Posted on in Journalism, Media

Should The New York Times be a truth vigilante?

A belated public response to The New York Times public editor, Arthur S. Brisbane:

Mr. Brisbane,

Ignore the morons who were quick to call you a “moron” regarding your blog posting “Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?” They’re playground bullies who never grew up. Your question sailed 10 feet over their collective heads while they were bent over and engaged in the act of delivering cheap-shots below the belt. They missed it completely. So let’s forget them and move on to your question: “Should The Times be a truth vigilante?” It is a seemingly simple question and I must confess that when I tweeted the link to your blog posting I somewhat flippantly added the hashtag #yes to that tweet. But the answer, I believe (and as you articulated in your follow-up posting), is far more multi-faceted and complicated.

Journalism’s first and most elemental principle is an obligation to the truth. I don’t think anyone would disagree with that statement; excepting, perhaps, Karl Rove. This is not some freshly minted idea, nor is it mine. Obligation to the truth is the first of the “Principles of Journalism” as outlined in The Elements of Journalism, a brilliant book by Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach that should be mandatory reading for all Americans. Certainly it should at least be read by all practicing journalists.

While “obligation to the truth” may be self-evident, people tend to disagree on what, exactly, “the truth” is. This is due, in part, to human beings being subjective individuals. We are subjective because we are constantly subjected to the beliefs, morals, and traditions of the culture we were born into. For better or for worse, we are indoctrinated into the culture we live within. For example, a Christian’s truth is radically different than an atheist’s truth. A Christian’s truth is rooted in the existence of God. An atheist’s truth is that God does not exist. This monumental difference fundamentally changes how Christians and atheists view the world. And it is our view of the world that shapes our actions. If that sounds like philosophy that’s because it is. Any discussion of truth is a philosophical discussion.

Journalism, however, is not philosophy. It is the practice of gathering and reporting news.

“News and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished,” wrote Walter Lippmann in his 1922 book Public Opinion. “The function of the news is to signalize an event. The function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality upon which men can act.”

Truth in journalism, or “journalistic truth”, is not the same as truth in the absolute or philosophical sense. “Journalistic truth” is a practical and functional form of truth by which we can operate day-to-day.

Achieving journalistic truth is a process, a journey toward understanding of an event that begins with the first reporting of an event and evolves as new “hidden facts” come to light. A “fact” is an event or thing that is known to have happened or existed because it is verifiable. Verification is the key. In journalism, an unverifiable “fact” is not a fact and should not be reported. Verification is the essence of journalism. If you are not verifying the “facts” you are reporting, then you are not practicing journalism. In fact, you may inadvertently be engaging in an act of propaganda.

How do you verify a fact? From reputable sources. What is a “reputable source”? A source that can be trusted to provide you truthful information about an event or topic. How do you know if a source is a reputable source? By verifying the information a source provides you against other sources. Over time, you learn what sources can be trusted and which ones cannot. It is this discipline of verification that makes journalism such a pain in the ass, which explains why there is a withering supply of good journalism in a world of exploding information.

Truth is elusive. It is the Holy Grail of journalism that serious practitioners of journalism must pursue. And they pursue it by adhering to the discipline of verification.

Just like any other newspaper, The New York Times has had its share of failings in the discipline-of-verification department. Judith Miller’s articles on there being WMDs in Iraq during the lead-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion come to mind. She and the editors at the time took those “facts” emanating from the White House hook, line, and sinker. If The New York Times had been adhering to the discipline of verification, if they had been vigilant, then that would not have happened. If all journalists had been diligently (and vigilantly) practicing the discipline of verification, I’d argue that the Bush administration would not have been able to muster enough popular support to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq and it would never have happened. This is how powerful and important the discipline of verification is. As the “first draft of history”, journalism has the power to change it.

The New York Times and other news providers will continue to have lapses of judgement and outright failings when it comes to the discipline of verification and pursuit of the truth because of the simple and unassailable fact that news is gathered and reported by human beings who are just as prone to mistakes and failure as anyone else in any other profession. This is not a blanket excuse; rather, it is a challenge to those who have chosen to make journalism their life’s work and news organizations such as The New York Times that endeavor to report “All the News That’s Fit to Print”.

Regards,

Scott Dewing

Video
Posted on in Economy

The surprising truth about what motivates us

Adapted from Dan Pink’s talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace.

Posted on in Education

Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution!

In this poignant, funny follow-up to his fabled 2006 talk, Sir Ken Robinson makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning—creating conditions where kids’ natural talents can flourish.

Posted on in Economy

The Year of Austerity

It’s all over except the shouting: no more lavish parties, high-stakes gambling trips to Vegas, or weekend shopping get-aways to Paris. For me, 2011 is going to be the “Year of Austerity” in which more pennies will be pinched than Playmates’ rear-ends by Hugh Hefner at a clothing-optional soiree hosted at the Playboy Mansion.

It’s actually worse than that: I didn’t do any of those things in 2010. Hell, I’ve never even been to Vegas or attended a lavish, black-tie-only party. I have, however, been to Paris. But only once and that was just for a 24-hour layover while en route to go live in a poor country—an experience that should come in handy as I seek to live more poorly in our relatively very wealthy country.

But it’s worse than that: I don’t even really have any pennies to pinch. And the only rear-end I’ll be pinching is my own as I cut back on those trips to Starbucks and struggle to remain conscious without the constant caffeine I.V. that nurtured me through 2010.

Like many of my fellow Americans, I don’t have pennies—I have debt. Like our government, I’ve been engaged in deficit spending. Deficit spending is like real spending, except that you walk around with rolls of Monopoly money in your pockets and pay for things with a plastic card, which is often gold in color to give you a false sense of wealthy confidence. That plastic card has a long string of numbers on it that, when added together and multiplied by your age, will yield the exact dollar amount owed to some corporate banking bookie who will bust your nuts and kneecaps with an iron-clad foreclosure notice if you don’t make your monthly minimum payment.

The only key differences between me and the government is that I don’t have a money printer down in the basement where I can just print up some more casheesh when I’m running low on dough and need another hit. Furthermore, I don’t have the political means nor the soulless cajones to rob my fellow Americans and disguise said robbery as a “bailout” that was done for their well-being.

It’s austere times like these that acutely remind me that I’m worth more dead than alive. Don’t take that the wrong way. That’s not a veiled suicide note, just an objective observation. Besides, my life insurance policy has a “suicide clause” that strictly prohibits me from profiting by killing myself. I’m contractually obligated to continue living here on Earth where I’m apparently allowed to carry on with killing myself slowly by working too hard and worrying too much about things like money. But I’m worth a million bucks if I stay the course and die of “natural causes” like a heart attack. So I’ve got that going for me.

“Austerity” was Merriam-Webster’s #1 Word of the Year for 2010. Defined as “enforced or extreme economy”, austerity, according to Merriam-Webster, “peaked dramatically several times throughout the year, as people’s attention was drawn to global economic conditions and the debt crises in Europe…”

“Austerity clearly resonates with many people,” said Peter Sokolowski, Editor at Large at Merriam-Webster. “We often hear it used in the context of government measures, but we also apply it to our own personal finances and what is sometimes called the new normal.”

Yes, it seems austerity is the new black that will replace the red in 2011. It’s all the rage and is often accompanied by rage against ourselves for having been so irresponsible, or rage against our government for having been so irresponsible, or rage about having punched the ballot that got all those fiscally irresponsible idiots elected in the first place. (Note to self-righteous Republicans: this economic shit-storm we’re sailing through started long before that African-American dude you shamelessly like to blame all of our country’s current woes on took the helm. Please just put down the dual-barreled rhetoric shotguns and back away slowly toward the mirror and do an about-face.)

So austerity is the in-thing in 2011 and I’m unhappy about that. But really America, let’s stop being a bunch of whiny douche bags. We’re better off than, oh, 99.99% of the rest of the world. Most of the rest of the world is a very poor and shitty place that, quite literally, smells like shit because there’s no indoor plumbing and the waste just piles up or is dumped conveniently into the same stream where you can take a bath and clean the pots and pans after dinner.

Buck up campers, buckle down, and enjoy the luxury of an austere year. Whatever austerity we’ll be feeling is nothing compared to the extreme poverty most other people in the world have been surviving day-in and day-out for their entire existence. They should be so lucky to merely have to undertake some austerity measures.

Posted on in Journalism, Media

Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload

Blur: How to Know What's True in the Age of Information OverloadIn a world of information overload from the digital deluge of the Internet, this is next up on my reading list.

Here’s the blurb from Publisher’s Weekly: Veteran journalists Kovach and Rosenstiel (The Elements of Journalism) begin their intelligent and well-written guidebook by assuring readers this is not unfamiliar territory. The printing press, the telegraph, radio, and television were once just as unsettling and disruptive as today’s Internet, blogs, and Twitter posts.

But the rules have changed. The gatekeepers of information are disappearing. Everyone must become editors assuming the responsibility for testing evidence and checking sources presented in news stories, deciding what’s important to know, and whether the material is reliable and complete.

Utilizing a set of systemic questions that the authors label “the way of skeptical knowing,” Kovach and Rosenstiel provide a roadmap for maintaining a steady course through our messy media landscape. As the authors entertainingly define and deconstruct the journalism of verification, assertion, affirmation, and interest group news, readers gain the analytical skills necessary for understanding this new terrain.

“The real information gap in the 21st century is not who has access to the Internet and who does not. It is the gap between people who have the skills to create knowledge and those who are simply in a process of affirming preconceptions without growing and learning.”

Posted on in Journalism

Don’t shoot the messenger

“There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.”
-Walter Lippmann

Before being arrested in London today, Julian Assange, the globe-trotting and dogged founder of WikiLeaks, had an op-ed published in The Australian.

Assange began the article by quoting Rupert Murdoch: “In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.” Murdoch purportedly said that in 1958, long before his beloved Fox News was launched and the world was plunged into a “fair & balanced” rush to truthiness.

In his op-ed, Assange claims that WikiLeaks has created a new type of journalism: scientific journalism.

“WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism,” wrote Assange. “We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?”

This is not a new type of journalism. This is what journalism is. (Well, or should be anyway.) Journalism is the discipline of verification.

According to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), “Journalists rely on a professional discipline for verifying information. When the concept of objectivity originally evolved, it did not imply that journalists are free of bias. It called, rather, for a consistent method of testing information–a transparent approach to evidence–precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work. The method is objective, not the journalist. Seeking out multiple witnesses, disclosing as much as possible about sources, or asking various sides for comment, all signal such standards. This discipline of verification is what separates journalism from other modes of communication, such as propaganda, fiction or entertainment.”

There is no real journalism without the discipline of verification.

Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth. “Democracy depends on citizens having reliable, accurate facts put in a meaningful context,” according to the PEJ. “Journalism does not pursue truth in an absolute or philosophical sense, but it can–and must–pursue it in a practical sense. This “journalistic truth” is a process that begins with the professional discipline of assembling and verifying facts.”

Without this pursuit of “journalistic truth”, the primary purpose of journalism–to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing–is gutted and left for dead.

“Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media,” wrote Assange. “The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption.”

Posted on in Press

U.S. students face second quarantine in China

Originally published @ cnn.com

A group of U.S. students touring China are gaining an experience they had not expected — a second round in quarantine following a positive test of the H1N1 flu virus, a chaperone for the group said.

By the time they leave China, the students from Oregon will have spent less than four days actually seeing the country in what had been planned as a three-week tour of the country, said Scott Dewing, one of the chaperones and director of technology at St. Mary’s School in Medford, Oregon

Speaking over the Internet, Dewing said he and his group of 64 students and six more chaperones were keeping their sense of humor. “The forecast here from Dengfeng is a high chance of smog,” he said from their hotel.

The group was placed in quarantine on Sunday in Dengfeng, Henan province, after a student tested positive for the virus, Dewing said.

The students had just been released last Thursday, after spending a week at a Beijing hotel in quarantine over H1N1 fears. The group joined other U.S. students and a group of British children who were quarantined in China’s capital following positive H1N1 tests from each of the groups.

After being released, the Oregon group traveled by bus to the city of Dengfeng, Dewing said. Initial roadside tests on Sunday for the H1N1 virus were negative, but results later in the day confirmed a positive test. That student has been placed in a hospital for H1N1 cases, Dewing said.

By Monday, two more students had tested positive for H1N1, Dewing said, and yet two more on Tuesday reported elevated temperatures.

Since May, China has been checking people arriving from countries where cases of H1N1 — also known as swine flu — have been reported. Anyone with a fever or exhibiting flu-like symptoms has been placed in quarantine, usually in a hospital, while anyone who sat near someone with such symptoms has been sequestered in hotel rooms, the U.S. State Department has said.

“Since we had been through this before, we knew what this meant,” Dewing said. “This means another seven-day wait.”

The Oregon group — ranging in age from 14 to 18 — might now miss its return flight to the United States, Dewing said.

Dewing relayed a conversation he had with one of the students during the first quarantine. “I came here to get an experience,” Dewing said the student told him. “This isn’t the experience I planned for, but it’s an experience, nonetheless.”

Posted on in Travel

Home at Last

Just a quick note to let everyone know that we’ve arrived home. After getting stuck in Salt Lake City for a day–where we couldn’t get a flight to Medford–we rerouted to Reno, rented a car and drove the rest of the way.

Thank you all for joining us on our journey through the Middle East. I hope that this blog and the photos were able to provide you with a sense of place and events. Of course, now that we’re back, I’m realizing that there’s a lot that I’ve left out; like the night in Nablus when we awoke to the sound of tank engines and gunfire at the south end of the city. Perhaps that didn’t seem relevant at the time because we’d been there for several nights and there had been gunfire every night.

Posted on in Travel

Escape from Tel-Aviv

Getting on a flight out of Tel-Aviv on standby requires persistence, patience and athletic ability. The first I have. The second, no. And the third is waning as I slide down the backside of my 30s.

I only sustained minor injuries on the last-minute dash to the gate, but I’ll get to that in a bit.

The flight we needed to get on was scheduled to depart at 11:40 p.m. At 10:40, things were looking really good for the dozen of us who were hoping to get out of Tel-Aviv that night. One group we knew from Tuesday night’s failed mission.

All the regular passengers had boarded and they had told us that they would begin calling us by priority level and processing boarding passes. There were several people who had higher priority standby status than we did and after they were processed, it was a our turn.

It was 10:50 when they began processing our tickets and that’s when things started going to hell. First a late-arriving revenue customer arrived. There was a flurry of activity to get his baggage checked and tagged, get his boarding pass processed and get him to the gate.

They closed all their windows and began processing standby customers again. We were in the process of getting our boarding passes when another late passenger showed up. They informed him that they had closed the windows. He wouldn’t take no for an answer and began arguing with the attendant. Everything stopped and the moments ticked away.

Apparently, he was a Palestinian. He said he had been detained at a checkpoint for 3 hours. There were no checkpoints inside of Israel, so I assumed he was a West Bank Palestinian who had come from Ramallah through Qalandiya checkpoint. I was fairly certain that the Israelis did not allow West Bank Palestinians to fly out of Tel-Aviv.

He had papers, which he waived at the attendants while arguing. I’m sure they had heard his story before. The Israelis at the counter most likely had worked at checkpoints during their mandatory service in the Israeli military. There was no way this guy was getting on the flight. Meanwhile, precious seconds ticked by while they argued instead of finishing our boarding passes.

Eventually, two security guards led the Palestinian man away while he yelled and waived his papers in the air.

“You’ll need to run if you’re going to make it,” one of the counter attendants told us.

We took off along with another attendant who would help expedite our passage through the security checkpoint and passport control.

After passing through the security checkpoint, we took off at a full sprint down a long corridor that led to the passport control area.

The floor on the corridor leading from security to passport control is not designed for running. It was like trying to run on an ice rink. But we had no choice if we were going to make the gate.

Everything was going fine until Sophia dropped her book. It slid across the floor and out in front of me. Rather than stopping to pick the book up, I attempted to scoop it off the floor without breaking stride. This turned out to not be a good idea. I got the book, but my foot slipped and I quickly found myself sliding down the corridor while doing the splits.

People behind us were laughing at the sight of the big white guy with a backpack sliding down the corridor while holding a book and doing the splits. I would have been laughing too except that I was completely stressed out and the splits had been accompanied by a tearing sound. Unfortunately, the tearing sound I’d heard was not the crotch of my pants, but my actual crotch. I realized this when I got back up and tried to continue running. Pain shot through my leg like electrical shocks. I kept running. All I cared about was making the gate. We had to make this flight. Adrenaline masked the pain that I would get to encounter later.

We went through passport control where some guy tried to step in front of us because he was in a hurry. I was just about to pick him up and throw him across the airport when I realized that I wouldn’t make the flight for sure if I did that. Instead I pushed his passport out of the way at the window counter so that the passport control agent could continue with ours. He tried to push it back up under the window but I kept the path blocked with my hand and moved my body so that the passport control agent couldn’t see the guy nor hear his ramblings about his passport problem.

After getting our passports stamped with exit visas, we took off down the final leg to the gate.

This part was carpeted and I ran as fast as my injured leg would allow. My goal was to get to the gate and stall them until Kacey and the girls caught up.

While I ran the 400 meters to the gate, Kacey and the girls were picked up by an airport courtesy car.

We arrived at the gate at the same time.

I was bent over, sweating and ready to puke.

“Daddy, we rode on a cart!” Emma exclaimed.

“That’s…nice,” I said between breaths.

“Are you okay Daddy?”

“Yeah, Daddy’s just fine. Get on the plane.”

We boarded and they closed the airplane door right behind us.

I slugged back a handful of ibuprofen as the flight attendants made final preparations for takeoff. Pain continued shooting through my leg but I didn’t care. We made the flight and were finally getting the hell out of Tel-Aviv. And at the moment, that was all that mattered.

Posted on in Travel

Ground Hog Day

We’re at the Ben Gurion Airport, going through the same thing we did Tuesday. It’s pretty much the same, but we hope the ending will be different and we’ll get on tonights flight.

Meanwhile, a Palestinian family just got led away from the luggage inspection center behind us. We don’t know what for, presumably for something that was in one of their bags. The woman was carrying a baby, she was sobbing and hyperventilating as they led her and her husband away with all their baggage.