Don't Answer the Question of the Day

Despite his conservative bent, lawyer and professional ethicist Jack Marshall authors what is consistently one of my favorite blogs, Ethics Alarms.  A recentpost of his attacked the “Question of the Day” posed by CNN’s Carol Costello on Thursday morning.  She asked her viewers to contact the show with their answer as to the rather nonsensical question “Do CEOs make good presidents?”  She went on to cite Donald Trump, Ross Perot, and Herman Cain as examples of CEOs.  Astute observers will notice that none of them were presidents, and they might also realize that no CEOs have ever been presidents.  But as long as Costello had to choose purely hypothetical examples, she certainly could have come up with a more balanced list.

Jack Marshall sees this as proof positive of liberal media bias, and an effort on the part of CNN to torpedo the Romney candidacy by any means necessary.  It’s honestly hard not to agree with him on that latter point, although I don’t for a moment believe in the myth of the liberal media.  The loaded question presented by Costello on Thursday morning was undoubtedly in Obama’s favor, but the overall bias of the media is not towards liberal viewpoints or personalities.  The overall bias is in favor of viewership and profitability, and outside of Fox News and MSNBC, where this is accomplished by a commitment to conservativism and liberalism, respectively, the result is a good deal of duplicity buttressed by base pandering and bad journalism.

Those are the things for which the media must be most vigorously criticized.  And what are more crucial than any particular bias are the elements of laziness and stupidity put on display by this and virtually any other CNN Question of the Day.  I’m not especially bothered by the fact that Carol Costello was trying to not-so-subtly impugn the qualifications of candidate Romney.  What aggravates me is the fact that she was asking her viewers to do it for her.

So we live in a representative democracy.  It’s wonderful; we’re all proud of that fact.  That doesn’t mean, however, that a seemingly democratic process is appropriate for every single social institution.  The fifth estate is supposed to be independent of the ebbs and flows of public opinion, as well as the influence of government.  Indeed, it’s crucial to a well-functioning democracy that the populous be informed by a media which deals in facts and expert dialogue rather than being an aggregator of private, uninformed opinion.

I’d be hard pressed to think of a more uninformed opinion than any response to the question “Do CEOs make good presidents?”  Whether you answer yes or no, your answer is as meaningless as if you had stated your opinion about the financial management skills of the tooth fairy.  There is no information on either topic, so to answer the question is to construct a purely speculative fantasy.  And even if there had been CEO presidents in the past – even if there was a tooth fairy – it wouldn’t make a poll of private opinions any more informative.  As politically engaged citizens, we’re supposed to be able to refer to the news media for information before we form our opinions.

If CNN believes that CEOs, in theory, would make terrible presidents, that’s fine; let them say so.  But let them say so by referring to historical facts and correlating business activities with the challenges that a person can be expected to face in political office.  Completely unbiased journalism is widely regarded as a fantasy, but there’s a clear distinction between responsible and irresponsible bias in reporting.  Framing one’s claim as the question of the day is decidedly irresponsible.  It just allows the network to hide its opinion behind unaffiliated responses to their hideously leading questions.  It parrots the common argumentative tactic of dodging criticism by insisting, “Hey, I’m just asking questions, here.”

Asking questions is indeed a crucial part of the media’s job.  But when it comes to political topics, many so-called journalists seem to have forgotten that other, equally crucial part: providing answers.  If you as a journalist think a question is essential to the public understanding, then it’s your responsibility to bring to bear facts and logic on that question to help the public to resolve it in a way that’s consistent with reality, not just with their preexisting points of view.  And if you find that the question you want to ask can’t be resolved in that way, say because there are no relevant historical data, then you’re probably asking the wrong question.

The modern news media is rife with examples of behaviors just like the CNN Question of the Day.  Instead of listening to the news and being informed, consumers are not encouraged to tweet at live broadcasts, to vote for their favorite stories, to sound off with their views in absence of substantive information that might clarify those views.  When did the media decide that its job is to provide a popular outlet for every individual’s point of view?  And perhaps more important, why does the public seemingly accept this as a good thing?

We all want to have our voices heard.  Of course we do.  But a responsible citizen also takes care to recognize when his voice is actually needed, and when, on the other hand, he needs to keep quiet and listen.  Collectively, we need to step outside of our presumptions from time to time, log off of our otherwise incessant Twitter feeds, and open ourselves up to the presentation of information that exists independent of our relished ability to talk back.  When we do, maybe we’ll take clearer notice of the fact that the people tasked with providing such information simply aren’t doing so, and maybe we’ll use our always-welcome voices to demand more.

The lessons learned from Thursdays Question of the Day almost make me want to believe that some rebel copywriter inserted it into the script in hopes that it would spur some tiny proportion of the audience to sit up and realize, “Hey, I can’t answer this question!  Why on Earth are they asking it?”  Far more likely, though, is that some researchers at CNN crafted that question so that they, and by extension their very network, wouldn’t have to do their job.

Shocking Common Financial Realities

Bill Cimbrelo directed me to a CNN Money story titled “Retirement Shocker: 60% of Workers Have Less Than $25,000 Saved.”  To my mind, the main question that this raises is for whom is this a “shocker”?  If the cited fact applies to more than half of the people concerned, isn’t it safe to assume that the majority of people should be unsurprised by the information?  The only reason that I see why a person would be surprised by statistics that affirm the day-to-day reality of his life is if he thinks his own experience is somehow anomalous, somehow out of keeping with the daily experience of other people like him.  Unfortunately, this is almost certainly the situation with most lower-middle class and poor individuals.

So here’s a breaking point that I’m looking forward to, and it’s one that’s on my mind often, and that I’ve brought up earlier and elsewhere.  The news media and society in general needs to stop presenting affluence as the default state of life in America.  It’s not correct, and more than that it can be damaging to policy and social discourse.  Our collective understanding of income disparity is distressingly skewed by a distinctly hopeful presentation of American life in most media, whether fiction or non-fiction.  As with all things, failure to accurately recognize the problem makes failure to craft solutions almost certain.

 People should never be shocked by information that’s right under their noses all the time.  If they are, then it’s pretty clear that something had been wildly misrepresented in the past.  You might object that it’s not as though people walk around with their total retirement savings tattooed on their heads.  Why should we have any idea what sort of figures apply to the majority.  You shouldn’t, of course.  And if you’re not a meteorologist you shouldn’t know exactly how much rain your area has gotten this month.  But when somebody tells you that figure would you be shocked?  If so, surely you’re either terrible at estimating rainfall or you haven’t been looking outside very much.  And if you weren’t paying attention, in order to be shocked you have to have made some groundless assumption about what the amount might be, which will then be contradicted by the facts.

There’s a lot of information that casual observers can’t be expected to know about people, about the economy, about the world.  But learning something new is not the same as learning something shocking.  Yet I don’t dispute that the headline for the given story was accurate and that a great many people were shocked by the revelation.  They wouldn’t have been if they hadn’t concluded on the basis of nothing whatsoever that the majority of Americans are well prepared for a comfortable retirement.  I put forth that this sort of thing reveals the entire perception of income demographics in America to be pure fantasy.

Such a fantasy promotes a victim-blaming mentality.  And it promotes that not just among the beneficiaries of income inequality but among the victims of it, too, as they may tend to be surprised by information that shows their experience to be firmly in the majority.  And yet even the recognition of that information is not in itself enough to move commentators towards the idea that financial difficulty is an endemic problem and not a personal one.  The language applied to stories about the plight of the masses still suggests that the simple fact of their being a part of the masses is in some measure attributable to their own negligence, sloth, or ignorance.

The CNN article takes pains to spin the subject in a certain direction that is at once optimistic about general patterns and unfair to individuals.  It points out, “While workers' lack of saving and confidence in their ability to retire comfortably is troubling, [Employee Benefit Research Institute director Jack] VanDerhei said it's good that people are becoming more realistic about their financial situations.”  Sure, maybe, but there’s an enormously significant dimension of this story that stretches beyond the personal responsibilities of the people who are negatively affected.  At the same time that those people exhibit realism about that, how about analysts, media, and society as a whole become more realistic about the financial situations of people other than themselves?

Please Stop Working for Free

I was pleased to see that Stephen Colbert levied brilliant criticisms against CNN’s iReport social network on his Monday night show:

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It’s wonderful to see a satirist or critic taking on the topic, but it’s important to keep in mind that CNN is far from being the only organization to uncompensated labor from the public, at the expense of actual jobs. If CNN is the worst offender, it is only by virtue of its being an exceptionally large and visible organization. But some content on the front pages of Yahoo! is drawn from its amateur contributor network. And while it does allow people to earn nominal payments based on page views, ultimately Yahoo! is relying on a large pool of writers and photographers who are willing to work for free and consider any compensation whatsoever to essentially be a gift. AOL and the Huffington Post utilize the same model, and of course the latter is also infamous for simply reposting paid content from other news sources. On top of that, there are various sites whose sole concept is to gather creative content from as many people as possible and then present some sort of prize to those that pay dividends on nothing. And each of them seemingly finds a steady supply of willing participants.

That willingness seems unlikely to become the focus of other critics, but I think it is the main issue here. So long as news outlets remain primarily concerned with making money, it is only natural that they will latch onto business practices that allow them to maintain output without the need to pay formerly requisite salaries. Quality be damned, if it brings them any revenue, it is worthwhile because it contributes nothing to overhead. There’s even a business term for this kind of acquisition of labor: crowdsourcing. It serves much the same purpose as outsourcing work to foreign countries, but is even better for the business, as outsourcing exploits the necessity of workers accepting appalling low wages because of their local conditions, whereas crowdsourcing exploits the willingness of workers to accept no payment at all because of their imagination of some future reward.

Certainly, I would be thrilled if there came a breaking point for the news media, and they came to realize that they have an obligation greater than the acquisition of capital. Each person can play a role in promoting that realization, primarily through his choice of what media to consume, but ultimately that breaking point is up to the executives of several corporations, and out of our hands. What ordinary people should realize instead is that they are enabling this sort of exploitation, and contributing to the rampant decay in the quality of news and popular culture. There is a breaking point that every writer and artist must reach, whereby we come to understand that we are being used, and that we are allowing ourselves to be used.

There’s really nothing in it for us if we keep giving away work for free. I’m sure that many people provide content for major websites purely in pursuit of fifteen minutes of fame, but I expect that many people also do so on the assumption that it will lead to some discovery of their brilliance, that the exposure to a wide audience of CNN viewers or Yahoo! readers will open doors for them. What they ought to understand, though, is that that pursuit of self-interest will ultimately prevent those doors from opening to anywhere. Every decent writer who offers free content in hope of future opportunities is evidently expecting someone to come along and pay for what everyone else is getting for free.

Of course, if the decent writers and artists realize this and drop out of the crowdsource, I suppose that would just leave behind the terrible writers and artists, and raise the question, would CNN, Yahoo!, AOL and the like continue to drink from a tepid pool? They might. But the subsequently accelerating deterioration of quality just illustrates the way breaking points work. If we keep quality content out of the hands of those who would exploit it for free, won’t there come a point at which the dreck they’re channeling into public view just isn’t worth looking at anymore? There simply must be a lower limit to what we’re willing to accept and popularize. There must be, even though there is apparently no lower limit to what many people are willing to accept as compensation for their creative efforts.

Clash of the Trifles

It seems that within the tremendous armed conflict in Libya, there is another tiny battle raging between the American news outlets covering the events. Harsh professional criticisms and personal insults have been passed back and forth between Nic Robertson of CNN and Steve Harrigan of Fox News, each on-the-ground correspondents in Libya.

It is not often that I can say I'm inclined to take the side of the guy representing Fox News, but that's the situation here. From the reports that I've read, Robertson fired first. It seems that it's become common knowledge that Fox is a shitty news organization, with an entrenched narrative that evidently considers the truth irrelevant. So it's also become commonplace for people to reflexively point to Fox News when launching criticisms of broader news reporting, or when a journalist tries to build up his own esteem by comparison. But let's keep two important points in mind here: First, the facts of Fox News' bias and disregard for journalistic evidence doesn't make that criticism equally applicable to every individual within the organization, or every instance of reporting by it. And second, Fox News is only the worst individual player in the entire, overwhelmingly shitty industry that is the modern news media.

The current story, in short, is thus: Fox News anchor Jennifer Griffin made a dubious report about the Libyan government utilizing journalists visiting the Gaddafi compound were effectively used as human shields. This prompted Nic Robertson to deride the report and accuse Fox of "lies and deceit" before moving to attacks on Steve Harrigan, Fox's only correspondent in Libya, whom he implied was a lazy, hands-off reporter. Harrigan has subsequently shot back, explaining his journalistic practices, his rationale for not visiting the aforementioned compound, and describing Robertson's own journalism as "Bullshit."

What that journalism entailed in this case, for Robertson and for numerous other reporters, was getting on a bus tripped organized by the Libyan Ministry of Information in order to tour a bombed site. Harrigan has claimed that such trips occur almost every day, and has described them as essentially propaganda, and as often being a waste of time. In light of that commentary, Robertson was evidently also irked that Harrigan sent a member of his staff to gather footage at the site, without going himself to report on it first-hand.

You know what? That seems like the appropriate delegation of responsibility for a competent journalist working in tight conditions. I see no reason why Harrigan should have been personally present to a trip led by one side of the conflict he's supposed to be covering. If the regime wants to try to lead the narrative, I praise the reporter who exploits that effort to gather resources for the story while focusing his personal attention elsewhere.

What gets to me about Robertson's position is that he's taking a self-righteous stand in favor of the ineffectual habits that have become endemic in journalism since the first Gulf War, when most reporters stuck to designated "press pools," and utilized direct access to the US government and media as their sole means of information-gathering. Since then, it seems that in foreign conflict, and indeed in every story whatsoever, the role of the media is simply to parrot official sources. The notion of pounding the pavement and gathering information from diverse people and places seems to be lost on most modern reporters. And the fact that people like Robertson take umbrage with those who object to media excursions amidst those who have only one side of the story to tell just goes to show that bad reporting has become so normal, so accepted, that its actually considered wrong to do anything else.

I'm not saying that Harrigan is an exemplar of good journalism. I'm just saying that he's probably trying to do the best he can, considering that he's the only correspondent in Libya from his news organization, and has to make live reports from his hotel roughly every half hour. So I think he's right when he says of Robertson's criticisms:

I can stand outside my balcony and report what I see," he said. "I can talk to people about what they see...but for someone to say I'm lazy who doesn't know me, who's not in our working condition, who doesn't know our schedule...this guy has a screw loose! (Source)

In short - and it's absolutely tragic that this is the choice we're left with as media consumers - I'll take no reporting over awful reporting. And even if Robertson is getting the better story out for CNN than Harrigan is for Fox, unless he's stepping into the combat zone to report on events first hand, and talking to people on the ground, he has no business criticizing anyone else for not properly doing his job as a journalist. There are precious few journalists left who are doing their jobs properly, and those few are heroes, and they don't need to lash out at their competitors to present themselves in a better light.

Again, I'm firmly in Harrigan's corner when he says:

Is that heroic what he’s doing? He puts on his blue blazer and gets on the government bus, and then pats himself on the back and calls that news? Bullshit.

Yes, it's bullshit. No better than the bullshit that Harrigan's outlet peddles every broadcast day. It's all part and parcel of the standard operational bullshit of the modern-day news media.

So the breaking point that I'm most hoping to come out of this is two-fold. I'd like reporters to realize that if your organization is better than another, it's no grounds for a self-righteous conviction that you're better than any member of that organization. And over and above that, I'd like them to realize that if one organization is better than the absolute worst in the business, that doesn't mean that it's any damn good.

Additional Sources:
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