My friend Garrick Utley died this week. He was 74. The cause was prostate cancer.
Garrick was the very model of a television journalist.
First, his curiosity knew no bounds. He was as passionate about music and art as about politics and economics.
He was always well prepared. His formal education at Westtown School and Carleton College supplemented what he must have absorbed at home as the child of two respected journalists, Clifton and Frayn Garrick Utley. He was fluent in Russian, German and French, eloquent and elegant in English. He never stopped learning, never stopped reading, never stopped hearing, and most important to his colleagues and his students, he never stopped teaching and never stopped sharing.
Even though he was often appalled at the changes in contemporary journalism, particularly the substitution of talking heads, interminably blabbing far from the scene for working reporters at the scene, he never lost hope for news. He taught his trade proudly and humbly to students he encouraged to ignore all invitations to despair, but to get involved and to do their reporting the right way.
At 6 foot six, Garrick stood, literally, head and shoulders above the crowd, but his manner, like his formidable intellect, was inviting not imposing. In his classic trench coat or blue blazer, he looked like a model foreign correspondent, but he reported like an all-terrain-vehicle. If that meant mud on the coat or scuffs to the blazer, so be it. He had faith in good editors and good cleaners. He made sure you knew how much he loved his wife Gertje.
He covered more big stories in more storied places than almost anyone of his generation, but like all the best newsies, he cherished the next one, not the last, biggest or best ones.
He made time for colleagues and students, even when he knew his time was running out.
The NY Times supplied an excellent, far more complete obituary.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/22/business/garrick-utley-former-nbc-anchor-and-foreign-correspondent-dies-at-74.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&_r=0
During his days in London for ABC News, he always kept his office door open to transient visitors. His invitations to guest teach by Skype to his classes at SUNY Oswego were a delight. His questions were always intelligent and focused.
He listened superbly.
He was a great man and a good one.
Gosh, I miss him.
Showing posts with label CNN. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CNN. Show all posts
Friday, February 21, 2014
Sunday, December 8, 2013
PLANNING THE ENDGAME FOR CNN
For me, doing news is a kind of religion.
My theology of journalism is simple, the god we serve is
reality, or put more simply, “what’s there.”
Our mission is to give our congregants, -- our readers, viewers
and listeners, -- the most direct and complete access, the truest understanding
possible, of the people, places, events or ideas which are our subjects.
Thus, my credo: “Reality will provide.”
The beliefs behind this statement of faith are that we will
never run out of news, and accurately and memorably covering its particulars
and its context is enough. Do this, and
do it well, and you will always find, hold and satisfy an audience, not to
mention serve the public interest.
Unfortunately, over the 50-plus years that I have worked in
the news business, both popular acceptance and professional performance of this faith and the zeal to serve it have been seriously
compromised, most frequently by command of management: network management,
station management, news management.
Their credo is “Reality is never enough.”
The epitome of this heresy is, alas, the current head of America’s most iconic television news channel, CNN, or as it once was proud to explicitly call itself, Cable News Network. Now, Jeff Zucker wants to renovate his “news channel” by removing as much news as he can from it. As he recently put it to capitalnewyork.com, a new branch of the Politico.com franchise: “The goal for the next six months, is that we need more shows and less newscasts.”
By that, Zucker means, he wants his former “news channel” to
be more like a “regular TV channel.” He
believes viewers are drawn to star personalities, predictable formats,
comforting beginnings, middles and ends, the characteristics of “shows.”
He does not believe Americans have a comparable attraction
to the variable imperatives of “what’s happening,” which may not feature
celebrity, glamor, conflict, and the imposed order of ending when the clock
says it’s time.
Instead of journalistic coverage full of facts and analysis,
Zucker says he wants “an attitude
and a take.” Reality is complex, and
slippery, ever-changing, often discomforting.
Today’s television "newschannel" version of “What I think about reality,” is refined to
simplicity, ideological fixity, and the assurance to a nation shaken by the
decline of American power and pre-eminence, that “if the assholes would only do
things my way, all would be well.”
Lying about
reality may not change it, but it seems, over the past 40 years, television
journalism’s consistent betrayal of reality has changed America. And not for the better.
When Neil Postman
wrote in 1985, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” he meant it as a warning. Now, for CNN’s Zucker and ABC News’ Ben
Sherwood and CBS’ Les Moonves, it’s a calling.
Moonves is the
guy who destroyed CBS News, chasing away a huge portion of its audience by
demanding that Katie Couric do a dumbed-down version of her role on the Today
Show as anchor of the CBS Evening News.
She, as she proved once Moonves stepped back from his original concept
of the nightly broadcast, was more than capable of following in the “news
first” footsteps of Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather, but Moonves, a creature of
Hollywood and fiction, had other ideas.
His viewers knew better, and sought a little more news and a little less
leg elsewhere at 6:30 PM. CBS has not
recovered that audience yet.
Sherwood, not
long after he took over at ABC, berated his staff because their news, as he saw
it, lacked the qualities that made thrillers best-sellers. The techniques of fiction, he said, should
henceforth be applied to dress up that old drab, news.
But we were
talking about Jeff Zucker, and he was talking about, something he clearly knows
and cares nothing about: news. News’
problem, he told Capital New York, is that it’s “so obvious.”
“We're all
regurgitating the same information,” he said, ignoring the fact that the
network news shows deal decreasingly in information, and his alleged “cable
newschannel” competitors, Fox and MSNBC, are never the same in the information
they offer; not in story selection, not in point of view, not in the kinds of
“attitude and take” they traffic in.
For Zucker, those channels, both of which have only increased their margins over CNN since he took over a year ago, are not his real competition. If you can’t beat ‘em, ignore ‘em, and go pester someone else. He’s going, he says, after “viewers who are watching places like Discovery and History and Nat Geo and A&E.”
These are places
that use reality, as in the
ubiquitous claim (today’s definitive signature of the charlatan) “based on real
events.” But truth is, they wouldn’t be caught dead sticking to it. The “real
world” by itself is nowhere near amusing enough for their audiences.
Zucker, who as
Andrew Roberts cruelly notes, “is the
gentleman who took NBC from
first to worst during his tenure as
president,” seems as ignorant about entertainment television as he is about
news TV.
Real news,
because it is perishable, is incompatible with any channel that wants to be
able to endlessly repeat its programming.
Ted Koppel’s Discovery programs on Iran, Iraq and China won awards and
good-sized audiences, but only for a single, or at most, a second showing. They had a sell-by date and could not be
shown year after year like the shows that make up Shark Week, or Great Sea
Battles. That’s why Discovery dropped
Koppel like a dead shark.
Covering the news
keeps on costing. “Show” costs can be
contained within a pre-set and profitable budget. So, as long as it still covers some news,
even if it hides this best it can, CNN cannot compete with Discovery or TLC or
THC or A+E at the bottom line.
This raises a
question I’ve long asked myself. Why do
people who hate news, or at least have no confidence in its ability to attract an audience, get into the news business in the
first place? Wouldn’t Zucker be happier,
and wouldn’t we all be better off, if he kept his skills in the entertainment
corner?
It reminds me of
another disastrous moment in recent TV news history: when NBC climaxed its
premiere edition of Brian Williams’ news magazine Rock Center with 10 minutes
of palaver with Jon Stewart, a great talent, but a purveyor of what he himself calls,
“fake news.” Stewart, a brilliant and amiable
man, and clearly a friend of the equally brilliant and amiable Williams, was
clearly embarrassed: “This is how you want to end your first show?” he asked.
Somebody, I’m
guessing it was not Williams, did, because they clearly felt news alone would not draw.
Further
embarrassments ensued, such as the hiring of Chelsea Clinton, a fake
newsperson, to do fake news stories of the “heart warming” variety. These were all “easy pieces,” and could have
been done as well, if not much better, by a professional journalist who might
have asked more interesting questions and framed the interviews in crisper,
better-focused prose. But real newspeople could not sate somebody’s lust
for publicity (most of which turned out, justifiably, to be pretty bad.)
I guess it’s
fortunate that there were no 2-headed personalities available, since a freak
show might well have out-drawn a fake show.
Here’s another bad Zucker idea: to “improve” CNN’s sister channel Headline News, now also stripped of its news label and tossed into the alphabet soup as HLN.
HLN “‘really just had a great year from an audience standpoint,’” Zucker told TVweek,
http://www.tvweek.com/blogs/2013/12/jeff-zucker-truth-and-fiction.php
but, he said, “‘it's not as strong a business proposition, and it's not really what advertisers are looking for. If we wanted to be in the court business, Time Warner would have kept Court TV.’“
So, the NY Daily News reports, Zucker has recruited, “cable veteran Albie Hecht
to run HLN. Hecht, who has no real background in news, has specialized in entertainment
programming at the helm of Nickelodeon and Spike TV.”
Goodbye Nancy Grace and wall-to-wall coverage of trailer-trash
trials; hello…. Hello? What?
Chris Ariens says in Media Bistro, “We hear the plan includes making HLN the
“social media network,” bringing the immediacy of social media and translating
it to TV.”
The immediacy of
gossip and speculation in under 140 key strokes.
#ifyourmothersezshelovesyoucheckitout.
Poor Ted Turner. He’s had to watch his real news dream channel destroyed, beginning virtually from the moment he sold it off to Time Warner. Now, he and we who once relied upon CNN for real journalism, covering the world, can witness its complete degradation.
“The plan,” says Andrew Roberts, of uproxx.com,
“is to turn CNN from a network that has gotten bogged down by poorly reporting the news and turn it into a network that poorly reports the news in between episodes of reality shows.”
Roberts has a better idea to turn CNN’s decline into a renaissance: “Be Good At Reporting The Damn News.”
In other words, go “there,” where news is made, lives are changed
or lost, ideas are launched or debated.
Describe accurately what’s going on and why. See clearly, write and shoot vividly, and
communicate to the audience how what’s being reported matters to their
lives. Then, be confident: “Reality will
provide.”
Saturday, October 19, 2013
A NEXT BIG THING IN NEWS
It started
in 1980 with a manic idealist’s most idealistic dream, CNN, the Cable News
Network, as conceived by Ted Turner, would be the global television news channel which would bring to the world,
if not peace and harmony, civility and as he titled his made-for-TV, almost-Olympic
games, Goodwill. CNN was meant to
change the world, to a place which had no “foreign” countries, and it did and
it didn’t.
Turner’s CNN used traditional
journalistic values and the latest communications and video technology to show
the people of the world the reality, in particular and in general, they live
in.
A shambolic
piece in the Washington Post by Henry
Farrell, an associate professor of political science
and international affairs at George Washington University, somehow never
mentions Turner in his analysis of the “big
news for journalism,” that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar is jumping into the news
business. Omidyar has hinted he’s ready
to match the $250 million Jeff Bezos paid for the Post to fund his own new
venture into news on the internet.
The money
alone has Professor Farrell certain it will be “a
serious journalistic enterprise. Capital of USD $250 million can hire some very good
people.”
Perhaps. But, also perhaps Farrell has never heard of
Rupert Murdoch, who started Sky News in the UK in 1989, and has seen his huge
investments into video journalism turn into profits and power, but not, at
least where his Fox News is concerned, into “a
serious journalistic enterprise.”
But Fox
News has been a dead serious expression of Murdoch’s unbridled, “robber baron”
capitalist values, and it has been more successful, or at least more sustained,
in selling Murdoch’s POV than the one-time Chicken Noodle News has been for one-worlder
Ted’s.
Then
there is the also Farrell-ignored Emir
of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin
Khalifa, the founder of
Al Jazeera Arabic in 1996. The Emir’s investment has not yet turned a profit,
but it has greatly magnified his power and influence, and without doubt has
transformed (if painfully incompletely) the politics of the Arabic speaking
world.
These guys, like Bezos and Omidyar are avatars of the Age of the
Super-Rich, Millennial Media Moguls, phenomena you would think would be of interest
to an academic who “works on international and comparative political economy.”
Apparently not, although in Omidyar’s case Farrell jumps directly from a
promised investment to a series of unsupported conclusions about what it will
produce. First, he asserts that
Omidyar’s great wealth will free him from “the kinds of political relationships that most newspapers are
embedded in.”
Farrell deduces this from the E-Bay guy’s
anti-establishmentarian first 3 hires: investigative
reporters Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, of the ongoing Edward Snowden, NSA
revelations, and Jeremy Scahill, whose world-class reporting has ranged from
Serbia and Iraq, to North Carolina and the Blackwater military contracting
company he shamed into Bogus Corporate Name Protection Program.
The trio represent a great start but –. Bill Paley, quite the fabulously rich media
man of his day, hired his most famous CBS radio and TV newsman Edward R. Murrow
for journalistic reasons, and tossed him aside over politics.
And, for all Farrell’s cheese-paring quotations from former NY Times
editors Bill Keller and Max Frankel, gaming political pressure to kill stories down
to, “You win some, you lose some,” and his hints that Wikileaks’ Julian Assange
found working with mainstream news organs to be “difficult,” those “kinds of political relationships” did
not prevent the Times from publishing The Pentagon Papers or James Risen’s more
recent explorations of high-tech domestic spying by the NSA and international covert
actions by the CIA.
Nor has Greenwald ever
complained that editors at The Guardian, under enormous political pressure in
London, hurt his Snowden journalism.
Even he and Poitras and the team from the Post have all agreed that government
deserves both notice of and an opportunity to respond to Snowden’s revelations,
and that some secrets should stay secret.
This has not kept them from doing great work alerting the public to the security
services’ penetrations of privacy and their lies about them. Farrell’s insinuations to the contrary are
inflated or simply false.
Of all the telling
stupidities in the Farrell article, none of them can top this: he doesn’t even get
what the NSA stories are all about.
“Snowden,” he says, “has
revealed [no] truly surprising and damaging information. European and South American governments
already knew that the U.S. was spying on them. China was certainly aware that
U.S. agencies were trying to hack into its systems.”
Henry,
the lead never was, “the NSA spies on other countries.” It was, despite legal constraints and public
denials, “The NSA spies on you,” on us, on Americans by the dozens and
hundreds, and potentially, hundreds of millions!!!
Students
of George Washington University, Rise Up!! Get out those pitchforks and
torches!! Well, no, not that, but golly,
… it’s when the Professor gets to the heart of his lecture, the part he
condescendingly cues for you, “(but bear with
me — our argument is a little complicated), that his remarkable ignorance really
shines..
What Dr. Farrell really wants to talk about is what he says
journalism is all about: “Established newspapers like the New York Times, The
Washington Post and the Financial Times play a crucial sociological role in
deciding which information is important and trustworthy, and which is not. When
one of these newspapers publishes information, it is legitimated as knowledge
— which people are not only more likely to take seriously themselves, but
may have to
take seriously, because they know that other people are taking it seriously.”
Bzzzt. Bzzzzt. Bzzzzzzt.
Hello Professor Farrell, it’s 2013.
You know, the Twenty First Century, and the world no longer gets its news,
its information, from the newspapers. They
no longer define what is credible and important. But the ever-more-dominant contemporary
sources like TV news do not appear on Farrell’s radar. Neither do the already-active internet news and
information distributors. Yikes!
The process of selection of “what matters” has not only
spread across media, it has spread across the globe. Millions of people get their info from
China’s CCTV, and Russia’s RT, even Iran’s Press TV, not to mention global
platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Weibo. Oh yes, and there are John Stewart and Steven
Colbert and a string of daring political comics from Russia and Kyrgyzstan to
Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia (check ‘em out on YouTube while they last).
And what they refine information into is not “knowledge.” It is “common knowledge” or “conventional
wisdom,” neither of which is the same thing as knowledge, which is something
tested by experience and evidence.
Also, if you’re gonna profess on “knowledge,” you might want
to consider what’s new and different about how it is acquired today. Most people today see information on screens,
not pages, from video, not from text. This helps account for the instantaneous
global spread of facts and ideas.
From these disparate, dispersed sources, people today often
gather “evidence” on their own. They hunt
down internet sites with their own two to 10 fingers; they literally see the
video with their own eyes, and thus, they tend trust their judgments and conclusions
more deeply than those validated by the professional reporters, editors and
presenters of the brand-name media. They
might call what they derive “knowledge,” but often it is mere supposition. It
is not helpful to confuse the two, but it absolutely necessary to note that the
“common knowledge” conferred by mainstream media often feels pallid compared to
the analysis of internet-derived video and text assembled at home.
What would be “big journalistic news” would be a real
assimilation of the deep investigative reporting of people like Greenwald,
Poitras and Scahill, along with the shorter-turnaround observations of both professional
reporters and editors and the millions of “citizen reporters” who are both
literally and immediately “on the scene” with their cellphone and video
recorders. Hopefully, this could restore
the working consensus of “common knowledge” from which informed judgment, real “knowledge,”
proceeds. It sounds like that may be what Pierre Omidyar has in mind.
But, with all due respect to those 3 remarkably admirable
journalists, achieving that will take more than they can deliver. It will require an editorial infrastructure
of old-fashioned researchers, reporters and editors, combined with new-fangled
outreach and collation of visual information “from the ground.”
What Omidyar and his colleagues will build will not be
especially new. News media, old or new,
still depend on direct observation, contextual knowledge, and presentational
production. What is new is this: the
sources journalists have always depended upon now operate long-distance, in
real time, and their testimony, which still must be collated and evaluated and ordered
can be not just self-asserted, but self-published. Thus the inherent questions sources raise, of
accuracy and balance, context and value are both more difficult to define, and
more immediate in their impact than ever before.
And all the slipperiness of endless dispersion and often-unknowable
dependability slides to the receiving end as well. Today’s information consumers can seek out
and assemble their own dossiers on stories they care about, forcing every news product, every news producer or
distributor to compete for credibility as never before.
It’s an incredible multi-media, global competition Pierre
Omidyar and his staff will be jumping into.
Let’s wish them luck, and figure the questions of how true he will be to
the intellectual honesty and editorial independence of his people and his
platform will be answered for all to see.
And as for Henry Farrell, here’s how he closes his piece: “If
governments start to lose control over public knowledge in the information age,
it won’t be because information “wants to be free.” It’ll be because of the
creation of new ventures like this that create public knowledge without
adhering to the old rules about how government has a voice in deciding what
gets published and what doesn’t.”
Uh, Professor? There
ain’t no “if” here.
Governments have already lost control over public knowledge precisely
because information is free.
Ventures like this one
exist in a world of hundreds, if not millions of competing voices supplying
what each calls information, which is why the old rules of government deciding
what gets published are as dead as a doornail.
If they can stop a story here, they can’t stop it there.
The UK Government has forcefully shown that it doesn’t want
The Guardian UK publishing any of the Snowden materials. But The Guardian (US) in New York, or the
Washington Post or Pro Publica or Der Spiegel (or Al Jazeera, or RT or France
24, or…or…or) make that wish, and the forced destruction of digital copies of
the Snowden files in The Guardian’s London office, a ridiculous, futile
anachronism.
And transforming common knowledge into knowledge particular and true will
still be the job, not of the writer, editor or videographer, but the customer. May the best reporting win his or her trust.
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
MIRANDA: ONE LEG TO STAND ON
On the night of Sunday August 18, officers of the London
Metropolitan Police pulled David Miranda, a Brazilian citizen who happens to be
the partner of Guardian journalist Glen Greenwald, out of a transit area of
Heathrow International Airport, held him incommunicado for 9 hours, showering
him with tough questions and barely veiled threats, and denying him access to a
lawyer, or Brazilian diplomats, before seizing his computer, his cellphone and
digital files containing copies of many of NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s
stolen documents.
Miranda was held under a British anti-terrorism law, not
because he was a suspected terrorist, or had ever committed any terroristic
crimes, but because the cops suspected, correctly, he might be transporting
files pertaining to official American (and British) security secrets.
That they had struck paydirt, was obvious within the minutes
it took for Miranda to surrender everything in his possession. The extra 8-plus hours of detention was about
payback, again, not so much against the unfortunate file-mule Miranda, but
against Greenwald, his investigative partner Laura Poitras (who had given the
data to Miranda) and The Guardian, the British newspaper which has, with the
Washington Post, been publishing a careful selection of Snowden’s damaging,
revelatory documents.
Implicit in the extraordinary detention was also a clear
message of intimidation aimed at all journalists: “Learn and report information
we want hidden from citizens of the UK, the US and the world, and see what
happens.”
The message was reinforced when British security agents
visited The Guardian, and in a little bit of theater that was simultaneously
tragic, farcical and futile, forced Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger to witness
the destruction of computers and accessories which also contained copies of
Bowden-collected documents. Other copies, Rusbridger has said, remain in
journalistic hands in the US, Germany and Brazil, if not other locations.
For a day or 3, this (and the White House’s role of
passively greenlighting the detention before the Bobbies moved in on Miranda)
was big news.
And then, quickly and quietly, the story died, except for
continuing coverage by (unsurprisingly) The Guardian and, to a considerably
lesser degree, the BBC.
The Miranda detention, which, in those heady first few
days, several British experts on the Terrorism Act, the security issues at
stake, human rights, press freedoms and journalism denounced as a gross
overreach and dangerous abuse, all but disappeared from the US and UK media.
The story’s lack of what we newspeople call “legs” is
easily documented.
Since their reporter’s partner’s detention, The Guardian,
which, by the way, had paid for Miranda’s air tickets, has run 85 stories
related to the security shakedown, more than twice as many as the BBC, and
exactly 5 times as many as any other British news organization. But even their vigorous coverage has run out
of gas. Of the 85 stories in The
Guardian since August 19, 74 appeared that month, missing only 2 of 13 remaining
days, and averaging 6 ½ stories a day for August. Since September 1, The Guardian has, by its
own count, published 11 stories in 50 days.
Worse news is that almost half of those stories appeared on
one day, September 18, and 5 of those 11 stories were devoted essentially to
one issue: the angry debate at the annual Directors’ conference of the
Liberal-Democratic Party, in which all the Lib-Dem Directors but one voted for
a resolution demanding changes in the letter and the application of the 13 year
old Terrorism Act.
Coverage of
the conference
included some high Party officials making some pertinent observations: “Home Office minister Jeremy Browne (remember the Lib-Dems are part of the Conservative-led ruling government coalition) condemned schedule 7 to the Terrorism Act 2000 as "too broad and overbearing," [while] Sarah Ludford, the Lib Dem MEP who secured the debate, said she suspected the use of schedule 7 to detain Miranda "was no less than an attempt to intimidate and shut up the Guardian."
And so on, yada, yada, yada.
More recently, The Guardian worked the Miranda story back into the paper through a lengthy analysis of the material relating the British version of the NSA, GCHQ, and by covering an instance of “Miranda-lite” treatment accorded a well-respected Yemeni human rights professional.
“Baraa Shiban, the project co-ordinator for the London-based legal charity Reprieve, was held for an hour and a half and repeatedly questioned about his anti-drone work and political views regarding human rights abuses in Yemen.” He says he was specifically threatened with “the full Miranda,” 9 hours in detention.
Note that Shiban was neither suspected nor accused of terrorism. He got the “locked room, hard questions” treatment because he has annoyed US and UK security bureaucrats by publishing reports documenting the so-called collateral civilian deaths caused by, and angry civilian response to, US-directed drone-borne missile attacks on suspected operatives of Yemen’s Al Qaeda subsidiary.
Aside from this story, and an accompanying comment on it from Guardian reporter Greenwald, the most enterprise The Guardian has shown, in terms of keeping the Miranda Case alive was a recent article by the paper’s ombudsman, Readers Editor Chris Elliot.
Elliot seemed surprised at how little reader response he’d seen to The Guardian’s coverage, not just of Miranda, but the whole Snowden NSA revelations story.
“More than 300 articles have been published since the
first, on 6 June 2013, which revealed that a top-secret court had ordered a US
telephone company, Verizon, to hand over data on millions of calls. However,
since then, the readers' editor's office has received only 108 emails in
relation to the series, of which just 13 were critical. Of the 13, only two
specifically criticised the Guardian for publishing the disclosures, which is
unusual for such a high-profile story.
“Of the rest, 48 were supportive of the Guardian's
reporting, 27 offered further information or further case studies, and seven
wanted to know how they could help Snowden, with some of them offering money,
advice on visas, or even places to stay. A further 13 wanted to know more about
what this kind of surveillance means for them personally.”
So, what about the rest of the UK media coverage?
The BBC, with 37 stories since August 19th, has been by far the most active. But even the Beeb has published only 4 stories since the end of August; and the rest of the Fleet Street and TV mob have been even more AWOL on the Miranda story.
UK Channel 4, probably the best television source for daily news coverage in English has done only 9 stories overall, one since the end of August.
SkyNews, Rupert Murdoch’s all-things-English satellite news channel has offered its viewers a total of 6 stories, none since August.
On the print side, Murdoch’s Times of London (once upon a time a “paper or record,”) has also totaled 6 Miranda-related stories, 2 this month (both on the arrest of the Yemeni drone-tracker).
The Daily Mail and The Telegraph have had 17 Miranda-related stories each, but only a single story (Yemeni arrested) in the Mail, this month, while The Independent has had 13 Miranda stories since August 19, none after August 30.
There is, of course, an American angle to this story. The detention was done largely in America’s interest, and, as we noted above, with passive approval from President Obama’s White House. But this has been of scant interest to American news outlets.
A search of the NY Times database shows 11 Miranda Case-related stories in all, none since August; while the Washington Post archive coughs up just 6 references. Again, no mention of the the case since the end of August. As for America’s so-called “news channels,” CNN has had 15 stories, MSNBC 5 and Fox News 3, but with the exception of one Fox story, none has said a thing since August 22, and only 1 story on CNN even mentioned the US’ enabling role.
As for that one September Fox story, it was merely a pass-along of an AFP report on the European Commission’s unease at the treatment British authorities had given Miranda. There has been no American newschannel coverage of the White House green light.
It’s not like the Miranda matter has gone completely unnoticed. In addition to the European Commission, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, Frank La Rue, and Ben Emmerson, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, have written to David Cameron's government requesting further information on the legality of Miranda's detention, and The Guardian reported,
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/sep/04/un-press-intimidation-state-secrets
they have warned the British government that the protection of state secrets must not be used as an excuse to "intimidate the press into silence."
These comments got zero coverage from the US news media, print or TV.
And there is this comment made to BBC’s radio 4 soon
after Miranda’s Heathrow detention, by David
Anderson QC, the British government’s independent reviewer of terrorist
legislation: “The police, I'm sure, do their best,” he
said, “But at the end of the day, there is the Independent Police Complaints
Commission, which can look into the exercise of this power, there is the courts,
and there is my function.”
If anyone in the British news media is
curious about what the terrorism law reviewer or the Police Complaints
Commission, the courts or Parliament is thinking about the Miranda case or the
Terrorism Act, they’re keeping it to themselves. Not a word has been published, not a question
has been asked in print, or on radio or TV. 7 weeks now, and no sign anyone in
the British media is waiting for results.
Until darkness fell, most of the coverage of the Miranda detention in the British print press (except in The Guardian) was harshly unsympathetic. Typical was this from The Telegraph’s Dan Hodges:
“Should
being a relative of Glenn Greenwald place you above the law? I ask the question
because this morning many people are arguing Greenwald’s partner David Miranda
should, in effect, enjoy immunity from investigation solely because his spouse
writes very lengthy articles for The Guardian.”
And,
on August 30th, when Oliver Robbins, deputy national security adviser at the
Cabinet Office, went on the record to warn that ‘lives’ had been ‘put at risk’
by Miranda, ‘if the documents’ he was carrying had fallen ‘into the wrong
hands,’ The Times, The Telegraph and The Daily Mail all rushed into stenography
mode with uncritical repetitions of the charge, often adding Robbins’ comment
that Miranda had ‘showed very bad judgment’ by, as David Barrett
wrote in the Telegraph: ‘http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10276460/David-Miranda-was-carrying-password-for-secret-files-on-piece-of-paper.html
“carrying
thousands of British intelligence documents through Heathrow airport
[while] also holding the password to an
encrypted file written on a piece of paper.”
If Barrett or any
of the other British journalists who wrote about Robbins’ charges had bothered
to check with Greenwald, or any expert on digital security, they would have
learned that for encrypted files like those Miranda was ferrying, one code word
is not enough. Usually 2 or more keys
are required to open the secured materials.
Suffice it to say, that weeks after seizing Miranda’s copies, the UK
security services had managed to read, according to the notes taken by The
Telegraph’s Tim Stanley:
“just a small portion of an astonishing 58,000 pages of
intelligence documents.”
In all of American journalism, the only substantive look at
the Miranda case this month came from CJR.org’s Ryan Chittum:
Chittum
seemed spurred by, and led with, the fact that the British Spook-in-Chief
Robbins had misquoted him (admittedly with egregious carelessness or
dishonesty). But, Chittum did take the
opportunity to add that “only a dozen” or so of the encrypted documents had by
then been accessed by UK Security because Miranda’s “bad judgment” had been
trumped by Poitras’ encryption tradecraft, and to note the fundamental
stupidity of Oliver Robbins’ on-the-record rant:
“’Indeed it is
impossible for a journalist alone to form a proper judgment about what
disclosure of protectively marked intelligence does or does not damage national
security,’ [Robbins said.]
“This is misleading, [says Chittum]. It’s not as if Greenwald is
doing a Wikileaks-style document dump and crowd-sourcing the reporting (that’s
one major difference between Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, by the way). The
Guardian is vetting the information, and you can be sure the paper is going
back and forth with the government, perhaps even with Robbins himself, before
it reports anything.”
So, as CJR has always put it, “laurels” to Chittum (with an
ink-stained cluster for pointing out why Manning was a “leaker,” and Bowden a
“whistleblower,”) and “dart” after dart after dart to just about everyone else
in journalism for cutting the “legs” out from under one of the year’s most
important stories.
Silence means consent.
Friday, August 9, 2013
THIS IS YOUR LIFE – MY WAY
I’ve always been queasy about fictionalizations of history,
especially fictionalizations of biography.
Obviously, there is nothing wrong with using history as
background, and even, although now we’re getting to trickier territory, using “real”
characters to interact with the major players in historical fiction. Serious writers from Tolstoy to Doctorow have
made that work to everyone’s advantage.
But where the writer simply appropriates a real person and
characterizes him or her as he or she chooses, the chance for abuse – of history,
of the named people, or the careless reader or viewer – is dangerously
high. Think of Oliver Stone’s JFK, in
which real names are simply hooks from which the writer-director dangles is
own, usually shallow and melodramatic ideas.
All of which is to say, NBC’s not-quite-a-plan for a Hillary
Clinton biopic series sounds like a very bad idea.
Licensing any writer/director team to dream up a fictional version of a
real character who may or may not be planning to run for President, while that
run is impending is asking for a mess.
On the other hand, (and why is this distinction not being
made?), CNN’s plan to let the distinguished journalist Charles Ferguson do a
documentary about Ms. Clinton, even as she considers her own Presidential
possibilities may be a very good idea. I
mean what is a “newschannel” for, if not giving serious, in-depth,
documentary-length evaluations of potential candidates. My guess is that Ms. Clinton may have more to fear from this project than the GOP.
Will Ferguson be making judgments about HRC? I’m sure he will, as an inevitable part of his journalistic process. Thus, those judgments will be based on facts, and backed
up by evidence on video drawn from real news coverage. That is very different from a dramatic
series, “based on a real story,” with made up dialogue, and character-defining
impersonations (even if from a distinguished actress like Diane Lane).
As for Republican Party Chair Reince Priebus’ threats to cut
NBC News out of any 2016 GOP Presidential Candidate Debates in retribution,
this is just silly, and given the quality and audience size of 2012’s endless
series of “thundering herd of elephants” debates, amounts to tossing the Peacock
squad into B’rer Rabbit’s briar patch.
Deny a network a chance at an hour or two of the next campaign’s version
of Herman Cain vs. Rick Perry vs. Rick Santorum et al? Hit me again, Reince! Please!!!
So, Steve Burke, turn away from this golden opportunity to
be excluded from that un-funny clown show, by doing the really right thing:
kill the Hillary project and leave covering the realities of politics to your professionals at NBC News who put reality first.
I guess NBC could come up with a compromise: do the biopic, but run
it on MSNBC, where reality has no role and rhetoric (fawning or abusive) already defines the brand.
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