No Media Zone

In a press release, the State Department has just announced that journalists who enter Libya without authorization will be considered terrorist collaborators by the Libyan government, who will arrest them if they are caught. The only reporters being allowed into Libya right now are CNN, BBC Arabic and Al Arabiya.
In the wake of all the violence towards the media that we've seen in the Middle East, the idea that the government of one of these countries in turmoil has officially declared itself off-limits is even more troubling. We may not know exactly what's happening in Libya right now, but it doesn't look too good.
Do you think the State Department is doing the right thing by warning journalists not to sneak into Libya illegally? How would you feel if an American journalist was arrested in Libya for trying to report on the developing situation there?

Will the other side of the story please stand up!

For my newswriting class, I am writing an article about a recent protest by anti-fur animal rights activists at Macy's. (You've all probably seen them there with their posters.) Trying to be a good journalist, I tried to get both sides of the story--the protestors think wearing fur is unethical, but what is Macy's view? What are their policies?

Of course, the protestors were happy to talk to me and explain their views, but it was basically impossible to get anything from the Macy's side. The salesperson in the fur salon told us she wasn't allowed to talk to us and basically kicked us out, and the emails I sent to the media relations person I was told to talk to went unanswered. A security guard supervising the protest chatted with me and Kim for a few minutes, but insisted that his comments be off the record.

So of course, my story is pretty one-sided. But how could I have done this differently? Is this inherently a one-sided topic (animal rights - good/ corporation - evil)? How do I fairly present the other side of the argument if they don't feel the need to address the issue at all?

My bigger question is - how often does this happen in the news we read and see? How often does a reporter present mostly one side of an issue because that is the side that embraced him and gave him good stories and quotes?

The weirdest intersection of media and politics yet?

So apparently Donald Trump is thinking for running for President in 2012, as a Republican. As Jon Stewart was helpful enough to point out, Trump announced his interest in the Republican nomination at CPAC by saying, "If I run, and if I win, this country will be respected again."

Really? I mean, I know Trump was a real estate mogul long before he had a seven-year run as a reality TV star and an even longer career as a hairstyling punchline. Is that what we mean by a relationship between media and politics? If Reagan and Shwarzenneger could move from show business to politics, why not Trump?

Apparently, it's not his first time running. New York magazine points out that not only did Trump run as a third-party Independent candidate in 2000, but his stance on many social issues, from abortion to health care reform, has changed drastically since then.

Is this a publicity stunt? Does Trump have a reasonable shot at the Republican nomination? Should his business experience be looked at as an asset, or should his contributions to American media's least thoughtful enterprise, reality TV, work against him?

Sex and scandal sell - but is it news?

Last week, Gawker.com broke the "story" that married Congressman Christopher Lee had apparently been soliciting contact with woman from the Craigslist personals section, and had even sent her a photo of himself shirtless. Later I read that the woman Congressman Lee had been flirting with had actually been the one to contact Gawker when she realized that he had lied about being single. The scandal forced Lee to resign.

What do you make of this kind of news-making? Ok, so the guy entertained the thought of cheating. Isn't that between him and his wife? He's not the President, he didn't do anything illegal, and I'm not entirely sure that something like this should have to ruin his career? Is it morally ok for Gawker to jump on an awkward shirtless photo and make a scandal out of nothing? How should the traditional media respond to this "tabloidization" of politics? Thoughts?

Crowd-Sourcing the Agenda

As I was dutifully copying the little circular chart Professor Adler drew on the board today illustrating the cycle of agenda-setting and news-creation--from the President's office down to the people and back around to Congress--I realized that there is another step being introduced to this process. Call it the Facebook effect, or "new media" exerting its power, or the WikiAgenda. I think that a lot of what people (especially those around my age) consider to be important to the agenda is set by other people like themselves, rather than the newspapers or a governmental PR office.

Take the NYTimes.com homepage. There is very clearly an agenda being set by the editorial board: the ongoing situation in Egypt is primary, along with responses in Iran and the rest of the Middle East. The budget takes precedence a little lower down the page, with local news and a report on New York Fashion Week closer to the bottom of the page. Once you "enter" the site by clicking on an article, however, the most direct link to the next article is via the "Most Popular" tab, which gives you a smattering of "high-priority" issues along with an expose on JC Penney's abuse of Google's search rankings, an article about the Grammys, and a progress report on Gabrielle Gifford's rehabilitation. All fascinating stuff (even the JC Penney article--read it!) and not junk or tabloid journalism, but not exactly the agenda that the NY Times wanted to set.

Moving beyond the news website itself, I think it's safe to say that many young people read serious news articles mostly when they come across them on Facebook (or Twitter - sigh). The way we process the news and the official agenda comes to us through our social networks and our friend's priorities. In fact, right now New York Magazine is telling me that I can be the first of my friends to "like" this article about the 1.65 trillion dollar deficit.

AOL buys Huffington Post

The NY Times reported today that AOL is buying the Huffington Post. What I think is interesting about this is not so much that a big, struggling company is eating a smaller, more successful one, but that AOL will actually be giving Ariana Huffington "oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone."
Arianna Huffington is a left-wing icon and the Huffington Post is an unabashedly liberal news-aggregator and blog site. AOL, meanwhile, has been moving away from being an Internet-provider company and more towards being a content provider. They have been buying up successful blogs on all kinds of topics, like culture, food, and technology, to form a massive advertising-generating content network, like a giant Internet-based newspaper. So it makes sense, on one level, for AOL to want the Huffington Post as their liberal editorial page, just like they wanted Engadget as their technology page.
The problem, I think, is this: If the Huffington Post editorial staff has oversight of much more of AOL's content besides for just itself, they will be in a position to shape and influence much or all of AOL's huge content farm in acordance with their political views. Obviously, that's not a problem on a political opinion blog. But on Mapquest? I'm not suggesting that Ariana Huffington is going to use her new authority to start ruling the Internet, but I do think that the lines between editorial content and just plain information on the Internet are fuzzy enough--and they're just going to get fuzzier.

Military Mythmaking

In the context of our class discussions,I was reminded of an article from the New Yorker a few weeks ago.

This article discusses that famous photograph from the beginning of the Iraq war, of Iraqi citizen cheering while a statue of Saddam Hussein is toppled. Even at the time, it was suspected that the celebratory moment being celebrated in the picture may have actually been staged by the military and the news corps specifically for the purpose of taking the photo. It turns out that pretty much every detail of that iconic photo seems to have been set up very deliberately by a troop of Marines in order to convey a certain message about the reception of the American troops. However, the author of this article, Peter Maass, who was actually there at the time, says that the event wasn't simply staged; nor was it completely organic, but something between the two.

It's kind of like when you go out with friends and are actually pretty bored and not too excited, but then someone pulls out a camera and everyone poses like they are having the time of their lives. We all know that people act differently when there is a camera around--so I think we should take into account that people who are being filmed for TV know that they are and aren't necessarily acting the way they were a moment before the TV crews showed up.

As the article says, "Propaganda has been a staple of warfare for ages, but the notion of creating events on the battlefield, as opposed to repackaging real ones after the fact, is a modern development."