Why should you pay money for newspapers?

Glancing at a copy of The Post-Star in Stewart’s today, I got a good insight as to why the industry is struggling. 

Grand pooh-bahs like Ken Tingley, so eager to pat themselves on the back, intone that newspapers are still valuable because of one thing: editorial judgment. You can get news for free in countless places. But what distinguishes the newspaper from the “Internet” is editorial judgment. That vaunted editorial judgment of the paper allegedly ensures that’s what's published in a newspaper is not only accurate and verifiable but also relevant to its audience. Editorial judgment is why they charge you a dollar.

The editorial judgment of the local Post-Star deemed worthy of front page coverage four stories today. One was about whether 4/20 should be a legal holiday in Colorado. One was the Vatican welcoming an Easter crowd. And one was about the Zimbabwe regime seizing land.

This is what the paper’s leadership thought would be relevant enough to entice upstate New Yorkers to view their product as good value for money.

The only local story was about a historic clock in Saratoga Springs.

Suffice it to say, I did not view this as worth a dollar of my hard earned money.

County Counting: Accuracy (if not openness) Counts at PostStar.com

by contributor Mark Wilson

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


Glens Falls Post-Star Editor Ken Tingley is having difficulty with arithmetic again. On PostStar.com last week, his Front Page blog post titled "Showing you is different than telling you" referred to "all 58 counties in the state" (NY). The post appeared Thursday afternoon. A reader comment pointing out the error Friday morning was never posted, and yet by noontime the error disappeared without a trace, replaced by the correct number (click image to enlarge).

As has been mentioned before in this series, the Post-Star and Mr. Tingley have an on-again-off-again relationship with professional journalism standards, particularly where online content is concerned. The About Us page at PostStar.com still promotes the newspaper as a "twenty-nine-thousand circulation, daily newspaper" even though the newspaper’s daily circulation dropped well below that level in 2010 (yet the same page has updated the awards the paper and its employees have received at least through 2011).

Of course this is not the first time Mr. Tingley has made mistakes on his blogs. He most famously twice used the term "proof readers" in a post (and comments) scolding commenters and letter writers for lax grammar. This, though, is the first instance we know of where a factual mistake was corrected after the fact without acknowledgement.

The level of professional journalism to which Mr. Tingley aspires has a low tolerance for ethical corner cutting. In its section devoted to accountability, the Society of Professional Journalists’ Ethics Code states: Admit mistakes and correct them promptly.*

Treatment of online errors is not a new issue to the profession. The American Society of News Editors addressed the subject in 2001.

In 2008 the Columbia Missourian devoted an entire blog to the topic, complete with historical context and a common sense comprehensive policy statement. It also addresses how severely the credibility of news organizations is damaged by lack of candor and transparency.

Three years ago, a commentary at the Columbia Journalism Review referred to an article at MediaBugs.org that advanced another set of common sense standards for correcting factual errors in online content, many of which had already been widely adopted throughout the industry.

None of the best practices advanced by journalism’s ethical watchdogs condone the sort of surreptitious content scrubbing that happened last week at PostStar.com.

For a newspaper that sells itself as a model of professional integrity and has built a reputation for shining light on less than transparent operations in public offices, the honorable and consistent recourse would be for Mr. Tingley and the Post-Star to adopt a firm set of online correction standards and post them prominently at PostStar.com. And then, of course, adhere to them.

Failing that, here are a few handy poses Mr. Tingley might strike while defending or explaining future lapses, should the question of New York State counties arise again:
The Global/Universal Posture: Its so hard to count them when they keep moving around—the constant rotating on the earth’s axis, and revolving around the sun. . .and don’t get us started on the ever-accelerating expansion of the universe!
The Hyperlocal Posture: Our news coverage is so close-to-home that we don’t give a hoot how many counties lie outside our circulation radius!
The Nativist Posture: We refuse to acknowledge the existence of Oswego, Otsego, Otisco and Otasco Counties until they give themselves English names!
The Where’s Waldo Posture: Dude, for a moment there we thought we were living in California.
The Taught-to-the-Test Posture: 58 out of 62 is 93.5%. We still get an "A."

Of course, when all else fails, there’s always the truth: Hey, I’m human. I made a mistake. I thought I knew a fact and I didn’t and I didn’t bother to have another editor read it before I sent it out over my name and under the Post-Star brand.

(Mark Wilson is an editorial cartoonist and illustrator living in Saranac Lake, NY. Since 1999 his work has appeared in news media across upstate New York, including, from 2000-2003, the Post-Star.)

*Note to readers: Links to charts and graphs from earlier postings in this series were broken in December 2012. They have been restored.

Beating a dead horse at The Post-Star

by contributor Mark Wilson

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

Post-Star Editor Ken Tingley is charging into the Valley of Death once again. In the latest effort to rescue up the battered image of daily newspapers, Mr. Tingley’s Sunday column contrasted newspaper reports on unfolding events in the Boston area last week with information posted to social media outlets. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, he generalized that, “the beauty of print journalism is [that] you get to check and recheck your facts. There is time to evaluate and debate the context of a news story, where it should be played and even which words should be used.”

Even if you discount the obvious embarrassment of the New York Post's two glaring front page falsehoods, Mr. Tingley seems to have already forgotten the mistake made by the Associated Press—the service that the Post-Star relied on heavily for its coverage of the bombing, siege and manhunt—when it erroneously reported the imminent arraignment of both suspects on Wednesday. Had the rumor moved over the wire at press time, it is likely that understaffed newspapers like the Post-Star would have run it. Mr. Tingley also conveniently ignores the fact that his editors, under the Post-Star brand, retweeted the AP’s announcement of the bogus news story, immediately and without independent verification or subsequent retraction.

The real lesson from last week—one evidently lost on Mr. Tingley—is that in news gathering nothing beats an eye-witness account. Sadly, it is a resource that newspapers and their hired wire services are less and less able to afford. Fortunately, if you can tolerate all the derivative nonsense, such accounts may often be found on the internet.

In concluding his Sunday column, Mr. Tingley expressed his hope that “maybe there is a place for a plodding old war horse like the daily newspaper after all.”

It is a fittingly dated metaphor: The last US Army horseback cavalry charge took place seventy one years ago on the Bataan Peninsula, Philippines. Today’s military horses are used for reenactments, parades and funerals.

I was wrong: people really are content with our political system

Looks like it's time for a mea culpa.

It seems Americans are overwhelmingly content with how our political system is functioning.

I believe there were only four candidates who were on the ballot in enough states to form an electoral college majority. Democrat Obama, Republican Romney, Green Jill Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson.

If you wanted a candidate who represented real human beings (presuming you didn't consider corporations to be such), if you wanted someone who opposed militarism and if you wanted someone who opposed corporate control of government, there were only two choices: Stein and Johnson. They were very different candidates but they were the only candidates who were pushing those fundamental conditions needed to make America into a true republican democracy.

I thought the time was right for a decent smaller party showing. People were very lukewarm about Obama and Romney. The last few years saw some very significant grassroots movements in the Tea Party (which we forget really was grassroots originally before it was hijacked by the far right money machine), by Occupy movement and the Ron Paul insurgency inside the Republican Party. This was anti-establishment discontent we hadn't seen since the days of the Vietnam aggression. Johnson and Stein were two very active, substantive candidates. They were aggressive in their use of social media (whose influence on politics is vastly overstated but in the face of a media blacklist, it was the best they could do). Each represented a significant demographic: true small government advocates dissatisfied with Republican hypocrisy on the issue and progressives disillusioned with Obama's complete abandonment of their agenda. I knew the media blacklist would be a significant barrier but I still Johnson and Stein had a reasonable shot to get 5 or 6 percent of the vote between them.

They actually combined to get 1.3 percent of the vote; all smaller candidates only combined for 2 percent. Now, 1.3 and 2 percents were orders of magnitude greater than the amount of media coverage they received, but it was still only 2 percent who voted for real change of some sort or other to our political system. 

Thus 98 percent of voters voted to fundamentally preserve the status quo.

Americans complain about divided government but elected another divided government.

Congress has an approval rating of 21 percent but 90-something percent of incumbents were re-elected, as is usually the case.

People complain about both Democrats and Republicans but over 99 percent of members of Congress will be of those two parties.

Everything bad piece of public policy Americans complain about was enacted by Republicans, Democrats or, more often, both. Every 'onerous tax,' every 'job killing regulation,' every billion wasted on corporate welfare, every war of aggression that you complain about was enacted by one or both of the parties supported by 98 percent of the voters.

From this, I can draw one of two conclusions. Either Americans are actually fairly satisfied with the functioning of our political system or they are unhappy but aren't really interested in doing anything about it. Either way, the incessant whining is not compatible with either of these two options. If you're happy, why are you whining? If you're unhappy, then go beyond whining and try to do something about it.

I was wrong. I believed people when they said they wanted certain things or held certain values. But I guess was wrong to assume they'd vote for those things or values. And of course, some truly did. But from what I can tell, most didn't. Most voted against a candidate, not for one. That's their prerogative. And I'd be wrong to say I don't understand the reasoning. But I simply fail to see how change will every happen if only 2 percent of the people are willing to make it happen. 

Or maybe they really don't want it to happen. Maybe they are not interested in any sort of real change on the federal level. So be it. I accept that's democracy. Just quit whining when you get what you choose.

Now people need to take the next step and quit whining about what they don't want or are not willing to change.

The insidiousness of lazy, casual bias

In a rapidly changing landscape, there is one article of faith among the pooh-bahs of the press: the main reason that traditional media are better than the new media is trustworthiness. Blogs, Twitter and other Internet outlets merely echo rumor and speculation, often because of an ideological agenda. Newspapers, magazines and broadcasters are superior because they always verify claims before publishing them. Or at least that's the contention.

The actions of the Glens Falls Post-Star give lie to this claim and also highlights the daily's rapidly declining standards. 

The Post-Star has long been a divisive part of the community with its editorials reflexively hostile to teachers unions. These editorials wrongly demonize teachers for wanted to be treated like high-qualified professionals when the real culprit for high school taxes is a completely insane structure of education funding in the state. However, a recent editorial highlights just how lazy and casual this bias is.

Its October 1 "Boos and Bravos" section, which states the paper's formal editorial opinion, deplored the 16-month contract impasse between the teachers union and the school board in Warrensburg. Pretty vanilla stuff. In the past, the paper has also called for more transparency in budget negotiations. No objection there.

But the paper goes on to declare that because of the wording of state education law, it can only surmise that this is a stall tactic by the teachers union...

Wait, what?

I thought they were a newspaper. Why do they have to "surmise"?

If they wanted, they could do some actual journalism to try to reveal whether the impasse really was because of a "stall tactic" or whether there was some other reason. 

What would a responsible news outlet would do? Do in a little digging, find out the truth and then let that reality guide their editorial opinion 

Instead, the paper does exactly what the pooh-bahs so often convict the new media of doing: publishing reckless, inflammatory speculation to suit an ideological agenda.

The previous week, the paper did publish a news article on the impasse. But the article did not quote district or union officials as to their positions. 

The paper may or may not have reported on such details in the past, but if it had, then it could have cited those details rather than just "surmising." 

It just assumes that this particular impasse is the teachers fault -- a position that conveniently correlates with its past editorials against teachers unions -- for no concrete reason. This sort of lazy, casual bias is the most insidious kind.

The gutting of The Post-Star's staff and the economic straits of its parent company have been widely chronicled in this blog.

Maybe The Post-Star doesn't have the resources to do decent journalism of the sort that getting to the bottom of this story might require. But if they can't inform the public about what's going on in Warrensburg, then it should remain silent until it's willing and able do its job. Reckless speculation with no stated basis in fact is beneath what a purportedly responsible news organization should be engaging in.

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?

Greens and media bias, Occupy and outsourcing police

A show on the excellent al-Jazeera English explored the question of whether the Green Party could influence this year's US elections. It's a sad indictment of our corporate media and its biases that the only mainstream media outlets that acknowledge the existence of the third largest party in the United States are non-American ones. In a related piece, NPR's Ombudsman explored accusations by American hero Ralph Nader that the public broadcaster ignores real progressives.

Speaking of NPR, it also pointed that just because that rumors of the Occupy movement's imminent death are greatly exaggerated.

Privatization of public resources, one of Occupy's main objections, have led to some disastrous scandals. The partial privatization of the military led to a variety of scandals with Blackwater including corruption, impunity and human rights abuses. The privatization of some prisons has led to Orwellian nightmares like Pennsylvania's Kids for Cash scandal. But a few people were making a lot of money out of these hideous abuses. So it's appalling, yet not surprising, that a few police forces in Britain are also outsourcing some of their public safety duties. Let's hope this reckless experimentation is short-lived and, especially, that it doesn't cross the Atlantic.

No wonder old media is dying

And media pooh-bahs wonder why people are increasingly unwilling to pay money for work which fails to meet their most basic expectations for the profession.

I recently sent an email to a senior figure at a local news media outlet complaining about a shoddy piece of reporting. In it, the journalist reported claims that were obviously untrue... to the point where if the reporter had paid attention to another part of his own story, he ought to have figured this out.

The response began, "While the reporting [sic] is not responsible for inaccurate conclusions from someone he has quoted, I would agree that the reporter did a poor job..."

So a professional reporter is not responsible for checking the veracity of claims made by someone he interviews. 

Wait, WHAT?!

Call me old school but isn't verification the fundamental difference between journalism and transcription?

"Reporting on a murder is taking a pro-homicide position" and other absurdities

North Country Public Radio announced that it is planning on doing a story on area gay couples who are getting married when it takes effect in New York. Seems pretty straight forward (no pun intended). Gays have never been able to legally marry in the state so doing a story on something that's never happened before seems a no-brainer.

Some of the enlightened commenters on NCPR’s In Box blog whined that such reporting constitutes the station “taking a political stance” on marriage equality.

Strangely, the “political stance” accusation wasn’t leveled at the public radio station when it aired a long interview with the Catholic archbishop of Ogdensburg railing against the gay marriage bill.

According to this sad logic, if a news outlet interviews a convicted murderer, it’s taking the political stance of being pro-homicide.

Those fishing for the dreaded “liberal bias” ogre will look under every nook and cranny for the tiniest semblance of evidence and are not bound by the logic of normal people.

In the same announcement, NCPR also mentioned that it was going to include in the report the views of municipal clerks who have religious reservations about issuing marriage licenses to gay couples (of course they should issue the license or resign on principle).

For some reason, this inclusion was not subjected to the “taking a political stance” accusation; in fact, it wasn’t even acknowledged by the whiners in question. According to the whiners, NCPR's real bias isn't that it's ignoring the anti-gay marriage position; it's that the station is including the pro- side.

But it’s well-known that selective vision and hearing are critical elements in any martyr complex.

Chris Hedges and The Death of the Liberal Class

"The system doesn’t work not because of Sarah Palin, the religious right or Glenn Beck. It doesn’t work because the liberal class failed to defend it, failed to find the moral fortitude to defend liberal values when under grievous assault. - Chris Hedges"


Last year, journalist Chris Hedges was at the Hudson Mohawk Independent Media Center in Troy last summer to speak about his book The Death of the Liberal Class. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the talk but it was helpfully rebroadcast on Alternative Radio.

The speech was fascinating and I tried to take some notes about key points he made...

-He talked about the propaganda state of permanent war/fear and the liberal class' complicity with this. He cited liberal icon Woodrow Wilson as an early example.

-He spoke about Bill Clinton, the "greatest traitor to the working class ever produced by the Democratic Party" and how Clinton's strategy was to take corporate money and do corporate bidding because he knew that unions and liberals had nowhere else to go (or thought they did) and would support him anyway.

-He noted that Canada didn't have a banking crisis because they didn't have a Clinton signing off on reckless deregulation.

-"Democrats essentially codified the destruction of international law and rule of law implemented by the Bush administration."

-"The for-profit health insurance companies sponsored the (Democratic Primary) debates in Iowa and weren’t going to allow someone like Dennis Kucinich, let alone Ralph Nader, to participate.... and the the liberal class was complicit."

-"Dostoyevsky knew that when the pillars of the liberal class collapse, the result is moral nihilism. The system doesn’t work not because of Sarah Palin, the religious right or Glenn Beck. It doesn’t work because the liberal class failed to defend it, failed to find the moral fortitude to defend liberal values when under grievous assault."

-"The last truly liberal president of the United States was Richard Nixon, because he was scared of movements and he passed a number of liberal bills, [one of which] was written by Ralph Nader, by the way."

-Anyone who thinks that voting for the Democratic Party will bring about fundamental change "lives in a universe that’s as non-reality based as the Christian right."

-He pointed out that liberals allow themselves to question details but NEVER the fundamentals underpinning the injust system. Ditto the mainstream (corporate) media.

Media deceit, smaller party candidates and good business sense

When challenged about their blacklisting of smaller party/independent candidates, the Post-Star and other corporate outlets usually offer the rationalization that they don't have 'space' or 'resources' to waste on candidates they decree 'no one is interested in'... despite evidence to the contrary.

The lack of resources argument is a common theme. In this blog piece, Post-Star managing editor Ken Tingley began: "I’m often surprised when a reader suggests that we should get one of our investigative reporters on a story," before going on to explain how expensive journalism was. Though readers can rest assured that they will always find resources to do dubious pieces on anything related to the Adirondack Park Agency or green groups.

Still, Tingley's admission is rather startling. If I ran a newspaper, I wouldn't be surprised when readers suggested investigating a story. I'd be flattered.

One reader of this blog emailed me with these comments on the blog piece (posted with his permission): He states that the P-S has eight news reporters and five sports reporters. The staff email directory lists nine news reporters and six sports reporters (not counting stringers). Unless this is his way of announcing another round of staffing cuts, Mr. Tingley should really consider getting someone to check his arithmetic as well as his grammar and spelling.

Incidentally, Mr. Tingley's latest tweet—beside the explanation of how difficult it is to assign investigative pieces—is a comment to the effect that with baseball playoffs coming it will be tough getting to work for the next few weeks. Priorities, Ken.


The Post-Star, like most corporate media outlets, has chosen not to cover any of the five smaller party candidates on the ballot for governor of New York.

(To its credit, the Long Island paper Newsday is co-sponsoring a debate on October 18 involving ALL the gubenatorial candidates.)

Despite its blacklist against candidates it decrees 'not serious,' The Post-Star managed to find precious resources and space to run a story on some guy running a write-in campaign, one who admits to consciously "not taking many positions, hardly any at all."

However, the 'lesser known candidates' on the ballot mentioned in a side graphic to the article (but nowhere else) are on the ballot precisely because they gained thousands of signatures to put them there.

The paper claims not to have space or resources to cover these serious candidates (who take actual positions!) who've done the hard work of generating interest but they find resources and *front page* space to cover this Green Tea guy (to say nothing of all the empty personality politics and polls analysis articles about the major party candidates).

In response to past criticisms of the same nature, Tingley has emailed me to complain, angrily asking me to tell him when his paper has been unfair. In his mind, they give about equal coverage to both the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate, hence it's fair.

Or to put in a way the former sports editor might understand. In his eyes, an umpire can be biased against the other 28 Major League Baseball teams but as long as he treats the Red Sox the same as the Yankees, then he's 'fair.'

In the corporate media's eyes, fairness means ignoring the overwhelming majority of the candidates or given them only the occasional token mention while running hundreds of empty articles on polls or the personal lives of the major party candidates. Fairness means ignoring smaller party candidates in a nation where the majority of people want more than two parties. All we need now is the self-appointed advocates for the public to report on those that already exist. Who knows? Maybe if newspapers gave their audience what it wanted, it might prevent that audience from shrinking even more.

Are journalists slaves to polling companies?

"At times it feels as if American politics consists largely of candidates without ideas hiring consultants without convictions to stage campaigns without content. Increasingly the result is elections without voters." –Gerald Ford

I’m a big fan of North Country Public Radio’s Brian Mann. I think he’s probably the best journalist in this area. His news stories are fair (different than neutral) as well as offering a depth and nuance pretty much unseen in this region’s journalism. But one of his weaknesses is his infatuation with the horse race of politics; this blog piece where he went on about a poll regarding the NY governor’s race is a recent example. I won’t crucify him for it because his real journalism is of such quality. But as someone who’s regularly criticized the overreliance on polls that cripples modern journalism, I wish he’d tone it down a bit.

I think journalists are infatuated by polls because they are far easier to frame than more complex (and more relevant) stories about issues. The way stories about polls are framed are remarkably similar to the way stories about sports are often framed. But ESPN's hype machine aside, most sports journalists don't pass their work off as being of epic importance.

Polls really are a a crutch of modern journalism. As I’ve said before, polls can be useful when they illuminate a story or issue. Far too often, though, they ARE the story. Polls fine as the dessert – fine in small quantities, easy to digest but with little nutritional value; instead, they are usually passed off as the main course – thus we get a malnourished civic soul.

I am convinced that this is a reason why ordinary people are tuning out of politics and why they are losing respect for journalism. Nearly all the coverage, and I mean in the state media in general not just Mann's blog, of the governor’s race is based on polls; this was exacerbated when a poll was released showing the GOP’s Carl Paladino only 6 points behind Democrat Andrew Cuomo. The small rest of the gubernatorial coverage has about Paladino’s controversial personality and emails he once sent.

I’ve seen hardly anything about the FOUR other statewide races, those for attorney general, comptroller and two US Senate seats. There was a little coverage about the Democratic attorney general primary (again mostly focused on the polls and who was 'ahead') but virtually none since.

The state is in a crisis but journalists seem to think that no one’s interested in hearing ideas about how to address the crisis and that everyone's more worried about the little parlor games of polls that ignore most of the candidates anyway.

Yes, the only people talking about issues and ideas are the smaller party candidates... this is almost always how it is. But if the media is going to blacklist those smaller party candidates and perpetuate the deceit that they don't exist, don’t they at least have a responsibility to press the major party candidates to talk about real issues, not just a candidate's crude emails or lineage?

Oh wait, I have to go. A poll shows that Paladino’s popularity has increased by 0.0441 percent since 22 minutes ago. Stop the presses! I need to write a story about this Earth-shattering development!


Update: Matt Funiciello offers his take.

Second update: Curiously, the media's infatuation with polls doesn't seem to extend to the one that shows 58% of Americans think the Republicans and Democrats so inadequate that a third party is needed. Of course, there ARE 'third parties' so this means that the majority of Americans think the media should actually cover them, like is done in the media of every other democracy.

Sm ppl hv gd sugstns

CNN ran a graphic encouraged people to Tweet their ideas for how to improve education.

My suggestion: develop enough civic literacy for people to recognize that complex issues can’t always be solved in 140 characters.

This blog's standards

I've never tried to explain what standards I try to use on this blog but my piece yesterday provided a good prompt.

Although this blog (and my Africa blog Black Star Journal) consists primarily of commentary, I do have training as a journalist so I try as much as possible to follow the basic standards of mainstream journalism. At some point in the future, I'd like to try to syndicate my work, although obviously my pieces would have to become shorter.

As critical as I sometimes am, I am very conscious of trying to avoid libel, slander and defamation, which explains my sometimes prodigious use of words like 'allegedly' and 'apparently'.

I believe in disclosure and the full-as-possible airing of issues. For example, I've tried to get Will Doolittle's side of the story regarding my critiques of his recent series on the Adirondack Park Agency. I've pro-actively contacted him twice to try to get some portion of his defense of his pieces published here (the last time, it said he was out of the office but hopefully he'll respond affirmatively when he gets back). It's not something I an obligated to do but I'm trying to do so for the sake of fairness. I don't want anyone to think I'm trying to do a hit job on him or trying to suppress his explanation. This blog may be almost entirely commentary, not straight journalism, but I still want his side published here so readers can have the full picture and make up their own minds.

It's because of this belief in providing as much access to as much information as possible that I publish links as much as possible. If I'm criticizing a piece, for example, I always link to that piece if it's available. I explain why I think it's wrong but post the link so that people can make their own decisions based on full information, not simply my subjective paraphrasing of it. I do this for every piece where a link is available, whether I'm criticizing the piece, praising it or simply referring to it. I believe sourcing is important both for the integrity of my piece and to give readers the ability to make up their own mind.

As much as possible, I also try to quote from a piece or person, rather than paraphrasing.

I strongly encourage dialogue. My essays are ideally intended to be conversation starters, not the be all and end all. I like the back and forth of discussion. It doesn't have to be sycophantic, but please, let it be intelligent. This is why, despite my misgivings about completely unsigned remarks, I've removed all barriers to commenting (except one).

The only exception is that I approve comments before their publication. My current standard is that I will publish all comments except are those that I consider potentially libelous or defamatory toward other people or ones that are spam. I've been criticized for the latter but I refuse to let my blog be the vehicle for potentially illegal (and almost always anonymous) smear campaigns. There is no question of me reversing this policy.

As an editorial policy, I will not refer to as 'president' any leader whose rule I consider to be illegitimate. I will refer to them as a leader, a head of state, a ruler, a dictator or a strong man, but not president.

If any readers have additional questions about the standards I try to use on this, they are welcome to leave a comment here or to email me (mofycbsj@yahoo.com) and I will respond in kind.