Today in framing

Pretty scary story there, Fair 'n' Balanced Network:

A former top Clinton administration diplomat who used his political sway to garner support for the Iran nuclear deal apparently was being bankrolled the entire time by Boeing -- which is set to make billions off a jet deal with Tehran now that sanctions have been lifted.

Campaign-season-wise, do you think the hed would have a different impact if it said "Reagan's ambassador to Israel got $$$ while pushing Iran deal"? Because Thomas Pickering's career kind of goes back a ways (he was Tricky's ambassador to Jordan after the October war, if you want to put it that way).

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Today in agenda-setting

If emails = golf made sense to Drudge on Sunday night ...

... maybe you should expect to see it at Fox on Monday morning:

And with a little more time to think, Fox can make the headline even better!

Though that creates a few pragmatic/discursive challenges of its own. "Reportedly flagged" is a nice, comfy headline passive: the point is the emails, of course, so why bother with a subject? "Teeing up," on the other hand, puts that question to the reader: Who's doing the teeing? Fox? The WashTimes? The cunning usurper himself, finally launching his move to push Secretary Clinton off the ticket in favor of Valerie Jarrett?

The emails are an interesting case, in that -- unlike the transparently bogus BENGHAZI !!!!! scandal -- they do point to some genuine questions about, if nothing else, common sense. If Fox, following in the master's footstomps, casts it as just another Black Guy Plays Golf Again story, it's missing a chance.

Today's journalism lesson: The follow-up

Well, this certainly seemed like a major Fair 'n' Balanced story last Tuesday: 

The status of 53 Cuban political prisoners who were supposed to be freed as part of the historic deal thawing U.S.-Cuba relations remains a mystery nearly three weeks after the announcement, prompting criticism from rights groups and lawmakers that the Castro regime is stringing along the White House.

“We are very concerned,” Francisco Hernandez, co-founder and president of the Cuban American National Foundation, told FoxNews.com. “The problem with the agreement [between Cuba and the U.S.] is that there is no agreement. There are no guarantees. This has been a tremendous victory for the Cuban government.”

... much as it had been a week earlier:

Cuban dissidents have expressed frustrations with the U.S. government over which political prisoners will be on a list of 53 people scheduled to be freed by the Castro regime as part of an effort to normalize relations between Washington and Havana.

So you could be forgiven for expecting this morning's* exclusive from Reuters to be a big deal as well:

Cuba has completed the release of all 53 prisoners it had promised to free, the Obama administration said on Monday, a major step toward détente with Washington.
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Drums, drums in the deep

You get back from a week at a conference and it looks like somebody just dropped a theory bomb all over the Fair 'n' Balanced Network. Let's enjoy a few not-quite-random selections from the day's top stories, interspersed with random commentary.

Like the human brain, the "media agenda" (and the political agenda, from which we kinda-sorta liberated the idea back in the early 1970s), has a limited carrying capacity. At Fox, it's pretty much four stories at a time. That adds up to a lot of discrete stories if you count all the bobbing and weaving that goes on through the course of a news day, and it gets more complicated when two agenda levels are happening at once. With the Graham story above, there's both issue salience -- Iraq, and specifically the ISIS insurgency, is the day's biggest story -- and attribute salience: basically, run! So life's not just scary, it's complicated.

Conveniently, there's a master frame to help organize things. The Kenyan has screwed things up again: 

South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham sounded the alarm Sunday about the growing threat of Islamic State launching an attack on American soil unless President Obama takes more decisive action to stop the terror group’s surge across Iraq and Syria.

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How the other half lives

You might indeed have awakened on some planet with twelve ammonia-fueled suns, whereon the feckless Kenyan's handshake with the murderous dictator of Cuba was dwarfed only by the "international incident" he and his friends created with somebody's iPhone:

Call it the selfie seen 'round the world.

No, don't. Has no one at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network even heard of the list of Forbidden Ledes?

Among the enduring images from Nelson Mandela's massive memorial service in Johannesburg Tuesday will be one of a jovial President Obama taking a cell phone pic with his seat-mates, Denmark's Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt and Britain's David Cameron.

As the three of them smile for the camera, a stern-looking Michelle Obama can be seen staring straight ahead, hands clasped. As if to remind anyone who sees this photo years from now that it was, after all, a memorial service for one of the great human rights leaders.

More about that in a minute, because we're skating up to the point at which the goofy theoretical stuff actually starts to explain the practical stuff fairly well. But first, this:

The tsk-tsk-ing could be heard across continents.
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Today in agenda-setting

You can learn a lot about what a story's supposed to be by looking at the stories it's supposed to be like -- here, the sidebars accompanying the afternoon's No. 2 story at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network.

The AP thumbsucker makes sense, but when you get to "USDA Sets New Standards" (glossed at The Fox Nation as "Obama unloads 160 pages of school snack regulations") and "More Americans Delaying Retirement," you get a clearer picture. This isn't a Second Amendment package, it's a Kenyan Muslim Perfidy package: the usurper is coming for your guns and your potato chips!

In agenda-setting terms, the first thing that comes to mind is issue salience. The brain is a busy place; it has a limited carrying capacity for issues, and -- quite reasonably -- we take a lot of cues from what we read and see about which issues to pay attention to and how to rate them. At the first level of agenda-setting, where the media's ranking of issues inspires a public ranking of those issues, Obama's devilry has been back and forth with Iranian Peril and Missing Moms all day.
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Today in vizcomm theory

Well, we could say several things about the top story Tuesday morning over to the Drudge Report. For one, it's bogus. The drawback to writing the headline before the election is held is that -- pesky voters! What were they thinking* when they (hem) "resoundingly rejected" (kaff) the measure in question?
More interesting, I think, is the ear in the upper left corner, which in typical Drudge fashion says "Revolt ..." But that's not nearly as cool as the American flag waving against the cerulean sky, reminding us all the the Founding Fathers fought and died so we could abolish the hated property tax and fund all those pesky teachers and cops and things from some other source the legislature finds appropriate.

Your Editor is partial to the era of the 1A editorial cartoon, so of course he's interested in such modern-day incarnations as the random use of the flag to illustrate DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN-style blunders. More to the point, though, he sort of hopes the New York Times and the few other remaining serious papers will try to get through the campaign season without consulting the Drudge Report before filing their campaign stories.

There's a fundamental difference between grownup journalism, which has a tendency to screw up in the course of trying to get things right, and the likes of Drudge, Breitbart, and the Murdoch empire, whose native purpose is to lie and mislead. Please let your favorite professional news organization know that you appreciate the difference. 


* Maybe they were thinking about this sentence from the AP report: "The measure required the North Dakota Legislature to replace the money lost from eliminating property taxes." That'll put you right off your fresh-fried lobster.

Passive aggressive: Priming

No one's ever going to accuse The Fox Nation of being a passive sort of place, and that's what makes this hed unusual. (In theory terms, we're primed to expect something particular from it, but you have to sit through some headlines before the punch line). The whole point of Fox Nation is that we know who's doing what to whom. Often that's the bad guys, as in these examples from today's homepage:

DC Organizer Admits to Paying ‘Occupy DC’ Protesters

Pitting Donors One Against Another: Obama Hits New Fundraising Lows

'Occupy Wall Street' Blasts Banking Industry -- but Apologizes to Its Own Banker

Feds Wanted to Give Solyndra More Money, Emails Show

Orrin Hatch: Obama Fuels Riots

Occupy Wall Street Protester Defecates On Police Car

Top Obama Funder Pushed Solyndra Loan From Inside
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Miracles!

My first thought on this one was -- well, that's a novel bit of restraint, isn't it? Someone's instinct was to proclaim State's not-quite-tying catch a miracle, but cooler heads prevailed and it was downgraded to "nearly miraculous."

It's not a perfect solution. Reporting on sports near-miracles still entails some assumptions about miracles, and miracles take a lot of the fun out of watching the stuff in the first place. (You may conclude from Bucky Dent's home run that the world is a cold, random and luckless place, but you may not conclude it is governed by magic.) But then I was reminded of the same paper's treatment of -- wow, could it be a Carolina game from just a few months back?

To recap, then: Carolina rates a "miracle comeback" for dropping a pass in the end zone, then dropping another pass in the end zone. (Either one would have tied the game, but at the standard exchange rate of 6 points for a touchdown, neither would have won it; even if the same pass had been dropped twice, it wouldn't have been the "winning TD.") The farmers get a "nearly miraculous" for actually catching a pass in the end zone (against, ahem, we have to point out, Carolina, whom they went on to beat). Can you start to imagine why some people out there in readerland might suspect a bit of a double standard?

We'll never entirely erase such perceptions, even if we do stop enthusiastically fueling them. There's a reason that college football and the Fractious Near East are the two areas in which the "hostile media effect" was first demonstrated. But we can try to damp things down a little, and banning miracles -- period, without exception, under all circumstances -- would be a start.

Theoretical Thursdays: The play's the thing

Hey, kids! Welcome back to the occasional detour into the land of "exactly what are you people doing up there on the fifth floor, anyway?" Today's theory is symbolic convergence, which --- among other things -- tries to figure out what people are talking about by looking at the sort of dramas they jointly construct from the stuff they encounter in their lives. SCT started life as a small-group theory but has proven lots of fun for media and political comm too because -- well, where else do people get their information about the political world?

The world is a big and confusing place, after all, and the quicker we can slot something into a familiar category, the quicker we can figure out who the good guys and bad guys are and how we ought to interpret things. When you say "I'm starting to get a really bad feeling about this,"* you're not just being Han Solo for a day -- you're also suggesting which side of the room the Empire is on, with you and your friends as the rebel alliance.

Our example here is Saturday's entry in the Impeachment-Worthy Scandal of the Century over at ... aw, we told you not to peek! It's another "Rahmbo" storm, but it's a Rahmbo storm that you're supposed to think about in a particular way. And even though the story itself (and, to be blunt, the "facts") never mention the magic words, the audience knows exactly when it's supposed to go "Aaaaaaay" or "Dy-no-MITE!"

Here's the hed:
Sestak Case Puts Rahm Emanuel's Backroom Politics Back in Spotlight

Sure, it's a question-begger's banquet, but the fun thing is how little the manifest content of the story has to do with its intent:

The White House official behind the controversial offer to Rep. Joe Sestak is no stranger to hard-nosed political horse trading.

Fine. Is this a case of that?

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who enlisted the help of his former boss Bill Clinton to approach a congressman about sitting out a Senate primary race, has been involved in several political controversies during his 20-year-plus career in Washington. And the current controversy is only the latest for Emanuel in the past 16 months, since he joined the Obama administration.

... Now Emanuel's brand of bare-knuckled politics is back in the spotlight following Friday's release of a White House explanation on Rep. Joe Sestak's allegation of a job offer last summer.

So for all this to be true -- right, this would have to be a particularly bare-knuckled offer, yes? Which is a place the story never goes. It doesn't have to, because the point isn't to shed any light on what happened; it's to let readers know which drama they're watching and who's playing Al Capone:

It just wreaks of old style corrupt Chicago politics.

Why are we surprised at this? Who did we think we sent to the White House? It's now "Chicago Politics" in the White House!

Funny, since the only geographic locations mentioned in the story are ... what's that, Ben Stein?

"The whole thing has about it a Huey Long or Deep South political machine or Boston political machine or Democratic political machine or Republican political machine," he said.

Indeed, "Chicago" never makes an appearance in text or hed. But it's in the url, as "rahms-chicago-style-politics" (meaning it could well have been in an earlier draft), so it's hard to escape concluding that Fox knows exactly what sort of drama it's writing. After all, that was the theme of the Sestak story 10 days ago:

Truth has no place in liberal Chicago thug politics! It's politics as usual for BO.

... and the discovery that the Census (hullo, Stalin!) hired a convicted sex offender:

I just hope someone blows the whistle on all the Chicago thugs and their cronies before someone get killed for knowing too much.

... or legislation on how Puerto Rico might vote on its status:

The "Chicago Way" enhanced! Need votes to stay in power? Just add another poverty minority state! Voila!

... Obama lets Bibi cool his heels:

It's about what I would expect. Chicago politics at its finest.

... the possibility of giving "national monument" status to some lands in the West:

Obama using the Chicago Way! It is so easy to accomplish things when you are a criminal and hopelessly corrupt!

... subpoenas over the leaks of security modifications:

This is a Chicago style warning to all journalists.

... "Crashergate":

This is just like a Chicago Drive by shooting, 25 Witnesses but no one knows anything, no one saw anything, and the Gang Leaders won't let anybody talk. Soooo Transparent!

... "Climategate":

This is what we expect from a corrupt Chicago Politician. The will of the people means nothing... only his objective of destroying the economy and for show.

... and, of course, Obamacare:

Please don't tell me anyone is suprised that O and his ilk are using strong-arm Chicago tactics.

Lies, threats, intimidation, payoffs ... just more of Obama's Chicago-style antics to push his social.ist agenda.

He only knows Chicago brute force approach, and that won't get him far.

When you've been writing the script long enough, you don't have to say "Hi, Norm." Hell, you barely have to get out of the commercial and into the theme.**

* As John's entertaining and well-observed post today suggests, journalists do symbolic convergence as well as anyone.
** If you like where this one's going, come see it in Denver in August.

To the barricades!

Gee. If you were leading tonight's discussion on agenda-setting, what conclu- sions would you draw from the Fox home page this morning?

Please address both the first ("issue agenda") and second ("attribute agenda") levels of agenda-setting. Would you distinguish second-level agenda-setting from framing, and if so, why? Or would you just buy some more ammunition and bottled water?

'Accuracy' and accuracy

Tonight's trivia question: What do college football and the fractious Near East have in common? Raise your hand if you said "original convincing test cases for the 'hostile media' effect" -- the idea that partisans of opposing sides can look at the same piece of "neutral" reportage and conclude that it's biased against their side.

It's tempting to conclude from the "hostile media" effect, and from the normal run of complaints about Middle East coverage, that all complaints about "accuracy" are complaints about ideology. Calls for truthful and unbiased reporting do often boil down to calls for a different kind of bias in reporting. But it's worth bearing in mind that amid the political minefields, there are still concerns about straight-up, literal, binary accuracy. And the evidence from one of the local fishwraps is starting to pile up uncomfortably high.

Last month, the Freep desk managed to pull a complete 180 on some Gaza copy: turning a "Palestinian speaking Hebrew" into a "Palestinian-speaking Hebrew." That suggests the sort of genuine unfamiliarity with the basics that -- not to be jealous or anything, but it'd get the perpetrator laughed out of a sports department in very short order. Nor have things gotten better since the current Gaza conflict erupted.

The teaser hed on the Jan. 5 front page proclaimed "Troops go deep into Gaza City." As the teaser itself (and the inside story it referred to) noted, they were doing no such thing; they were going deep into the Gaza strip, but the effect was to cut the city itself off, not to enter it. Last Sunday, the lead hed on 4A declared "Hamas, Fatah rift tears Gaza" -- interesting if true, but since the story was about public opinion in the West Bank, an important topic on its own but quite distinct from public opinion in Gaza, pretty spectacularly off the mark.

If you've done much deadline editing, you've seen how the latter mistake happens: somebody gets the day's "Gaza story" (which happens to be about the West Bank, and is fairly prescient in the bargain) and, not knowing the West Bank from Hazel Park, figures the most important word to get into the hed is "Gaza." Today's blunder, though, is different. Here's the cutline from today's 4A:

An Israeli Arab fighter flashes a victory sign in Tel Aviv, Israel, during a demonstration against Israel's military operations in Gaza.

Some background while you scrape your jaw from the floor. Arabs (Muslim and Christian) comprise about 16% to 18% of Israel's citizens, and they do most of the things that citizens do (military service usually being the big exception). They can vote. They can run for parliament. And, as Israelis in general are often good at, they can demonstrate. Which, according to all versions of the cutline I've seen (including the one at the WashTimes), is what's going on here: An Israeli Arab flashes a victory sign during a demonstration against Israel's military operations in Gaza, in Tel Aviv,Israel, Saturday, Jan. 17, 2009.

True, it's been a while since I've watched a demonstration in Tel Aviv,* but I think it's safe to say that if "Arab fighters" were running loose in the streets during one, we would have heard about it. It looks as if some Freep desker figured that "fighter" must be the safe, neutral way to describe "scary-looking person with a keffiyeh over the face," rather than having the common sense to read the damn caption and the basic area knowledge to realize that it might be -- hold on -- just a "demonstrator."

If that reading is correct,** the "Israeli Arab fighter" cutline is just a remarkably stupid blunder, but it's the sort of blunder that's impossible to tell from bias, and that ought to sound a warning bell downtown. Not just for demographic reasons (the Freep used to take some pride in its awareness of the significant Arab population in these parts), but for fundamental questions about whether the paper can credibly claim to offer an accurate portrayal of things that are happening in the broader world.

The "one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter" argument has been with us for decades (the earliest specific reference I know of is from 1948). Reasonable people still wrestle with it because it's still a vexing impediment to attempts to define terrorism, and terrorism is worth defining because a calm, rational understanding of it gets us closer to the condition suggested by German legal scholar Christian Walter: A person committing certain criminal acts may (or even: must) be considered everyone’s terrorist even if he or she is someone’s freedom fighter or someone else’s law enforcement agent.

That's an ideal, and I can see why a newspaper would want to look neutral on the question of when a "fighter" is a terrorist and when he (or she***) isn't until that ideal is reached. But not distinguishing between types of substate violence is a whole world different from not being able to distinguish armed violence from civil protest. If the Freep can't tell those things apart, it's in far more serious trouble than a new home delivery schedule can fix.

* Or in Ramallah, for that matter.
** If anyone has a different account, by all means check in soonest at the comments.
*** The subtitle of Geula Cohen's autobiography, after all, is "Memoirs of a young terrorist." Worth reading if you keep up with this sort of thing.