The rush to be the first outlet to break all sorts of news in the wake of the Monday bombing of the Boston Marathon that killed three people and left many others gravely injured has done all sorts of damage to both individuals’ reputations and to our larger community this week. The New York Post reported that a man of Saudi origin was being questioned by law enforcement in a Boston hospital in the wake of the bombing—it turned out he was merely a survivor of the attack who had been tackled by a bystander who was suspicious of him for doing the rather sensible thing of running away from a scene of carnage. The Boston Globe and CNN mistakenly reported that a suspect or suspects in the bombing had been arrested, when, as became clear, no such arrests had taken place. The Post subsequently published on its front page a photo of two men at the marathon with the headline “Bag Men,” suggesting they were wanted in the bombing—it emerged that they were Salah Eddin Barhoum and Yassine Zaime, local teenagers who had hoped to run part of the Marathon route in the wake of the officially-registered runners. And social media sites, included Reddit, suggested that missing Brown student Sunil Tripathi was a suspect in the bombing, a misidentification amplified significantly after his name was overheard on a police scanner during the escalated manhunt for the real suspects last night, and one that conservative media sites who seized on his name have been slow to correct.

These are serious errors, and they’ll bring a range of consequences, from lawsuits to loss of reputation, for the outlets that reported them or that doubled down on them, seemingly having abandoned standards of journalism like having two sources to confirm a piece of information. And reporters like Pete Williams of NBC News, who have been judicious and often first to be correct about developments in the investigation, will hopefully be rewarded for their care and reliability. I’m disgusted by the damage that the Post, in particular, has done to the reputations and potential safety of innocent people. And I think that a general rush to claim scoops and exclusives is counterproductive for journalism in general. It’s possible to develop true scoops through deep, proprietary reporting that genuinely reveals new information to the public that other outlets could not offer up because they haven’t done the same research and interviews. But much of the information claimed as proprietary is nothing of the sort: it’s reproductions of official announcements or information that will shortly become widely available. They’re scoops only in the sense that one reporter has a better wifi connection at a press conference than the competition, or that someone is able to type up a headline faster than other people who have received a press release at the same time. Claiming scoops or exclusives under those circumstances is a cheap way to try to burnish a publication’s credibility that actually does the opposite.
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At 9PM tonight, PBS will air Central Park Five, co-directed by Ken Burns and his daughter Sarah Burns. An adaptation of Sarah Burns’ book The Central Park Five: The Untold Story Behind One of New York City’s Most Infamous Crimes, Central Park Five is a searing examination of the 1989 sexual assault on Trisha Meili, a crime for which five young men, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam were convicted after coercive interrogations and wrongfully imprisoned. Though their convictions were vacated in 2002 after Matias Reyes confessed to the attack on Meili, a civil suit filed by a number of the men in 2003 is still pending, the district attorney in the case, Elizabeth Lederer, still works for the city of New York, and the city attempted to subpoena outtakes and additional footage from the Burns’ film, an effort that was just recently blocked by a judge.

I spoke at length with Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and Raymond Santana, one of the Central Park Five, in Pasadena in January. We discussed the role of the media in the case, the impact of courtroom sketches, and why Lederer, who the Burns’ believe had grave doubts about the prosecution, has never spoken about her involvement in the case. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I think the movie is tremendous, and it’s wonderful to have all of you here. I wanted to start out by asking, one of the things that really struck me about the documentary that I’m not sure is completely explicit, but that really came across to me, was that New York in this time was a place that was not really safe for women or for young men of color, and this was a case that ended up pitting these two populations that were being poorly served against each other. I wasn’t sure if that was something you wanted to pull out explicitly or that was more interesting to have as an implicit thread.

Ken Burns: We took a lot, we made a lot of narrative decisions that were at least superficially different than other movies that we’d made, so in fact we were trusting that a lot of things would have to remain implicit and not explicit. Explicit could be explicated by narrative. And in this case what we felt would just contain as much of the story as possible, filled with all of its excruciating paradoxes and contradictions. Not the least of it is that. I think that’s a really good point, that the most vulnerable are in some ways the symbolic antagonists in this invented drama.

Sarah Burns: I think Craig Steven Wilder does a good job of giving you at least some sense of that, of the vulnerability of minority teenaged boys especially, as the people who were most likely to be victims of the crime that people were seeing and were concerned about. And that was something that was forgotten. That’s sort of an important thing to understand, both that that was happening, and the way the media was covering not only this case but the time in general was such that we were seeing those people who were most likely to be victims as the source of our problems and not the victims of them.
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In the annual meeting of the Disney Company’s shareholders on Wednesday, Justin Danhof, the general counsel for the National Center for Public Policy Research, which owns Disney stock, asked company president Bob Iger what he intended to do to about a liberal bias in the company’s news outlets, including ESPN and ABC News:

It’s particularly strange to hear Danhof cite Rob Parker suggesting that Robert Griffin III was “a cornball brother” for being engaged to a white woman and possibly having Republican political beliefs as evidence of some sort of liberal bias on the part of ESPN. The idea that it’s liberal to believe that people should date and marry within their racial and ethnic groups as a form of solidarity has no particular basis in the existing discourse. And while it’s not unreasonable to debate why African-American or Latino voters tend to vote Democratic or Republican based on those parties’ histories and platforms, I don’t know that there are a lot of people on either side of the aisle who saw Parker’s condemnation of Griffin as a constructive contribution to that debate. But in any case, it wasn’t as if Disney endorsed Parker’s analysis of Griffin’s racial loyalties. ESPN suspended Parker for 30 days over the comments and ultimately chose not to renew his contract, citing his comments about Griffin as a factor.

The example of Brian Ross suggesting that the shooter at the Aurora, Colorado midnight screening of The Dark Knight is potentially a better example of bias, but it’s also a case study in how a broken reporting and vetting process can interact with political assumptions to put bad information on the air. The problem is less that Ross made that assumption—I don’t think there’s anything wrong about thinking through potential political affiliation and other motivations or influences as inspirations for reporting— but that he broadcast it without ensuring that it was factually accurate. If there were procedures in place that prevented Ross from attributing political motivations and organizational affiliations to the man who turned out to be James Holmes without solid reporting behind it, then the fact that he considered Holmes’ affiliations off-air wouldn’t have mattered. And it’s not as if it would be appropriate to have a rule that prevented, say, the on-air identification of Holmes as a Democrat or a member of an Occupy group, if that had turned out to be correct. The problem isn’t politics. It’s fact-checking. Iger’s acknowledgement that “we have at times either presented the news in a slightly inaccurate way through mistakes or in ways that we weren’t necessarily proud of,” is the right problem to identify. But it’s true that it would have been helpful if ABC News president Ben Sherwood had been more willing to publicly address the procedures or violations thereof that lead to Ross’ broadcast, which would have shifted the emphasis from political problems to reportorial ones.

Shifting that debate won’t satisfy everyone, of course. There are some conservatives who will always work backwards from outcomes, convinced that reporting that doesn’t reach conservative conclusions must be flawed because it didn’t arrive in a place that confirms their worldview or that makes them comfortable. But news organizations should stick to fixing processes that produce both inaccuracies and the perception of bias, rather than letting themselves be nudged into seeking outcomes that will take heat off of them.

On Friday, the Washington Post announced a change that may sound procedural, but has enormous implications: after 42 years, the paper will no longer employ an ombudsman to examine the operations and stances of the paper from an independent perspective (Disclosure: the last ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, was a colleague and editor when I started out at National Journal, and remains a friend). Instead, publisher Katharine Weymouth wrote in a note to readers:

We will appoint a reader representative shortly to address our readers’ concerns and questions. Unlike ombudsmen in the past, the reader representative will be a Post employee. The representative will not write a weekly column for the page but will write online and/or in the newspaper from time to time to address reader concerns, with responses from editors, reporters or business executives as appropriate.

On the face of it, this structure seems like a problem for two reasons. A reader representative is not the same thing as a person who represents the best interests of the Post, and who tries to discern what those interests might be for readers, reporters, editors, and the business side in concert. Reader concerns are only one part of that constellation—though of course they’re an important one—and readers’ concerns may not grow out of an understanding of what it takes to report a news story. Readers’ interests may run counter to journalistic ethics or to quality journalism, as is the case with readers Pexton wrote about in a recent column, who want coverage of homosexuality to give equal weight to discredited ideas about gay people. And readers aren’t the only or most informed critics of most papers: a good ombudsman weighed criticism from media analysts and ethics groups as well as reader concerns. Replacing the ombudsman with a reader representative feels diminishing, a step down to an emphasis on the local reaction to the paper rather than a continued emphasis on the Post’s national reputation.

And even on that scale, this is a worrisome development. How can someone who is employed by the Washington Post itself be expected to truly represent reader concerns against the priorities of the people who sign his or her paycheck? Even if the job is being scaled down to focus on reader concerns, readers should feel more confident if their advocate is financially independent of the paper. And reporters who are criticized by readers should worry about whether they will get a fair hearing against those criticisms given that the person weighing them needs to please their employer as well, and is representing readers, who in turn represent dollars, to the publisher. It’s also notable that Weymouth, rather than Post editor Marty Baron, made the announcement of this change in policy, which seems more about customer service than journalistic integrity. This is a tangled set of incentives rather than one set up to produce firewalls and genuine independence, much less trust from the readers this new position is meant to represent.

In a feature on the decision at NPR, Edward Schumacher-Matos argued that, while it’s not surprising that news organizations, like individuals, might dislike hearing criticism, the best ones embrace ombudsmen as a way of enhancing their own credibility, and as a way of protecting themselves from backlash against free speech. He explained:

Curiously, while the American news media cowers and pulls back, unable to believe in itself, the increasingly free press in so many other parts of the word are adding ombudsmen and improving standards. Even in some places without a long tradition of free press, there is a growing recognition of the link between good public information, on the one hand, and economic development and democracy, on the other, as shown in studies by the World Bank and others.

I am on the board of the international Organization of News Ombudsmen and have watched with delight as the number of ombudsmen has taken off in countries such as India, Bangladesh and South Africa. According to Stephen Pritchard, the president of ONO, Colombia now has 14 ombudsmen working just in television — each with a weekly half-hour show—and Mexican television has five. When Lord Justice Leveson issued his report last November on the phone hacking scandal in Great Britain, he cited having an independent ombudsman as a “best practice” to respond to public complaints.

In other words, the Post’s choice to ditch the ombudsman position doesn’t just make the Post look journalistically anxious. It makes the paper look parochial. And if the Post wants to restore its reputation as a nationally and internationally important news organization, it would do well to look past its own organizational anxieties to international norms for excellence.

As has been widely reported, Vice is in North Korea with Dennis Rodman now on what has been billed as some sort of pseudo-diplomatic mission, but which has instead turned into a parade of gross declarations of friendship for the horrifically oppressive regime on Rodman’s part, and disgusting tweets about getting hammered with Kim Jong Un from Vice staffer Jason Mojica. It’s worth noting that this isn’t just one of Vice’s usual video stunts. It’s an episode that the company is shooting for its HBO news magazine series. And that they’re doing something like this isn’t particularly surprising.

This summer at the Television Critics Association press tour, I asked Vice’s Shane Smith about the way they were branding the show, which included things like introducing segments by offering up as analysis of the Kashmir conflict “India and Pakistan fucking hate each other,” and about what level of information they expected their audience to have. His answer didn’t reveal a keen awareness of the difference between starting broad and getting more detailed, and the problems with presenting news about the world beyond the United States in a reductive tone that smacks more of cultural tourism than insight.

“They do fucking hate each other, and they’ve hated each other for quite some time,” he told me. “So, you know, we get into why, which is because of partition and Kashmir. But also it goes to a very complex point of its water now. Water is a huge issue in Pakistan. They’re saying that ‘India’s taking our water.’ Water is maybe the main issue in India right now. Now, that’s a very complex point to get to, but you have to start sort of broad and say, ‘They hate each other. This is why they hate each other.’”

I’m absolutely a believer in trying to bring new audiences in to international news, and into news at all. But to have any sort of integrity, your priority in that mission has to be the story itself. Speaking the same language as your target audience may be an important skill set to bring to the mission. But the point is less that you want to meet them where they’re at than to convince them to come along to where you are. And if using that language and those values—including the idea that it’s transgressive and cool to get drunk with and fed by a dictator who is starving his own people to death—take over what you’re trying to communicate about water rights in Pakistan or the horrendous repressiveness of the North Korean regime, you probably need to slow your role and reconsider what you’re doing. If this was some sort of Increasingly Poor Decisions Of Todd Margaret-style fiction, I could see it as a Girls-level satire of the grotesque privilege and oblivious of First World tourists in the Third World. But Vice and Rodman are actually doing these things. And I’m curious how HBO is going to try to convince audiences that this is really a fresh, edgy take on news reporting, if only for the despair factor.

This post discusses, in its entirety, the first season of Netflix’s House of Cards.

Over the past two days, I watched all of Netflix’s most ambitious original series yet, a remake of the British miniseries House of Cards. While the show raises interesting questions about both television business models and narrative structures, and while it’s deeply entertaining to watch Kevin Spacey, as Democratic Majority Whip Frank Underwood, chomp scenery and occasionally on Kate Mara’s ambitious young reporter Zoe Barnes, I couldn’t help but feel that House of Cards has a fatal flaw. For all that the show looks attractive, and even half-authentic to the District sometimes, and for all House of Cards is trying its darndest to replicate the repellant chilliness of the British original, it’s actually far too nice to the people and institutions the show would like to skewer. And that’s because House of Cards itself falls prey to some of the kinds of thinking that are most pernicious in the nation’s capital.

Part of the problem is House of Cards‘ insistence that there’s a grandness, rather than a grandiosity, to Frank—while the show believes he’s malign, it’s still convinced that he’s Milton’s Satan rather than Dostoyevsky’s, who Arturo Perez-Reverte once described as “petty. A civil servant with dirty nails.” He declares in the first episode that “My job is to clear the pipes and keep the sludge moving,” and House of Cards seems largely to agree with his assessment. Frank may hold up an education bill to get a version that suits his ends, or derail the nomination of the man who was chosen to be Secretary of State over him, but he does get a bill to the President’s desk roughly on deadline, and once the other man is out of the way, speeds the confirmation of his hand-picked replacement. What really distinguishes him from his colleagues, however, and what the show portrays as the source of Frank’s efficacy, however unattractive it may be, is his treatment of power as a higher good than policy. “Leave ideology to the armchair generals,” he says in one of his many editorial asides to the camera. “It does me no good.”

House of Cards is full of acid portraits of people whose conviction has made them weak or duplicitous without being excellent at it. Even if the show has some sympathy for their dedication to and principal on the issues, it never gives them triumphs over Frank, and frequently suggests that passion makes them obvious, slow, or otherwise unfit to play the game that Frank has mastered so well, his competence overriding our moral calculus. During a subplot that involves the passage of a major education reform bill, Frank’s partner on the legislation, a life-long liberal reformer who’s a stand-in for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy turns out to be a naive patsy without the stomach for compromise or maneuver. “I could put my mind to policy, but I’m no good at this brand of politics,” the man tells Frank in agreeing to take the fall for a leak of his proposed bill that garners negative press coverage, and to let Frank take over writing the next draft. His actual ideas about the issues are never mentioned, simply summed up by Zoe as “very far left wing” for a headline. Somewhere in Massachusetts, Kennedy is rotating in his grave fast enough to dislodge the dirt above him so he can haunt House of Cards writer Beau Willimon for this perfidy.
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Poor Rush Limbaugh, who really has no one else to blame for the fact that his comments about Sandra Fluke lost him advertisers and made Mike Huckabee a viable competitor, seems to be feeling sorry for himself lately. In a recent interview with The New Republic, President Obama said, truthfully, that “If a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you’ll see more of them doing it.” Now, Limbaugh appears to believe that this means President Obama is pulling some kind of mysterious strings—and to be denying his own influence. As The Hollywood Reporter explains:

Rush Limbaugh told his radio audience Monday that President Obama is promoting a “secondary boycott” against those he disagrees with and that the mainstream media is on board with the strategy.

“I would love to take credit for this,” Limbaugh said Monday. “I’d love to say that I find myself here because of a brilliantly conceived and flawlessly executed strategy, but one of the reasons that Fox News and I stand out like sore thumbs here is because the rest of the media is gone. The rest of the media is in the tank. The rest of the media has long ago ceased doing their job. They’re not reporting, they’re not curious, they’re not holding Obama accountable. They are on board. They are part of the agenda-advancement team.”

I’m awfully curious about this kind of thinking. Does Limbaugh believe himself to be influential, or not? If he doesn’t believe himself to have any particular influence over lawmakers, does that mean advertisers can’t decide if they do or don’t want to be associated with him, which is, after all, how pure media organizations have always set up that part of their revenue equation? How does President Obama saying that legislators care what Limbaugh thinks translate into him organizing a boycott against Limbaugh? What kind of free time does Limbaugh think President Obama has? It’s always entertaining seeing what it’s like down the rabbit hole, but I have less amused tolerance than usual when the subject is Limbaugh’s hurt feelings.

Central Park Five, the latest documentary directed by Ken Burns with his long-term collaborator David McMahon and Burns’ daughter Sarah, is a searing portrait of how detectives and prosecutors coerced confessions out of Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, and Kharey Wise, which also implicated Yusef Salaam, in the 1989 rape and assault of Trisha Meili. McCray, Richardson, Wise, Salaam, and Santana, who I had the privilege to meet and speak with yesterday, had their convictions vacated in 2002. Matias Reyes, whose DNA has been matched to that found on Meili’s body (there were no DNA matches between Meili and the Five), has confessed to the crime. In other words, the facts of the coercions, the false convictions, and the true perpetrator are not controversial, even if the city of New York has yet to settle a civil suit filed by the Five. So it was disappointing to hear from Burns yesterday at the Television Critics Association press tour that some of his regular and long-term funders had been afraid to back the project.

“A good deal of the money also came from the Atlantic Philanthropies, a foundation we had not had any relation with before, but who is willing to take on a sizable part of our budget in large part because so many others had avoided what they feared would be too controversial aspects of this story,” he explained in his introduction to the film.

Burns refused to name names, and was gracious about the fact that underwriters always have a lot of choices, even from among his slate of projects, but he didn’t mince words about the funders who expressed anxieties about the subject material or the tone of the film.

“I did not begrudge sponsors. They’re not obligated,” he explained. “We normally sort of work on a ten year plan. We have a film on the history of Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Sarah and Dave and I are working a film on Jackie Robinson. Lynn Novick, who’s been here before, and Sarah Botstein and I are in the middle of a massive series on the history of the Vietnam War. Dayton Duncan, who we were here with last summer on The Dust Bowl, and I are in the middle of researching and beginning to write a history of country music. We have a biography planned of Ernest Hemingway. All of those things are part of it. And underwriters have had a chance to sort of cherry-pick and choose what they want to do. And these are tough times for underwriting. And I think particularly for some, the notion of not knowing what the final product would look like, it was something that prudence suggested they stay away of, which is sad.”

But Burns also offered a rebuke to the idea that his other movies are sentimental or uncontroversial—or unconcerned with racial justice in the way Central Park Five is.

“There are aspects…in almost all the films in which we’ve been unwilling, in fact unable, to present a comfortable, sentimental or nostalgic version of American history,” he said. “And more often than not, scratching the surface of American history, we’ve dealt with race and this is certainly about that. I think it speaks volumes, this story, about America and our tortured racial history.”

The coverage of the Central Park Fives’ exoneration wasn’t nearly as loud as the media calls, in some cases, for them to be literally hung when New Yorkers were convinced they were guilty. Central Park Five is an opportunity to correct that balance, and to give Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise, and Yusef Salaam back some of their dignity and names, some of the slim recompense available to them, given that the years they lost to prison are unrecoverable. It also could help shift the sentiment on their civil suit against the city, which also cannot restore those years, but could give the Five some compensation for lost earnings and lost time to develop their careers. It’s a real shame that any funder would be more willing to back an argument about race in history when the victims of cruelty aren’t available to be helped, than to support the funding of a project about a shameful event of recent memory that could do some substantive good today.

GQ has named Beyoncé Knowles the sexiest woman of the millenium, an assessment with which I have no quibble. But what’s most interesting about the resulting profile of her, written by Amy Wallace, and the interview for which took place on the condition that Wallace consent that it be recorded by Knowles in an inversion of the normal agreements between source and subject, is that it’s all about Beyonce’s experience of being watched, often by herself. There are stories of Beyonce watching DVDs of every performance she’s ever made. There’s mention of the autobiographical documentary she’s making for HBO. And then there’s the intense, almost unnerving, archiving Knowles appears to be doing of even her most private life:

Anytime she wants to remind herself of all that work—or almost anything else that’s ever happened in her life—all she has to do is walk down the hall. There, across from the narrow conference room in which you are interviewing her, is another long, narrow room that contains the official Beyoncé archive, a temperature-controlled digital-storage facility that contains virtually every existing photograph of her, starting with the very first frames taken of Destiny’s Child, the ’90s girl group she once fronted; every interview she’s ever done; every video of every show she’s ever performed; every diary entry she’s ever recorded while looking into the unblinking eye of her laptop.

“Stop pretending that I have it all together,” she tells herself in a particularly revealing video clip, looking straight into the camera. “If I’m scared, be scared, allow it, release it, move on. I think I need to go listen to ‘Make Love to Me’ and make love to my husband.”

Beyoncé’s inner sanctum also contains thousands of hours of private footage, compiled by a “visual director” Beyoncé employs who has shot practically her every waking moment, up to sixteen hours a day, since 2005. In this footage, Beyoncé wears her hair up, down, with bangs, and without. In full makeup and makeup-free, she can be found shaking her famous ass onstage, lounging in her dressing room, singing Coldplay’s “Yellow” to Jay-Z over an intimate dinner, and rolling over sleepy-eyed in bed. This digital database, modeled loosely on NBC’s library, is a work in progress—the labeling, date-stamping, and cross-referencing has been under way for two years, and it’ll be several months before that process is complete. But already, blinking lights signal that the product that is Beyoncé is safe and sound and ready to be summoned— and monetized—at the push of a button.

Given how invasive paparazzi already are, I can’t imagine inviting more documentation into, say, dinner with a spouse or boyfriend. But I wish the profile had gone longer on this point. Because there’s something fascinating about a woman responding to the relentless commodification of her life by taking very direct control of the process. If you have an archive of every commercial photograph ever taken of you, you’re not going to be surprised when something surfaces. If you have better footage of yourself than anyone could ever put on the market, you have enormous control of what your final image is. And if you’re going to be nitpicked to death, becoming your own most careful critic and curating your image is a way to satisfy yourself, rather than satisfying someone else, even if the standards you’re striving to meet remain enormously high. I’m not sure I could live up to the standards Beyoncé sets for herself, and I wonder if they represent a capitulation to some really horrible cultural norms. But I admire her discipline.