News in name only

There's not a lot of real estate in the local paper these days for the world beyond southeast Michigan, and you'd have to agree that Brazil accounted for a good chunk of it on Wednesday. The problem isn't the space; it's mistaking coverage for news.

The caption certainly appears to be accurate:

The presidential convoy, led by Brazil's President-elect Jair Bolsonaro and his wife, heads to the National Congress for his swearing-in. CARL DE SOUZA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

... if hardly Shakespearean in letting you know where you are right  away. But the broader takeaway point from the space devoted to Brazil seems to be more like: "Those quaint foreigners: Cavalry AND a Rolls convertible!"

On the opposite page, accounting for the bulk of N&W space, the top story is devoted to THE WALL, quoting (by my count) five tweets from the president and two from the incoming House speaker. The most interesting Trump tweet of the day -- in the narrow sense of "policy-relevant," rather than "deranged ranting with frimfram sauce and a side of batshit" -- isn't among them:

If it's the kind of "great inauguration speech" that has the president proclaiming his support, I'd really like to know more about it than what kind of expensive car Bolsonaro took to  his inaugural.

There is some thorough coverage to be found, usually including at least some pictures (because pictures). Here's the Guardian, for example:

Jair Bolsonaro has announced Brazil’s “liberation from socialism, inverted values, the bloated state and political correctness” after being sworn in as the country’s 42nd president.

His words delighted a crowd of more than 100,000 – many of whom had travelled to its modernist capital for the event, convinced the far-right populist can rescue their troubled country from virulent corruption, rising violent crime and economic doldrums.

Granted, international news doesn't pay the rent at your standard metro daily. Broadly, it never did, but the cheerful side of the bargain -- should you want to know whom your president is cuddling the country up with -- was that amid the profusion of 5x18 department store ads cropping up for returns season, there was a lot of room for words;, and by default some of those words were going to be about the outside world. You could, in other words, have formed an idea of where President Bolsonaro was headed that might have helped you put the inauguration speech into context. A big photo with horses and cool uniforms, on the other hand, is news in name only.

Sweetheart, get me rewrite

Not a bad Wednesday lead story by the Washington Post there:

The Justice Department has “systemic” problems in how it handles sexual harassment complaints, with those found to have acted improperly often not receiving appropriate punishment, and the issue requires “high level action,” according to the department’s inspector general.

Justice supervisors have mishandled complaints, the IG said, and some perpetrators were given little discipline or even later rewarded with bonuses or performance awards. At the same time, the number of allegations of sexual misconduct has been increasing over the past five years and the complaints have involved senior Justice Department officials across the country.
 
 Not quite good enough for the Fair 'n' Balanced Network to appropriate yet, but just add some Kenyan Muslim usurpering in the rewriting process and ...

The Justice Department scolded the Obama administration on Wednesday following a report on how sexual harassment of all kinds was improperly handled at the department for years.

The shock findings are a little less shock on the inside hed:

Where did all the "rampant office sex" go? Maybe the Post will tell us:

The cases examined by the IG’s office include a U.S. attorney who had a sexual relationship with a subordinate and sent harassing texts and emails when it ended; a Civil Division lawyer who groped the breasts and buttocks of two female trial attorneys; and a chief deputy U.S. marshal who had sex with “approximately” nine women on multiple occasions in his U.S. Marshals Service office, according to investigative reports obtained by The Washington Post under a Freedom of Information Act request.

Fox's summary is shorter (and leaves out the FOIA request) but doesn't add a lot in the way of sex or groping:

The Washington Post reported that the DOJ’s inspector general had found “systemic” problems with how complaints were addressed, with offending officials often being let off the hook or even rewarded. The article cited investigative reports on a lawyer who allegedly groped two female attorneys and a top U.S. Marshals official who had sex with “approximately” nine women in his office.
Though fresh complaints have been filed as recently as August, the IG said some of the worst alleged offenses happened several years ago in the department’s Civil Division.

Ready for the scolding?

Ian Prior, a spokesman in the Trump Justice Department, would not comment in detail about the allegations but described the problems as largely occurring during the prior administration.

“The Department does not discuss specific employee disciplinary actions or comment on personnel actions or matters that may impact personal privacy. That said, the Department was very disappointed with the issues that occurred in the Obama administration and strives for a workplace free of harassment and other misconduct for all of our 115,000 employees,” he said in a statement. “That is why the Civil Division has implemented additional safeguards and systems to ensure that all misconduct allegations are handled appropriately going forward.”

Fox might have gotten a copy of the statement on its own -- a Fox staffer is credited in the shirttail -- but otherwise, there's nothing here you couldn't have gotten from a dead-tree edition produced by adults. Fox just added the "watchdog releases shock findings" part, and if by "watchdog" it meant the Post, that was actually kind of charitable.

Flying verbs: A user's manual

Friends of the Flying Verb, rejoice: Now there's a journalism textbook to explain it all for you! Assuming you're on track to graduate in 1943, at least.

Under the subhead "Implied subject," here's how Radder & Stempel's "Newspaper Editing, Make-Up and Headlines"* introduces the example above:

The subject may not be expressed in the first deck. It may be implied in the first deck and expressed immediately in the second, provided it is the first word in the second deck. ... Some editors consider it bad form to run headlines in which the first deck has an implied subject.

The book cautions against using the flyer "if the verb might be understood to be in the imperative mode," and the examples have plural implied subjects: "Hear Bible Scholar" and "Rob Los Angeles Bank" (followed by "Pair Flees in Automobile"):

A few newspapers have a rule against beginning any headline with a verb, holding that even the third-person singular form might be confused with the imperative.

The section on writing heds about speeches fits the specification exactly:

... though many, if not most, shops that employed the Flying Verb were far more flexible. Here's the World's Greatest Newspaper, reporting on the dustup that eventually became Terminiello** v. Chicago:

The deck is "Three policemen injured outside hall"; I have trouble seeing them as the subject of "seize."

UK readers will be happy to know that there's also a justification for claim quotes, also from the section on reporting about speeches:

When the thought to be expressed is too long to go into the first bank with the name, some newspapers permit the copyreader to enclose the speaker's statement in quotation marks and let it stand alone in the first deck. The words need not necessarily be the exact words of the speaker. If they are not, the quotation mark merely indicates that someone made the statement.

Further insights on the flyer, or formal guidance for the art of the claim quote, always welcome. Thanks to Michael Fuhlhage*** for the loan of the textbook.

* Second edition, published in 1942. The first, in 1924, was called "Newspaper Headlines and Make-Up." Radder was a former NYT rimrat who taught at Indiana; Stempel, a student when the first edition was coming together, put in some time at the New York Sun and elsewhere before joining the academic ranks.
** "Self-styled Father Coughlin of the South," as the Trib put it.
*** The one, the only, the coiner of the phrase "Donner Party comma" for the comma of direct address ("Let's eat, Grandma").

The death of irony

You can tell why this is the No. 3 story at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network this evening. It's got everything: anti-Trump bias, happy ending and Muslims Behaving Badly!

New York City college student Yasmin al-Scaryname who claimed to be the victim of a hate crime by Trump supporters is under arrest and charged with filing a false report, a police source told The New York Daily News.

The 18-year-old al-Scaryname caused quite the media stir with her sensationalized account of Trump supporters attacking her on the subway. She claimed three men attempted to pull off her hijab while calling her a terrorist and yelling Trump’s name. All this happened, she said, while New Yorkers sat idly by and watched her get assaulted.

Fun fact of journalism: You can tell more about news practice from how the rules are broken* than from how the rules are followed. "Don't convict 'em in the hed" is a powerful and universally followed rule, because breaking it can have practical consequences as well as ethical ones. If you declare the suspect Guilty Guilty Guilty on Monday and charges are Dropped Dropped Dropped on Thursday, you have some explaining to do if the erstwhile suspect demands to know why your professional negligence allowed a false and defamatory statement onto the front page. Breaking the rule is a calculated risk.

The ethics part, as usual, is more entertaining. Declaring yourself Fair 'n' Balanced means your starting position is not to take sides: Innocent until proven guilty, let's hear both sides, and no matter how loud the crowd gets, the headline is Smallville Loses Heartbreaker, not Blind Ump Costs Our Town Title. You only get to break that rule when there's a higher good to be served.

Stop the tape for a moment to give credit to Heat Street, one of the many parajournalistic sites that provide the sort of content Fox doesn't have the time or attention span to write on its own. Although the entertaining syntax may belong to someone else, the moral conclusion in the hed is Fox's:

The many media outlet’s initial reporting of the fake hate crime did not include qualifiers like “alleged” and “claimed.” Instead they reported the hoax crime as a fact like with Buzzfeed’s story, “Drunk Men Yelling “Donald Trump” Attempt To Remove Woman’s Hijab On NYC Subway.”

OMG Buzzfeed left the attribution out of a headline! Does the Pulitzer committee know about this?

* That's "broken," as opposed to "didn't get the memo about 'Christmas came early' and the last copy editor was furloughed after Thanksgiving." If you want to chart the structure of power in the newsroom, look for stories in which the subjects are known by first name, rather than family name, on second reference; that writer usually outranks most of the editors.

Today in balance

Looks like Real Clear Politics has finally acknowledged which side its bread is buttered on, huh?

Burying the lede

When you take the devil's sixpence, sooner or later he's going to expect a dance -- say, the evening's No. 2 story at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network:

Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes, responding to a report based on unnamed sources, Tuesday denied suggestions that he had sexually harassed anchor Megyn Kelly a decade ago.

His lawyer, Susan Estrich, said in a statement: “Roger Ailes has never sexually harassed Megyn Kelly. In fact, he has spent much of the last decade promoting and helping her to achieve the stardom she earned, for which she has repeatedly and publicly thanked him.”

Here's the inside play:

For the most part, that looks like basic second-cycling: If the morning paper has "Fire destroys business," the afternoon paper gets "Firefighters sifted through the rubble today." Flip for a moment, though, to the last graf of the 503-word story:

The New York Times reported late Tuesday that Ailes and 21st Century Fox, now managed on a daily basis by Rupert Murdoch’s sons, James and Lachlan Murdoch, "are in the advanced stages of discussions that would lead to the departure of Mr. Ailes as chairman of Fox News.” While it is impossible to predict the outcome of negotiations, I can confirm that such discussions are under way.

Odd. The source in the Times's second graf is the same as in Fox's:

Mr. Ailes and 21st Century Fox, Fox News’s parent company, are in the advanced stages of discussions that would lead to his departure as chairman, Susan Estrich, one of Mr. Ailes’s lawyers, said in an interview on Tuesday.

To be perfectly clear: "Impossible" might be an overstatement, but predicting the outcome of negotiations is difficult enough that journalists should generally leave well enough alone. (The same is true of predicting political campaigns, but that doesn't seem to stop anyone at Fox.) Guessing at the outcomes of legal actions, even when they're aimed at reprehensible people, is silly and irresponsible. But since the boss's lawyer has already talked to the Times, it seems like a phone call to the boss's lawyer might be in order.

Writing about the boss is a challenge. You can spare a kind thought for Fox News if you'd like. Or not.

News pragmatics: As heads is tails

A lot of the underlying rules of journalism are pretty clear, even if we don't spell them out in the textbooks.* You might never have written a headline in your life, but you can tell when somebody bollixes the assumptions about how proper names work in heds,  because that's how you've been brought along. "McDonnell arrested" (or Obama, or Snyder, or Scalia, or Yastrzemski) in a headline doesn't mean Jim-Bob McDonnell down the block has been shooting bottle rockets at passing cars again, because he'd be "local man" or "OCC student" (or "Harvard graduate," or "failed entrepreneur," or "crazed Vietnam veteran," or any of the other social/occupational categories we have at hand). The name means it's somebody you already know.

First names are similar, though the social land mines are more concealed. Your "everybody calls her Hillary!" might run into a "well, I don't," or it might not. But generally, when you see a given name in a hed, it's because someone assumes a Lebron-like level of mutual understanding:

Because when a workplace dispute goes bad -- how's that again, Fox10?

A Walmart employee upset over a missed promotion took his manager and another employee hostage Tuesday before he was fatally shot by police, according to the Amarillo Police Department.

... the first hed you'd write is "Dave from Lubbock shot dead," right?

Hence, of course, the Drudge hed from Monday morning at top (the "Mohammad" play was June 14; see if you can figure out why). You're not supposed to wonder whether this Khan is Genghiz, or Samir, or Irving; it's a Khan, and it's plotting terrorism! Whether the plot involved oh, flying a single-engine plane into a federal building is irrelevant; beauty is truth, and truth Khan, and GAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

So if you're wondering whether there's any evidence that the party press is openly, deeply, fundamentally racist -- of course there is. That's kind of how things work.

* Because then we couldn't tell whether you knew the secret handshakes, could we?

Man bites pundit

Regular reader Garrett asks for the house's take on this from electoral-vote.com:

Despite Delaware and studios full of pundits saying the voters are furious and 2010 will be a terrible year for incumbents, the reality is that 98% of incumbents have won their primaries. Only seven incumbents have gone down, but the media are completely consumed by those seven and have ignored the hundred of incumbents who have survived challenges. "Man bites dog" makes for better news than "dog bites man" but the latter is still a lot more common, despite the odd headline about the former.

The short answer is "yep," but the long answer is more fun. "Man bites dog" isn't exactly the right analogy, though. That's just the J105 value of novelty: the odd Hapsburg working at the Burger King. I like "shark bites man" better; it's a rare event that sometimes turns into a trend story and sometimes doesn't, without regard to whether or how the underlying numbers have changed.

Read more »

Blame game: From man to pig ...

We spend a lot of time around here picking on the Fair 'n' Balanced Network, so let's take a brief glance at how the world looks from a fresh, distinct, radically different angle:

(CNN) -- When signs of a severe economic downfall emerged more than two years ago, then-candidate Barack Obama was quick to point a finger at the man he hoped to replace.

Seventeen months into his administration, the message is often the same, and Republicans say it's time for him to drop the Bush bashing and take ownership of the problem.

"Nothing makes a president look weaker than pointing the finger at past administrations," said Republican strategist Ron Bonjean. "By blaming somebody, it looks like you are playing politics and people just want jobs. They don't care about whose fault it is. Playing the blame game only boomerangs on yourself."

Sound familiar? It should. It's been a running theme for many months over at ... wait, what's that other network? The one that everybody's always holding up as the anti-CNN? Here's Sean Hannity from a year ago:

President Obama claims that he wants the American people to hold him accountable for his decisions, but as Peter Baker of The New York Times points out, since taking office the president has dodged responsibility for any of our nation's problems.

Instead he's been engaging in one of the liberal left's favorite pastimes: blame Bush, blame Bush, blame Bush.

Let's take a look:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIPS)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, 2/9/2009: We also inherited the most profound economic emergency since the Great Depression.
OBAMA, 2/24/2009: With the deficit we inherited.
OBAMA, 3/6/2009: We inherited a big mess.
OBAMA, 3/12/2009: Because of the deficits we inherited.
OBAMA, 3/18/2009: Because of the massive deficit we inherited.
OBAMA, 3/19/2009: Because of the massive debts that we've inherited.
OBAMA, 3/20/2009: Because of the massive deficits we inherited.
OBAMA, 3/25/2009: And because we've inherited a historic fiscal mess.
OBAMA, 6/1/2009: We inherited a financial crisis unlike any that we've seen in our time.
OBAMA, 6/9/2009: The financial crisis this administration inherited is still creating painful challenges for businesses and families alike.
(END VIDEO CLIPS)

This is a broken record. Isn't it time for the president to retire that line and maybe start to take some responsibility for his own?

Amazing coincidence! That's the takeaway message CNN has too!

The White House needs to go on a confidence campaign and perhaps take a page from President Reagan's playbook, Epstein said.

Let's do just that. Here's Reagan from 1982:*

Sept. 16, 1982: ",,, if we had not brought inflation down as far as we have from the double-digit rates we inherited."
July 1, 1982: "A year and a half ago, we inherited 21.5 percent interest rates, double-digit inflation and a trillion-dollar debt, the worst economic mess in post-war history."
June 16, 1982: ''Some diehards are now declaring the present recession was caused by our program,'' Mr. Reagan said in a speech at the Albert Thomas Convention Center here tonight. ''May I just point out - we had the recession before we got the program.''
April 30, 1982: "And they have every reason to because that 12.4 percent inflation rate we inherited has been running at only 3.2 percent for the last six months."
March 19, 1982: "Our Administration has been reminding the American people that the economic mess we inherited last year - and the recession we're in now - is the legacy of years of misguided policy. ... Well, we inherited many mistakes by others - but we're not going to just bemoan the past."
Feb. 19, 1982: "A year ago, I went before the American people to say that we'd inherited the worst economic mess in half a century."

Nothing makes a president look weaker, huh? Good thing Reagan had gotten out of the habit by the time he ran for re-election:

Oct. 2, 1984: Mr. Reagan told the business group that his Administration ''inherited the legacy of 42 unbalanced budgets in the last 50 years.''
Aug. 24, 1984: "The Census Bureau confirms that, because of the tax laws we inherited, the number of households at or below the poverty level paying Federal income tax more than doubled between 1980 and 1982."
Feb. 23, 1984: "May I give two examples? We've not only cut down the rate of increase in spending that we inherited and that we found when we came here, but no one has added up the proposed spending increases that we have denied. "
Feb. 1, 1984:In an address to executives of the concrete and gravel industries, Mr. Reagan cited a dozen different aspects of the economic recovery, saying, "We inherited despair and turned it into hope."

The right time to drop the bashing and take ownership, in other words, seems to be sometime toward the end of Year 4. Unless you're a major cable network trying to build a bogus politics story around a fictional talking point about one party passed along by a strategist for the opposition, that is.

The point is not that CNN and Fox are the same thing. They aren't, though when it comes to buying this handful of magic beans from this huckster, it's hard to tell. But it's equally important to note that they aren't polar opposites or left-right anchors on a Likert-type scale of ideology in journalism or anything like that.

CNN is building a story in a very old-fashioned way: some people in the pundit class are saying X, here's an expert saying Y about that, here's another expert saying sort-of-Y, and here's an opposition expert saying not-Y. The gatekeeping fail comes at the outset. As when it buys into, say, Paul Payack's loopy assertions about presidential speech, CNN isn't bothering to ask what properties would have to be in place for X to be worth talking about. And as with other such pseudo-quantitative assertions, the first thing to do is -- ready for this? look around a little and see what the terrain looks like. If the pundit class is chattering about some phenomenon that amounts to Water Flows Downhill or Sun Rises in East, that's a sign that you don't have a story and should tell the strategist to bugger quietly off into that good night. CNN evidently doesn't make a habit of that sort of reflection, but if we ask nicely, there's always a chance that it might.

Fox is a different creature. It can turn out stories built exactly along this pattern (claim, support, contradiction, coinclusion), but it only does them for some political actors. Fox would never run an assertion that George W. Bush was a girly speaker because of his use of the passive voice, or that his use of the first-person singular pronoun marked him as a blithe narcissist unfit for leadership in times of crisis. Fox is a propaganda organization, and propaganda organizations don't buy magic beans from the enemy. That's why CNN is easy to game and Fox isn't.

Takeaway point for editors? If the reporter can't tell you what a "blame game" would look like and how this alleged instance compares to your good old null hypothesis, you don't have a story. You don't have to show it's false. The reporter has to show it's true.


* Not what you'd call a thorough content analysis, but a ranging shot; it's what you get by searching the NYT archive for "reagan" and "inherited."

The Cronkite moment

Saturday was the anniversary of another of those Great Moments in Journalism History: The Walter Cronkite comment on the Tet offensive that allegedly caused LBJ to lament that if he'd lost Cronkite, he'd lost Middle America, after which the rest is history.

Think again, says the proprietor of Media Myth Alert: Even if there was agreement on what LBJ said, he was probably too busy toasting John Connally at a birthday dinner in Austin to have seen and said all the things that make Cronkite's editorial such a perennial favorite in the Great Stuff Journalism Does Hall of Fame.

That doesn't make Uncle Walter a bad person. It does suggest that journalists are as prone as anyone else to use history as way of organizing the world to put themselves and their role in a comfortable light (that's one reason the occasional j-history syllabus still crops up with "we've got the best press EVAR" at the top). The world is a tidier place when heroic reporters can bring down a presidency by themselves, but it's the sort of phenomenon we're going to have trouble replicating in real life.

I've enjoyed W. Joseph Campbell's work before, and I'll be looking forward to the myths book.