I just found out that John Stewart was in my fraternity, at the William & Mary chapter.
Neat. Yet another fraternity brother who’s vastly funnier than me. I’ll have to settle for being the second most famous Pike journalist, after Ted Koppel.
It looks like we’re having an intern for all of three days this summer, so I’ll be dropping my pearls of wisdom here, instead of in an intern’s ear.
At my first newspaper, the News Messenger of Christiansburg, Virginia, my editor was the inimitable Debbie Haerr. I was new to newspaper writing, having gone to college to become a disc jockey, and changed course towards becoming a television reporter after ending up in an Electronic News Gathering class. I had written a total of one newspaper article while I was in college, for the campus paper, but my folks were moving to Egypt and the TV stations weren’t calling (yet) and my girlfriend suggested I go ahead and apply to the News Messenger.
“What the hell,” Debbie said, for some reason. “I’ll give you a shot.”
It was an amazing time, where I would literally find myself improving in my writing and news gathering skills (two separate skill sets, as I’ll explain some other time) expanding on a daily basis. I was full of questions, and in Debbie, I was fortunate enough to have a willing mentor to answer them. Debbie had been an award-winning reporter right out of the chute in the Midwest, and was full of good insights.
Not surprisingly, as I had been a Communications major with a broadcasting concentration, I had never thought to take a shorthand class or anything like that. I had a great deal of trouble writing fast enough to keep up with people speaking, and as getting a quote right is incredibly important — even if the substance is right, being off on the wording undercuts the reporter’s credibility with that source to a degree — I asked her if I should get a tape recorder and record interviews.
“No. You won’t listen to what they’re saying if you tape.”
I thought about this.
That night, I went home to my basement apartment in Blacksburg and watched “The Arsenio Hall Show.” He was interviewing Michael Jordan, as I recall. If not Jordan, then some big deal NBA star who had been interviewed hundreds, perhaps thousands of times in his life, and was very comfortable with the process. Talk show guests are typically pre-interviewed by show staff who go over topics, find the best ones to ask about and prepare the good questions for the host on 3″ x 5″ cards. And Arsenio dutifully worked his way through the cards, asking the questions of Jordan. And Jordan, being a veteran interviewee, was funny and charming, and gave great answers, as he tends to do. And after he finished, Arsenio would ask the next question.
And then, Jordan stopped, slowly looking over at Arsenio.
“I just answered that.”
Jordan, it turns out, had jumped ahead in the conversation, expanding on the answer of one question and already giving the answer of what should have been the next question. Arsenio was flustered, and shuffled his cards nervously.
“You weren’t listening to me, were you?” Jordan asked, his mouth smiling, but not his eyes.
The upshot: I don’t use a tape recorder.
Next week at this time, we’ll talk “inside baseball.”
It’s not quite Faith the Vampire Slayer, but much of the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel will be returning to television next season.
Frankly, a lot of these look like dogs, but I remember critics saying that Friends would be dead by mid-season its first year, so who knows.
My heart goes out to all those affected by the bombings in London. It was a senseless, pointless, stupid, bloody act.
I’ve already gotten the heads-up that my London friend is OK, but I know many other people are not — 40 dead at this hour and more than 700 injured, and both numbers are still climbing. I can only hope that this is the worst of it.
Once again, I’m struck by what a massive miscalculation this sort of attack is, just as attacking the United States on 9/11 was a mistake. Watch our movies, world: John Wayne is our national self-image, and how do you think he would react when attacked? The British have endured decades of terrorism and capitulation is not how they respond to it.
A sort of brutal Darwinism is taking place here: Terrorists stupid enough to attack enemies who will strike back hard are going to find giant holes blown through their organization. Maybe the organization will carry on, maybe it won’t, but most of those responsible won’t be around to find out.
In any case, my deepest grief and sympathy for Londoners and the British in general. I am put in mind of Gail Simone’s wonderful post-9/11 essay (first published at CBR, and later reprinted in Marvel Comics’ “Heroes” charity book). To paraphrase what she said then, the people responsible for this atrocity thought they were striking at the heart of Britain.
They missed.
Nothing said on this site should be taken as representing the views of Freedom Communications or the Daily Press family of newspapers.
It would be fair to say that many journalists are upset about Time’s decision to turn over notes to a grand jury regarding the Valerie Plame leak.
That’s not because journalists don’t take what happened to her seriously — quite the contrary, all the journalists I’ve discussed it with realized how much potential impact this would have on her work and the lives of her contacts the moment Robert Novak released her name — or because journalists are lawbreakers as a category.
There is a fear, probably a legitimate one, that confidential sources will be less likely to speak to journalists if they know their names will come out in the end anyway. (They sure won’t be in a hurry to talk to reporters for Time.) As I noted recently, most journalists don’t want to publish stories featuring the words of a person who doesn’t want their name on the record. I’ve been in newsrooms where management actually forbade it, although given good enough reason, they’d relent.
Because sometimes there is a good reason: Let’s imagine that the local police department is rife with corruption, and a non-uniformed staffer has information to prove crimes have been committed. That staffer has a strong belief that her life would be in danger if she came forward to expose this information, and that filing charges would be just as bad and accomplish even less. So what does she do? She goes to a reporter and becomes an anonymous source.
Now, anonymous tips are used more often than they appear to be to readers and viewers, because the way journalists (and publishers, who are the ones who have to pay for the lawyers) prefer to use anonymous tips is as a springboard to getting information on the record from sources you can name. Much like tough love parenting, when you come to someone knowing the truth, very often, the people you confront fold and starting telling you the truth, even if it’s only pieces of it that you will have to assemble manually on your own. Used in this way, anonymous sources suffer very little risk of exposure, since the focus will shift to the people who speak on the record and give their names. But even here, there’s an initial risk involved — that anonymous source stuck their neck out, even if only briefly. (This is typically referred to as getting information “off the record,” but it really amounts to the same thing as an anonymous source.)
But sometimes, even that doesn’t work. Much like the teenager with icewater in their veins when confronted by their parents, often people with something to hide will be able to stonewall a journalist and they and their associates will present a united front. In those cases, the question of what to do becomes trickier.
I’ve been in more than one newsroom where I was told, typically with regret, but not always, that if I used an anonymous source, and ended up on the wrong side of the legal system, I was on my own, since the paper simply didn’t have the money to fight the legal challenge. (The public would likely be horrified if they realized how much of the local media operates just pennies from the red at all times.) And, while I realize this probably has a chilling effect on how aggressively reporters are willing to do their jobs (and aggression is sometimes necessary, even for those of us who realize you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar), it’s hard to argue with the papers’ position on this.
But it certainly isn’t the case with Time. So while reporters may not like using anonymous sources more than anyone else, if it’s felt to be necessary, they’d expect Time, if anyone, to be able to afford to back reporters up.
Myself, I don’t know how I feel: The Supreme Court made its decision, and I definitely respect the rule of law. I’m also someone who believes that democracy has been well-served on a number of important occasions by the use of anonymous sources. I do know it’s a mess and I do know that I’m surprised that Time made the decision they did.
In any case, I suspect this is far from over. There is a renewed push for a federal shield law, which would give certain uses of anonymous sources legal protection (31 states and the District of Columbia already have them), so we will likely hear more about this debate in future weeks and months, not to mention the eventual results of the Novak investigation.
For more on this, check out Yahoo! News’ Full Coverage of Media Issues, which is currently dominated by stories, editorials and related coverage of this case from a variety of sources.
KCRW’s To the Point also discussed the issue this week.
As if to provide an example of the other side of the anonymous sources issue, the LA Times gets publicly burned for trusting anonymous sources without rigorous fact-checking. Oops.
The Daily Press’ Opinion page ran this commentary by Kathleen Parker of the Orlando Sentinel as well as this editorial originally from the San Jose Mercury News.
The Christian Science Monitor weighs in.
It turns out that the Cleveland Plain Dealer is sitting on two stories of “profound importance” because of this issue. (Source.)
The July 8 edition of On the Media devotes about half of the hour-long show to this issue, including discussion of what sort of federal shield law at least one legal scholar thinks is a good idea.
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