Mediactive Page 3

  Trust and Reliability

  In this emergent global conversation, as we ride a tsunami of information, what can we trust?

  Trust and credibility issues are not new to the Digital Age. Journalists of the past have faced these questions again and again, and the Industrial Age rise of what people called “objective journalism”—allegedly unbiased reporting—clearly did not solve the problem.

  We don’t have to look back very far to note some egregious cases. The New York Times’s Jayson Blair saga, in which a young reporter spun interviews and other details from whole cloth, showed that even the best news organizations are vulnerable. The Washington press corps, with dismayingly few exceptions, served as a stenography pool for the government in the run-up to the Iraq War. And so on.

  The credibility problem of traditional media goes much deeper. Almost everyone who has ever been the subject of a news story can point to small and sometimes large errors of fact or nuance, or to quotes that, while perhaps accurate, are presented out of their original context in ways that change their intended meaning. It’s rarely deliberate; shallowness is a more common media failing than malice.

  Having said that, I greatly appreciate what traditional news people give us in many cases: their best efforts in a deadline-driven craft. Despite the minor errors, the better media organizations get things pretty much right (except, of course, when they go horribly awry, as in missing the financial bubble until it was too late). The small mistakes undermine any notion of absolute trust, but I tend to have some faith that there’s still something worthwhile about the overall effort.

  Most traditional media organizations try to avoid the worst excesses of bad journalism through processes aimed both at preventing mistakes and, when they inevitably occur, setting the record straight. Yet too many practitioners are bizarrely reluctant to do so. As I write this, it has been more than a year since the Washington Post published an editorial based on an absolutely false premise, which I documented in my blog and passed along to the paper’s ombudsman, who passed it along to the editorial page editor. The editorial page has neither corrected nor acknowledged the error, an outrageous failure of its journalistic responsibility.

  I still don’t know why the Post refuses to deal with this mistake, now compounded through inaction, but I do know that the silence betrays another major failing in the mass media: a lack of transparency from people who demand it of others. I’ll discuss this at much greater length later. (On the subject of transparency, I should note that I have relationships, financial and otherwise, with some of the institutions and people I discuss or quote in this book. My online disclosure page, dangillmor.com/about, lists many such relationships, and I’ll mention them in this book either directly or with appropriate links.)

  One of the most serious failings of traditional journalism has been its reluctance to focus critical attention on a powerful player in our society: journalism itself. The Fourth Estate rarely gives itself the same scrutiny it sometimes applies to the other major institutions. (I say “sometimes” because, as we’ve seen in recent years, journalists’ most ardent scrutiny has been aimed at celebrities, not the governments, businesses and other entities that have the most influence, often malignant, on our lives.)

  A few small publications, notably the Columbia Journalism Review, have provided valuable coverage of the news business over the years. But these publications circulate mostly within the field and can look at only a sliver of the pie. As we’ll see in upcoming chapters, the “Fifth Estate” of online media critics is helping to fill the gap.

  The new media environment, however rich with potential for excellence, has more than a few reliability issues of its own. It’s at least equally open to error, honest or otherwise, and persuasion morphs into manipulation more readily than ever. There’s a difference between lack of transparency and deception, though. Some of the more worrisome examples of this fall in the political arena, but less-than-honorable media tactics span a wide spectrum of society’s activities.

  Consider just a few examples:

  • Procter & Gamble and Walmart, among other major companies, have been caught compensating bloggers and social networkers for promoting the firms or their products without disclosing their corporate ties. This stealth marketing, a malignant form of what’s known as “buzz marketing,” caused mini-uproars in the blogging community, but a frequently asked question was whether these campaigns were, as most believe, just the tip of the iceberg of paid influence.

  • Meanwhile, new media companies have created the blogging and social networking equivalents of the “advertorials” we find in newspapers, compensating people for blogging, Tweeting and the like and not always providing or requiring adequate disclosure. Federal regulators have been sufficiently alarmed by these and other practices that they’ve enacted regulations aimed at halting abuses; unfortunately, as we’ll see later, the new rules could go to far if enforced too strictly.

  • President Barack Obama has been the target of mostly shadowy, though sometime overt, rumors and outright lies. They range from the laughable to the truly slimy. What they have in common is that during the election campaign they were plainly designed to poison voters’ attitudes in swing states. During Obama’s presidency, they have been designed to discredit his authority among a large swath of the American people. The people behind these campaigns have succeeded to a degree that should scare every honest citizen. A nontrivial percentage of Americans believe Obama is a Muslim and originally a citizen of Kenya. If the latter were true, which it is not, Obama would be disqualified from holding his office.

  • On blogs and many other sites where conversation among the audience is part of the mix, we often encounter sock puppets—people posting under pseudonyms instead of their real names, and either promoting their own work or denigrating their opponents, sometimes in the crudest ways. As with the buzz marketing, it’s widely believed that the ones getting caught are a small percentage of the ones misusing these online forums. Sock puppetry predates the Internet and has never gone out of style in traditional media, but it’s easier than ever to pull off online.

  Craig Newmark, founder of the craigslist online advertising and community site, famously says that most people online are good and that a tiny percentage do the vast majority of the harm. This is undoubtedly correct. Yet as Craig, a friend, would be the first to say, knowing that doesn’t solve the problem; it takes individual and community effort, too.

  In a world with seemingly infinite sources of information, trust is harder to establish. But we can make a start by becoming better informed about what we read, hear and watch.

  Innovation and Participation

  Because we’ve become accustomed to a media world dominated by monopolies and oligopolies, we still tend to imagine that just a few big institutions will rise from the sad rubble of the 20th century journalism business. That’s not happening—at least. not anytime soon. As I said earlier, we’re heading into an incredibly messy but also wonderful period of innovation and experimentation that will combine technology and people who push ideas both stunning and outlandish into the world. The result will be a huge number of failures, but also a large number of successes.

  One of the failures was mine. In 2005 I helped launch an experimental local Web journalism project called Bayosphere, and made just about every mistake in the entrepreneur’s goof-kit. But since then I’ve also invested in several new media enterprises. I co-founded a site with a media component—users telling each other about where they were traveling, and giving advice on what to do once they got there—that worked well enough to be bought by a big company.1(I’m also involved in several startups as an advisor, and serve as an advisor or board member on several media-related non-profits.)

  I can’t begin to list all of the great experiments I’m seeing right now. I’ll explore many of them on the Mediactive website (mediactive.com), and mention at least a few in this book.

  What’s important is the breadth and depth of th
e innovations we’re already seeing—even now, before the traditional media have disappeared or evolved. The experiments and startups range from not-for-profits doing investigative reporting to data-driven operations at the hyper-local level to aggregators of journalism from many sources, and include any number of other kinds of enterprises.

  In one journalistic arena in particular, new media have pretty much replaced the old: the world of technology. The widening array of coverage, with some of the best focusing on narrow audiences and topic niches, has not only superseded the magazines and (shallow) newspaper coverage of old, but is deeper and fundamentally better. Some of this is exemplary journalism. Not all topics will lend themselves to this kind of transition, as we’ll discuss later, but there’s every reason to believe that many of today’s weakly covered topics and issues will enjoy better journalism in the future.

  I’m still having fun working on new media projects, but my money—literally, not just figuratively—is on a younger generation. For the past several years, while continuing to write and publish journalism online and in newspapers and magazines, including regular publication in the online magazine Salon.com, I’ve been working in academia. Currently I teach at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where I’m helping to bring entrepreneurship and the startup culture into the curriculum. We’ve encouraged students in a variety of programs, not just journalism, to team up and create new kinds of community-focused information products and services. Several have landed funding to take their ideas further, and all have shown the kind of potential that tells me we’ll get this right in the end. I envy my students, and I tell them so; they and countless others like them around the world are inventing our media future, and the field is wide open for them in ways that I could not have imagined when I started my own career.

  At the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, the ASU project we launched in 2008, my colleagues and I make this point to our students at the outset of every semester: There’s almost no barrier to entry if you want to do something in digital media.

  The tools for creating news and community information are increasingly in everyone’s hands. The personal computer that I’m using to write this book comes equipped with media creation and editing tools of such depth that I can’t begin to learn all their capabilities. The device I carry in my pocket boasts features such as Web browsing, email, video recording and playback, still-camera mode, audio recording, text messaging, GPS location sensing, compass headings and much more; oh, and it’s a phone, too.

  The other side of the media-democratization coin is access.

  With traditional media, we produced something, usually manufacturing it, and then distributed it: We put it in delivery trucks or broadcast it to receivers.

  With new media, we create things and make them available; people come and get them. Now, this isn’t as simple as I’ve just made it sound. We get things in a variety of ways, such as RSS “feeds” and daily emails that come to us from many news sources; we also explore Webpages, Twitter tweets, Facebook messages, videos and so much more. Web publishers still look for ways to grow audiences. But I think of “distribution” in the new media world as the process of making sure that the people long known as consumers—that would be us—can find what’s being created not only by commercial and institutional publishers, but by all of us.

  Publishers and online service providers especially crave audiences whose members become active participants in a community. That’s how some new media empires are made today: by helping the former audience become part of the process.

  As media democratization turns people from mere consumers into potential creators, something else is happening. We are becoming collaborators, because so many of the new tools of creation are inherently collaborative. We have only begun to explore the meaning, much less the potential, of this reality. All I can say is, wow.

  It’s Up to Us, Not “Them”

  In mid-to-late 2009, if you were paying even the slightest attention to the legislative debate over America’s messed-up system of health care, you heard again and again about “death panels.” These were the shadowy governmental bodies that opponents claimed would decide your fate if the Democratic-controlled Congress enacted just about any major shifts away from the current system. Tens of millions of Americans believed this, and many still do.

  But if you were paying sufficiently close attention, you’ll came to realize that the reports of death panels were not merely inaccurate; they were outrageous lies. They’d been concocted by opponents of pretty much anything the President might propose. (It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: Democrats have been known to lie to make political points, too—the Democrats’ tendency to equate taxpayer-subsidized with “free” is an ongoing abuse of language and logic—but the death panel invention was especially egregious.)

  The death panels lost their power in the public mind for several reasons. Most importantly, the charge was so inflammatory that some traditional media organizations did something unusual: They stopped simply quoting “both sides” of an issue that had a true side and a false side, and reported what was true. Of course, not all media organizations did this, and some continued to promote the falsehoods. But the issue was significant enough, and the consequences alarming enough if the charges had been true, that many people spent the extra time it took to figure out what they could trust. The public, by and large, learned the truth. And the health-care debate shed at least one flagrant deception.

  We need to do this more often. We have no real choice.

  When we have unlimited sources of information, and when the Big Media organizations relentlessly shed their credibility and resources in the face of economic and journalistic challenges, life gets more confusing. The days when we had the easy but misguided luxury of relying on Big Media are gone.

  With new tools and old principles, we’ll break away from the passive-consumption role to become active users of media: hands-on consumers and creators. This won’t only be good for society, though it certainly will be. We’ll be better off individually, too. The cliché “Information is power” is true for you and me only if we have trustworthy information.

  Above all, hands-on mediactivity is satisfying, and often fun. By being mediactive, you’ll get used to gauging the reliability of what you see, pushing deeper into various topics and following the many threads of arguments to reach your own conclusions—not on everything, of course, but on the issues that you care about the most. And when you’ve made that process part of your life, you’ll have trouble waiting for the next break in your day so you can get back to to the satisfaction that it brings.

  Chapter 2

  Becoming an Active User: Principles

  “What I like about April Fool’s Day: One day a year we’re asking whether news stories are true. It should be all 365.”

  The above quote is a Twitter “tweet” by Prentiss Riddle (@pzriddle) of Austin, Texas, posted on April 1, 2008. It’s a line we should all live by.

  Why don’t we ask ourselves, every day, whether the news reports we’re reading, listening to and watching are trustworthy? The fact that most of us don’t is a vestige of the bygone era when we used to watch the late “Uncle” Walter Cronkite—called the most trusted person in America before he retired as CBS Evening News’s anchor in 1981—deliver the headlines. It’s a vestige of a time when we simply sat back and consumed our media.

  At the risk of repeating this too often, let me say again: We can no longer afford to be passive consumers. In this chapter, we’ll look at the core principles for turning mere consumption into active learning.

  Even those of us who spend a good deal of our time creating media, as I do, are still consumers as well. In fact, we are and always will be more consumers than creators.

  Principles of Media Consumption

  The principles presented in this chapter stem mostly from common sense; they involve the exercise of our inhere
nt capacity for skepticism, judgment, free thinking, questioning and understanding. The tactics, tools and techniques we use to achieve this goals– blog commenting systems, for example—change with sometimes surprising speed, but these principles are fairly static. Essentially, they add up to something that we don’t do enough of today: critical thinking.

  The following sections look closely at the five principles of media consumption. Some of what this chapter covers may not be news to you, but in context it strikes me as worth saying. At the end of the chapter, I’ll step back and consider the more philosophical question of how we can persuade ourselves to, as a smart media critic has written, “take a deep breath” as we read, watch and listen to the news. The next chapter will present some ways to apply these ideas to your daily media intake.

  1. Be Skeptical

  We can never take it for granted that what we read, see or hear from media sources of any kind is trustworthy. This caution applies to every scrap of news that comes our way, whether from traditional news organizations, blogs, online videos, Facebook updates or any other source.

  The only rational approach, then, is skepticism. Businesses call the process of thoroughly checking out proposed deals due diligence, and it’s a term that fits here, too. Let’s bring due diligence to what we read, watch and hear.

  I don’t have to tell you that as their businesses have become less stable, the quality of traditional media organizations’ content has been slipping. You’ve seen this for yourself, no doubt, if you still read your local newspaper. In theory, traditional journalism has procedures in place to avoid errors and wrong-headed coverage. But as discussed in the previous chapter, even the best journalists make factual mistakes—sometimes serious ones—and we don’t always see the corrections.