This Is Not News

There’s been some kerfluffle lately over Dan Froomkin’s “White House Briefing” column at washingtonpost.com. It seems the paper’s ombudsman thinks the column is too liberal, and the political editor doesn’t like the title. A few sites in the liberal blog sphere have reacted in exasperation over the issue. A large undercurrent seems to be along the lines of “You guys have reporters who are hip deep in this whole Plame affair continuing to write and comment about the case without a whiff of disclosure, and this is the thing you’re going to harp on?” I admit I can see the point, but then I’m probably ideologically sympathetic to what Froomkin’s doing.

In the larger view, I think the idea of a column that uses a less formal voice to try and hold politicans accountable is a good thing. And when ever there’s a Democratic president, we’ll get to see if Froomkin’s as bipartisan as he claims he wants to be. But as to the very specific complaint about the title, I think Froomkin’s critics may ahve a point. The first fiew times I clicked links to it, I did think the column might be a report from someone who attends White House press conferences or reports on the beat. ‘White House Briefing” jsut has that generic tone that you’d expect to see on a “straight” news piece. If it were something more colorful, like “White House Watchdog” or something, I think it might give a more accurate impression. (I noticed that the title graphic for the column now has “Dan Froomkin, Columnist” written up there.)

The whole title thing can’t help but remind me of the source of this site’s title. Back in college, one of my major ambitions was to write a Dave Barry-esque humor column. When I became features editor of the paper, I got to do just that. Well, at some point, one of the executive editors told me I had to give my column a title, because the faculty advisor was concerned that people would mistake my sarcastic recollections of dorm life for actual news. I admit, I found this absurd. I was writing about non-serious topics, in the features section, on the same page as our comic strips, with a byline box with my picture. If you see a guy’s photo in a big byline box next to his story, that’s like universal newspaper code for “This is a column, not an objective news story. See this guy here? It’s his opinion or perspective.” My objections were in vain. A title was demanded. So I slapped down black bars above and below the byline box, and in white Serpentine text I wrote “WARNING: This Is Not News.”

Snarky and immature? Probably. But that’s probably why it fit the column so well. And I grew to like it so much, I decided to use the name again when I started this site. Hopefully, if Froomkin changes his title, he’ll find one that suits him just as well.

This is priceless. I just finished taking a course in Third World history that focused on how wealthy nations exploit the resources and cheap labor of poorer, developing nations. Interesting class, lot of food for thought, but right now it mainly makes me think that this article in the New York Times is hysterical and deeply troubling all at the same time.

We are outsourcing video-game-playing to China. There are sweatshops involved.

“For 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, my colleagues and I are killing monsters,” said a 23-year-old gamer who works here in this makeshift factory and goes by the online code name Wandering. “I make about $250 a month, which is pretty good compared with the other jobs I’ve had. And I can play games all day.”

…

On eBay, for example, 100 grams of World of Warcraft gold is available for $9.99 or two über characters from EverQuest for $35.50. It costs $269 to be transported to Level 60 in Warcraft, and it typically takes 15 days to get the account back at the higher level.

…

One huge site here in Fuzhou has over 100 computers in a series of large, dark rooms. About 70 players could be seen playing quietly one weekday afternoon, while some players slept by the keyboard.

“We recruit through newspaper ads,” said the 30-something owner, whose workers range from 18 to 25 years old. “They all know how to play online games, but they’re not willing to do hard labor.”

Another operation here has about 40 computers lined up in the basement of an old dilapidated building, all playing the same game. Upstairs were unkempt, closet-size dormitory rooms where several gamers slept on bunk beds; the floors were strewn with hot pots.

It is truly amazing the gaps in the world that we find ways to fill, isn’t it?

I’ve been on a bit of a nostalgia-fest watching the first two seasons of The Greatest American Hero on DVD. Fuller reviews will be posted here and/or at the LogBook some time soon, but as I was enjoying the show’s goofy charm, I also realized I do not have nearly enough suspension of disbelief to accept some plot developments. But it did make me ponder a question.

What would the world be like if it were like the world in Stephen J. Cannell shows?

I mean, we’re talking about a world where gun runners trying to supply anti-American insurgents in South America want to finance their purchase by winning a large bet on who wins the National League pennant and try to injure various players on the California Stars in order to ensure the bet goes their way. And at no point in this procession does the baseball team hire bodyguards for their players or even a car service that will prevent them from having to park their cars in underlit garages where the yare easy prey for hired muscle.

And that’s just oen episode of Hero. I have not even begun to ponder The A-Team yet.

I’m pretty sure Eddie Murphy did this already back on Saturday Night Live:

A black family learns what it’s like to be white while a white family becomes black in the six-part documentary series “Black.White,” scheduled for broadcast on the FX cable network in March.

Makeup temporarily transforms the two families for the series developed by filmmaker R.J. Cutler and actor-rapper Ice Cube.

It seems like there are few ideas so outlandish that a television producer will not attempt them.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has been tracking some press coverage of the legal problems of Republican Congressmen such as Tom DeLay and Duke Cunningham, along with the associated scandals. One thing he has pointed out is that the media seems to be bending over backwards to depict the story as being part of an overall political culture of corruption in which both parties are equally guilty, even when most of the federal cases right now involve Republicans. (Conversely, if you want to talk about corruption in Philadelphia, you have to focus the attention on the local Democratic Party, which has been unchallenged for a long time and shows plenty of signs of bloat.) He mentions today a Washington Post chat in which a reporter acknowledges that sometimes the effort for balance creates its own distortions.

Around the same time, Next Hurrah linked to a very good article in the NY Review of Books about how the emphasis on balance, along with corporate pressure and the overall culture of journalism, keeps the press from challenging the public with information about the powerful and the consequences of their actions. There are a number of good anecdotes in the article, many of which focus on issues like poverty and Iraq. Michael Massig strives for accuracy, but he is clearly concerned with facts that do not paint American society or government in the best of lights. I leave it to you to determine if he is being unfair or if, as Rob Corddry once joked on The Daily Show, the facts on the ground have a bias.

When it comes to the balance issue, I admit that I simultaneously see the problem and want to leap to the press’s defense. Part of that, I think, is an effort at self-defense. When I worked on the campus newspaper at Fordham, the effort to “get both sides” was one of the things that I emphasized when covering news stories. I still clearly remember one story where there was a dispute between another campus publication and the administration (via the student-run budget committee) that resulted in the publication being shut down. The narrow focus of the dispute was whether or not the publication was bringing in enough outside ad revenue to keep it going – the publications had to be somewhat but not entirely self-supporting – and whether enough of an effort was being made to increase that revenue. My reporting and writing pretty much boiled down to interviewing the two sides and presenting their alternate takes on what had happened, filling in some basic context where necessary. I felt at the time that it was the right approach because I didn’t really have the resources at hand to try and verify some of the claims about what had gone on in the past. (The budget cutbacks so many media organizations face today definitely make this a concern for reporters in the field today.) Nor did I have sources who were willing to go on the record and tell me that there was any kind of larger agenda involved – which there probably was, because the administration had long had its problems with the other publication. But I didn’t want to seem like I was gloating over a rival publication’s troubles or trying to kick the administration, so that whole balance thing was definitely in my head when I wrote the article.

I actually just now pulled my copy of that year’s paper off my shelf and reread it. In the narrow context of events, I actually think the strive-for-balance approach worked. The various sides had different perspectives on what was fair and appropriate, and a lot of basic facts weren’t really in dispute. It was more a question of how to interpret them – was the administration/committee being ham-handed or unrealistic in its demands, or was the publication failing to live up to its obligations? So presenting the sides wasn’t a bad thing to do. On the other hand, I did nothing to establish the larger context of the administration’s feud with the publication and raise the question of whether this was some kind of payback. Student leaders at Fordham were a fairly incestuous group – one of the leaders of student government was my editor-in-chief the year after this story ran, and she worked on or ran several other organizations as well. (No way to avoid that, because there were far more positions than people who wanted to fill them.) But as a result we heard plenty of rumors about “what was really going on” – but no one was willing to say anything on the record. Which brings us back to the issue of sources and why cultivating them is so important if reporting is to have any credibility. That cultivation sometimes results in compromises being made and reporters having to sit on information that they have but can’t source or prove. That’s part of the territory, but the sources have to be put to good use rather than being accumulated for their own sake.