Jack Shafer

Let’s assume that Herman Cain misbehaved, in the manner that is alleged in Politico, during his time as the head of the National Restaurant Association in the late 1990s.

Such an assumption is hard to make—not because the allegations are unbelievable, or because Cain vehemently denied the charges today at a National Press Club lunch (“I was falsely accused”), but because Politico wrapped the allegations in journalistic gauze that frays and dissolves as you unwind it.

What are the allegations? To review, Politico reports that:

·At least two of Cain’s female employees complained about his behavior, which included “conversations allegedly filled with innuendo or personal questions of a sexually suggestive nature.”

·These conversation took place at “hotels during conferences,” at “association events,” and at “the association’s offices.”

·Cain also allegedly made “physical gestures that were not overtly sexual but that made women who experienced or witnessed them uncomfortable and that they regarded as improper in a professional relationship.”

·A source says one of the women “suffered what the source described as ‘an unwanted sexual advance’ from Cain at a hotel.”

·A source “closely familiar with Cain’s tenure in Washington confirmed” that the claims “disturbed members of the board who became aware of it.”

·This source tells Politico that “sealed settlements [were] reached in the plural” and are said to include payouts “in the five-figure range.”

·Cain allegedly told a campaign staffer this year that claims of sexual harassment could surface.

Granted, we’re talking about a first-day story. Politico may be holding the salient facts in reserve for its follow-ups so it can build its case against Cain a day at a time. If and when they publish them I may change my tune. But right now the subject is today’s story. Until Cain’s accusers speak forthrightly on the record, until Politico shares the underlying “documentation describing the allegations” that it claims to possess, readers have the right to gripe about the charges against Cain being as clear as dappled light on fog.

Before we drag Cain to The Hague’s highest HR court for trial, I’d like to know exactly what Cain said to the women. Did he sexually proposition them? Did he boast about his virility in a vulgar manner in their presence? Did he ask women who worked for him intrusive questions about their sex lives? I’m prepared—especially after Cain’s kooky National Press Club appearance today, at which he sang a bit of “He Looked Beyond My Faults”—to believe the worst about him. As we’ve seen during his presidential campaign, he’s impulsive, he’s an egomaniac, he loves to entertain, and he lives to provoke. Add a wandering eye and lascivious impulses to that bundle and you’ve got the makings of a classic sexual harasser.

But that’s all conjecture. Just because he’s a little bit crazy doesn’t make him a sexual harasser, nor do the vague charges made against him. (I’m very curious about what sort of “documentation” in Politico’s possession describes the decade-old charges against Cain. Transcripts? Internal HR filings? A letter of accusation? A tape-recording? A letter from the lawyers for the accusers petitioning for a cash settlement from the National Restaurant Association?)

If members of the National Restaurant Association board were disturbed by the claims against Cain, surely they were upset by something more detailed than the hazy allegations Politico presents. Likewise, I’d like to know what sort of physical gestures Cain made around his female employees that were not overtly sexual but still made women uncomfortable. If we’re going to judge Cain’s conduct, surely his gestures can be sketched in full by Politico. Why the reluctance? We’re big boys and girls, Politico. We can handle it.

In criticizing the story’s shortcomings, I mean no comfort to sexual harassers. Sexual harassment in the workplace is bad, and not just because it harms women. It injures everybody by arbitrarily discouraging half of the working-age population from contributing their skills and energies to schools, offices, factories, laboratories, and other places of labor. Subtract women from the workplace and you subtract half of all of the creative and industrious workers, damaging the value of goods and services. In the long run, even the men who sexually harass women suffer from their actions, although I doubt that insight will move them to correct their course.

Sometimes the headline of a piece reveals its inadequacies, which seems to be the case with Politico‘s “Exclusive: Two women accused Herman Cain of inappropriate behavior.” If the art of journalism is located in the specifics, the Politico piece deserves just one star.

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What tunes should be on the Herman Cain playlist? Send nominations to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. My Twitter feed streams instrumentals only. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for notification of column corrections.

PHOTO: Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain speaks at the National Press Club in Washington, October 31, 2011.  REUTERS/Jason Reed

Ted Koppel, my favorite media punching bag, has stepped back into the ring for another beating.

After exile from ABC News to the BBC and the Discovery Channel, Koppel is now joining Brian Williams’ forthcoming NBC News magazine program Rock Center as a special correspondent. How special? Koppel has never been shy about proclaiming how great he and his peers were during the alleged “golden age” of broadcasting and how much everybody else sucks today. But the preening soundbite he delivered today in the Associated Press about the modern media’s failure sets a new standard for the 71-year-old newsman who anchored ABC News’s Nightline for 25 years.

Koppel states:

Instead of giving the public what it needs to hear, we’re giving the public news that it wants to hear, and one of these days the public is going to turn on us and say, “Why didn’t you tell us about those important things that were going on?”… They’re not going to like the answer and we’re not going to like the answer. We’re going to say we gave you what you wanted.

Read it again and see if it doesn’t remind you of some father bawling his kid out for spoiling his supper with a Snickers bar. Koppel is essentially saying that the press is failing its audience by giving them what they want instead of what they need—that is, the sort of news Koppel and his fellow media giants (Walter! The Brothers Kalb! Harry Reasoner! Chet and David! Arnold Zenker!) beamed to the nation’s TV sets as recently as the 1980s.

Evidence that Koppel is reading from an internal teleprompter comes from this Pullman, Wash. talk late last month (PDF):

The first thing we have to do is get back in the business of giving the American public what they need to hear—and what they need to hear is nonpartisan news about issues of real importance. … That means giving them less of the candy news that they’ve been getting over the past few years.

More evidence comes from a September talk in Tulsa, when Koppel speaks about his Nightline years:

Back in those days we believed we had a mission. … Our mission was to tell you at the end of the day what we thought you needed to know. We didn’t give a lot of thought to what you wanted to know…

It’s an industry where we no longer give you [what] you need to know but what you want to know—and that can be mindless trash.

Koppel’s consistent nostalgia for the old days must not go unchallenged. No thinking person would trade the current mediascape—which gives us instant access to newspapers around the country and around the world, from the BBC and Al Jazeera, to the Reuters, AP, and AFP wires, and to narrowcasting websites of all sorts— for the ancient one in which the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the newsweeklies, CBS News, NBC News, and to a lesser degree Koppel’s also-ran, ABC News, ruled the news universe.

Koppel can only think that journalism has lost its “mission” if he spends more time on TMZ.com than he does on the Guardian. The rest of us who care about news are feasting our way through an endless, high-quality banquet.

The source of Koppel’s news angst isn’t hard to locate. He pines for the 1980s because that was the high-water mark of the now-displaced “media regime” in which he held power. I lift the phrase and the analysis from After Broadcast News: Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment (Cambridge University Press), a new book by Bruce A. Williams and Michael X. Delli Carpini.

Williams and Delli Carpini explain how technology and the end of the Cold War “have destabilized the media regime of the mid-twentieth century, challenging the premises of which the Age of Broadcast News were based and accounting for current debates over the eroding boundary between news and entertainment.” It isn’t the first time that a media regime has toppled. Williams and Delli Carpini provide history lessons tracing earlier media displacements—the rise of the penny press in the 1830s, for example, and the development of the halftone print in the 1880s, which made newspapers more visual, and the later triumph of broadcast journalism over newspapers. Somewhere in history’s dustbin a 110-year-old newspaper guy is making the same complaints about Walter Cronkite that Koppel is making about the current scene.

What Koppel and the 110-year-old guy are really bellyaching about is not the demise of journalism but their own relative demise. People paid attention to Koppel not because his work astonished them but because he was one of very few choices on the TV dial. As Williams and Delli Carpini point out, “by 1980 the average American home received ten television signals, national and international news remained almost entirely the purview of the thirty-minute (including commercials) evening broadcasts of the three national networks.” Nightline began broadcasting in 1979 with a very sensationalistic title, The Iran Crisis—America Held Hostage, and Koppel took the reins shortly after its debut.

The proliferation of cable TV in the 1980s and the Web in the 1990s shattered what Williams and Delli Carpini call the hegemony of broadcast news, and one of the casualties is Koppel. He yearns all these years later for the mass audience he didn’t earn with the quality of his work (which I will confess was high) but which was an accident of technology and regulation.

After Broadcast News attacks the foolishness of people like Koppel who insist on a set-in-concrete distinction between news and entertainment. Comedians, talk-show hosts, and satirists are better equipped than professional journalists to refute the fictions that clog the news stream, Williams and Delli Carpini maintain. “[T]he line between news and entertainment is inherently blurred and contestable and never fully maps the boundaries between politically relevant media forms. It was only the regulations, institutions, norms, and practices that came to define the broadcast news media regime that made such distinctions seem natural,” they write.

One excellent example of this blurring offered by Williams and Delli Carpini is the work and career of CBS News legend Edward R. Murrow, who in the early 1950s investigated wrong-doings with his See It Now program at the same time he was chatting up celebrities (Brando, Bogart, Monroe, Sinatra) on his Person to Person broadcasts. Koppel must know all about how news and entertainment aren’t enemies, that they can co-exist and even feed symbiotically on one another. After all, when he made his pissy comments at WSU-Pullman, he was there to receive the 2011 Edward R. Murrow Award for Lifetime Achievement in Broadcast Journalism.

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“The true poem is the daily paper,” Walt Whitman wrote in 1852, according to Williams and Delli Carpini. But where did he write it? I can’t find it in Google Books. If you know, send its GPS via email to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. My Twitter feed doesn’t come close to poetry. For that, follow @tricialockwood. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: ABC news anchor Ted Koppel holds a farewell gift, a miniature statue of Walt Disney character Donald Duck after the final taping of his ‘Nightline’ show at the ABC studios in Washington November 22, 2005. Reuters/Jason Reed

Is this the best the right-wing press critics can do?

In principle, I’m all for James O’Keefe’s guerrilla campaign to destroy the media establishment. The more rough handling journalists receive, the better for them and the better for readers. But the hidden-camera sortie O’Keefe and his Project Veritas’ “To Catch a Journalist” series just flew against Huffington Post White House correspondent Sam Stein fails miserably. It ends up making Stein look normal and O’Keefe slightly tetched.

The allegedly damaging video footage records Dale Maharidge, a former teacher of Stein’s at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, saying that his former student is “old school” and “goes out drinking at night with people.” Maharidge then comments, in reference to Stein, “You get some booze in people, and suddenly the stories start to flow.”

When O’Keefe confronts Stein in a recorded interview, he recasts Maharidge’s statement.

“Do you booze your sources up to get a story out of them or get your sources drunk to get information out of them? Because that’s what somebody told me,” says O’Keefe.

“So you’re asking if I get my sources drunk,” Stein says.

O’Keefe interrupts, “Specifically to get information out of them.”

“Uh, no I don’t,” Stein responds.

So Stein denies saying something there is no proof of him saying. What a catch!

Even if Stein had told his former teacher that he gets sources soused to pump information out of them, what sort of gotcha would that be? The journalist-source relationship runs both ways, with sources pumping journalists for information and attempting to spin a story in their direction, and a traditional venue for this sort of dance has been the bar. The journalist-source relationship is not unlike the salesman-client relationship or the “Hey, you’re cute, can I buy you a drink?” pairing. Both parties want something and think that it’s to their advantage to add spiritual lubricants into the mix. The only thing O’Keefe has accomplished with his “To Catch a Journalist” expose is to prove that Stein is a conventional journalist.

O’Keefe isn’t the only righty misfiring this week, as a piece on Politico today by Keach Hagey indicates. Hagey catalogs the efforts of two prominent conservative press-watchers to marginalize Occupy Wall Street by criticizing some of the journalists writing about the protests. Andrew Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh are publicizing the pro-OWS emails of Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC and Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi, with Limbaugh holding that Ratigan and Taibbi help prove that OWS is a “construct of the media Democrat industrial complex.”

Excuse me if I’m not struck dumb by the revelation that Ratigan and Taibbi, who fervently support OWS in their journalism, also support it in emails.

Also, a Breitbart video has outed freelancer Natasha Lennard, who reported on OWS for the New York Times, as an OWS activist. Indeed, Lennard appears to have both covered the protest and taken part in it. But Breitbart’s expose would be meatier if he could actually quarrel with the substance of Lennard’s Times pieces. Breitbart, better than most, should be able to appreciate that politically committed reporters are capable of producing worthy journalism. Let’s hope that Breitbart’s outing of Lennard doesn’t deter editors from assigning future pieces to reporters who have may have eaten cake with the tea partiers.

Meanwhile, Erik Wemple reports on Bernard Goldberg’s loopy appearance on The O’Reilly Factor last night. Goldberg gave Meet the Press host David Gregory hell for his expressing “subtle bias” in favor of President Barack Obama by saying the president “can’t do a whole lot about the economy right now.” I align myself with Wemple’s take: If Gregory expressed subtle bias in favor of Obama it was so subtle as to be invisible. Nor can I get too excited over the right wing’s efforts to demonize NPR over the off-mic political activism of Lisa Simeone, the host of public radio’s Soundprint and World of Opera. If an arts host can’t join the revolution, what sort of society have we become? (The story of Simeone’s political activism was broken by Roll Call, not by the right wing press-watchers. But the right has made hay of it, so it belongs in this round-up.)

The episodes uncovered and publicized by the righties over the last week barely qualify as journalistic misdemeanors. It’s no sin for Stein to booze with his sources as long as he doesn’t sprinkle knock-out drops in their drinks. (Has anybody checked to see if Stein can hold his liquor?) It’s no crime for opinion journalists like Ratigan and Taibbi to advise political movements, for Gregory to acknowledge the limited power of the president, or for Simeone to protest. The critiques by O’Keefe, Breitbart, Limbaugh, and Goldberg end up being unintentional endorsements of big-media conduct: These guys are picking nits because they can’t find any whales to harpoon.

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Should news journalists keep their opinions to themselves? Should they avoid all activism? Join my Poynter chat at 12:30 pm today, Oct. 26, with @mallarytenore. For more on Stein’s alleged alcohol problem, see Mediaite’s interview with James O’Keefe. Send virtual drinks to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and have one on me at my Twitter feed. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

The newsroom debate over which blood-smeared Muammar Gaddafi images to share with viewers and readers—which consumed wire services, newspapers, and news channels around the world today—seems a tad quaint in the age of the Internet. Thanks to ubiquitous cell phone cameras and hard to govern entities like Al Jazeera, YouTube, Twitter, and other social media that publish first and deliberate later, the old newsroom debates over what images to publish are moot, resembling the futile acts of paternalism a father might inflict on his 24-year-old son who moved out three years ago. It’s a wonderful spectacle, it makes news editors and producers feel important, but it no longer means much.

(Warning: Graphic discussion ahead. If thinking about graphic news images disturbs you and you don’t want to be tempted by hyperlinks that connect to some famous horrific images, please click out of this page now.)

The prejudice against publishing ghastly images and footage was late to arrive in American media, writes Barbie Zelizer in her 2010 book About to Die: How News Images Move the Public. In the early 20th century, images of the dead and the dying were not uncommon in American newspapers. For instance, see the graphic news photo, “The Genesee Hotel Suicide,” which captures a suicide in mid-plunge, and which ran in the Buffalo Courier Express in 1942. Changing ideas about decency, good taste, and propriety pushed such images out of the popular press, she writes, attributing part of the impulse to the censorship of battlefield footage during World War II.

In an interview, Zelizer connects our death-image squeamishness with a growing respect for individual privacy and an increased disdain for voyeurism. But the media’s squeamishness is a “movable standard” that expands or contracts as needed, she points out, to provide catharsis–as in the case of the endless re-runs of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers–or to embolden nationalism. By way of counter-example, when the horrors of the Cambodian holocaust needed publicizing, bone-stacks of the murdered were widely published without much hand-wringing in newsrooms.

The public never got much direct say in the deadly images deliberations. Journalists, acting like an information guild, reserved the discussion and power to themselves. They ostracized—or at the very least marginalized—publications such as the National Enquirer for publishing the dead Elvis picture because it violated their unwritten standards and challenged their control.

As Zelizer explains, digital tools have diminished the control professional journalists once held over deadly images. In 2009, Iranian videographers side-stepped the pros by posting on YouTube the final, bloody minutes of the life of Neda Agha Soltan, shot dead on the streets of Tehran during the protests. The conventional news media proved their redundancy by bowdlerizing her death scene, as Zelizer explains:

Some news media opted to show only select still images from the video, while others provided links to the site where it could be found, sidestepping its display in any form. Yet others heavily edited the sequence, blocking out the woman’s face, withholding her name, or running a pixelated version of the video.

The Gaddafi gore videos posted to the Web today (a manhandled, barely alive Gaddafi dragged off a pickup truck, an apparently dead Gaddafi being mobbed on the pavement, and a dead Gaddafi displayed with less ceremony than a hunting trophy) give network producers an easier egg to hatch. Whereas Soltan was young and innocent, making her death a tragedy, Gaddafi was old and evil, making his demise a cause for celebration. This afternoon, the CBS News website embraced that standard by posting video screen-grabs of Gaddafi’s crimson corpse and sharing the manhandled video.

In Zelizer’s calculus, the willingness of professional editors to publish disturbing material has been dictated by their geographical proximity to the scene of the carnage and the identity of the killed. The British media avoided publishing pictures of dead Diana, the American media did not. The WTC jumpers disappeared from U.S. media shortly after the 9/11 attacks but appeared “prominently and continuously” in non-U.S. media.

This hypocrisy—or inconsistency, if you prefer—proves Zelizer’s premise that standards expand or contract to serve the interests and sensitivities of individual publishers and networks. The home team must be protected (hence the scarcity of photos of dead American soldiers in U.S. media) but it’s always open season on the away team. By erasing the home-team, away-team distinction, the Web undermines the authority of old media to dictate which deadly images should be allowed.

The Web’s insistence on violating the taboos against deadly images isn’t without precedent. The foreign press, tabloids like the National Enquirer, samizdat media, and underground media have long ignored traditional American standards of squeamishness and treated their audience like adults. But the Web, unlike the tabs, enjoys a scale that makes it impervious to the scorn and censoring ways of the traditional gatekeepers. The journalistic old guard can complain all they want about the proliferation of deadly images and the alleged damage they do. But at this point, they’ve lost. Their protests merely determine which old-guard media operation will be “first to be second” in breaking visual news.

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“Everyone wants to be first to be second” has been attributed to Jerry Nachman. Who said it first? Send nominations to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. My Twitter feed will never die. (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 man purported to be Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is seen in this still image taken from video footage October 20, 2011. REUTERS/Esam Al-Fetori

New York Times reporter Jeremy W. Peters invests 2,400 words today in a Page One story delineating the “rift” between News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch and his son and heir apparent, News Corp. Chief Operating Officer James Murdoch.

If News Corp. were a normal company and Rupert Murdoch a normal father, readers might glean from this report that a real power struggle is going on for the future of the company. But News Corp. is not your normal company, Rupert is not your normal dad, and there really is no struggle going on for the future of the company, only a replay of the previous “rifts” that have opened between Rupert Murdoch and his two other children by his second wife Anna—Elisabeth and Lachlan. You see, Rupert sets his adult children up to smack them down.

The first of Rupert’s heirs apparent to suffer the public humiliation of a rift was Elisabeth. In 2000, when she was 31, she escaped the family business. A Guardian story from 2000 about her departure says she was “once tipped as a business successor to her father.” What rattled her was her father’s designation of Lachlan as the new heir apparent. The Guardian continues:

Ms Murdoch is understood to have been frustrated by the promotion of her younger brother, Lachlan, 28, within the corporation. Last year he was rewarded with a place on the six-strong board at News Corp—which has a 37.5% stake in BSkyB—becoming the only one of the young Murdoch clan to make it that far.

In an interview with the magazine Newsweek last year, Rupert Murdoch had indicated that Lachlan would eventually succeed him at the head of News Corp. Last month Mr Murdoch was diagnosed as suffering from “low grade” prostate cancer.

At Sky, Ms Murdoch is understood to have had turbulent relations with successive chief executives, Sam Chisholm and Mark Booth. The appointment of Mr Ball to the chief executive’s chair last year reportedly prompted Ms Murdoch to reconsider her future there.

In 2005, Lachlan likewise abandoned the heir-apparent track for daddy reasons and because, as Tom Scocca puts it in this 2005 New York Observer article, other News Corp. executives pushed him around. Scocca writes:

Reports of anger toward his father’s sometimes tyrannical rule were rife, and the elder Mr. Murdoch’s terse declaration that he was “particularly saddened” by his firstborn son’s decision to quit didn’t quiet them. …

Lachlan Murdoch reportedly chafed under the competitive power sphere of Peter Chernin, the News Corp. chief operating officer, to whom he had to report—a surrogate older brother to go with his real father.

Next into the scorpion bottle that is the Murdoch executive-training academy came James, who is 38. Rupert has groomed James for the News Corp. crown, as he had Elisabeth and Lachlan. But once again, something is going wrong with the ascension. The little prince(ss) is perceived as a little too grabby, a little too pushy, a little too grating, and is getting on the nerves of others in the company who push back by leaking anonymously to the press.

Reuters reporter Peter Lauria was onto the Rupert-and-James rift story two months ago, relying, as does the Times, on anonymous sources inside News Corp. to chart the crack-up of the latest heir-apparent. Give a listen:

News Corp’s senior management is starting to think about what the company might do if James Murdoch stepped aside, sources inside and close to the global media empire said. …

A third source close to the Murdoch family added, “There needs to be some kind of separation for James from this issue before he can run the company more broadly.” …

Three sources pointed to that comment as evidence that News Corp was at least considering life without James. …

… [T]he first News Corp insider characterized the move to New York as an attempt by the company to remove him from the line of fire in the UK, not as a logical step in his ascension. …

King Rupert could, of course, end the corporate gossiping about James with a few phone calls. He’s probably powerful enough to stop the former company officials from blasting their icky snark on James, as well. But the reason Rupert doesn’t stop the chatter is that he considers his qualified heirs to be expendable—just as long as he has enough of them around.

He happens to have them in abundance. News Corp. just bought Shine, Elisabeth’s production company, and she remains untainted by the phone-hacking scandal, which has swamped James. The Times quotes “a person who has known [Elisabeth] for years, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect their relationship” saying, “She very elegantly or ruthlessly created a definitive separation for herself.” Lachlan is similarly clean, rested, and ready.

You’d think that James Murdoch would have figured this all out by now—that the king dreams for a continuation of the royal family but can’t commit to an heir because to do so would mark the end of his reign. Perhaps all the interfamily squabbling disturbs the adult Murdoch children, but the old man relies on their triple loyalties to the Murdoch family unit, their father, and the family company to keep them destabilized. There is no power struggle in the house of Murdoch. There is only Rupert Murdoch.

Tom Scocca figured out all of this in 2005, writing, “the only heir Rupert Murdoch has ever kept is Rupert Murdoch.”

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I’m not obsessed with Rupert Murdoch, just interested. See this previous Reuters commentary about the Wall Street Journal Europe scandal and several years’ worth of Slate pieces. Let me know what you think of King Rupert via email: Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. Monitor my Twitter for fair and balanced tweets. (This RSS feed rings every time a new Shafer column goes live. This hand-built one rings every time a correction is filed.)

PHOTO: News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch (L) talks to his son James Murdoch at Cheltenham Festival horse racing meet in Gloucestershire, western England March 18, 2010.   REUTERS/ Eddie Keogh

Washington’s anonymous sources are disagreeing with one another today.

In the lead story in today’s New York Times (“U.S. Debated Cyberwarfare in Attack Plan on Libya”), the anonymous sources tell reporters Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker that the issue of whether or not to attack Libya with cyberweapons was “intensely debated” by the Obama administration last March.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post‘s catch-up story by Ellen Nakashima that runs on A5 in today’s print edition, disputes an important element of the Times revelation. Relying on its own anonymice, the Post piece confirms that a cyberwarfare debate took place but asserts unequivocally that the debate “did not reach the White House” according to Pentagon officials. [Emphasis added.]

Obviously, either the Times or the Post owes its readers a correction because the administration cannot have “intensely debated” cyberwar against the Libyan military at the same time that it did not. Such  a fundamental contradiction screams out for a follow-up story by both papers, but will we see them?

Probably not, because the whole genre of anonymously sourced Washington journalism avoids the basic accountability that comes with on-the-record attribution. Speak an untruth on the record to a Washington reporter and he will hound you for an explanation. Speak the same untruth to a Washington reporter as an anonymous source and the reporter will probably insist on taking you to lunch to pump you for more information and only gently chide you for your misdirection.

Washington reporters care for, feed, and coddle their anonymous sources because reporters here outnumber important sources by at least 100 to one. The lopsided supply and demand permits important sources to dictate the terms of engagement, and anonymity is one of the terms they often demand. Anonymity allows them to dictate or spin a story to their advantage while suffering no liability for what they say.

The reporters behind the opposing stories are talented and deeply tapped in. Timesmen Schmitt and Shanker are particularly well versed in the subject of cybercapabilities, having recently published a book about the Pentagon’s secret wars against Al Qaeda. The Post‘s Nakashima similarly has a number of solid bylines on the topic of cyberwar to her credit.

But the differences between the two stories are dramatic. The Times makes it sound as if the Pentagon and the White House conducted a spirited trans-Potomac conversation about contaminating the Libyan military’s computer grid, which means the Obamaites were open to the idea. The Post makes the discussion sound more like a Pentagon rap session than deliberations over escalating the Libyan war. (Odd, isn’t it, that the decision to bomb radar installations—and kill people in the process—came easily, but the decision to dispatch a virus to infect those same radars and not kill people is still on-going? But that’s the topic of a different column.)

The Times piece gives credence to the Post‘s interpretation in several passages, most notably writing that “the cyberwarfare proposals were rejected before they reached the senior political levels of the White House.” If the proposals reached only junior political levels of the White House, it seems misleading to describe those conversations as “intensely debated” inside the “Obama administration,” which is what the Times does. Other reasons to speculate that the Times inflated its story: The “previously undisclosed debate” took place “among a small circle of advisors” and, “The debate about a potential cyberattack against Libya was described by more than a half-dozen officials.” So the “debate” was small and the sourcing pool was small, too.

But there’s a case to be made for the Times‘s interpretation of events. The Post‘s equally anonymous story was published after the Times‘s, which was posted to the Web on Monday, so one way to critically read it is not as a news story but as an answer by the Post‘s White House anonymous sources to the Times‘s Pentagon anonymous sources. Viewed this way, the Post and its sources are saying, move along, never happened, to the assertion by the Times and its sources that we came this close to declaring cyberwar.

The Post‘s account invites skepticism if only because its biggest news—that the debate did not reach the White House—is ascribed to “officials.” Well, of course “officials” are the sources, as opposed to stumps and rocks. But in which bureaucracy–Pentagon or the White House–are these “officials” located?

When anonymous sources duel like this in the pages of the Times and the Post, there’s often a more nuanced power struggle going on than the press corps can detect. Not to get all Rashomon on you, but the identity of a story’s sources is as important as what the sources said. When a newspaper fails to name its sources—as the Times and the Post did today—it invites skepticism, disbelief, doubt, and suspicion from readers, making press critics of us all.

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Rat out anonymice with email to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. See also my vermin-free 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 laboratory mouse. (Credit : Dennis Thiele/University of Michigan)

An editor must have a heart like leather. Not freshly tanned leather—all supple and yielding like a baby’s bum—but like an abandoned baseball glove that’s been roasting in the Sonoran Desert for five or six years. Only those who are hard of heart can properly deal with the plagiarists who violate the journalistic code.

I’m pleased to report that this morning Politico‘s top editors, John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei, were rock-hearted in resolving charges that their reporter, Kendra Marr, lifted material from the New York Times, the Associated Press, Scripps Howard, Greenwire, The Hill, and elsewhere for at least seven of her stories with no attribution. Marr has resigned. Harris and VandeHei’s compact statement about Marr’s disgrace doesn’t use the word plagiarism, but should, as my friend the press critic Craig Silverman points out. I agree.

“There are no mitigating circumstances for plagiarism,” the cold, cold heart of Washington Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli stated earlier this year after Post reporter Sari Horwitz got caught stealing copy from the Arizona Republic.

Brauchli got it exactly right. It doesn’t matter if you pinched copy because you were tired, you were harried, your spouse or child was sick or dying, you were under deadline pressure, you jumbled up your notes, you took boilerplate or wire copy that nobody should really claim “authorship” over,  you have a substance problem, you committed a cut-and-paste error, you were blinded by the “warp speed” of the Internet, you were a victim of the “win the morning” culture, you are young and inexperienced, you had two windows open at the same time and confused them, or any of the excuses tendered by the accused reporters described in Trudy Lieberman’s 1995 Columbia Journalism Review article.

These aren’t excuses. These are confessions. And they mitigate nothing.

As I’ve written before, plagiarism doesn’t offend me because it exploits the previous hard work of some enterprising writer—even though it does. When you attribute passages to another writer, you’re likewise exploiting their work. But at least they receive psychic income from the citation. The quoted writer is enriched by the fact that their work has been acknowledged, that somebody might go back and read their work, and that their reputation is likely to rise because of the credit thrown their way.

Spare the violated writer any pity. He’ll be okay. Give your pity to readers, who are the real victims.

The plagiarist defrauds readers by leading them to believe that he has come by the facts of his story first-hand–that he vouches for the accuracy of the facts and interpretations under his byline. But this is not the case. Generally, the plagiarist doesn’t know whether the copy he’s lifted has gotten the story right because he hasn’t really investigated the topic. (If he had, he could write the story himself.) In such cases he must attribute the material he borrows so that at the very least the reader can hold somebody accountable for the facts in a story.

Or to put it another way, a journalist who does original work essentially claims, this is true, according to me. The conscientious journalist who cites the work of others essentially makes the claim that this is true, according to somebody else. The plagiarist makes no such claims in his work. By having no sources of his own and failing to point to the source he stole from, he breaks the “chain of evidence” that allows readers to contest or verify facts. By doing so, he produces worthless copy that wastes the time of his readers. And that’s the crime.

For evidence of how widespread journalistic plagiarism is, to appreciate the commonness of Marr’s transgression, search the word on the Poynter Institute website and scroll the scores of action reports. Plagiarism—like other forms of professional malpractice—can’t be eliminated. It can only be policed.

Please don’t confuse plagiarists with aggregators, which is tempting in this case because the transgressor is Politico. Oh, aggregators upset a lot of people, from Robert Thomson to Bill Keller. But as long as aggregators stay within the fair-use doctrine and cite the sources that they’re summarizing, I can’t complain. To cite myself, aggregators are serving “a huge, previously ignored readership out there [which] wants its news hot, quick, and tight,” an audience that the legacy media could have owned. Today, the Washington Post Co. finds itself playing aggregation catch-up via a beta project called Trove. It’s about time.

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The crime of plagiarism goes lightly punished, as Lieberman’s story reports, but is that why it persists? If you have any ideas, drop me a line at Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. My Twitter feed is certified plagiarism-free. (This RSS feed rings every time a new Shafer column goes live. This hand-built one rings every time a correction is filed.)

Wall Street Journal Europe Publisher Andrew Langhoff resigned yesterday, but why?

A hard-to-comprehend story in today’s Wall Street Journal alleges that Langhoff transgressed by pressuring Wall Street Journal Europe reporters into covering an advertiser, consulting firm ELP, and by contractually promising that WSJE reporters would cover ELP in “special report” sections. (The tainted stories in question now carry a disclaimer.)

There’s a third dimension to the scandal, which the Wall Street Journal article soft-pedals. It turns out that bulk-sold, discounted copies of WSJE were sold to the same advertiser, ELP, to boost circulation. I defy any reader to cull the salient passages and find any evidence or hint of circulatory wrong-doing by the publication.

For that sort of coverage, see today’s piece in the Guardian by Nick Davies, “Wall Street Journal circulation scam claims senior Murdoch executive.” Davies exploits the circulation angle, alleging that the WSJE publisher “set up a complex scheme to channel money to ELP to pay for the papers it had agreed to buy—effectively buying the papers with the Journal‘s own cash.” The Guardian also calls Langhoff’s resignation a “damage limitation exercise” prompted by its inquiries into the scandal. The Wall Street Journal calls the resignation a result of an “internal probe” into the special-report articles and a circulation agreement with ELP.

Will the scandal go bigger or will it burn itself out in a couple of days? Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which owns the Wall Street Journal Europe, has already copped to the journalistic sins of having a publisher promise an advertiser coverage and of leaning on reporters to produce it. This behavior is considered very, very, unclean in the world of publishing when conducted covertly. But when the advertiser-pleasing copy is produced overtly in special sections, the worst publishers are accused of is opportunism. Today, most quality newspapers assemble special sections themed to energy, transportation, education, philanthropy, investing, health, et al. These sections, which contain soft or backgrounderish copy, are propped up by lucrative ads from the major industries doing business in the theme area. So great is the publisher’s appetite for special sections that if the New York Times could persuade Eukanuba, Purina, and Hartz Ultraguard Plus Rid Worm tablets to take out gigantic ads, it would gladly print a “Your Dog’s Retirement” section. Twice a year.

The Financial Times, for example, hammers together special sections with laughable regularity. Yesterday’s FT special section, “Canadian Energy,” contains big-ass ads from Chevron, Shell, and the American Petroleum Institute. Are you dying to read “Oil shifts country’s centre of gravity”? Does “Technology opens far-flung possibilities” float your boat? Then grab a copy before they all disappear.

The articles in most special sections aren’t embarrassing or unethical as much as they’re useless. You’ll rarely find a critical article in a special section, so why bother reading? The intended audience for special sections isn’t readers, it’s advertisers. As a rule, special sections are two steps up from supplements titled “Advertising Supplement,” which are written by outside writers, and two steps down from a newspaper’s regular coverage. There are good special sections out there—I’m thinking of the ones that run in the Economist—but most of them suck.

As for the Wall Street Journal Europe‘s circulation problems, that scandal could grow, too, especially if Murdoch’s minions don’t force others to walk the plank. (The best way to stanch a scandal is to feed it human flesh.) But again, the standard newspaper circulation scandal isn’t what’s illegal, it’s what’s legal, to cite Michael Kinsley. For decades, publishers and advertisers have used their captive, the Audit Bureau of Circulation, to expand the definition of what constitutes paid circulation. The definition has grown so broad that it wouldn’t surprise me if it started including monarch butterflies and fallen autumn leaves in its official counts of newspaper circulation. For more about the ABC and how the organization’s blind-eye generosity contributed to the last decade’s circ scandals at Newsday, the Dallas Morning News, Hoy, and the Chicago Sun-Times, see my 2004 piece from Slate.

Still, even by the low standards of the industry, the Wall Street Journal Europe circ shenanigans seem pretty wild. According to the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal Europe had a circulation of 75,000 in 2010 of which 31,000 of which were sold at a steep discount for distribution to students, who “may or may not have read them.”

What’s the bigger scandal? That the WSJE had a pitiful circulation of 75,000 in 2010? Or that 41 percent of that circulation was ginned up in an arrangement that the Audit Bureau of Circulation deemed “legitimate,” as Davies puts it? I think the former.

How will Murdoch get out of this one? The last time one of his newspapers got him into ethical trouble, he had it exterminated. But killing News of the World didn’t stop the bleeding. For such an ethically compromised businessman, this has got to be a sideshow.

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PHOTO: News Corp Chief Executive and Chairman Rupert Murdoch arrives, sitting next to a copy of the Wall Street Journal, to attend a parliamentary committee hearing at Portcullis House in London July 19, 2011. REUTERS/Andrew Winning

Alaskan anonymice. Joe McGinniss got knocked by reviewers—me included—for relying so heavily on anonymous sources for his new book, The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin. Today he strikes back at his critics in the opinion pages of USA Today, citing Bob Woodward, New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson, and Huffington Post media reporter Michael Calderone on why journalists must get anonymice to squeak about the powerful if they’re going to get the story.

In mounting his defense, McGinniss lunges for the “speaking truth to power” cliché and hugs it as if he’s drowning and it’s the only safety buoy bobbing in sight. In the case of McGinniss’s coverage of Palin, who resigned from the office of governor in July 2009, the more appropriate catch phrase would be “speaking truth to those out of power.” Since 2009, Palin has held little power outside of her TV appearances, her reality TV show, her two best-selling books, her sporadic bus tours, and a threat to run for president. By such a wobbly yardstick, even Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich can almost be considered “powerful.”

McGinniss brags in the op-ed that he interviewed about 200 people in Alaska and quoted more than 60 in the book. As I read The Rogue, I kept track of the number of anonymous sources that he cited and came up with more than 50. It seems to me that a book that isn’t about national security or whose information isn’t cocooned beneath a corporate veil, such as The Rogue, should have had a better ratio than 60 named sources to 50 unnamed ones. McGinniss builds the case in his book and his op-ed that Sarah and Todd Palin deal vindictively with people who cross them, although to the best of my knowledge none of their victims have been fished out of Cook Inlet.

It doesn’t bother me that McGinniss relied heavily on anonymous sources for reporting his book but it does bug me that he gave them such voice and prominence in the telling of his story. Just because an anonymous source says something doesn’t make it true; just ask Judith Miller. In many cases, anonymous sources have less of an incentive to tell the truth than someone speaking on the record because they know nobody is going to find them out. Also, on-the-record quotations are easier to verify than anonymous ones. McGinniss knows this. Must I go on?

As for McGinniss’s USA Today kicker—”And let’s remember, without Deep Throat, there wouldn’t have been any Watergate hearings, and Richard Nixon would never have resigned”—this is absolutely wrong. Deep Throat wasn’t the essential source that broke the Watergate story, as W. Joseph Campbell (and others) have reported. McGinniss could pick up a copy of Campbell’s 2010 book, Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism or click through to this piece on Campbell’s blog. As Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein write in All the President‘s Men, Woodward’s discussions with Deep Throat were “only to confirm information that had been obtained elsewhere, and to add some perspective.”

Netflix switcheroo. Having named his DVD rental service “Netflix” instead of “PostalFlix,” company founder Reed Hastings consciously telegraphed the electronic future of his company. So, having contemplated this transition from the beginning, how could he so completely bollix the decision to halve the company into two entities, Qwikster for DVDs and Netflix for streaming, and then today announce that he’s stitching the twins back together and calling his one big baby Netflix again?

I can’t think of any parallel in business history that compares to the Netflix debacle. Hastings’s mistake was to bundle a new service—video streaming—into the Netflix classic product in 2007 and charge no additional price as long as subscribers didn’t exceed defined viewing thresholds (six hours for $5.99 a month subscribers and 18 hours for $17.99 a month subscribers). Netflix is a flat-rate viewing service, Hastings actively signaled to his customers.

Had Hastings charged a nominal extra sum for streaming from the beginning, indicating to customers he was launching a second, new product that he was discounting to his DVD customers, few would have griped. That would have left him free to increase the streaming fee as the size and quality of his streaming library grew and as he expanded the number of hours of streaming per customer. I don’t recall any cable TV subscribers threatening to bomb Comcast offices when pay-per-view was introduced as a separate, paid product decades ago.

People don’t really protest for long if you start charging for something that was once considered free, just as long as you haven’t mistakenly bundled it with a paid product. Take, for example, the low resistance to the New York Times‘s recent imposition of a pay wall for its Web site. The Times could have pulled a Netflix and split itself into two different products—the paper edition and the Web edition—and started charging separately for each. Instead, it started charging for the free service—targeting the excessive free-riders who had no moral right to object to the shakedown—but left undisturbed its relationship with paid print subscribers, who were encouraged to use as much of the Web edition as they like.

Although he’s killing Qwikster, Hastings is still sticking to his previously announced price increases, which is what most riled his customers in the first place. The company won’t restore its relationship with its customers until they accept the higher prices as normal—and with $1 a night rentals at Redbox and online alternatives at Amazon, iTunes, and Hulu, that won’t be soon.

Ask an expert. This week’s installment of “Ask an expert” taps political reporter David Weigel, my former colleague at Slate. Hey, Dave, what’s the biggest difference between the Tea Party movement and Occupy Wall Street? Dave’s answer: “The Tea Party, from the outset, had a satisfactory political outcome in sight/mind. Namely, beating Obama and winning Congress.”

FOIA update. On Sept. 22, I wrote a piece about the critiques of Al Jazeera the State Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency wrote in 2005 and whose existence were revealed in diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks. I filed FOIAs the next day with both State and DIA requesting copies of those critiques, which the cables say a State Department officer shared with Al Jazeera, and promised to keep you up to date on the FOIA process.

Today, the State Department confirmed via the U.S. Mail that it had received my request and would notify me after it had retrieved and reviewed the material.

Nice turnaround, State! That’s 10 working days! Now, get on the case, DIA! (For RSS updates on my FOIA request, add this to your feed.)

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The DIA will probably deliver its response with a drone. Send yours via email to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. I stream all day on 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: Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is reflected in the window of her SUV in Portsmouth, New Hampshire June 2, 2011. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

If BMW had an auteur—the kind of auteur Apple had until last night—would his fans gather at local BMW dealerships when he died to light candles and toss flowers in front of showroom windows the way Steve Jobs fans are now at Apple Stores around the world? Would they storm Twitter to post recollections of the first and second BMWs they owned and thank Mr. BMW for having made their ordinary trips to the store for milk and eggs more like cosmic adventures in motoring?

Obviously not. No other gadgets have wormed themselves into the global psyche the way Steve Jobs’s have. Like most of Jobs’s coups, the takeover was a matter of design. Although he had been synonymous with Apple since the late 1970s by virtue of the computer he developed and marketed with Steve Wozniak, and the cult of Apple was already in full bloom at the time of the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984, Jobs didn’t fashion himself the maximum leader of the cult until he returned to the company in 1996.

Jobs’s restoration was read by his followers as a resurrection, and he encouraged this interpretation by using his regained powers as Apple’s guru to further mesh his identity with that of the company’s products. Jobs became his Macs and iPods and they became him. By and large, they were pretty good products, if not a little pricey. (Ask me, I’ve owned a few.)

What Jobs understood was that there was and is room in the computer market for a prettier or marginally better product—packed tightly in a very fashionable box—that could be sold at a premium price if he marketed them as “Veblen goods,” luxury products that convey status upon their purchasers. Jobs hasn’t been alone in this discovery. Take the modern American kitchen. It has become our most densely populated Veblen-goods petting zoo, with its Viking six-burner range with griddle and double oven, its Sub-Zero refrigerator-freezer, its Bosch silent dishwasher, and its MoMA tea kettle. The modern kitchen appliance signals the high status of its owner to friends and neighbors, and so do Apple’s products. When Appleheads visit your home or office and see your iMac or MacBook Air, you can see the Oh, you’re one of us! thought bubble forming over their heads. Conversely, these folks emit a palpable sense of disappointment if catch you with a Dell or a Toshiba. But you seemed so creative! You can observe this sort of messaging on the subway, too, as Apple owners steal glances at one another, bonding wordlessly as they pinch and flick their way through their iPhones and iPads.

Becoming a loved brand wasn’t easy for Apple. Given the automatic hatred the creative class (or those who think of themselves part of the creative class) has for corporations, Apple and Jobs should have been targets of scorn. What he and Apple had going for them at the beginning was their underdog position against IBM and then Microsoft. Apple wisely projected itself as the alt-computer company, a distinction Jobs cemented with the 1984 Super Bowl commercial. Just using Apple products was supposed to be an act of rebellion against the system.

After the Jobs resurrection, he made sure that salvation came with every purchase. For what are Apple Stores but places of worship, with priests who possess secret knowledge manning a Genius Bar at the far end of the temple? Is the Apple logo on the wall not a late-20th century cross? Is every Apple employee toting a handheld credit-card scanner not a human tithing-station? You laugh, but I can’t tell you how many Sundays I’ve gone to my neighborhood Apple Store to renew my faith, and to indoctrinate my children in its fundamentals.

Jobs’s flirtations with Eastern philosophy give credence to my interpretation, as does the energy he spent playing the role of the infallible leader. Jobs told his customers, point blank, that if they wanted his products and services, they’d have to use them the way he delivered them. Just as the pope doesn’t let anybody take a bath in holy water, Jobs wasn’t about to allow anybody to jailbreak an iPhone without at least risking excommunication.

Evidence of Jobs’s psychological hammerlock on the culture can be found in today’s news stories about his life and times, which quote heavily and without caustic comment from his speeches and interviews. These quotations would be ridiculed as Khalil Gibranian nonsense if spoken by anybody else. “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become,” Jobs has said. And, “I want to put a ding in the universe.” And, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” And, “You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.” And, “There is no reason not to follow your heart.” And, “Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent.”

I predict a quickie book, The Eternal Wisdom of Steve Jobs, in stores and e-book shops soon.

The doublethink of the Apple slogan “Think Different,” revealed Apple as an oddly totalitarian organization (no, you can’t change your own battery in your iPhone). What the company has always wanted its followers—I mean, its customers—to do was think like Jobs. Follow your bliss! But do it inside Steve’s cocoon. That so many customers regarded Jobs and Apple as rebel leaders instead of techno-conformity ringleaders does not flatter human perception.

None of what I’ve written is intended to subtract from the products and services he helped create, his extraordinary business comeback, or his tenacity, all of which I admire. My problem isn’t with Steve Jobs but the sloppy veneration of Steve Jobs. He made computers, pretty good computers. Isn’t that enough?

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Charles Arthur shares some pop psychology ideas on why some people love Apple and some people hate it. (I’m in neither group.) Use your Mac to send hate mail to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and your iPhone to monitor 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: Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs gives a wave at the conclusion of the launch of the iPad 2 on stage during an Apple event in San Francisco, California March 2, 2011. Jobs took the stage to a standing ovation on Wednesday, returning to the spotlight after a brief medical absence to unveil the second version of the iPad. REUTERS/Beck Diefenbach