COMM 150: WikiLeaks -- massive end run around the gatekeepers

Publication this week in The New York Times, The Guardian (United Kingdom), El Pais (Spain), Le Monde (France) and Der Spiegel (Germany) of U.S. diplomatic cables leaked to WikiLeaks, an internet-based group of freedom of information activists, is the biggest -- and arguably the most important -- since publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 helped turn public opinion against the Vietnam War. It raises some of the basic issues we are reading about as we scramble to finish our syllabus in COMM 150 ... secrecy, the public's right to know, journalistic ethics and the role of new media in challenging authority.

It isn't what I'd planned for Wednesday's class.

As you recall, we were going to discuss the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics and how it relates to Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death." Now we've got bigger fish to fry. But, if you get my drift, you'll still get the opportunity to express yourself in writing about the SPJ Code of Ethics. In fact, why don't you open a new window now? That way you'll have the Code handy as we go over the WikiLeaks story in class.

So let's get started.

Background.This is a major developing story worldwide, and it's confusing. It takes off in all directions, from the threat of war with Iran and diplomatic jockeying over China's relationship with North Korea to gossip about whether a foreign leader's wife had Botox treatments. Not to mention WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's legal problems, ranging from an allegation of sex crimes in Sweden to a U.S. Justice Department investigation into violation of espionage laws. Even Sarah Palin is Twittering about it. I have no idea what the story going to look like by class time Wednesday, but CNN News filed a pretty good explanation this morning (Tuesday) of some of the background. (Scroll down to "Revealing secrets online" box w/ graphic of WikiLeaks page in background, and click on box.) Arguably the most objective news organization in the world is the British Broadcasting Corp. And BBC Washington correspondent Kim Ghattas' initial report, which aired Monday, is an even-handed summary. And the Washington Post has a fascinating, must-read story about how The New York Times got it from The Guardian "as a result of a leak of a leak."

Issues. We aren't going to be able to sort all this stuff out in class. We're not even going to try. But there are several points here that relate to what we're studying in COMM 150. Among them:

• Technology and the ability of new media to evade the gatekeepers. From the time of Gutenberg and Martin Luther, innovations in the means of communication have allowed people get their message out despite opposition from the authorities. Amsterdam's unlicensed printing presses played the same role as WikiMedia's web servers in the 16th century. Is this any different?
  
• How is this story being covered by American media? I think the New York Times' main story summarizing the leaks (linked below) was more entertaining -- i.e. included more funny little details, like the lady's Botox treatments, than the Guardian of the Spiegel. But maybe that's because I've been reading too much Neil Postman lately. How much ink and air time are the leaks getting?
  
• One of the final chapters in John Vivian's "Media of Mass Communication" is about globalization. How many global angles do you find here? Where are the papers that are publishing the leaked documents? Where is Assange from? Where is he now? What is WikiLeaks doing in Iceland? How international is the internet, anyway? Is WikiLeaks an international entity?
  
• Journalistic ethics. Is it right to publish secret documents? What are the pros and cons? (There are some of each.) What safeguards are reasonable? What would the SPJ Code of Ethics counsel? How do you tell the truth and minimize harm? I'm especially concerned with this last question.

There are more points. But those will do for starters.

In class we'll watch an eight-minute webcast by editors of the Guardian that examines some of the implications of the leaks, again from a British viewpoint, and also shows some of the effort that went into preparing the leaked information for publication:

US embassy leaks: 'The data deluge is coming ...'Jonathan Powell [former chief of staff to then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair], Alan Rusbridger [editor of The Guardian], David Leigh [investigations executive editor], Timothy Garton-Ash [historian and Guardian foreign affairs columnist] and Heather Brooke [free-lance journalist, writer, and freedom of information activist] discuss the leaked US embassy cables ...

The New York Times has set up a website called State Secrets to archive its coverage. It includes editor Bill Keller's explanation of why the Times is publishing the leaked documents. Keller says:

The Times has taken care to exclude, in its articles and in supplementary material, in print and online, information that would endanger confidential informants or compromise national security. The Times’s redactions were shared with other news organizations and communicated to WikiLeaks, in the hope that they would similarly edit the documents they planned to post online.

After its own redactions, The Times sent Obama administration officials the cables it planned to post and invited them to challenge publication of any information that, in the official view, would harm the national interest. After reviewing the cables, the officials — while making clear they condemn the publication of secret material — suggested additional redactions. The Times agreed to some, but not all. The Times is forwarding the administration’s concerns to other news organizations and, at the suggestion of the State Department, to WikiLeaks itself. In all, The Times plans to post on its Web site the text of about 100 cables — some edited, some in full — that illuminate aspects of American foreign policy.

The question of dealing with classified information is rarely easy, and never to be taken lightly. Editors try to balance the value of the material to public understanding against potential dangers to the national interest. As a general rule we withhold secret information that would expose confidential sources to reprisals or that would reveal operational intelligence that might be useful to adversaries in war. We excise material that might lead terrorists to unsecured weapons material, compromise intelligence-gathering programs aimed at hostile countries, or disclose information about the capabilities of American weapons that could be helpful to an enemy.

On the other hand, we are less likely to censor candid remarks simply because they might cause a diplomatic controversy or embarrass officials. ...

Keller's "Note to Readers" should be read in full. It makes it clear the decision to publish was not taken lightly.

Commentary. Heather Brooke, the FOI activist who was quoted in the Guardian's video, had an op-ed piece in today's paper arguing publication of the leaks is a good thing. (She also said she got ahold of the data from a third-party source, not WikiLeaks, which is an interesting sidelight. Once this stuff gets out there, it takes on a life of its own.) Brooke argues:

Diplomacy has always involved dinners with ruling elites, backroom deals and clandestine meetings. Now, in the digital age, the reports of all those parties and patrician chats can be collected in one enormous database. And once collected in digital form, it becomes very easy for them to be shared.

Indeed, that is why the Siprnet database – from which these US embassy cables are drawn – was created in the first place. The 9/11 commission had made the remarkable discovery that it wasn't sharing information that had put the nation's security at risk; it was not sharing information that was the problem. The lack of co-operation between government agencies, and the hoarding of information by bureaucrats, led to numerous "lost opportunities" to stop the 9/11 attacks. As a result, the commission ordered a restructuring of government and intelligence services to better mimic the web itself. Collaboration and information-sharing was the new ethos. But while millions of government officials and contractors had access to Siprnet, the public did not.

But data has a habit of spreading. It slips past military security and it can also leak from WikiLeaks, which is how I came to obtain the data. It even slipped past the embargoes of the Guardian and other media organisations involved in this story when a rogue copy of Der Spiegel accidentally went on sale in Basle, Switzerland, on Sunday. Someone bought it, realised what they had, and began scanning the pages, translating them from German to English and posting updates on Twitter. It would seem digital data respects no authority, be it the Pentagon, WikiLeaks or a newspaper editor.

Her solution: More transparency on the part of government.

Another view.Luke Allnutt, who writes a blog called Tangled Web, says in a post on Radio Free Europe that the WikiLeaks information dumps could have an opposite effect to what Brooke and the WikiLeakers hope for. He has an informed opinion: His blog "focuses on the smart ways people in closed societies are using social media, mobile phones, and the Internet to circumvent their governments. It also covers the efforts of less-than-democratic governments to control the web. Now and then, it might also cover shiny new gadgets." Here's what he says about the diplomatic cables:

The leaks, of course, were meant to embarrass the United States, but in the end the opposite seemed true.

Those looking for skullduggery won't find very much, although of course as they will remind us, that is because all the skullduggery is hidden behind much higher layers of secrecy. As Timothy Garton Ash writes, "from what I have seen, the professional members of the US foreign service have very little to be ashamed of."

Rather than die-hard imperialists bent on a nefarious masterplan, U.S. diplomats appear to be honest brokers dealing with a complex world. The cables show what a flawed and decidedly human game diplomacy is, where foreign policy is at the mercy of personalities, hearsay, high-level gossip, and charlatans.

One of the biggest ironies, though, is that a WikiLeaks world could end up being a world with less transparency rather than more. In a commentary for "The Guardian," Heather Brooke talks about how the digital revolution has just begun. It's all rather techno-deterministic, in the same vein as old arguments that "information wants to be free" and how the Internet just routes around censorship. ...

... when being candid has [bad] consequences, diplomats will either be less candid or more cautious. Diplomats will use different channels: either retreating to an analogue world of hidden notes and snatched conversations, or using top-secret channels, with much higher levels of encryption, for even the most mundane chatter.

Or diplomats will simply censor themselves, writing with greater candor so that information becomes sanitized to the point of banality -- just as we might censor ourselves in our emails at work, never knowing whose in-box our message will end up in. Diplomats will write cables, but perhaps always with an audience beyond the intended recipients in mind.,/blockquote>

All five papers withheld certain parts of the information from publication, mostly for security reasons. They published accounts of how they decided what to withhold:

• Der Spiegel (English-language website). "With a team of more than 50 reporters and researchers, SPIEGEL has viewed, analyzed and vetted the mass of documents. In most cases, the magazine has sought to protect the identities of the Americans' informants, unless the person who served as the informant was senior enough to be politically relevant. In some cases, the US government expressed security concerns and SPIEGEL accepted a number of such objections. In other cases, however, SPIEGEL felt the public interest in reporting the news was greater than the threat to security. Throughout our research, SPIEGEL reporters and editors weighed the public interest against the justified interest of countries in security and confidentiality."
  
• Le Monde (Paris). "Les journaux ont aussi établi des listes communes de personnes à protéger, notamment dans les pays dictatoriaux, criminalisés ou en guerre. Toutes les identités de personnes dont ils estiment qu'elles seraient menacées ont été masquées. WikiLeaks a accepté de ne pas diffuser dans l'immédiat les 250 000 télégrammes. Seuls les mémos ayant servi à la rédaction des articles des cinq journaux seront, après protection des identités, publiés."
  
• El Pais (Madrid). "Ese [editing] proceso se ha llevado a cabo bajo una exigente condición de no poner en peligro en ningún momento fuentes protegidas de antemano o personas cuya vida podría verse amenazada al desvelarse su identidad. Al mismo tiempo, todos los medios han hecho un esfuerzo supremo por evitar la revelación de episodios que pudieran suponer un riesgo para la seguridad de cualquier país, particularmente de Estados Unidos, el más expuesto por estas revelaciones. Por esa razón, algunos de los documentos que serán puestos a disposición de nuestros lectores a partir de hoy aparecerán parcialmente mutilados."

Your blogging assignment. You knew it would come to this, didn't you? Please comment on the following question(s): Which specific points in the SPJ Code of Ethics apply to publication of information from WikiLeaks? How can the first principle -- Seek the Truth -- and the second -- Minimize Harm -- be reconciled in this case? Do any conflicts of interest arise when a journalist is considering the publication of material that might be harmful to his/her national government's security? How did the journalists involved in this story reconcile those conflicts? Do you feel like they took reasonable precautions?

COMM 150: Assignment for Wednesday

How do the codes of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Public Relations Society of America set out the role of communications professionals in a democracy? How does John Vivian discuss it in Chapter ____ of "Media of Mass Communications?"

Post as comments ...

COMM 150: Now here's a word for it ... TV-driven 'screamfest' of ideas

Rich Miller, who publishes the Capital Fax newsletter and blog, posted his analysis of clemency for former Illinois Gov. George Ryan, now serving time for a federal conviction on grounds that have since been overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. The legal issues involved are complicated and subtle, and Miller's pitch was basically for a dispassionate, rational approach to resolving them. "The deciding factor here," he wrote, "ought to be the law, not passion."

Which prompted a comment in the online CapFax forum that raises the same issues we're studying as we get ready for a FINAL EXAM question on Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" (1985).

"I applaud the dispassionate analysis," said Anonymous, at 8:07 a.m. "Reason is sorely lacking in today’s cable-TV-driven-screamfest marketplace of ideas."

Perfect.

Ask yourselves as we get into Postman's analysis of public discourse: How do the trends that Postman identified in 1985 contribute to today's screamfest?

COMM 150: Neil Postman, 'Amusing Ourselves to Death,' baby-talk and our FINAL EXAM in COMM 150

As we round the corner into the home stretch -- and FINAL EXAMS -- one guy whose theories are going to help us make sense of what's happening in the world of mass communications -- not to mention the questions on the FINAL EXAM, if you get my drift -- is a media critic and communications professor at New York University named Neil Postman. He died in 2003 and wrote his most influential book in the 1980s, but he described today's world to a T. He was like any other academic with a theory to peddle (including me), he overstated his case sometimes. But he said some things that were worth thinking about. You don't have to agree with him. You just have to know what he said well enough to write a 50-point FINAL EXAM essay on it ... or think about it the next time you watch CNN, Fox News or even Channel 20 Springfield.

Postman's main theory was that the mass media -- especially television -- were blurring the lines between entertainment and serious subjects like politics and government, education, religion. In the title of his 1986 book "Amusing Ourselves to Death," he put it in a nutshell. The subtitle: "Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business." Because we seek amusement rather than knowledge, we develop the attention span of cocker spaniel puppies. Or 5-year-olds, as Postman would put it.

"Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world," says Postman. [Would it interest you to know that I used exactly the same quote from Postman to set up the term paper in Communications 386 - Media and Government in the Fall Semester of 2008 and 50-point midterm question in COMM 150 in Fall Semester 2007?] "The problem," Postman adds, "is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining."

Excerpts available on line at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Broadcast_Media/AmusingOurselves_Postman.html ...

I'm going to give you snippets, without context. Which is what Postman complains about. He says he cringes when a TV anchor segues from one news item to the next by saying, "Now ... this." No context. No explanation. Just unrelated slices of reality. Like this.

Now ... this.

Here's a frequently-quoted snippet. It's long -- hopefully long enough to let us off Postman's hook -- and he builds on the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 and 1980, but you could plug in any of today's crises and make the same point. The meltdown in Ireland's banking sector. The conflict over islands on the North Korean-South Korean border. See if you recognize what Postman was saying:

... Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world. I say this in the face of the popular conceit that television, as a window to the world, has made Americans exceedingly well informed. Much depends here, of course, on what is meant by being informed. I will pass over the now tiresome polls that tell us that, at any given moment, 70 percent of our citizens do not know who is the Secretary of State or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Let us consider, instead, the case of Iran during the drama that was called the "Iranian Hostage Crisis." I don't suppose there has been a story in years that received more continuous attention from television. We may assume, then, that Americans know most of what there is to know about this unhappy event. And now, I put these questions to you: Would it be an exaggeration to say that not one American in a hundred knows what language the Iranians speak? Or what the word ``Ayatollah" means or implies? Or knows any details of the tenets of Iranian religious beliefs? Or the main outlines of their political history? Or knows who the Shah was, and where he came from?

Nonetheless, everyone had an opinion about this event, for in America everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different order from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?

What Postman says about commercials has a great deal of relevance to the way we do politics in the 21st century.

Indeed, we may go this far: The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products. Images of movie stars and famous athletes, of serene lakes and macho fishing trips, of elegant dinners and romantic interludes, of happy families packing their station wagons for a picnic in the country- these tell nothing about the products being sold. But they tell everything about the fears, fancies and dreams of those who might buy them. What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so, the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research. The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.

Does this affect the way we elect our leaders? You betcha, as one of our would-be leaders might say it. It goes something like this: TV encourages short, snappy -- but superficial -- sound bites. It breaks down the distinction between public affairs reporting and entertainment like, oh, say "Dancing With the Stars." Where does Jon Stewart fit in here? The commercials program us to look for quick solutions to complex problems. (Take a pill, and your psychological state brightens immediately. Don't believe it? Just watch the pharmaceutical ads.) We look for candidates who are "like us" or share our values rather than "elites" who drone on about public policy. Does it lower the level of public discourse? You betcha.

What's the overall effect of all this? Here's what Postman says. Try it on for size. Agree or disagree? Does he reflect today's reality?

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainment, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk: culture-death is a clear possibility.

Joseph Siry, professor at Rollins in Florida, has a provocative webpage on the book's main themes ... worth a look ... is it amusing?

D R A F T COMM 150: Final exam -- schedule and HINTS/CONTENT ADVISORY

11:00a.m. MWF ... -- Friday, December 17 -- 10:30a.m. – 12:30p.m.

Look for questions on these issues:

• A 50-point essay: An NYU professor named Neil Postman said "Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world" because the mass media blur the line between information and entertainment. How can the media balance their need to entertain viewers -- and thus make the profits they need to stay in business -- and their function as "watchdogs"/"zookeepers" in a democracy?
  
• Question 2A. The same self-reflective essay you get on all my finals.
  
• A 25-point essay: How do artists use the convergence of new and old media to get around the "gatekeepers" and exercise more creative control?

D R A F T / COMM 150: Conflicting roles ... news, entertainment, 'infotainment' and Sarah Palin

If you're looking for Wednesday's class questions, keep scrolling down to the post headlined "COMM 150: 'Don't touch my junk [journalism]' hyping body-scan story? FOR CLASS WEDNESDAY." But come back to this one sometime, this whole issue of junk journalism, the role of the press in a democratic society, celebrity journalism, entertainment vs. news values, and journalistic ethic is looking like a very likely contender for a final exam question. I will be posting items to the blog over Thanksgiving to clarify how they fit together ... and polishing the posts labeled "DRAFT" like this one ... so keep watching this space.


http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/the-800-pound-mama-grizzly-problem/

The 800-Pound Mama Grizzly Problem

Ms. Palin’s search traffic, since the start of 2010, is roughly 16 times that of Mitt Romney, 14 times that of Newt Gingrich, 38 times that of Mike Huckabee, and 87 times that of Mr. Pawlenty. (It is about six times greater than these other four candidates combined.)

Ms. Palin, in fact, draws almost as much search traffic worldwide as the man she would face if she wins the Republican nomination: Barack Obama. And her name is searched for about 30 percent more often than the President’s among Google users in the United States.

Ms. Palin’s search traffic, since the start of 2010, is roughly 16 times that of Mitt Romney, 14 times that of Newt Gingrich, 38 times that of Mike Huckabee, and 87 times that of Mr. Pawlenty. (It is about six times greater than these other four candidates combined.)

Ms. Palin, in fact, draws almost as much search traffic worldwide as the man she would face if she wins the Republican nomination: Barack Obama. And her name is searched for about 30 percent more often than the President’s among Google users in the United States.

Ms. Palin’s search traffic, since the start of 2010, is roughly 16 times that of Mitt Romney, 14 times that of Newt Gingrich, 38 times that of Mike Huckabee, and 87 times that of Mr. Pawlenty. (It is about six times greater than these other four candidates combined.)

Ms. Palin, in fact, draws almost as much search traffic worldwide as the man she would face if she wins the Republican nomination: Barack Obama. And her name is searched for about 30 percent more often than the President’s among Google users in the United States.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_bear proper name for a female grizzly is a sow or a sow grizzly

D R A F T / COMM 150: Bristol Palin's 'big middle finger' on Dancing With the Stars

If you're looking for Wednesday's class questions, keep scrolling down to the post headlined "COMM 150: 'Don't touch my junk [journalism]' hyping body-scan story? FOR CLASS WEDNESDAY." But come back to this one sometime, this whole issue of junk journalism, the role of the press in a democratic society, celebrity journalism, entertainment vs. news values, and journalistic ethic is looking like a very likely contender for a final exam question. I will be posting items to the blog over Thanksgiving to clarify how they fit together ... and polishing the posts labeled "DRAFT" like this one ... so keep watching this space.



Ken Tucker's TV
http://watching-tv.ew.com/2010/11/21/bristol-sarah-palin-alaska-dancing-with-the-stars/ column on EW.com, the Entertainment Weekly website ... with the intriguing headline "Bristol to Sarah Palin: 'Mom, take your prom-hair back home!' How the Palins 'stun' TV viewers"

Sarah Palin’s Alaska and Dancing with the Stars combine to throw a monkey-wrench into pop and political culture. The second episode of the former governor’s TLC series Sunday night was an irresistible hour of halibut fishing and clay-pigeon shootin’: “Don’t retreat, just reload,” she told daughter Bristol as she racked a rifle. Meanwhile, Bristol will reload once again on Monday to out-last more dainty hoofers on DWTS. What is it about these two that exerts such a pull on viewers?

Tucker answers his question, and provides the headline as well:

On Sarah Palin’s Alaska, Bristol bristled at her mother’s constant stream of advice, and snapped at her, “Mom, take your prom-hair home!” Sarah paused, apparently perplexed for a moment: She knew she’d been sassed impudently, but at the same time, she clearly admired her kid’s spunk.

Well, let's be accurate, here: It's Bristol Palin who gave Tucker the headline. The Palins, mother and daughter, are good copy. They know how to give the media what the media want.

Tucker realizes this. And his take on Dancing ith the Stars is interesting:

So it is with both Palins on TV. As Bristol thunders across the ABC stage soliciting home-audience votes, the “candid” rehearsal footage shows her reeling off the sort of talking-points her mom trades in, chatter about how ordinary folks like her because she’s “real.” Bristol’s DWTS longevity has given rise to debate about whether or not her continued presence long after superior dancers have hung up their tap-shoes is damaging the “integrity” of the show. Except for the inviolate humor of Tom Bergeron, integrity is so irrelevant to the purposes of DWTS that a Palin — whether it’s one on the dance floor or a Mama Grizzly in the peanut gallery — cannot be blamed for sullying anything.

xxx

On Sarah Palin’s Alaska, the titular hero relished telling the camera that she’d had her “first baby shower on this shooting range,” and that “I love to share that story, ’cause it gets the liberals all wee-wee’d up.” Priceless. No humbling vista of nature captured by the show’s cameras is sufficient to stanch the flow of Palin’s grudgery. (Hey, if she can coin words, so can I.) Thus the family outing with Bristol as well as daughters Willow and Piper became, in Sarah’s eyes, a chance to escape the media glare Bristol had endured “bein’ drug through the tabloids … because of someone she had been associated with.” (Somewhere, Levi Johnston was feeling a verbal fish hook suddenly embedding itself in the back of his skull.)

Whenever Palin puts fame and its travails to one side, however, she becomes far more engaging. The scenes of her helping to haul a heavy, thrashing halibut onto a fishing boat and then clubbing it (“Ya need to bop ‘em right between the eyes,” says the ship’s captain) to keep the fish from “bruising its own meat”: This was as engrossing as an episode of Deadliest Catch. I thoroughly admired Palin’s roll-up-your-sleeves effort on the “slime line,” pulling ice out of the fish’s innards and proclaiming joyfully, “It smells like work!” Tea Party or Tuna Fish party, you have to give some credit to anyone on television in 2010 extolling the virtues of good, decent manual labor.

The quality of forthright enthusiasm, whether it emanates from Sarah or Bristol Palin, is a large part of what viewers respond to — what’s made them stars. Sometimes it can be a bit much — you feel as though you’re behind hit in the head with a charm onslaught, or what Sarah called “stunnin’ the fish.” And stunning the fish seems to be one Alaskan strategy that these Palin women have adapted for their own purposes, as a canny media tactic, with the public as the fish.t

COMM 150: Do Palin's attacks on Couric, mainstream media undermine democratic institutions?

If you're looking for Wednesday's online class discussion, scroll down one more. It's in the post about "don't touch my junk" stories and junk journalism ... this post is about the same general subject, i.e. criticism of the media, but the questions are at the end of the next post. - pe

This just in. I won't ask you to comment on it, but it relates to our study of ethical standards and values in journalism. Ex-Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska has accused CBS News anchor Katie Couric ... not for the first time ... of biased reporting.

Palin's remarks, dishing on her interviews with Couric during the 2008 presidential campaign, came on the Sean Hannity show to be aired tonight. Clips of Hannity show and part of an original interview are embedded in an Entertainment Weekly EW.com story on Palin's appearance on the Hannity show.

Palin is hard to paraphrase accurately -- like so many of us, she often starts new sentences before the finishes the first one, and it's hard to figure out how they all fit together -- but she seems to be saying Couric doesn't live up to the basic standards of journalism.

"I want to help clean up the state that is so sorry today of journalism," she told Hannity, as quoted by EW.com. "And I have a communications degree. I stud[ied] journalism. Who, what, when, where, and why of reporting. I will speak to reporters who still understand that cornerstone of our democracy … And then we get to decide our own opinion based on the facts reported to us. So a journalist, a reporter who is so biased and will no doubt spin and gin up whatever I have to say to create controversy, I swear to you I will not waste my time with her. Or him."

If that's what Palin is saying, I believe she's quite simply wrong. Whatever her shortcomings as a network TV news anchor, Couric's ethical standards are entirely professional.

My impression during the 2008 interviews was that Couric was trying to ask questions that would draw Palin out. Much of Couric's background was as a "soft news" reporter, especially on the Today Show, and I felt like she was falling back on the same interview techniques any experienced feature reporter uses with interview subjects who are inexperienced, nervous and/or inarticulate. I've used some of them myself. In one of the later interviews (there were three or four), I thought she did let her irritation show when it was apparent that Palin was evading her questions. But as I watched in 2008, I was more struck by what I considered to be Couric's tact with a news source who was obviously having a hard time making herself understood.

Why does this matter now? It doesn't bother me when politicians attack the media. That goes with the territory. But when a politician poses as a media expert, as Palin did on the Hannity show -- "I studied journalism. Who, what, when, where and why ...," etc. -- I expect the politician to get it right, to tell the truth. Palin may think she's telling the truth, but what she's saying about Couric here -- and the "lamestream media" in general -- is her opinion and ought to be recognized as such.

All of this seems to be coming to a head lately with Palin's book tour and her carefully orchestrated hints about running for president in 2012. In an op-ed piece on Palin's hard-core political appeal over the weekend, Frank Rich of The New York Times asked, and answered, the question, "Could She Reach the Top in 2012? You Betcha." He said:

... What might bring down other politicians only seems to make her stronger: the malapropisms and gaffes, the cut-and-run half-term governorship, family scandals, shameless lying and rapacious self-merchandising. In an angry time when America’s experts and elites all seem to have failed, her amateurism and liabilities are badges of honor. She has turned fallibility into a formula for success.

What Palin does, and she does it very well, is to express the grievances of a lot of Americans against elites of any kind. Which isn't all bad, as far as I'm concerned. Elites and experts give me stomach cramps at the best of times. As a reporter, I wasted too much of my time writing them up as they pontificated at news conferences.

But I get nervous when the expression of grievances goes over a red line, and it begins to undermine society's institutions like government and the press. And I think Palin is getting pretty close to that red line with her repeated personal attacks on Katie Couric and others she sees as elites.

COMM 150: 'Don't touch my junk [journalism]' hyping body-scan story? FOR CLASS WEDNESDAY

For class discussion (on line) Wednesday ...

Featured on The Daily Beast website today (Monday) was a take-down by media critic Howard Kurtz, who finds junk journalism -- i.e. the journalistic equivalent of junk food -- in the coverage of the use of body scanners and pat-down searches during security checks at 70 airports.

Kurtz, who recently joined the Daily Beast after 10 years as the highly respected media writer for The Washington Post, says the story is hyped:

You might get the impression, from the way the coverage has achieved warp speed, that millions of airline passengers are being groped and humiliated by heavy-handed security guards.

From network newscasts to local TV, from newspaper front pages to a blur of Web headlines, it seems untold numbers of women are having their breasts touched and untold numbers of men are feeling the intrusive hands of government guards near their packages.

Actually, that’s far from true. Despite some outrageous incidents involving idiotic conduct, with 2 million passengers screened each day, more than 99 percent are unaffected by the new policy.

After giving some examples of hyperactive TSA guards, he adds:

The obtuseness of these TSA clowns boggles the mind. And in the modern media world, anecdotal accounts rule. Perhaps some customers, not the disabled ones, were being oversensitive; doesn’t matter. We all identify with bedraggled passengers, having removed their shoes and belts, having dumped their drinks and packed their tiny toothpaste tubes, being oppressed by a rigid and inflexible system. But that doesn’t mean the excesses are widespread.

After some examples of hyperventilating coverage, Kurtz concludes:

Whether all this scanning and probing and patting down is enhancing our collective security is very much in doubt. Pistole repeatedly points to the Christmas Day underwear bomber, and who among us wouldn’t submit to additional inconvenience if it meant stopping an extremist from bringing down a plane? A CBS poll earlier this month found that 81 percent of those questioned support the TSA’s use of full-body scanners.

But an ABC/Washington Post survey out Monday says half the respondents think the new pat-down techniques go too far. (After the overwhelmingly hostile coverage, it's surprising that figure is only 50 percent.)

On the other hand, it seems absurd to be screening grandmothers and young kids, and has this elaborate and expensive enterprise caught a single terrorist?

No self-respecting man wants a hyperactive security guard touching his junk. But I’ve about had it with media types who insist on turning this into a junk story.

Kurtz' writeup raises ethical issues. If his summary of the coverage is accurate, and I think it is judging by what I've seen on the web, there are ethical issues in the way this story is being handled.

Your assignment: Read Kurtz' story in the Daily Beast (linked above) and re-read the SPJ Code of Ethics (linked here). How do you rate the ethics of the journalists whom Kurtz quotes? Which specific principles apply? (By specific, I don't mean the broad rules like "Seek the Truth ..." but the detailed statements like "Analysis and commentary should be labeled and not misrepresent fact or context.") Post your answers, about 250- to 500 words, as comments to this post.

I think you'll find the coverage to be a mixed bag. For example, Juan Williams' remarks on The O’Reilly Factor are quoted, “Prepare for a travel nightmare if you're getting on a plane to go see your family for Thanksgiving ... Twenty-four million Americans will go through a living hell just because they want to visit their loved ones!” A little over the top, right? But Williams was on a clearly identified Fox News opinion show. Was he misrepresenting the facts or stating his opinion in a colorful way? Sometimes these things aren't clear-cut. Open two windows. Read Kurtz' column, and do a point-by-point evaluation of the coverage quoted in it. The exercise should take about 50 minutes, about the same time as a class period.

COMM 150: Another Irish foreign correspondent's raison d'etre, 'to be there, to see, and to record'

Irish Times Washington Correspondent Lara Marlowe has a new book out. And this weekend's editions carry an excerpt from the book that echoes some of the themes in BBC correspondent Fergal Keane's first-person piece "Letter to Daniel." I've been reading Marlowe's coverage, off and on, since the Kosovo war more than 10 years ago. She has been in most of the world's more vicious trouble spots. Lebanon, Algeria, Africa, civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, American wars in what she calls (quoting Mort Rosenblum*, another journalist) "Vietraqistan." Marlowe says here:

Suffering is the lot of mankind; if my reporting sometimes strikes a chord in readers, I believe it is because I feel tied to the people whose pain I describe. As T S Eliot wrote: “I am moved by . . . The notion of some infinitely gentle/Infinitely suffering thing.” Some, like the parents of children who died violently in Ireland and France, became friends. Most have been swallowed up by distance and time. But I do not forget them.

That rings true, for what it's worth, to me. I've been told if a reporter stops waking up in the middle of the night worrying about the people he writes about, it's time to get out of the business. Lose sight of that common humanity, and you're done. Cooked.

And Marlow says this:

At the Féile an Phobail [community festival] in west Belfast in the summer of 2010, I was asked if I despaired of what the American poet e.e. cummings called “manunkind”. I didn’t want to sound negative, and strained to find examples of heroism. On occasion, I have encountered humour, generosity, altruism, even beauty. But for the most part, I have found the world to be as Matthew Arnold described it: without joy, love, light, certitude, peace, or help for pain. The instruments of suffering are usually remote: fighter bombers at altitudes of tens of thousands of feet; the secret minutes of politicians’ meetings. Only occasionally does one glimpse the face of cruelty: in a Serb prison-camp commander or, more recently, in an Arizona sheriff who glories in chain gangs of hungry prisoners and the deportation of Mexican migrants.

Despite the sadness and anger, I remain endlessly fascinated by the human condition. I still want to know what will happen. Looking back at this juncture, this mezzo camino [midpoint in a journey, lit. road], I have found something approaching a meaning and a purpose: to be there, to see, and to record.

__________
* After heading Associated Press bureaus in bureaus in Kinshasa, Lagos, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Singapore, Buenos Aires, and Paris, as well as a 10-year stint as editor of the International Herald-Tribune based in Paris, Rosenblum now teaches journalism at the University of Arizona. His latest book, and I am not making this up, is on chocolate!

COMM 150: Coming attractions ... segue to law and ethics

On Wednesday, I want us to blog about ethics. The class will be on line. I will be in Dawson 220 at 11 a.m. to meet with any students who wish to have an F2F conference with me, but our class discussion will take place on The Mackerel Wrapper. And after Thanksgiving we'll spend the rest of the semester talking about law, ethics, professional conduct and "doing the right thing" ... which kind of covers it all.

But to set the stage and provide a context for our discussion, in class Monday I want us to listen to a 1997 broadcast by Irish journalist Fergal Keane. At the time he was a foreign correspondent for the British Broadcasting Corp., and he was in Hong Kong for the ceremonies that marked the former British colony's incorporation into the Republic of China. But Keane's broadcast wasn't about that, it was about the recent birth of his son Daniel ... and, as he explained it later, he spoke "not just about becoming a father, but also about my own past, about loss and the failure of dreams, about the pain of different children I had met along the roads of war, about my father and how alcohol had taken him from me."

It was called "Letter to Daniel" and it became a BBC classic. We'll listen to it in class. You can read along if you wish.

Several years later, Keane told how he wrote the piece and what it meant to him, and his listeners:

There was one draft of the letter. No re-writing. And after the piece was done I went back to my paternity leave.

And then the letters started to arrive. By the sack load. From a mother whose only son had died on a military exercise in Canada; from a man writing by the light of an oil lamp in a tent in Antartica, missing his family back in Britain; and many, many letters from those who had struggled with alcohol or seen loved ones die from it.

***

Some of my friends worried that I would be identified with "Letter To Daniel" for the rest of my life; they felt for me when a critic attacked me for writing so personal a piece.

And I replied that nothing anybody says about it - good, bad or indifferent - matters a damn in the long run.

When I read the Letter now, and I remember that morning with the baby asleep in my lap, I see a young father about to start out on the greatest adventure of his life. He doesn't know that yet, of course.

But that child will be the making of him, the saving of him.

Before class time Wednesday, I will post a blogging question in which I link to a fact situation -- something for you to read -- and ask you to comment on it in terms of the ethical issues it addresses.

So, to get ready, we need to be familiar with ...

1. The Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists:

Preamble
Members of the Society of Professional Journalists believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues. Conscientious journalists from all media and specialties strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty. Professional integrity is the cornerstone of a journalist's credibility. Members of the Society share a dedication to ethical behavior and adopt this code to declare the Society's principles and standards of practice.
Seek Truth and Report It
Journalists should be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information. ...
Minimize Harm
Ethical journalists treat sources, subjects and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect. ...
Act Independently
Journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public's right to know. ...
Be Accountable
Journalists are accountable to their readers, listeners, viewers and each other. ...

... and ...

2. The Code of Ethics of the Public Relations Society of America

... principles and guidelines built on core values. Fundamental values like advocacy, honesty, loyalty, professional development and objectivity structure ethical practice and interaction with clients and the public.

Translating values into principles of ethical practice, the Code advises professionals to:

• Protect and advance the free flow of accurate and truthful information.
  
• Foster informed decision making through open communication.
  
• Protect confidential and private information.
  
• Promote healthy and fair competition among professionals.
  
• Avoid conflicts of interest.
  
• Work to strengthen the public’s trust in the profession.

Fergal Keane probably would not be a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, which is an American organization. But the values of American and British reporters are quite similar. Which principles in the SPJ Code of Ethics would apply to his Letter to Daniel? Please post your answers as comments to this blog.

COMM 150: GM, coming out of bankruptcy, re-listed on NYSE ... let's look (and listen) for the brands ...

-- General Motors Marks Introduction to the Public Market

at The New York Stock Exchange (posted by GMBlogs) .

News item:

NEW YORK (AP) -- General Motors stock began trading on Wall Street again Thursday, signaling the rebirth of an American corporate icon that collapsed into bankruptcy and was rescued with a $50 billion infusion from taxpayers.

The stock rose sharply in its first minutes of buying and selling, going for nearly $36 per share -- almost $3 more than the price GM set for the initial public offering. The stock pulled back slightly by early afternoon and closed at $34.19. It had traded for less than a dollar when the old company filed for bankruptcy last year.

On the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, a crowd eight deep jostled around the company's trading post, adorned with its familiar blue-square logo with an underlined "GM." CEO Dan Akerson rang the opening bell as raucous cheers went up and the sound of a Chevrolet Camaro's revving engine echoed through the room.

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9JIR31O0.htm

COMM 150: Of zookeepers, 'makin' things up' and public debate -- FINAL EXAM CONTENT ADVISORY

Here's something I saw in the news today that might make a good question for the final exam ... and will certainly give us something to think about when we take up media law, ethics and societal effects after Thanksgiving.

Thomas Friedman's latest op-ed column in the New York Times praises CNN announcer Anderson Cooper for fact-checking what Friedman called a "bogus rumor that President Obama’s trip to Asia would cost $200 million a day."

Which qualifies Friedman for my zookeeper-of-the-week award.

The rumor was a estimate that President Obama's trip to Asia cost $200 million a day. It apparently traces back to a local politician in India, but it was picked up by U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn., and high-profile right-wing commentators including Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. It was not only false, but ludicrous on its face. Cooper tracked it down, and suggested the cost would be more like $5 million a day (still a pretty good hunk of change). Friedman said:

When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, we have a problem. It becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues — deficit reduction, health care, taxes, energy/climate — let alone act on them. Facts, opinions and fabrications just blend together. But the carnival barkers that so dominate our public debate today are not going away — and neither is the Internet. All you can hope is that more people will do what Cooper did — so when the next crazy lie races around the world, people’s first instinct will be to doubt it, not repeat it.

I think he's right about that. As Jon Stewart once said, sometimes you've gotta have a zookeeper say "Bad monkey!"

(Recall the zookeeper question on the midterm? Would that give us a context for our discussion after Thanksgiving? Would it make a good final exam question? Either a 25- point or, focused this time on law and ethics, even a 50-point question.)

Of course, monkeys on both sides of the aisle -- uh, zoo -- sometimes need to be admonished. Former Alaska Gov. Sahrah Palin blasted what she calls the "lamestream" or mainstream media in her farewell speech in Fairbanks, Alaska, when she quit the office in 2009. SHe said:

“Some straight talk for some — just some — in the media. … You represent what could and should be a respected, honest profession that could and should be a cornerstone of our democracy. Democracy depends on you. That is why our troops are willing to die for you. So how about in honor of the American soldier, ya’ quit makin’ things up?”

Of course, Palin has has her own challenges with the facts -- or, more precisely, with selective -- and misleading -- quotation.

COMM 150: Tiger who?

Mike Lupica, sports columnist for The New York Daily News, has this to say about Tiger Woods' brand and -- more generally -- about our interest in sports figures overall:

Woods was once the biggest star in sports. You know who is the biggest star of the moment, even bigger than LeBron? It is Michael Vick of the Philadelphia Eagles, who did jail time not long ago because of his involvement with a ring that tortured and killed dogs.

Vick did his turn on "60 Minutes" a while ago, his own media tour. Nobody remembers a word he said. Now he is on television for six straight national games because he is the most exciting player in his sport. It doesn't change what he did with those dogs. It is just that people are now a lot more interested in what he does on the field than anything he has to say. There is nothing noble about this, by the way, and it tells you as much about us as it does about Vick.

That's one sportwriter's view. Does it hold true in general?

COMM 150: Newsweek merger - convergence - FINAL EXAM CONTENT ADVISORY

Fallout from the planned merger of The Daily Beast and Newsweek is, appropriately enough, concentrated in new media. Over the weekend, staffers in Newsweek's website - Newsweek.com - took to social media to state their worries about being laid off. And mostly it's web-based media that have covered it. Made to order for a final exam question about across-platform convergence of web-based and print media, huh? Just askin'. Or not.

a post by Joe Pompeno in a Yahoo! News blog called The Cutline.

On Friday afternoon, while the media world was buzzing about the freshly inked union between Newsweek and the Daily Beast, a handful of Newsweek.com staffers headed over to the Ear Inn, a watering hole in Manhattan's West Village, and started drinking. The mood was grim, an insider told us at the time, because the future of Newsweek.com suddenly seemed uncertain now that the famed magazine would be merging with Barry Diller and Tina Brown's 2-year-old Web news start-up.

Sure enough, staffers woke up Saturday morning to Daily Beast Publisher Stephen Colvin's confirmation that Newsweek.com would be getting the ax under the new joint venture (which makes Brown editor-in-chief of both publications). So they decided to state their case on Tumblr--the preferred outlet for Newsweek to respond to its detractors.


xxx Tumblr is a microblogging platform

... Newsweek's dot-com staffers have laid out a strong argument for why Newsweek.com should survive, touching on issues like search engine optimization, branding, existing partnerships--and, not least, its status as a consistently higher traffic draw than the Daily Beast.

"In the face of indifference, condescension and even outright hostility from its print counterpart; with little to no resources; with more high-level hires and fires over the past couple of years than anybody could possibly count—and a revolving door of editors—the small but tireless staff at Newsweek.com consistently created editorial work that made waves," reads the post.

xxx

COMM 150: For Friday (paper topics, chapter on entertainment)

Read John Vivian, Chapter ___, entertainment. We will focus on branding issues, but skim over the rest of it, too. My focus: Entertainment, including sports, is a business. How do people engaged in this business use mass communications media to build fan base and maintain their brand?

Your paper No. 2 ... come into class ready to tell me what your topic is what topic you've already started your paper on. If you haven't chosen a topic, I will be delighted to help you by assigning a topic. Here are a few for starters:

• Kumquat Growers Inc. of Dade City, Fla.
  
• The Scottsdale (Ariz.) Community College Fighting Artichokes.
  
• The National Kitchen and Bath Association (NKBA).
  
• The National Frozen Pizza Institute.
  
• The Iowa-Nebraska Equipment Dealers Association.
  
• The Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association (SOCMA).
  
• The Hearth, Patio and Barbecue Association.
  
• The Window Covering Manufacturers Association.

Preview of coming attractions: Our study of public relations, advertising, entertainment and market research has focused pretty much on marketing and branding issues. Keep this in mind for when you learn about integrated marketing communications in future classes. After Thanksgiving, we'll finish the book. In a mad scramble, but we'll finish it!

The readings are:

• Chapter 16, Mass-Media Effects on Society
  
• Chapter 17, Global Mass Media
  
• Chapter 19, Mass Media and Governance
  
• Chapter 20, Mass Media Law
  
• Chapter 21, Mass Media Ethics

You should skim them all, but especially Chapters 20 and 21 on law and ethics. We'll use those issues as sort of a prism to focus our exploration of media effects on American and international society. Soon after Thanksgiving, I will give you final exam essays to help focus even more. This is the part of the semester where everything is supposed to come together, and you'll find our discussion of law and ethics ties together things we've been studying all semester.

COMM 150: Chevrolet, ads, USP in action

"How to Create Your 'Unique Selling Proposition' (USP) That Makes Your Marketing Generate More Results" by Interactive Marketing Inc. of Bend, Ore. defines a Unique Selling Point (or Proposition) as whatever "makes your product or service the 'gotta have' item." They say to:

Write your USP so it creates desire and urgency. Your USP can be stated in your product itself, in your offer, or in your guarantee:

• PRODUCT: "A unique baseball swing that will instantly force you to hit like a pro."
  
• OFFER: "You can learn this simple technique that makes you hit like a pro in just 10 minutes of batting practice."
  
• GUARANTEE: "If you don't hit like a pro baseball player the first time you use this new swing, we'll refund your money."

Write your ideas on paper now...

This isn't the only explanation of how ads work. It may not even be the best. But it's convenient, and all of these things say pretty much the same things. So we're going to give it a road test (forgive the pun) by looking at some Chevrolet ads and trying to second-guess what the USP is.

Here are some old print ads ... up to 1969. What do they emphasize about the PRODUCT, What's the OFFER? Any GUARANTEE?

And here's a recent TV ad "Chevvy Runs Deep." Let's watch it, read some commentary ... and discuss.

The comment is by Mikey Kaus, who writes a blog for Newsweek's website. He panned the Chevvy ad. Quoting another website, he suggested it's probably not quite the "Worst Ad Slogan Ever," but it comes close. Kaus added:

That may be a stretch. It's better than "Excellence for All"! But it is a little weird. Is this a submarine they're selling? What is there about Chevy that runs deep? Red ink? Work rules? Influence in the Obama administration? More important, as Jalopnik notes, the slogan tells you zero about the product (assuming it's nonsubmersible). "Chevy Runs Deep" appears to be yet another attempt to sell you patriotic "heritage"—in other words, to get you to buy an American car because American cars used to be really good and everybody drove them!

Snarky, snarky.

But is Kaus' snark accurate?

Is there a USP here? Is it tacked on? Does it, as John Vivian might say, "Create a benefit of the product, even if from thin air?" Or is there something real in Chedvrolet's brand? How does it change our perspective if we focus away from the product and more on the experience a consumer has with the product? What does history have to do with a brand?

COMM 337: Analytical blog ASSIGNMENTS

Emailed tonight to students in Communications 337 (advanced journalism).

Hi guys --

Ho ho ho. They're already playing Christmas carols in Best Buy -- no doubt in our other fine retail establishments as well -- Thanksgiving is next week, and the end of the semester is just around the corner.

All of which means we'd better start making up for lost time.

Here are the assignments for the four analytical pieces I want you to write and post to your blogs. Here's what the syllabus says about them: "Students will create a web Log (blog) and write analyses professional writing of 1,000 words each of: (a) a newspaper feature story, (b) a magazine feature, (c) a piece of public affairs reporting and (d) an opinion or op-ed piece on the blog." More detailed instructions are on The Mackerel Wrapper, and I'll link you to the assignments below.

In addition, you'll write: (1) a publishable magazine story; and (2) a query letter "selling" the story to an editor. (That would be me, in this case, but writing query letters pitching your free-lance stories is an important skill.) We've talked about your stories, and I feel like you're on track. So what you need to do now is finish the interviews and write the stories. I'll post directions for the query letter before Thanksgiving.

In the meantime, here are the analysis assignments:

No. 1. Public affairs reporting. Posted to The Mackerel Wrapper Oct. 16. Link here: http://mackerelwrapper.blogspot.com/2010/10/comm-337-assignment-for-your-1000-word.html

No. 2. Newspaper feature. Posted to The Mackerel Wrapper Oct. 28. Link here: http://mackerelwrapper.blogspot.com/2010/10/comm-337-2nd-analytical-blog-post.html

No. 3. Magazine feature. Posted to The Mackerel Wrapper Oct. 28. Link here: http://mackerelwrapper.blogspot.com/2010/10/comm-337-3rd-blog-post-magazine-feature.html

No. 4. Opinion (editorial) piece. Posted to The Mackerel Wrapper Oct. 28. Link here: http://mackerelwrapper.blogspot.com/2010/10/comm-337-4th-blog-post-opinion-piece.html

They're due any time you get to them. (How's that for fitting them into our busy schedules?) Just email me when you get them written and posted to your blog.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to get back to me. If you don't want me to think you've died tragically and I need to send flowers somewhere, don't hesitate to get back to me! In fact, why don't you drop me an email message ASAPest just so we'll know you haven't gone Code Blue on me.

-- Doc

COMM 150: This might be a good final exam topic ...

Is that headline blatant enough for you?

But it's true. It might ...

It's a story in The New York Times on why The Daily Beast is buying Newsweek ... and it's all about convergence as it explores why Barry Diller, owner of several electronic magazines and websites including the Beast, would want to buy an ailing print publication. Merger of Newsweek and the Beast was announced late last week.

And an interview with the principals in the merger on CNN's "Reliable Sources" show. Hosted by Howard Kurtz, media critic who recently left The Washington Post for The Daily Beast, the show's format allowed Tina Brown, editor-in-chief of the combined publication, and Newsweek owner Sidney Harman to expand on the economics of publishing print magazines, web publication and their plans for the future. Count how many times they use the word "brand."

Headline in the Times: "Newsweek’s Printing Press Was a Top Draw for [Beast owner] Diller."

Some snippets:

• “It’s hard to make enough money on digital-only platforms,” said Jim VandeHei, executive editor of Politico, which despite being a thriving Web site still generates about half its revenue from a print publication distributed free on weekdays around Washington. “Digital is clearly the future, but print — in the right circumstances — can still thrive and help provide a bridge to an all-digital future,” Mr. VandeHei said.
  
  
• Mr. Diller had more than a few good reasons to think twice about not being too territorial when it came to sharing control with Mr. Harman. Starting his own print version of The Daily Beast would be costly. Newsweek had a brand and all the infrastructure in place needed to go to print on Day 1.
  
  Plus, by rolling Newsweek.com into The Daily Beast, they could hope to absorb some of the nearly five million unique visitors Newsweek clocks each month. The Daily Beast’s traffic growth has slowed lately, though it is up tenfold to more than two million a month since the site made its debut in October 2008, according to comScore.
  
  
• The merger is likely to come with other forms of consolidation. One of the main reasons the merger appealed to Mr. Diller and Mr. Harman was that combining the newsrooms and business sides would allow them to reduce staffing. When asked about possible job cuts on Friday, Ms. Brown said, “We’re going to have to look at the whole business model, the whole editorial model, and we’ll have to make our assessments.”

Which means we'd better go back and look what I posted a couple of days ago, too, about this merger. There are branding issues here, along with the convergence of new and old media. That's a big part of why I'm thinking maybe final exam question ...

COMM 150: For Monday ... USP = unique selling proposition - "Chevvy runs deep" - running too deep?

On page 333 in "Media of Mass Communication" (our edition), John Vivian discusses the Unique Selling Proposition in terms of "lowest common denominator" advertising. I wish he wouldn't do that. Not that it isn't all too often true ... He suggests it's about "Creat[ing] a benefit of the product, even if from thin air, and then tout[ing] the benefit authoritatively and repeatedly as if the competition doesn't have it." Well, OK, yeah. But you're maybe not going to stay in business long if you rely on that.

Vivian does acknowledge, "A unique selling proposition need be neither hollow nor insulting, however." And that's where I want us to start.

Positioning ... vs. clutter ... "Ad clutter, as it is called, drowns out individual advertisements. With positioning, the appeal is focused and caters to audience segments, and it need not be done in such broad strokes."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_selling_proposition Wikipedia

Rosser Reeves of Ted Bates & Co.

• Each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer. Not just words, not just product puffery, not just show-window advertising. Each advertisement must say to each reader: "Buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit."
  
• The proposition must be one that the competition either cannot, or does not, offer. It must be unique—either a uniqueness of the brand or a claim not otherwise made in that particular field of advertising.
  
• The proposition must be so strong that it can move the mass millions, i.e., pull over new customers to your product.

Interactive Marketing, Inc., a website optimization and Internet marketing company of Bend, Ore., http://www.interactivemarketinginc.com/unique-selling-proposition.html

Your USP is the force that drives your business and success. It can also be used as a "branding" tool that deploys strategy with every tactical marketing effort you use such as an ad, a postcard, or web site. This allows you to build a lasting reputation while you're making sales. The ultimate goal of your USP and marketing is to have people say to you... "Oh, yes I've heard of you. You're the company who..." - And then respond by requesting more information or purchasing [boldface, italics and blue type in the original].

Vivian makes it sound like the USP is basically a gimmick, but it isn't. Notice what the advertising pros say: It has to be real, "Not just words, not just product puffery, not just show-window advertising." Adds Interactive Marketing, "Think in terms of what your business does for your customer and the end-result they desire from a product or service like yours. So, what are the 3 biggest benefits you offer?" And this, "Consumers are skeptical of advertising claims companies make. So alleviate their skepticism by being specific and offering proof when possible."

Mikey Kaus, who writes a blog for Newsweek's website, xxx http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/kausfiles/2010/10/26/let-s-find-a-better-slogan-for-chevy.html

Jalopnik calls it the "Worst Ad Slogan Ever." That may be a stretch. It's better than "Excellence for All"! But it is a little weird. Is this a submarine they're selling? What is there about Chevy that runs deep? Red ink? Work rules? Influence in the Obama administration? More important, as Jalopnik notes, the slogan tells you zero about the product (assuming it's nonsubmersible). "Chevy Runs Deep" appears to be yet another attempt to sell you patriotic "heritage"—in other words, to get you to buy an American car because American cars used to be really good and everybody drove them!

Snarky, snarky.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5AG2KbD5ko

COMM 150: On the Web today, a newsy, beastly merger and a re-branding

In the news today, the announcement of a merger between The Daily Beast, on online news and entertainment magazine, and Newsweek, an old-line, not-so-imaginatively named, well, uh, weekly news magazine. MarketWatch has the essentials of the transaction:

Newsweek will merge in a 50-50 joint venture with the Daily Beast, the publications said Friday, a transaction designed to combine the magazine’s resources and depth with the Web site’s more sophisticated understanding of Internet culture.

Editor of the combined magazine will be Tina Brown, who had a well earned reputation for being brash, irreverent and in-your-face as editor of The New Yorker. Newsweek has a reputation for being, uh, stale and antiquated might be the kindest words for it. Dull. Boring. Sinking ship. Other words come to mind.

All of which prompted this from Juli Weiner of Vanity Fair (in part quoting another media critic Rick Summers, one of droves of journalists who recently left Newsweek):

Perhaps the most tantalizing detail of the Observer story is the hint of rebranding. “For now, Newsweek will be called Newsweek and The Daily Beast will be called The Daily Beast, with some intermingling of the names to come later,” Summers wrote. The media’s tweeting masses interpreted this as something of a challenge. Beast Week, the Daily Week, Week Beast, and News Beast were all suggested as potential appellation for the new venture, although the “Daily News” was not a contender, for that has already been claimed by the Daily News. ...

Lame jokes, but the issue is real. The merger raises legitimate issues of branding. Which image will the new combined magazine project? Newsweek and The Daily Beast couldn't be much farther apart. What's the new magazine's mission? What are its core values going to be? All these strategic planning buzzwords try to get at things that are real, even if they're hard to define. How do you put in-your-face and interesting in a mission statement? On a T-shirt? Here's what Tina Brown said this morning in The Daily Beast:

It’s a wonderful new opportunity for all the brilliant editors and writers at The Daily Beast who have worked so hard to create the site’s success. Working at the warp-speed of a 24/7 news operation, we now add the versatility of being able to develop ideas and investigations that require a different narrative pace suited to the medium of print. And for Newsweek, The Daily Beast is a thriving frontline of breaking news and commentary that will raise the profile of the magazine’s bylines and quicken the pace of a great magazine’s revival. I'm impressed with how Newsweek's outstanding staff has continued to put out a lively, well-informed magazine after the departure of their tireless editor, Jon Meacham.

It's also a wonderful new riverboat gamble. But it may be exactly what's needed to keep Newsweek from going under.

COMM 150: Second paper - due Monday, Nov. 22

According to our syllabus for Communications 150, " Each student will write, (1) a documented term paper (at least 2,000 words or eight pages) on a subject to be chosen by the instructor on some aspect of mass communications, to be agreed upon ahead of time by the instructor and the student; or (2) two documented essays (at least 1,000 words of four pages each) reflecting on topics to be assigned by the instructor. So let's take advantage of spring break and get started now.

Here's the topic for the second paper. I'll state it as a question:

How does ________________ (*insert name of corporation, organization or celebrity here) practice brand management? Our textbook by John Vivian doesn't say much about it, but a brand is the image a corporation or a product has with the public. So the Cardinals or the Cubs are not only ball teams, they're brands. How do they maintain their images? Think of other corporations that are in the news. Google. Apple. Toyota. Political causes. PETA isn't just an animal rights organization named People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. It's a brand, one with an off-beat -- and controversial -- way of attracting attention to its cause. Think of celebrities. Vivian mentions Paris Hilton. Is she a brand? Well, duh. She has a clothing line. But does she have a brand as a celebrity? Is an entertainer a brand? Is Tiger Woods? Jay Leno? Are Bill and Linda Gates? Brad Pitt? Angelina Jolie? Some are very good at brand management. Others aren't. Some might get better at it if they pay attention the next time they're in rehab. How do they -- or don't they -- keep a consistent image with the public?

Due Monday, Nov. 22, at the beginning of Thanksgiving week. Choose the right brand, and you can have some fun with this one.

The paper is documented. In my classes, that means sources of information in all of your writing must be attributed or documented according to an academic system like MLA or APA. Key concept: If you write down anything you didn’t know before, say where you found it! Failure to do so, even unintentional, is plagiarism. In our field, it may also be copyright infringement. Do not write just to fill up space. Create clear, concise, accurate, and relevant thoughts. And convey them to readers in a well-written, grammatical, engaging fashion.

Let's start working on it in class today, as we discuss advertising, public relations and market research. They're all related.

John Vivian's discussion of branding defines the practice as: "Enhancing a product image with a celebrity or already-established brand name, regardless of any intrinisic connection between the product and the image" (332). He uses Paris Hilton as an example, citing "a Paris Hilton handbag, a Paris Hilton wristwatch, a Paris Hilton whatever."

Whatever.

True enough, but there's more to it than that. A good starting place is Vivian's discussion of "brand image" (330-332). He cites adman David Ogilvy, who pioneered the concept during the 1950s and 60s. A certain type of dress shirt (a Hathaway), a certain type of whiskey (Jack Daniels) was hooked up with a certain type of image (a pirate with an eyepatch, down-home sippin' whiskey, whatever). Whatever. It does sell product, though. Or does it sell product by selling the experience? See how all this stuff starts fitting together?

Vivian defines a brand as a "non-generic product name designed to set the product apart from the competition" (330). Ford. Chevvy. BMW. They're all cars. What's the image of each? The American Marketing Association defines a brand as a "name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers. The legal term for brand is trademark. A brand may identify one item, a family of items, or all items of that seller." Done right, branding reinforces in our minds something that marketing people call a unique selling proposition i.e. something that sets one product apart from all others.

Wikipedia defines brand management as "the application of marketing techniques to a specific product, product line, or brand." Here's how it works:

[Brand management] seeks to increase the product's perceived value to the customer and thereby increase brand franchise and brand equity. Marketers see a brand as an implied promise that the level of quality people have come to expect from a brand will continue with future purchases of the same product. ...

If time permits, we can brainstorm on branding issues presented by different people, products and causes that have been in the news.

COMM 150: Yahoo! TV Blog - "Reign of Right-Wing Primetime" - niche broadcasting, market research, Sarah Palin and sow grizzlies

Not sure what I think of this -- but it's about niche broadcasting -- and politician-turned-TV-personality Sarah Palin and her new reality TV show about Alaska. And it shows how you can slice, dice and crosstab audience research figures.

Palin's sponsors on the TLC cable network are betting she'll appeal to a loyal market niche, and they downplay the controversy she brings to most subjects.

"Palin's going to be talking about Alaska: the Alaska salmon, the Alaska grizzly bear, the Alaska moose," Aaron Cohen, executive VP and chief media negotiating officer at Horizon Media, is quoted as saying. "As long as she doesn't end up shooting the moose, I don't think it will become a controversial program."

But the overall story compares and contrasts the alleged viewing habits of Republicans and Democrats. How thorough the research is, I'm not too sure. But it's based on a survey that cross-tabbed declared party preference with viewing habits. Nut graf:

According to months of data from leading media-research company Experian Simmons, viewers who vote Republican and identify themselves as conservative are more likely than Democrats to love the biggest hits on TV. Of the top 10 broadcast shows on TV in the spring, nine were ranked more favorably by viewers who identify themselves as Republican.

[list of shows deleted]

Liberals appreciate many of the same shows, mind you. But their devotion typically is not quite as strong as right-wingers, and Dems are more likely to prefer modestly rated titles.

And this: "... if you look at the list of broadcast shows that are Republican favorites, it closely mirrors the Nielsen top 10 list, whereas Democrats tend to gravitate toward titles likely to have narrower audiences."

And this ...

For what it's worth, Sarah Palin's reality show. The Yahoo! story's take on it follows a lengthy discussion of how shows were upbeat and approving of authority back in the day, more rebellious during the 70s and more conservative again in the 80s (which strikes this reader as doubtful pop sociology) and a segue:

All of which brings us to …

Alaska.

"Sarah Palin's Alaska." TLC is set to make one of the biggest bets of the year by taking arguably the most polarizing figure in politics and giving her a reality show. The broadcast hits on Experian's index tend to have at least some bipartisan support, but the lower ratings bar set for cable shows mean they get away with appealing to only one side or the other.

There's even a trailer for "Mama Bear" Palin's new show, which got panned, incidentially, in the Anchorage Daily News.

Best comment on Palin, well, my favorite, at least, was a letter to the editor in the ADN that suggested that if Palin spent more time in Alaska, she'd realize what she calls a "mama grizzly" is really a sow. The males are boars. For more on the lifestyle of sow grizzlies check out this story in the Alaska Dispatch. Palin is not mentioned, but it's good on bears.

COMM 150: Mission statements, PR and advertising

One reason John Vivian -- along with most people who write about public relations -- insists that PR is a management function is that it should reflect an organization's mission. Done right, a mission statement is at the core of its strategic thinking. It takes someone in top management to make sure it is followed through, and it takes a PR person in upper-level management to ensure the organization's public face is consistent with its mission.

Done wrong, a mission statement is a jumble of words and cutsey slogans. Which is one reason why it's important to do it right.

So here's a brief outline, and below that an exercise for you to do and post as a comment to this post.

Peter Drucker, who was probably the 20th century's most influential management consultant, once famously said "a mission statement should fit on a T-shirt. In an book called "Managing the Non-Profit Organization," Drucker put it like this:

The first thing to talk about is what missions work and what missions don't work, and how to define the mission. For the ultimate test is not the beauty of the mission statement. The ultimate test is right action.

The most common question asked me by non-profit executives is: What are the qualities of a leader? The question seems to assume that leadership is something you can learn in a charm school. But it also assumes that leadership by itself is enough, that it's an end. And that's misleadership. The leader who basically focuses on himself or herself is going to mislead. The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader's charisma. What matters is the leader's mission. Therefore, the first job of the leader is to think through and deflne the mission of the institution.

And he summed up what he had to say about mission statements with this:

A mission statement has to be operational, otherwise it's just good intentions. A mission statement has to focus on what the institution really tries to do and then do it so that everybody in the organization can say, This is my contribution to the goal.

What does that mean: A mission statement has to be operational? It has to be something you can translate into action. In "Managing the Non-Profit Organization," Drucker gives a couple of examples. Here's one:

Here is a simple and mundane example-the mission statement of a hospital emergency room: "It's our mission to give assurance to the afflicted." That's simple and clear and direct. Or take the mission of the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A.: to help girls grow into proud, self-confident, and self-respecting young women. There is an Episcopal church on the East Coast which defines its mission as making Jesus the head of this church and its chief executive officer. Or the mission of the Salvation Army, which is to make citizens out of the rejected. Arnold of Rugby, the greatest English educator of the nineteenth century, who created the English public school, defined its mission as making gentlemen out of savages.

My favorite mission definition, however, is not that of a nonprofit institution, but of a business. It's a definition that changed Sears from a near-bankrupt, struggling mail-order house at the beginning of the century into the world's leading retailer within less than ten years: It's our mission to be the informed and responsible buyer-first for the American farmer, and later for the American family altogether.

Sears has lost sight of its mission in recent years, according to some business analysts. But for a long time, it was nothing if not a farmers' store. Farmers and their families ordered from the Sears catalog (which they also put to other uses), and they shopped at Sears when they came to town. I remember as a kid walking into the Sears in Knoxville, Tenn., and they were selling everything from baby chicks to metal washtubs. You knew it was for farmers. Who are Sears' customers now? Well, there aren't that many anymore. And I think lack of a clear mission is one reason why.
Here's the exercise:

Your assignment: Find something on the World Wide Web that clearly explains what a mission statement is and what it does.
* * *
Please post what you find out as a comment to this blog. And be sure to include a Web address. Copy and paste it from the address field in your browser into your comment. Like this:
http://www.brs-inc.com/news002.html

Business Resource Software of Austin, Texas, says, "A mission statement may look simple but it should communicate the core of your organization with a precise statement of purpose. Words should be chosen for meaning and clarity - not technical jargon." There's more. I like it. It's simple. It's clear. And it tells you what to do and how to do it. What's not to like about that?

COMM 150: In class Monday ... Billy Goat Tavern ... a public relations case study

Monday we're going to look at how the Billy Goat Tavern, a Chicago institution, keeps its name -- and its brand, i.e. its corporate image -- before the public. And how it illustrates the principles in John Vivian's discussion of public relations in "Media of Mass Communication." Let's start with his definition on page 290 in the 9th edition that PR "is a management tool for leaders in business, government and other instititutions to establish beneficial relationships with other institutions and groups."

BTW, we use the language oddly in PR. A "public" is any group that has a relationship to your organization. So you can have lots of different "publics." [One of them is the public at large, which is what we usually mean by the word "public." But there are smaller publics, especially in a world of niche marketing.] It sounds awkward at first, but you'll get used to thinking about different publics.

Chicago's Billy Goat Tavern
© Jeremy Atherton 2006
Wikimedia Commons

Last week we saw how U.S. Sen.-elect Mark Kirk and unsuccessful candidate Alexi Giannoulis got some free publicity from a meeting -- really a photo op -- at the Billy Goat. Today we'll look at how tavern owner Sam Sianis promotes the business and maintains beneficial relationships with other institutions and groups.

First place to go for background, as always [at least in my classes], is Wikipedia [while you're there, notice how quickly the Kirk-Giannoulis meeting got into the Wikipedia profile, and click on the photo. You'll notice it is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. This means that it can be reused if the photo is credited to the creator of the content and his copyright is acknowledged. It's in its formative stages, but Creative Commons is an interesting attempt by content creators on the Internet to work within the confines of copyright law.

Back to the Billy Goat ...

Go to the tavern's website at http://www.billygoattavern.com/home.html and see how it promotes the business. There's also a history page at http://www.billygoattavern.com/history.html that will be of particular interest, no doubt, to Cubs fans. As you read, identify the various publics represented.

For Wednesday: Evaluate the website in light of Vivian's discussion of the differences and similarities of public relations and advertising. What is integrated marketing communications, and how does IMC fit into the picture here? Is the Goat following an IMC policy when it ventures into areas like politics and baseball?

COMM 150: Media trends in the morning news

So I'm going to open my email, and before I even get to my inbox there's a couple of Associated Press stories on the Yahoo! News site that relate to trends we're studying this semester.

Here's one on new- vs. old-media competition ... a fall-off in the number of cable subscribers that may (or may not) reflect internet TV services:

NEW YORK (AP) -- Cable companies have been losing TV subscribers at an ever faster rate in the last few months, and satellite TV isn't picking up the slack.

That could be a sign that Internet TV services such as Netflix and Hulu are finally starting to entice people to cancel cable, though company executives are pointing to the weak economy and housing market for now. ...

And so on. Like I said, we'd better read it.

Here's another TV story. The Nielsen ratings show Fox News, as usual, blew out the other TV networks on election night audience share. If my theory is correct, it's more evidence that niche broadcasting works. The AP reports:

The Nielsen Co. said Thursday that Fox had 6.94 million viewers during the 10 p.m. hour Tuesday. NBC was second with 6.27 million, followed by CBS with 5.86 million and ABC with 5.53 million. CNN had 2.59 million viewers during that key hour and MSNBC had 2.04 million.

And at the bottom of the story, another trend - concentration of ownership - in AP's usual filler in the last graf:

Fox is owned by News Corp.; ABC is a unit of The Walt Disney Co.; MSNBC and NBC are subsidiaries of General Electric Co.; CBS is owned by CBS Corp.; CNN is a unit of Time Warner Inc.

Concentration of ownership. Convergence. Niche targeting. That's how the world is changing.