Perspicacious Baker...

Thank you NewsTeam Boulder!

2010-05-02T12:47:00.003-06:00

So sad to be done with the semester, especially finishing up a wonderful time at the student TV news station. I made so many new friends in the 12+ weeks working at that station, and to see the unbelievable amount of growth all of us went through as journalists was worth some of the struggles we faced.

To celebrate, the wonderful Paul Daugherty published our blooper reel from the past semester. It is so worth the 9min in length to watch.

Thank you NewsTeamers! I love and miss you all so very much, and I cannot wait to see where our paths take us in the future.

NewsTeam Boulder Spring 2010 Bloopers from paul daugherty on Vimeo.

DN > The White House's War with Fox News

2009-10-29T19:56:00.008-06:00

The growing feud between Fox News and the Barack Obama administration has become quite the hot topic within media circles. While the White House claims Fox isn't a news organization, and Fox cries a breach of the first amendment, lost in all of this what this means to the future of journalism. Regardless of your political affiliation, is it fair for ANY governmental body to pick and choose who to talk to and who to freeze out? And is it fair for only those outlets who agree with you to get exclusive interviews, while leaving the critics out in the dusk?

Fox has been ubiquitous since its inception in 1996, for framing most stories during their news programming as fairly one-sided, while offering popular conservative voices like Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity during its primetime lineup. In addition to the network being run by Roger Ailes, a former media consultant to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagen and George H.W. Bush, Fox News also employs former Republican politicians like Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and Oliver North, and writers like Fred Barnes, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Fox made headlines for portraying then candidate Obama as having a shady past, and many stories asked if he had attended a madrasah as a child, was a practicing Muslim and a possible terrorist. Obama would eventually boycott the network back in early 2008, leading mogul owner Rupert Murdoch to hold a private meeting with the candidate. Once the meeting was over, Obama went on more Fox programs and received more positive coverage from the network. Ailes later told the Guardian:

"It might not have been this way if Obama had more willingly come on the air instead of so often giving Fox the back of his hand."

Since the election, Fox News has been quite adamant in its attempt to hold the new Obama administration accountable, as the network has devoted much of its coverage since last November to scandals involving ACORN, former White House adviser Van Jones and school czar Kevin Jennings. ACORN has since lost all of its government funding, and Jones resigned after Fox revealed that he had once been part of a radical racial group.

So with the rising rift between the network and the administration coming to a head, the White House would punch back in mid-October, when White House Communications Director Anita Dunn went on Howard Kurtz's CNN program "Reliable Sources" (a Sunday TiVo-MUST for journalists), and fired the first shot at Fox, calling it a "Research Arm of the Republican Party."

The full White House blitz would continue, as Senior Adviser David Axelrod and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel went on the Sunday talk circuit to call into question Fox's credibility.

"[FOX News] is not really a news station. It's not just their commentators but a lot of their news programming it's really not news it's pushing a point of view. " - David Axelrod, on ABC's This Week

"The way the president looks at it - we look at it - it's not a news organization so much as it has a perspective." - Rahm Emanuel, on CNN's State of the Union

The situation continued to be partisan bickering between the two outlets for days, until ABC's White House correspondent Jake Tapper, asked Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about the White House's assertion of Fox not being a legitimate news organization:

Tapper: It's escaped none of our notice that the White House has decided in the last few weeks to declare one of our sister organizations "not a news organization" and to tell the rest of us not to treat them like a news organization. Can you explain why it's appropriate for the White House to decide that a news organization is not one:

(Crosstalk)

Gibbs: Jake, we render, we render an opinion based on some of their coverage and the fairness that, the fairness of that coverage.

Tapper: But that's a pretty sweeping declaration that they are "not a news organization." How are they any different from, say -

Gibbs: ABC -

Tapper: ABC. MSNBC. Univision. I mean how are they any different?

Gibbs: You and I should watch sometime around 9 o'clock tonight. Or 5 o'clock this afternoon.

Tapper: I'm not talking about their opinion programming or issues you have with certain reports. I'm talking about saying thousands of individuals who work for a media organization, do not work for a "news organization" -- why is that appropriate for the White House to say?

Gibbs: That's our opinion.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/20/jake-tapper-challenges-wh_n_327820.htmlThis isn't the first time that a president shunned some networks, while giving exclusives to others.

In his first days in office, Obama gave an exclusive tour of the White House to NBC News' Brian Williams, and recently froze out Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace when he did his media blitz to talk about health care reform. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were notorious for always giving exclusive interviews with Fox News, including one of his first interviews on the lead up to the Iraq War with Brit Hume.

The problem for the Obama administration is they cannot de-legitimize Fox, while giving legitimate access to organizations like MSNBC, a network with popular progressive hosts like Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz.

Just this last weekend, CNN anchor Campbell Brown spoke to Senior White House Adviser Valarie Jarrett, who was unabashed when it came to Fox, but evasive when asked about MSNBC.

Senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett said Wednesday evening that Fox News was an obviously biased television network, but declined to comment on whether the same could be said of MSNBC.

Asked by CNN's Campbell Brown whether Fox had an ideological slant, Jarrett replied firmly: "Of course they're biased. Of course they are."

But the top aide quickly walked that statement back when Brown pressed her to judge MSNBC's political leanings.

"You know what, this is the thing. I don't want to - actually, I don't want to generalize all Fox is biased or another station is biased. I think what we want to do is look at it on a case-by case basis. And when we see a pattern of distortion, we're going to be honest about that pattern of distortion," Jarrett said.

The New York Times reported that just last week, the White House had a private meeting with progressive commentators like Olbermann and Maddow, in addition to Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich of the Times.

Even though Fox frames a majority of their stories to a more conservative audience, it is unfair for the administration to only denounce Fox, as if the other networks haven't had their fair share of chastising the president. Last time I checked Lou Dobbs, who was one of the few commentators who speculated if Obama was born in America (the Birthers), hasn't let CNN lose any of its access to the White House.

However it may be unfair to point the blame solely on the Obama administration, the Bush administration was just as guilty of this. MSNBC never was able to get access to the administration, and the only access it was able to show was anything NBC News was able to get.

It becomes an issue of safety nets. George W. Bush would never in a million years do an interview with Olbermann, and I seriously doubt Obama would talk to Hannity anytime soon. There is way too much of a chance of error going on those programs and looking weak and incompetent, thus why you would see Nancy Pelosi on Maddow's show and Cheney will frequent Rush Limbaugh. The politicians will be lobbed softball-type questions, and have a pretty good idea of where the interview is going. (Where is Tim Russert when you need him?!?)

We as journalists have enough to worry about with the changing media landscape. Gone are the days of Cronkite, Murrow, Russert and Peter Jennings. Network newscasts do not get anywhere close to the ratings they once did, and even anchors who are promoted as objectionable and hard-hitting (Anderson Cooper), ratings seem to be more and more of a problem. In this generation, our news continues to get more and more fragmented, where news becomes customizable depending on your political affiliation. If you are a conservative, the Drudge Report and Fox News are great outlets to get the news and information that you care about, and the same can be said for on the left with MSNBC and the Huffington Post.

CNN, who paints itself as a mainstream news organization, always loses the battles against the pundits, EVEN when it's matched up against its sister network HLN. People seem less inclined to make their own decisions based on news, and would rather agree upon those who would talk about it.

I am not saying this is a bad thing, it is apparently how the future of news has become. It becomes a problem though when the government and more importantly the White House dictates what is and isn't news and allows access of information based upon it.

DN> The Anonymous Source and Media Ethics

2009-09-03T15:13:00.019-06:00

With the new generation of digital journalism, traditional media outlets are constantly trying to reinvent their institutions with their online content. Having to compete with bloggers, backpack journalists and social network sites to get information out to the masses, never did the traditional media outlets think they would have to change the way they reported their stories from an ethical point of view... that is until now.

For years the media (especially the entertainment outlets), have had to compete with the likes of famous blogs like TMZ, The Drudge Report and Perez Hilton, websites who are ubiquitous for trying to be the first to break news stories. Many of these blogs rely on anonymous sources, something traditional media outlets like The New York Times and CNN try to stray away from. Journalism students across the country have had ingrained in their heads that an anonymous source is NEVER okay, but with the dynamics of the media landscape changing from sites like CNN and NYT to TMZ and Hilton, should we as journalists change our ethics to fit the times?

The situation with anonymous sources continued to bear its head as a topic this summer, with the recent death of Michael Jackson. TMZ was the first to report that Jackson had suffered an apparent heart attack, and when he eventually died at 2:26PM, TMZ was the first to make the breaking announcement at 2:44PM.

Many of the media outlets refused to break the TMZ story, largely because they could not verify the sources it had used, and instead ran with a piece from the LA Times saying Jackson was in a coma, even though TMZ had already announced he was dead. Fox News was the first TV outlet to report TMZ's findings, at 4:47PM, almost a full two hours later. CNN waited even longer, not reporting the story until 5:25PM, when they received confirmation from the Los Angeles County coroner. By the time CNN reported it, Jackson had been dead for almost three hours. As researched by the LA Times, many posters to the CNN website during the Jackson drama claimed CNN was dead as a news source, with one writing that TMZ should write CNN's obituary. (One bit of interesting detail...CNN and TMZ are both owned by Time Warner).

This isn't the first time TMZ has broken a story before the rest of the traditional media outlets. They were the first to report on Mel Gibson's DUI and eventual anti-Semitic remarks to police; the death of Heath Ledger, Farrah Fawcett and Anna Nicole Smith; the first to receive audio recordings of Alec Baldwin's tirade against his daughter and more recently of pop singer Rihanna's brutal photo of domestic abuse from her then boyfriend Chris Brown.

However TMZ managing editor Harvey Levin told the LA Times, he wasn't surprised that the rest of the media weren't jumping to credit TMZ with the scoop.

"That's typical," Levin said during a phone interview when asked about rivals' hesitation to credit the site. "No matter what they say, people know we broke the story. That's how competitors handle it. There's no issue about our credibility.

"Today I made 100 phone calls, and everyone else made 100 calls," Levin said of his staff. "Everyone blanketed the city. . . . We were getting calls from everyone under the sun, established news operations, asking, 'Are you sure?' That's such an odd question. We would not have published it if it were not true."

Asked about its Jackson coverage, CNN said: "Given the nature of this story we exercised caution." Nigel Pritchard, a CNN spokesman, declined to elaborate.

Many can understand the media's reluctance to source TMZ for breaking news. The gossip blog has been notorious for posting stories consider tabloid journalism, including infamous photos of celebrities leaving rides without underwear. Others like Amy Argetsinger, who writes the Reliable Source gossip column for the Washington Post, have said they have had to write embarassing corrections because some of the information they had taken from TMZ turned out not to be true.

In a wonderful discussion on CNN's Reliable Sources, Levin and Argetsinger joined host Howard Kurtz and former New York Times entertainment reporter Sharon Waxman, and discussed if TMZ's journalistic practices were ethical, especially when citing anonymous sources.

After watching the Levin interview it really got me thinking about the future of journalism. In this new technological age, it is what we are finding on the internet that is becoming more relevant it seems than older models of news like newspapers and TV. To think that many heard Jackson had died by seeing the TMZ HOURS before others heard it on other news sources is just mind boggling. And since we are in a 'first to report' mentality, it begs to ask the question: Should journalists compromise many traditional ethical practices and cite an anonymous source to be the first to break the news?

Many in my generation it seems are less interested in the overall credibility of a news outlet, hence why hits to websites like Drudge and Perez Hilton are so high. It makes outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post more obsolete, since they may not confirm the stories younger audiences care about. If viewers can get information quicker from TMZ than from CNN, and are less interested if the information is reliable or not, does that make CNN a dying breed in a changing media landscape? This led the LA Times to ask, "have our standards for accountability dissolved?"

“I’m not sure it’s technology that’s breaking down the barriers of accountability,” says Jeffrey Seglin, author of The Right Thing, a weekly ethics column published by the New York Times Syndicate. “The National Enquirer broke facts about the O.J. case before other media outlets did. Matt Drudge reported information on the Monica Lewinsky affair that Newsweek had been sitting on.” But that was the ‘90s, before gathering and spreading information was as easy as turning on your iPhone, anywhere, any time. Can you imagine if TMZ’s story spread on Twitter before Jackson’s family even learned of his death? And who was TMZ’s source anyway? The site’s managing editor, Harvey Levin, said he and his staff made hundreds of calls, but he didn't divulge whom they spoke to, which makes one question whether they confirmed the news with a reliable, accountable source -- as is required by the Los Angeles Times -- or if they spoke to someone who was violating patient confidentiality.

“A curious thing is at play here,” Seglin continues. “Few people expect TMZ or Drudge or the National Enquirer to get things right or to report on issues of substance. When they do, at least so far, it’s a bit of an anomaly. So the consequences for getting it wrong among such sites do not seem terribly high. If CNN, Fox … got such things wrong, the consequences would likely be higher.

Fact checking, multiple sourcing and virtually never using anonymous sources has been a hallmark in journalism teaching and ethics for decades. However, there is more and more information available that doesn't subscribe to most journalism ethics practices, and sometimes they are the ones beating the traditionalists to the breaking stories. And with the media landscape constantly changing, should traditional journalists change their ethics practices too?