very reassuring to realize I’m not the only person in the world who both favors gay rights and seeks the destruction of the terrorists.
If the purpose of the MSM is to draw attention for the advertisers, then it is natural, indeed inevitable, that the headlines become outrageous, that bad news be overemphasized, and that the dramatic be overexaggerated. The advertisers demand eyeballs everyday, ergo drama and excitement, disaster and mayhem must be proferred each and every day.
The staples of newspapers are those sections which provide drama on a daily basis in a predictable way, to wit, sports, stocks, wars, outrageous votes in the Senate.
If Pajamas Media becomes a money-making enterprise rather than of an object of love, then it will eventually become indistinguishable from the MSM, all good intentions or plans notwithstanding.
Isn’t it interesting that both sides of the current political debate loath the MSM? On this side the MSM is derided as being “leftist”; on the other as being “corporate”.
I would suggest that the reason people are so unhappy with the MSM is not because they want facts, nor because they want truth, objectivity, fairness, or any of those other lofty goals, but rather because the MSM has become so mind-numbingly monolithic. It represents a classic failure of market capitalism: eventually one or two big fish ate all the little fish. In almost all markets there is only one newspaper of interest; in most cases that one newspaper is owned by one or two mega media corporations; and in most cases that one newspapers does little but reprint items off the AP wire anyway (costs must be cut you know). What appears to be a multiplicity of voices is actually nothing but the thoughts of a tiny, rather incestous group of people. When the biases of that particular miniscule subset of humanity begins to chafe us we start to howl in pain.
The blogosphere is interesting because it once again consists of thousands of little fish. As there was in the newspaper world a century ago, there is now in the blogosphere the possibility of finding viewpoints or voices that have something to offer other than the dogma of the day. But the blogosphere is unfortunately often boring because it’s unprofessional, unorganized, and has little that’s actually new to bring to the table. Moreover in its current incarnation it is of necessity lacking authority: it is impossible for one human mind working alone, no matter how well-intentioned, to achieve the gravitas afforded an institution like the NYT. I confess I’m getting bored with Instapundit. I know how he stands on all the issues and I know his rhetorical flourishes. So what’s new? What compels me to read his writing? The good news is that blogs working together, perhaps with the help of commenters, may be able to overcome these limitations. The jury is not only out, but has yet to be selected.
Hello Roger & all;
I have a few suggestions based on what I as a customer of PJM would like to see in an online news/commentary service. I agree with most of the comments here to do with transparency, fact checking, dividing facts from opinions, etc. The key to making a viable product out of PJM is in organizing the parts of the information that comes in, in a way that gives readers confidence in the system, and gradually builds up the credibility of PJM. That’s what it’s all about.
I see each news item building up into four parts, which I’ll call Raw Story, Story Outline, Fact Checking, and Analysis.
It starts with a Raw Story, which is written by a source or a blogger on a news site somewhere in the world. They wrote it and sent it because they personnally think it’s newsworthy. Granted, it may be biased, exaggerated, or completely false. You wouldn’t know at that point, but I think it’s important to have the original Raw Story (or more than one) prominently available to the readers to allow them to see the progression of the news item through different stages.
The Story Outline is the most visable part; a series of bullets which tries to outline what is known about this news item, up to the moment. Your editors would pull basic facts, as you understand them, from the Raw Story, and then keep updating it as new information comes in from Fact Checking, with links as appropriate to individual posts at Fact Checking. The Story Outline functions like a scoreboard, and it should be obvious to the readers how it is evolving over time. It should be clear, hour by hour, when things are confirmed or disproved. The graphics should be exciting and have a live, scoreboard type of look.
Fact Checking would be the bullpen of posts from all over, from witnesses on the spot to technical experts in specific areas. They would be specifically supporting or challenging items in the Story Outline. Although individual posts would undoubtably be biased and contain opinion, the focus here would be to “show me the evidence”. You, the editors, would be openly challenging the world to prove the story. Posts that contradict each other would be encouraged, with the editors demanding evidence. Let them battle it out, and your editors would “keep score” by updating the Story Outline as you became convinced by the posts of particular details. Of course, there would be some judgement on your editors’ part, but I think it would be self correcting because if you appeared to be getting pushed to one side, you’d immediately get hammered by more opposing posts. Again, this section would be all about challenging the facts, not whining and pontificating.
The Analysis section would be links to external writers who’ve taken the current information from the Story Outline and written their opinions on what it means, what are the effects, what it means historically, etc. Your editors would have no control over the writing, and would only try to provide some balance of opinions in the collection of links.
These four sections would have to arranged in some way to keep them together for the news item. It’s important as well as entertaining for your readers to be able to watch the evolution of the story hour by hour.
I hope this helps in getting PJM up and running! Again, this is what I’d like to see as a consumer of online news.
let me just say that if just by asking these questions doesn’t scare the msm enough to crap their collective pants nothing will.
the msm is dead. long live the pjm!
I like the idea of factual(who, what, when, where, how and even why – if known)reporting with possible side-bars of interpretation or opinion by an expert panel representing a number of social, cultural or political perspectives. What concerns me is the subtlely intrusive niggling partisanship and/or bias that leaks into everything in the MSM news accounts or papers. Let me give an example from the NYT’s:
In the Sunday magazine there is always an interview with someone or another by Deborah Solomon. It is supposed to be smart, hip, quick on the draw type of smarmy give and take. But I have yet to find any of her interviews whether with artists, actors, writers, CEO’s etc. where there is NOT a question that takes on Bush, Iraq, Christian Right, prayer, etc. I always start by looking at the interviewee (this week Larry McMurty) and say to myself – Ok, how will she sneak Bush in this week? Well she never disappoints – this time it is some silly Q&A about his ranch in Crawford that gets minimized as just a “Reagan knockoff bush clearers getaway”. Incredible.
And this is common – it runs through out the paper from the sports section to the weekend escapes. Some one in charge has made it a priority or a procedure that politically negative subliminal messages and asides must accompany every darn article. It is disgraceful journalistic reinforcement of the base readership and is becoming comical.
So my advice is report, allow diverse interpretation and opinion but always lead with the 5 W’s and the 1 H if you know it.
One of the main strengths of blogs is they can allow news consumers to vet original sources for themselves by linking to the various sources. These would be the accounts by the person or persons who witnessed the event. Original video or photographs of the news event. Original documents confirming the event. The MSM tends to hide these from their readers/viewers by anonymous sourcing, editing of video, cropping and cherrypicking photos. Blogs should link to the original photos, video and/or documents. In addition they should provide as much information about witnesses as possible. This vetting process is improved and speeded up by the use of a comments section. Everyone is an expert about something. The more eyes that can be brought to bear on a news item, the more likely any flaws will be exposed. One of the most frustrating things to me in the MSM, one that has driven me from them is to see something you know is not true reported as a fact and know you are powerless to expose the lie. The competition between blogs and the comments by readers means lies will not stand for long. By increasing the likelihood of a lie being exposed you will decrease the likelihood of lies being attempted in the first place. Lies are only useful if not exposed.
geoffb wrote:
If PJ Media had only one purpose, I believe that should be it. Whether the lies be from the MSM, the government, corporations or the blogosphere, if PJ Media enhanced the blogosphere’s ability to root out lies it would be a valuable addition.
Wrt the filibuster, “Single-issue bloggers and Googlers produced, directed and wrote the deadlock drama” says Martin F. Nolan in the SFGate Online.
While I think the extensive comments have covered most of the bases, I’d like to add a counter-point of good MSM writing…
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve read several articles in the Wall Street Journal and been left wondering “Is that good or bad?”
It hit me that that is the hallmark of a fact-based article: It makes you draw your own conclusions.
I like the Raw Story/Story Outline/Fact Checking/Opinion Link-Out format suggested above. When a story is “done”, the Story Outline section should be in a state where every bullet is shown to be true, false, undecidable, or opinion (probable or improbable might also be useful). In any case, it should be a small set of states that are easily recognizable to the reader.
P.S. It’s fascinating watching this grow in real time.
As a news consumer, I want more first hand accounts. I hope you can find a way to utilize the millions of picture taking cell phones with text messaging out there. I want to get multiple views of an event from people who are there. I want to take my camera with me everywhere so I can contribute pictures and commentary of events I consider newsworthy or entertaining. You would not have to pay people to participate. Lots of us would be glad to do it just for the fame and glory.
Editors that are good at selecting submissions for publication should get paid. That would be their day job.
I thought the best reporting in the invasion of Iraq was from the embedded reporters even though they frequently said they didn’t really know what was going on.
Here’s a nice clean model, John Loftis’ collection of GWoT intelligence.
The MSM is the way it is, not so much because it is full of ideologues, as because it is a money-making enterprise… If the purpose of the MSM is to draw attention for the advertisers, then it is natural, indeed inevitable, that the headlines become outrageous, that bad news be overemphasized…
I’m not convinced the MSM is all about producing product that produces revenue and, as such, is somewhat value neutral. If violence sells and that’s why journalists and their news organizations treat us daily to how the US causes death and mayhem and commits abuses and stirs up Islamists, why is there always the prejudice against what America (allegedly) does and very little about the depths of depravity of those who fight us? Why oppose wars that would produce plenty of blood and tears for sensational reporting? Why more editorial outrage over Abu Ghraib than over 9-11? Why is Guantanamo a bigger issue than real human rights abuses in other countries? Why harp on Halliburton when they could investigate and rail against the criminals of the UN and in the French and Canadian governments? Do MSM advertisers really thrive on anti-American angles in the news? The local journalists I personally know, several of whom are on the editorial board of a large city paper, are all strong leftists and Democrats, and their reportage shows it.
It can’t be just about the money, especially since the MSM is disaffecting so many of its consumers with its focus and having to niche market to stay afloat. It’s got to be about message, too, and to their detriment. This is why Fox found and now PJ Media will find fertile opportunity to grow in the news market. Old media’s crap is at least good for something.
So much has already been said so well – but I think we can be effective online Joe Fridays if we are clear about whether our content is intended to be read as coverage of what is happening out there, versus content intended to take what is happening and use it as support or evidence of a particular opinion. I think many writing as Joe Fridays ask themselves before they click ‘Save’, whether or not his reader will conclude that the writer is Left, Right or whatever . . . and of course they shouldn’t be able to . . . that is his litmus test for being a good Joe Friday. So I guess readers should be guided into one category or another – Joe Friday newswriters (or writers offering to completely round out MSM’s presentation of the news), and opinion pieces. Forcing the writers to select one category or another will be a good threshold for the piece – maybe the button could be ‘What is this anyway?’ – hahaha. Anyway, in my view Joe Friday pieces and opinion are clearly separate writing functions, and the MSM thrives in the twain which is its terminal defect in my view . . .
Wow! I’m pleased that my “Joe Friday” comment produced so much intelligent discussion. PJ Media is going to have a tough time sorting through all the really good input.
I don’t have any further suggestions. I’m retired and I spend at least four hours each day reading blogs,watching primarily Fox News, and at least a few times a day, switching to CNN and MSNBC, for their take on issues. I never watch the three networks, because I don’t trust their input. I value the blogs for presenting all sides to a story, and for linking to the whole text or photo.
I look forward to the PJ Media entry into the fray.
I think many of you are vastly under-estimating how difficult a “just the facts” approach is when people disagree on what is a relevant, established or unadorned fact.
Jay, it seems easy. Follow this story:
The Nominating Committee (who) for the Nobel Prize (what)met in Brussels (where)on May 28, 2005 (when)to evaluate the qualifications of candidates submitted (why).
Those are facts. Characterizing the makeup of the Nominating Committee, or the candidates being considered, would be purely the writer’s opinion.
That is the kind of reporting I would like to see. Give me the facts, and I’ll do my own research on the rest.
Jay, the “Rashoman” effect, or the blind men describing an elephant; right…cops know about ‘eyewitnesses’, the mind ‘completes’ chaotic experiences, and most of the time one can’t even be certain of what one saw.
Mighty yeasty. The temptation is to say, ahh, quit with the fuzziness–but that’s less a prescription for decribing reality than it is impatience with perfectionist detailia.
We do have to know that the bank got robbed–even if we don’t know what the backstory is. MSM can tell us the bank got robbed–after that, the rest of the MSM report, apply grains of salt, and look for the truth between the lines.
Volume of content and numbers of observers–something only the blogosphere provides–will be decisive if one wants to ‘understand’ the bank robbery. I make up my mind on many issues–sorry to say–on the basis of what I know about who is commenting on it.
Jay,
You may be 100% correct but what difference does it make? PJM is interesting because it is announcing that it will be operating from a different template than that of the 500 Fantasists who decide what “facts” are in the MSM.
The niche market served by the MSM’s political reporting – which those same 500 Fantasists has elevated to include sport, travel, business and whatever else they can find – is dwindling. The current 500 are far too obvious in their propagandizing and are being rejected to the extent that, today, there is plenty of potential market share to be exploited.
Will PJM succeed? Perhaps, it depends entirely on a clear identification of the principles of the principals. The quality of the product (in a small business environment – which this is) is always a product of the owner’s values. The current crap being produced by the NYT or the WaPo Group (both toys of the materially rich but intellectually impoverished) is as clear evidence of that as has ever existed. Hopefully, Roger, Charles and Marc will remain committed to providing a quality product that strives for transparency and honesty.
Personally, I disagree strongly with the use of transparency because the NYT and WaPo have been ‘transparent’ to me for thiry-five years and it hasn’t led to warm fuzzy feelings about them.
I don’t believe that it will be difficult to beat the j-schoolers ‘standards’ regarding facts at all.
Buddy,
I don’t think ‘detailia’ is going to replace minutiae any time soon.
ìI think many of you are vastly under-estimating how difficult a “just the facts” approach is when people disagree on what is a relevant, established or unadorned fact.î
We are on the same page. I definitely agree that an over reliance on a ìjust the factsî approach inevitably runs into problems in the real world. When everything is said and done, I prefer knowing something about the world view of both the editorial staff and the journalist. The facts deemed important, for instance, by economist Joseph Schumpter will differ greatly from that of John Kenneth Galbraith. The former will emphasize the necessity of allowing no longer relevant jobs to be destroyed while the socialist will highlight the role of government. Both may refer to the same set of facts—but reach entirely opposite conclusions.
Rick, I had to use the one I had the best shot at spelling correctly. No spell check in comment boxes guts me like a carp.
Oh I don’t know Rick, there is some prior use of the term “detailia”…http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-15493.html and ‘ctrl f’ by a ‘Texas Dissident’ and an ‘Okiereddust’, wonder if it was anyone we know.
By the way Buddy, thanks for the ‘comp’ the other night, believe me its a rare event.
I understand the emphasis on honesty of course, but it reminds me, in a Woody Allen kind of way, of a couple going into a relationship with a vow to always be totally honest with each other. Usually one party or the other to paraphrase Jack N. “can’t take the truth.”
Who will be the intended audience? What will be the ‘mission’ of PJM? Why is this endeavor being started? When will it get started? I can’t wait!!
Agree and disagree with Jay Rosen. Yes, it’s true that to report on anything requires active selection by the author: elevation of some facts, suppression of others; inclusion of some voices, omission of others. But here’s the nub of the problem for the legacy media: their format’s stuck in a twentieth century mode of information transmission that does not fit the needs and habits of readers/viewers in the internet age. People don’t want “stories” anymore. They want useful, modular pieces of information from a wide variety of sources, and they prefer the information to be as hard and actionable as possible.
The old journalistic story-telling format’s completely unsuited to how people today access and use information. Readers won’t be “led” through a story anymore. They pick what’s useful, discard what’s not solid, have little patience for rhetorical tropes.
Partly this is because today’s educated readers are on average better educated than most journalists, but it’s also because people today are comfortable absorbing vastly increased amounts of information. Journalists can’t seem to grasp that almost any white collar or other professional worker today has great experience in not just self-directed searching but also in assessing, filtering, making sense of and acting upon very large quantities of information every workday. Nobody has the time for “stories” anymore; more tellingly, nobody will tolerate such story-telling when the web gives them access to far richer sources of fact-based, actionable, to the point information.
For educated people today the preferred means of gathering this info is not via an inverse pyramid story but in terse, discrete packets that can be assembled, interpreted, discarded etc as per the user’s preference. Look at the format that everyone from schoolkids to David Byrne (no joke – see recent issue of Wired magazine) now relies on to convey complex information: the powerpoint presentation. Bullet points. Headlines. Terms clearly defined. Points followed by supporting evidence. And data, data, data: NO assertions that cannot be substantiated with hard evidence.
Sum: change the FORMAT. Strip it down. Links everywhere. More data points, and every assertion accompanied by hard, verifiable data or references/links to authoritative sources.
Guess I’m in agreement with some of the above who don’t believe there’s anything close to just the facts in a news service that reports anything more than the four W’s and one H. Of course, PJ Media should strive for accuracy, self-correction, and better accuracy, but should it try to be a value neutral version of the left-biased old order? Trying to be a comprehensive news service and imposing exaggerated standards of fairness and balance could ruin the quality of the spontaneous and thoughtful burbling up of story selection and analysis we enjoy in the self-ordering sections of today’s blogosphere, especially on the center-right. A strict policy of ‘equal time’ in Blogger News Service headlines and cyber real estate could be a turn-off for readers who would resent the inclusion of silly, cynical and even dangerous spin beyond a mention in a hard news line-up, because that spin is already MSM product, by and large. Still, leftist sites should be (are already?) included in the PJ Media blog line-up, and both the news service and as many blogs as will do it should link to primary material and contexturalized citations from the left, right, center, up, down and all around for stories and discussion.
Maybe it’s just me, but consensus polling to rate story worthiness and slant feels like a forced and unreliable mechanism for editorial evaluation, when bad stories tend to sink of their own weight, anyway, and worthy countervailing POVs arise quickly in the sphere. Blogs feed off of the give-and-take dynamic between principals and stories, blogger/analysts and reader/commenters and between bloggers, or they become static and discredited. The fascinating part about this constant churning of information, analysis, opinion and even of blogs themselves is how it yields fairly consistent narratives, at least on each side of the left-right divide, due to evolving group-thinks and intrinsically shared philosophy and psychologies. There are also the organizing contributions of Glenn, Roger, Charles, and others like the Powerline guys and Wretchard who already have been functioning as de facto supra editors for their part of the sphere because of what they choose to post and link to on their separate but familial blogs. The PJ Media editorial board will easily intuit which stories should be told and which ones have traction without relying upon polls and counters that can be gamed. Feedback from bloggers and commenters will be swift, merciless and out in the open when they get it “wrong”. Editorial direction should probably remain more art than ‘science’ and be the purview of a committee of bloggers with some rotating slots.
Can and should PJ Media try to close the left-right divide in terms of “fair” news and analysis; is it doable or even desirable, like straddling the Grand Canyon? Most of us center-right readers who follow the blogs of the PJ principals entered the sphere bubble because we had become allergic to leftist mainstream germalism in the outside world. That the MSM strains fact and opinion in service to an agenda frustrates us, of course, but it’s not just about compromised truth or lies and lack of objectivity- it’s the diseased worldview itself. Since the left side of the sphere tends to be a forum to spread and intensify MSM contagion, one might ask how healthy it would be to spread it much further, other than to examine it, expose it to sunshine and scrub it with fact and logic. It should be enough that PJ Media include left-proper blogs and link to far leftie sites. Giving them equal space and respect in the aggregated news service and editorial homepage, though, seems unwise and unnecessary, given how ubiquitous and entrenched the other media’s leftist orthodoxy still is. (Hey, if I weren’t a reasonable partisan, I would still believe in the MSM suits and not support the Pajamas.)
For center-left and center-righters, libertarians, independents, neo-cons and other cons, the cyber environment has more room in which to link, think and breathe, and is more ranging in discussion, infinite in truth-divining possibility and expansive in its reach around the globe than is the rarefied, infected and closed loop old media world out there. Here’s hoping that PJ Media can offer information-news that’s as straight as possible, given real life constraints and the fact that we’re human, and also that its blogs will continue to give us opinion and features that are sharp, serious, hard-hitting, insightful, funny, whimsical and controversial. But, please, may there be less leftist cant and more “News that’s less skewed and views that are skewed just right”, please!
As Krillix notes, voting in Europe gives rise to LePetomane sentiments; “We’ve gotta protect our phoney-baloney jobs, gentlemen, we must do something about this immediately!” Wrt France, lets not forget that “chauvinism” is not an Anglo-Saxon term. French plumbers worrying about Polish plumbers coming to town had a great deal to do with the “Just Say Non” result.
This isn’t going to stop the Kojevians because nothing short of death has ever stopped the committed socialist. For them,this is just a rest stop on the road to inevability.
thibaud_ and c, very well said. Makes me wonder if Roger, Charles and Marc really know what they are getting into
Someone earlier mentioned the probative model used in courts of law for establishing and adhering to standards of fact. That’s moving in the right direction – anything to get rid of the moronic, childlike journalistic story-telling format – but I’d propose another. What sources of info do people use more than any other today? By far, it’s email. What makes a good email? Same things that make for an effective powerpoint: Headlines. Bullet points. Data. Transparency of motive and intention, ie, who’s being addressed, cc’ed etc.
So here’s a specific example of how my approach to fact-based reporting could benefit PJM. Let’s take reporting on the EU referendum in FRance. Legacy media here will be represented by today’s piece in the IHT, ie the NY Times’ woman on the scene in Paris. Her article this am – sorry, can’t find the link; seems to have been taken down in last hour – followed the typical, here’s the issue, side A says x, side B says y, and then followed with snippets of quotes from about seven ordinary frenchmen, ending with, as always, one who seems to express the personal view of the article’s author, an “internet consultant” and Oui voter who laments that “my friends in Spain and Italy can’t understand what on earth is going on in France.”
This article is utter crap. It has lots of tone, color, emotion, and utterly none of the precision, data, and hard definition of a typical email or powerpoint.
For starters, the NYT hack defined the EU constitution as “a sort of rule book.” What? Can you imagine anyone writing this in an email to his/her company’s executive team? Not even an attempt to specify what’s new and what’s merely regurgitation of existing EU law, let alone mention of the fact that most of the constitution is the latter. And who in his right mind would seek to convey the actual dispositions of the voters through anecdotal quotes – from a handful of anonymous people who weren’t even randomly selected? This wouldn’t even do for a focus group, which itself would only serve to provide one set, among many, many other sets, of data points. And of course, this being legacy media, not a single link to any hard data point or source document.
This btw was the same kind of non-rigorous, non-quantitative, non-researched hackery that gave us the bogus “moral issues defined ’04 election” meme. As I;ve said again and again on these boards – and as a new issue of the AMerican Almanac of Politics will also argue soon – an analysis of the actual county by county results from ’00 to ’04 yields the opposite conclusion, that what gave Bush his margin was the defection of nearly 2 million centrist, DEmocratic Gore voters to Bush, most likely on national security grounds. One hundred thousand in NYC alone and nearly twice that number in Broward and Dade County, FL. Had the typical reporting format in November been a powerpoint/bulletpoint one, the hollowness and lack of evidence in support of the “moral issues” explanation could have been exposed immediately and conveyed to millions of readers.
We deserve and demand much, much better. There’s utterly no reason that bloggers cannot use the aggregating, filtering, sorting, and ETL capabilities of today’s software to provide the same degree of rigor, terseness and high signal ratio that every other professional demands today.
Wow – apologies for the crossed comment – that’s a first for me and I can’t even blame Preeviw.
I think it’s worth remembering that when the facts got tough, even Joe Friday knew when to be blunt.
Who could forget this Dragnet classic?
I’m sure someone could update that to suit the…. times.
Raise the bar. Use numbers and hard data sources and lawyerly analysis of probative weight wherever possible. Support with data, data, data, and statistically valid inferences from that data. Readers today are much smarter than the MSM hacks think. They can take it.
Leave story-telling and rhetorical flourishes for the lengthy opinion pieces. Make the factual side of the house as terse, logic-driven, actionable and information-rich as a presentation to the Board of Directors or to the Joint Chiefs.
A simpler example of how the bulletpoint, data-based format would vastly increase the factual content of today’s journalism. Consider that this format will accustom readers to straightforward, colorless assertions of fact followed by vastly more detailed arrangements of supporting evidence. Readers will therefore start to focus less on the emotional charge of the assertion and much more on the quality and depth and logical tightness of the evidence adduced– in other words, to apply to news the same rigorous, logic and fact-based habits they now apply to the vast sea of information around them in their professional and corporate lives.
Case in point: my format would force Eason Jordan, and for that matter his critics, to simply argue yea or nay to a very crisp, simple, clear proposition: Does the US military intentionally seek to kill journalists? And then the real meat of the info conveyed would be simply a set of bullet points conforming to incidents – when where who – and within each item, links to authoritative sources providing fuller investigations. The whole format would be geared toward CLARITY and DISPOSITIVE evidence: we know for certain “x” or “not x”, and here’s what we know.
Sum: Shift the emphasis from telling stories to making fact-based arguments. Use the internet and database technology to gather, extract, display and make use of the facts that constitute the essence of the argument.
Eric,
Great quote! But, even if you update Joe Friday to account for our times, (we need free and easy access to smut for all our citizens, don’t discriminate against panhandlers and the homeless on our streets and don’t crack down on street crime ’cause the drug laws are unfair, our schools are great but they need billions more of taxpayers’ money, and a good women’s basketball team subsidized by local dollars will be good for all of our girls), isn’t he still editorializing a bit??
thibaud_ said:
thibaud_,
You offered some compelling thoughts. Do you see PJ Media as a place that will offer one fact-based argument per issue/incident/story, or do you see it as a place where several fact-based arguments may exist for the same issue/incident/story?
IOW, bias toward a strictly commercial alliance, or an editorial/political alliance, or an artistic alliance? I’ve been readig the posts, but still don’t quite grasp that basic. This is nothing new for me.
“I’ve been readig the posts, but still don’t quite grasp that basic.” – Buddy Larsen 4:52
“I suppose I’m still a bit confused concerning what PJM actually is or hopes to be.” Rick Ballard independently at 4:57 at WoC
Obviously weak minded individuals unable to cope with the flow of transparency and honesty.
Ha! Thought it was just you, didja? So’d I. I mean me, not you. I think.
Rick: I am a supporter of Pajamas Media. I agree that it is “interesting because it is announcing that it will be operating from a different template,” as you wrote. To that end I like the idea of replacing “fair and balanced” with “honest and transparent.” I think this is definitely the way to go.
I agree with thibaud, as well, that the traditional formats for conveying information are tired, dull, inefficient and behind the times.
When Roger said, “the one I liked was that we should imitate Sgt. Joe Friday of the old Dragnet show and seek ‘Just the facts, ma’am’…” well, then I got worried. I think you are buying into a big illusion with that one, which might be suspected any time you take as a motto for reporting the tag line of a television show.
Take the Swift Boat episode from campaign 2004. If PJM was operating then, it’s quite likely it would have had an important role in that story. But would “just the facts” have helped bring clarity to that episode, when so much was in dispute, including the facts? Anyone who says so is being naive, and naivete will not help this experiment succeed.
I noticed among the right side bloggers commenting on the Newsweek Koran story that very few of them mentioned Gen. Richard Myers statement that the Newsweek article had little to do with the riots and were not a cause. It’s certainly a fact that he said so, and his source was the commander on the ground in Afghanistan. Or wait a nminute: was that not a fact because it was only Myers stating something second hand? Whereas the left side bloggers and many of the news accounts did mention the Myers statement. After all they said, “it’s a fact.” In a situation like that, what to do?
I submit to you that Joe Friday is not going to help.
Mr. Rosen, you have misquoted Mr. Simon. He did not write “the one I liked…”, but “one I liked…” (no definite article). That is a big difference, especially to a novelist, which he is. The whole sentence is “This latter had many interesting and sometimes amusing permutations, but one I liked was that we should imitate Sgt. Joe Friday of the old Dragnet show and seek “Just the facts, ma’am.” Perhaps you should be reading a little more closely before you post.
FRMN,
Do you see PJ Media as a place that will offer one fact-based argument per issue/incident/story, or do you see it as a place where several fact-based arguments may exist for the same issue/incident/story?
The latter, of course. Truth is rarely unitary, especially for topics like the US presidential elections, the EU referendum in France, the future of Iraq, US energy policy, the US housing market, stem cell research … you get the point.
My larger point is that news is almost always selected, arranged, and presented in accordance with an underlying meme. The cretinous NY Times article on the EU referendum that I mentioned was struggling for a meme, finally landing on the sophisticated classes (Oui vote) vs the rubes. There is always, always a meme, whether journos are conscious of it or not, and my point is that for the good of both the journos and the readers we should ruthlessly, unsparingly expose the memes that guide their news selection and presentation decisions.
So here’s another presentation angle: Meme vs Meme. Or Meme and Counter-meme(s). Full, naked disclosure of where the author’s coming from and where he wants to take the reader. In other words, the equivalent of a debater getting up and stating very clearly, “Resolved: that support for Bush comes mainly from evangelicals,” etc. Other sample memes would include:
IRAQ = THE NEXT YUGOSLAVIA
IRAQ = THE NEXT COLOMBIA
IRAQ = THE NEXT IRAQ
FRENCH REJECT BOTH US-STYLE CAPITALISM AND GRAND
EU SUPERPOWER AMBITIONS
BUSH’S REELECTION MADE POSSIBLE BY NAT-SEC’Y DEM CROSSOVERS
Dispense with the crap story-telling and bare the meme, in as stark a fashion as possible, at the top of the – what, the article? No, it’s not a story, it’s not an account. At the top of the author’s SLIDE. In IT-speak, what’s being presented is the meta-data, the bigger category that allows comparison, rationalization, in short, enables the system to perform real value-added operations on the data/content.
Journos benefit from being forced to think about their biases and then justify a particular story angle with evidence that can be clearly, succinctly conveyed. Readers benefit from no longer having to wade through all the crap “man-on-the-street” interviews, the mindless Expert A says, Expert B countersays parroting, and the myriad slipshod, lazy, unquantified, imprecise journo tricks that make most reporting today such a waste of the reader’s time.
After all doesn’t much of the above amount basically to What’s News? and Why Is It Important? On Mr. Simon’s questions: Who makes the decisions about what is accurate? To what extent are standards different . . . I would say that we have to be the initial finders of these facts – like persons with a license to lose we should be given latitude to make those calls – folks care a great deal about their accuracy and reputations, and that we can garner credibility in this fast paced world by hitting high (if not perfect) averages can be shown in some form of weighting system I’m sure – some system should be able to emulate real life enough to show that misses make for impaired credibility. eBay folks care like crazy about their ratings – and rightfully so in their transaction grading world – it’s their stock in trade so to speak – and I don’t think the model isn’t amenable to credibility. Maybe something like this?
You’re right. It was not “the one I like,” but just “one I like.” Different statement. Still worries me.
I submitted the original “Sgt. Friday” comment.
All I want from PJ Media is a terse reporting of what happens. I do not want a spin from any side of what it “means”. Tell me (Who) participated, (What) happened, (Where) it happened, (When) it happened, and a list of the participants. Let me figure out whether “Why” has any significance to my life
Jay,
Thank you for replying. Yesterday over 19,000 words were written concerning a marketing slogan which was transformed to Honest and Transparent. Today a lesser but still significant number have been spent on facts and Joe Friday.
Your comment concerning Gen. Myer’s statement was basically correct and does identify a ‘blinders’ mentality that needs to be addressed. One of the problems that I forsee is that the commenters feedback loop can become so blind to facts outside the author’s template that errors are not addressed and corrected.
I have no idea as to how the PJM template will develop but I have some faith that the liberal proprietors will seek to find a method that encourages a wide latitude of expression. If “fiercely independent” became the name of the template, I’d be satisfied.
I hope that you drop by from time to time to remind us of potential errors.
I’ve been in newspapers for 20 years. One of my editors once told me there were three kinds of reporters: “diggers” (those who can take a stack of documents and find the damning sentence, or the fuzzy math), “writers” (those who can actually make you leaf back 20 pages for the story jump to follow the flow of their prose), and “quoters,” who are those who come back from a story with the human angle, who can get the victim’s mother to talk about his life, who can get the grumpy fire chief to tell you the name of the dog in the house where everyone died in a fire (in one memorable case, the dog’s name was “Freebase”).
Somehow, ideally, you’d have one of each kind working on every story.
Observation 2: You can’t escape the bias. Every news story ever written is based on a certain set of assumptions, even the most straight-ahead factual. “Man Walks on Moon” contains a presumption that a flat-earther (they do exist) or a “Capricorn One” type conspiracy theorist would reject as a bias. I’ve come to admire the British papers, which do not disguise their bents and warps.
Roger,
If you want to segregate fact from opinion, fact must be displayed as raw data. As soon as that raw data is placed in narrative, opinion is unavoidable.
This is the beauty of the ìhonest and transparentî standard I suggested to your first PJM question. It recognizes that all narrative comes from a certain perspective, and as long as the writer is honest and transparent, unachievable attempts to separate facts and opinions are unneeded.
The separation of opinion and news by the MSM is the root of their hypocrisy. Once this divide is revealed as a fraud, the question becomes: Given opinion can not be separated from the reporting of news, what should be expected from the reporter of news? The answer to this question is the same as the answer to the first PJM question: Honesty and Transparency.
Jeffrey King
http://www.threebadfingers.com