Reading the above post and watching the short clip, another voice — independent from me — is helping illustrate why the occupy movement is the shark that corporate journalism jumped in 2011.

Transparency is killing old-school journalism. Old school journalists aren’t really becoming more transparent, despite all the consulting, advice and the movement of society using online and social media to be more open and sharing. But regardless of the journalists, the rest of the world is becoming more transparent because the Internet gives us all the ability to share and be heard. Against this context of so many voices and so much information, it becomes painfully obvious when the news media is getting it wrong.

In the instance of the occupy movement, which was instantiated and is organized online and is essentially a prolonged meetup of many intersecting social media spheres of concerned citizens, the record is transparent online and completely accesible. There are lots of voices. There are lots of people watching. They’re all detecting that the mainstream corporate-owned media are not covering and have not covered this movement in any accurate way. It is even more obvious that many outlets are acting obtuse or misinforming or outrightly attacking it.

Other journothinkers are in agreement that transparency is the new objectivity, and more and more are coming around. For a long time, it seemed only Jay Rosen and I were talking about it. For years, I’ve been counseling the journalism establishment to becoming more transparent and asking them how they reconcile the ideological and philosophical conflicts in their ethic of objectivity – which is impossible to achieve and corrupt in all modes of practical implementation.

Journalists have to lie to themselves to be able to say they are objective, and they lie to their readers. You can’t be in the trust business when you start your conversation on this premise.

The old school journalist world view:

1. First, journalists said the Internet was a fad.
2. Then they said it wasn’t as good as traditional media.
3. Then they blamed it for killing their business.
4. Then they said it killed the truth and you don’t know who to trust online.

Surprise, this is the reality:

1. The Internet is a massive technological innovation, an impetus for a paradigm shift that has completely changed forever the means of production and access to the means in communication and interaction. It is a classic manifestation of Marxian revolution theory.
2. Producers of content on the Internet have a wide spectrum of quality that correlates to the population of the world that uses it. But the best have risen to the top in meritocracy of traffic, and challenge traditional media who were slow to adapt and are failing.
3. The Internet is a technology. It doesn’t kill anything unless it is used by an animate life form for that purpose. People used the Internet to rebel against the business of journalism because they were dissatisfied with the service it provided them. They did this by creating their own journalism. Now they occupy that niche.
4. The “truth” that old school journalists lament passing is the truth – the world view – of the old, white, rich establishment that has owned mass media for two centuries. While it was comfortable for them because of their ideological indoctrination, it is not, and has never been, a truly objective or accurate depiction of the world as it is.

In the online space, the old school journalism voice stands out like one that is increasingly out of tune with the rest of the society. It speaks for power, not for the people.

It is a business built to cater to advertisers, a business that views people as product: viewers or readers, eyeballs to be delivered to a paying customer. Since that advertising online has failed journalism, journalism has no idea how to deal with people. In abandoning low-price classified ads, the newspaper stopped working with the people of their communities in business transactions. Now, only a few, very large and wealthy businesses buy space in the paper. Since television has always been priced highly, now the media only cater to affluence.

As everyone else becomes transparent, we can eventually tell what the non-transparent look like from their silhouette. The tools of research and discovery are more available, the Internet gives people the ability to give themselves access to the information that the gatekeepers formerly had exclusive access.

Is it any wonder that congress convened hearings to try to figure out how to save journalism in the digital age? Because their business depends on them controlling the version of reality through their relationship with the establishment media. Is it a surprise that political advertising is now the lifeblood of the journalism industry? As more and more people cut the cord and don’t subscribe and then learn how to use the net and program new tools and platforms, they take into their hands the means to change and enable all those new voices to be heard.

And that’s the transparency that’s killing old-school journalism. It is a death of a billion clicks.

                          

The link above, to Jay’s PressThink blog, contains his transparent accounting of the story behind the spurious and specious story that James O’Keefe is trying to present as a “truth.” It also features the embedded video by O’Keefe.

First, my full support and admiration go to Jay and Clay, friends and colleagues, both of whom I deeply respect for their intellectual honesty and efforts to promote intellectual honesty among journalism students at NYU. The industrial mindset in journalism has never needed a deeper examination of the intellectual underpinnings of the entire field than right now. This is perhaps even more critical than the new digital skills and technology we teach, for these skills and tools must be applied with new methodologies and we must consider the deeper implications of the paradigm shift. It fundamentally changes what journalism itself is and the role it plays in the society writ large.

Second, I truly admire the high road Jay takes and applaud him for it. As one who challenges my classes and regularly offends my students and peers as I try to shake their foundations into examining their thinking and be critical of the thinking of others in our space, I would not back down from this in a second and my response would not nearly be as thoughtful or measured. Jay reveals the specious premise to the story and clearly shows there is nothing scandalous here at all. I too have suffered attacks, and anyone who fights in this space will eventually face someone who tries to discredit or silence them. Bravo.

Third, attacking intellectual honesty in journalism and education in this fashion is an assault on us all and the greater purpose journalism and education seek to address. The deeper implication of this kind of action is to discredit the critical voices in the space. Seeking to discredit and shame the process of critical thinking by calling it liberal — as if that in and of itself is a dirty word, we do have colleges of liberal arts and sciences after all — is preposterous. Mr. O’Keefe shows his own myopia in not understanding the Socratic dialogue or Hegelian dialectic in its natural environment, the halls of the academy.

Finally, nothing depicted here is shameful, what is embarrassing is how it is clumsily framed as shame by the sting operation and how they self identify as true journalists. Despite the sensationalist approach and editing, no one is really caught doing anything remotely inappropriate or saying anything incorrect or inaccurate. There is no liberal elite media conspiracy to expose, the context of the comments show Rosen and Shirky exposing their students to critical thinking that they will recognize themselves among the elite — in terms of their dedication to the pursuit of journalism and also their devotion to the consumption and processing of raw information and news at the highest level before disseminating it to a wider audience. They are not economically elite, they are elite in their situational awareness as being successful in their profession would require.

That O’Keefe and his operators think this is somehow scandalous shows why they actually fail — quite literally — at journalism school. They wouldn’t be able to pass the class, for they are not intellectually honest enough to recognize the material the professors are covering and discussing. It has absolutely nothing to do with their own personal political views, it has to do with that their strict adherence to their agenda closes their minds to accepting what reality in fact depicts, and instead their false consciousness dominates their perception. It is impossible to be a journalist as such, you can only be a propagandist for one ideological perspective… which is what James O’Keefe is recognized as by serious and thoughtful students of journalism.

                          

But, can we ever really afford to do that? If we don’t get it, don’t we owe it to ourselves to try to get it? Don’t we owe it to others?

Image via Wikipedia

Say there’s a guy who needs to get his kidney operated on. If I didn’t know how to help address that person’s need, could I in good conscience operate on that guy’s kidney? If someone showed me how and I didn’t get it, would I be a good person if just shrugged and said “I didn’t get it,” and then dismiss that it wasn’t important that get it because I got something else that was different? What if I was a barber who used to be the person that people go to for that thing, and someone else figured out a way to do it better and they became doctors, and then surgeons. Would I say that I don’t get that thing they do, and keep trying to tell myself that the way I have been doing it is ok and I don’t have to get that?

Or, let’s say I was a witch doctor or spiritual healer who people used to come to for this kind of thing, and it turned out that surgeons and physicians had figured out a scientifically based means of dealing with the problem with unfailingly better results? Would I hold true to my faith in these regards? Would I be bitter or resentful that my faith was unfounded? Could I accept that there was a better way to meet the need of this person? Is the person’s need to be met more important than the process that I once practiced to me? What’s my real job that I’m doing? Am I serving the person, myself, my ideology?

What if instead of helping one person and their kidney what you did was provide information intended to help millions of people make smart decisions about themselves as individuals and collectively? Decisions about what products to use and their safety, how to plan their lives, their own futures and foster the world their grandchildren will inherit? What if you were a journalist? And every day you wrote about really complicated things or chose stories about complicated things to share with people, and if you didn’t understand what you were doing, you might misinform someone? Would you feel responsible, or would you say it was just your job? What if you were being used by very powerful people to pass information that served their purposes, not the purposes of the people? But you thought the way you did it was the way it has always been done, and new ways just aren’t worth thinking about?

What kind of world will that be? Will it be a world where that person who needs the kidney can get the help they need? Will you be able to help that person? Is helping that person the only way you can help yourself? If we don’t get it, shouldn’t we get out of the way so someone who does get it can help that person?

Get it?

                          

guardiannews.com is looking for a creative interactive designer to join our interactive team to develop our site and online brand. In this role you will participate in and lead interactive projects, bringing fresh ideas on their architecture, design and delivery.

You will support and maintain the interactive content and technology on guardiannews.com developing ways to enrich our interactive presence on the web and social sphere using a variety of programming languages. You will thrive in a creative and technically accomplished environment and enjoy the challenge of coming up with technical solutions for cutting-edge designs.

Based in New York, you will have extensive experience as an interactive designer having designed and delivered a portfolio of web products and services both professionally and personally. You will have a good understanding of the role of online news and have a stong voice on the web and demonstrate engagement with the online community. You should also have a demonstrable interest in current affairs and an understanding of the editorial aims and values of the Guardian.

via Jobs at GNM.

That should be the baseline for getting into grad school today. You should be ready to rock, so we can start working on rocking the world from the day you step on campus.

Other academic disciplines require that you have a thesis question in mind before even applying to grad school.  Yes you come there to learn, but you come there to create.  You bring research to the world.  Having a thesis means you come in with something to prove.

We’re in the middle of a revolution. This is no time to train cogs for an industrial machine that is breaking down before our eyes. It isn’t the technology that is breaking it, it is imploding from within.

Now is the time that great thinkers should come to the academy to think about what we’re doing, where we’re going and why we should do what we do. If ever a subject of study needed studying, it is ours, now. We need theory and methodology discussions so badly, and all we seem to be doing to is trying to slap digital skills in front of everything we do in the industry and in the academy — without thinking for a minute about why we even do what we do. We drift from new thing to the next new thing, and bounce around words like convergence and SEO and anything else you care to name like we’re seriously considering them. All of the innovation in our industry is coming from outside – and outside journalism. We are reactive, not proactive. We echo, we do not create.

You shouldn’t come to grad school to get a job and grad school — in theory — shouldn’t be geared to get you a job. You should come to get an education, and an increasingly higher education. You should come to learn and teach and study. Because that is what it is really about. The academy is a temple of intellect where we better ourselves, because when we are better, we better our world.

We must be pioneering. We must create as much knowledge as the knowledge we disseminate. And our students need to hold up that bar with us, because that’s what the deal is supposed to be.

I want someone with these qualifications to have to choose between going to work at the Guardian or coming to study with me. I want it to be a hard choice, and I want it to be a no-lose decision.  I don’t want someone to come to learn from me just so they can get a job in some media company.

Is that too much to ask? I only ask, because it was what was asked of me when I started grad school. And I didn’t just accept it as a fact of life, it was a life I wanted. More than anything else, more than any job. And I still do.

                          

I posted this video to my facebook profile earlier today, a friend shared it and it drew some comments. I got long winded in my response, so I want to post it here and share out the work beyond the walled garden.

I AM NOT MOVING – Short Film – Occupy Wall Street – YouTube.

The video is incredibly gripping and powerfully edited. It is heavy handed, but the point is made. At every stage, the occupy wall street movement is being shunned and belittled. This has happened over and over again in American history. To minorities, to the poor, to the workers, and to socialists. It is happening again. Here. These are the free and the brave.

So these were the comments my friend got when he shared the video:

yes there is so much in common between libya and the us. why didn’t i think of that.

actually, the distribution of wealth in the united states is pretty similar to many dictatorships, but that’s out there already.

Even more telling — many more people gathered for tea party rallies across this country than have gathered for the OWS mobs. Yet no scenes of violence, defacement and damage of public property, anti-semitism, garbage piles, etc. i am so happy the dems are siding with the OWS crowd.

well, yeah. see earlier posts about who funded the tea party rallies. thanks NRA and Fox News! but anyway, here comes the one we knew would get here….

if the OWS mob has a theme at all, it is to kill capitalism and the free market system, the one financial structure that has created the highest standard of living for more people than any other system yet devised. while they haven’t offered any alternatives, the obvious one would be socialism, a system that has been proven a failure in every country where it’s been tried.

Ah that it is. The penultimate step towards Godwin’s Law. So… anyway, here’s my response:

take some time to read this please, it is long. far too long for talk radio talking points, but this is very serious.

i interpret the data differently, the clear message to me is that the markets are not free at all, and that republican democracy has been subverted by oligarchic plutocracy. the top four segments of the economy have all been deregulated and subsidized in ways that have moved tax payer dollars into the hands of extremely wealthy individuals while tax codes have been structured to keep profits made from the capitalization of those industry level subsidizes. these are far more long ranging and harmful than the overt bonuses paid to financial executives following the tax-payer bailouts.

just to hit a few off the top of the heap – billions for offshore or remote oil infrastructure that could not normally be brought to market at a competitive price, locally subsidized construction of telecomunications infrastructure and auction of public spectrum into private hands, monopolistic merging of banking entities and crossing of state lines until there is no choice or competition at the consumer level, consolidation of health care insurers without transparency in how premiums are spent when they have increased at a multiple of 10x the cost of providing basic service, the needless production of advanced weapons systems for our own consumption at a level that is completely out of balance with the world market, or – perhaps the most damaging globally, allowing massive balloon like growth in inflated economic value through the creation of deravative financial products that have no real value other than speculation on white paper debt…. we could go on and on.

but while not even granular, this is far more complicated on a macroeconomic and philosophical level than most are willing to engage.

capitalism is not without problems, however, particularly in a planet were global population, pollution, resource consumption, and communication were not even imagined when it was first conceived. predating the industrial revolution, adam smith’s vision of capitalism is far more moralistic and humanistic in philosophy than the economic system that came into being. marxism, a product of post industrial thought is more of a framework for understanding cultural interactions through conflict. an objective student can observe that both philosophical perspectives are at work in expansion of modes of production into cheaper labor markets where standards of living are lower and civil rights are laxed, but in the global information age we are seeing how short lived and unsustainable that kind of predatory capitalization strategy is. capitalism requires resources to capitalize and free markets require capital to be effective. our economy has become so dependent upon consumption instead of production that it is unstable, and there is not enough capital in the hands of consumers to move the needle any more.

and your points about socialism, while predictable ideology of the american culture that was propagandized against it by the mercantilist, industrialist, and financial ruling class, are not based in reality. the standards of living in many western european nations that adopted various models of democratic socialism based in no small part on george marshall’s reconstructive plan are higher than in the united states. our current economic disparity rivals the economy of pre-revolutionary france and, in terms of wealth per capita and chances of upward socio-economic mobility, the united states offers less to citizens than did great britain to its citizens at the end of the royalist economy that we found so repugnant that we revolted against it.

there are currently more people unemployed and in poverty in the united states than the whole population of sweden, commonly held by american conservatives as a boogeyman of socialism. in truth, our unemployed workforce is nearly twice the entire population of sweden. and it should be noted that there have been no changes to the tax structure of the job creating class, and corporate profits are record setting, but there are still no opportunities for these people — so that argument of job creating class is just not true. and there are great opportunities for ambition and accumulation of sizeable personal wealth in these societies — the owner of ikea – who lives in sweden and pays taxes there – is one of the world’s richest people and held the top spot on the forbes list a few years ago.

state socialism of the core industries that provide the foundation of all other industries and commerce – electricity, telecommunications, and healthcare, would remove cost burdens from employers who have had to lay off workers to mitigate the skyrocketing costs those industry segments have placed upon all other business. such a move is a natural step in the maturity of economic models, even predicted by capitalist economists. currently, taxpayers subsidize privatized non-competitive companies to supply these core services in sweetheart deals.

we have heard the calls for smaller and smaller government, but honestly, the expanding population requires levels of services and our marketplace requires solid infrastructure for people to do business in it, or else all business people become serfs or sharecroppers to the owners of the marketplace. the guise of smaller government has been achieved in the past several years by outsourcing critical functions to private contractors while lowering taxes on wealthy, but we have seen that the value for those services has been terrible and the price point was debt financed. debt became a tradable commodity, and people continued to get very wealthy more quickly than reasonable by financial trickery, without contributing real wealth to the marketplace.

there are more americans living in poverty than ever in the united states. this is proof that your argument is not true. more americans enjoy a lower standard of living because this market iteration is not free nor humanistic in the way adam smith envisioned. the needle has gone too far, and too few people who champion this form of government and economy are actually victims of it. this is not capitalism anymore. more appropriate words are oligarchy, plutocracy, and kleptocracy. these are all more conservative systems, and are so far to the right that they make real capitalism look like communism.

but the easiest solution is to stop the foreign wars we shouldn’t have started, stop buying weapons we don’t need because it is just our economy eating it’s own tail, and start re-investing in the growth of a middle class (our consumer market) who can buy things to move our domestic production and manufacturing capacity back up to a balanced domestic supply and demand. but first, make the exotic financial dealings that make money out of air illegal again, because that is what is really hurting us, and that is why people are mad at wall street.

they’re not a mob, they’re a market.

See, there’re not socialists, commies, damn dirty hippies, or even nazis (sorry Godwin), they’re customers, consumers, and producers. You business types can understand that, right? They’re citizens. They’re people…. and maybe they’re people who actually remember watching Mr. Rogers on PBS and give a shit about each other and making the world a better place.

                          

I’ve been talking about this movement for five weeks, because that’s when it started and I saw it start because I was watching it via Twitter. And as I’ve talked, lectured, blogged, tweeted, and posted about the event, my angle has been on how corporate media has ignored the story or covered it with a stunningly overt and largely unaddressed bias/objectivity problem.  The media and telecommunications industry is the fourth largest private segment of the United States economy. While loudly discussing how critical their role is to holding government accountable, the “objective” media is not at all objective about covering criticism of the marketplace where their own stocks are traded. And that marketplace of the 1% of wealthiest Americans is dangerously intertwined and more powerful than the government of the people, and by the people. Here follows a lengthy excerpt of the piece:

In the first full week of October, according to Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, the protests occupied 7 percent of the nation’s collective news coverage, up from 2 percent in the last week of September. Before then, the coverage was so modest as to be undetectable by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which surveys 52 news outlets each week to produce a weekly study of news coverage.

The study released Wednesday showed that cable news and radio, which had initially ignored the protests almost entirely, started to give the protests significant coverage last week, often with a heavy dose of positive or negative opinion attached.

Some protesters have assailed news media outlets for scoffing at their leaderless nature and lack of agreed-upon goals, but some have also carefully courted attention from those outlets.

“They insist on their story being told, even as they’re arguing about just what the story should be,” the media critic James Rainey wrote in Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times. Mr. Rainey suggested that reporters resist the urge to make instant judgments about what the protests represent: “Sometimes the most courageous story is the one that says: I haven’t seen this before. I’m not sure what it means. I don’t have a clue where it is going.”

The populist main message of the occupy movement is actually quite clear to anyone who can see it with an open mind, particularly one that has not been deafened by three continuous decades of ‘free’ market trumpeting. The occupiers are trying to show everyone who hasn’t realized it yet that the so-called ‘free’ market is not free at all, it is rigged by the wealthiest participants, who have successfully used it and co-opted the government into plutocracy that is actually acting in kleptocratic ways, taking taxpayer money into corporations that don’t in turn pay taxes.

These very few people have used their wealth to influence the political process to deregulate certain segments, consolidate competition into monopolistic entities and subsidize certain industries, change tax codes to help them retain more of that money, and then use their influence to thwart any chance of a political or civic action that could threaten the accumulation of that wealth.

This is not only done through the campaign financing process (reform of which is a clearly stated goal of the occupy protesters) but also through very successful use of major corporate media platforms. Let’s just link to a google search of “Wall Street Journal scandal” to put a nail in the the ‘liberal media’ straw man so we can move on productively. I’ll let you the reader figure out just how pervasive, powerful, and completely unethical Rupert Murdoch’s media enterprise — the largest in the United States — is. It is pretty clear.

But even if they aren’t peddling their influence to candidates as the News of the World did in the U.K., all U.S. news media are completely dependent upon a divisive political process. Talking deeply and legitimately about campaign finance reform and the ultra wealthy would be literally attacking the richest and best customers.

Television news media on cable and broadcast cannot survive without political advertising revenue. And that’s all there is to that. 2012 will be a record year in political ad spending at a time when core media platforms are absolutely being destroyed by new media platforms. In much of the same way we only cover bombing body counts or protester arrests, all journalism stories on campaign finance reform talk in big, generalist terms that have little meaning to real citizens, and all of these stories start and stop with the obscene amounts that candidates raise. They never go the next step to tell the citizens the ultimate beneficiaries of these huge campaign war chests are their companies. The people used to own a great deal of the newspaper media without realizing it, their purchasing of classified advertising was the 42 percent revenue buffer that kept the super wealthy advertising customers from holding so much financial influence over that platform of critical, in-depth journalism.

But that bird has flown and, really, this is all old news to the Internet community that has been talking about this and calling for action and looking for solutions and changes for years. Many members of that community are holding an extended and protracted and diverse IRL meetup on Wall Street and elsewhere around the nation. Glenn Beck isn’t there and there are no organized, big money underwriters taking people to protest in busses. But, citizen media is there, and has been from the start. This time, a short quote from the piece:

The spike in news media coverage is significant because, among other reasons, it may lend legitimacy to the movement and spur more people to seek out protest information on Facebook and other Web sites.

I beg that the data calls for a different interpretation, Brian. Here’s my rewrite:

The lag in news media coverage is significant because, among other reasons, it shows how their legitimacy is becoming more questionable as they grow out of touch with the people they claim to serve while serving the wealthy and powerful that the occupy movement is protesting, having gotten their information from trusted friends on Facebook and other independent and objective Web sites.

See what I did there? But, hey, some nameless, uncredited, and therefore unaccountable editor (who may have gotten some stock options way back when) is probably going to cut that down for ‘clarity.’

P.S. Thanks, Brian. It’s a good piece.

                          

Americans spend just a fraction of online time with news compared to social media | Poynter..

The above link by my friend and sometimes editor Steve Myers at Poynter points out some great research by Nielsen about our online habits. We spend more time socializing online than we do with the news online.

That’s no surprise. We do this in our offline lives too. Even my great grandmother only watched the nightly news for 30-60 minutes a day or read the paper in the morning for less time than that. But she spent hours with me playing checkers and talking and doing things.

So now we do more things on the Interwebs, so why shouldn’t we spend more time with our friends and families near and far than we do with journalism. It doesn’t make us less aware. And the framing of these kinds of conversations tends to suggest _ even in the research level_ that there is some shallowness applied to spending our time socializing than reading important news.

But the big thing wrong about that inference is that the news of my loved ones’ lives is very, very important to me. Social media is all about sharing news and information that matters on scales small and large. We talk about events of the day at lunches and around the family dinner table and at happy hours and everywhere else people meet. We share our stories of what happened to us and what we’ve experienced. Online or on the phone or on a letter or in person, we are all people connecting to each other in different ways but doing the same things.

All of it is news to us. And it comes from the most trusted sources, our friends and family. This shouldn’t be news to news people.

                          

*DO* WORRY ABOUT US. AND, MORE TO THE POINT, U.S. As most of you know, I believe that the United States has gradually, subtly, invisibly to most of us, become a police state over the last 30 years. This morning’s events are roughly equivalent to the Reichstag fire that provided the social opportunity for the Nazi take-over of Germany. I am *not* suggesting that, like the Nazis, the authoritarian forces in America actually had a direct role in perpetrating this mind-blistering tragedy. (Though their indirect role deserves a much longer discussion.) Nevertheless, nothing could serve those who believe that American “safety” is more important than American liberty better than something like this. Control freaks will dine on this day for the rest of our lives. Within a few hours, we will see beginning the most vigorous efforts to end what remains of freedom in America. Those of who are willing to sacrifice a little – largely illusory – safety in order to maintain our faith in the original ideals of America will have to fight for those ideals just as vigorously. I beg you to begin NOW to do whatever you can – whether writing your public officials, joining the ACLU or EFF, taking to the streets, or living visibly free and fearless lives – to prevent the spasm of control mania from destroying the dreams that far more have died for over the last two hundred twenty five years than died this morning. Don’t let the terrorists or (their natural allies) the fascists win. Remember that the goal of terrorism is to create increasingly paralytic totalitarianism in the government it attacks. Don’t give them the satisfaction. Fear nothing. Live free. And, please, let us try to forgive those who have committed these appalling crimes. If we hate them, we will become them. May God – or Whatever you want to call It – bless us all. We’ll need it. Barlow

via From John Perry Barlow’s mailing – Boing Boing.

                          

Today in my multimedia journalism class, the anniversary packages gave us incredible material to review. Phenomenally talented producers and storytellers pulled out all the stops to create some incredible pieces of work from which we can admire and learn from for that pure, arbitrary stance. But as we go through them one after the other, it starts to blur and the common methods and techniques stand out and the content wears and even becomes thin and repetitive as the same angles, the same devices, the same contrivances keep showing up. They become cliche.

Let’s really think about what we do here as a collective culture. Some stories are perennials and some are annuals. I have seen first hand in many editorial meetings the editors’ calendars come out and the anniversaries get plugged in, big and small. We have to come up with new angles on them all the time, some are quite a stretch.

For the decade edition of the 9/11 anniversary, folks have been planning for a year or more. I’ve been in a lot of those meetings too. These packages are like the monster wedding, and the journo bridezillas have been sweating and fretting over every detail from the napkin rings down to the boutonnieres for months on end. 9/11/2001 is their big day and all their wall-to-wall coverage is going to walk down the aisle after all the build up and expectation. There will be tears, right where they should be. Formula, expected, a sure thing.

And at what cost? How many hours and dollars went into these projects and packages and specials? How could that effort, skill and talent have been applied on pressing and current issues with deep significance and meaning to the whole society? While we covered a circus of politics that plays daily in the tents we raised just for them, how many journalists could have done more to inform rather let pols and pundits wag on? Could we have our national spending, deficit and budget debate covered with such artistry? Would we have understood healthcare reform better if half the effort from 9/11′s anniversary been spent there? Or the Arab Spring? Or something about the watchdog of democracy or whatever?

But those are hard stories to tell. Anniversaries of death are easy pickings. And we’ve gone all out on this one every single year leading up to this big bang, just a look through major foreign media is a gut check with how heavy handed we are.  We can all tell ourselves that it is what the people want, because that’s what we think, and we’ll get re-enforced by the people who look and talk about it. We’ll say with long faces that we’re performing a service and stepping in with rather than setting the conversational agenda with our bombardment. We’re playing to the crowd.

And then the big industry and corporate PSAs and viagra ads will roll. And we’ll count up the ratings and page views and copies sold. We’ll cash in on the anniversary of tragedy. Because that’s what the business end of our business has become. That’s what the seasonal hackneyed editorial and traffic drivers have driven us to, the business model of the annual back to football sections, or the memorial day content for the appliance sales. And I can’t help it, these are the times when it gives me a bad taste in my mouth. This isn’t saving democracy, it is playing on people’s fear and grief.

This is a significant event and a big story, no doubt.  And I’m sorry for what happened on 9/11. I was a part of it. I have deeply painful and conflicted emotions about it. But no matter how close or far or what you lost on that day, you all know that fear and terror and death and loss happen in small and big ways all over the world all the time. Bad things happen, terrible things happen, tragic things happen.

It isn’t the tragedy though, but how we react after the tragedy that defines us.

                          

A fantastic Op-Ed by Krugman today:

Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas, recently made headlines by dismissing evolution as “just a theory,” one that has “got some gaps in it” — an observation that will come as news to the vast majority of biologists. But what really got peoples’ attention was what he said about climate change: “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.”

That’s a remarkable statement — or maybe the right adjective is “vile.”

via Republicans Against Science – NYTimes.com.

Let’s now turn to the last interview given by Dr. Carl Sagan, the man who popularized science for a generation:

In the Bible, the rainbow is a sign from God, a promise that he won’t send other disasters to the world. After a few thousand years, we know that the rainbow is caused by the refraction of light in moisture in the air, a prism effect. You can make one with a garden hose.

You can’t run a 21st century technology based nation and economy with belief systems from the 8th century B.C. This is completely unacceptable and patently irresponsible.

It is equally irresponsible that news editors and reporters do not mention this right up front in their reporting of these kinds of comments. It isn’t an opinion page thing, it is a fact checking thing. These are facts.

And no matter what these candidates believe in, the facts need to be spelled out in context with the quotes if journalism wants to be taken seriously. Hiding behind bias, objectivity and odd ethics is no way to go forward. It just creates more misinformation and hinders the progress of the craft and industry.

And in these cases, it actually threatens the lives of every living thing on the planet.