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A little fact is a dangerous thing

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Since I’m talking on Saturday at BloggerCon about blogs and journalism, I’ve been thinking about what seems to me to be the central issue in this field: trust. Here is a semi-formed essay — consider it a sort of notes-in-progress.

Three weeks ago, reading a New York Times “Political Memo” piece (9/7/03) by Adam Nagourney, my eyes scanned the following sentence: “Perpetuating a widely circulated myth, a senior adviser to a Dean rival recently sent an e-mail message saying, ‘You do know that he is the Dean of Dean Witter, don’t you?’ He is not.”

It was the “He is not” that grabbed me: Its definitive tone. Its absence of attribution (no linking to supporting evidence possible in a newspaper, of course). Its assumption that the reader would simply accept its assertion. And my own willingness as a reader to accept it.

Because I did, the first time I read the piece. I trusted it. I didn’t ask, “Sez who? How do you know? Why should I trust you?” Which are the questions I would almost certainly have asked had I found such a statement on a Web page. I trusted it based on my years of experience reading the Times, on my faith in its still-formidable (Jayson Blair affair notwithstanding) editing apparatus, on my belief that the people who work at the Times are (mostly) devoted to getting the facts right.

But then I started wondering. And I got curious for myself. So I started poking around, using the same search tools available to everyone. And this is what I found.

If you search Google for “Howard Dean Witter” you will find a profusion of blogs and pages posted by people who don’t like Dean saying snide things about how he’s the Dean of Dean Witter. Many of them point to an August column by Jimmy Breslin which asserts that “His father was the head of Dean Witter stocks on Wall Street.” Comments posted here and there by Dean supporters challenge this statement by pointing out that Dean Witter is not a firm founded by Messrs. Dean and Witter; rather, a guy named Dean (first name) Witter (last name) gave his name to the company when he founded it in 1924.

Ahh — so Breslin got this wrong, the anti-Dean bloggers spread the bad meme, then others corrected the record, and Nagourney closed the case, right?

Not so fast. If you keep poking through the factual detritus on the Web you eventually find that Howard Brush Dean Jr., the candidate’s late father (he died in 2001), was a successful stockbroker. And Time reports that the firm he worked for, and indeed was a “top executive” at, was none other than Dean Witter (known at that point in its corporate evolution as Dean Witter Reynolds).

Assuming that Time can be trusted on that, as far as I can tell, we have the following facts:
*Howard Dean’s Deans are not the Deans who founded Dean Witter; BUT
*Howard Dean’s father was a top executive at Dean Witter.

In other words, Breslin and Nagourney were both technically accurate. Breslin’s statement “His father was the head of Dean Witter stocks on Wall Street” seems factually contradictory to Nagourney’s flat-out dismissal of the “myth” that “he is the Dean of Dean Witter.” But it is quite likely — unless I have completely bungled this little inquiry — that both are right.

The purpose of this exercise is not to cast aspersions on Dr. Dean for his stockbrokerly upbringing. My point is that facts in political debate are always at the service of perspective. “Facts all come with points of view,” as David Byrne sang 20 years ago. Facts are not the endpoint but rather the starting point for a political argument. But too often — among bloggers like everywhere else — we use them as a way to close off debate. “You’re wrong,” we say; or, worse, “you’re lying.”

We like to cordon off “fact” from “opinion” in our brains, but there is no bright sharp line between them. A fact can mislead depending on what other facts it is or is not juxtaposed with. (Jay Rosen has a good piece about this in relation to the hoary question of whether blogs are reporting or opinion.) Opinions need facts to give them persuasive heft, but facts need opinions to give them meaning. We all have lots of both. It’s how we integrate them that counts.

One way of defining honesty is this: Honesty is the quality of accepting new facts even when they run against your opinions. And that quality is what earns trust — whether you’re a professional journalist, a blogger, or any combination thereof.

Blogging Plame

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As the Plame affair rolls forward, we are seeing an interesting split in the blogosphere — unsurprisingly, along liberal/conservative lines. You can find almost round-the-clock updates and thoughtful commentary from Josh Marshall (the independent journalist) and Brad DeLong (the economist and former D.C. insider). DeLong leads the way in reminding us that this story first broke over the summer, that Bush had many weeks to pursue this, and in fact, rather than being eager to find out who leaked Plame’s CIA status, he has done nothing to find that out, and instead waited until the CIA forced his hand:

  The White House has had eleven weeks to act, and has not done this. The cover-up is already eleven weeks ongoing, with the Bush White House hoping first that the CIA could be pressured into not making a criminal referral to the Justice Department, with the White House now hoping that somehow the Justice Department will make the thing go away, and with George W. Bush having “no plans” to ask any of his aides whether they are the ones who think it’s cool to blow the cover of CIA operatives actually trying to find weapons of mass destruction. It’s not just the two principals, by now it is virtually the entire White House staff who are accessories after the fact to a plan to aid and abet our enemies, et cetera.

A lot of people find this story dramatic and important. On the other hand, you have normally astute conservative bloggers like Glenn Reynolds and Eugene Volokh admitting that they just can’t get excited about it and will not be posting much on the subject. Ed Cone chastises them for this. To me it seems to be entirely their their right. Still, the story isn’t going to go away, and ignoring it isn’t going to make it irrelevant — it might instead make them (bloggers who ignore the story) less relevant. Time will tell.

The leaker, he sleeps with the fishes

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Just heard the president’s remarks on the Plame affair:

“And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of.”

Taken care of? Isn’t that, like, what Don Corleone or Tony Soprano says?

Or is Bush covertly signaling that the leaker will receive a fat brown paper bag of unmarked bills if he stays mum?

OK, that’s pretty farfetched. But how did we end up with a president who talks like a gangster?

The Plame game

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As the Valerie Plame leak story balloons from footnote in blogland to major scandal, there are differing perspectives on the seriousness of the thing. Jack Shafer in Slate argues that the story is unlikely to have legs. But Brad DeLong thinks heads will roll: “This makes it very likely that before this ends there will be multiple resignations either from the White House staff or from the CIA — and the fact that it is the CIA that has initiated this tells us where they at least expect the resignations to be.” Meanwhile, if history is any guide, the worst pitfalls for Bush lie not in what happened but in how the circle-the-wagons coverup mentality may tempt him or his deputies into new lies.

Quick recap: Valerie Plame is the wife of whistleblower Joseph Wilson, whose finding that there was no basis for the claim of a uranium connection between Niger and Iraq put the lie to a key plank of Bush’s Jan. 2003 State of the Union address. After Wilson came forward to say as much, anonymous White House sources fed conservative columnist Robert Novak the tidbit that Wilson’s wife, Plame, worked undercover for the CIA. This casual exposure of a CIA employee’s identity for political purposes is a crime, and has the intelligence community seething. Now there is a Justice Department inquiry — but how can an Ashcroft-overseen investigation be trusted?

Josh Marshall has blogged up a storm on the story since its revival last weekend. In August, John Dean offered a tough-minded perspective on the legal aspects.

Given the nature of the story, it’s been fascinating to see how lackadaisically the White House is treating this sort of national security leak. Here’s White House press secretary Scott McLellan’s comment from the Monday press briefing: “I’ve seen the anonymous media reports. But like I said, there are anonymous media reports all the time. Are we supposed to go chasing down every single anonymous report?”

Actually, that is exactly what members of the Bush administration have done in the past. In particular, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been a notorious hard-liner on leaks. (Just Google “rumsfeld leaks” for a slew of stories.) “They ought to be imprisoned,” he said about whoever was responsible for leaking details of a Pentagon war plan to the New York Times last year. “And if we find out who they are, they will be imprisoned.”

When we find out who leaked Plame’s name, will Rumsfeld stick to those guns?

Editors vs. bloggers

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So,, thanks to the controversy about Sacramento Bee columnist/blogger Dan Weintraub, there is now a growing discussion about whether blogs appearing as part of a larger journalistic institution’s enterprise should be edited. (For independent blogs, it’s not really an issue — they are generally one-person operations anyway.)

As an editor and a blogger, I find that the perspectives on this tend to fall into two camps talking past each other.

Bloggers and those who view blogging as a genuine new online form decry the notion that blogs should be edited; they prize the un-mediated spontaneity of the unedited blog, and believe that editing is contrary to the very heart of the blogging enterprise. Editing in a true blog happens live, in public, in a continuous dialogue between the blogger and his or her readers (and other bloggers).

Many professional journalists (people who earn their living by reporting, writing or editing) scoff at this. They have been trained in an ethos according to which no one is above editing; even when editors-in-chief writes something, somebody else edits it before it’s published. So when these journalists hear bloggers saying, “We don’t need no stinkin’ editors!,” what they hear is a claim of privilege, and their response is to think, “Buddy, who do you think you are? Everyone gets edited!”

My heart is with both of these perspectives; I think they’re both right. Great editors make for great journalism, and many editors have rescued many writers and many publications. Blogs, however, are something different, and they do benefit from presenting the unfiltered, warts-and-all perspective of an individual.

We are getting into trouble, I think, because blogs have acquired some small amount of buzz and excitement, and media organizations are jumping on the bandwagon, but in the process they are aping the superficial qualities of blogs and failing to embrace their essence. If a blog were just “short items organized in reverse chronological order,” every newsroom has one already — it’s called the wire feed. And that, sadly, is what some media operations are now providing as they try to bring blogs into their universe. (Just compare CNet’s “Wi-Fi Journal” to Glenn Fleishman’s Wi-Fi blog to understand the difference.) Meanwhile, when a newspaper actually puts a real blog in the hands of a writer, as the Sac Bee apparently did with Weintraub, editors freak out and other reporters get jealous. It can be done — Dan Gillmor has been doing it for a long time now — but it’s not easy.

A newspaper or magazine editor considering what to do about blogs can either say, “This is an experiment, go, blog, you don’t need an editor,” and make that clear to the readers, and persuade the newspaper’s lawyers to relax. (That last bit is probably the hardest.) Or she could say, “Look, blogs are great, but they’re not what we do.” If it were me, what I’d probably do is encourage my reporters to keep blogs in their spare time. (The union would probably not be happy with that, however.)

But I wouldn’t waste my time trying to push blogs back into the old template of the newsroom. The world is richer for the existence of well-edited newspapers and unedited blogs. I want them both — they complement each other nicely. And there’s no reason we can’t have both. What we don’t need is the same old news product in new blog-shaped bottles.

An economist and reality

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On today’s Wall Street Journal opinion page you will find an essay by economist Allan H. Meltzer arguing that, thanks to some fluky contradictions in the statistics, this “recovery’s” employment situation isn’t as bad as it looks. Meltzer makes a reasonable case (though one that is more theoretical than based on hard evidence) that the jobless numbers look worse than they really are because the Labor Department’s “Establishment Survey” records jobs shed by large companies faster than the government tracks jobs generated by small new companies.

What’s happening in the economy today, Meltzer argues, is that a lot of big corporations are outsourcing lots of service jobs to other, often smaller, companies. So that the janitor who might once have shown up as an employee of BigCorp disappears from the government’s numbers, and we think a “manufacturing” job has been lost, but that’s not what’s happened. Same number of jobs, same work being done: “In fact,” according to Meltzer, “nothing real happened.”

Oh, but there is one other little thing that Meltzer notes, almost as an aside: that worker “may receive fewer benefits and perhaps lower wages.”

This strikes me as a critical point, both for said worker and for the economy as a whole, which is depending on consumers’ purchasing power and which is trying to cope with a burgeoning health care crisis. But to Meltzer, all of this is “nothing real.” Who cares if hundreds of thousands of workers are making less money and losing their benefits? “Nothing real.”

It came as no surprise to read, in the author’s description at the end of the piece, that Meltzer is affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute.

WMDs: Must be here somewhere!

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I think by now most Americans fall into one of two camps: Those who have already concluded that the Bush administration was either lying or duped in its pre-war assertion that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that were an imminent threat to the U.S.; and those who don’t care, either because they supported the war on purely humanitarian grounds (a defensible and noble position) or because they are among the hordes of Americans who fell for the FUD about the Saddam-Al Qaida connection (a preposterous position).

For anyone else who is still patiently waiting to see what might turn up in the WMD hunt, the news today was not good. Someone leaked to the New York Times information about a draft of the report (now dubbed an “interim” report) by David Kay, the former U.N. weapons inspector whom the U.S. commissioned to lead the weapons search. The Times story suggests that after four months the findings are still meager: no weapons at all. None. Some “precursors and dual-use equipment that could have been used to manufacture chemical and biological weapons.” And “one Iraqi security officer who said he had worked in such a chemical and biological weapons program until shortly before the American invasion in March.”

With reports like this, no wonder the Bush administration is frantically back-pedaling on the significance of Kay’s work. As Josh Marshall points out, only a couple weeks ago Secretary of State Colin Powell was telling us, “I am confident when people see what David Kay puts forward they will see that there was no question that such weapons exist, existed, and so did the programs to develop one.” But here’s Condoleeza Rice on Monday: “David Kay is not going to be done with this for quite some time. And I would not count on reports.”

It seems pretty clear now that, even if down the line Kay does stumble upon a canister or two of poison gas, the line the Bush administration fed the American people before the war — that Saddam had tons of this stuff, that it was what he lived for, and that if the U.S. didn’t strike now he would threaten the American homeland with it — was at best a mistake and at worst a lie.

If it was a lie, Bush should be impeached yesterday — but it’s next to impossible that anyone will ever be able to prove it was a lie. So let’s give Bush and company the benefit of the doubt: Let’s say it was a mistake. Maybe Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi told his American contacts that Saddam was sitting on mountains of bioweapons, or that he was this close to building nukes. That doesn’t exactly make one feel better about the future pursuit of the war on terror: It means that, far from achieving a new level of alertness and smarts in the post-9/11 age, Bush and his advisers remain stuck in the same fog of bad information and bad intelligence leading to bad decisions that was their pre-9/11 norm.

There’s another report circling the runway that might illuminate what went wrong with our intelligence back then and what we should be doing now — the big 9/11 investigation headed up by Tom Kean. Yesterday the Times reported that the commission seemed likely to suggest a major overhaul of the structure of American intelligence — something Bush has resolutely opposed. Is it any wonder that his administration has done everything it could to delay, dodge or downplay that report, too? Just as it has done everything in its power to block release of a previous Congressional study of what went wrong on 9/11?

A cynic might even wonder whether the Republican strategy is to keep kicking all these issues down the field — keep withholding information from Kean’s committee, keep labeling Kay’s work “interim,” and so on — until Bush is safely past Election Day. And maybe the only thing scarier than a first-term George W. Bush fighting for his political life by endangering our national security is a second-term George W. Bush who doesn’t have to think at all about winning over moderates, and is free to let his Inner Autocrat run wild. You can bet that, if Bush wins in Nov. 2004, we won’t see many more reports of this kind. After all, as Bush has said, “I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.” It’s good he understands so well the way power and information should flow in a democracy.

See no evil, hear no evil, report no evil?

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Scanning the blogs this morning I came across an interesting dustup between Glenn Reynolds and Josh Marshall. Since I’m sharing a panel with them at Bloggercon next week this naturally caught my eye.

Josh came across a column in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Democratic congressman Jim Marshall suggesting that negative media coverage might be “killing our troops” in Iraq, and wrote, “It really doesn’t get much lower than that.” Glenn disagreed with Josh Marshall and agreed with Jim Marshall — and his response is worth parsing closely.

Reynolds is too smart to simply suggest that the U.S. media should suppress all negative stories from Iraq. So he couches his complaint more subtly, maintaining that “It’s not the reporting of criticisms or bad things that’s the issue… It’s the lazy Vietnam-templating, the ‘of course America must be losing’ spin, the implicit and sometimes explicit sneer, and the relentless bringing to the fore of every convenient negative fact while suppressing the positive ones that’s the issue. It’s what the terrorists are counting on, and it’s what too many in the media are happy to deliver, because they think it’ll hurt Bush.”

Notice that an argument that, at bottom, is about demanding that the U.S. media suppress bad news from Iraq has been inverted into an argument that the problem is really with the suppression of positive news (no examples provided). A neat trick.

Let’s take it phrase by phrase: “Lazy Vietnam-templating” is not a charge I would level against, say, Max Cleland, who is the most forceful recent applier of the Vietnam analogy and who is far more qualified than I or most other commentators to apply it. If an observer feels that the U.S. is making the same mistakes in Iraq that it made in Vietnam, surely his duty is to speak loudly and try to get the U.S. to change its policies before we lose this war the way we lost Vietnam, and before too many more American servicepeople pay the price of our mistakes. This isn’t “lazy … templating,” it’s fair debate. So pace Reynolds, arguing that we should not oppose policies that we think will lose the war doesn’t help the terrorists, it helps our democracy.

Then there’s the reference to “‘of course America must be losing’ spin.” Notice how the entire issue of whether the U.S. is winning or losing is bypassed, and the possibility that some of us actually feel the U.S., following the current botched Bush policies, is losing is reduced to a matter of “spin.” But what if it’s not spin? What if you’re a journalist on the scene in Iraq and what your eyes and ears tell you is that the U.S. is losing? According to the Jim Marshall/Glenn Reynolds argument, are you supposed to just shut up?

Reynolds doesn’t like “sneers,” either, but he doesn’t offer any examples, so there isn’t much to argue with here, beyond the fact that people are saying things he disagrees with in a tone of voice that he doesn’t like. It’s always nicer when those we disagree with are cordial; Reynolds himself is always a gentleman, and I don’t like sneers either. But a sneer never killed anyone, and sneering is not killing American troops in Iraq.

Finally, Reynolds complains about “relentless bringing to the fore of every convenient negative fact while suppressing the positive ones.” It’s strange to hear this line from a journalist/blogger; usually such reasoning is heard from the mouths of politicians who are unhappy that the media are focused on some scandal while failing to publish their own upbeat press releases.

We have all lived long enough to understand that government spin is ubiquitous and inevitable. The government spin from Iraq is that “everything is fine, these things take time”; and journalists’ job is to brush that spin aside and tell the world what they are actually seeing. If what they are actually seeing is a country in chaos, and American troops dying every day, and a nation turning against its “liberators,” then reporting that is their duty. In trying to “shush” opposition by playing the “aiding and abetting our enemies” card, the “blame the media” argument aims to choke the open democratic debate that, after all, is the basis of what makes our system better than the one we overthrew in Baghdad. What this argument really boils down to is, “Stand by our boys! Don’t report that they’re dying!”

Personally, I wish the news from Iraq were better. I wish the killing would stop, and Iraq would quickly become a beacon of light and democracy to the Middle East, as the cakewalk-neocons promised us. But that isn’t what’s happening. And since it’s clear President Bush is not going to change his policies in order to win the international cooperation that this nation-building project was always going to require, a patriotic American who believes we are on the wrong path has no choice but to say, “Bush is the problem.” If he can’t figure out that his policy is a disaster and we need to change course, the only way to get the U.S. — and Iraq — back on track is to change presidents.

Reynolds suggests that people like me are focusing on the bad news from Iraq in order to “hurt Bush.” That’s backwards. I want to “hurt Bush” (note to FBI: I mean politically “hurt” — “hurt” meaning see him lose elections) in order to improve the news from Iraq.

Journalism construction set

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When I wrote about Jay Rosen’s Columbia Journalism Review piece below, I failed to mention that Rosen is keeping a good blog going himself. Then, in one of those wonderful circular link trails, I was reading, on Geoff Cohen’s consistently stimulating blog, about metaphors for programming and is computer science a science?, when I stumbled on Cohen’s link to this fine piece on Jay’s blog, about “Master Narratives in Journalism.” Worth reading for its insight into the rarely acknowledged role journalists play in not only “covering” the political story but in “constructing” it. Rosen writes about this concept from postmodernist literary theory in an entirely approachable way; far from drowning in the jargon, he extracts useful meaning from it.

The perils of the paperless ballot

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If you haven’t been keeping up to date on this stuff, as Salon’s Farhad Manjoo has, you will find his interview today with voting-machine whistle-blower Bev Harris a must-read.

It seems that the people who built Diebold’s electronic voting systems just didn’t think security was critical, nor did they think maintaining the integrity of auditing was a big deal. Well, gee, they’re just elections, right? They’re not, like, something important.