Majikthise

Lindsay Beyerstein on CNN: "Stimulus II, The Reckonning" [Video]

Here's the link to my CNN appearance.

Lindsay Beyerstein on CNN at 12:15 EDT

Tune in live.

U.S. locks up asylum-seeking Mexican journo

Border journalist Charles Bowden has a gripping story in Mother Jones about a small town reporter who is forced to flee Mexico and seek asylum in the U.S. because his coverage offends the soldiers who are occupying his town as part of the president's war on the drug cartels.

The military is the biggest cartel in town, which is partly why the local general is so touchy about media coverage.

When the reporter, Emilio, arrives at the border with all his documents in order and his 15-year-old son in tow, he is immediately incarcerated in a private immigration prison:

What he gets is this: He is immediately jailed, as is his son. They are separated. He is taken to El Paso and placed in a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center run by Deco, Inc. He is deloused, given a blue jumpsuit, and set to work scrubbing floors for a dollar a day. He is denied bond, and no hearing is scheduled. Had he entered the United States illegally and then asked for asylum, he would be eligible for bond. But since he entered legally and asked for asylum at the port of entry he is kept in prison because the Department of Homeland Security declares that Emilio has failed to prove that he "would not pose a danger to the community.

Emilio eventually gets out, thanks to a crusading attorney, but only after an unnecessary ordeal.

Think how much it cost taxpayers to incarcerate this fully documented, law-abiding asylum-seeker and his young son.

Read "We Bring Fear".

WaPo, bring back Dan Froomkin

Damn. The Washington Post fired Dan Froomkin:

POLITICO learned today that the Washington Post has terminated its relationship with liberal columnist/blogger Dan Froomkin. Froomkin authored the "White House Watch" blog and was told today that the blog had essentially run its course. [...]

Froomkin was none too happy with the decision, telling POLITICO that he's "terribly disappointed."

"I was told that it had been determined that my White House Watch blog wasn’t 'working' anymore," said Froomkin. "Personally, I thought it was still working very well, and based on reader feedback, a lot of readers thought so, too. I also felt White House Watch was a great fit with The Washington Post brand, and what its readers reasonably expect from the Post online. As I’ve written elsewhere, (http://www.niemanlab.org/category/themes/danfroomkin) I think that the future success of our business depends on journalists enthusiastically pursuing accountability and calling it like they see it. That’s what I tried to do every day. Now I guess I'll have to try to do it someplace else." [Politico]

White House Watch is a terrific blog. I suspect that Froomkin's high-profile advocacy of accountability journalism dimmed his career prospects at the Post. Froomkin argued that journalists shouldn't be afraid to passionately call out bullshit when they see it instead of keeping up a bad faith facade that allows the reporter to write as if s/he finds all assertions equally credible.

Politico reports that bloggers from Andrew Sullivan to Glenn Greenwald to Wonkette are bemoaning Froomkin's ouster. Even the painfully cynical Gawker is crying foul. Add me to the list of deeply disappointed readers.

Froomkin is a very rare commodity--a skilled reporter who is also a talented blogger. He's a gem and the Post was foolish to let him go.

L.A. police union wants changes at San Diego paper

The next time someone holds up established newspaper corporations as bastions of structural independence compared to partisan media, I'll point them to this story:

The union representing Los Angeles police officers is pressuring the owner of San Diego’s main newspaper to change the paper’s editorial stance on labor issues or to fire its editorial writers.

The  feud is rooted in the recent purchase of the San Diego Union-Tribune by Platinum Equity, a private Beverly Hills firm.

Platinum relies on a $30-million investment from the pension fund of Los Angeles police officers and fire fighters, along with large sums from other public-employee pension systems around the state, to help fund its acquisitions of companies. As League President Paul M. Weber views it, that makes the League part owner in the flagging Tribune and League officials are none to happy with the paper’s consistent position that San Diego lawmakers should cut back on salaries and benefits for public employees in order to help close gaping budget deficits.

There's been a lot of talk lately about how to fund print reporting now that so many newspaper companies are going out of business. Two of the most popular alternative proposals are philanthropic/non-profit journalism and government funding. These options have been criticized as undercutting the independence of the media. If a foundation funds a newspaper, the news will reflect the agenda of the funders. There are ways to insulate government-funded media from political pressure, but the risk of bias can't be dismissed entirely.

The police union story illustrates certain structural biases in the current business model. If a paper is a corporation, its investors may have ideological as well as financial agendas.

The paper hasn't caved yet, and it's not clear whether the police union will carry the day--probably not this time, given the optics of firing op/ed writers after all this publicity. Still, it's worth thinking about how similar dynamics may be subtly or dramatically influencing coverage at papers around the country.

[HT: Boing Boing]

Speaking of journalists getting screwed: Columbia J-School vs. Erin Siegel

Photojournalist Erin Siegel says she was unfairly denied the chance to graduate with her class at Columbia J-School for turning in extra work at her thesis adviser's request.

Siegel got permission to work on the same project for her MA thesis and her book seminar. She even created a PowerPoint presentation explaining to her supervisors how she was going to break down the work. Siegel agreed to write a book and turn in an abridged version of that manuscript as a Master's thesis. The result was a 16,000 word manuscript.

At the last minute, Siegel's thesis adviser suggested that she submit the whole thing, instead of just a 5000-word excerpt. She did. When the book seminar prof found out, he accused Siegel of deciet and flunked her out of his course.

Do journalists deserve to get paid?

In a recent op/ed, media economist Robert G. Picard argues that journalists deserve low wages until they can elevate their output above that of a random person with a flip-cam: "Wages are compensation for value creation. And journalists simply aren't creating much value these days."

Picard posits that journalists deserve low wages because technological interventions have rendered their profession largely obsolete. He doesn't think journalists add much now that anyone can report the news on a blog.

Op/ed writers are in direct competition with blogs, but reporters aren't.

A professional reporter working a beat with institutional support and editorial supervision can generate a lot of value that a shifting cast of volunteer bloggers can't match. Sure, we can all think of examples where the media have been ineffectual or even destructive--but consider the sheer volume of reported information about the world around us that we consume like oxygen.

That's not to to denigrate bloggers, it's just that most of them contribute something different--typically, analysis and synthesis of published reporting. There are plenty of blogs that report the news, like TPM and the Center for Independent Media blogs--but these sites are staffed by paid reporters who work their beats as like any other journo.

Picard simply has his facts wrong. User-generated content hasn't eclipsed professional reporting or even presented serious competition. Occasionally, you'll see a viewer-submitted photo of a tornado or a forest fire on CNN, but the overwhelming majority of the visuals are still professionally produced.

He claims that journalism has become deskilled. If anything the opposite is true: The internet has enabled many non-journalists to hone reporting skills they might never have cultivated otherwise (cf. Marcy Wheeler). The supply of skilled journalists currently exceeds the demand, which drives down wages--but that's not the same as saying that the supply is excessive because anyone can now do the job.

News is a volume business. It simply takes time and money to generate the steady stream of content that we've become accustomed to from our newspapers. There are no shortcuts. We can't expect volunteers to pick up the slack by covering stories in their spare time. Reporting as we know it requires a certain amount of command and control. The reporters don't just decide what to cover based on their whims at the moment, they get assigned stories by an editor who has some larger vision of what the daily mix should look like. There's no way a distributed armies of volunteers will reliably attain that kind of coordination. If you want someone to reliably cover boring school board meetings you have to do it the old fashioned way: Paying them to do the job.

Just try to get your all your news from blogs. Pick any subject you like, crime, courts, the state house, Congress and try to piece together the events of today using only original reporting from independent, unpaid bloggers. I bet you can't do it. You'll find extensive discussion of the events of the day and probably come away much better informed than if you just sat down with a couple newspapers--but you'll find the professional reporting provides the raw material for the vast majority of news-oriented blogging. Newspapers also provide raw material for a lot of TV and magazine journalism, not to mention fodder for congressional investigations, open source intelligence, and more.

Obviously, the professional press is nowhere near as good as it could be. Part of the problem is that papers don't have the resources to underwrite ambitious investigations or employ experienced reporters with deep knowledge of their beats. As jouro-turned-TV-producer David Simon likes to say, you can't keep doing more with less.

For the most part, people aren't declining to pay for the news because it's not good enough. They're just hoping that someone else will pay for them.

It's not print journalists who are obsolete, its the business model that supports them. Newspapers used to be able to subsidize hard news-gathering with classified ads and color advertising supplements, but those revenue streams have dried up. Blame the killer Craigslist. 

Old school investigative reporting at the Village Voice

Props to the Village Voice for running not one, not two, but three solid investigative stories this week.

If local newspapers have a future, this is the kind of coverage that will keep them alive.

The first, by veteran investigative reporter Tom Robbins, explains how two buddies of the then-state comptroller essentially sold access to firms seeking investment from the state pension fund, which the comptroller oversaw.

The second, by Graham Rayman, unearths more details about the "fight club" in the adolescent housing unit at Rikers' Island.

The third and finest, also by Rayman, exposes the black market in New York cemetery plots wherein black market speculators, including major funeral service businesses, hijack ancient burial societies and sell off their graves.

Welcome New York Times readers

Eric Etheridge linked to my Observe and Report review in this morning's edition of the Opinionator.  

TIME critic raves for the "Observe & Report" rape scene

TIME film critic Richard Corliss delivers a review of the new comedy Observe & Report that's as disturbing as the rape scene excerpted in the trailer.

Corliss's review is really more of a review of the rape scene than a review of the movie. In short, he loved it:

Here's a scene to frighten the horses. About an hour into Observe and Report, mall cop Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen) has finally achieved his dream and taken the blonde, egotistical, doltish perfume saleslady Brandi (Anna Faris) to bed, basically by getting her drunk. Problem is, she's pretty much passed out, her puke staining the pillow, as Ronnie happily, obliviously churns away. He pauses for a moment to notice her comatose state, and without opening her eyes, Brandi mutters, "Why'd you stop, malefactor?" Or a 12-letter word to that effect.

Now that's character comedy, I mean tragedy, I mean tromedy, of the highest, I mean lowest, I mean high-lowest order. Beyond the weirdness, if you can get there, is a quick portrait of trailer-park America pursuing its urges by any means necessary. It's clear that Ronnie, no babe magnet, will take what he can get on this night of nights, even if it's not quite the exalted ecstasy he had hoped for; and that Brandi, who's been in this position once or twice before, wants the sexual exercise, even if she's not awake to take an active role in it — somewhere in her stupor, she's feeling a rote rumble of pleasure. The scene achieves what few American movies even attempt: to pinpoint the grim compromise, the desperation, that can attend the sex act. Don't call it love; don't call it grand; but whatever it is, don't stop. 

That minute or so is the finest thing in Observe and Report, and if it doesn't strike you as funny-peculiar, you may as well stop reading now. (Emphasis added.) [TIME]