A Well-Earned Break

After blogging here tirelessly for nearly three days, I’m going on hiatus.

Really, though, I unexpectedly took a job this week with Obama for America in Madison, Wisconsin. As a result, I don’t expect to have much time for blogging in the coming weeks. I intend to come back here though when time allows, so I’m leaving this space intact.

Until then.

And Column Inches for Provocateurs

Yesterday I mentioned the potential problems that come with giving airtime to climate change deniers. While giving credence to junk climate science can get people killed in the long run, publishing offenses to Islam tends to get people killed in more immediate ways.

The New York Times reports this morning that the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, printed some cartoons that mock the Prophet Mohammed. Usual debates over free speech, tact, and appropriate reactions will ensue.

Something, I think, interesting about reporting on this subject is that the Times won't dare show its readers what these cartoons look like. Not that they should, and reporters Nicola Clark and Scott Sayare give enough of a description for readers to get the idea.

The Times might defend its decision not to print the images without even considering potential violent reactions, on the same grounds that it can reasonably avoid printing other images that might be offensive. This case is different, though, because while some other offensive images might be printed because of their news value (consider a recent image from the Times' home page showing the aftermath of the Empire State Building shooting), I can't imagine that the Times would ever print something like a cartoon mocking the Prophet, regardless of how important to the story showing such an image would be.

Three Years of Searchable News Broadcasts plus Video

Alex Weprin at TVNewser points to an awesome new service from the Internet Archive.

Airtime for Contrarians

Media Matters has some reasonable complaints about a PBS NewsHour story from last night featuring a climate change denier. Shauna Theel raises an important point, which is that creating for the public even the perception of debate is a goal of climate change denial groups.

Theel also writes: 

"While PBS mentioned that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that manmade global warming is occurring, it did not reflect this consensus by giving significant airtime to Watts' contrarian views. The segment presented Watts as the counterbalance to scientists that believe in manmade global warming -- every time a statement that reflects the scientific consensus was aired, in came Watts to cast doubt in viewers' minds. As 66 percent of Americans incorrectly think that "there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether or not global warming is happening," news organizations need to be careful not to contribute to this confusion."

I'm sympathetic to this concern, but I wonder if news organizations really need to -- as a general rule -- reflect the balance of opinions in their use of sources. I think properly contextualizing fringe views is a more important objective. That way journalists can report on the activities of climate change denial groups, intelligent design proponents, etc. when those activities have news value.

Harry Crane Takes the Night Off

I was watching Revolution on NBC last night because, well, I don't know, and this Google ad came on and creeped me out.





The father and daughter characters grow closer to each other to each other using Google products after the mom dies. It kind of reminded me of the Apple FaceTime promo video that showed people using sign language. A major and important difference between the two though is that the Apple video didn't reference some tragedy which had recently robbed the FaceTime users of their hearing.

Perhaps I was only turned off by this Google ad's heart-string-tugging because the characters on Revolution were, only minutes before, discussing a dead mom.

Even worse for Google, I think, was that mere minutes after their ad, a character on Revolution revealed that he had worked for Google and his $80 million savings was now worthless in their post-apocalyptic world. And this was part of a general message about over-reliance on technology.

The Smart Money?

The Washington Post has a cool interactive map showing campaign television ad spending by the two presidential campaigns and the leading Super PACs. One thing the map shows is that Americans for Prosperity is virtually alone in making ad buys in Minnesota.

Minnesota is generally considered to be safe for President Obama -- FiveThirtyEight gives Obama a 94% chance of winning in November -- and the state's other high-profile election this year looks to be a safe one for Senator Amy Klobuchar. So what's happening here?

It isn't simply that AFP is spreading its money indiscriminately across the country. The Minnesota spending is part of a $25 million campaign targeting 11 states, including the most competitive states of the presidential campaign. It could be that AFP has a feeling about Minnesota and is willing to place a bet that the Romney campaign and other groups are not yet willing to. If nothing else, the spending illustrates the potential of outside group spending to reshape a campaign's terrain.

How To Get Glenn Beck in Your House

TPM reported the other day that Glenn Beck and Eliot Spitzer appeared at a boxing-themed event promoting their upcoming debate, which will be hosted by the Dish satellite TV service. This is funny, and bizarre, and everything, but more interesting to me was the note that Dish is offering Current TV, which airs Spitzer's talk show, and Beck's new TheBlaze network as $5 add-ons to any of their programming packages.

If you want to see Current on AT&T's U-verse, in contrast, you need to subscribe to a package carrying at least 300 channels, according to the AT&T website. Tying niche programming to large and expensive programming packages is one of the advantages cable/video carriers have over consumers and one I'd expect them to cling desperately to.

Allowing subscribers to add on a single channel for a small fee is a great alternative for consumers. It's good to see that Dish is either able to make money off of this model or thinks that it will be able to.

The Context Black Hole

Jason Stein has an article in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that compares the potential impact on individuals of Romney's and Obama's tax proposals. Of course, more can be said about the president's proposal because that proposal exists, in full detail, in current time, in a way that Romney's does not.

Stein's reporting is, first of all, an example of what good campaign reporting can be. The candidates do have real different positions on issues, and if implemented, their preferred policies would have different impacts. So comparing the impacts is a great use of newspaper real estate.

There is a problem here, though, which illustrates the general pattern of missing context in newspaper reporting. This line jumped out at me:

"To boost the nation's struggling economy, Romney would renew all of the Bush tax cuts, including those for the wealthiest Americans."

This phrasing takes as given (1) Romney is proposing the tax cuts in order to boost the economy, and more importantly (2) that renewing the tax cuts would in fact boost the economy.

The supposed benefits of the tax cuts must be broken down in a better way, but can this be done without resorting to either the dreaded "but Democrats disagree" or by taking a brief foray into macroeconomics? Giving readers information about how cutting taxes is supposed to spur growth and the evidence for and against that expectation seems to be the best solution, but must all that info supplement any claim about tax cuts? And do readers need a backgrounder on the importance of the budget deficit, the value of a payroll tax cut, etc?

Thus we have the context black hole of journalism, where more information is always desirable for readers to have a better (if not complete) understanding of an issue, combined with the fact that daily reporting on an issue -- like the Arab/Israeli conflict or arguments about tax policy -- would require all that context to be re-reported every day.