Jack Shafer

As long as the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press continues to insist on conducting opinion polls about “trust” and the media, I’ll continue to insist on writing columns like this one.

I’m not knocking Pew. As collators of public opinion go, it’s not a bad organization. But you’ve really got to break the spines on Pew’s trust-in-the-media reports to glean the higher truths about how the public really feels about journalists and journalism.

Pew’s latest survey, released this week, reports that negative opinions about news organization performance have reached new highs, based on many of the measures it has tracked since 1985.

More respondents than ever believe that overall, media stories are often inaccurate (66 percent), news organizations unfairly tend to favor one side (77 percent), and news outlets are often influenced by powerful people and organizations (80 percent). (See the chart from Pew.)

Pew’s respondents are far from being connoisseurs of news. Instead, they appear to be slaves to their televisions, with 66 percent of them claiming to get most of their news from TV. Now, I’ve got nothing against television. I own two and keep one in my office. They are wonderful devices. But as dispensers of news, they’re not sufficient to the task.

Let’s say you get your world and national news from ABC’s, NBC’s, or CBS’s half-hour nightly newscasts, each of which is still more popular than anything on cable. Let’s say you watch every night. More nourishing on one level than the politics/current event shows featured on cable, the nightly broadcasts are still a stingy news meal. As Andrew Tyndall of the Tyndall Report points out, the news hole for a 30 minute newscast is between 18 and 19 minutes after you delete commercials, “openings, closings, teases, promos and logos.” After you shave the transcript for last night’s CBS Evening News to its essence, you’re swallowing about 3,111 words describing seven main stories.

Even if you’re a slow reader, you can probably read 7,000 to 8,000 words from 15 or 20 newspaper stories in the 30 minutes it takes a nightly newscast to unwind. Unless there is remarkable video or superb drama in the telecast, there’s no way that TV’s nightly news can deliver as much information as a newspaper in the same time. A TV viewer is, by definition, news challenged compared to a newspaper reader. He may absorb a lot of headlines by watching the news ticker at the bottom of the screen or by channel surfing, but it’s an exercise in wading in the shallows. If you’re one of the respondents who gets most of your news from television, then I’m going to assign you two hours of TV news a day, including blocks from BBC and PBS telecasts, before I let you into my news clubhouse.

The media assessments of the TV-favoring Pew respondents are about as valuable as the restaurant advice of that guy who has eaten 25,000 Big Macs. When Pew respondents say (over time) that news is increasingly inaccurate, increasingly one-sided, and more than ever is influenced by the powerful, they’re mostly telling us about the television news they watch, right?

One way to understand the increase in negative opinions about the press is to go back to 1985, when Pew started these surveys. Back then, there was no Fox News Channel and no MSNBC. Cable penetration was only about 42 percent of households, with only a smattering of satellite viewers. Today, more than 90 percent of households subscribe to cable or satellite. I reckon that Pew is actually measuring an increase in TV news consumption—probably of the cable variety—and less a decline in underlying media trustworthiness.

Not that the media should be trusted. Remain wary of all institutions of power at all times is my advice, advice that Pew’s respondents seem to live by. They don’t seem to trust anybody. They have less “trust” for government—state, federal, the Obama administration, and Congress (all measured separately)—than they do for national news organizations.

Where does government/media distrust come from? Some is organic, rising naturally from the soil. Some is encouraged by politicians following in the footsteps of such strategic haters as George Wallace and Richard Nixon. And some of it is piped in by news outlets like Fox, which coaches its viewers to distrust other media for commercial reasons. As a professional skeptic, I approve of all distrust, even if the underlying goal is to win political office or turn a media buck. From doubt comes knowledge.

But Pew’s respondents are not my sort of doubters, if only because they don’t have the courage of their convictions. Having trashed the press in general, they rate the trustworthiness of local news very high, with 69 percent saying they trust it a lot or some. And when asked to rate their main sources news—TV, radio, newspaper, magazine, website or app—62 percent of respondents say their main sources get the facts right.

This is the Big Mac eater’s way of saying, “I like the burgers that I like.”

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Back in my Slate days (was it really that long ago?), I declared my lack of trust in Pew respondents and in Mr. Trust himself, Walter Cronkite. Earlier this week, I chatted about trust with Craig Silverman and Mallary Jean Tenore at Poynter. Send your trusting correspondence to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and subscribe to America’s most trustworthy Twitter feed. (This RSS feed rings every time a new Shafer column goes live. This hand-built one rings every time a correction is filed.)

PHOTO: A KNBC-TV news van nears the main entrance to the NBC television network studios in Burbank, California, October 11, 2007. REUTERS/Fred Prouser

Ivan Lewis energized freethinkers everywhere today by proposing that the naughty U.K. press be reined in by “a new system of independent regulation.” In his speech to the Labour Party conference, the Labour shadow culture secretary called for the press to “consider whether people guilty of gross malpractice should be struck off,” by which he meant banned from the practice of journalism.

The U.K. press immediately roared back—all but accusing Lewis of campaigning for a cabinet position as Minister of Censorship. Lewis then retreated on Twitter. “I said industry should consider whether gross malpractice should lead to a journo being struck off and i oppose state oversight of press,” he wrote.

By the end of the day, Lewis was backpedaling faster, telling the BBC, “I regret the fact that there has been a response to something that I didn’t say.”

Yeah, yeah, Ivan, but I think we got your message the first time: When a scandal swallows police, newspaper executives, media moguls, private detectives, the prime minister, and journalists, your remedy would not be jail time for those who broke existing laws. What you want is a special “independent” body that would ostracize and shun the rotten journalists. Maybe even build a leper colony for them.

But as Helen Lewis-Hasteley writes on the New Statesman website today, no mechanism exists in the U.K. to disbar or otherwise “strike off” a rotten journalist. The news profession doesn’t accredit journalists—they’re not like doctors or lawyers or accountants with specific professional qualifications! It follows that there’s no industry-wide consensus on what constitutes gross journalistic malpractice. Likewise, the U.K. has no power to create a registry to prevent rotten journalists from practicing their craft, which means implementing Lewis’ modest proposal  would require a law spanning all print and electric media. You’d have to govern the U.K. the way the Communist Party governs China if you wanted to appoint guardians to stand at the gates of the Web to prevent shamed individuals from setting up blogs or otherwise expressing themselves.

Even if such a registry of banned journalists were conjured into existence, posits Lewis-Hasteley, how would it be enforced? She writes:

If we look at the countries around the world where the government keeps such a register, I bet they’re not the ones you’d regard as shining beacons of democracy and enlightenment. Who would administer the register? What would the appeals procedure be? How much would it cost to join?

Maybe Lewis can figure this all out by staging a fact-finding mission for himself and other members of Parliament to Zimbabwe and Nicaragua, where the state licenses (PDF) journalists.

“Will [Lewis] jam bloggers from outside Britain?” asks Roy Greenslade in the Guardian. “Are we to take the Chinese path by setting up a battery of digital censors located in some Whitehall technology centre?”

Lewis isn’t alone in calling for a new regulatory apparatus. Tory Prime Minister David Cameron made similar noises in July—sans the “striking off” innovation. Cameron called for the establishment of a new regulatory body that would be “independent” of both the press and the government. How the new watchdog agency Lewis and Cameron advocate would differ from the current, voluntary watchdog, the incompetent Press Complaints Commission, is not obvious. The Economist recently judged the PCC as not “so much toothless as blind” in investigating and policing the phone-hacking scandal (which is just about right) and called for the PCC to be put out of its misery.

If truly independent of the press and state, the new regulator would have no power and be accountable to nobody. That would amount to reinventing the PCC. If given the power to police the press, the new regulator’s existence would be a greater crime against humanity than all the phone-hackings put together.

There is no shortage of laws on the books to deter a resurgence of phone-hacking. Phone-hacking is against the law, as is ordering an employee to hack phones. Paying bribes to police is against the law. Destroying evidence is against the law. Perjury is against the law. If U.K. journalists violated these laws, U.K. police and U.K. courts have plenty of “regulatory” power to punish their “gross malpractice” without setting up a new version of the PCC.

In 1704, Daniel Defoe confronted an earlier set of censors with his pamphlet “An Essay on the Regulation of the Press.” He had it much worse: Back then, both the meddling state and the church hassled writers.

“To cure the ill use of liberty, with a deprivation of liberty,” Defoe wrote, “is like cutting off the leg to cure the gout in the toe, like expelling poison with too rank a poison, where both may struggle which poison shall prevail, but which soever prevails, the patient suffers.”

Will somebody pass along to Lewis that—especially in the Web era—there are no journalists? There are only acts of journalism. People who commit acts of journalism for a living deserve no special treatment from the government, such as shield laws. But neither do they deserve new laws or “voluntary” regulations that would blackball them.

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There’s another great line in the Defoe pamphlet that I couldn’t squeeze into this piece. “I know no nation in the world, whose government is not perfectly despotick, that ever makes preventive laws, ’tis enough to make laws to punish crimes when they are committed, and not to put it in the power of any single man, on pretence of preventing offences to commit worse.” Send your favorite Defoe lines to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com or rescue me from the lonely island of my Twitter feed. (This RSS feed rings every time a new Shafer column goes live. This hand-built one rings every time a correction is filed.)

PHOTO: The last edition of News of the World newspaper goes on sale alongside other British Sunday newspapers in London July 9, 2011. REUTERS/Paul Hackett

Another Slow-loading Ombudsman If newspaper ombudsmen have any right to exist—and I’m not suggesting that they do—it is to intervene in a way that solves reader problems. A reader has trouble with home delivery or billing? Expedite, Mr. Ombudsman! A reader can’t get the editors to correct an error? Persuade the editor to amend his ways, Mr. Ombudsman, or shame him in a column.

Washington Post ombudsman Patrick B. Paxton ignores this maxim in his most recent column, “Post Web site loads too slowly.”

After fielding complaints from dozens of bellyaching readers who say the Post‘s website takes forever to download pages, Paxton explains what the Post webmasters have explained to him: Post pages load slowly because they’re are larded with ads, videos, photos, and “plug-ins” that allow the viewing of various kinds of content. And that’s not all. They’re also filled with tracking and marketing code, which compiles dossiers on where viewers come from, and where they go, and helps determine which ads to display on the Post page.

The tech staff tells Paxton that they’re aware of the snail-speed of their pages—”in recent days, a ‘SWAT’ team was formed to examine page performance,” Paxton writes. But the tech staff has greater priorities than page-loading right now, he writes, like redesigning pages for the politics and polling pages, and improving Post apps for mobile devices.

Acting more like a Post PR representative than the paper’s ombudsman, Paxton conveys how important ad revenue and tracking information is to the Post‘s bottom line. He concludes by declaring the paper must make faster page-loads “a higher priority.”

Had Paxton stepped out of his bubble and called a tech-head not employed by the Post, he would have learned Post readers tormented by slow-loading pages can receive instant relief! Every Post page will load like a featherweight if users customize their Internet browsers to block ads and kill all that crazy code loading in the background. DotTech offers this primer on how to block ads on four top browsers. The NoScript plugin for Firefox prevents JavaScript, Java, Flash, Silverlight, and other plug-ins from loading automatically. Chrome users can block JavaScript and plugins with the Safy extension, and Internet Explorer users can follow these ad-blocking and Java-filtering tips from ghacks.net.

I don’t oppose Web ads: How do you think my salary has been paid for the last 15 years? I don’t think most readers are opposed to ads, either. What they hate are poorly implemented ads, and underlying faulty tech that makes ads load slowly, says my Reuters colleagues Anthony DeRosa.

So be your own SWAT team, Post readers—intervene yourself to make pages load faster—because the ombudsman is clueless and the Post tech staff would rather serve future readers than satisfy existing ones.

Why Is the Press Ignoring Presidential Candidate (fill in the blank)? A few weeks ago, Ron Paul supporters and some members of the commentariat (Roger Simon, Jon Stewart, et al.) were  protesting that the press unfairly ignored Paul after he finished No. 2 in the Ames straw poll. This gripe was slightly ridiculous: Ron Paul gets more stories written about him than he does votes. Having run for president with Stassen-like persistence (1988, 2008, 2012), Paul and his policy views have become pretty well known—thanks to previous stories in the press.

Besides, where is it mandated that coverage be apportioned by the percentage a candidate wins in a straw poll or primary? As this Houston Chronicle blog post from Sept. 14 indicates, a candidate has a lot of control over what sort of coverage he gets. At the time of the post, neither Michele Bachmann nor Ron Paul had scheduled press conferences to coincide with their speeches at the upcoming California GOP convention. If you want to make news, the blog noted, make yourself available to the press.

At the risk of being blogged to death by Paul fans, I’m satisfied that the Ames straw poll coverage got it just about right—the real news was that Michele Bachmann clobbered the field and that Mitt Romney and Rick Perry lost big. That Paul made a decent showing did not remake the campaign.

Now that Herman Cain has unexpectedly won the Florida straw poll, surely the commentariat will throw a similar pity party for the man from Godfather Pizza. But only 2,657 delegates voted, and Cain got only 996 of them. If you expect election coverage to be proportional to three-figure winning vote totals, you might want to consider remedial studies in both politics and journalism.

Bad Hed Whenever reading editorials or op-eds, I hear the voice of former (1986-1992) New York Times Editorial Page Editor Jack Rosenthal in my head. Rosenthal famously banned his editorialists from using “should” and “must” in their copy, as Timothy Noah reported in a 1999 article for George magazine, because the words mark the absence of a logical argument.

Rosenthal told Noah that should-and-must editorials sounded as if the Times was giving orders. “You must, by God, because we said so, and we’re the fucking New York Times,” Rosenthal said.

Few newspaper sections violate the Rosenthal prohibition with as much enthusiasm these days as the Financial Times‘ op-ed page, where they place should-and-must in headlines! Give a gander at these recent op-ed heds:

“Britain should bite the bullet and back a eurobond,” Aug. 25.

“HP should have avoided a big bang,” Aug. 25.

“The U.K. must escape its longest depression,” Sept. 2.

“Why we must listen to what bond markets are telling us,” Sept. 7.

“What the world must do to boost growth,” Sept. 9.

“The world must demand that Europe act to rescue its currency,” Sept. 19.

The Financial Times should hire Rosenthal at his day-rate to stamp out these lame heds. No, it must!

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Although it should take Rosenthal only about an hour to set the FT straight. Got any other 60-minute missions? Send your ideas to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. For 60-nanosecond updates, see my Twitter feed. (This RSS feed rings every time a new Shafer column goes live. This hand-built one rings every time a correction is filed.)

PHOTO: A loggerhead turtle reaches the water after making its way across the sandy beach towards the sea at Gnejna Bay, in the north of Malta August 11, 2011.  REUTERS/Darrin Zammit Lupi

Everybody thinks of themselves as a press critic these days, even the U.S. State Department.

A slew of diplomatic cables recently released by WikiLeaks portrays the State Department as the A.J. Liebling of Foggy Bottom. Drawing on content analysis by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, U.S. embassy officials in Qatar in 2005 aggressively leaned on and lobbied the top editors of Al Jazeera, the news channel and website owned by the Qatar monarchy, giving them unsolicited editorial suggestions. It’s quaint to imagine Pentagon employees watching hour after hour of Al Jazeera and clicking the vastness of its website with the diligence that Media Matters for America applies to ferreting out media bias by the Fox News Channel. I wonder if they get pee breaks and snacks.

The release of diplomatic cables from 2005 may have contributed to the ouster this week of Al Jazeera’s news director, Wadah Khanfar, according to a Sept. 20 report in the New York Times by David D. Kirkpatrick. The cables portray Khanfar as a pliant vessel in his meetings with hectoring representatives from the U.S. embassy. For instance, an October 2005 cable described a meeting in which a U.S. embassy official gave Khanfar a hard copy of unclassified snippets from a DIA critique of three recent months of Al Jazeera coverage of the Iraq war.

From the cable:

[The U.S. official] told Khanfar that despite an overall decrease in negative coverage since February, the month of September showed a worrying increase in such programming over the previous month. She summarized the latest [U.S. government] reporting on Al Jazeera by noting that problems still remain with double-sourcing in Iraq; identifying sources; use of inflammatory language; a failure to balance of [sic] extremist views; and the use of terrorist tapes.

Rather than telling the U.S. press critic to bug off—which is the treatment I’m often accorded when I disparage an editor’s work to his face—Khanfar said he had already seen some of the DIA critiques (the Qatar government had forwarded them to him)  and responded that he was preparing a reply to them.

“Some are simple mistakes which we accept and address,” the cable quotes Khanfar. “This report takes bits and pieces from a whole thing and does not give the context.”

Khanfar attempted to mollify the U.S. official by claiming to have deleted from the network’s website two images of injured civilians that the U.S. had previously objected to. After the U.S. official complained about a different website piece, Khanfar agreed to delete it, too. “Not immediately, because that would be talked about, but over two  or three days.” According to the cable, “Khanfar appeared to repress a sigh” in response to the criticism.

Khanfar did, however, balk at the wording of one of the DIA reports, which states that the news organization had violated a previous agreement with U.S. officials. That agreement was “non-paper,” Khanfar said, adding that Al Jazeera could not “sign agreements of this nature, and to have it here like this in writing.”

A December 2005 cable chronicles another meeting with Khanfar in which the U.S. official griped about Al Jazeera’s “lack of professionalism.” Playing good cop, bad cop, the official held out the idea of inviting Al Jazeera journalists to participate in the State Department’s International Visitor program, which brings foreigners here to learn about life in the United States. “Khanfar acquiesced immediately,” the cable reported, and he reciprocated by extending an invitation for U.S. journalists to spend a week or so in the Al Jazeera newsroom.

The State Department delivered a separate press critique to Abdulaziz Al Mahmoud, the editor of AlJazeera.net, according to an October 2005 cable. A U.S. embassy official told Al Mahmoud of his displeasure with a slideshow that blamed the U.S. government for “the starvation of thousands of Arabs and Muslims,” among other sins. Al Mahmoud later called the embassy to say that Khanfar had ordered the slideshow removed from the site.

How did the embassy appraise Al Mahmoud? From the cable:

Al Mahmoud is clearly very wary of attracting negative attention from his chain of command, and is aware that an irritated [U.S. government] means trouble for him. He urged [the embassy official] to call him directly any time the Embassy observes troubling material on the website.

The State Department’s Al Jazeera offensive had two fronts. Around the time that it was twisting Al Jazeera’s arm, U.S. Ambassador Chase Untermeyer was pressuring its financial source, the Qatar government, in a meeting with Sheik Hama bin Jassim Al Thani, now Qatar’s prime minister but then its minister of foreign affairs.

Untermeyer discussed with al Thani the monthly reports the DIA and the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service had been collecting on Al Jazeera, according to the cable. What most irritated Untermeyer were the insurgent-provided videos from the Iraq war that Al Jazeera had aired and the “anti-American interviewees.”

Also, the DIA had perceived an increase of “hostile reportage” on Al Jazeera from 7 percent in August to 11 percent in September, the first increase “since our bilateral engagement on AJ began in February,” the cable stated.

“This backsliding, Ambassador pointed out, will be noted negatively in Washington,” stated the cable.

(Khanfar has been replaced at Al Jazeera by Sheikh Ahmad bin Jasem bin Muhammad Al Thani, a member of the “royal” family, helping to erode the news organization’s claim that it is editorially independent of the government.)

How much of Khanfar’s willingness to roll over for the U.S. embassy is genuine and how much a function of the cable authors’ self-aggrandizement can only be answered by the flies on the walls at the meetings. Still, the cables have convinced me that the State Department never regarded Al Jazeera as independent from the Qatar government in the first place. What does surprise me, based on the leaked cables, is the paucity of the State Department’s critique. What State seems ever-protesting is the way Al Jazeera frames its stories; who appears on its talk shows to damn the West (and the frequency with which those damners appear); the graphic depiction of wounded; a lack of balance (where have we heard that one before?); the provenance of some of its videos  (“insurgents”); and more. Not to find equivalence between Al Jazeera and, say, the BBC, but should the State Department be in the business of playing the Columbia Journalism Review to a state broadcaster?

For personal and professional reasons I’m dying to know how good the boys and girls at DIA and FBIS are at dossier building for the press critics at State. So tomorrow, I’m going to file FOIAs for DIA and FBIS analysis of Al Jazeera. I promise to post updates to the FOIA responses on this RSS feed.

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For a worthy take on what the leaked cables tell us about Al Jazeera, see Omar Chatriwala’s piece in Foreign Policy. WikiLeaks obsessives who have found additional press-related cables should send the URLs to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. Contrary to rumor, my Twitter feed is not owned by the Qatar government. (This RSS feed rings every time a new Shafer column goes live. This hand-built one rings every time a correction is filed.)

PHOTO: A general view shows the newsroom at the headquarters of the Qatar-based Al Jazeera English-language channel in Doha February 7, 2011. REUTERS/ Fadi Al-Assaad

By Jack Shafer
The views expressed are his own.

Before we go any further on the topic, may we first please thank the gods for media bias?

If not for media bias, I’m certain that my news diet would taste so strongly of sawdust and talc that I would abandon news consumption completely. As long as I’m eating news, give me the saffron smoothness of New York Times liberalism and the hallelujah hot sauce excitement of Fox News Channel conservatism. Anything but a menu of balance, moderation, and fairness!

Not that I don’t value balance, moderation, and fairness—a good Associated Press story can nourish the soul as well as a six-pack of Bud on a hot summer day. But as a rule, I like my news chefs to make spicy meals or no meals at all.

My devotion to biased media puts me on the outs with the conservative gang at the Media Research Center, who patrol the nation’s airwaves and news pages for liberal transgressions against the truth, and the liberals at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and Media Matters for America, who stalk conservative deviations. Good luck to you all, I say, but leave me off your e-mail lists.

Yet the search for media bias goes on, the latest contribution to the genre being a new book by Tim Groseclose, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind. Professor Groseclose, who holds positions in both the political science and economics departments at UCLA, has with his colleague Jeff Milyo, devised a new way to measure bias. First, he calculated the “PQs,” or political quotients, of members of Congress “based upon issues chosen by the Americans for Democratic Action.” The closer the member follows the ADA’s liberal line, the higher his score; the less often, the lower. The PQ machine awards Rep.  Maxine Waters, D-Calif., a perfect PQ of 100 and Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., a PQ of 4.8. Former U.S. senator Arlen Specter scored about 50, making him the archetypal middle-of-the-roader. (I took Groseclose’s 10-item questionnaire and recorded a PQ of 30, but don’t put too much stock in that score. I’m a libertarian, a political persuasion that confounds questionnaires designed to smoke out righties from lefties.)

The two scholars then devised “SQs,” or slant quotients, to measure media bias. The more liberal think tanks a news outlet cited, the greater its SQ. The New York Times came in at 73.7 out of 100 for perfectly liberal and the Washington Times scored 35.4. By juxtaposing PQs and SQs, Groseclose attempts to demonstrate how far the press diverges from what America thinks.

I won’t bother to argue with Groseclose whether the New York Times is more liberal than the Washington Times. Neither would former New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent. The average reader who seeks the New York Times isn’t looking for a “normal” publication that cites liberal, centrist, and conservative think tanks in equal portions. He’s likely looking for a publication that ranks his Manhattan-state-of-mind as normal—that is pro-gay marriage, pro-gun control, pro-choice, pro-regulation, and so on. This reader won’t throw his newspaper to the dirt in disgust if an article mentions the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute, but he’s not going to tolerate a newspaper that acts like a debate society, giving equal time to all points of view in pursuit of a SQ score of 50. The same is true for your average Washington Times reader or Fox News Channel viewer, who would rather be accused of soliciting confirmation bias from their news sources than be forced to watch PBS’s NewsHour, which records a predictable middle-of-the-road SQ of 55.8.

I admire Groseclose’s effort to quantify bias, and I found enlightenment in his chapter-long studies of press coverage of tax cuts, “partial-birth abortion,” Hurricane Katrina, and the role of race in UCLA admissions. So, I will also keep his book on my shelf for future consultation. But here’s the “but”: Left Turn‘s worshipful normalization of the centrist point of view prevents it from rethinking the media bias question. As the folks at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting have been shouting for 20 years, centrism is just as much an ideology as leftism or rightism. The “truth” does not necessarily reside in the center: A centrist is potentially as biased as any lefty or righty. Or to put it in the Texas pejorative, as Jim Hightower does in a book of the same name, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.”

Rather than ripping news outlets for “slanting” the news—as Groseclose and the other bias-hunters do—I prefer to blame news consumers for journalism’s deficiencies: Readers and viewers aren’t as critical about their favorite news outlets as they should be, except to complain that the New York Times isn’t as liberal as it should be or that Fox has failed to terminate the career of Barney Frank. My cure for this kind of credulousness is simple: Have readers and viewers expand the range of news sources they consume, embracing the whole SQ spectrum from liberal to centrist to conservative to “off the wing.”

The recommendation comes from my prejudice that liberals are better at sniffing out corporate corruption and national security shenanigans and conservatives better at blowing the whistle on waste and overreach by governments. Centrist news outlets, or at least self-defined centrist journalists, don’t strike me as possessed or deranged enough to battle their way to the end of a good investigation.

I also call upon readers to learn how to hit both lefties and righties—and whatever ambidextrous centrist journalists take the mound. Media bias isn’t a journalistic problem. It’s a solution.

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In addition to four daily newspapers, I read the Weekly Standard, the Nation, the National Review, the American Prospect, Reason, the New York Review of Books, Mother Jones, Commentary, Harper’s, the New Republic, the American Spectator, and more. My RSS reader similarly overflows. What else should I be reading? Drop recommendations to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and follow my Twitter feed, where I suggest worthy articles frequently. (This RSS feed rings every time a new Shafer column goes live. This hand-built one rings every time a correction is filed.)

PHOTO: Members of Color of Change protest against Fox News Channel outside the News Corporation building in New York July 23, 2008. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

By Jack Shafer
The views expressed are his own.

What were the London police thinking when they invoked the Official Secrets Act last week to compel Guardian reporters Amelia Hill and Nick Davies to disclose the confidential source for their July 4 Milly Dowler phone-hacking story? Did they think the Guardian would roll over when they arrived in court on Friday to contest the order? That Hill and Davies would submit? That free-speech advocates, members of Parliament, and journalists around the world would pay no mind to the prosecutorial over-reach?

Whatever the Metropolitan Police thought, they’ve rethought it today, announcing that they’re dropping for the time-being their request for a court order that the Guardian give up its sources.

With the perfect vision that comes with hindsight, it now appears that the court order was a bluff. As the Guardian reported yesterday, the Met did not consult the director of public prosecutions before wielding the Official Secrets Act, as the 1989 law requires. He was only consulted on Monday. In other words, the London police went rogue. If that’s the case, perhaps the goal of the cops was to give the Guardian and its journalists a fright and deter other reporters from investigating the pile-up of journalistic malfeasance, crimes by private detectives, corporate malfeasance at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corps., and, of course, bribe-taking by the Metropolitan Police.

But as all game theory enthusiasts know, a bluff—even an empty bluff such as the Met’s—can disturb the existing equilibrium and leave one’s opponent unsettled. The police may have calculated that the psychological damage done to journalists by requesting a court order would be worth the black eye the police might suffer for making it. But that’s giving the police too much credit for thinking ahead. If they had the skill to think ahead they would have prosecuted the phone-hacking cases back in 2007 when the evidence was fresh.

The Metropolitan police’s targeting of the press—like Rupert Murdoch’s decision to pay out $4.7 million in News Corp. guilt money to Dowler’s family and charity—indicates a frantic turn in the phone-hacking story. The police are now conceding they don’t really understand the law. And Murdoch is conceding that his now-dead newspaper, News of the World, committed the very crimes at the center of the scandal.

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If you’ve got a spare $4.7 million, send it in bitcoins to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. For confirmation of delivery, see my Twitter feed. (This RSS feed rings every time a new Shafer column goes live. This hand-built one rings every time a correction is filed.)

By Jack Shafer
The views expressed are his own.

London’s Metropolitan Police, who helped cover up the U.K.’s phone-hacking scandal for the better part of a decade, have finally figured out how to crack the case. Attack the press.

The Guardian, which kept the story alive after Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World minions, top politicians, and the cops throttled it, reports that the Metropolitan Police have requested a court order to force two of its reporters, Amelia Hill and Nick Davies, to surrender their confidential sources from their July 4 Milly Dowler phone-hacking story. Hill has already been questioned by police.

The Met is making its demand under the  Official Secrets Act, which is usually invoked in national security cases. In 1985, Ministry of Defence employee Clive Ponting was prosecuted under the act for divulging information about the sinking of an Argentinean ship during the Falklands War. In 2002, counter-intelligence officer David Shayler was convicted of giving secret documents to a newspaper. In 2003, U.K. government employee Katharine Gun was charged under the act with leaking to a reporter email from the National Security Agency requesting help in bugging the United Nations offices of six countries.

But the act’s fine print also criminalizes leaks of “damaging” information by government officials that could impede the prosecution of criminal suspects. It’s through this window that the police hope to push their court order.

Although I’m appalled by the Met’s assault on the freedom of the press (as we ACLU sympathizers like to say), I’m mollified by the fact that after years of dilly-dallying, the Metropolitan Police are finally taking the phone-hacking case seriously—even if they are punishing a pair of reporters whose only crime is having uncovered long-term wrong-doing that the police previously entombed. The real criminals in the phone-hacking scandal are, of course, the newspaper editors and reporters who hacked phones or ordered them hacked; the private investigators who did the journalists’ illegal bidding; the newspaper executives (Rebekah Brooks? James Murdoch? Les Hinton?) who facilitated the crimes; and the police who, for reasons of self-preservation, pushed the scandal under the carpet.

The circular logic behind the Met’s request for a court order delivers more torque than a spinning Ferris Wheel: The police want the Guardian‘s reporters to surrender the confidential sources who blabbed about the illegal phone-hacking, arguing that the stories are impeding an investigation. But the police had for years deliberately ignored the information that was ultimately leaked to the Guardian! There was no police investigation for the Guardian to “impede” until the Guardian brought the facts to the public’s attention and the public demanded that the police do their job!

Had the Guardian reporters not “impeded” the police investigation, News of the World journalists and their like-minded colleagues in the press would have remained undeterred in their efforts to break the law to break news. Likewise, we probably would have never learned that News of the World hacked a dead girl’s phone, simultaneously interfering with a police investigation and giving the girl’s parents false hope that she was alive.

That the police have a grudge to settle with the Guardian and the press goes without saying. The press has been making life miserable for the cops. Earlier this summer, the Guardian‘s Davies reported that police have collected thousands of pounds of bribes from a detective employed by journalists. Reuters’ Mark Hosenball also reported the existence of e-mail traffic okaying the payment of a “four figure sum” by News of the World to a police contact. (Cops hate it when you reveal the source of their donut money.) In 2007, Andy Hayman, the lead police investigator in the phone-hacking case, left the force in the wake of questions about his professional conduct. His destination: a post as columnist for Murdoch’s Times of London. Over the summer, Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson was forced to resign when his personal links to a News of the World editor arrested in the hacking investigation were revealed. Assistant Commissioner John Yates, who neglected to reopen the phone-hacking investigation after he reviewed it in 2009, also resigned this summer following assertions that he had mucked up the probe.

How badly did Yates neglect the investigation? Between 2006 and autumn 2010, nobody in Scotland Yard “bothered to sort through” the “11,000 pages of handwritten notes listing nearly 4,000 celebrities, politicians, sports stars, police officials and crime victims whose phones may have been hacked by the News of the World,” as the New York Times‘ Don Van Natta Jr. reported in July. Said Yates in defense of his investigative priorities, “I’m not going to go down and look at bin bags.”

Stephenson, Yates, and Hayman have recently been cleared of misconduct in the case, but it’s a rare police force that doesn’t hassle the press for exposing its transgressions and embarrassments. The best way to grade a news organization is to ask when the government last subpoenaed its reporters. If it’s been longer than two years, the news organization hasn’t been doing its job.

The Guardian provides a perfect example of no good deed going unpunished. The explicit target of the court order is the Guardian journalists, but the unsubtle message to leakers of police misbehavior everywhere is this: Do the right thing and we will smoke you out and send you—and your sources—to jail.

The Guardian‘s Dan Sabbagh asked an excellent question on Twitter this afternoon: Why didn’t the Met police go after the Telegraph with the Official Secrets Act after it published—in defiance of Parliament—its 2009 investigation of the misuse of expense budgets by members of Parliament? Sabbagh’s analysis is dead-on: If airing evidence of Parliament’s wrong-doing before the authorities have sanitized it isn’t “impeding” an investigation, nothing is.

This isn’t the first time the police have tried to shut down the Guardian‘s phone-hacking investigation, as it reports today. In December 2009, Commissioner Stephenson tried—unsuccessfully—to convince the paper that its coverage of the affair was overblown. But last summer in testimony to the select committee investigating the scandal, he reversed himself and conceded the Guardian had been right to pursue the story.

When police botch a case, as the Metropolitan Police have, usually nobody but the press will investigate. When the police go crooked, as bribe-taking members of the Metropolitan Police are believed to have, you can’t always depend on the internal affairs department to set them straight. Your better bet is an unfettered press. Instead of harassing the Guardian with court orders, the cops should be buying Davies and Hill drinks.

That’s something even former Police Commissioner Stephenson might salute now.

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By my own yardstick, I am a failed journalist. Never has any police force subpoenaed me. If the Met has any spare court orders, won’t someone please e-mail one of them to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. For faster delivery, send them to my Twitter feed. (This RSS feed rings every time a new Shafer column goes live. This hand-built one rings every time a correction is filed.)

PHOTO: A traditional lamp stands outside a Metropolitan Police station in central London February 1, 2011. REUTERS/Luke MacGregor

By Jack Shafer
The opinions expressed are his own.

In case you haven’t heard, the 2012 presidential election is already over and the Republicans stole it. Both Rolling Stone and Mother Jones report this week that those wascally Wepublicans have already walked away with the ballot boxes.

The Rolling Stone piece (Sept. 15, 2011) finds evidence of an “unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008.”  Comparing the Republican efforts to suppress the vote to the Jim Crow-era poll taxes and literacy tests erected by Dixiecrats, writer Ari Berman claims that a “dozen states have approved new obstacles to voting.” By “obstacles” Berman means new laws requiring proof of citizenship in Kansas and Alabama; the repeal of Election Day voter registration in Maine; shortened early voting periods in Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia; and the presentation of government-issued ID before casting ballots in Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin, as well as other new voting measures.

As clampdowns go, these measures seem too anemic to support the Rolling Stone‘s hysterical headline, “The GOP War on Voting,” but it is no journalistic crime to over-promise and under-deliver on a piece, especially a political piece.

Mother Jones’s less wiggy article, by Nick Baumann, explains how Pennsylvania’s Republican state legislators are “pushing a scheme” to change the way the state’s Electoral College votes are cast from winner-take-all to winner by congressional district (two votes would go to the state-wide contest winner). The horror of the plan, Baumann writes, is that it’s legal. It’s also constitutional—Nebraska and Maine cast their votes this way, he writes, and it could cost President Barack Obama a second term in a close election.

Whatever might be said about these charges, they are certainly not “unprecedented.” Fears of a stolen election are as old as American politics and as contemporary as the last big contest. In 2008′s third presidential campaign debate, John McCain declared that ACORN was “now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”  In October 2008, Rolling Stone published a feature whose thesis was similar to the current piece, titled “Block the Vote: Will the GOP’s campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president?” By the time the froth on both sides dried, nobody uncovered evidence of either an ACORN or Republican coup d’etat.

At the risk of sounding like the moderating voice of reason, I’d like to point out that the Republican efforts to “suppress the Democratic vote” aren’t quite as demonic and unfair as Rolling Stone makes them out to be. Of course, Republicans want as few potential Democratic voters to cast ballots as possible, and will shout “Vote fraud!” if that makes their case more persuasive. That’s politics. Democrats want as many potential Democratic voters to cast ballots as possible, and they don’t particularly care if those Democrats are double registered or otherwise ineligible as long as nobody finds out. That’s politics, too, a point that historian Alexander Keyssar makes repeatedly in the 2006 2000 book The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States.

Any effort to uncouple politics from the way that voters are registered, votes are cast, and votes are counted is foolhardy, because the whole enterprise is political and always has been. “Federalists and then Whigs tended to favor longer periods of residence,” Keyssar writes of politics in early 19th century America, “because they were wary of the unsettled and the poor and suspected that most transients would vote for Republicans or Democrats. The Democrats shared this analysis, advocating shorter residency requirements in the hope of enfranchising more of their own supporters.”

Rolling Stone makes a big deal out of the fact that the feds convicted only 86 people of voter fraud between 2002 and 2007. But the lack of prosecution doesn’t mean widespread voter fraud doesn’t exist. In 2004, journalist Bill Gifford compiled these hilarious examples of non-partisan voter fraud for Slate.

The Orlando Sentinel found that 68,000 Florida voters are also registered in Georgia or North Carolina (the only two states it checked), 1,650 of whom voted twice in 2000 or 2002. The Kansas City Star discovered 300 “potential” cases of individual voter fraud, including Kansans voting in Missouri and St. Louisans voting in both the city and the surrounding suburbs.

At the risk of sounding like a Republican, I direct you to the data collected by the United States Elections Project at George Washington University, which indicates that “suppressing” the potential Democratic vote in such Electoral College vote-rich states as California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Illinois could be a worthy, democratic initiative. According to the Elections Project, almost 20 percent of  the voting-age population in California in 2006 was ineligible to vote because of their lack of citizenship or other reasons. In Texas, the figure was 16.34 percent; in Florida, 13.47 percent; in New York, 13.21 percent; in Illinois, 9.72 percent. In the average state, about 7 percent of its voting-age population is ineligible to vote.

So when Republicans deploy their “suppressive” measures in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois—and other places in which the ineligible are found in profusion—you can make like a Democrat and complain that their efforts are disenfranchising whole populations that have a right to vote. Or you can make like a Republican and claim that the GOP is protecting the sanctity of votes cast by the eligible by making it harder for the ineligible to register.

Or, you can make like the moderating voice of reason—me—and have it both ways, simultaneously supporting and protesting the Republicans’ war on voting.

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Disclosure: The 2011 Rolling Stone article notes that the Koch brothers help fund the American Legislative Exchange Council, which designs legislation “to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.” I worked for almost three years in the early 1980s for Inquiry magazine, which was funded by the Kochs. Cast your ballot for or against this piece with email to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. This hand-built RSS feed rings every time a Shafer correction is filed.

PHOTO: Voters cast their ballots at the Super Suds laundry in Long Beach, California November 2, 2010. REUTERS/Phil McCarten