The Texas Observer: still treading water, still pretending otherwise

 More than a year after nearly imploding itself to death, the Observer (under an interim executive director; I don't know if the last permanent one quit at some other time, or got shit-canned at the same time as editor-in-chief Gabriel Arana did) pretends it's back to normal by passing out Molly Awards. (Aug. 10: They now have a cartoon Molly introducing the most recent Strangest State piece.)

First, per Jim Hightower, how much of a real populist are you if you go to Smith College, re Molly Ivins?

Second, weren't these awards in the past, passed out in the fall?

Third, per my first link on what's wrong with the Observer business-wise, there's still no paywall and still no ads, and surely still hypocrisy about the latter. What's to celebrate?

Fourth, they've got Gus Bova as Arana's interim replacement.

A&M shoots itself in journalism foot (and again); Trib raises eyebrows on edits

The Aggies wanted to revive their J-school, which went belly-up a few years ago. So, they decided to hire alumna, and Houston native, Kathleen McElroy away from the Tea-Sippers in Austin.

Until the mouth-breathers got word of a Black woman who used to work at the New York Times running Aggie Pride journalism. Then Texas Scorecard started a lynch mob about her alleged DEI-ing. 

And, then, Aggie leadership, starting from the top down in College Station, including, it seems, the Board of Regents, and definitely an interim dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, José Luis Bermúdez, essentially decided to dirk her. The Trib has details at that link. After McElroy agreed to, under some pressure, have the job description changed to make it a non-tenure track position, the Gag Me Aggies changed it AGAIN.

There is stuff missing from the piece, though. As in, didn't the Trib try to get A&M System Chancellor John Sharp (Rethuglican in Democrap drag, still?) to comment? Or College Station President M. Katherine Banks? So what if they no-comment you. Shame 'em, if it does any shaming.

Update, July 21: Banks has resigned! She said "negative press has become a distraction." What a KAREN. And, she's not the only Karen in College Station. John Sharp is, too, because the A&M SYSTEM that released this is his baby:

The A&M System said in a statement that Banks told faculty leaders this week that she took responsibility for the “flawed hiring process.” The statement said “a wave of national publicity” suggested McElroy “was a victim of ‘anti-woke’ hysteria and outside interference in the faculty hiring process.”

Fuck off.

Sadly, as I said on Twitter, there's a possibility the System's regents try to replace Banks with a real wingnut, and given that statement, that would not at all surprise me.

==

New update, July 23: To put it bluntly, per this new Trib story, Banks reportedly is some kind of a racist, overarchingly intervened in the hiring process, and essentially forged, or had someone else forge, a signature. That's all according to Hart Blanton, head of the department of journalism and communications and the person whose signature was forged.

Otherwise, it looks like Bermúdez is kind of being hung out to dry, or else is dumb enough to sign up for that voluntarily. 

The update story also notes that Bermudez is stepping down as interim dean to head back to a teaching-only faculty spot. Sharp et al will likely look for a winger to run the College of Arts and Sciences.

And, per people warning about Texas (and other anti-DEI-ing states) having problems getting new faculty? A shoe is dropping. With that, I note that McElroy added that "nothing has changed" since her own undergrad days in College Station. Shock me.

Update July 21 from a weekly office email newsletter. The A&M Faculty Senate's executive committee says it wants more transparency in the hiring process and mentioned outside interference. I don't know if they're referring to mouthbreathers like the Rudder Association interfering or they're parroting Sharp's news release and claiming "woke groups" interfered. (It IS Sharp's release at bottom line.) The former is surely more likely, and looking at an earlier update I posted, yeah, that's clearly the case. but it could be either one in these days. As for the mouthbreathers, given that their namesake, when A&M prez, moved the Aggies away from an an all-male college, as well as moving it away from a quasi-military institute, he might not agree with them.

Meanwhile, the Chronic has also weighed in, but its piece doesn't even mention Banks, let alone Sharp, and obviously doesn't try to get comment from either one.

Update, Aug. 28: Did this play any factor in the Trib's recent layoffs? I mean, A&M IS a "sponsor."

Update, Sept. 25: The Observer has a short first-person profile from McElroy, back with the Tea Sippers.

Is Julian Assange a journalist?

I promised in my initial post about Assange's arrest on my primary blog that I would address this further. And here we are.

A simple answer is two words: "Yes, but ..."

And, that's with everything implied by folk psychology tropes by adding "but" after the "yes."

So, I'm going to break that out more, with a nutgraf of sorts kept down at the bottom.

So, here we go ...

Journalists don't just seek out, gather and collate information.

They analyze it.

Then they write about it.

Assange did little of the analysis or writing work even with the initial information he got from Chelsea Manning, when he had much greater degrees of freedom of space, time, and working space than he does now.

Writers, and even more, editors, make judgment calls with information they receive. Some of those judgments are whether the material is true or not. Others are whether it would be harmful to release some of it.

I think Glenn Greenwald, for whatever reasons, has gone overboard on what Edward Snowden information he and Laura Poitras have chosen not to release, but, they have made a judgment call. I think they went way beyond just going overboard when they yanked the rights to the Snowden information from the eyes of everybody but themselves — ie, no Guardian, no Intercept, etc. Frankly,  wouldn't be surprised if Ken Silverstein is right and the Russkies honeypotted Snowden but that's another story.

Assange? In the past, at a point after his working space freedom started to close up but was not that tight, made decisions to dump information without redactions, and in the case of some Afghanistan material, was rightly criticized for an endangerment factor.

That's just one issue. As Wikipedia's page on Wikileaks notes, it's released Social Security numbers, credit card numbers and more. With basically no effort at redaction.

In short, he's as much a sub-Redditor as he is a journalist.

I also said in my initial piece on the actual "yes," that to the degree it's true, he's actually like a Beltway steno in reverse in some way. He's an opiner, not a news writer, to the degree we consider him a journalist, by what he gathers, and what he solicits. I've already, along with others, criticized him for not seeking and encouraging leakers inside places like Russia and China. I've criticized more his response to that initial criticism. Today, Russia has a home-grown version of something like Wikileaks — no thanks to Assange.

I can't prove what's behind that. But, between that, and his likely lies about the source of the initial round of 2016 DNC emails — that VERY likely source being Russians, whether or not on paper officially connected to the Russian government and not a DNC employee — Assange is at least open to the charge that he deliberately refused, for clandestine reasons, to help get a Russian version of Wikileaks started. Countervailing that would be the idea that if Assange was hands-on, on getting such a movement started, even with alleged anonymity, he could turn people in.

(That said, this is a good spot for a side note.

For all the people not only (rightly) denying Russiagate, but claiming Russia can basically do no wrong? I'm thinking of the specific issue of the claim that the Internet Research Agency has no direct connection to the Russian government. Big fucking deal on a nothingburger claim. China says the same thing all the time about its Red Army hacker squads.)

Counterpunch publisher Jeff St. Clair here has the number of not only Assange, but of people like that, and of the people who believe them:

I think Julian Assange's lowest moment was his inculcation of the Seth Rich conspiracy in some of the more credulous precincts of the Left. The strangest part of the affair is that if the preposterous Rich conspiracy had proved true, it meant that Assange would have outed his source.

Now, the likes of Mark Ames and Aaron Mate haven't signed off on Seth Richism, just the IRA type stuff. But, I do Google from time to time.

When Assange, or Wikileaks as its mouthpiece, HAS made editorial judgment calls, sometimes they've been off the wall. Like criticizing the leak of the Panama Papers.

Here? I suspect 190-proof red-eyed jealousy at work — as one motive.

Another? I'm still not ready to call him a Russian agent, but the Panama Papers' attacks on Russian businessmen (Mafiyya, let's be honest) is another reason Assange attacked their release, claiming the U.S. government was behind this, which is nonsense. Ken Silverstein had done some work on Mossack Fonseca even before the main Panama Papers leak and I KNOW he's not a government agent.

And? Vlad the Impaler Putin himself cited Wikileaks in fighting to defend Russkies with likely government ties. Again, Assange may not be a Russian agent, but he has certainly left himself open to accusations of such.

Jealousy is not a one-off issue with Assange, either. Edward Snowden was among those who criticized Assange for not sufficiently curating and editing leaked materials, and Assange claimed Snowden was pandering to Hillary Clinton.

Good journalists also have good ethics. In promoting the totally base and vile Seth Rich conspiracy theory, primarily to try to cover up that the initial DNC emails came from a Russian hack, Assange has shown his lack of ethics and his willingness to outrightly lie. (Given that nobody — not Assange, Patrick Lawrence, Adam Carter or anybody else that I know of — has tried to explicitly claim that the spearphishing attack that got the later emails was not Russian-done, why the lie was engaged in was perplexing, too, and remains so.)

And, related, Silverstein thinks Snowden, if not originally a Russian agent, got compromised at some point, so who knows?

Wikipedia also raises the issue of whether or not Assange is anti-Semitic. First, to the Assange nutbar fanbois, I know well myself the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, and the use of the latter as a weapon against people calling out the former. As with Russian agent questions, at a minimum, I think Assange has left himself open to anti-Semitism claims.

And, per Andrew Stewart at Washington Babylon, Assange is definitely anti-feminist, which ties back to his troubles in Sweden (which have now been opened legally AGAIN!) He's also, weirdly but openly, anti-atheist, at least on Tweets that Stew collated. And his call for more births in Europe make him come off a bit like an Anders Breivik, or other white nationalists in Europe and America. If this is journalism, it's op-ed journalism.

Assange is also an idiot at times. In the link above, I mentioned his previous issues with lack of password protection. His belief that Trump would give him a pardon or something for all the DNC leaks further shows this idiocy. By the way, to riff on Janice Joplin, schadenfreude is just another word for someone else who arrogantly still has plenty to lose.

Journalism is also a collaborate effort in some way. Even at a small community newspaper, the managing editor will bounce ideas off other staff. A publisher will be a check, if the editor doesn't voluntarily include the publisher in his or her advisors.

Assange is managing editor and publisher all in one, with a sycophantic, perhaps even cowering, editorial board, even if Kristinn Hrafnsson is listed as editor in chief.

Journalism is an art or a craft, not a science. It will always have a demarcation problem, per philosopher friend Massimo Pigliucci and his writings (in the sciences) on demarcation issues.

I wouldn't put Assange outside the bounds of journalism. But I would put him in the borderlands.

And I'm comfortable with saying that.

And if we stopped calling him a journalist, I'd be OK with that, too. We don't call Snowden one, nor has he ever presented himself as one. And, that's that buried nutgraf.

So, why IS Assange a journalist, if he is one, and Snowden is not? Is it anything other than Assange having an organized backing behind him and Snowden not? Is it Assange-generated PR related to that?

Here's option three — we call Wikileaks a journalistic organization but don't call Assange a journalist. For my personal value, this has the petard-hoisting factor of, on paper, forcing Hrafnsson and others to defend Wikileaks separately from defending Assange.

Are journalists psychopaths?

So says a British psychologist. He ranks journalism as the sixth-highest profession, in terms of percentage of psychopaths.

His overall take:

Although people tend to think of psychopaths as killers—indeed about 15-25% of people in prison are psychopaths—in fact many people with psychopathic tendencies are not criminals.
Here are some of the traits of psychopaths:

• Self-confident
• Cold-hearted
• Manipulative
• Fearless
• Charming
• Cool under pressure
• Egocentric
• Carefree

He also notes that the idea of a "successful psychopath is largely not true, saying they earn less money than average.

Hey, there's a newspaper trait!

More seriously, I can think of three former bosses who fit at least the cold-hearted, manipulative, egocentric and carefree portions of the description.

#Poynter #PolitiFact and St. Pete Times: Overblown blowhards?

Between deliberately slapping ESPN in the face at times just to prove it's a good contract/consultant ombudsman, between financially affiliated St. Petersburg Times getting ready to call itself the Tampa ("Bay, if you will") Times while the Tampa Tribune still publishes, and other things, I'm beyond skeptical to cynical about both the paper and the media institute.


The latest? Its/their PolitiFact have awarded the claim that the GOP wants to kill Medicare the lie of the year, then said that the raft of objections to that award is all just from liberals being in an echo chamber.


Oh, technically, the GOP doesn't want to directly kill Medicare. But, privatization of it? Everybody with a brain knows that is exactly what will happen.


Basically, PolitiFact descends into he said/she said journalism:

We stand by our story and our conclusion that the claim was the most significant falsehood of 2011. We made no judgments on the merits of the Ryan plan; we just said that the characterization by the Democrats was false.

That's exactly the problem: Politifact made no judgment on the merits of the Ryan plan. Krugman's right: RIP PolitiFact. And, as far as I am concerned, everything else in the Poynter/St. Pete Times stable.

Update, Aug. 8: If there is any truth to this, Markos Moulitsas (Kos) may well be on the right track, that Jon Huntsman Sr., father of the GOP presidential candidate and former Utah gov, is Reid's source. It's an inter-Mormon connectedness source (and an inter-Mormon grudge — don't forget how Huntsman Jr. felt about Romney) who has place, time, connections, more.

Court: Blogger isn't journalist - he may be right

Let's see the new media fluffers' take on this:

A federal judge in Oregon has ruled that a Montana woman sued for defamation was not a journalist when she posted online that an Oregon lawyer acted criminally during a bankruptcy case, a decision with implications for bloggers around the country.

Crystal L. Cox, a blogger from Eureka, Mont., was sued for defamation by attorney Kevin Padrick when she posted online that he was a thug and a thief during the handling of bankruptcy proceedings by him and Obsidian Finance Group LLC.

U.S. District Judge Marco Hernandez found last week that as a blogger, Cox was not a journalist and cannot claim the protections afforded to mainstream reporters and news outlets.

Is this just a matter of Oregon needing a better shield law? That's one claim.

“My advice to bloggers operating in the state of Oregon is lobby to get your shield law improved so bloggers are covered,” said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. 

Dalgish may or may not be right on that. She is right on this:

“But do not expect the shield law to provide you a defense in a libel case where you want to rely on an anonymous source for that information.”

That's because Hernandez went further:

The judge ruled that Cox was not protected by Oregon’s shield law from having to produce sources, saying even though Cox defines herself as media, she was not affiliated with any mainstream outlet. He added that the shield law does not apply to civil actions for defamation.

But, Dalgish is not guaranteed to be right on this, if Cox is indeed not a journalist.


Now, contra new media fluffers who accuse old media of trying to maintain a guild system, I'm not doing that.


Let's read WHY Hernandez ruled as he did:

Hernandez said Cox was not a journalist because she offered no professional qualifications as a journalist or legitimate news outlet. She had no journalism education, credentials or affiliation with a recognized news outlet, proof of adhering to journalistic standards such as editing or checking her facts, evidence she produced an independent product or evidence she ever tried to get both sides of the story.

Emphasis on the last clauses are mine. Hernandez, although he appears to start from the "guild" point of view himself, goes beyond that to use generally recognized journalistic standards as a large portion of his decision.


And Cox's response, if anything, justifies Hernandez's decision:

Cox said she considered herself a journalist, producing more than 400 blogs over the past five years, with a proprietary technique to get her postings on the top of search engines where they get the most notice.

“What could be more mainstream than the Internet and the top of the search engine?” she said.

Let's try riffs on that:
1. Twenty years ago: What could be more mainstream than junk mail and a filled mailbox?
2. Sixty years ago: What could be more mainstream than Joe McCarthy and a stack of papers waved in one's hand?
3. Seventy-five years ago: What could be more mainstream than Father Coughlin?
I think you get the drift.


I'm sure Dalgish's organization and others will file amicus briefs in any appeal, but, really, they shouldn't. Both for the actual defendant and for the material facts involved.



Here's my response.


First, blogging may be journalism. It isn't automatically journalism. That's reason one professional media organizations should be wary of offering amicus briefs in this case, at least without actually taking a look at Cox's blog first.



Second, I'd potentially partially disagree with the judge that that plaintiff is not a public figure. I'd have to see the details of how big his tax shelter advice was, whether he's a defendant in the fraud case against some of his advisees and other things. He may be a public figure.


This isn't a slam-dunk one way or the other, unlike the Houston-area blogger of a few years ago, who was reporting on a criminal case, a felony, and using anonymous sources.. There's no indication that Cox was even using anonymous sources, or doing anything more than writing opinion pieces. And, even if attorney Patrick IS a public figure, while case law cuts more latitude on opinion pages in conventional newspapers and magazines, even there, there isn't a license to libel.


Given that Cox is using a "proprietary technique," which is probably called paying $99 to some SEO optimizer outfit, and boasts about that, she's not a journalist from where I stand, and probably stands guilty of the failings of effort Hernandez found.


I do agree with media analysts that a case like this shows we need SCOTUS to eventually wade in. BUT, this case ain't the vehicle for it.

Reporters and media protection latest BushCo ‘security threat’

I guess a media shield law will give al Qaida “aid, hope and comfort,” or some other stupidity.

First, we have the Subtler, Suaver Alberto Gonzales™, Attorney General Mike Mukasey, claiming a shield law now wending its way through the Senate, defines a journalist too broadly.

Of course, this is the same AG Mukasey who cut blog/online news source Talking Points Memo off the list of daily e-mail media recipients from the Department of Justice.

And, doorknob bless Patrick Fitzgerald for prosecuting Scooter Libby, but he’s just wrong in claiming a shield law isn’t needed.

Dismissing notions that media subpoenas would dampen investigative reporting, Fitzgerald said, “Journalists have been saying the sky is falling since 1972 ... and that suddenly the stories will dry up. But I'm not seeing big blank spaces on the front page.”

Uh, Pat, the worry isn’t what has happened since 1972, but what has happened since 2001. Get a clue. Or else admit that you’re spinning a line here.

Journalists get depression wrong with ‘chemical imbalance’ meme

No, I still don’t believe memes exist, at least not in a strong sense, but the word is a handy catch-all. Anyway, that’s besides the point.

A set of psychology researchers say that media use of “chemical imbalance” to describe depression is scientifically inaccurate. Rightly, they note that the idea comes from classical Greece’s concept of the four “humors” in the body.

Contempt, fines for journo failing to cooperate in lawsuit: where do we draw the line?

Judge Reggie Walton may hold former USA Today reporter Toni Locy in civil contempt for refusing to cooperate with former Army scientist Steven J. Hatfill in his suit against the government.

Hatfill, as some may recall, was named a “person of interest” by the government in its investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks that hit the U.S. Capitol and other sites shortly after 9/11.

Hatfill, who worked at the Army's infectious diseases laboratory from 1997 to 1999, was publicly identified as a “person of interest” in the 2001 anthrax attacks. He is suing the Justice Department, accusing the agency of violating the federal Privacy Act by giving reporters information about the FBI’s investigation of him.

Five people were killed and 17 sickened by anthrax that was mailed to lawmakers on Capitol Hill and members of the news media in New York and Florida just weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. After initially being identified as a "person of interest" in the investigation by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, the case remains unsolved.

Walton ordered Locy, James Stewart and three other reporters to reveal their sources to Hatfill. Stewart claims his sources have had their info corroborated by other persons identified to the public. Locy is not wanting to cooperate at all. The other three, Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman of Newsweek and Allan Lengel of The Washington Post, have revealed at least part of their source information.

There is precedent on this, on the civil side, from Wen Ho Lee’s suit against the AP and other media sources. After Lee reached a settlement in his suits, reporters who had been found in contempt had their appeals turned away.

I’m inclined to cut reporters some more slack in civil cases. That said, civil contempt in a suit like this may be the slap on the wrist needed to get reporters to treat government sources more critically.

How today’s Web journalism world still makes no financial sense

Ted Rall sis right as usual. Double of nothing (doubling your online visitors even as Internet ad rates stay near zero) doesn’t make sense.

And, it’s “liberal” blogs as well as “conservative” traditional media that aren’t getting it.

Wanna blog for Huffington Post? As Rall points out, they’ll pay you plenty of prestige, but zero dollars.

And, as long as you the publicity-hungry blogger make that sucker’s bet, Huff Post, including its charming Dragon First Lady, Ms. Arianna herself, will continue to double down on you. As Rall says, also, try using “prestige” to pay the mortgage or rent.

End result, says Rall:

Print media is dragging content providers into the abyss. First comes downsizing. Writers, cartoonists, and photographers are losing their jobs to peers willing to do the work for less or, in the case of readers invited to submit their comments and images for the thrill of appearing in the local rag, nothing. Then they squeeze those who remain for pay cuts. A cartoon that runs today in Time, Newsweek, USA Today, The New York Times or The Washington Post — the most prestigious and widely disseminated forums in the United States — brings its creator less than The Village Voice would have paid for it in the 1980s. Some print venues offer no payment at all.

What happens if we don’t do anything?

Unless something changes soon, deprofessionalization will further erode journalistic quality. The resulting dumbing down of our politics and culture will accelerate. We can’t get the toothpaste back into the tube. The Internet is here to stay. Unfortunately, the best way to make it more profitable — to stimulate all e-commerce, not just journalism--will require us to give up something dear to our rugged individualist American hearts: the illusion of Internet privacy.

Yes, it is an eye-opener, if disconcerting in a way, to hear Rall, an ardent civil libertarian, say that. But, between spyware that is logging keystrokes on infected computers to ISP providers being leaky sieves to the government even before 9/11, Net privacy, in many ways, went the way of the dodo long ago. Besides, your financial information went even more the way of the dodo even earlier, every time you zipped a debit card at the grocery store.

This is the first of a three-part series by Rall. I’m interested in hearing what he offers in the way of a solution.

The difficulties of news reporting in Iraq

From San Antonio Express-News veteran Sieg Christenson.

Texas Senate passes journalism shield law

I give the bill a B/B-minus. Biggest concern is it defines bloggers outside the loop; the story isn’t clear about “independent journalists” or freelancers being covered or not, as well. And, I’m kind of iffy about the bill defining who is or is not a journalist, in general. I think the definition, if any, should be in the act of journalism.