David Cohen

On the tragic demise of the Digital Homeroom

2009-03-01T08:19:04Z

A short but tedious eulogiac ode
Posted in response to popular demand, with profound apologies to the distinguished critic and writer of epic verse, Mr. Kevin Patra
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If you will, think on an August day, when
First their course began. To ASC, with
Laptops, pens they went, one 9 a.m.
Perchance to learn, perchance to sleep, they sat
In stair-stepped rows, and then: A whirr! A flash!
A slide, and then another, as POWERPOINT came
Forth to herald sore journalism's sweet relief
And SIXTY students watched in disbelief.

Sing in me, blog, and through me tell the story,
Of HOMEROOM, that spurned digital salvation,
Where tired pupils looked away, or slept,
Or wrote Jack Leonard's summaries of "Face the Nation."
It's been two weeks, let's check and see what's up:
Not much: MARC COOPER merely haws and hems,
As FIFTY students send IMs.

Ah, BRANDING! What the fuck art thou? Art thou...
A blog? A resume? A site? Art thou a
Different kind of thing, made on the Point,
Or out of tags? Art thou made by Waterfall,
Or Scrum? (I never knew what either was at all).
As guests and guests droned on and bored
FORTY students sat and lightly snored.

Let's pass a month, as winter falls. Fire, like
Soft fleece on sheep, lies on the hills,
And, just as a bad shepherd, who rambles
Without thought or note, at sheep who really should
Be doing real work, begins to lose his flock,
Full half our class has vanished like a prayer,
And THIRTY students wonder why they're there.

Come New Year, even Cooper's fled, and though
They'd covered little ground in three long months,
There came another leader, DANA CHINN,
To lift up that mighty banner, and do it once again.
Fast-march reverse! And in just a week, they're
Back at tags--old branding raised its sorry head
And TWENTY students wished they'd stayed in bed.

And then they went in secret, like vermin
Treading softly in the sneaking night
They bitched, they moaned, they said that horrid
Thing--the truth--and bit the hand that fed them
So much talk, but left them hungry still.
Oh, HOMEROOM! Slain by those ye loved so fine
Who'd sooner see ye drop than code a single line.
Why do I weep? Why write these sorry lines, why lift my pen?
Well, sad truth be told, I was of the final TEN.

Wake held for 4-year-old shot in Echo Park

2009-01-23T08:43:02Z

Family and neighbours gathered Thursday night at the home of the Lopez-Gonzalez family for a wake to honor Roberto Lopez, Jr., the boy shot dead Jan. 13 while walking from his Court Street home to a community center next door.

Make video montages at www.OneTrueMedia.com

As the parents of the slain boy cried and the local singer Juan Carlos Sanchez sang a song entitled "El Perron," written in honor of Roberto, Jr., members of the family wearing t-shirts printed with an image of him dressed as a cowboy filed past the white casket.
]]> Sanchez said that he had lived in the area for about twenty years, but recently moved away because it was too dangerous. Police said that the area was not among the city's worst for gang activity, but that there were frequent reports of gang incidents.

Neighbour Liz Hernandez said, following the shooting, she would no longer allow her children to walk in the street unaccompanied. "Not any more. Parents are getting concerned," she said.

The city closed off two blocks of Court Street to allow members of the extended family to park, and police gathered outside to pay their respects.

An altar built on the street at the site of the shooting attracted a steady stream of visitors and cash donations from outside the area last week.

The Iglesia Evangelica Latina, an evangelical church on Bellevue Avenue, held a car wash to raise money for the family's funeral expenses last Saturday. Pastor Nelson Sandobal of the church said that people had driven off the 101 Freeway on their way Downtown to give money, and that they had raised $1,040.

The Catholic Church has said that it will pay all of the costs of the funeral, which is to be held Friday morning at 9:30 a.m.

Police said that Howard Astorga, the 25-year-old parolee and alleged gang member who was arrested in connection with the shooting last week, was charged with murder Tuesday.

Edgar Jacinto, who owns the Tassos Market across the street from the house, said that Astorga was an occasional visitor to the street. He described him as having come to the shop about once a month, and having been an unfriendly customer, saying only "How much is this?" and "Thank you."

Police said they are still seeking the occupants of the red car at which they believe Astorga was shooting when two of his bullets struck Roberto, Jr.

Narrow line between ashes and life in Sylmar hills

2008-11-25T01:56:37Z

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On access to education

2008-11-17T03:05:15Z

I've spent the last few weeks reporting a piece about student loans for broadcast, and I have to say the really surprising thing I've found is that it's still possible to talk to a hell of a lot of people who don't think there's a serious problem. Financial aid deans at USC, UCLA, and Los Angeles City College all agree that, while there must be trouble someone, it isn't at their institutions, and a remarkable number of students--about a dozen at LACC and a good fifty I spoke to at UCLA--say they don't have any loans at all and don't want them.

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Right off the bat, I don't know. But I do know the following:

First of all, as a student, you're basically entitled to take out at least a Stafford loan, which has a limit, and also more generous Pell grants and Perkins loans if you can demonstrate need. Nonetheless, even if you have these, you mostly likely haven't got enough to pay your tuition and live, so you probably wind up wanting a PLUS loan, which is made to your parents if you're an undergraduate and to you if you're a graduate.

Loan officers, as well, for that matter, as Sallie Mae, are fairly sure that none of these are under threat, which seems to be basically the case. All these federal loans are backed up by the Federal government if the student defaults, so they aren't too risky for the lender, and the government is buying up old loans to make sure the lenders have capital, lest the general catastrophe hitting banks bring student lending down with mortgages.

But a lot of students have traditionally wound up taking out private loans as well. These are generally a bit looked down on by loan officers, but UCLA reckons that about a fifth of its students who have any kind of aid have private loans.

How do you wind up with them? Well, I've heard two stories from friends. One, from a graduate classmate of mine, relates to the question of need--if you go to school on scholarship and it pays a stipend for living, the Federal government considers you taken care of. If you need more, you have to go to the private sector. The other, from an undergraduate at Columbia, is a bit more dramatic--it comes back to the PLUS loans. If you're an undergraduate and your parents gave you money last year, you're considered a dependant and the loan can only be made to your parents. If your mother refuses to sign the papers, you're obliged to go to the private sector. Both of these students ultimately relied on private loans.

Now, how available are these types of loans? In general, loan officers say that Federal loans are not going anywhere. But the market for them appears to be shrinking. But according to Sallie Mae's earnings disclosure for this year (note that this link is a PDF download), many of its private partner companies are reducing their involvement in private loans; even after Sallie Mae issued many more loans directly, it and its partners issued about $5.5 billion in Federal loans in the quarter which ended this September, when the academic year begins and most student loans are issued, down from about $6 billion in the same period last year. Private loans fell from $2.8 billion to $2.1 billion.

Most of this difference, if I understand it correctly, has to do with the adoption of stricter requirements. Sallie Mae announced in February that it would begin considering students' credit rating and the graduation rate of their school in making decisions about Federal loans, and lenders have begun requiring students and their parents to demonstrate extremely high credit ratings in order to take out private loans, and the parents to agree to be responsible for the loans. The graduate student I spoke to told me that, despite her having a good credit rating, over 650, and her parents' having one over 750, they were given the second-worst interest rate of five Wells Fargo offers.

With the collapse of the subprime market, options for students who cannot demonstrate excellent credit history may be simply off the table. All of which suggests that access to higher education may be becoming something which is determined not only by your wealth but by your credit rating.

Socialists see opportunity in economic crisis

2008-11-16T07:14:55Z

Election Day

2008-11-09T02:14:02Z

Election day in Los Angeles. Three----count them, three!----slideshows, covering the local campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain, as well as voting, plus a little text about the Obama victory party. Apologies for a lack of pictures on this last, but my puny camera was no match for the dimly-lit room.

The Obama Campaign: AFL-CIO

The Polls

The End

I'm somewhat loath to write about Barack Obama's victory, as it's already been thoroughly covered. But, for the sake of completeness, here it is:

The roar at the Obama victory party in the Century Hyatt Hotel in Los Angeles was not far off deafening when the victory became official. For a good ten minutes the crowd repeated, first "Yes we can," and then "Yes we did." When the shouting ended, a series of state and local Democratic notables took the stage to make speeches. John McCain began his acceptance speech after about ten minutes, just after Senator Dianne Feinstein took the stage. She said "When I was ten, I went to Florida and I got on a bus," and then she was interrupted by the crowd shouting for her to wait until after the speech. She tried again, but the crowd kept shouting, and she told them to quiet down. After being shouted down another time, she stepped aside and waited until after the speech.

After McCain's speech, which was punctuated by more cheering, there were more speeches. It was almost an hour before Obama gave his acceptance speech, and the crowd grew bored. People started to complain about the number of speeches, and a group of three black volunteers lit cigars in the ballroom. At the risk of exposing myself to a fine, I must admit I lit a Marlboro Red. A campaign volunteer gave them a cup of ice for an ashtray, but, after we had smoked about half, a hotel guard came and made us put the cigars out. Asked, one said that he had started to believe Obama would win about a year ago, another "I still don't believe it. Until they called it, I kept thinking they were going to steal it somehow."

Finally, Obama came onscreen. By the time he was finished, two of the men were crying, while the third patted another on the back, telling him "See man, I told you you was going to cry." After a few minutes, he lifted his head off the other's shoulder to shake my hand when I left.

Most of the crowd left immediately after the speech. The escalators were jammed, so I found a side door that led into an underground parking structure with an exit. The front of the hotel was still crowded with a people trying to get in, like the line at a night club.

Chad Coleman, a television actor who appeared on "The Wire," stopped me to bum a cigarette. He said he'd seen Obama's victory coming from the beginning and that it was about time. As I stood smoking, about half a dozen elated people gathered us, also looking for smokes. They expressed amazement and pride, and disbursed when I ran out of cigarettes. It was very cold. No one outside said "Yes we can," but as we left Coleman called out "270, baby!" referring to the number of electoral votes needed to win.

A bad campaign

2008-10-12T16:20:14Z

In the old days, we used to believe politics was about something.

So I watched a debate this week, and then I went to find out what I saw. And, though the miracle of television, I found out that the debate had been a near drawn and that John McCain had introduced a bold new proposal to buy up a lot of bad mortgages and reduce them to the present value of the houses they were on. Through the wonders of the interwebs, I found out that Obama has "slammed" this proposal, that Obama lied four times and McCain three, or maybe the other way around, or maybe it was all Tom Brokaw's fault, or something. I've read about how dishonestly Obama is campaigning and how Orwellian McCain's campaign is, or maybe a crypto-fascist, or maybe he's actually going to step down two days into office for McCain. The point, anyway, is that I don't give a shit. ]]>
I'm going to apologise right now for commenting on this. I'm not qualified, and I'd prefer to keep out of this thing, but as long (and it is important in a blog to make your point of view entirely clear) as I'm writing a blog on pass/fail I suppose I might as well make a spectacular ass of myself occasionally.

I'm sorry to say this, and I know it's an unfashionable point of view, but I think we've been badly screwed over by the blogs. It's a sin the media's criticised for every election, but I really don't think this was nearly this bad in 2004--people believed that there were objective truths about whether the war in Iraq was going well, and whether people would be better off with nationalised health care, and even whether Kerry had deserved his purple heart and Bush ever turned up for his service in the Texas National Air Guard, and that the answers to these questions could tell you who to vote for. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, whether their attacks were effective or not, were considered sufficiently shameful that Bush had publicly to disavow them--in fact, we had a phrase for those kinds of arguments, which was an "ad hominem attack." I certainly remember employment figures being followed closely. They were seen as dishonorable but inevitable low blows, irrelevant to the real issues of the election.

Fast forward to 2008. I've heard people talking seriously about whether it was fair for Charlie Gibson to ask Sarah Palin about the Bush Doctrine in the way he did. Many of today's top stories are about McCain's choice to spend the waning days of the campaign trying to tar Obama with a connection to Bill Ayers. If you watch coverage of any major speech, any of the sum-ups of the conventions, or the talking heads who pop up to comment after the debates, the first thing they say is invariably "I don't think there were any major gaffes tonight," quite rightly admitting that the most significant thing that could possibly happen is that one of the candidates might say something foolish that could be used in an ad against them.

This kind of "analysis," based on nothing more than you can learn about the campaigns through YouTube, is the form most popular online, for the fairly simple reason that it's what you can do without leaving your chair, but it's been a long time since other media held themselves above the fray. And indeed, when I tried to find an article that actually attacked the question of whether McCain's plan made sense, one of the better things I found was on Slate, from back in February. The other was in the New York Times.

This detailed analysis of exactly how the candidates are campaigning keeps getting printed under the excuse that it reveals their character, and that it addresses the important issue of who will be the next President of the United States. But this is, of course, bullshit--the bit that actually counts is whether their economic plans are going to work, which approach to health insurance actually makes sense, and which approach to Iraq. But it looks as though the chance of most front pages, electronic and paper, getting any closer to the question of which economic plan will work than the debate over whether Obama and McCain are accurately characterising what each other said about the economy four months ago, is pretty slim. It makes the clip at the top of this entry look like a romanticization of American campaigns.

So, on the whole, I think Dean Reynold's piece about how well the McCain and Obama campaigns tend to the press was about the deepest and most important piece of journalism I've read about this campaign. As long as we're talking mostly about how the candidates attempt to manipulate their own and each other's images in the media, what could be more relevant than the immediate way they interact with representatives of the media?

What the hell was this graphic doing on CNN?

2008-09-28T07:01:47Z

Watching the debate, I found CNN's little audience reaction meter quite interesting. If you didn't watch it on CNN, it was a line graph at the bottom of the screen, like this:

The three lines were supposed to indicate how well a sample of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents were taking whatever was going in the debating hall. They moved up in down constantly as the candidates spoke, appearing to indicate real-time responses. It's not really clear where the numbers came from--at one point, according to one blog, they said that there were panels of viewers in Columbus, Ohio, but the link he provided to CNN's own website doesn't work. At rate, it was an interesting play in the inevitable contest to determine who's actually won a political debate.

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To begin with, it was an awfully bad graphic. Perhaps appropriately, as CNN didn't bother to make it clear what the lines meant, it was almost impossible to see them. I was watching on a rather good large-screen TV, and even there the Democratic blue and Republican red faded into the grey background, while the independent line, although it was clearly visible, was, oddly, yellow, despite being green in the key.

This aside, it's had an interesting effect on the discussion of the debate. By and large, online reaction to the graphic has been dismissive--'What the hell was it?' But it's also been used like a Rorshach Test, of course, by anyone who supports one side or another to show that they won a particular point. There is, of course, especially in absence of any indication as to what the data means, no guide to interpreting it reasonably.

I wonder, though, how it has affected the individual interpretations people made watching. The Commission on Presidential Debates generally forbids the live audience to react to anything said in the debate, for fear of influencing people's understanding of it. The meter, like applause during the debate, gave viewers grounds to say that one candidate or another was winning at a particular moment, even down to particular arguments or phrases.

My own sense is that is that the chart favored Obama overall in a purely political sense, as the independent line tended to track the Democratic line, implying that crucial independent voters were impressed by him--which probably had a political effect, as, odd though it may be, the perception that a candidate is winning seems to be politically advantageous. Especially considering that a focus group of independents in Pennsylvania (also trivially small) conducted during the debate favored McCain, it doesn't seem that it was by any means a necessary result. On balance, then, the inclusion of the graphic was an odd decision, perhaps irresponsible, which provided no real information to viewers but may have affected CNN viewer's sense of who won and lost Friday's debate.

No there there, but a good deal of spin, in online spin-hunters

2008-09-20T20:23:25Z

Basically, having been set to review two new websites which purport to help one sort reliable journalism from "spin," or "bias," or some other bugaboo of present-day conversation about the media, I can tell you straight up that you're still better off relying on your own common sense and using a pinch of skepticism when reading anything. If you're worried about bad coverage, read a reputable paper or its website, or maybe try the BBC.

I'm not really surprised that neither turned out to be awfully impressive. Both sites, at root, rely on their users to review the news, and rely on a lot of people doing so in order to get at the kind of cumulative accuracy of sites like Wikipedia. They forget, I think, that Wikipedia took years to build, and that the process of drafting an article involves dozens, in some cases hundreds or thousands, of inaccurate revisions gradually being weeded out through vicious behind-the-scenes arguments on message boards. In the most contentious cases, especially those dealing with politics (and, indeed, news), it required the adjudication of Wikipedia's editors, long-established users with special rights to allow or forbid changes. If you check out one of these arguments, they tend to rely on citation and other forms of verification----all of which is to say, that by the time something's reached the standard which people have compared to the Encyclopedia Britannica, it's no longer news.
]]> Newstrust.net seems like a genuine, and very sincere, effort, which simply hasn't yet got off the ground (and, I will argue, isn't ever likely to, not being terribly well-conceived), while Spinspotter, as Mark Liberman argued on Language Log, is at best an effort to spin a minimal product into something useful, and, much more likely, just a con. As Liberman writes, that journalists writing about Spinspotter have so far taken its claims more or less at face value is better indictment of the power of spin in the journalism than anything the service has done. I'm going to give you reviews of the two sites first, and then write a little about why I think they not only aren't but couldn't be done well; I've chosen to ghetto this at the bottom of the entry , as it is really speculation.

I'm tempted to beat up on Spinspotter first, as, well, I gotta admit I get a sick pleasure out of writing bad reviews. But that'd be a cheap trick, especially as I haven't anything better than Liberman (same link as above)--who, if you're curious about Spinspotter, you should read, as he seems to have spent much longer looking into the device than it deserves. He demonstrates quite rigorously that there isn't anything there, and has some nice work on the coverage of its release. I'll write about Spinspotter, using a lot of his work, below, but I recommend you read it instead of me.

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NewsTrust is clearly genuine. Its website has content, the featured stories seem to make sense in terms of being about the matters people are probably trying to find out about today (I haven't been watching it except since ten a.m. this morning, so I can't say how well it performs at times when the top story of the day is less clear than it's been since our economy started going the way of the Weimar Republic). But I can't really see what it's for. I don't want to judge it by an imposed standard, so here's what NewsTrust has to say for itself on its About page:

NewsTrust.net helps people find good journalism online.

Our nonprofit, non-partisan project provides quality news feeds, news literacy tools and a trust network to help citizens make informed decisions about democracy.

The free NewsTrust.net website features daily feeds of quality news and opinions, which are carefully rated by our members, using our unique review tools. We rate the news based on quality, not just popularity. NewsTrust reviewers evaluate each article against core principles of journalism, such as fairness, evidence, sourcing and context.

Well, I can't say I've found any news literacy tools on the website, but maybe they're coming. It seems to be the feeds that are at the core of the website's mission. Well, feeds you can get a lot of places; NewsTrust seems to be claiming that its feeds are vetted for reliability. Looking at it, I can't really see enough evidence for this, nor do they seem to be especially interesting.

Let's have a look. Here's a version of the NewsTrust homepage from a little after noon on Saturday, 20 September:

So, first of all, it is pretty boring. There's only one story visible at once, about the obvious topic of the day, the economy, and it's from the Economist. So poor marks to the site as an agglomerator--as you look down the page, the links are all leading articles from the major newspapers, Salon, and leading newsmagazines like Newsweek. It did have an article from the British Independent, which is going a little outside the box for an American site, but hardly to the standard of a good online newsfeed in terms of finding otherwise little-known stories. Nor does it seem to be especially good at picking the news--the stories about the economy are all general articles, from today, about the state of the economy, and not about today's developments. This isn't awfully surprising--according to How These Stories Were Chosen, the stories were chosen by their ratings on ten "good journalism" values, and not by comparison with other sources' top stories, or indeed anyone's judgment of what people want to know on a particular day. So, it doesn't seem like the site's a very good place to go if you want to find out what the news is without having first read it somewhere else, but somewhere you go to check something you've read in another source.

Now that we've ruled out everything else, does it seem to be especially reliable? I can't see any reason to think so. Following the link to the reviews of the top story on the site, the Economist's "No End in Sight to the Financial Crisis," we find that it achieved this place after being reviewed well by three people. Looking through a number of articles, including some a few days old, I didn't find any reviewed by more than three or four people. NewsTrust doesn't consider a story to have a rating if only one or two people have looked at it, but it does post such stories in the same places as though that are rated. Proverb or no proverb, three isn't a crowd in the context of "the wisdom of crowds." If the website is going to be useful, then, we have to be willing to trust a selection process that involves significantly less people reviewing a story than used to do so on my high school newspaper. So, are these three experts, then? Not especially. None claim any qualification in economics. Jeanne Roberts, according to her NewsTrust profile, is a freelance writer in Minnesota. Derek Hawkins is a recent graduate of Northwestern who works for the website. And Jack Dinkmeyer is a "film consultant" who likes NewsTrust because it "gives me the opportunity to talk back to the news media after eight frustrating years gritting my teeth in silence about the neocon bias from the supposedly 'liberally biased media.' Keep in mind: media is plural--same goes for data; and if you're not angry, you haven't been paying attention." That I am being asked to trust this man's judgment to find me with neutral and honest reporting above that of the editorial boards of established media shocks me to an extent that I feel can be expressed only with the moronic simplicity of an emoticon. I will, therefore, now use one: :-o

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I am sympathetic to what NewsTrust is trying to do, although I don't think they've succeeded, but SpinSpotter is actually dishonest. It talks very big indeed:

Now there's a website and software tool that exposes news spin and bias, misuse of sources, and suspect factual support. At SpinSpotter, you'll experience the news in a profound new way. Yes, the truth is back in town. (From the front page, linked above)

Basically, it claims to have an algorithm to detect bad writing in newspapers, and, as the Liberman article linked to above quite effectively shows, it doesn't. I am willing to believe that, when its creators realised that it was impossible to build a machine that could read, which is essentially what they promised, they decided to release it anyway, hoping that enough people would be drawn to the site to build a functioning online community of people willing to criticise the news for them. If so, it was the hope of the Ponzi schemer, albeit one which will cost the public little. Alternatively, it could simply be a profoundly cynical attempt to grab a little advertising revenue with a glossy but very simple product (I saw an advertisement for Dianetics on the site earlier today, which is profoundly suspicious--though, as I can't find it now, I wouldn't claim you have any reason to believe me).

I won't bother to wade into talk about whether it is possible to find "spin" or "bias" with a machine, or whether SpinSpotter's list of reportorial crimes are really worth hunting down, nor to mock it for its incorrect definition of the passive voice (well, now I have brought it up, I might as well tell you that if you scroll down from that last link, you'll see that their example of the passive voice is in fact written in the active voice). The problem is that, as Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, there's no there there (there is now in Oakland a recently-redeveloped tower with a little blue flag on top bearing the word "There," which is kind of cute). It doesn't do anything.

Download the program (I recommend you don't--in fact, as soon as I finish writing this section I intend to get rid of it, as I suspect it's collecting information about my computer to sell, or doing something nasty, as it clearly isn't doing what it's supposed to), put it on its most sensitive setting, and you can trawl through pages of NYTimes.com, LATimes.com, and even Foxnews.com, without seeing once the little red icon that tells you that the device has found spin. In fact, to find some I had to go to a New York Times blog post about Spinspotter, which linked to a few pages that had results (the blog post itself had flags on it, but they were from the site's creators, defending themselves). Well, here's what you get:

So, it didn't like the headline, "How plan protects taxpayers," since the article was about the opinion of only one expert, and didn't like the subhead, "One expert gives treasury a good grade. A bond guru even says the government could make money." The subhead seemed to me to dispel the sourcing problem of the headline, but evidently you have to source "guru" because it makes him sound too competent. Personally, having grown up in L.A., a town where we have a lot of gurus, I can't say the term inspires any particular confidence in me, but maybe I'm jaded. Then the article wrote that the treasury "had to" bail out Freddie Mac and Frannie Mae, and I suppose SpinSpotter was right that they probably should have written "chose to," and then it tells us that expert is also the president of a website called governmenttakeover.org, which sounds quite interesting, but clearly didn't come from the algorithm. Seeing as this is the best the New York Times or I could find, and it is clearly the work of a human rather than the advertised machine, it isn't much.

Spinspotter does have excellent PR, though. It successfully got the attention of a number of media outlets, of which only the Times noticed that it doesn't actually do anything, and it has got a very, very glossy and glib little cartoon advertising it on YouTube. Although I've learned to embed videos since last week (and, yes, Mr. Cooper, gone back and done it where they're relevant in my last post), I refuse to embed this one, because it is, after all, spin.

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I suspect that the model NewsTrust is using doesn't have all that much potential. It seems like it may simply be the Nupedia version of Digg. Everyone, these days, knows how Wikipedia came into being--it began as an effort to create a free online encyclopedia from the work of experts, with a several-stage process of peer review, and after months two articles had been finished, and less than a hundred begun. Jimmy Wales then added a freely-editable parallel site for drafts, and this grew with breathtaking speed and begat Wikipedia. NewsTrust, likewise, has established a hierarchy of the expertise of its users, promising that all its reviews will come from qualified people, and, while it's gotten a bit farther than Nupedia did, actually managing to get articles on the website, hasn't got enough volume of reviews to make them seem reliable. This isn't any great tragedy--our society already has wonderfully effective ways to harness the knowledge of professionals, which, in this case, are so-called legacy media outlets. They demand to be paid in return for their expertise, but that's what makes them professionals. The open, unpaid model which has made Wikipedia, and blogging, successful, doesn't purport to provide definitive answers, but does allow amateurs to share their thinking in new and extremely effective ways. But definitive answers remain the province of older forms.

Of course, sites like NewsTrust and Spinspotter claim that the old media aren't really definitive, that they aren't always right and need to be corrected. And, of course, this is true. But does the intensely detailed criticism they both claim to provide really have the potential to help much? If you look back at the reviews of the Economist article mentioned above, you'll see that the reviews relate purely to writing style--the article is called "insightful," or said to have enough information. The reviewers clearly have--as their mini-CVs imply--no independent knowledge of whether the article is right or wrong.

The reviews I've read on NewsTrust remind me of the controversies you see in the comment areas of blogs. Writers there often make sophisticated arguments, but inevitably they degenerate into calling out niggling inaccuracies in each other's reasoning, and then, worse, into responding by offering subtle redefinitions of their own writing--"I think you'll find that I wrote only that the rockets cannot be proved to have been fired by Islamic extremists, and not that they were not, which, being in the present tense, by no means means that it was impossible for Islamic extremists later to be proved to have fired the rockets. Furthermore, OldHickory038, you call them mortars, which clearly shows you have no idea what you're talking about." This is an unrealistic example only in that it doesn't include the words "moron" or "ignorant." These debates quickly take on the tenor of the most convoluted of the semantic debates Medieval theologians used to engage in over charges of heresy.

All of this kind of writing seems, to me, to be rooted in the fundamentally bizarre idea that it is possible to reach the truth about something by a sufficiently precise revision of what's been written about it. The truth about the economy, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is of course something external to what's been written about it, and it seems to me patently obvious that you're going to get a better picture of the economy by reading two decent articles about it than one with a second article about the way it was written. Occasionally, of course, as journalism students, and I'm sure for those of us who go on into journalism as journalists, we need to read serious writing about the way we write, because we need knowledge about writing qua writing in order to do it. But even if we had a journalism that never broke any of the proposed rules these two sites claim to enforce, that always cited expert opinion and never judged, it would still miss things, and still get things wrong. As long as journalism is likely to remain a human enterprise, and imperfect, surely it's better to work on getting enough out that someone finds the errors of fact? Much the same way that Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that the answer to hateful speech is usually more, more reasonable speech, the answer to inaccurate speech is usually more, more accurate speech, rather than endless drafts of revision without more reporting.

Are media critics actually watching the media?

2008-09-13T22:25:31Z

The press has been making news on the campaign this week, as all of the candidates, most notably Sarah Palin, have been appearing in television interviews. Personally, I became interested in an interview which began to be aired the week before, Bill O'Reilly's talk with Barack Obama. While I haven't yet seen the word 'bias' in a description of it, the various responses to the interview online demonstrate how deeply the perception of bias--indeed, the simple perception of what happened--is subjective. Even looking at the writing of people with similar political opinions, it seems impossible to find a single idea of what happened in half an hour of television. ]]>
Part 1----Foreign Policy:

Part 2----Economy & Taxation:

Part 3----Rev. Wright &c.:

Part 4----Energy:

Debate arose after the first segment was aired as to whether O'Reilly had treated the candidate fairly. Some argued that he had been disrespectful, interrupting and belittling him, while others described the same behaviour as "asking tough questions." But this disagreement rested on a more fundamental question, mostly assumed by bloggers: whether Obama had come out of the interview well. To some, the question seemed to be who had won. This did not follow a simple left/right divide--the liberal blog Crooks and Liars seemed to be offering an excuse for Obama, suggesting that O'Reilly had used dishonest tricks to make Obama "look weak next to his [O'Reilly's] huge ego." Many of these had suggested that Obama should not have taken the interview, as it would be impossible for him to get a fair hearing in the hostile setting of "The No-Spin Zone." A blogger named Steve Young didn't wait to see the interview, but published a mocking piece about six hours before it aired purporting to be a leaked transcript of the interview. He portrayed as an incompetent and egotistic attack dog; this piece was copied and linked to by the well-established, and relatively mainstream, Huffington Post, a liberal news accumulator.

Bloggers on another major liberal website, the Daily Kos, saw the interview entirely differently. They agreed that Obama had come out looking well, and that by and large O'Reilly had treated him fairly. The author of the longest piece, which described each of the interview's four sections in detail, thought O'Reilly had tried to shout Obama down at times, but gradually given up; another writer described O'Reilly as having "behaved himself," and even appeared to suspect that O'Reilly is a convert.

The O'Reilly interview was a fairly simple event--a single conversation between two men whose politics are widely known. Given that even people who agree in their support of Obama were divided on the simple question of whether it had portrayed him in a positive light, let alone whether it had been conducted fairly, leads me to a suspicion of online charges of bias. If there isn't a clear answer as to whether or not Bill O'Reilly made Barack Obama look bad, I can't see any hope in judging whether or not a story purporting to be hard news was trying to make a candidate look bad. Many--and I think the Crooks and Liars commentary is the real offender here--simply set out to defend their candidate without considering, it seems, whether he even needs defending. It is strange that this commentator decided to do so; even O'Reilly, according to comments quoted by Ben Smith on the Politico thought he had made a good showing. "On the foreign policy front, Obama has convinced me that he is tough but cautious... I am also persuaded that he is a sincere guy, that he wants the best for all Americans." It was, however, also possible for a right-wing commentator to think Obama had failed in the interview (admittedly, it is entirely possible that by describing this source as right-wing I am revealing my own adherence to this perceptual framework; he doesn't say so explicitly, but I deduce it from his sympathy with O'Reilly and negative view of Obama's performance), as with this blog which explains how O'Reilly trapped Obama into contradicting himself--which, as noted above O'Reilly didn't seem to think he had done.

The most adulatory of the Daily Kos writers appears to have been equally inclined to see what he wanted to see. Describing O'Reilly's commentary on the interview, he wrote "at one point you'll see he praises Obama for how well prepared he was for the interview. Bill was really impressed that Barack knew things about him personally, about his story. Barack had taken the time (while campaigning for POTUS) to learn about him," using an acronym for President of the United States. Watching the clip, this is plainly a bad summary. O'Reilly says in fact that Obama had been well prepared, describing him as polished and well prepped--comments which cut both ways, making the candidate appear false or artificial, and quite possibly an effort to explain away what O'Reilly had conceded was a good performance in the interview. And, indeed, contrary to the blogger's summary, when O'Reilly was immediately afterward asked if he liked Obama, he answered noncommittally, saying he had only spent half an hour with him.

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While it's a departure from the topic of online media criticism, I should like to take the opportunity to write a little about my own view of the O'Reilly interview, which I thought excellent. It was a model piece of transparent journalism. While O'Reilly very clearly did express his own views in interview, arguing with Obama at points and at other times conceding that they agreed--either of which would be very much a violation of the traditional canons of journalism--the result was extremely informative about Obama. Comparing it with a few other interviews I've watched this week--George Stephanopoulos's interview with Obama and Charlie Gibson's interview with Sarah Palin (I shan't bother to include a link, as I'm sure the reader has seen it), both of which were conducted with traditional methods, and Keith Olbermann's interview with Obama, which was probably more opinionated than O'Reilly's, and so favorable that most of the online reports I've seen about it included jokes suggesting that Olbermann was sexually interested in the candidate--O'Reilly's had far and away the most that was new. Almost everything Palin and Obama said in the other interviews seemed like a prepared talking point. By and large, I suspect they were unhelpful to a voter trying to form an opinion of the candidates--while both interviews included a few embarrassing moments for the candidates, some real and some artificial, both finished the interview without having definitely expressed any opinion more controversial than that government waste is bad and a solid support for apple pie, motherhood, and the flag. With O'Reilly, I think Obama was drawn far enough into argument about policy to make statements with which it was possible to disagree; it helped to give a sense of what he might do differently from any other person elected president.

Strangely, Gibson's interview, although conducted from a neutral standpoint, seemed designed to provide fodder for partisan debate. He asked a number of questions, most famously the one about the Bush Doctrine, which had little potential interest other than to provoke gaffes, while O'Reilly, despite cutting his interviewee off during answers, was more inclined to follow the topics on which Obama seemed to have something to say.

In all, I would argue that O'Reilly's "transparent" interview accomplished much better the ends of traditional coverage. It was more interesting not because the interviewer expressed his own opinions, but because his doing so provoked the subject to provide better explanations of his. He allowed the candidate to express himself as fully as seems possible within the short time allotted to the segment. On reflection, this doesn't seem surprising--the traditional style of "tough questioning" allows the interviewer to challenge the subject only when he appears to have said something factually inaccurate, which leads ultimately to discussion about whether a particular assertion made in support of an argument was an error or a gaffe; the direct challenge to an idea which an interviewer with explicit political views can make leads his subject to address the whole issue in response. Entirely laying aside questions of party politics, it may simply be a stylistically superior way to approach an interview. O'Reilly's interview with Obama certainly did attract an audience--6.6 million viewers, the show's second-highest rating ever, for the first segment when it was competing with the Republican National Convention, according to TV Week and then 4.6 million when it competed with another Obama interview on MSNBC--so perhaps it points the way forward for future political interviews?

No challenge to old values in new means

2008-09-08T03:35:22Z

If you happened to check www.google.com/trends/hottrends, a section of Google's website that lists the day's most popular search terms, around six in the evening, Pacific Time, this Friday, you'll know that the most Googled woman in America--in fact, the most Googled thing in the world--on that day was not Sarah Palin, as was recently the case, but Anne Kilkenny (her name spelt Ann Kilkenny, while her own spelling didn't make the top 100 searches). Kilkenny, a resident of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin's hometown, has risen to digital fame (I should like to invite some discussion on synonyms for this term--I've seen references to "web celebrity," "e-famous," and "digital acclaim," but internet culture is still waiting for a definitive neologism) as the result of the widespread publication of an e-mail (here is a copy of a copy) she wrote to friends explaining who Palin is and criticising her terms as mayor of Wasilla and governor of Alaska.]]> NPR story from which I first heard of her. Kilkenny is a transparent writer herself, providing, since no one knew anything about Palin, both a factual summary of her career, as Kilkenny understood it, and analysis. She describes her own role in and attitude to, usually as an opponent of Palin, the events she reports, and at the bottom of the piece describes how she produced the statistics on which she bases her argument about Palin's record with government money, noting that she does not have any training as an accountant. Her purpose in writing is obviously to dissuade her audience from believing the good things that had been said about Palin by her supporters. It appears from the NPR story that she genuinely intended to reach only a few friends, and did not anticipate reaching national circulation--at any rate, in the interview she doesn't appear to know the difference between instant messaging and blogging, which suggests a considerable remove from online discussion.

Kilkenny's e-mail, written at a time when reporters from major outlets were still on their way to Wasilla and very little information was available about her, was obviously an important primary source about her career. It was, of course, recognized as such, as testified to by its place in Google's rankings. But it clearly posed a difficult problem for media outlets invested in neutral coverage. While the letter contained a significant amount of information about Palin not yet widely circulated, it was barely mentioned in legacy media outlets at first. The reasons for this are obvious--its assertions were not backed up to traditional standards, and Kilkenny, an unknown person, was essentially an anonymous source. Such was the uncertainty that conservative blogs at first suggested that Kilkenny was a fiction created to source an attack on Palin.

Legacy media did pick up the story gradually, in two different ways. Like NPR, the McClatchy newspaper syndicate ran a story profiling Kilkenny and writing about the deluge of calls and responses she has received since her writing became famous. Both profiles confirmed that she existed and was who she claimed to be, and also allowed media outlets unwilling to print her assertions directly to repeat many of them. The other tack, taken by the Kansas City Star, was to take on specific charges from the e-mail--in this case, the assertion that Palin had attempted to force the city librarian to remove several books from the library--and to check them out. The New York Times also mentioned this incident in a story with interviews from Wasilla, curiously interviewing Kilkenny without mentioning her e-mail. The Star, likewise, mentioned Kilkenny's e-mail only at the bottom of the article. Online sources, on the other hand, generally reprinted Kilkenny's e-mail without commentary, or little more than the equivalent of "You go, girl!" if they were sympathetic, providing only the text, which was not available through major news sources, despite, as we have seen above from Google, evident widespread demand for it.

The whole affair, then, seems to have followed a pattern similar to that of the Mayhill Fowler case, in which a blogger present at a closed Obama fundraiser posted online a video containing his now-notorious 'clinging to religion' remarks, leading to widespread online commentary before the traditional media took up the story. Like Kilkenny, Fowler was barely mentioned in the print and broadcast stories that derived from her work. Both stories, to my mind, suggest that the traditional media are already settling into a new role within the American public sphere, one in truth not that much different from their historic role. People are, as this year's State of the News Media report shows, still turning to established news outlets. It seems likely that they are doing so in order to find authoritative, or better-reported, accounts of stories they have first heard about online. Many people, too, like me, first hear about these stories through major news media, although they were broken online. To my mind, at least, this doesn't seem to suggest a fundamental challenge to the methods or goals of traditional journalism--while it obviously has now to defer to online discussion's choice of an agenda at times, and has to rely less on the being the first than on being reliable, that is, if anything, surely likely if anything to encourage what I have been told is the purpose of journalism, the truthful reporting of things that people actually want to know.

Handicapping the Veepstakes

2008-09-02T00:12:07Z

Back on Friday, it was pretty clear that presumptive Republican candidate John McCain's running mate was going to be either Tim Pawlenty, governor of Minnesota, Mitt Romney, former Massachusetts governor and rival primary candidate Mitt Romney, or, if he decided to go out on a limb, independent Connecticut senator and serial executive-branch candidate Joseph Lieberman. As it turned out, of course, McCain chose Alaska governor Sarah Palin (also former beauty queen, a fun fact which opponents are trying to make a political liability). Taking a sampling across media and political orientations, I assembled as much coverage of the selection as I could find from the New York Times, Politico.com, and the website of Fox News. Palin's name occurred around the edges of stories in all three, but none considered her a serious contender...
]]> Associated Press, which was the most interested in making a prediction. It tried to deduce the choice from the actions of the three favorites, citing Mitt Romney's being seen with an overnight bag, and similar details, and speculating that each might have been planning to travel to accept the nomination. This version dominated the coverage, being used verbatim by Politico and the Huffington Post, which ran nothing else about the matter, and forming the basis for both Fox News's and the Los Angeles AM news radio station KNX 1070's stories on Friday.

Even sources that wrote their own material, however, agreed with the AP on the plausible contenders. The New York Times's story was more analytical in emphasis, summarising the possible consequences of each choice rather than trying to predict. It had, indeed, no evidence of original reporting at all, except for citing a single anonymous source's assertion that there had not been serious disagreements within the McCain campaign. The Times evidently considered predictions as being out of bounds of traditional journalism, as a blog entry by Michael Cooper, one of the authors of the main story, speculates that the nominee cannot be Lieberman because the announcement is to be made during the Jewish Sabbath, which he keeps. It was set off from an ordinary story by a jocular exclamation at the beginning, 'Tea-leaf alert!' Unsurprisingly, Politico.com also ran a number of analytical pieces in the week leading up to the election.

Fox News's take on the issue of prediction was the most interesting, and it also ran, predictably, prescriptive pieces as well as accounts. I should note that I am drawing from Foxnews.com rather than viewing, however. It ran most of the AP stories, but also several written by Fox staff; these had the same emphasis as the AP on prediction, but stressed the unpredictability of the choice rather than repeating the AP's attempts to predict the candidates' travel plans. They added a rumor that Mitt Romney's family were in touch with the Secret Service, and mentioned Tom Ridge--evidently a Fox News favorite, as he came up in a number of stories. Like the Times, though it was willing to talk about prediction, Fox News seemed to be suspicious of it, repeatedly mentioning the unpredictability as a disclaimer, and publishing a satiric piece about the attempts to guess--also using more heavily than any other source the portmanteau 'Veepstakes.' In all, the three sources differed little in their perceptions of the situation, each using the same basic list of Romney, Pawlenty, and Lieberman. Fox, however, devoted a significant amount of time on air to opinion pieces, interviewing their own Laura Ingraham about the candidate's stances on abortion. While quite clearly an expression of her own views on the matter, it was played under the title "Breaking News: Radio Host Laura Ingraham Warns McCain Against Pro-Choice V.P. Pick."

Politico made an attempt to get inside the campaign's selection process, leading both to a story on the mechanics of the announcement, and, more interesting, to a spat with Karl Rove over a report that he had called Lieberman in an attempt to get him to drop out of the race. Rove denied this through Fox News, and Politico reporter Jonathan Martin responded briefly, writing 'I stand by my reporting.' Although he didn't make his sympathies clear in the original story, in the response Martin referred to Rove's allies as 'Bushworld,' which leaves me less inclined to trust a story ultimately built only on his assertion. This exchange illustrates rather well the weakness of unsourced stories; Martin's original post cited no one but 'three sources familiar with the conversation,' leaving no particularly convincing view of the affair.

In this rather small case, there is a visible difference between the standards of evidence present in blogs and 'legacy media'--the blog was more comfortable with writing about predictions and in the use of anonymous sources whose existence they couldn't prove, while the Times was significantly more conservative about prediction than Fox News. But as for reaching the truth, I can find no evidence that blogs are immune from the 'echo chamber' effect--searching on Google or Google News finds no serious references to Palin from before the leak of the announcement above the level of the editorial pages of local papers. Where she did turn up, though, is on a report on the website Onlinecasioreports.com, noting that on Friday, while Romney and Pawlenty led the pack in Ladbrooks.com's betting, Palin, at third, led Lieberman with odds of 1:8 against 1:20. It's the best call I was able to find, and a nice confirmation of the wisdom of crowds--though it ought, perhaps, to lend a grain of salt to the idea that blogs represent the wisdom of crowds.

Working notes on homelessness in Skid Row

2008-08-26T15:14:33Z

I don't think I got a story in Skid Row. I saw a lot that was news to me, and a few things that with a little more depth would be worth writing on, but all I know about it is from a day tour and the odd-numbered pages of the 'Report Card on Homelessness in Los Angeles County,' the evens having been lost in photocopying. I didn't even get around to talking to someone on the street. We've been invited to use the first person, and I'm going to take advantage of that----I'd like to stress that I haven't done the research or the reporting it would take to write with authority about homelessness, or anything you couldn't pick up by browsing through The Soloist (which, in the interests of full disclose, I haven't). What I am going to try to do is to get down some working notes on the way Skid Row works, as best as I know about it, and then to see if I can find anything in there from which a story can be made. They're incomplete, but they should represent both what I know about it, and how much I don't.

How to get there:
The crucial fact about Skid Row is that it is the site of almost all of Los Angeles County's provision for the homeless. People, therefore, come from all over the county and beyond--the Rev. Andrew Bales, head of the Union Rescue Mission, relates stories of people being brought by family from as far as Fresno, seeking the shelter and treatment offered by the area's missions. Famously, as the Los Angeles Times as reported, hospitals as far away as Pomona and Anaheim have brought patients who have nowhere else to go there on release. Bales recounted also stories of elderly people being evicted from apartments in Monrovia and the Palisades calling the shelter, looking for a place to stay. What this means, to my mind, is that we need to refine our understanding of what it means when we describe Skid Row as 'rock bottom'--while it almost certainly represents the worst point in the lives of many people who wind up there, it is not necessarily somewhere one finds oneself after a period of homelessness elsewhere. Rather, it is probably the most reasonable place to go at once for people thrust unexpectedly into homelessness; it is the place where one stands the best change of finding shelter and a meal.

The population of Skid Row comprises, in addition to addicts and the insane, families (the LA County Report Card on Homelessness estimates that 25% of homeless people in the county were living in families during 2007, though, while it is clearly significant, I do not have a number for Skid Row), elderly people whose social security payments and pensions do not provide enough for their rent, and employed people who have been unable to pay their rent during a period of unemployment. 60-75% of families are not drug users, according to Scott Chamberlain, the Union Rescue Mission official responsible for women and families, Some, especially of the last category, are able to make limited stays, knowing when they come when they will be able to afford a new home. The presence of women and children is a relatively recent fact, dated to the early 1990s by most observers, and one which the area's institutions are still coming to terms with. The Union Rescue Mission, and others in the area, are still in the process of establishing procedures and facilities for families.

There are also, however, addicts and criminals, but this population is not unmixed either. Some, according to Bales, do in fact have homes. For dealers and pimps, the attraction of Skid Row is obvious--it is perhaps the city's greatest concentration of their clients, and thus the place in which it is easiest to operate with impunity. By all accounts, matters have improved in the past few years, but according to Lt. Richard Thomas of the LAPD, in charge of the Safer City Initiate intended to clean up the area, in 2005 it was not uncommon to see someone lighting a crack pipe in plain view of a patrol car. Some, as well, seem to come to the area by choice as customers. Estella Lopez, director of the area's business association, describes it as 'a place to get laid and get high.' The story told by Alex Carnejo, an ex-addict employed by the Union Rescue Mission, seems to confirm this. Both he and his father left the area for a time, and returned seeking drugs.

Homelessness on Skid Row:
Out of Skid Row's estimated current population of 6,000-7,000, only about 500 are believed to be 'shelter-resistant' by the LAPD. These, most probably those most afflicted by mental disorder, are unwilling to spend time in shelters. Bales describes some who, convinced to spend the night in a shelter, insist on taking a cot in the overflow rooms near the Mission's entrance so as to be near a way out. Single women, according to Chamberlain, are especially likely to be shelter-resistant, mistrustful of attempts to help them. 80-90% of homeless women report having faced violent or sexual abuse; many say they went on the street in order to escape abusive homes.

Of the remaining population,

Getting off the street:

Assignment One: 'What you intend to do in the world of journalism'

2008-08-24T18:48:02Z

My hope is that I can get paid to see how people live and to hear stories. I don't much care about what form the product takes, so long as it's honest----I don't reckon I'm good for much but writing, but blogs need text and broadcast needs scripts. I'd like to keep out of politics, which I find boring compared to 'the daily life of the American people', as the New Yorker used to have it, and to avoid the realm of things denominated as 'trying to change the world' or 'writing what you really think'. I figure, if I'm lucky, I might be able to offer some decent description of how things are, and better minds than mine can argue how they should be. I'm interested in China and Latin America, which seem like places in which there's going to be a lot to write about the next few years, and in writing about immigration and assimilation in this country.