Okay, I admit it. As a reporter, I've withheld information from the public. I've actually done so quite often and will continue to do so in the future.
The subject of when the media should disclose information came to light this week in two separate circumstances. First, the revelation that Prince Harry was fighting with U.K. forces against the Taliban in Afghanistan and, second, that the New York Times put out a story suggesting that John McCain might not be eligible to run for president because he was born outside of the United States.
Those two highlight the main reasons why news outlets don't necessarily pass along everything they learn.
-- Airing a story might prove to be recklessly dangerous, or,
-- making a judgment call on whether a story is relevant and pertinent.
Let's take the dangerous scenario first. A thumbnail sketch of what took place: the British media agreed to not publicize the prince's deployment until after he returned home, in exchange for almost unprecedented access to his activities for embedded reporters. The cover was blown this week by an item on the Drudge Report, and Harry is being shipped home for his own safety. The danger of militants knowing he is there is obvious. However, there's a debate raging over whether the British media should have accepted such a deal and whether it was right for Matt Drudge to blow it.
This is not an unusual subject, however, and it runs the gamut from the national media to local reporters. Remember how the Bush administration fought desperately but unsuccessfully to prevent publication of a story that revealed how the Treasury Department tracked international exchanges of money in its terror financing probes. That was a security issue for all of us.
Me, on the local level, well I'm often asked to not reveal a name of someone who might be a cooperating witness in a court case involving criminal street gangs. If the prosecutor, or the witnesses' lawyer, can give me legitimate explanation for how the witness has been threatened, then I won't reveal the name. In exchange, I build trust with an official who is more likely in the future to give me information that will prove beneficial to my readers, probably more so than simply putting out a name.
Considering whether a story is newsworthy, and how to present it, is an issue that's bedeviled The New York Times in the past week in two articles about McCain, including the most recent about whether he is in fact eligible to run for president.
McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone while his father was stationed there. He was born in a military hospital. A military installation in a foreign land, like an embassy, is considered U.S. soil. Therefore, McCain is a "natural born" citizen as specified by the Constitution and is therefore eligible to become president. There's no question about it. Americans born in civilian areas of the Panama Canal Zone may not have been so lucky, I understand, but that's not the issue with McCain.
So the story is neither relevant nor pertinent, and should not have been run the way it was, especially following the previous piece on McCain -- on his alleged relationship with a female lobbyist -- that turned into a disaster for the newspaper. The circumstances of McCain's birth are curious, though, and could have been an interesting sidebar snippet that does not leave his candidacy an open question.
---
News today is that overall advertising in the New York Times dropped more than 11 percent in January, led by a 22.6 percent drop in classified ads, a paper's lifeblood. Large shareholders are revolting because the New York Times Company has lost more than half of its share price in five years and isn't doing much to find new Internet-generated revenues (though few newspapers are finding the Web to be a money-maker).
The Times Company also includes the International Herald Tribune, the Boston Globe (which when I viewed it in 2003 appeared to me to be the worst big-city newspaper I'd ever seen), and About.com, which is actually quite useful and from which I'm learning at my ripe middle-age to play guitar -- on a very, very, very basic level. But you gotta make money from it.
It's easy to dump on The New York Times. The people who run the paper make themselves appear unbelievably silly sometimes. But what is happening to them is happening to newspapers across the United States, and the business of journalism is much worse off for it, as is the ability of consumers to get the daily information they need so they can lead productive lives.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
The Middle Class Strikes Back, Hillary, More
Before the presidential primary campaigns got serious around the middle of last year, there were a couple of consensus assumptions: Hillary Clinton would waltz to the Democratic nomination and John McCain could very well be the first Republican knocked out.
Here at the end of February, Clinton is hanging by her fingernails and is clearly campaigning in a desperate style, and McCain has all but wrapped up the Republican race.
So how did things go so wrong for the conventional wisdom? Call it the revolt of the middle class. The rest of us struck back against what "they" told us what would happen. We were tired of what "they" kept telling us. We were sick of those who "they" were thrusting upon us, a queen-to-be awaiting her coronation, a slick and clever corporate CEO, a trial lawyer, a career bureaucrat who assumed we would ignore his various indiscretions.
What we told those people was that they weren't going to get a free pass for getting us into the mess that we're in: a souring economy, troublesome relations with countries that should be our friends, a failed system of education that's crippled our competitiveness, and a southern border that's been rendered meaningless. Don't get me started, there's more I could add in, but you know already.
For all their faults -- which are many -- Barack Obama and John McCain spoke to us plainly and positively and didn't try to sneak anything past us. They both will take office with the intention of getting things done. Now the choice will be between competing versions of what those things should be, instead of character failings.
The people have spoken.
---
No strategery is going to bring Clinton back against Obama. If her message hasn't caught on with people by now, and her personality hasn't won her admirers, then she will lose no matter what she does. Only good old-fashioned hardball politics leading into the party convention can save her candidacy now.
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Okay, just who thought that the partial resignation of Fidel Castro would change things in Cuba and why would they even think something like that? Uh, the brother, Raul the enforcer, open up the political and economic system? Laughable. Go back and see who told us that this was a great opportunity for change, then ignore them in the future.
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"Duh" news item of the day. A study by associate professors at Wellesley College and Rutgers University shows that U.S. born adult males are imprisoned at a rate 2.5 times above those of immigrants.
As we've pointed out on this blog before, my observation from years of covering crime and court news is that the problem with immigrants from the south of our nation is drunk driving and, to a much lesser extent, domestic violence. They're not going around assassinating Ma and Pa Kettle like some claim. Sure, there's individual exceptions, but if they're rare enough to point out, then they're certainly not the rule. Plus, DUI and DV cases almost always result in probation and victim-impact classes, not prison, so these convicts won't show up in their figures.
Secondly, immigrants who commit crimes are less likely to be apprehended than U.S. citizens. There are quite a few open murder cases I can think of just off the top of my head in my neck of the woods in which the suspect is believed to have fled to Mexico.
Finally, while it's probably not a big deal where the results of the study are concerned, the authors do not differentiate between legal and illegal immigrants. No one cares about legal immigration. It's the illegal border crossings that people want to stop.
Here at the end of February, Clinton is hanging by her fingernails and is clearly campaigning in a desperate style, and McCain has all but wrapped up the Republican race.
So how did things go so wrong for the conventional wisdom? Call it the revolt of the middle class. The rest of us struck back against what "they" told us what would happen. We were tired of what "they" kept telling us. We were sick of those who "they" were thrusting upon us, a queen-to-be awaiting her coronation, a slick and clever corporate CEO, a trial lawyer, a career bureaucrat who assumed we would ignore his various indiscretions.
What we told those people was that they weren't going to get a free pass for getting us into the mess that we're in: a souring economy, troublesome relations with countries that should be our friends, a failed system of education that's crippled our competitiveness, and a southern border that's been rendered meaningless. Don't get me started, there's more I could add in, but you know already.
For all their faults -- which are many -- Barack Obama and John McCain spoke to us plainly and positively and didn't try to sneak anything past us. They both will take office with the intention of getting things done. Now the choice will be between competing versions of what those things should be, instead of character failings.
The people have spoken.
---
No strategery is going to bring Clinton back against Obama. If her message hasn't caught on with people by now, and her personality hasn't won her admirers, then she will lose no matter what she does. Only good old-fashioned hardball politics leading into the party convention can save her candidacy now.
---
Okay, just who thought that the partial resignation of Fidel Castro would change things in Cuba and why would they even think something like that? Uh, the brother, Raul the enforcer, open up the political and economic system? Laughable. Go back and see who told us that this was a great opportunity for change, then ignore them in the future.
---
"Duh" news item of the day. A study by associate professors at Wellesley College and Rutgers University shows that U.S. born adult males are imprisoned at a rate 2.5 times above those of immigrants.
As we've pointed out on this blog before, my observation from years of covering crime and court news is that the problem with immigrants from the south of our nation is drunk driving and, to a much lesser extent, domestic violence. They're not going around assassinating Ma and Pa Kettle like some claim. Sure, there's individual exceptions, but if they're rare enough to point out, then they're certainly not the rule. Plus, DUI and DV cases almost always result in probation and victim-impact classes, not prison, so these convicts won't show up in their figures.
Secondly, immigrants who commit crimes are less likely to be apprehended than U.S. citizens. There are quite a few open murder cases I can think of just off the top of my head in my neck of the woods in which the suspect is believed to have fled to Mexico.
Finally, while it's probably not a big deal where the results of the study are concerned, the authors do not differentiate between legal and illegal immigrants. No one cares about legal immigration. It's the illegal border crossings that people want to stop.
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