Here are the ten key ideas I plan to share with the Media140/Sydney conference underway right now in Sydney, Australia. I will be speaking to the conference via Skype in a few hours. The theme of the event is “the future of journalism in the social media age.” These ten Twitter-able ideas are my contribution to that puzzle.
1. Audience atomization has been overcome. (Link)
2. Open systems don’t work like closed systems. (Link)
3. The sources go direct. (Dave Winer)
4. When the people formerly known as the audience use the press tools they have to inform one another— that’s citizen journalism. (Link)
5. “There’s no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.” (Clay Shirky)
6. “Do what you do best and link to the rest.” (Jeff Jarvis)
7. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; I just don’t know which half.” (John Wanamaker)
8. “Here’s where we’re coming from” is more likely to be trusted than the View from Nowhere. (Link)
9. The hybrid forms will be the strongest forms. (Link)
10. “My readers know more than I do.” (Dan Gillmor)
Bonus notion: You gotta grok it before you can rock it. (Link)
A method I endorse is to understand things by participating in them. By doing your own thing, you learn the difference between possible actions (what you can do with the system) and likely behavior: what most people will tend to do when that system is switched on for them. Forget this difference and you foreclose on your invention.
I started about a year ago in my project to understand Twitter by being on it. I wanted to know what it could be used for by citizens of the Web seeking knowledge for any reason. As a writer I wanted to make it work for me and my interrelated schemes. (Which is the approach I have with Tumblr, too. And Friend Feed.)
Taking @jayrosen_nyu for my ID on Twitter brought the social graph of the university and its requirements into play. Constraints create the “field” in which a style can emerge upon a practice. The name I’ve given to the posting style I favor is mindcasting. These notes are in further definition of the form, which is also a meme that is incompletely spread.
But it has spread, as I will try to show. And I am trying to spread it now, by posting this compendium.
Notes 1-16
1. Home page of my Twitter feed. “I don’t do lifecasting but mindcasting on Twitter.”
2. David Sarno, technology reporter for the Los Angeles Times: On Twitter, mindcasting is the new lifecasting (March 11, 2009)
Twitter, the micro-messaging service where users broadcast short thoughts to one another, has been widely labeled the newest form of digital narcissism. And if it’s not self-obsession tweeters are accused of, it’s self-promotion, solipsism or flat out frivolousness.
But naysayers will soon eat their tweets. There’s already a vibrant community of Twitter users who are using the system to share and filter the hyper-glut of online information with ingenious efficiency. Forget what you had for breakfast or how much you hate Mondays. That’s just lifecasting.
Mindcasting is where it’s at…
“Mindcasting came about when I was trying to achieve a very high signal-to noise-ratio,” he explained. This meant using his Twitter account to send out tweets pointing to the best media news and analysis he could find, 15 or 20 times a day. “I could work on the concept of a Twitter feed as an editorial product of my own.”
As Rosen noted, that product is itself a distillation of the huge stream of input he gets from the nearly 550 journalists, analysts and news outlets he follows on Twitter. “I’ve hand-built my own tipster network,” he said. “It’s editing the Web for me in real time.”
Also said to be practicing the mindcasting style: Tim O’Reilly. (Who later responds on Twitter: “I only wish I was as disciplined as to use the process [he] outlines in #3.”)
3. From Digital Media Buzz, Mindcasting: the New Blue Ocean:
The act of building an editorial presence in Twitter by filtering, processing and structuring the flow of information that moves through the medium using one’s follow list, journalistic sensibilities and individual right to publish updates.
4. New method: (Twitter, April 4th, 2009) Slow blogging at PressThink, daily mindcasting at Twitter, work room at FriendFeed. Example: post in gestation.
5. Mindcasting: Field Notes
√ Demo for a breaking news approach: Example of trying to be first for followers, with new facts and perspectives on a story. Which are then—if it works—spread by followers. (The story: “Seems Maureen Dowd plagiarized from TPM’s Josh Marshall. Wonder what the explanation could be.”)
√ Demo of a Tweet that uses 140 characters but it’s constructed for easy re-tweeting via the chopping method. http://tr.im/kWAw
√ Demo: professional press watcher’s hand-built tipster network and alert system.
√ Demo: live bug catching in an AP report about a Twitter-based TV show.
6. Twitter is blogging adapted to the live web. (Read Doc Searls on the distinction, live vs. the static web.) PressThink, begun in 2003, is the site I use for long-form blogging: feature posts typically run 2,500 words with dozens of links, plus an After Matter section that curates reactions and adds related material. Each feature attempts to be definitive in some way; they succeed in search when done right.
The research question was: can ‘casting on a theme over an interval in editorial time—a month, say—drive the production of an standout long-form blog post on that theme, in that time? (The month.) Here’s the demo I did to test the idea: links were proven effective on Twitter, then woven into a round-up post on a big debate going on now. The final product saves the user time and meets other ends the university has. It is J-school on the extension model.
PressThink, Rosen’s Flying Seminar In The Future of News (March 29, 2009)
The pace quickened after Clay Shirky’s Thinking the Unthinkable. Here’s my best-of from a month of deep think as people came to terms with the collapse of the newspaper model, and tried looking ahead. I know these twelve links work. I tested them on Twitter.
As the crisis in newspaper journalism grinds on, people watching it are trying to explain how we got here, and what we’re losing as part of the newspaper economy crashes. Some are trying to imagine a new news system. I try to follow this action, and have been sending around the best of these pieces via my Twitter feed. It’s part of my experiment in mindcasting…
We like to test our work: did the flying seminar take off? Google search for “the future of news.”
Also: by using Twitter as a simple notification system I can drive as many users to my new blog posts as I used to get by wrangling links from other bloggers and aggregators. This is because the people who follow me have selected for what I ‘cast about, as you can see here.
7. It’s true that mindcasting is a pretentious term. People have always told me that certain things I do are pretentious. Every occupation has its hazards, right? What saves mindcasting from being totally so is that it’s an alternative to an even more pretentious notion: lifecasting. Still, I have no quarrel with lifecasting; I just don’t do it, myself. Twitter’s architected question, “what are you doing?” got crossed out, in favor of: “what are you thinking? ” and (via Chris Brogan) “what has your attention?”
8. Sean Carroll at Discover magazine’s Cosmic Variance group blog.
The biggest substantive complaint is that we have become a society of over-sharers, and one simply doesn’t want to be continually updated about what people had for dinner. Again: fine! Just don’t subscribe to Newt Gingrich’s feed. But the claim that Twitter is nothing but mindless inanities is just as wrong as the analogous claim for blogs — in fact it’s precisely the same claim, five years later. There are other things you can do with the technology — the technical terms are “lifecasting” [here’s what I had for dinner] vs. “mindcasting” [here’s a thought, a question, an observation, a link to something more substantial]. And if someone else really does want to know what their friends are having for dinner, why should you be so bothered?
9. Wordspy (“the word lover’s guide to new words…”) has an entry on mindcasting.
pp. Posting a series of messages that reflect one’s current thoughts, ideas, passions, observations, readings, and other intellectual interests.
—mindcast v., n.
—mindcaster n.
10. A Blog Around the Clock: New Journalistic Workflow (April 5, 2009)
Step 1 is mindcasting on Twitter (often misunderstood for time-wasting lifecasting, e.g., this)
Step 2 is aggregation of a number of imported tweets and digestion of them on FriendFeed
Step 3 is aggregation of several FF threads into a more coherent blog post.
The next step, Step 4, could potentially be to aggregate the ideas and knowledge from several blog posts and publish as an article in the traditional media outlets.
I can think of even Step 5 - aggregating a number of media articles into a book.
11. Mindcasting has metrics. Of course it does. See http://jay.40twits.com/ “These are the 40 most recent links I’ve pushed through Twitter, ranked by the number of times they’ve been clicked.” (You’ll see that “Seems Maureen Dowd plagiarized from TPM’s Josh Marshall” did very well.)
jay.40twits.com is a Twitter application in the development phase, created by media hacker Dave Winer, author of Scripting News, godfather of RSS. We discussed it in this 45 min podcast, part of a series we do called Re-booting the News. The top 40 list is a tool “of” mindcasting. It teaches me about what I am doing. What works with the crowd I am doing it for. (Currently around 21,000 people.)
12. Christopher Geidner at Law Dork, 2.0
As I deal with figuring out what Twitter means for my blogging, I’m trying to post much of the “quick links” and pithy (or not) thoughts (what Rosen calls “mindcasting”) at Twitter while reserving the blog for longer, more developed posts. In other words, if you like Law Dork, I’d encourage you to follow chrisgeidner @ Twitter.
13. New York Magazine’s Twitter approval matrix. Graphs Twiiter users on two dimensions: “insightful” to “insipid” on the vertical, lifecasting to mindcasting on the horizontal. Meme spread high point. Caused Twitter to put me on the suggested users list on April 29, 2009. The next day I requested that they take me off the list, for reasons explained in the first 15 minutes of this podcast with Dave Winer.
14. Stowe Boyd, Word of the Moment: Mindcasting (March 15, 2009)
We’ll have to see if the subtle shading of mindcasting really catches hold. I am betting no, although I appreciate the nuance.
I favor streaming as the core verb for all these activities, anyway. Casting is too strongly related to broadcast, which is strange, considering Jay is the guy who coined the term “the people formerly known as the audience.”
15. Comment I left at Mindcasting: the New Blue Ocean.
I’d like to add one component to your list of key features in mindcasting as currently practiced…
and
16. Julian Dibbell, Is a Tweet the New Size of a Thought? (Wired.com)
It may begin as just a seed of an idea — a thought about the future of online media, say — tossed out into the germinating medium of the twitterverse, passed along from one Twitter feed to another, critiqued or praised, reshaped and edited, then handed back for fleshing out on a blog, first, and then, perhaps, in a book. It’s not that tweet-size sparks of insight haven’t always been part of the media ecosystem, in other words. It’s just that Twitter now has given them a vastly more exciting social life.
The Tuscon Citizen
Our Opinion: Seeking answers?
For those of you looking to this space for perspective on the Citizen’s demise, for those looking for What It All Means - you are looking in the wrong place. Excuse us, but we’re a little too close to the situation right now.
Do you ask someone how it feels when a relative dies after a long bout with cancer? After all, we knew the end was coming for months.
But here’s a revelation: When death comes, even if it’s not supposed to be a shock … it’s still a shock.
So give us six months, or six years. Then we can provide some context.
Let’s stick, then, to the few points we can make with a sufficient degree of conviction:
• If there’s a way to spin the Citizen’s closure into a positive for Tucson, we’d love to hear it. But one doesn’t exist.
It would be bad enough if we were just any company. But a newspaper is the type of high-salary, knowledge industry, “smart” business that any of the city’s TREOish, economic-development types would love to recruit.
Those of us who have explored Tucson’s, uh, challenging employment environment know we won’t be making anywhere near the money we make now. Bottom line for Tucson: More than five dozen well-paying jobs lost.
But a newspaper isn’t just any company. It’s a repository of the city’s collective memory and of our aspirations and hopes.
Healthy journalism equates with a vibrant city. A dead paper is analogous to the city’s libraries closing - a chilling prospect.
• To all those bloggers and “citizen journalists” who, if you believe the Internet, are this close to reinventing the industry, here’s your opportunity.
Now is your chance to cover never-ending board meetings, make Freedom of Information Act requests to dislodge facts from public officials, call sources - you have cultivated sources, right? - and otherwise do what we in our dying industry like to call “reporting.”
To do it right, you’ll have to work eight to 10 hours a day, five to six days a week. If it sounds like a job, not a hobby, it is. But don’t expect to get paid; apparently, that business model has been discredited.
We’re rooting for you. Public officials need vigilant scrutiny if our dollars are to be wisely spent and public policies are to be sane and progressive. So good luck with that.
• Finally, frankly, this paper’s closing dissolves a colorful, creative cast of characters the likes of whom you’ll never find in one place again. From sweet Mary Bustamante’s long-time devotion to schools to Dan Buckley’s vivid mariachi videos, from Ryn Gargulinski’s bizarre takes of the macabre to Alan Fischer’s scintillating science coverage, from Steve Rivera and Geoff Grammer’s mastery of Wildcats basketball and high school sports, respectively, to Anthony Gimino’s personal peeks at sports personas, we’ve had it all. And you had it, too.
But not now. With the loss of the Tucson Citizen, everybody in Tucson loses. And that’s a fact. Goodbye.
Editor and Publisher: Tucson Citizen Folding Tomorrow
Tuscon Citizen: Our epitaph
Arizona Star: AG sues to block closing of Citizen: Star’s owner denies it conspired with Gannett on paper’s shutdown
The problem lay not so much with the poverty of the underlying theory as with selective reading of it—a selective reading shaped by the social milieu. That social milieu encouraged financial decision makers to cherry-pick the theories that supported excessive risk taking. It discouraged whistle-blowing, not just by risk-management officers in large financial institutions, but also by the economists whose scholarship provided intellectual justification for the financial institutions’ decisions. The consequence was that scholarship that warned of potential disaster was ignored. And the result was global economic calamity on a scale not seen for four generations.
… These simple models should have been regarded as no more than starting points for serious thinking. Instead, those responsible for making key decisions, institutional investors and their regulators alike, took them literally. This reflected the seductive appeal of elegant theory. Reducing risk to a single number encouraged the belief that it could be mastered. It also made it easier to leave early for that weekend in the Hamptons.
Now, of course, we know that the gulf between assumption and reality was too wide to be bridged. These models were worse than unrealistic. They were weapons of economic mass destruction.
When it is costly to acquire and assimilate information about how reality diverges from the assumptions underlying popular economic models, it will be tempting to ignore those divergences. When convention within the discipline is to assume efficient markets, there will be psychic costs if one attempts to buck the trend. Scholars, in other words, are no more immune than regulators to the problem of cognitive capture.
The consumers of economic theory, not surprisingly, tended to pick and choose those elements of that rich literature that best supported their self-serving actions. Equally reprehensibly, the producers of that theory, benefiting in ways both pecuniary and psychic, showed disturbingly little tendency to object. It is in this light that we must understand how it was that the vast majority of the economics profession remained so blissfully silent and indeed unaware of the risk of financial disaster.
— Economist Barry Eichengreen, The Last Temptation of Risk, April 3, 2009
On a recent visit to Iraq, my first trip back in over three years, a few things surprised me. There was the “countdown calendar” to President Bush’s last day in office, sitting openly on a soldier’s desk. There was the high-up United States official who told me, by way of introduction, that he did not believe the decision to invade Iraq was “reality-based.”
— New York Times reporter Ian Fisher, Bahgdad Bureau blog, March 20, 2008.
As Whitman told me on the day in May 2003 that she announced her resignation as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency: ”In meetings, I’d ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!”
— Ron Suskind, Without a Doubt: Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush, New York Times, October 17, 2004
The White House seemed guilty of what might be called persistent, chronic up-is-downism, the tendency to ridicule the possibility that a given policy might actually have its predictable adverse consequences, to deny those consequences once they have already occurred, or—failing that—to insist against all evidence that those consequences were part of the plan all along. By late July, even a paragon of establishment conservatism like Barron’s columnist Alan Abelson was lamenting the president’s “regrettable aversion to the truth and reality when the truth and reality aren’t lovely or convenient.”
In the midst of getting those policies passed, the administration’s main obstacle has been the experts themselves—the economists who didn’t trust the budget projections, the generals who didn’t buy the troop estimates, intelligence analysts who questioned the existence of an active nuclear weapons program in Iraq. That has created a strong incentive to delegitimize the experts…
By disregarding the advice of experts, by shunting aside the cadres of career professionals with on-the-ground experience in these various countries, the administration’s hawks cut themselves off from the practical know-how which would have given them some chance of implementing their plans successfully. In a real sense, they cut themselves off from reality. When they went into Iraq they were essentially flying blind, having disengaged from almost everyone who had real-world experience in how effective occupation, reconstruction and nation-building was done.
— Josh Marshall, The Post-Modern President, Washington Monthly, September, 2003
1. “Left to Just Study What We Do.”
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
— Ron Suskind, Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush, New York Times, Oct. 17, 2004.
2. Other Governments Got it and Reported Back
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
—The Downing Street Memo, (emerged) May 1, 2005.
3. Torture Gets the Flow of Facts Going for Claims that Were Fictions to Begin With
In gathering evidence from victims of torture, we built a consistent picture of the narrative which the torturers were seeking to validate from confessions under torture. They sought confessions which linked domestic opposition to President Karimov with Al-Qaida and Osama Bin Laden; they sought to exaggerate the strength of the terrorist threat in Central Asia. People arrested on all sorts of pretexts – (I recall one involved in a dispute over ownership of a garage plot) suddenly found themselves tortured into confessing to membership of both the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and Al-Qaida. They were also made to confess to attending Al-Qaida training camps in Tajikistan and Afghanistan. In an echo of Stalin’s security services from which the Uzbek SNB had an unbroken institutional descent, they were given long lists of names of people they had to confess were also in IMU and Al-Qaida. It became obvious to me after just a few weeks that the CIA material from Uzbekistan was giving precisely the same narrative being extracted by the Uzbek torturers – and that the CIA “intelligence” was giving information far from the truth. I asked my Deputy, Karen Moran, to call on a senior member of the US Embassy and tell him I was concerned that the CIA intelligence was probably derived from torture by the Uzbek security services. Karen Moran reported back to me that the US Embassy had replied that it probably did come from torture, but in the War on Terror they did not view that as a problem.
— Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Trying Again to Stop Torture, March 13, 2009. (via Andrew Sullivan.)
4. Making Your Own Reality is Hard; I’m Pooped!
Frank Luntz, the arch-conservative pollster known as the research hammer by which the Gingrich revolution came down hard on President Bill Clinton, wants to take over research for the entertainment industry. Why would he give up pollstering in American politics — where he has been so successful — for the movies? Luntz, who sold his company, Luntz Research, to Omnicon in 2005, said he’s had enough of politics. “I’m tired of selling reality,” he said. “Reality sucks. It’s mean. Divisive. Negative. What Hollywood offers is a chance to create a new reality, in two hours time.”
—Sharon Waxman, Fox Pollster Goes Hollywood, April 27, 2009
5. The base is not reality-based. So why would the people at the top be?
This study investigated biased message processing of political satire in The Colbert Report and the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert. Results indicate that political ideology influences biased processing of ambiguous political messages and source in late-night comedy. Using data from an experiment (N = 332), we found that individual-level political ideology significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert’s political ideology. Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism. Finally, a post hoc analysis revealed that perceptions of Colbert’s political opinions fully mediated the relationship between political ideology and individual-level opinion.
— International Journal of Press/Politics, The Irony of Satire, Vol. 14, 2009. (via Jason Linkins.)
6. On what basis, indeed?
The word had appeared a few times before in this context, most recently on April 10, when the Central Intelligence Agency said it was closing the network of secret overseas prisons where interrogations took place. Scott Shane, who covers national security, said he and his editor in the Washington bureau, Douglas Jehl, negotiated over the wording of the first paragraph. Shane wrote that methods used in the prisons were “widely denounced as illegal torture.” Jehl changed that to the “harshest interrogation methods” since the Sept. 11 attacks. Shane said he felt that with more information coming to light, including a leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the words harsh and even harshest no longer sufficed. He proposed brutal, and Jehl agreed. … Jehl said that when the paper is discussing what is generally regarded as the most extreme interrogation method the C.I.A. used, waterboarding, “we’ve become more explicit in saying in a first reference that it’s a near-drowning technique” that Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and many other experts “have called torture.” But he said: “I have resisted using torture without qualification or to describe all the techniques. Exactly what constitutes torture continues to be a matter of debate and hasn’t been resolved by a court. This president and this attorney general say waterboarding is torture, but the previous president and attorney general said it is not. On what basis should a newspaper render its own verdict, short of charges being filed or a legal judgment rendered?” Jehl argued for precision and caution. I agree.
— Clark Hoyt, New York Times, Public Editor, Telling the Brutal Truth, April 25, 2009
√ For more on these themes, PressThink: The Retreat from Empiricism (2006)
PoliticsDaily is the brainchild of Martin Moe, senior vice president at AOL, and is built under Bill Wilson’s new MediaGlow division, which is building new content brands distinct from AOL itself.
Moe says that while the Huffington Post is largely a content aggregator, has a leftward bent, and doesn’t pay many of its bloggers, PoliticsDaily will be 100% original content from “experienced” paid writers, and will be “poly-partisan” with perspectives from the liberals, centrists and conservatives. Of course, with the financial backing of AOL, PoliticsDaily has the advantage of being able to pay all those editors and reporters. But if PoliticsDaily is supposed to be an online new magazine, why isn’t AOL’s sister subsidiary Time Inc. running it?
via TechCrunch
I recently was in Evansville, Ind., where my parents live, to cover Sarah Palin’s speech at a pro-life dinner there. (No, we most certainly are not above luring in readers with a gateway drug, hoping they stick around for the hard stuff). At a League of Women Voters lunch there, the local Congressman, former Vanderburgh County Sheriff Brad Ellsworth, made the same point Kristof had: “When you see the gotcha that goes on,” with both right and left not only claiming they’re correct 100 percent of the time but “trying to make the other side look like serial killers,” neither side is wholly credible. “Whether you watch 24/7 Fox or 24/7 MSNBC,” he told the crowd. “Don’t watch only that.” Instead, make sure you’re exposed to multiple views, and thus the whole picture. Which is what we’ll do our best to offer at PoliticsDaily.com.
Melinda Henneberger, editor of PoliticsDaily, Old School Journalism in a Dot-Com Package.
1.
The New York Times’ Peter Baker, who reported on the Clinton and Bush 43 administrations for the Washington Post, said that the Obama administration is “in some ways … more transparent,” but in other ways, “they’re just like every other White House.”
Baker said that while the Obama team will engage with reporters more than the Bush team did, the traditional dynamic between the press corps and White House remains largely unchanged.
“They’re practitioners of the game,” Baker said of the Obama press team. “They’re not angels sent down from Heaven to change the way Washington works. They’re practitioners of the way Washington works.”
(Because we were under the impression that they are the heavenly angels of truth.)
— The Politico, Mixed Grade for Gibbs from WH Press
2.
I see no reason at all to doubt the sincerity of Dennis Blair, Obama’s own national intelligence director, who said in an April 16 memo to his staff that “high value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding” of Al Qaeda.
Blair later qualified this by adding, “There is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means.” But a reasonable person might imagine that it would take more than sweet talk, mind games, and lollipops to get hardened terrorists to sing.
— Stuart Taylor, Jr. National Journal, Did Torture Save Lives?
(Because we were under the impression that hardened terrorists would reveal all if we asked nicely and gave them sweets.)
— By Kevin Drum | Thu April 23, 2009 10:01 AM PST
Just kill me now. Via The Monkey Cage.
1.
For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.
“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.
But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted…
George Monbiot, a British environmental activist and writer, said that by promoting doubt, industry had taken advantage of news media norms requiring neutral coverage of issues, just as the tobacco industry once had.
“They didn’t have to win the argument to succeed,” Mr. Monbiot said, “only to cause as much confusion as possible.”
— Andrew Revkin, Industry Ignored its Scientists on Climate, his front page story in the New York Times today on industry exploiting he said, she said tendencies in journalism to sow confusion about climate change.
2.
There’s no way to gauge whether the industry-financed campaign of lobbying, public relations and advertising helped build that Senate blockade to ratification. But environmental campaigners say it’s clear that a little uncertainty goes a long way toward sustaining public inertia on an issue with the time scale and complexity of human-driven climate change.
“Their objective was always to slow things down,” said Kert Davies, a climate campaigner at Greenpeace. “Their argument was essentially the inverse of the precautionary principle: We shouldn’t do anything until we know everything.”
William O’Keefe, who was chairman of the Global Climate Coalition and a senior official at the American Petroleum Institute when the documents were produced, rejects such assertions. “The idea that there is some great industrial conspiracy to thwart progress is one of the greatest myths,” he told me. “Industry is rarely united on anything, and on this issue it’s totally not united.”
Andrew Revkin, A Climate of Doubt, blog post in the New York Times about today’s front page story on industry exploiting he said, she said tendencies in journalism to sow confusion.
3.
Currently at PressThink. He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User.
The bolding is my own— JR
To some degree, words failed us all in the aftermath of 9/11, a time of fear and disorientation. Journalists did not meet the challenge of holding the executive branch accountable, politically and morally, in the run-up to the Iraq war. Such failures, it is true, were not gross manipulations of the law in the service of inhumanity, but they were failures nonetheless. And they carried a human price.
So I’m wary of the clamor for retribution. Congress failed. The press failed. The judiciary failed. With almost 3,000 dead, America’s checks and balances got skewed, from the Capitol to Wall Street. Scrutiny gave way to acquiescence. Words were spun in feckless patterns.
Those checks and balances are recovering now… The U.S. has emerged from eight years of dyslexia. It has now revealed how dangerously words were manipulated and is learning again to speak a language the world can understand.
— Roger Cohen, No Time for Retribution, New York Times, April 22, 2009
Reply by Adam Serwer, Where the Elite Meet to Exonerate One Another
