"Access Twitter" form of "access journalism"

Access journalism is Beltway access, whether to the President, an executive branch Cabinet agency, or in the case of Joan Biskupic, to the Supreme Court. I suppose that with a Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi, there's some sort of access journalism there, too.

Access Twitter is a riff on that, but it's an intra-journalism angle.

I was blocked by Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat two weeks ago. I discovered that when Jeet Heer was quote tweeting over just how bad of hasbara he was spouting:

I remember when the hasbara was better. They're not even trying anymore. https://t.co/nKCvUmi9h5

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) March 2, 2024

And realized I couldn't see just how bad it was.

Obviously, Higgins hadn't blocked Jeet. I don't know if he's yet blocked Mark Ames, who, in my blog post a few weeks ago about the Texas Observer jumping in bed with Bellingcat, had two Ames tweets about Bellingcat, though neither was a quote-tweet of Higgins or other top brass. That said, per the official Bellingcat Twitter account, yeah, as of the start of March, it was radio-silent indeed. Plenty to say about Russia, naturally, with the likes of Fukuyama being advisors. Nothing about the Gaza Genocide. One post in the first half of February about Rafah and .... using tools adapted from Ukraine to track bombing in Rafah. No moral comment at all. A post at the start of February about a Beeb show talking about the "disinformation war" in the Middle East. No use of the word "hasbara" in the tweet. The Beeb podcast itself at least tilt toward he said, she said twosiderism.

And, that's the only two tweets about Israel-Gaza going back to before Christmas 2023. Before that, on Dec. 20, there was a tweet with the gist of the Feb. 13 tweet about Rafah, but before the creation of the Rafah pocket. A Dec. 18 tweet talked about the "environmental damage" Israel was causing in Gaza. No, really.

Before that? A Dec. 12 tweet about "unraveling" the death of Shireen Abu Akleh. Her death had been unraveled well before that, given that she had been killed seven months earlier. The piece itself has a big data cram, lots of videos, analysis, etc., then says, in essence, "it appears," without making a call. This itself looks like hasbara, in that somebody prodded Bellingcat to do "something.

The Texas Observer's near-demise, one year later

Apparently the Texas Observer's attempted recovery from its near death experience one year ago, mainly due to financial mismanagement, but with bits of other mismanagement and other general problems, as I wrote about at the time, isn't going so well.

At the start of this month? Editor-in-chief Gabriel Arana is now "the former," allegedly to help the Observer as it still loses money, and being replaced by fundraising staff apparently paid off what was his salary. Well, his salary and two other editorial staff also canned. They were explicitly canned to free up money for fundraising staff. The first piece hints at unspecified additional reasons for Arana getting the boot. The two other staffers have spoken in support of the Observer. At the time, at least, Arana had radio silence. 

The Observer and its parent, the Texas Democracy Foundation, continue to cause their own problems on the financial side, as I noted a year ago, for the holier-than-thou attitude of refusing to accept ads mixed with the stupider-than-thou refusal to paywall. I have no sympathy. And, if the recent changes are just the surface of an iceberg, re Arana, will other editorial staff be jumping ship? And, will the fundraising staff broach some Trib-like "pay to play"?

Maybe, re just Arana, wrangling over the Bellingcat partnership led him to be canned? The timing is right, for sure. (He's now at The American Prospect in some way, shape or form, per his Twitter bio.)

So, the AP is going to sell us shit now?

 

I remember, a year or so ago, when I first saw the AP's "donate" button at the upper-right corner of its website. The Associated Press has shat in its own foxhole for years (I just love the occasional use of "shat"!) and wanted bailing out? Hah.

Well, I guess not enough people were sending it couch change.

Or else, so many people were that it figured it could grift off them.

It's now going into the e-commerce world, partnering with Taboola.

The shatting (past participle/gerund) in its own foxhole goes back 30 years to then AP board chair Dean-o Singleton, who convinced the rest of the board that the so-called "TV model" was a thing and AP did not need to worry about Internet 0.5, including not needing an early version of a paywall. AP then proceeded to undercharge news aggregators like Yahoo (remember when it was a "thing"?), not anticipate Reuters, then AFP, expanding their American presence, not adjust membership tiers and fees for U.S. member newspapers, and much more.

And, now, it wants to sell us shit.

What do we get?

A digital version of Dean-o's autograph? 

Options to buy into Alden Global Capital?

A model of the "TV model"?

==

Update, March 19: Whatever AP does with e-commerce, that won't be the end. Gannett and McClatchy are both cord-cutting at the end of their current subscriptions. AP told the NYT this "would not have a material impact on our overall revenue." 

Bullshit. 

As much bullshit as Gannett's claims, here if you hit the Slimes paywall:

“Between USA Today and our incredible network of more than 200 newsrooms, we create more journalism every day than The A.P.,” Kristin Roberts, the chief content officer of Gannett, wrote in a company memo.

More bullshit. Gannett was crappy before being acquired by Craphouse, and has done zero in investments since then.

You know American newspaper journalism is in the toilet when you can't figure out if Gannett or AP is the bigger liar.

One interesting note?

Gannett's not dumping wire services entirely.

Instead, it's going with Reuters.

Since Deano screwed the pooch long ago, both Reuters and AFP have expanded their US presence, and by a large amount. I'm sure other current AP members are going to come knocking on Reuters' door pretty quickly. 

"Can I have the Gannett deal?"

THAT will affect your bottom line indeed, AP.

==

Weirdly, Dick Teufel, on his Substack, missed that Gannett isn't getting rid of wire services in general, just dumping AP (in part, not totally, in fact) for Reuters. (And, despite me noting that in comments, he hasn't updated.)

He does note, of relevance to the first half of this piece, that AP claimed a year ago that traditional newspaper memberships were only about 10 percent of its revenue stream. (AP itself confirms, per that Poynter link above about Reuters.) That said, most pieces don't discuss how much Gannett was paying. Well, surely some of the video licensing it touts is to newspapers, and I assume Craphouse and McLatchKey are ditching that, too. And, that's not discussed anywhere.

On the First Amendment, cybersecurity law is not media law

I just got done reading a book that sounded interesting, and even was good at the start, but, had a surface-level treatment of background history behind our current level of First Amendment law, and worse, was surface-level in discussion of tweaks, including but not limited to Section 230 related items.

Liar in a Crowded Theater: Freedom of Speech in a World of Misinformation by Jeff Kosseff
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Good, but not quite great, and ultimately, not quite not quite great, as it slumped at the end. Let's dig in.

The best way to describe Kosseff’s thrust in the first half to two-thirds of this book, is by analogy with the old lawyers’ joke.

(Well, WHICH old lawyers’ joke?)

That’s the one where a person says, of Lawyer X, usually of the famous type, “Boy, they’re a jackass,” but down inside says, “If I ever need a lawyer, I want them.”

That’s the way freedom of speech is, per Kosseff, or one way to think of it: “Boy, I hate THEM getting to spew that, but I want that same level of protection myself.”

First, Kosseff says, after separating truth from legend in Holmes' "crowded theater" (which I already knew) the marketplace of ideas meme is good but not great, is not the only 1A protection, and cannot stand by itself. First, different actors have different size stalls in the marketplace. Second, the “informed citizenry” argument bolsters it. Beyond people vending ideas, people simply needs to see ideas. Re the marketplace, cites Bill Brennan that there needs to be buyers as well as sellers, and thus, restraints on speech are harmful both ways.

Then Kosseff notes the difficulty of establishing “truth.” Things like predictions aren’t simple empirical statements, but they’re more than opinions. Weather forecasts an example. Next, publishers of ideas, unlike makers of products, don’t have an express liability for the ideas they publish. That would kill publishing. Then, notes that what once seems untrue might be true; Kosseff cites the lab leak theory on COVID. Ironic even as Team Biden now faces suit over its attempt to put a thumb on the social media scales, even if that’s not direct censorship.

Re Washigton Gov. Jay Inslee’s bill, 183ff, The Baffler suggests another option vis-à-vis Trump: That either the original 1870s Ku Klux Klan Acts, or a modern equivalent, would disbar him. Just one problem: the KKK Acts, all talk about a “conspiracy” of … “two or more” or similar. Whether these acts are constitutional or not (and Thomas Geoghegan acknowledges they could be ruled unconstitutional) good luck proving a conspiracy of two or more.

The “self help” chapter in part 3? Kind of naïve. And, from here on, the book is kind of "meh." It shows not only a surface-level treatment, but by its lacunae, that Kosseff has particular ideas of what he favors or not. We'll get to the lacunae in a minute. 

First? The idea of retraction statements being a defense against at least punitive damages in defamation cases and that this could be extended to social media? Laughable, on the "extension." What’s to stop them from being pulled down again? And, does FB, Twitter, etc. want to be engaged in locking such posts? If they are, what if the defendant quote tweets to say “I repudiate this.” Fact-checker orgs like PolitiFact as self help? Per earlier chapters by Kosseff, I’ll bet it called the lab-leak theory “mostly false” in the early days of COVID. It’s been wrong plenty of other times, in framing for sure, if not actual facts. And, per other themes of Kosseff, should be called “PolitiOpinion.” Snopes is not always incredibly good either.

The next chapter? Quite timely, given SCOTUS now debating the two NetChoice (lobby arm for social media) vs states lawsuits, and re “jawboning,” the Murthy vs. Missouri scheduled for March. (Rick Hasen, "interestingly," doesn't mention it.) 

That said, re Section 230, I do favor amending it. Indeed, social media companies do act like publishers. Maybe not totally. But, there’s enough that’s analogous that we should carefully amend it. (I oppose starting over with new law; a big old bag of worms would be opened.) The big problem is that it’s not that Facebook, the biggest of all, can’t do more as a publisher. As anybody who’s read about the “content moderation farms” in the Philippines knows, the real issue is that Hucksterman is too damned cheap. Kosseff doesn’t address that. Nor does he engage with media and media law orgs. My link above discusses a piece by Nieman Lab, and to extend the analogy of social media to media, they talk about “monetization” as a “trigger.” In fact, other than his one reference to PolitiFact, there’s no index listings not only for Nieman, but Columbia Journalism Review, Jay Rosen (not that I totally agree with him, but he's a known standard), Dick Teufel formerly of ProPublica, etc. Indeed, per my discussion of his mention of PolitiFact, there as IS NO SUCH THING as one unified Politifact. And, in the point of dropping in that last link, I realized he was going to go down to three stars after all.

As for his suggestion that perhaps things like Net Nanny should be rolled out? Facebook Purity already exists and Hucksterman does everything he can to sabotage it. Next? Kosseff overly romanticizes Mastodon. Related? Bluesky? Started within Twitter. And, Jack Dorsey is good only in comparison with Elon Musk.

Another three-star reviewer talks about much of Kosseff’s solutions as “milquetoast.” I’d have to agree. Finally, it should be noted that he's in cybersecurity law. That's probably a big deal at the Naval Academy; I'm sure that media law is not. 

Finally, Kosseff is wrong, elsewhere, in book-length form, about Section 230. It is NOT "the 26 words that created the internet," but rather, "the 26 words that created the internet as we know it today." That's a big difference, per one reviewer of his book.

Given both these, I think you can take a pass on reading him, folks.

View all my reviews

The latest Texas Observer #fail — Bellingcat

That would be, per this piece, pairing with Bellingcat.

For the unawares, Bellingcat is, contra how the Observer describes it, a Cold War 2.0 and Nat-Sec Nutsacks™ facilitator. See this Mark Ames Tweet, for example. Or see this retweet by Ames, noting that Bellingcat has gone radio-silent over Gaza. Wiki glosses over most of the challenges to Bellingcat reporting. Shock me; in related news, Wiki also glosses over Alexei Navalny's alt-right nationalism, Islamophobia and more.  Update, March 1: Per this Ames Tweet, yep, Bellingcat hunting down left-wing German grannies instead of talking about Gaza is a hoot. Yes, per the NYT story, Daniella Klett was a fugitive. But, she'd done nothing in 40 years. Bellingcat could have bigger fish to fry if it wanted. And, a response Tweet to Ames notes that Bellingcat employs an ex-Stasi agent.

On Bellingcat in general? Read this for more. Even the New Republic notes that Bellingcat gets money from The National Endowment for Democracy, for doorknob's sake.

Was the Southern Poverty Law Center and its oft-overinflated (and pimped out) claims of "X is a hate group" not available as a reporting partner?

I would repeat the old joke about Bernard Rapoport turning over in his grave over the Observer, but that's been used by me so often that he would have bedspins. (Also, I don't know, vis-a-vis the Ames retweet, if he was a Zionist or not.)

Update, March 2: Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat has now blocked me, so, I can't, via Jeet Heer, see just how bad of hasbara he's spouting:

I remember when the hasbara was better. They're not even trying anymore. https://t.co/nKCvUmi9h5

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) March 2, 2024

There you go, if you can see it.

"Congrats" to the Observer, and any staffers who follow this blog still, or follow me on Twitter.

Let me add that an Internet search shows that MANY organizations besides Bellingcat have written about, and researched, the "Active Club movement." My comparison to the Southern Poverty Law Center didn't just come out of nowhere.

And, one Observer staffer who had followed me on Twitter, and perhaps was a follower of this blog by RSS? Editor-in-chief Gabriel Arana is now "the former," allegedly to help the Observer as it still loses money, and being replaced by fundraising staff apparently paid off what was his salary. Well, hs salary and two other editorial staff also canned. They were explicitly canned to free up money for fundraising staff. The first piece hints at unspecified additional reasons for Arana getting the boot. The two other staffers have spoken in support of the Observer. At the time, at least. Arana had radio silence. More in a separate post. That is now up. And, I wonder if wrangling over the Bellingcat partnership is part of what led Arana to get the boot.