I woke up this morning to a front page article in The New York Times all about how Carly Fiorina, the newly minted Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in California, dissed the incumbent Barbara Boxer’s hair in one of those “open mike” comments, the kind that percolate up when a candidate speaks without realizing the comments would be overheard.  The press has jumped on this as a window into Fiorina’s character.   Never comment on a woman’s hair, one pundit said.  A stylist was quoted as saying that a woman’s hair is her personality.  Maybe so. I am bald and a man so I just don’t know.

Now, I thought Fiorina did a terrible job at HP.  It was five years of non-stop drama and she almost drove the company into the ground.  To top it off, she is trying to claim credit for Mark Hurd’s subsequent  success.  That said, shouldn’t  open-mike comments be out of bounds for reporters (although in a YouTube age they probably will always circulate to some degree.)   Do we really learn anything from candidates’ off-hand remarks?

I am old enough to remember the ruckus Ronald Reagan raised when he tested a microphone by announcing that the bombing of the Soviet Union could begin.  It turned out that Reagan was the least war-like of all our presidents in the last 30 years (though there were fewer military casualties in the Clinton administration).

Based on her tenure at HP, I think Fiorina is going to have a “character problem” because apparently a lot of people who have worked with her don’t like her and she seems to have gotten off on the wrong foot with the press as well.  But should the voters of California choose their senator based on who has the best hair or what one candidate says about the way the other candidate looks?

Below are images of Carly Fiorina (before her bout with cancer and chemotherapy) and Barbara Boxer from 2007.  So who has the best hair?  As they say, “we report, you decide.”

Carly Fiorina before her chemotherapy

Barbara Boxer in 2007

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My friend Keith Thomas sent me an interesting link in which Gwen Ifill, the moderator of Washington Week in Review defends the show against an attack in The Washington Post by New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen.  In a feature called  “Twelve Things the World Should Toss Out,” in which an eclectic group of semi-prominent to prominent folks nominate candidates for “spring cleaning,” Rosen suggested tossing out Washington Week in Review. the PBS show in which a bunch of Washington-based reporters sit around and chitchat about the events of the week.  After allowing that the reporters and moderator Gwen Ifill were professionals, Rosen attacked the show, which as been on the air for 43 years,  from top to bottom.  The premise was “exhausted,”   he argued. The reporters are too close to the politicians they cover.  The audience is a bunch of  insider “wanna-be’s.”  The show, Rosen wrote,  has “no grace, edge, mystery or dissonant voice,” and is often “a lie.” Whoa, that is kind of harsh, I think.

After giving what seems to me is the usual boilerplate about “there is plenty of things wrong with journalism,” and she will “defend anybody’s right”  to express opinions with which she disagrees, Ifill suggests that there areplenty of people who prefer shows that are trying to bring more light than heat to the discussion of politics. (I would say, well maybe not plenty but there are some)

A couple of points. First, over the years Rosen has been one of the more thoughtful and most entrepreneurial academic advocates of journalism reform.  So of all the targets in journalism to pick to “toss out,”  for him to pick out Washington Week seems to me to be a really bizarre one.   So what if it has no mystery,  no dissonant voices and no edge (I am not sure what “no grace” means).  Is it misleading; is the information wrong or bad? Is the show harmful in some way?

Second, maybe some people like to sit around the table (in a virtual sense, of course) and have a nice discussion about politics with people who may know something.  I am not sure where the line is between wanting to know more (“inside information”) about politics (I thought that would be a good thing) and being an “insider wanna-be” which I assume is a bad things worthy of scorn and ridicule. And if there is a big enough audience that want  the information the guests on the show offer for PBS to want to continue to serve it, well, why should the show be tossed out?

For myself, I have sworn off watching all of the so-called commentary shows unless at some point, some time, one of the guests representing one of the sides (I don’t care, liberal or conservative, it makes no difference), listens to a point made by the representative of the  other side and says “you know, that is really interesting, I am going to have to think about it.”

And one last thought.  Fifty years ago, Walter Cronkite was not seen as the most trusted man in America because he was edgy, mysterious or, in some way,  a dissonant voice.

Jay Rosen of New York University

Gwen Ifill of Washington Week in Review

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I got my new print copy of the Columbia Journalism Review (I have a very specific relationship with print CJR.  I think six issues are worth $10 a year or even $12 but not $21.95 so I always take advantage of the new subscriber teaser rate and then never renew.) In any case, there was an interesting article exploring the funding of investigative reporting by non-profits. The troubling piece for me was the editorial “Bite the Hand That Feeds,” (not accessible via the Web site)  which looked at the Chicago News Cooperative, whose board of directors includes Ann Marie Lipinsky, the vice president for civic engagement at the University of Chicago (and a former editor of the Chicago Tribune.)  The important question, the editorial writer Jamie Kalven wrote, was “in view of how the news cooperative is constituted, will it bring sustained critical journalistic scrutiny to bear on the University of Chicago?”

My question is this.  Why should the Chicago News Cooperative have to bring “critical journalistic scrutiny to bear on the University of Chicago?”  Why can’t that job to left to the Tribune, to bloggers, to somebody else.  Why do journalists feel that they have to be able to criticize everybody, especially the hands that feed them.  Historically, it has only been since the early 1950s that news organizations have felt the need to criticize and investigate everybody. Prior to that,  a newspapers would stand on one side and generally criticize the other side.  Democratic newspapers loved to investigate Republicans and Republican newspapers loved to return the favor, and so on.  In 1870, Boss Tweed the Democrat was exposed by The New York Times, which was Republican at the time..   Today,  news organizations typically position themselves  as the critics of all.   As a result, everybody criticizes journalism, and not a good, healthy way.

There may be plenty of good stories about the ways the University of Chicago is not living up to expectations by engaging in “stealth real estate dealings,” or  allowing its medical center to “systematically” deflect the poor, two potential stories that Kalven points out.  But can’t somebody other than the Chicago News Cooperative investigate those stories.  And there may be plenty of stories about the great things the University of Chicago does.  Perhaps those stories should be left to others as well.  I am willing to bet that if the Chicago News Cooperative focused its attention just on city and state government, it could make a good contribution to civic life in Chicago.

There are two points to be made here.  Not every news organization has an obligation to cover everything (nor can they and nor should a news organization be criticized for that.)  And if journalists are against everybody, everybody will be against journalism, which is pretty much the situation we have now.

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I had just sent off  $50 to renew my Newsweek subscription for the next two weeks when I read that it was on the block and might not be able to find a buyer.  I have been a long-time subscriber to Newsweek and though I had mixed feelings about the redesign–a little too narrow a range of voices and little too much “how to easily fix the big problems in three easy steps”–I found that every week I would start reading it when it arrived on Tuesday and periodically pick it up during the week.  In an interesting blog post that my friend Jon Barnes of The Munich Group sent me, the marketing guru Seth Godin suggested that the era of the mass circulation general interest print magazine was dead and it would be replaced by by an era of 100,000 micro-magazines, which he defines using seven characteristics.  Who actually reads the news weeklies anymore and who will miss them when they are gone, he wondered.

Well,  Newsweek has nearly two million subscribers and Time has more than three million and I bet that a lot of them read the magazines and a lot of the like them.  I know that if it fails, I will miss Newsweek.  It is not a little ironic that people like Glenn Beck or Keith Olbermann and other pontificaters are seen as driving the conversation while  Newsweek and Time with their well-researched, well-reported, dare I say it, thoughtful articles somehow “won’t be missed.”

Magazines represented the first national medium and though they were eclipsed by television in the 1950s, leading to the demise of Life, Look, Colliers, etc. in the two decades that followed, magazines like Newsweek and Time still play a national role.  While it is possible that with links and the potentially viral nature of information on the Internet, a 100,000 micro-magazines could replace the news weeklies, it is unlikely that they can replace the deliberate consideration of the the issues and the insightful takes on different aspects of  social life in a well-written, authoritative, digestible format  that Newsweek now provides. Alas.

An early Newsweek cover

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I attended a book signing for my book Free for All:  The Internet’s at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s Alumni weekend last Friday night.  Prior to the signing, Ron Suskind, the author of such terrific books as A Hope in the Unseen (my personal favorite), The One Percent Doctrine (very scary, especially the result), The Price of Loyalty and others, received a distinguished alumni award. A very funny and entertaining speaker, Suskind had a serious and direct message.  The role of journalism, he said,  (and I am paraphrasing here) is to chronicle that we are here; that we live in this time and place; and we have done our best to tell the story or our times.  It seems to me that bearing witness is a  core value of journalism that makes it all worthwhile.  Taking the time to bear witness says we are alive; we are awake; and our lives matter.

Pulitzer-prize winner Ron Suskind

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A lot of people know Frank Sesno from his days as the Washington bureau

Frank Sesno is fired up about journalism.

chief for CNN. At some point he was getting a lot of quality air time. Well, Sesno has left CNN to become the Director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University and he just delivered the annual Caulfield Lecture at Loyola University Maryland, where I teach.  It was excellent. Sesno is one of the first “old school” journalists who is not only not wringing his hands about journalism, he brims with enthusiasm about the future.  He talked to students about  some exciting start-up projects like Global Post and his own school’s Planet Forward.  His main message–the 20-something generation is going to invent the future of journalism and while invention is scary and hard, it is also a lot of fun.  I am working with my own students to try to reimagine crime reporting.  I admit that our the blog Big City Crime started out as an epic fail, to use the current terminology, but it is getting better and it has been fun.  And I guess it is too much to expect to invent the future in six weeks but it is worthwhile to try things to discover what might work.  In any case, to me, Sesno was very motivational. He was excited about what he was doing in journalism. In fact, the title of this post comes from a joke that Sesno said President Reagan used to tell about pessimists and optimists. The punchline is that the optimistic finds himself in a room full of manure but nonetheless he is happy as can be because, he tells his father, “I know that there is a pony in here somewhere.”  Sesno seems to think there is a pony as well and so do I.

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The so-called Tea Party movement has certainly gotten a lot of media

An angry Tea Partier

attention since a year ago March.  Generally portrayed as angry–very angry–and not too bright–best demonstrated by the quote “keep the government’s hands off my Medicare”–the coverage has conjured  a lot of cultural assumptions.  Consequently, the results from a poll that The New York Times has been publishing over the past couple of days have been very interesting.  Not surprisingly, the Tea Party is largely male, white and older.  Since the days of Network’s Howard Beale, older white men have been on anger’s vanguard.  What is surprising is that Tea Party members are better educated and richer than expected. And what is very surprising is that many members of the Tea Party feel that personally they are doing just fine, thank you, although they think the country is going to hell in a handbasket, so to speak.  The contradiction between their anger at the direction of the country but their sense of personal well-being seems to me to point to a more inchoate sense of loss, which is probably hard to address politically.  As always, despite what the polls say now, the Tea Party movement’s real electoral strength won’t be tested until–okay this is kind of obvious–there is an election.  The results of the Times poll suggests that at least to some degree, the Tea Party are Ross Perot voters redux–only older, angier and even whiter.  And while the Perot movement generated a lot of heat, it did not change the direction of the country.

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ESPN's Tony Kornheiser

ESPN's Michael Wilbon

I find ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption as the most amusing talking-heads-disagreeing-with-each-other show on television.Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon are both very knowledgeable and they have great chemistry.  To use a cliche, they disagree without being disagreeable.  They take sports seriously but don’t seem to think that being right is the be-all and end-all of existence. If political talking-head shows could be conducted in the same way, they might even be fun to watch.

The show is also very well organized.  The list of topics to the right of the screen let’s viewers know what to expect. And the buzzer at the end of each segment keeps the show moving without cutting somebody off mid-sentance.  The best part is that though Wilbon and Kornheiser disagree, I always get the feeling that after the show, they would like to get a beer and continue the conversation. Maybe because they are talking about sports and not something weightier, to me, they come across as two friends debating issues that interest them.

The “combatants” on political talking-heads-disagree shows always seem like they truly hate each other. I don’t find that much fun to watch.  PTI is a great model for simple, entertaining and informative television.

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In “Free for All”, longtime scholar of digital media Elliot King begins with a brief history of the technological development of news media from the appearance of newspapers in the sixteenth century to the rise of broadcasting and the internet. Within that context, King demystifies the emergence of online communication and social media as the third major technological platform for news, making the current pace of change appear less vertiginous. “Free for All” provides anyone with an interest in the future of journalism the grounding necessary for an informed discussion. Elliot King, a veteran technology reporter, has been on the cutting edge of communication technology since he opened his first e-mail account in 1984. He is professor of communication at Loyola University in Maryland, founder of his school’s digital media lab, coauthor of The Online Journalist (2000), and special editor of three volumes of the Electronic Journal of Communication about journalism and the internet.

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