Humanity is dooming itself to extinction in this century

The Huffington Post might be the news organization that comes closest to maintaining a steady drumbeat on the climate change issue. The lead headline right now is "Clear and Present Danger," about a U.S. government report declaring that the nation is already feeling the effects of climate change in drier droughts and wetter downpours, among other things.

Huffington Post also captured this damning quote from Neil deGrasse Tyson's show "Cosmos":

We just can't seem to stop burning up all those buried trees from way back in the carboniferous age, in the form of coal, and the remains of ancient plankton, in the form of oil and gas. If we could, we'd be home free climate wise. Instead, we're dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a rate the Earth hasn't seen since the great climate catastrophes of the past, the ones that led to mass extinctions. We just can't seem to break our addiction to the kinds of fuel that will bring back a climate last seen by the dinosaurs, a climate that will drown our coastal cities and wreak havoc on the environment and our ability to feed ourselves. All the while, the glorious sun pours immaculate free energy down upon us, more than we will ever need. Why can't we summon the ingenuity and courage of the generations that came before us? The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What's our excuse?

It's past the point of pretending this isn't happening or that it will all go away on its own. Huffington Post reports the U.S. climate change report is chock full not just of problems, but of solutions. We need to start building the political will to enact them.

It's time for the news media to get obsessive about climate change

On April 22, Vox.com Editor-in-Chief Ezra Klein tweeted out a post by Brad Plumer headlined, “Two degrees: How the world failed on climate change.” Among other observations in the story were:

• Chances are dwindling that the world will meet the 2-degree Celsius warming ceiling that scientists have warned is the maximum a sustainable environment is likely to stand. In fact, we’re on track for an increase of 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) or more by the end of the century.

•  “The World Bank determined that ‘there’s no certainty’ humans could adapt” to 4 degrees Celsius of warming.

• Policymakers and citizens are not taking this situation seriously enough to do anything about it.

The essence of the story was: Modern humanity is willfully dooming itself to extinction in this century.

On April 23, according to his Twitter profile, Klein issued about a dozen tweets on a number of topics – from income inequality to food policy to affirmative action to science denial. He even took time to let everyone know they probably had herpes.

In other words, the day after reporting that humanity is willfully dooming itself to extinction was just another newsday for Klein, one of the nation’s most high-profile and public-interest-oriented journalists.

Which strikes me as a key reason why we’re doomed.

The New York Times, while offering some of the nation’s most laudable and aggressive climate change coverage, nonetheless is guilty of the same phenomenon. On April 14, the lead headline in the Times' morning email newsletter was “Climate Efforts Falling Short, U.N. Panel Says,” supplemented by the readout, “The countries of the world have dragged their feet so long on global warming that only an intensive push in the next 15 years can stave off potential disaster.”

The next day, the Times’ newsletter lead was, “Ukraine Falters in Drive to Curb Unrest in East.” The following day, “New York Drops Unit That Spied on Muslims.”

I’m not suggesting that either of these subjects, or really any story the Times tends to lead with, is a trivial matter. I am trying to figure out, given the dire nature of the climate situation and its ability to render Ukraine and New York obsolete in the coming decades, why everyone isn’t running around with their hair on fire about this story all the time.

Witnessing the current news judgment around climate change, even as the science gets clearer and the consequences of inaction more grave, is tantamount to watching a television news anchor announce, “The planet is about to be struck by a life-ending asteroid. Now, here’s Jane with the weather.”

It’s no secret that we as a species have limited attention spans, that we’re not good at making concrete decisions about abstract concepts, and that any message repeated often enough gets a little tiresome. As a journalist and journalism educator, I concede that leading every edition with “Humanity is dooming itself to extinction in this century” might have short-term consequences for circulation and page views.

And it’s true that, on a day-to-day basis, we still have to get our kids off to school and earn a living and save for retirement, even as we march toward our existential cliff. If we dropped everything and directed all our attention toward arresting the carbon emissions that will lead to widespread extinctions, droughts, floods, wars, and possibly the collapse of every ecosystem that can sustain human life, it would be tremendously inconvenient, costly and disruptive.

On the other hand, it’s hard to conceive of anything more inconvenient, costly and disruptive than warming ourselves right off the planet. That’s going to drive a lot of companies out of business and put a major dent in news organizations’ engagement metrics.

So, yeah, until collective global will is assembled to meaningfully address climate change, I would endorse leading every paper, every website and every newscast every day with the reminder that humanity is willfully dooming itself to extinction in this century. Given the magnitude of the impending calamity, such treatment conforms to what “Elements of Journalism” authors Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel call making the news “comprehensive and proportional.”

The alternative, really, is just to stop reporting on climate change altogether and do a better job pretending there will still be a Ukraine to fight over or a 401(k) plan to withdraw from 50-plus years from now. There’s hardly a point in talking about how we’re dooming ourselves to extinction if we’re not going to do anything about it.

Journalists can cover haters without helping them

Via Romenesko, more on how the media can do hate-mongers' jobs for them, this time over the weekend's planned Koran burning. The key insight from this Orlando Sentinel column:

We created the Rev. Terry Jones from dust. And in two weeks, to dust he shall return. Then we'll move on to the guys who plan to run over the Quran at their monster-truck pull. Whatever it takes to keep your attention.

And some good advice from Poynter on how not to be used.

Journalists culpable in mosque madness

Things are not well in our anarchic, allegedly gatekeeper-less new media environment when the most radical, bizarre and hateful voices routinely infect and then somehow come to dominate mainstream thought.

I keep hearing things in the news that sound outlandish and so outside what is reasonable, rational or Constitutional that I shrug them off as little asides in our grand diverse discourse, only to find days or weeks or months later that these off-the-wall agendas have become Big Stories.

So, for instance, little dribs and drabs of complaint are sounded about an Islamic center being built in New York City near the site of the terrorist-destroyed World Trade Center, and I think: Well, naturally, some people will let fear and ignorance and xenophobia trump the uniquely powerful and enduring American ideal that all people have a natural and (domestically) a Constitutional right to assemble and worship as they please, but cooler heads will surely prevail and the addition of another religious fixture in the nation's most diverse and vibrant city will not become a national story engulfing Congressional politics and cause the president to waver in his firm declaration of support for this unique and enduring American right and lead to overwhelming popular opposition to the construction of such a center.

I was wrong, as usual. Because that's what happened, because politicians and politico-entertainers would much rather divert people with issues like this than discuss, say, the economy, or our continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or, heaven forbid, the remaking of the earth's surface through global climate change.

Salon.com has a piece charting how the story might have gained traction, which seems to follow a similar pattern for much of our diseased national dialogue.

Lots of people let us down when these things happen, but my primary concern on this blog is the journalists, who allow something like a noncontroversial building permit to grow into A Threat To The Nation through inertia, pack journalism and fear of appearing biased against xenophobia.

Let me just come out and say here, as a supporter of traditional journalistic values, that those values do not require the fanning of xenophobic flames. That traditional journalistic values call for judging the relative significance of one story against another, and that journalistic time and resources should not be steered toward the basest and most superficial kinds of stories in service of politicians and pundits who want to say "Hey, look over there!" so we don't have to talk about real problems in real ways. Journalistic values call for us to say: Well, I see that over there, but how is that going to affect the country's jobless rate or stop the bloodshed in Iraq and Afghanistan or produce better responses for the increasing natural disasters affecting millions of people around the world? Why don't we talk about that for a minute?

Because journalism is an independent process. It has no obligation to hop on the diversionary political agenda of the moment. Its goal is to make people smarter about the world, better prepared for its challenges and more understanding of why things are the way they are.

Its job is also, I would argue, to defend the First Amendment, against all challengers. Because it looks like nobody else is going to do it.

A specific proposal for a local news consortium

Here. J-Lab, a new-media based public affairs journalism think tank, is way ahead of me on the collaboration idea I floated a couple of posts below. J-Lab did a study of old and new Philadelphia media that led to a recommendation of a collaborative effort encompassing newspapers, blogs and niche Web sites to focus citizens on key public affairs issues. It's local instead of national, but that makes more sense as a way to start, anyway.

What makes us watch

Seems like more people are interested in connecting what goes on in the brain with how people seek and interpret media content. The Poynter Institute has an interview with former Chicago Tribune editor and publisher Jack Fuller, whose new book apparently deals in part with the neuroscience of news consuming.

From Steve Myers' Poynter story:

Fuller explained that we're drawn to scary images like fires and car wrecks for the same reason our ancestors kept an eye on predators: survival. When we see such images, fear courses through our brains and focuses our attention on what appears to threaten us. Our brains respond the same way that our ancestors' did, even though we know we're not really endangered by those dramatic images.

An interesting discussion ensues over the extent to which journalists must use emotion to get readers' attention, and the ethical limits of this approach. It's worth reading, and so likely is Fuller's book, which comes out in May.

A new kind of agenda-setting

I was invited by the Committee of Concerned Journalists yesterday to participate in a survey the organization is conducting to prepare comments for the Federal Communications Commission, which is in the throes of a project aimed to help shape the future of media. The survey asked several interesting open-ended questions about the state of journalism today and what can be done to ensure that Americans continue to have access to credible, reliable information in the digital age.

This led me back to my thinking about re-aggregating the splintered audiences of America. And for the first time, I discovered the kernel of an idea, which I expressed poorly in the survey because I hadn't thought about it enough.

Here's the idea: What if there was some way, around major issues like health care, climate change, the war in Afghanistan, the deficit, that news organizations -- new and traditional, large and small, national and local -- could form voluntary, shifting consortia that fostered simultaneous, parallel coverage focused on a shared set of basic facts and central questions? In other words, rather than The New York Times holding one conversation on one issue and ABC News holding another conversation on another issue and The Daily Beast talking about something else and local media ignoring it altogether, a vast coalition of newspapers, broadcasters, bloggers, tweeters, etc., could agree on what to talk about, set basic parameters and hold similar discussions, in their own styles, at the same time.

That way, instead of everybody in the country having their attention pulled in different directions depending on their primary news source and therefore having nothing in common to talk about, the majority of people who were remotely tuned in could be having similar conversations on significant issues and might be able to focus long enough to reach a broader, quicker national consensus -- or at least might have a collective sense of what was going on.

Of course, people on the margins -- those who refuse to believe anything in the "mainstream media" or who simply refuse to get on board with what most rational people can agree are the central facts of an issue -- will remain on the margins. But they might be far less likely to dominate the discussion than in the past, because such a large number of people will have access to good information and be paying attention to it at the same time.

Now, this might or might not be a good idea (or maybe someone's already thought of it -- let me know). It would require a great deal of good reporting, coordination, trust and -- most significantly -- a shared sense of priorities. It could result in one important issue getting too much attention while others languish. But it could also be a way to fill the gap left by the death of the Walter Cronkite model of national conversation -- where a very few people set the agenda and everyone else followed it. Now, agenda-setting power is in more hands, but that power is so diffuse that there is virtually no agenda, so almost nothing gets done.

If we could return the role of agenda-setting to the press, but also make that role exponentially more broad-based and transparent, maybe we could get Americans talking to one another again in constructive ways.

Anyway, it's worth thinking about.

Who cares what you THINK?

Via Romenesko, a new PressThink post by NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen offers suggestions for CNN's primetime programming in light of news that the network is in a sustained ratings funk. I'm not super crazy about Rosen's suggestions, because despite his likely aim of generating more interesting discussion, he's still advocating for more of the same "talking heads" formula that has ruined television news. I prefer the first couple of comments on his post, which call for less opinion and more news from the 24-hour cable network, which I stopped watching a couple of years ago because it regularly set me off into a life-shortening, sputtering rage.

The problem with so much CNN programming is not just the contrived "balance" that leads to ridiculous hyping of false and trivial assertions that distract from meaningful issues, it's the relentless quest for opinion to the near exclusion of the quest for facts. Worse still, CNN doesn't seek opinion from independent-thinking experts on the issues of the day; it returns again and again to partisan hacks who are clearly pushing specific political agendas and dispensing talking points issued from central authorities. The "debates" among these people are about as authentic as professional wrestling, and I suspect people have stopped watching because they know that none of these pundits has the public interest at heart during these all-but-scripted bloviating sessions.

As one Rosen commenter said, in so many words, it's time we stop listening to what people THINK and concentrate on finding out what they KNOW. Maybe then we can actually learn something from watching the news, instead of leaving CNN and other cable news networks dumber than when we came to them.

More on the challenge of mythbusting

A belated nod to my University of Georgia colleague Barry Hollander, who recently published a paper on public perceptions that's gotten some attention.

Hollander uses a study of persistent misperceptions about Barack Obama's religion -- he's a Christian, not a Muslim -- to illustrate how people tend to hang on to incorrect beliefs even after the false perceptions have been corrected in the media.

I've posted before about both the importance and the difficulty of mythbusting. It's growing increasingly clear that people are wired to cling to their beliefs, even in the face of contradicting evidence, and also that repeating a myth for the purposes of debunking it tends to reinforce it.

I've also noted that the greatest challenge for journalists today might be finding ways to re-aggregate a perhaps hopelessly fragmented nation so that we can all pay attention long enough to have a constructive conversation. Everyone doesn't need to agree on everything, but it would be helpful to keep the more fantastical stuff off to the margins instead of having it dominate the discussion.

An open letter to Sarah Palin

Dear ex-Gov. Palin:

I see that you have taken a position on The Associated Press's decision to publish a photo of a dying U.S. Marine in Afghanistan, and that, as is your special skill, you're getting a lot of attention for it.

Your courageous stand is that it was wrong for AP to have published the photo of Lance Cpl. Joshua "Bernie" Bernard. Here's what you apparently posted on your facebook page:

Shame on the AP for purposely adding to the grieving family’s pain. Ignoring the family’s wishes by publishing a sacred image of their loved one proved a despicable and heartless act by the AP. The family said they didn’t want the photo published. AP, you did it anyway, and you know it was an evil thing to do

While I appreciate your sympathy for the family, I'm troubled by your apparent conviction that no one should see images of soldiers who are wounded or dying in our wars. I'm reminded of your courageous quitting speech a few weeks ago, during which you goaded the news media: "So, how about, in honor of the American soldier, ya quit makin’ things up."

Well, one of the great fictions perpetrated on the American people by the government and news media over the past eight years is that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are painless. We've been encouraged or bullied to "support the troops" with trite bromides and yellow ribbon car magnets, but that's the limit of civilian involvement in these fights. No need to pay more taxes or alter our lifestyles to provide for body armor or reduce our demand for the resources that make this region such a powder keg. And for heaven's sake, no physical evidence that when soldiers are sent off to wars, some of them come home in pieces, and some come home in boxes.

Only recently has the Pentagon lifted its longstanding ban on photographing flag-draped coffins when they return from overseas. And even now, the very idea that everyday Americans should witness a fraction of the violence that our soldiers and Marines are thrust into for months on end is considered one of the great moral transgressions of our time.

The truth, ex-Gov. Palin, is that thousands of American soldiers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tens of thousands have been physically wounded. Countless others have been emotionally scarred for life, and have brought those scars home to their families and communities. It should not be too much to ask that the rest of us develop the stomach to witness that sacrifice, rather than turning away from it, rather than pretending our willful ignorance is the moral high ground.


The photo in question, which appears here (at the risk of facing AP's copyright wrath), was taken by an Associated Press photographer who was feet away from where this Marine was wounded, which means she could easily have been wounded, too. The image is difficult to read, and the soldier's face is all but unidentifiable, but the mortality of the situation is plain. The photographer, Julie Jacobson, witnessed this event, because she had the courage and selflessness to risk her life to tell the truth about the war and its violence. The other troops on the scene witnessed this event, because we sent them there to risk their lives to further American interests. The implication that asking the rest of us to witness this event, to contemplate its meaning, to consider that the war is real and physical and kills actual people -- the implication that this is "despicable and heartless" is wide of the moral mark. To suggest that such reporting is "evil" -- well, that's the hallmark of self-serving hyperbole. I'm not sure what makes you such a moral authority, ex-Gov. Palin, but there are many greater evils in the world than telling the truth.

Publishing graphic images is always an ethical challenge for journalists, and the grieving family's desire that the photo not be published heightens the dilemma. Reasonable and well-meaning people can disagree about whether making this image public was the right thing to do. But Joshua Bernard did not just die for his family; he died for his country and his fellow citizens. We owe him the dignity of confronting and acknowledging his sacrifice.

Ex-Gov. Palin, your facebook post includes this promise:

Our thoughts and prayers are with the Bernard family. Words can not adequately express our sorrow and appreciation for your sacrifice. We will never forget your Marine or his fallen comrades

Call me a skeptic, but I don't believe you. I'd be surprised if you can recall this Marine's name a week from now. More to the point, I'd like you to tell us something about the last U.S. soldier who died before Bernard, or the next one who died after. You know, share your heartfelt memories of the troops whose pictures you didn't see.

The pitfalls of short-term thinking

Knowing what audiences say they want and what they are chasing is a useful tool for news judgment, but it should not be the sole driver of content. As Tom Rosenstiel mentions in my book, news is what hasn't happened yet, and there's no backward-looking research that can tell you what content will be useful or desired going forward. More to the point, audiences/readers/citizens can't ask for something they don't know is there.

That's why this column on Web hits at the Project for Excellence in Journalism site is so important.

To quote Jim Brady:

I was pretty confident that a story about the celebrity meltdown du jour would get more traffic than our story on President Obama’s current thinking on the Department of Agriculture. But The Washington Post’s bread and butter is coverage of the federal government, politics, diplomacy, national security, local news and local sports, not national entertainment news. To put it another way: If The Washington Post decided to promote stories on its home page based purely on traffic potential, what makes it unique would quickly evaporate.

And, his example originally quoted by Romenesko:

There was nothing in our traffic history to suggest that stories about military veterans were of particular interest to our readers. But when Dana Priest and Anne Hull uncovered the poor conditions at Walter Reed Army Hospital, the story went global in hours. That kind of journalism will be increasingly at risk if we get too caught up in the race for page views.

The search for the silver bullet is one of the reasons, to mix a metaphor, that journalists have been chasing their tails for the last several years. The most successful content isn't the kind that follows an audience; it's the kind that creates an audience.

No more national consciousness

OK, I realize that going seven months without posting eliminates me from consideration for the blogger of the year award.

Politico has an interesting story today asserting that Barack Obama is getting away with many affronts to human decency (reducing travel restrictions to Cuba, hosting the Grateful Dead in the White House, going on the Jay Leno show, etc.) that are infuriating conservatives but hardly blemishing his overall popularity. The story quotes pundit Mark Halperin saying that President Clinton, by contrast, "would have gotten hammered" for such pokes in the eye of tradition and dignity.

It may be true that Obama is getting away, relatively speaking, with activities that would have been much more damaging to Clinton in the 1990s. But these examples of an official escaping mass outrage, it seems to me, miss the forest for the trees. Instead of, say, reducing prosecutions of users of medical marijuana, as Obama has done, imagine if Clinton had clandestinely approved the torture of U.S.-held prisoners in a bid to elicit false confessions that would provide evidence to start a war resulting in more than 4,000 American deaths. Such a revelation, a decade ago, likely would have led to bipartisan impeachment charges that would have stuck.

Of course, these are the kinds of details emerging about the Bush administration's treatment of terror detainees (for the best aggregating on this topic over many years, see Dan Froomkin's reporting and editing at washingtonpost.com). But, just like the video of Obama bowing respectfully to the Saudi Arabian king, the torture revelations are landing on the American conscious with all the impact of a fluffy feather.

It seems to me that the reason for this universal lack of popular outrage is simple, and it's not the conclusion that Politico reaches in its story. Politico suggests Obama is getting an easier ride on cultural affronts than Clinton did because the country is getting more liberal, and upcoming generations don't have all the hangups that the Baby Boomers did about late-night television and respecting foreign leaders. That might also be true, but the "more liberal" theory doesn't explain the general shrugs with which ongoing revelations about our program of torture are being received.

Here's my argument for why both the Bush and Obama administrations suffered, and are suffering, less widespread scrutiny and criticism for their crimes and misdemeanors than Clinton or any previous administration of the past several decades: It's because Americans no longer have a coherent, broadly recognized and heeded structure for receiving and understanding the news.

Two phenomena -- the fragmentation of news sources brought on by cable and the digital era, and the "hyperlocal" movement among newspapers that has essentially banished national and world news from the front pages of all but the biggest dailies -- have resulted in a widespread mainstream disengagement from the news of the day. When big chunks of us get our news from the Fox network, and big chunks of us get our news from MSNBC, and those of us who still subscribe to local newspapers find largely parochial coverage from within a day's drive of the reporting staff, there is no medium or institution that foments and moderates a national conversation.

Clinton's scandals were on the front pages of most newspapers in the 1990s. Bush's scandals were relegated to inside wire pages or briefs. Coverage of first three months of Obama's administration has been similarly kaleidoscopic: Throughout their days, most Americans receive and personally assemble tiny shards of news from talk radio, cable news, word of mouth, RSS feeds, etc. Each of us builds from these fragments a different impression of the world, an individual view of events that skews to our personal interests (kite flying, NASCAR, whale watching) and leaves all but the most politically engaged of us with the sparest impressions of public issues and events.

We no longer have national conversations about the most important questions -- like how should we deal with our recent legacy of torture -- because no majority of us is seeking or receiving the same reliable information from the same set of trustworthy sources.

People have celebrated the digital age for the liberating effect it's had on all of us as consumers of information. We are all free to seek and receive the kind of information we want, when we want it. The traditional gatekeepers, the "mainstream media," which used to inform and guide our civic conversations, are decreasingly influential. One result of this is that more information is available than ever before, and that a select few can't determine what we see and know as a national community. But another result is that, while we can see and know whatever we want, there is no national community to deliberate over what we know.

As newspapers continue to shrink and die, concerned journalists and citizens are wondering who will ask the tough questions, hold officials accountable, and provide the kind of information we need to make good decisions that sustain our democracy. But I don't think our major problem is that there will be less journalism. All these stories are out there. There's plenty of information available about torture, plenty of information about Obama's friendly handshake with Hugo Chavez. More people than ever are asking questions, digging up facts and publishing information that make powerful people uncomfortable.

The big challenge for journalism going forward is not whether it will get done, but how we can get a critical mass of people to pay attention to it. Because right now the future of journalism appears to be thousands of trees falling in the forest, and no one hearing a sound.

Lipstick on the press

The national news media, especially the cable and broadcast news media, might as well go ahead and put big "tool" stickers on their foreheads for the duration of the presidential election. Their complicity and delight in helping divert the American public from substantive issues has been evident throughout the primary season this past year, and -- despite the extraordinary stakes in this election -- it continues apace.

The latest and perhaps most egregious example is giving credence to the McCain campaign's objectively bogus claim that Barack Obama called Sarah Palin a pig the other day when Obama repeated a cliche he's often used ("You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig") when discussing McCain's economic policy. Obama was clearly referring to economics and had not even brought up Palin so far in his remarks when he used the refrain -- one that McCain has also used this year in criticizing Democratic policies. But the McCain people are smart enough to know that, since Sarah Palin recently brought up lipstick to distinguish hockey moms from pit bulls, they could then accuse Obama of sexism and tie up a couple of news cycles.

News outlets like CNN took up this cause, despite knowing, and generally pointing out, that the McCain campaign's claim was fabricated. It doesn't seem to occur to these reporters and producers that when they go ahead and lead news programs with bogus claims, they lend support to those claims and give aid and comfort to their progenitors. See my previous post on research showing that repeating a lie further embeds it in people's heads, even if you prove the lie to be false.

The extraordinary thing is that, even as self-proclaimed journalists wallow in this incendiary crap -- to the exclusion of delving into actual health, tax and national security policy in any meaningful way -- they pretend that they're just along for the ride and have no choice but to cooperate. Watch how CNN Deputy Political Director Paul Steinhauser introduces the "lipstick on a pig" hoax by saying, "This is what they're arguing about today ... Can you believe it?"



As Obama explains in the clip, he wasn't arguing about lipstick -- he was arguing about economic policy. He had to talk about lipstick the next day because the McCain campaign made up a ludicrous charge and the news stations all started repeating it.

What if these journalists did their jobs, evaluated the truth or falsity of stories BEFORE airing them, and stopped being boxing gloves for whichever campaign is smart enough to distract and delude them from their real responsibilities?

Fortunately, there is some deeper reporting that is bothering to call out the McCain campaign for its carefully crafted and expertly deployed low blows in this election, despite the danger of being called partisan for doing so. Here's an AP analysis, for example.

I need to disclose here that I'm supporting the Obama campaign. I'm not presently affiliated with a news organization. I believe the fate of our democratic republic -- which has been under assault from within as well as without in the past eight years -- rides on the outcome of this election. This is not a partisan belief. It is based on my understanding of the Constitution and of the role that both the people and the press play in deciding the future of our country. If John McCain and his supporters want to convince the American public that they truly have a better plan for restoring this country's strength, security, global leadership and economic stability, let them do it. Let the news media hold McCain and Obama accountable for their records and ideas. Let all the candidates submit to tough questioning from fair-minded reporters, and let the best ideas and leaders emerge.

In the meantime, if this is the best the national political media can do for our country, we might as well consign the very idea of a democracy guided by an informed public to the dust bin of history.

If you don't like it, stop it

Romenesko linked to an interesting speech that Washington Post political reporter Dan Balz gave the other day at Columbia University.

He said a couple of things that would have brought me to my feet, like this:

This election reminds us of something that has too often been ignored: That Washington matters. That government matters. Most of all, that who wins the White House matters. As we have seen over the past eight years, the choice of a president affects the way America projects its power around the world and how the world sees us. It affects who gets health care and at what price. It affects who gets taxed and at what rates. It affects the distribution of wealth in a society where income inequality continues to grow. It affects how we educate children and how we care for older Americans. It affects what this nation does to combat global climate change and therefore the world your children and your grandchildren will inherit.

That's exactly the kind of understanding that leads to substantive political reporting and, ideally, a better informed and more thoughtful electorate. Balz also said this:

Good political reporting devotes as much energy and curiosity to plumbing the state of the country, the aspirations of all Americans, the clash of ideas and the changes that may be realigning the nation’s political power structure, as it does to what candidates say or do on any given day.

That's about context, which lends meaning to the news of the day. Amen.

Here, though, is where Balz lost my sympathy:

My first concern is that we talk more and more about less and less. We seize on trivial developments rather than big ideas. We obsess over process and but not over policy. We over-cover a snide remark by David Geffen about the Clintons and under-cover a major speech. We spend too much time speculating about the future and not enough examining and understanding the present and the past. We write for one another and talk too much to one another. In other words, we are in danger of reducing to an insider’s game the most important set of decisions people are making about the future of our country.

Note the disconnect in this relatively short speech between what Balz says is important (see his first passage) and what he says political journalists do. His acknowledgement of how far off the rails most political reporting is, is particularly disappointing because Balz so clearly understands what it should be.

My advice to Dan, and all the other people currently covering politics but unhappy with the state of political coverage, is: START DOING IT RIGHT.

Balz's lamentation implies a feeling of helplessness, but all it would take for political coverage to improve in this country is for political reporters and their editors to stop complaining about how trivial much of their work is and do the other kind of work instead. Stop talking about how political journalism needs to be better, and make it better. If the Washington Post can't do it, who can?

In fairness, the Post's political coverage is about as extensive as one could hope to find, and although it delves deeply into the inside-baseball, blow-by-blow aspects of electoral politics, it also spends a lot of time on substance, issues, fact-checking and the other elements that make elections historic decisions and not cultural side shows. If everybody covered politics as thoroughly as The Washington Post, Dan Balz wouldn't have to complain.

But every election cycle we watch journalists wring their hands over how shallow, horse-racey and misguided election coverage is, when they're the very people who produce it. It's like going to a restaurant and having the chef complain about how bad the food is there.

Hey, chef, make better food!

Sucking up to pols, vs. socking it to them

I've got another column on the Committee of Concerned Journalists site, this one comparing two incidents of presidential election coverage on cable.

In one case, a network continued flogging a story that its own journalists and analysts were consistently saying was a non-story.

In another case, an anchor didn't let a candidate's surrogate get away with generalizations.

Check it out.

The problem with 'hyperlocal'

I wrote a column for the Committee of Concerned Journalists last week, discussing how being TOO local of a news organization means missing a great deal of national, world and state news with a direct impact on your audience.

Local is the franchise of small and mid-sized newspapers, but it's a bad idea to assume your readers are getting the bigger news they need elsewhere. The best local journalism explains how all the world's events affect and change local communities, and how those communities can have an impact on the wider world.

Local is vital, but context is king.

See the column here.

The dangers of mythbusting

I need to address some new research reported recently in The Washington Post that warns truth-tellers to be careful in the way they attack myths and false conventional wisdom.

In my book I make a big point of the importance of repeatedly correcting public misperceptions, because merely reporting the truth once and moving on is not a powerful enough weapon against misinformation. But a recent study seems to show that busting myths in the wrong way can do as much to perpetuate them as to dispel them.

The basic finding is that once an idea has entered people's heads, repeated exposure to the idea tends to reinforce its original message, regardless of whether new information contradicts that message. So even though people are repeatedly reminded that Saddam Hussein wasn't involved in planning the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a pretty steady 40 percent continue to believe it.

The research, which wasn't specifically about terrorism, "highlights the disturbing reality that once an idea is implanted in people's minds, it can be difficult to dislodge," the Post story says. "Denials inherently require repeating bad information, which may be one reason they can paradoxically reinforce it."

Citing another study, the story concludes that, rather than denying falsehoods, "it is better to make a completely new assertion that makes no reference to the original myth."

The Post does some great regular reporting on how the brain's inherent tendencies affect our response to politics, news and information. Lots of stuff we intuitively think is constructive or obvious can turn out otherwise, because of the way we're wired. This latest story is a warning that, in pursuit of making sure people know the truth, we have to be very careful not to reinforce fallacies.

Holding people accountable

A couple of things from this past week demonstrate an increasing commitment by journalists to making sure audiences get the truth from news reports -- not just unchallenged speculation and spin.

On Friday, Matthew Felling blogged for CBS News' PublicEye about "Pop Up Politics," in which he proposed covering debates with VH-1-style "pop-up" boxes that emerge onscreen as candidates ramble through their talking points. The pop-ups would provide background and biographical information on the candidates, explain their positions on issues and, ideally, point up contradictions between their present and past statements in real time.

Felling seemed to be half joking in his post, but this is a terrific idea. Not only would it help bring televised debates into the 21st century, it would be engaging, informative and help keep the candidates honest. Major style points to the first network (does it have to be Comedy Central?) that tries it.

Then yesterday Romenesko posted a lengthy internal memo from AP writer Ron Fournier about writing with authority. The memo is posted under Miscellaneous Items -- I'm not sure if this is a permanent link or if a search would be required.

This memo is a great litany of tools reporters can use to make sure they are acting as journalists and not just stenographers of official statements, including:

-- Following up on process stories by checking in six months or a year later to see how proposals and promises fared in reality

-- Actively and unapologetically exposing intentional lies and misstatements by officials

-- Working sources to get more insight into what's really happening behind the scenes

-- Writing what reporters know to be true based on verifiable observations rather than relying solely on the official word. Fournier uses coverage of Hurricane Katrina as an example.

If AP adopts these ideas as standard practice, the ubiquitous news organization could help revolutionize the way officials are covered, to the disadvantage of the disingenuous and in great service to the public.

Do newspapers deserve to live? (Part II)

Yes, if they maintain the gumption and independence the San Antonio Express-News demonstrates in its coverage of a recent Al Gore speech to an architects group.

The speech, to an audience of thousands, was supposed to be closed to the media -- but the newspaper sent a reporter in under his own name without declaring himself as a journalist. We can discuss the ethics of this practice, but I'm persuaded by the argument of Express News public editor Bob Richter, who explains the paper's decision in his column.

The point is, here we have a newspaper that recognizes its role in the community and its duty to the public -- which is to share information that citizens have an interest in, even if that means annoying powerful people. The last paragraph of the news story sums it up: " On the request of Gore's media handlers, Saturday's event was closed to the media. Because of the importance of the issue and Gore's status, the San Antonio Express-News chose to cover it anyway."

This paper knows who it's working for.

Thanks, as is often the case, to Romenesko, for spotlighting these stories.

Do newspapers deserve to live?

Not at the rate they're going. Here's nationally syndicated columnist James Lileks, a sharp and witty writer with an audience that seeks him out, explaining that his bosses at the newly commoditized Minneapolis Star Tribune are killing his column and moving him to a local straight news beat. In other words, rather than trumpeting its unique voices, the paper is stamping them out. It's being bland on purpose.

This is so ridiculous that it feels like it might be one of those hoaxes perpretrated to get people like me all riled up, only to end up with egg on our faces because we didn't bother to check it out before we started commenting about it. If that's the case, congratulations to the joker who pulled it off. Unfortunately, the news business has reached the point where, as blatantly stupid, short-sighted and mean-spirited as this move is, it's entirely believable.