Cross posted from Pruning Shears.

I will admit to having had a snobbish view towards local TV news for most of my adult life. I think it is at least somewhat justified; local TV news frequently has a disreputable whiff. Whether it’s the “if it bleeds, it leads” ethos, sweeps week stunts (this item is in almost all American households AND IT COULD KILL YOUR CHILDREN), large doses of pabulum delivered as News You Can Use, and so on – there is a lot to look down on.

(I won’t even go into the disturbing tendency of weather forecasters to insist to viewers that the overwhelming majority of the world’s climate scientists are charlatans.)

That perception seems to be fairly common. Maybe it’s a demographics issue; this study (PDF) from Pew shows (p. 37) daily newspaper readers with higher aggregate educational levels than local TV news viewers. It also shows (p. 38) newspaper readers having higher incomes. So to put it crudely, newspaper readers are smarter and richer than TV news viewers.

Without even seeing such statistics I definitely internalized a sense of newspapers’ superiority over the years. That bias is silly though; TV, like newspaper, is a medium. It’s what you do with it that matters. The New York Times is printed on newsprint, and so is The Onion.

The degree to which my assumptions about print and TV are faulty has been brought home over the last year or so as I’ve become more involved fracking-related activism. For instance, Youngstown NBC affiliate WFMJ has done a very thorough job covering the issue. When a company illegally dumped toxic fracking waste in a waterway, reporter Michelle Nicks filled her report with detail: Not just the event itself, but the response (such as it was) from regulators, from state political leaders and national ones as well.

Even more impressively, CBS affiliate WKBN filed public records requests and discovered the company in question has received dozens of citations, violations and injection well suspensions stretching back to the eighties. WKBN is doing exactly the kind of investigative journalism we normally associate with newspapers – not just reporting the news but really digging into it in order to give viewers a better understanding.

In Cleveland, NBC affiliate WKYC has set up an entire section of its web site for fracking and done a great deal of reporting on it. Multiple reporters there, including Monica Robins, Dick Russ and Lynna Lai, have reported on the issue from a variety of angles. While you could say that flaming water from a tap is the kind of arresting visual that conforms to the worst stereotypes of local TV news, there’s nothing especially dramatic about a cracked foundation or a politician’s legislative proposal. If it was all about sensation they wouldn’t have run most of those reports.

Newspapers have a spotty record on this issue. Some reporters cover it well. In northeast Ohio, Bob Downing of the Akron Beacon Journal has been on it for a while now (recent reports here, here and here). In other fracking-intensive regions I’ve found reporters like Bruce Finley at the Denver Post doing similarly admirable work (here, here and here for example).

But the largest newspaper in our area – the Cleveland Plain Dealer – has been considerably less thorough. There is less coverage overall, and the stories tend to center around fracking initiatives or headlining industry propaganda. While they occasionally look at the political fight over the issue, they rarely look at the effect it is having on local communities. (Perhaps the publishers don’t feel the concerns of blue collar-skewing populations in rural or semi-rural areas are of interest to their more (sub)urban and upscale readership.)

This is especially striking because the paper has repeatedly touched on an issue that seems ready made for a little Truth To Power type initiative. Jimmy Haslam, the new owner of the Cleveland Browns (and brother of the Tennessee governor, incidentally), owns a trucking company that stands to handsomely profit from fracking. Shortly after buying the Browns he stepped down as CEO of the company. Or didn’t. (“I’m still going to be CEO of Pilot Flying J.”) That detail was never ironed out exactly.

He’s definitely back in the saddle now though – which raises the same question his heading the company originally raised: Should the owner of such a high profile and beloved franchise be profiting by visiting environmental hazard on a significant portion of his fan base? There are lots of Browns fans in Youngstown. Maybe they wouldn’t be too crazy about knowing the team’s owner is a key part of the industrial chain that just befouled their community.

The PD is not going there, though. For whatever reason the community impact of fracking has been of zero interest. Again, this lack of coverage is not characteristic of all newspapers; some are doing a really good job. My point is that on this urgent, substantive issue, newspapers have been a mixed bag – as have local TV stations. (In Cleveland, WKYC is head and shoulders above its on-air competition at the moment.) In general the reporting matrix doesn’t break along expected lines. Sometimes papers provide better coverage. But in some cases the supposedly low-rent local TV stations have left their ostensibly more respectable print counterparts in the dust.

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Last week an Oregon blogger named Crystal Cox had a $2.5 million defamation judgment issued against her. It was for posts she had written about investment firm Obsidian Finance Group and its co-founder Kevin Padrick; the case hinged on whether her allegations were factual or not. Padrick said they were defamatory, while Cox said they were factual but that because said facts had been leaked to her by an inside source she could not provide details. She then claimed she was protected by journalism shield laws allowing her to not name the source.

There are some extremely interesting and complex details to hash through in this case. The big one is the nature of shield laws in the Internet era. It is now possible for an individual to write anything at all, true or not, about anyone, and for that to be visible to the whole world. If that individual is sufficiently knowledgeable and persistent it’s also possible to manipulate search engine optimization to put those posts right at the top of the results page for the target. Cox was knowledgeable and persistent.

The underlying assumption of shield laws seems to be that organizations are unlikely to pursue vendettas and also unlikely to go to the mattresses to defend a spurious piece of reporting. In other words, the circumstances that create a full blown defamation lawsuit will be rare, and the defendant will have incentive to settle. But in our new world it’s possible for there to be a proliferation of defamatory content as well as a legion of single minded fanatics willing to take the full legal journey out of pure spite.

It is easy to envision courts getting clogged up with this kind of case, where one pissed off individual with an axe to grind comes up with an imaginary source to justify any kind of claim, then hides behind shield laws to get away with it. It’s a real problem. We need a way to evaluate claims of inside sources made by bloggers in a way that allows a defamation claim to be evaluated without potentially compromising the identity of a whistleblower.

There’s a lot to chew through, and Judge Marco Hernandez failed to even take a bite: “the record fails to show that she is affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system. Thus, she is not entitled to the protections of the law[.]” In other words, she is not employed by a respectable outlet so to hell with her.

David Carr then took to the Paper of Record to write a nasty, snide little piece that also completely missed the issues at play. He piously begins by claiming to have come to the case on the blogger’s side: “I went to work on a blog post, filled with filial umbrage, saddened that the Man once again had used a boot heel to crush truth and free speech.” (“Filial umbrage” reeks of insincerity, just in case the ironic mention of the Man was not enough to clue you in on the joke.)

His entire post drips with contempt for the unwashed rabble who dare to practice journalism outside the high temples designated for it. “In the pre-Web days,” he sneers “someone like Ms. Cox might have been one more obsessive in the lobby of a newspaper, waiting to show a reporter a stack of documents that proved the biggest story never told.” Yes of course, Mr. Carr, because the New York Times has never missed an important piece of news, does not have blind spots and always prioritizes stories strictly according to their importance! Why should anyone ever attempt to bring anything to anyone’s attention outside of that which arrives via the comprehensive and infallible process used by newspapers?

Articles like his are a great example of exactly the kind of flawed reporting that creates such deep skepticism towards traditional outlets. There is a real issue here that Carr’s arrogant, smug and superficial (he doesn’t even mention shield laws!) gloss completely misses. Whether he misses it out of laziness, a simple lack of intelligence or some compelling need to demonstrate he’s not like them doesn’t matter.

The plain fact is, anyone who got their information on the case from David Carr’s writing at the New York Times would be substantially less informed than those who read Curtis Cartier’s piece at the Seattle Weekly blog. That is why we need bloggers, lots of them, in lots of places. And we need to find a place for their journalism – yes, David Carr, journalism – within the legal system. Because even the Times cannot cover all the news that’s fit to print.

Cross posted from Pruning Shears.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Washington’s view on ethics seems to be schizophrenic. Lawbreaking that is done for immediate personal gratification – primarily sexual or financial – is lavished with attention. Political opponents call for investigations and resignations, news outlets provide saturation coverage, vehement denunciations are issued and defenses raised, and generally speaking a high old time is had by all. Since Republicans like to appeal to voters as the party of values and morality there is usually a credible charge of hypocrisy coming from the left when it’s a GOP perpetrator. But the capitol is entirely unequipped to grapple with illegality that happens for less obvious reasons, and elites tend to bend over backwards to rationalize it when they are forced to confront it.

The templates for both approaches were nicely illustrated by two Washington Post writers in the 90′s. The high dudgeon/fainting couch approach to sexual mores was sketched out in a now-legendary 1998 article by Sally Quinn, wherein leading lights recoiled in the horror of Bill Clinton getting a blow job from an intern and then lying about it in a civil suit. "He came in here and he trashed the place and it’s not his place" huffed David Broder, while Joe Lieberman thundered "Before this is over the truth must be told." It even includes a quote from a socialite named Muffie, foreshadowing of the impending death of parody.

The model for rationalizing lawlessness may have been created by Richard Cohen in 1992. Looking at the pardon of Caspar Weinberger for his role in the Iran Contra scandal, Cohen ponders the issue from the perspective of having seen Weinberger at the supermarket and concludes, "Cap, my Safeway buddy, walks, and that’s all right with me." His actions in the Iran Contra scandal – which, remember, was an entire shadow foreign policy being run out of the White House that involved selling weapons to the very regime that took our people hostage in order to secretly and illegally fund a civil war in a country of zero strategic importance – did not trouble Cohen. Cap was his Safeway buddy, a salt of the earth guy who never fooled around with anyone. Therefore, anything that he did in his official capacity as Defense Secretary was just fine.

Echoes from that can be heard by Chuck Todd when he says, "There was no doubt the White House, the previous White House was trying to play politics with US attorney selections. That has been proven. Except what did we also find out – it was perfectly legal…they serve at the pleasure of the president" (a phrase he uses twice in the Greenwald interview even though it long ago passed into ridicule). The idea that US Attorneys serve at will but still enjoy protections against certain kinds of termination literally does not occur to him. Since there were no favors or money exchanged it could not be illegal. Thus with looking glass logic the firing of US Attorneys for refusing to launch bogus investigations of Democrats right before an election is not the politicization of policy differences; an investigation of it is, however. Which incidentally means there is a functional statute of limitations on presidential criminality: the last day of that president’s term. Beyond that we are on a witch hunt and litigating the past.

Such a resolute effort to keep high officials above the law may make everyone much more comfortable at the grocery store but it is not proving very satisfactory outside of the hothouse. Physicians for Human Rights is calling for investigations into doctors at international detention sites, and wants their licenses revoked if it turns out they assisted in torture. Similarly, the American Psychological Association is embroiled in controversy over its past and current support of torture. Great Britain has successfully prosecuted a group plotting attacks there, and it was done with traditional FISA-compliant surveillance. Spain appears to be ready to proceed with torture prosecutions for the Bush Six.

The momentum just about everywhere but the capitol is for investigations to begin and any necessary accounting made. Only in Washington do people continue to insist we keep walking and ignore all evidence of serious wrongdoing. Would, say, a war crimes trial for a former vice president be political? Yes – because his defenders would insist that it was entirely driven by score settling. Would it bring DC to a standstill? Of course it would. I tend to think everything should stand still for a war crimes trial. And even if our elites want to keep walking, the rest of the world has decided to linger a bit. The more the distance between the two grows, the worse the current ruling class will look to history.

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Awhile back aimai posted about an encounter with Joe Klein at a beach party. It was an amusing first person account written with bloggy flair and attitude, and it raised a number of important points as well. One of the main ones was, in the internet era it is possible to search archives and keep close track of both good and bad journalism. Someone who gets something wrong is less able to ignore it and have it recede into the past than it was, say, fifteen years ago. Aimai’s post was by all appearances an interesting but minor story – the political junkie’s equivalent of celebrity snapshots of a famous actress taken at the grocery store.

It clearly was much more than that to Klein, because on Monday Glenn Greenwald posted (on his personal blog) several of Klein’s messages attacking him on Journolist, a site described by Greenwald as "a secret club composed of several hundred journalists, editors, bloggers and other peers and colleagues." The encounter got to him so much that he went out and started attacking someone else in front of not just hundreds of people, but hundreds of journalists. In response to Greenwald’s post Klein went completely round the bend, publishing an unhinged diatribe against him and claiming his writing on Journolist was private. (His myopic attack on the wrong target helps explain his support of the Iraq war as a response to 9/11, though.)

Let’s take a step back and remember the reason the enmity began to build in the first place: Greenwald accurately accused Klein of incorrectly reporting details of the FISA debate in a November 2007 Time magazine article. At the time Scott Horton somewhat regretfully wrote, "Not only was the substance of this description factually inaccurate in almost every respect, it was the very core of the piece." Klein then updated with a correction that, Horton noted in his own update, did not actually correct anything. Then Crazy Pete Hoekstra announced that he was the source for Klein’s story, which really undermined Klein’s credibility. (Klein memorably challenged critics the following May, "Tell me where I’ve been misled by my sources." See aimai’s criticism of columnists expecting their readers not to remember anything. Also, Hoekstra’s revelation led to my favorite Photoshop ever.)

Klein then took another stab at getting it right and failed. Tried again, failed again. And that’s pretty much where the episode ended – with Klein uncritically passing along the incorrect talking points of a right wing extremist, then issuing a couple of intellectually dishonest rationalizations masquerading as corrections. The official record of Joe Klein’s reporting on this issue is somewhere between egregiously misleading and outright falsehood. Clearly this gnaws at him: Nearly two years later he goes into a frenzy when a moderately prominent blogger reports on her challenging him on it.

Digby refers to the Washington DC media and political elite as the Village in order to give a sense of its insular and provincial outlook. Klein could be the most interesting journalist there because he seems to occasionally be aware of the world beyond it. That creates a certain amount of cognitive dissonance you don’t see in, for instance, David Gregory. For instance, he took on the still-ascendant (in the Village) neoconservative outlook last year. By virtue of his good standing there he was able to confront the neocons in a way few others could, and he took a beating from them over it. From a professional standpoint it was at least a little risky. No matter how obvious his points seemed to those of us out here in the hinterlands, in the circles he runs in they were very provocative.

Klein appears to at least dimly understand that this isn’t all a game, that what happens on the streets near his home can have a profound effect on hundreds of millions of his fellow citizens. But he also seems to have fundamentally bought the conventional wisdom on journalism and politics as practiced by his peers. So he veers between lazy repetition of what passes for centrism in the capitol and spirited critiques of such bland assumptions elsewhere. He can’t seem to muster the majestic contempt of a George Will or Bill Kristol towards the unwashed masses, but can’t dismiss the importance of those same people’s opinions for fear of diminishing his standing in the Beltway. When he’s fought the good fight he’s come across to me as a somewhat sympathetic (and maybe even slightly tragic) figure, but weeks like this he just seems like another soulless hack.