McCain's complaint

The U.S. Senate voted 85 to 13 today to confirm Condolezza Rice as President Bush's new secretary of state. The 13 who voted against her, and who actually held up the confirmation vote for several days, included 12 Democrats and independent James Jeffords of Vermont. They said they held up the confirmation vote and voted no today because Rice shares blame for mistakes and war deaths in Iraq.

In criticizing those dissenters this morning, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said they voted against Rice and held up her confirmation just because they were sore (election) losers, since everyone knew there were more than enough votes to confirm, including those of 30 Democrats.

The AP quotes McCain as saying: "So I wonder why we are starting this new Congress with a protracted debate about a foregone conclusion."

My take: This whole nation is founded on the notion of debate, protracted or not, about every conclusion, foregone or not. Non-violent political dissent at any time should be respected, encouraged and welcomed, even if inconvenient to those who know what the outcome will be. Such dissent is the only basis on which foregone conclusions can be changed, on which people of principle can oppose the tyranny of the majority, on which history can judge the wisdom of government action.

How do you see it?

An online ombudsman???

Here's an interesting item from the blog of Scott Rosenberg, columnist for salon.com:
Software development teams have used bug tracking software for ages now -- why not journalists? But keeping it in-house, as the papers the Bee cites seem to do, limits the value of the approach.
I'm spending a lot of time these days around open-source software developers, and they take the logic of this approach one step further: Major open source projects maintain public bug databases. Anyone can come along and post a bug report. It's like opening a trouble ticket: developers will have a look, see if your complaint is new or duplicates an existing problem; over time the database provide a permanent record of the resolution (or non-resolution) of the issue.
The model doesn't map perfectly onto journalism, but it's not too far off: Let people file "bug reports" if they believe your publication has published something in need of correcting. The publication can respond however it seems appropriate: If the complaint is frivolous, you point that out; if it's a minor error of spelling or detail, you fix it; if it's a major error, you deal with it however you traditionally deal with major errors -- but you've left a trail that shows what happened. However you respond, you've opened a channel of communication, so that people who feel you've goofed don't just go off to their corners (or their blogs!) feeling that you're unresponsive and irresponsible.
I know this idea will horrify a lot of editors and reporters, but I think an adventurous newsroom could benefit from the transparency and the accountability. Maybe someone's already doing this out there -- if so, it would be great to see what we can learn.

Student Journalists Not Given Opportunity to Learn

Recently, two student editors at East High School in Pueblo resigned from their posts, claiming censorship by their principal. According to a report in the Pueblo Chieftain, the students said their principal decided not to distribute the Dec. 16 edition of their newspaper because he felt it promoted Christianity and did not include other religious views. The Chieftain reported that the principal said he didn't want the newspaper to be distributed because he was "concerned about the number of errors that were in it."

Regardless of why the principal chose not to distribute the newspaper, the fact is that his decision was wrong. While the issues of censorship and prior restraint are the most significant legal issues in this case, one must also look at the soundness of the reasoning behind the principal's actions. If his reasoning behind preventing distribution of the paper was because of errors--that he didn't want the school's reputation to suffer as the result of a poor-quality publication--he is doing a great disservice to student journalists and to journalism education in general.

We all learn from our mistakes; some would argue that we learn more from our mistakes than from our successes. Based on the news report, the material published in the student newspaper did not appear to be obscene or libelous, it did not portray any private figures inaccurately and it did not promote unlawful behavior. Preventing these students from learning the importance of accountability and taking responsibility for what they choose to publish seems to be an irresponsible--and uninformed--philosophy of journalism education.

Television Pundit Gets Paid to Promote Bush Education Policy, but Keeps the Dollars a Secret

Conservative pundit Armstrong Williams, who's been busy promoting the Education Department's "No Child Left Behind" policy on his own talk show as well as CNN and Fox, forgot to mention he was being paid $241,000 to sell the Bush education agenda.
Williams is a television and newspaper commentator and initially claimed he'd done nothing wrong by failing to disclose that he was being paid to promote the policy under the guise of being an independent and impartial observer who strongly supported the federal program.
After being grilled by CNN and MSNBC, along with print criticism, Armstrong retracted his earlier stance and apologized for not disclosing the financial relationship, saying that the public holds him to journalistic standards and he should not have accepted the money and wouldn't do it again. Unfortunately, perhaps a little too late for Williams. His reputation as a commentator who speaks for himself is now tarnished. There's a major difference between journalists and promoters. Community journalists attempt to limit they're bias and public relations folks often must admit to bias when communicating. Williams was perceived more like a journalist, at least up until now.

Two questions emerge from this incident, frankly, bigger than Armstrong Williams' role in it.

1. Is it ethical for a person to be paid to promote an idea?
Famous people are paid to promote products, services and ideas all the time. What's a key difference? We know they're being paid. Let the audience determine the validity of communication that's coming from a paid source. Williams didn't let his audience know the checks were rolling in. Information that comes from an informed and supposedly unbiased source is often perceived as more credible by the audience. THAT'S WHY WILLIAMS DIDN'T TELL!

For the record, the PRSA Code of Ethics clearly states that it is unethical for a public relations effort to communicate information in which the source isn't identified. No front groups allowed. No secret payments to people as spokespersons without disclosure.

Here's the more interesting question to pose:
2. Should the government use our tax dollars to pay people to promote its programs? Before you answer, how about this? DOES the government do this? Yes. Is it legal? Yes, as long as the government TELLS US the information is promotion and not objective journalism. Think about all the advertising and public relations efforts to promote the post office, military, and IRS. The voter has long determined that government should be allowed to have hired communicators to educate and inform citizens because of the complexity and mass impact of government policy.
However, the Bush administration is stretching "information" into "promotion" by twice producing promotional efforts relating to drug policy and medicare without disclosing they were paying for it.

Blogger fallout at CBS

2004 was the year of the blog, and the biggest blog story of the year was the "uncovering" of the shoddy reporting by Dan Rather and 60 Minutes in their segment on the President's National Guard service. Today the Washington Post is reporting that four executives, including Rather's producer Mary Mapes and 60 Minutes Wednesday executive producer Josh Howard, will be fired. According to the independent panel, the story was pursued with a "myopic zeal" which led to a story that failed to meet the network's standard of fairness. In response to the panel's findings, CBS President Leslie Moonves was quoted by the Post as saying that, "there were lapses every step of the way--in the reporting and the vetting of the segment and in the reaction of CBS News in the aftermath of the report." The "aftermath of the report" refers to the bloggers' dismantling of the facts reported by Rather. And if it wasn't for his announced retirement, Rather himself might be in a very difficult position.

This admission of failure by CBS should result in additional support for the notion of The Wisdom of Crowds (see the book by James Surowiecki), however there are still many questions to be answered. For instance, what is the role of bloggers and what should be their relationship to traditional newsgathering organizations? We still need reporters, fact-checkers, editors and publishers...but can the blogsphere be all that and more?