The Death of the Liberal Class foreshadowed our current collapse in social cohesion

Some years ago, I started reading but did not finish Chris Hedges' book The Death of the Liberal Class. (liberal of course meaning classical liberalism, not left-of-center politics)

Published in 2010, it described the collapse in credibility of the public institutions that long served as the foundation of western liberal democracy. This collapse has led to the comprehensive pan-ideological breakdown in social cohesion that we've experienced the last several years, which has been laid even more bare by the pandemic. 

This breakdown was accelerated by the Trump presidency, who exploited it mercilessly to get (s)elected in the first place. But the unraveling did not start with Trump's inauguration and will not end with his long overdue eviction from the White House. I think it's time I picked the book back up.

How the media feeds tribalism

American journalism has taken a beating in the last year, to a large extent by those angry that it's doing its job. "Fake news" has come to be a lazy slur toward any story that reflects poorly on one's tribe.

But what's obscured is the culpability of the increasingly large part of the media that no longer engages in journalism. The part whose sole purpose is to give microphones to divisive windbags and blowhards reading the Script of their tribe.

Most of this part of the media is stuck in the binary narrative that essentially reduces everything to a zero sum gain. It is tribalism plain and simple.

There is no more effective recipe for division than convincing people that social and economic progress is a zero sum gain.

The biggest loser of this presidential election: journalism

I’ve been saying for a long time that the decline of journalism would have a major impact on civic life in America. It was not an original though... Chris Hedges even wrote a book about it. 

This decline did not start in 2016 nor did its effects.

My dad pointed out the start of this trend about 20 years ago. It was reinforced to me when I lived abroad and listened on shortwave to foreign radio stations and noticed how differently they covered issues.

The decline is essentially the increasing emphasis on polls and “analysis” and opinion at the expense of in-depth factual reporting. Journalism has become less about revealing what’s going on beneath the surface and mostly dominated by parroting of superficial conventional wisdom. It’s shallow b.s. and the media that pats itself on the bdack as watchdog is suffocated by it.

For the last several years, Nate Silver has been canonized by adherents of the analysis school of “journalism.” I think only a week before the election, I checked his site. It said that Hillary Clinton had at least a 95% chance of winning (might have been 99%). It said that she had 268 electoral votes in the bag and Trump 210. And that basically Trump had to win every single swing state, bar none, to win the election. Clinton will end up far short of even that 268 that Mr. Infallible predicted. He epitomizes the failure of modern journalism. He’s a statistician yet the media treated what he did as journalism.

Trump/Pence’s fascist bigoted agenda was only endorsed by one of every four Americans. Trump is our president but the overwhelming majority did not endorse his agenda. Only one of our four

Nearly half of all Americans did not vote. This shows how sick our democracy is far more so than the identity of the winning ticket. The media only reports on two choices. And despite overwhelming disgust with those two, they almost completely ignore the two (national ones) that offer something meaningfully different. “Conventional wisdom” was that you were wasting your vote if you voted for a smaller party candidate. Even on those rare occasions a smaller party candidate gets media attention, there is NEVER an occasion where s/he isn’t asked about being a “spoiler” or chances of winning or other horse race garbage. S/he is lucky if meaningful policy discussion is even half of the interview.

So when you are told that your choices are to waste your vote on a good candidate or support someone you find morally repugnant, it is any surprise nearly half of Americans said “the heck with all this”? When they find out that the person who gets the most votes doesn’t win – unlike EVERY OTHER OFFICE IN AMERICA – it makes the process seem even more pointless. When “experts” and the professional pundit class tell them must vote for the “lesser of two evils” and to vote for A because B sucks even more, does that really inspire them with a deep sense of patriotic and civic pride?

If you want those half of Americans to actually vote, don’t lecture them. Don’t condescend to them. Give them a positive reason to do so.

 

Sloppy Post-Star's death by a thousand (self-inflicted) cuts

I know quality control at the Post-Star has become pretty close to non-existent but this is inexcusable even by their standards.

They ran a front page graphic earlier this week which claimed that teachers at Warrensburg missed an average of 10.6 days per year per teacher. This was far higher than any other local school, so obviously it gave the district a black eye.

Then the paper ran a correction - buried in middle of the paper in a tiny segment - stating that OOPS they had used an incorrect data point and that Warrensburg teachers had actually missed only 3.27 days per year per teacher. This was well within the norm of local schools. 

So what did they do yesterday? The print edition* re-ran the old graphic with THE DATA THAT THEY THEMSELVES HAD STATED WAS WRONG.  

(*-this has been corrected in the online edition)

Incidentally, this discredited table was paired with a deceptive editorial using a troubling national statistic and implying that it was a problem locally, even though local numbers are 1/2 to 2/3 lower.

This is what you get in product whose price has doubled in recent years. 

Mainstream journalists like to tell themselves that newspapers' implosion is due to the increased desire for commentary and contempt for objective journalism. And to a large extent, that's true. But there's also a large number of people who see sloppiness like this and no longer see the use in spending their money on an entity with a credibility suffering a death by a thousand self-inflicted cuts.

Neutrality is killing journalism

I was watching the public TV show New York Now. They conduct a yes/no poll question on their website during the week. On the show, they show the results of the poll and selected answers. They always show one pro- and one con- or two pro- and two con- answers. They do this whether the poll results were 53-47% or 91-9%. A small thing but illustrative.

One of the three things that is crippling modern journalism is the conflation of the principles of neutrality and objectivity. Most feel journalism's goal should be objectivity; most journalists claim the same if you ask them. Yet in practice, the goal increasingly seems to be neutrality, little more than transcription.

Neutrality is telling the truth. Objectivity is telling the whole truth (or as close to it as resources allow). Objectivity is "Serbs committed an estimated 90% of the atrocities in the Balkans wars and Bosnians 10%." Neutrality is "Both sides committed atrocities." Both statements are factually correct. But the former is clearly a greater reflection of the truth.

I think news organizations have largely abandoned objectivity in favor of neutrality/transcription because activists of all stripes wage relentless campaigns of accusations of bias. If you report anything negative about any group or organization, you will be accused of bias against that group. Neutrality becomes the easy way out, as you can say you were reporting equally on both sides. Unfortunately, this insistence on the lesser truth has devalued journalism to the point where increasingly few numbers of people feel it worth paying for.

Print newspapers are dying... just follow the (ad) money

At North Country Public Radio's In Box blog, Brian Mann posted an interesting graphic which highlighted the flow of advertising dollars away from the traditional print media toward online sources. It provoked an interesting discussion, but it shows the decreasing relevance of newspapers. And that's unfortunate.

The problem with the newspapers is that the main product is fundamentally the same as it’s been for a long time even as the broader media landscape has transformed radically.

Sure, newspapers added bells and whistles like websites, video, Twitter and blogs. Journalists themselves are absolutely doing things a lot differently. But the core product, the print newspaper, is fundamentally unchanged. And that's why the industry is dying.

The typical local newspaper contains some local news. Lots of canned wire service news stories, often shortened into meaninglessness. Tons of syndicated features. Press releases. You’ll notice that all of the stuff, save the first, is identical to what you can get elsewhere for free.

Newspapers have adapted to the changing reality via the (often free) bells and whistles but they haven’t adapted the core product that they’re all asking people to pay money for.

They need to recognize that people are getting their national news elsewhere. They’re getting their infotainment elsewhere. They’re getting their sports scores and standings elsewhere. They're getting their movie listings and recipes elsewhere. The print newspaper can’t compete with other media in these areas. They need to focus like a laser beam on what makes them truly unique: LOCAL news and other local content.

Sure, they will say “Blah blah blah we do x local stories each day” devoid of context. One weekday print issue of the Post-Star, I counted every single story and tagged it as created by a staff member or not. About 40% of the stories were created by one of their journalists. I’m not picking on the Post-Star (they’re just the one I read every day). Most smaller newspapers are like this. Many have a much lower percentage of local content.

Newspapers are losing money because they aren’t offering enough original, unique content to  make people think, “I *can’t* not read the paper today because I will miss stories I can’t get anywhere else.” Most local papers don’t have nearly enough of those stories. They need to re-direct their resources. 

Slash syndicated features to the bare minimum (people freak out about puzzles and cartoons so keep those and the better op-ed columnists but get rid of the syndicated fluff stories). Get rid of all other wire service content. Take all that money and re-direct into more and more local content.

Sclerotic 'experts' may say it’s crazy. But when your industry is in a death spiral, not be willing to risk big changes is what’s crazy.

An inconvenient truth

Earlier this month, The Post-Star's Will Doolittle published a blog entry regarding a Syracuse Post-Standard article on the Adirondack Park Agency and the Adirondack Club and Resort in Tupper Lake. Doolittle, a long time harsh critic of the Agency and of green groups, criticized the central New York daily for shallow, 'he said, she said' journalism. He goes on to add further 'context' that the Syracuse paper should have, in his opinion, included about how the environmentalists were wrong.

I left a comment on the PostStar.com blog saying that Doolittle was essentially attacking the Syracuse paper for not pushing his personal viewpoint. I also pointed out that the shallow 'he said, she said' transcription (not journalism) is a staple of most newspapers and broadcast outlets, including The Post-Star itself. Maybe that's why the daily doesn't do any reporting on Fred Monroe's taxpayer-funded anti-APA activist group.

I guess the comment hit too close to home. The comment has not been published more than two weeks later.

The 'suffocating, self-imposed conformity' of political reporters

The Common Dreams website ran a great essay on the stultifying reporting (not to be confused with journalism) of the presidential campaigns. It describes the corporate media's 'suffocating, self-imposed conformity of reporters and commentators' which results in an obsession with tactics and particularly the facile horse race/polling punditry - all at the expense of serious, issue-based journalism. The conscious blacklisting of smaller party and independent candidates is also mentioned.

Media corruption and sycophancy

A couple of recent stories highlight the current ethical state of the corporate media.

Yapping head David Gergen, a senior analyst at CNN, came under fire for not being sufficiently transparent about his ties to Bain Capital, the private equity firm once lead by GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney. In addition to yapping about the current presidential race, Gergen has been a spinmeister in the administrations of presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton.

The Huffington Post reported: Gergen, while acknowledging his "bias" on Monday [July 16], wrote how he's "come to admire and like the leaders of Bain Capital" because the firm "stands out for the respect in which it is generally held and for the generous philanthropy of some of its partners."

Commentator Andrew Sullivan said this embodied "what's wrong with the press corps."

And he's right. This is hardly the first time the corporate media has offered openly biased observers, under the guise of objective analysts, with financial ties to topics they were discussing. 

There are many other examples but the most infamous recent one was during the aggression against and occupation of Iraq. The War Department hired a number of retired senior military officials to spout the party line. They were presented on cable news [sic] shows as objective, credible analysts, not paid flacks of a Pentagon propaganda campaign.

I suppose this isn't surprising since, while liberals like to single out Fox, there is precious little journalism on any of the so-called cable news channels. It's all speculation and analysis... apparently corrupted analysis.

But there is a different form of corruption, which shows the degree to which the 'watchdog' media is in bed with, or perhaps afraid of, those it's supposed to be watching.  

The Guardian, much derided by one regular reader of this blog but a much more vigorous watchdog than any daily in this country, reported that several major US media outlets have been submitting quotes to the campaigns of President Obama and Mitt Romney for approval before publication. The UK daily cited The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times as papers who were reviewing this policy.

The Guardian reported: Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University agreed that "this is not a new problem", but said it had got worse.

"There have always been sources that tried to win these terms, and lately more and more have succeeded. What was new and significant in the Times story was that quote approval is now the norm for a whole layer of campaign sources; most of the reporters working the beat had already come to terms with that, the Times suggested."

Rosen said that reporters told him that the process has been building for years under George Bush and now Barack Obama.

It is not clear why this was done. But the corporate media has shown that it prizes one thing above all else: access. It doesn't seem to care if it actually uses that access for any sort of public service, as long as the reporters (not all of them act as journalists) get invited to fancy parties and White House comedy jam sessions. I suspect the quote approval abdication of duty was done to preserve this meaningless access.


In an industry that pats itself on the back as the national guardian of transparency and questioning - the party line is the democracy would collapse if such sycophantic reporting disappeared -  the degree to which the big corporate media outlets themselves are compromised would shock a lot of people.

Then again, given the decreasing respect in which the media is held, maybe it wouldn't.  


Update: James Fallows has a good column on how the media will have to start understanding the difference between 'objectivity' and 'neutrality.' It's telling how truly substantive investigative reporting - Fallows for The Atlantic, Seymour Hersch for The New Yorker, Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone and independent author Prof. Chalmers Johnson - is all found outside the context of daily newspapers and television.

Also, for those interested, Prof. Rosen is on Twitter.

How the media priorities can prevent an informed citizenry

Why do fewer and fewer people think the local newspaper is relevant enough to fork out a dollar of their hard-earned money? 

Here’s a clue. 

The front page of Thursday’s Post-Star contained a wire service article about the sports program at Penn St. (a college hundreds of miles away) and a millionth generic wire service ‘analysis’ of the presidential race (as usual ignoring 2/3 of the candidates).

The front page did not a word about a significant boil water notice affecting 14,000 people in the paper’s hometown. That was deemed too minor to make the front page and was relegated to the local section. 

This is a pretty accurate reflection of the editorial judgment of the paper’s decision makers.

The national media is little better. The Progressive reported on a study by Media Matters. The study noted that in the last 18 months, the Kardashians have received 40 times more coverage in newspapers and television than ocean acidification, one of the major consequences of climate change.

Only in America would more people believe in the Kardashians than in climate change. Though for people who rely on the corporate media to be informed, it's easy to understand why.

Organic food turns people into jerks, and other deceitful headlines

Recently, a news story made the rounds about a study that concluded that organic food turns people into jerks. NBC News' Today show was one of many mainstream media that ran virtually identical headlines on this topic.

This instance of media bias may have been merely sloppy headline writing or some overworked copy editor in search of a good headline, but the effect was to mislead readers. It's a perfect example of how merely consuming the news media, even generally respected sites, can make you LESS informed, not more, if you do so uncritically.

The headline implies that eating organic food turns people into jerks, according to the study. But when you actually read the articles and use those critical thinking skills, you find out that the subjects don't actually EAT any organic food. They are merely SHOWN PICTURES of organic food.

So an intellectually honest headline would read, "Does *seeing pictures* of organic food turn you into a jerk?"

What's worse is that none of these news outlets bothered to raise questions about the credibility of research on the effects of organic food where none of the subjects actually ate organic food as part of the study. How such a flimsy study got such wide and uncritical media play perhaps creates a greater suspicion of media bias.

Polls show we're not doing our job

This morning, North Country Public Radio just did a news brief, about 30-ish seconds, about (what else) a pol -- this time,l showing that hardly any New Yorkers knew anything about the primary challengers to NY Democratic US Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. I have heard similar polls relating to Massachussetts' Democratic US senate candidate Elizabeth Warren's primary challengers. Is it possible that this is because the mainstream media refuses to do any actual reporting on said primary challengers?

Will local newspapers adapt or die?

New Orleans has become the latest (and biggest?) major city in the United States to cease having a daily newspaper. The Times-Picayune, celebrated for its work and investigative journalism during and after Hurricane Katrina, will now publish in print only three days a week.

Will other dailies, especially smaller local and regional ones, evolve or will they keep patting themselves on the back and telling what’s left of their readership “You’ll miss us when we’re gone”? So far, they've preferred the latter.

Most seem to think 'evolving' constitutes posting videos on their websites. When I visit a newspaper website, it doesn't even occur to me to watch a video -- that's not what I go there for -- unless someone I know has told me they're in it. I don't know of anyone who does otherwise. 

This is really part of the smoke-and-mirrors (or razzle-dazzle lasers) approach most papers are taking to avoid truly transformative action that might actually save their business. Videos. Semi-paywalls. Giving blogs to people who already have columns. None of this matters.

Truly revolutionary change in the newspaper industries would be for local newspapers to focus on *local* news. Drop the wire service for everything (except for the cartoons and puzzles which I guess people freak out about if messed with). Take the money you save and use it to invest in more local reporters and better local journalism.

The national and international news they publish is half-a**ed crap written which is usually hacked for space reasons to the point of being... well... pointless. No one *pays* for The Post-Star or Saratogian for national or international news, when they can get the same stuff for *free*, and much better quality, from hundreds of different websites or, for that matter, on television. 

Local papers ought to focus exclusively on local content. Why? Because that's the one thing that's truly unique. It's the one thing they offer that people, particularly in smaller areas, can't get anywhere else. If it's truly unique, they're more likely to be willing to pay for it. If a newspaper is 30% unique customer and 70% stuff you can get for free else where, it diminishes the value of the entire product. If the newspaper is 90% or 100% unique content, then it has a much greater value to the potential customer.

Most newspaper people will read this and adopt the ostrich approach. They will call me naive and say "I don't understand" blah blah blah. Well, there is one thing I do understand. Circulation numbers for most papers are down, some way down. Some papers, even major ones, are going out of business or ceasing to be dailies. That's not me talking. That's the market talking. The band-aid-on-a-flesh-wound strategy isn't working. This isn't the time for the timid newspaper man. They'd better act. And they'd better act boldly and decisively before the newspaper ostriches go the way of the dodo.

Update: Also, it's not exactly the smartest business strategy to tut-tut commenters to your newspaper website for their poor spelling and then misspell (or not bother to notice the copy-pasted misspelling of) the name of your paper's own city, as did "Glen Falls" Post-Star editor Ken Tingley.


Also see: my earlier essay The Decline and Fall of the Newsprint Empire.

Buy A Falling Star

by contributor Mark Wilson

Part of a series on the troubles at The Post-Star and its parent company Lee Enterprises.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations has released paid newspaper readership figures for the six month period ending March 31. The report brings more hard news for the Glens Falls Post-Star. With average daily circulation standing at 24,578, the paper showed a loss of 1,455 paying readers since last October. Compared to a year ago, the average daily circulation is off 1,029 or roughly 4 percent. This places the Post-Star in the middle of the pack of nearby newspapers—the Albany Times Union showed a slight gain in paid readership over last year, while the Saratogian and Troy Record reported heavier losses of 5.7% and 7.5% respectively. Of the four regional papers, only the Post-Star showed deteriorating numbers in the second half of the past twelve month period.

With the latest report, the Post-Star has officially broken below the 25,000 average daily circulation level, a threshold which many organizations recognize when bestowing annual newspaper awards. With the general collapse of newspaper circulation over the past decade, the number of newspapers occupying the under 25,000 category has swelled, far surpassing occupants at higher levels.

While the Post-Star’s circulation losses are middling in comparison with neighboring papers, its performance against the rest of the newspapers owned by Lee Enterprises were considerably worse. Over the past six months, the Post-Star suffered the third highest percentage circulation losses of all fifty papers owned in whole or part by Lee. Perhaps of greater concern, against the firmament of Lee papers, the Post-Star has dropped farther than any other over the past five-and-a-half-years, dropping from the twelfth largest Lee property in October 2006, to twentieth (the ranking figures in the accompanying table take into account the various Lee properties that either merged or were sold over the years).

The Post-Star’s harrowing circulation drop might well explain why the newspaper moved so suddenly at the end of April to subscribed access for its online content: while plenty of people may be reading the Post-Star, fewer and fewer are buying it.

Hitting the Paywall: The Post-Star and other Lee properties resort to fee-for-online content

Part of a series on troubles at The Post-Star and its parent company Lee Enterprises

by contributor Mark Wilson

The Post-Star of Glens Falls announced in Monday’s editions that as of midnight May 1, they will charge a subscription for access to most online content. Officials at Lee Enterprises, Inc.—the Post-Star’s Davenport Iowa-based corporate parent—announced in late March that most of the company’s 48 daily newspapers would erect a paywall before the end of the year. The announcement comes at a precarious time for the Post-Star, Lee Enterprises and newspapers in general. Over the past decade, the industry has been staggered by numerous body-blows, many delivered by online and mobile technologies; some, sadly, self-inflicted. National, local retail and classified advertising, once roughly three quarters of Lee’s operating revenue dropped by over 40% between the second quarter of 2006 and the most recent second quarterly report released in early April. While part of that loss can be blamed on the national recession (income which may eventually return) most of the missing ad revenue has been steadily raided by national online advertising engines like Google, Groupon, Monster and Craigs List. That revenue is gone for good. As reported in earlier installments, much of Lee Enterprises’ financial woes stem from its wildly over-leveraged and over-priced purchase of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (and the rest of the Pulitzer chain of newspapers), overseen by CEO Mary Junck and CFO Carl Schmidt in 2005. The resulting debt landed the company in bankruptcy court at the beginning of this year. The court-ordered reorganization seems only likely to prolong a grim reckoning for another few years.

At the annual meeting of Lee shareholders in March, corporate directors rewarded Junck and Schmidt with $500,000 and $250,000 bonuses, respectively, for piloting the company through a “successful” bankruptcy. While this amounts to an insignificant fraction of Lee’s annual costs, at a time when Lee headquarters was ordering damaging layoffs at papers across the country, the bonuses attracted unwelcome attention.

At the local level, the fiscal mess in Iowa has translated into increased layoffs (diluting valuable local content) and increased prices passed along to the consumer. Either one of the increases would be a tough sell to a readership in the grips of a national recession. Combined, they constitute an assault on even the most dedicated or dependent audience.

In April 2010 the Post-Star doubled the newsstand price of its print editions, little more than a year after laying off 15.5% (25) of its listed staff (business and editorial). Post-Star circulation losses of 4.62% the year of the layoffs ballooned to 10.58% after the price hike—the fourth worst circulation losses in Lee’s entire portfolio. Needless to say, loss of paying readers only compounded advertising revenue losses.

Of course, two years ago much of the paying Post-Star readership could easily retreat to the free content available at PostStar.com (visits to which have been growing steadily for years). The hope underlying yesterday’s erection of the paywall is that the paper will manage to reconvert enough of these online free-readers into paying news consumers, thereby reversing circulation revenue losses (which—in context—are still only 6.6% of advertising losses).

The success of this plan or its failure—a potentially accelerated migration of readers—hinges on the outcome of two major uncertainties: The first is what role increased free-print and online competition in the Post-Star’s circulation region—NCPR, Adirondack Almanack and Denton Publications to the north, Saratoga Today, WAMC, the Times Union and YNN (Time Warner Cable) to the south, and the Chronicle within the city—will have in providing Post-Star readers with satisfactory alternatives. The second is how the Post-Star’s most recent layoffs—including the closure of its Saratoga Bureau and the attenuation of its northern coverage—might undermine readers’ loyalties in those vulnerable regions.

Statistically, the answer to these questions will begin to emerge in six months when the Audit Bureau of Circulations reports semi-annual circulation and online activity numbers.

Anecdotally, the answer may be more immediate. The Post-Star’s report yesterday of the paywall’s imminent introduction drew a high volume of comments from online readers. By six o’clock yesterday 82 readers had registered 94 reactions. A casual count of those comments showed roughly three of every four commenters objecting (a majority forcefully) to the move with one of every eight either resigned to or tepidly in favor of the move.

Post-Star to go behind paywall

In news predicted on this blog last month, The Post-Star announced that starting tomorrow, it was putting most of its online contentbehind a metered paywall, similar to the system used by The New York Times. According to the daily, readers will be to access for free 15 articles a month. Further articles will require an online subscription, whose cost varies depending on length and whether the user is also a print subscriber.

How theft by newspapers affects professional writers

guest essay by Lawrence Gooley

I make my living selling what I write and publishing books for others as well. If you have a job, your healthcare, gas money, mortgage, heating, electricity, phone, internet, TV, groceries … all of it and more comes from your paycheck. My “paycheck” comes from stories and books that I sell. I create each one and have to sell each one.

Many of my stories appear in full or are excerpted on Adirondack Almanack and NY History Blog as per my agreement with those entities, and those works also appear as chapters in my books. My recent book, Adirondack & North Country Gold: 50+ New & True Stories You’re Sure to Love, is an example, containing 51 of my original works. Before summer, I’ll be releasing a similar collection of true murder stories. When those stories appear online, it is not for public reuse. It is copyright protected material, and is my livelihood.

A few years ago, I exchanged emails for two months with a newspaper editor (representing several newspapers and editors). The discussion was about hiring me to write history stories for their publications on a weekly basis. They reviewed samples and expressed great interest (and I retain copies of those communications). However, in the end, the economic downturn was given as the reason they couldn’t hire at that time.

Recently, two of my pieces in their entirety appeared in those same newspapers, both in print and online. My name is mentioned with the articles, but there were no links to me in the online version and there was no other mention of my input. Nothing … just “by Lawrence P. Gooley.” I received no payment, and wouldn’t even know I had been “robbed” had I not found it myself by searching online. The editor obviously knew that Lawrence P. Gooley had not sent them that article for publication, and they in fact include mention of the person who sent it to them. Due diligence, and it’s quite simple, is to contact the author. His name, after all, was on the piece. In this case, the person who alerted them to the piece received as much credit as the actual author who did all the research and writing.

In an instance like that, I’ll contact the source, explain my position, and open the possibility of paying me. If that doesn’t work, I’m prepared to go to small claims court, where I will present the evidence and ask for damages encompassing payment for the article, PLUS the time required to communicate in sometimes lengthy emails, and the cost of gas to travel back and forth to court. I often work 12-18 hour days, and time is money. Dealing with theft of materials carries a financial cost for me.

Taking my material for their own use is no different from taking $200 out of my wallet. It is my work, and considerable expense is involved in producing it, including memberships to a number of newspaper archives, genealogical sites, and history sites. For one story, often 50 or more sources provide bits of information, after which the story has to be composed and written professionally. It’s then up to me to market, sell, and protect my work, a very time-consuming and difficult process.

I have three such cases to deal with at the moment. I’ve worked at various jobs over the years, and this is nothing different than someone else getting paid for work that they did not do. What’s worse is that often the people doing this are writers and editors, the very people who are fully aware that it is wrong and illegal. They KNOW a particular piece is not theirs, but decide to take it anyway, and it is used in their publication for financial gain, whether by selling the newspaper or selling advertising. There’s a word for that: theft. Sometimes it’s called “an accident,” which actually means the editor didn’t bother to check the source. In my case, I’m pretty easy to find. In other cases, it’s intentional, which is just plain wrong.

Lawrence Gooley operates Bloated Toe Enterprises, offering book publishing and web design, and features the North Country Store, an online vendor of regional books and other products. An award-winning author, he will soon release his eleventh book, and is a weekly contributor to the Adirondack Almanack and New York History blogs.

The Post-Star war on underage drinking (part 2)

by contributor Mark Wilson

Also see part 1

New York State keeps detailed motor vehicle accident statistics, compiling them year-to-year and county-by-county. Those data as well as the aggregate state figures compiled since 2001 are available online at safeNY.gov. The standards for data collecting and reporting have remained consistent since 2003, the year New York lowered the blood alcohol content standard for drunk driving, and the year the Glens Falls Post-Star initiated its policy on publishing names of teenagers busted for drinking.

Data in the following comparison are derived from police-reported accidents—collisions resulting in fatalities, personal injury or property damage. These records are more uniform within each region and over time than DWI ticketing, for example (another standard measure), which varies regionally and seasonally, skewed by periodic local crack-downs, check points, etc.

To get a sense of how the Glens Falls region’s statistics for underage drivers involved in alcohol-related accidents stacked up against the average statistics across New York, we set the number of alcohol-related-accident drivers aged twenty and younger both regionally and statewide against the number of alcohol-related-accident drivers from all age groups and compared the resulting percentages. A consistent drop in the regional percentage against the statewide percentage would suggest that the campaign was influencing underage drinking trends favorably.

The results
While eight years of data form no solid basis for statistical analysis, the regional numbers—despite countervailing swings in the middle years of the range—seem to track overall with the statewide norms (even to the point of convergence with state figures in 2009 and 2010, the most recent years evaluated). While this may not be enough of a statistical sample to determine failure of the Post-Star’s policy and overall campaign, there is nothing here to encourage their advocates, either.

Not surprisingly Post-Star editors have not brought statistical analysis to bear on their policy of shaming teenage drinkers. Nor have they cited the statistics in their periodic recommitment to the campaign. If anything they seem to be spurred onward by their own often overheated editorial rhetoric on the subject: “Underage drinking is dangerous and if you don’t believe me, I will show you the headstones.”

Ken Tingley publicly declared his own immeasurable standard for continuing the crusade:

“If there is one young person who learns the lesson, if there is one young person who gets grounded for life for embarrassing their parents, if there is one young person who pauses to consider whether to accept a beer at the next party because they don’t want to see their name in the newspaper, then it is worth it.”

There is little doubt, given the power and range of the Post-Star’s editorial voice, that the shaming policy and Mr. Tingley’s angry bluster have successfully reached any number of kids (and/or their parents). On the same token, given the contrary nature of so many adolescents, can anyone doubt that as many kids may have reacted (sadly) predictably to Mr. Tingley’s bullying and ignored the grim statistics, or worse, headed defiantly in the opposite direction?

The lack of movement of the underage drunk driving numbers against the backdrop of statewide figures suggests, at the very least, that some neutralizing backlash may be at work here.

The broader picture
One of the more troubling aspects of the Post-Star policy is its selective and asymmetric targeting of underage drinkers for the sake of reducing the deaths of young people in motor vehicle accidents.

In 2010 alcohol was the primary cause of 30.5% of all motor vehicle fatalities throughout all upstate counties across all age groups. Speed, by comparison, was the primary cause of 29.2%. The statistics in the three counties served by the Post-Star were quite different: In Saratoga, Warren and Washington counties alcohol was responsible for 20.6% of motor vehicle fatalities, claiming seven lives, while speeding was responsible for 35.3% of motor vehicle fatalities claiming twelve lives. Moreover, in 2010 speed caused 439 injuries across the three counties (31.9%), while alcohol caused only 174 (11.3%).

When you add to that the fact that teenagers are far less likely to drive drunk (accounting for 9.3% of all drivers in alcohol-related accidents statewide) and far more likely to speed (accounting for 22% of all speeding-caused accidents statewide), the math becomes clear: speeding—and not drinking—is by far the deadliest behavior by drivers young and old on our roadways. It comes as no surprise that the Post-Star is devoting none of its diminishing resources to publishing the names of speeders in an effort to embarrass them and their families in a misguided effort—no matter how well-intentioned—to alter their behavior.

Two final thoughts on this subject
This challenge to (and argument against) the Post-Star’s policy of publishing names of teenagers fined for drinking should not be interpreted in any way as condoning the behavior. While it may be a rite of passage—as even Ken Tingley concedes—it remains reckless as it ever was. When combined with driving it has abundant potential to be life-destroying. The sole concern of this post is that the approach undertaken nine years ago by the editor of the Post-Star to combat the issue may simply have made matters worse.

The Post-Star is in many respects a fine newspaper. It is, to be sure, a troubled newspaper belonging to a troubled corporation in a troubled industry in a weak economy. The last thing the editors and publisher of the paper should be doing at this stage is alienating its future readers and subscribers in a way that from any angle looks like a double standard. The Post-Star needs to descend from the bully pulpit and get back to its number one responsibility to the community: reporting news.

This article was published as part of a collaboration with the AdirondackAlmanack.

The Post-Star's war on underage drinking (part 1)

by contributor Mark Wilson

Ken Tingley is back in his bully pulpit. Two Sundays ago in his weekly column, the Editor of the Post-Star defended his newspaper’s policy of publishing the names of teenagers ticketed for violating underage drinking laws. In blunt and patronizing language, the crusading editor took on a recent South Glens Falls High graduate who had dared to leave a comment on the Post-Star's Facebook page objecting to the policy:

Mr. Mumblo was probably playing video games and reading comics when we reported the death of 17-year-old Jason Daniels in Warrensburg on May 18, 2003, and four months later, the death of 19-year-old Adam Baker, also in Warrensburg.

The policy was best described in a harsh editorial that ran on June 12, 2011, nearly eight years into the campaign:

Underage drinkers get their names in the paper. We publish the names of all kids arrested for consuming alcohol. We hope the embarrassment factor helps serve as a deterrent to parents and their kids. Not only does the kid’s name go in the paper, it goes on our website. And the Internet is permanent. So whatever they get caught doing today will follow them the rest of their lives.

From this it is hard to tell if the editorial board is angrier at the kids or their parents. The editorial proceeds to insult the children it hopes to protect:

Kids fib... Kids are lightweights... Kids are reckless... Kids are terrible drivers.

The final line of the editorial—A dead child is gone forever—reveals that the true target of the editorial (and the policy for that matter) is the parents; the humiliation of the children is merely a baseball bat to the gut to get their parents to pay closer attention.

Some HistoryOn June 15, 2003, as New York State prepared to drop the DWI blood alcohol content standard from .1 to .08 percent, and after a succession of fatal underage drunk driving accidents in the region surrounding Glens Falls, Ken Tingley wrote a column outlining the Post-Star's policy on reporting crimes:

Here is what are (sic) policies are now:

• We don't use the name of the child under age 16 charged with any offense - even if it is a felony - but we include the age, sex and town of residence. One exception: We will publish the name of any minor who is being prosecuted as an adult.

• We don't use the name of the child age 16, 17 and 18 if they are only charged with misdemeanors or violations, but we include their age, sex and town of residence.

• We do use the name of minors age 16, 17 and 18 if they are charged with felonies.

• We do use the name of anyone 19 or older charged with any offense if the crime is deemed newsworthy because of unusual or interesting circumstances.

• We've also left it up to the discretion of the editor to print the name of a minor if major crimes or unusual circumstances are involved.

The column concluded with hints of transition:

With the recent debate over underage drinking in our communities, we debated recently whether it might do some good to start listing the names of teens arrested for underage drinking. We currently do not print those names unless there is a felony charge.One of our editors suggested that we should print the name of all teens arrested, that the embarrassment of arrest might be an appropriate deterrent for a young person, that it might even bring a weightier meaning to some parents who don't seem to take the issue that seriously.It is something we will probably be looking at in the future.

The future arrived less than five weeks later when the Post-Star published the names and ages of six minors from Corinth who were charged with “the noncriminal violation of possession of alcohol by someone under 21.” The policy has remained in effect ever since.

According to data compiled by New York State, in 2003 the number of underage drivers involved in alcohol-related accidents in Saratoga, Warren and Washington Counties stood at 19. The number rose to 25 the following year and dropped to 17 in 2004. In both 2005 and 2006 the number of underage drunk drivers involved in accidents shot up to 42 and has been declining steadily toward the 2004 level since. 2010 is the latest year for which the state has compiled statistics.

In June 2008 after another cluster of alcohol-related traffic fatalities involving minors, the Post-Star ran an exasperated editorial under the headline “Message is not getting through.” It began:

We give up.

No one seems to be listening anyway.

Sanctimonious and preachy? Out of touch with reality? OK, we concede. You're right. Underage drinking is a rite of passage. A tradition. We all did it as kids. There's nothing that can be done to stop it. Kids are gonna do what kids are gonna do.So have it your way.

Naturally, the editorial does not give up and charges once more unto the breach to deliver the message. It ends with a poignant appeal to the reader not to let the newspaper abandon the crusade.

By this point, nearly five years along, the policy of outing teenagers charged with non-criminal alcohol violations —despite the absence of any evidence that it was doing any good— was so conflated with the broader cause of stopping underage DWI as to be inseparable. For all practical purposes, under guard of the sharp hyperbole of the Post-Star’s editorial position, unquestionable.

This article was published as part of a collaboration with the MoFYC blog.

Next, Part 2: Questioning the Unquestionable

The curious intersection of journalism, editorial agenda and loss of faith in the media

It's pretty clear from anyone reading Post-Star editorials is that the paper's agenda is devoted to making people believe that Adirondack Park Agency regulations are suffocating the (human) life out of the Adirondack Park. This is despite the statistical fact that the Park's population is growing *faster* that New York's population as a whole.

However, that agenda is also reflected in its supposedly objective news coverage. I've written about this before so I won't belabor previous points. But more recently, reporter Jon Alexander described Hamilton County as 'on the endangered list.'

Now, this was tagged as 'analysis' (ie: opinion) but it does give some insight into his point of view, which happily corresponds with the editorial board's agenda. In a column in Adirondack Almanack, John Warren took serious issue with Alexander's 'analysis.'

Yet in a purportedly objective news story yesterday (doesn't seem to be available online), Alexander notes that Saratoga County's population is growing while Most of the North Country continues to hemorrhage population...

(Again, don't forget the data you'll never see the daily report on)

But the graphic accompanying the article showed that from 2010 to 2011, Hamilton County lost 0.8% of its population, Essex County lost 0.3% of its population,Washington County lost 0.2% of its population and Warren County actually *gained* population. (And even Saratoga County's 'boom' was a modest 0.4%)

While these numbers aren't stellar, they hardly constitute a 'hemorrhage.' But when there's a narrative to conform to...

Additionally, Hamilton County lost 42 residents last year. If the county continue losing that many people every year, it would take 115 years for the 'endangered' county's population to run out. And there's no indication yet that this decline is a long term trend. Hamilton County *gained* population in every census from 1950 to 2000. And since the county was founded, its population has increased in 14 out of the 20 censuses. The county's population has had modest ups and downs in its history, but mostly ups.

But this is not the only seeming intersection of editorial agenda and journalism.

Another of the daily's agendas is its crusade against school spending, which it attributes to malefic and greedy teachers unions.

In an article on Friday (also not available online), education reporter Omar Ricardo Aquije described a meeting between the Glens Falls school board and residents regarding the district's proposed budget.

According to the article, both in text and graphic, the overall tax levy would remain identical from the current fiscal year to the next.

And yet, the jump headline on the inside page B5 blared "Residents question raises, tax increases."

I questioned this discrepancy in an email; the reporter indicated that his figures were correct and that the headline (typically written by layout people... or copy editors, assuming they still have any) was incorrect. The reporter wrote the story honestly. But the headline writer's mistake, was it incompetence or outright deceit? Neither reflects well on the paper's declining standards.

A correction ran in the following day's issue, as usual in print significantly smaller than the original wrong headline.

I don't have any evidence that this was intentional deceit on the part of the paper's backroom staff (I don't blame the reporter, since his text was correct). But this is a very significant error, given how sensitive a topic school budgets are in this area. It certainly undermines what's left of the paper's credibility when these sorts of significant 'errors' in purportedly objective articles just happen to oh so conveniently jive with the paper's editorial crusades.


But for its faults, at least The Post-Star isn't stealing material from regional blogs and writers. More on that later this week.

Update: Today, managing editor Ken Tingley tells us that credibility is key to what they do. No wonder they're in so much trouble.