What Journalists Don’t: Lessons from the Times (Aaron Swartz: The Weblog)

Speech to the Bay Area Law School Technology Conference blogs panel, as prepared.

So I was asked to speak about bloggers and journalists — it seems like people are always finding an excuse to talk about this. In fact, the National Press Club had a panel on it just yesterday. Most of the discussion focuses on what bloggers do — is it trustworthy? is it right? — but I’d like to take a different tack. I’d like to discuss what journalists don’t.

Last summer, during the election campaign, I decided to take on a little project. Every day for a month I would read all the political articles in the New York Times and take notes on them on a blog. A number of things stood out and I thought I would discuss them. Keep in mind that this is the New York Times, widely recognized to be the most serious of newspapers. So everything that applies to them applies to an even greater extent to all the lesser newspapers, the evening news, the talking head shows, and so on.

The first was the extreme conservative bias. One day, they ran a front page story that claimed Kerry was, quote, like a caged hamster. Another, claiming, quote, life is like high school, decided to interview various Kerry classmates. So they got two quotes. On the right was the guy who thought Kerry “seem[ed] ruthless” and on the left was the one who insisted “hatred is too strong a word” for what his classmates felt. These are just fun examples — I found hundreds of these things in just a month. And many were on more serious issues as well.

The constant theme was that Times reporters would repeat Republican talking points and images and so on. Kerry was elitist, Kerry was a flip-flopper, the Kerry campaign was failing. One reporter even had his own cottage industry in stories of that last type. Adam Nagourney ran 22 consecutive stories claiming Democrats were worried about themselves.

But we shouldn’t forget the more important things as well. The Times was, of course, one of the major outlets for false claims that Iraq had WMDs. My understanding is that it’s a sort of cardinal rule in journalism that if you’re going to make a claim, especially a big, important front-page claim, you get two sources. Well, the Times didn’t do that on WMDs — they just printed whatever the administration said. And when the administration used their bogus reporting to go to war, the Times did its best to ignore the fact that the war was a blatant violation of international law.

In all these areas, the blogs bested the Times. Some tracked the spreading meme that Kerry was elitist, others pointed out that Bush wasn’t much of a down-home cowboy himself, still others carefully debunked each new right-wing myth. Blogs pointed to people like weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who correctly pointed out there were no WMDs, or the Iraqi defector who explained they had all been destroyed. Blogs 1, Times 0.

The second thing I noticed during my study was that reporters rarely pointed out Bush was lying, corrected his lies, or even conceded that an objective reality containing a truth existed. You don’t have to trust me on this one; I spoke to Washington Post campaign reporter Jim VandeHei about it when he visited Stanford. Some things are undoubtedly true, he said — he got very animated — but editors won’t let reporters print the facts. He wanted to do a piece where he compared Bush and Kerry’s stump speeches to see how many lies they contained, but editors just wouldn’t let him.

So instead you get the results so perfectly parodied by Paul Krugman, who commented that if the administration announced the Earth was flat, the lead story in the Times the next day would be “Shape of Earth: Views Differ”. In fact, we don’t really need to leave that sort of thing to the imagination anymore. The other month ABC ran a show which balanced people who claimed they had been abducted by aliens against respected doctors who explained that their experiences resulted from a condition called sleep paralysis. Who was right? ABC refused to say.

Even when facts are reported, they don’t seem to stick. Just last month, a Harris poll found that 47% of adults think Saddam helped plan 9/11 and 36% think Iraq had WMDs. But if the media sends the message that it’s unnecessary to check your beliefs against the facts, should we really be so surprised that so many Americans don’t?

Blogs suffer from no such compulsions. They’re happy to take tell you the facts and show you the evidence. They’re happy to tell you that some things are just wrong and often furious against those who dare to lie. The incredible blog Media Matters, for example, diligently tracks right-wing lies spread through the media, citing all the sources that prove them false.

But the most important thing, and the thing that nobody really seems to talk about, was how completely empty the Times’s coverage was. It was entirely focused on who the candidates were giving stump speeches to or what ads they were buying this week.

The only time an actual policy proposal was mentioned was deep inside a discussion of how a candidate played with a certain group. You know, ‘Kerry has had problems with the Teamsters, even though they support his health care plan’ or something. That was basically it. And this is supposed to be the high point of journalism! If the Times won’t talk about policy then no one will.

And if nobody talks about policy then nobody votes on the basis of it. A September 2004 Gallup poll found that only 10% of registered voters said that they voted based on the candidates, quote, agenda/ideas/platforms/goals — 6% for Bush, 13% for Kerry.

And it’s at this point that you really have to ask yourself: “is this really a democracy?” It’s the most contested election of out time, coverage is lavished on the topic, the nation is closely divided, and yet the media completely ignores the issues. There’s no policy debate. And if the media doesn’t report the policy proposals and the media doesn’t report the facts, then we’re right back to my first point: vague emotional claims about Kerry being a rich elitist flip-flopper, or, from the other side, Kerry was a brave soldier who blew stuff up in the Vietnam war.

This wasn’t your grand democratic election: The people didn’t get together and look at the facts and have a debate about issues. They didn’t look at facts and they didn’t discuss issues at all! They sat in their houses, watched a bunch of fuzzy TV commercials, and took in news coverage that recited the same vague themes. And then they voted based on which fuzzy image they liked the best. There’s a word for stuff like that. It’s not pretty, but I think it’s appropriate. It’s called propaganda. This was an election on the basis of propaganda.

And so I believe blogs are important insofar as they help us move away from this sorry spectacle and towards a real democracy. Blogs, of course, can help spread propaganda — and no doubt, most do — but they can also help stem it. Political blogs can help pull people into politics, tell them things they wouldn’t otherwise hear, and lead them to organize their own projects — like building support for Howard Dean or trying to save social security.

One of the most important things I think blogs do, though, is teach people. The media, as I’ve noted, is supremely unintelligent. But I don’t think the people of this country are. And one of the most striking things about blogs to me is how they almost never talk down to their readership. Indeed most seem to think higher of their readership than they do themselves.

Atrios doesn’t hesitate before explaining some piece of economics that the Washington Post finds too complex. Tim Lambert will teach you the statistical theory you need to understand why some right-wing claim is wrong. And Brad DeLong has taught me more about what it’s like to be an economics guy in the government than I got from Paul O’Neill’s book.

The media isn’t going to come save from this nightmare. But maybe blogs can. Or at least they can help. The more people learn, the smarter they become. The smarter they become, the more they understand the way the world really works. The more they understand, the more they can do to fix things. And that is the truly important goal. Thank you.

So, what I did was I took the above speech, bolded the key words and numbers, and printed it out. Then I gave it mostly from memory, occasionally looking down to get the next bolded word or a particularly well-worded phrase. It worked really well, I think.

The speech touched quite a nerve, as I hoped. My two conservative co-panelists (Zack Rosen failed to show) immediately demanded a chance to respond and then cut off my rebuttals. One of them (Mike) started insisting there was no such thing as objective truth at which point I cut in and said ‘Well, I can see why Republicans would want to deny that truth exists since it often cuts against them!’ which was hailed as the best line of the night.

After the talk I got a lot of compliments and a guest blogger for Daily Kos said he’d talk to Markos about getting me an occasional spot on Daily Kos, which is something like the liberal blogger equivalent of a regular gig on the Tonight Show. So I think it went well. :-)

posted April 10, 2005 07:57 AM (Politics) (20 comments) #

What Journalists Don’t: Lessons from the Times

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