Jack Shafer

Giving testimony yesterday at the Leveson phone-hacking inquiry (PDF) in London, former News of the World features editor Paul McMullan took the only position on the scandal not yet occupied: That of an unrepentant tabloid journalist.

Don’t blame tabloid excesses on tabloid journalists, McMullan held, as he blithely parried the panel’s questions about how he could justify the tabloid press’s phone-hacking practices, its surveillance of subjects, and other intrusions into people’s lives.

Blame tabloid readers, McMullan said.

“Circulation defines what is the public interest. I see no distinction between what the public is interested in and the public interest,” he said. “The reason why News of the World sold 5 million copies is that there were 5 million thinking people and that’s what they wanted to read.”

Continuing his blame-the-readers-not-me tack, he said, “[Readers] are the judge and the jury of what is in the paper, and if they don’t like it—if they don’t like the fact that you’ve written a story about Charlotte Church’s father having two-in-a-bed—sorry, three-in-a-bed on cocaine, then they’ll simply stop buying the product.”

Asked by Lord Justice Leveson if the ends justified the means, McMullan let his interrogator have it. “Yes, I think so,” he said. “All I’ve ever tried to do is write truthful articles and to use any means necessary to try and get to the truth.”

Although the Leveson committee was asking the questions and not giving the answers, it seemed stumped by McMullan’s intransigence, even when he offered that “Privacy is the space that bad people need to do bad things in. Privacy is particularly good for pedophiles. … It brings out the worst in people.”

Obviously, just because News of the World—which owner Rupert Murdoch closed this summer as the phone-hacking scandal crested—commanded 5 million paying customers can’t justify the serial law-breaking attributed to its journalists. But McMullan’s moxie temporarily moved the topic to an area of non-consensus: How grounded to reality are the privacy expectations of politicians, sports stars, celebrities, and civilians?

In a recent Journal of Media Law & Ethics (PDF) article about the Max Mosley case, scholar Stephen Bates notes that the British law only recently embraced privacy.

“A dozen years ago, British reporters were less vulnerable to invasion-of-privacy suits than American reporters. Today, British reporters are far more vulnerable. Indeed, privacy lawsuits are outnumbering libel ones,” Bates writes. “As a result, freedom of the press in Britain has been constricted.”

Bates, who is a lawyer, surmises that the news coverage lavished on adulterers Mark Sanford, John Ensign, John Edwards, and Tiger Woods would have given all four randy fellows standing to sue for invasion of privacy under British law.

Sounding a little like McMullan (but without justifying law-breaking or other tabloid excesses), Bates writes:

The press does more than help create informed, active citizens. It seeks not merely to serve the public interest; it also seeks to serve the public’s interests, including interest in celebrities and scandals. The news media entertain as well as inform, and they serve the working class—the principal audience of tabloids—as well as the middle and upper classes. Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol once wrote, “It is probable that as much mischief has been perpetrated upon the human race in the name of ‘the public interest’ as in the name of anything else.”

The appetite for scandal news, both here and in the U.K., is so insatiable that tabloid journalists are forever creating or “discovering” new celebrities whose peccadilloes—especially sexual ones—can be reported. How else to explain the rise of the Kardashians? This appetite has no automatic right to a meal but the healthy market for the “red top” tabs in the U.K. and their U.S. counterparts—Star and Us, TV shows like TMZ, and celebrity columns in every U.S. daily newspaper—confirms how mainstream and widespread the consumption of gossip is. McMullan is right: The demand so demonstrably creates the supply that it requires us to pause long enough to figure out why we so love anything approaching a scandal, even if the exposé doesn’t contribute to the “public interest.”

Who among us will turn down gossip, especially of a sexual nature, about classmates, officemates, casual acquaintances, Hollywood actors, politicians, and all the way up to complete strangers? Bates helps us understand when he quotes C. Edwin Baker: “Gossip is an essential means of communication.” We crave intimate details of others’ lives because they give us a sense of power over them; because the intimate details of others’ lives help us understand our own; because the intimate details of others’ lives give us social currency and social standing. “Scandal news, like literature, illuminates human nature,” Bates writes.

Again, none of this is meant to defend reporters who break the law. But as the Leveson inquiry vectors from investigating law-breaking toward invasion of privacy questions, the closer it comes to criminalizing journalism. Most celebrity actors and musicians employ publicists to cultivate press for them, seeking, as Bates puts it, “positive publicity for their private lives,” as he approvingly quotes this passage from a 2009 legal case: “As there should be ‘truth in advertising,’ so there should be truth in publicity. The public should not be misled.”

If the Leveson inquiry ends up inspiring new, tougher privacy laws in the U.K., celebrities might sleep better. But so will U.K. government and corporate officials, and that’s not good. I encourage you to read the Bates article, not just because it’s learned and wise, but because it summarizes the issues in its kicker by quoting this splendid passage from Tom Stoppard:

“Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.”

******

Keep your hands off my junk! Invade my inbox with email to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. Track my most intimate utterances on 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.

Allow me to be among the first working journalists to welcome Chelsea Clinton to the Fourth Estate. Clinton, as you probably read in this morning’s New York Times, has taken a job with NBC News as a full-time special correspondent and will cover stories for the network’s do-gooder “Making a Difference” series.

Please read no snark into my Clinton welcome.

Yes, I know that many of you will deplore the fact that somebody like Clinton with no real journalistic experience but plenty of connections has won a high-ranking reporting position at a broadcast network. Your thought balloons about cronyism, already passing over my office, read, If Chelsea wanted to be a journalist she should have gone to journalism school or gotten an internship and parlayed that into a job covering crime for a paper in the boonies, and then over the years worked her way up.

But Clinton, who will turn 32 in February, isn’t the first high-profile political spawn to use the family name as a media-career springboard. The Times article notes that President George W. Bush daughter Jenna Bush Hager is an NBC Today correspondent, and presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s daughter Meghan McCain contributes to MSNBC. Caroline Kennedy has published nearly a dozen books about patriotism, the Bill of Rights, courage, and poetry and Susan Ford, daughter of President Gerald Ford, has published two volumes of mystery fiction. Ron Reagan, Michael Reagan, and Maureen Reagan all leveraged their father’s prominence into jobs behind the microphone. Maria Shriver, whose uncle was President John Kennedy and whose father, Sargent Shriver, ran for vice president, capitalized on her family connections to get a job as a reporter at a Philadelphia TV station in 1977 straight out of college at the age of 22. She moved to CBS News six years later. You know the rest.

The promotion of the under-talented sons and daughters of the politically connected to fancy media jobs seems to violate our great, national, meritocratic creed, as does the assignment of politicians such as Joe Scarborough, Susan Molinari, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Eliot Spitzer, and George Stephanopoulos to their respective media slots, and the addition of Republican hacks Palin, Huckabee, Kasich, Santorum, and Gingrich to the Fox News Channel payroll.

But the reflexive disdain for cronyism ignores the essence of TV news: Like the movies, TV news thrives on a star culture that is so devolved that almost anybody with name-recognition, positive or negative, can be considered a star, as hooker-happy Eliot Spitzer proved. And there’s nothing a network likes to do more than to steal a star from another network.

Only as a last resort will TV producers put nobodies on screen. They want somebodies, and even a minor member of Congress can qualify if they’re not too ugly, not too old, and not too tongue-tied. The political somebodies listed above may look like nobodies to you, but in the world of TV news they’re rainmakers whose status as semi-celebrities makes it easier to book other semi-celebrities on their political talk shows.

“Somebody” status appears to be inheritable, as the offspring of presidential stock keep proving. There’s something atavistic about our culture’s fascination with presidential sons and daughters. Do we consider them a kind of faux royalty, as American princes and princesses? (My friend Mark Feldstein says, “Maybe we should go direct to monarchy, and save everybody a step.”)

Or do network executives (and book publishers) detect genuine power in the children of presidents that the more discerning miss? Take Chelsea Clinton: If so much of what passes for network news is about celebrity wrangling, would any world leader, corporate chief, or movie star dare turn down an invitation from her to appear on NBC lest they offend her parents? Especially seeing that NBC has assigned Clinton to a feel-good news beat, there will be no downside to agreeing to talking to her on camera. As a NBC reporter, she won’t be a rainmaker. She’ll be a typhoon, flooding the airwaves with one big celebrity “get” after another.

The hiring of Chelsea Clinton doesn’t so much debase the TV news currency as reveal its true value. Lack of experience is no bar to becoming an on-air personality because there’s always money for staff to back up the neophyte. Journalism is less a profession than it is a description–that is, anybody with a good idea and some sources and a modicum of literary talent can commit a worthwhile (or watchable/readable) act of journalism. It hurts journalists to hear this, but there really are no bars to entry. If I can be a journalist, why can’t Chelsea Clinton?

Go ahead and beat up on Chelsea Clinton all you want. But the crony journalism that got her the job is an effect, not a cause of the quest for celebrity journalism.

******

I ran out of time and space to include all the wonderful examples of the crony journalism that results in the hiring of the sons and daughters of famous journalists. Maybe next time. Send tips to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and monitor my meritocratic 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.

PHOTO: Chelsea Clinton speaks during a panel discussion regarding technologies for economic empowerment at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, September 22, 2011. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

Media columnist Jim Romenesko—who was scheduled to depart his full-time position at the Poynter Institute at the end of the year, anyway—vacated it abruptly yesterday after his boss, Julie Moos, publicly criticized his “incomplete” methods of attributing other journalists’ copy in his summaries of their work.

For those who haven’t followed the story—and I don’t blame you if you haven’t, because it’s so inside baseball it’s inside the laces of the ball—Romenesko has been writing a Web-based cheat sheet about the news business since 1999. The column, which the non-profit Poynter Institute picked up in 2000, has been an indispensable destination for journalists and civilians interested in the media. (Interests declared: Romenesko has cited my work many times since 1999. For the last 10 weeks, Poynter has been paying me to participate in weekly, hour-long Web chats with readers.)

In declaring a “pattern of incomplete attribution,” Moos pointed to a recent example from Romenesko’s work in which he ran whole sentences from a Chicago Tribune story in his summary of it without placing the words in quotation marks or block quotation to indicate its exact provenance.

Romenesko’s style was not Poynter’s style, Moos wrote, commenting that, “One danger of this practice is that the words may appear to belong to Jim when they in fact belong to another.”

Like Moos, I think that Romenesko should have placed in quotation marks (or block quotations) copy taken from stories he summarized. When I’ve worked as an editor, that has been my standard. As a writer, I follow the same code. If anything, I overdo the quotation-marks thing. You’re free to criticize the windy way Moos explains Poynter’s policy and its inquiry, but as the editor she’s well within her rights to set attribution rules.

But the perplexing thing about the Romenesko dust-up is that, as Moos notes, nobody ever noticed Romenesko’s style of non-attribution until Columbia Journalism Review assistant editor Erika Fry brought it to Poynter’s attention. Those nobodies include the Poynter editors who have been reading Romenesko’s work behind him for the last 12 years. (Romenesko has traditionally posted his copy without going through an editor.) Other nobodies apparently include the thousands of journalists Romenesko has summarized over the years. According to the Moos post, no writer or publication had ever told Poynter “their words were being co-opted.”

Moos continues, “That raises some questions of its own.”

How is it that the incomplete attribution escaped Romenesko’s readers notice for so long? Vain journalists—is there any other kind?—love to scream plagiarism. They love to scream it not just when their words are lifted but when they think their ideas have been purloined! Given that Romenesko’s blog is the most avidly read page in the journalism business, one would think that his “incompleteness” would have been uncovered earlier.

Yet it wasn’t. I’ve read every Romenesko condensation of my work since his column began, but as I tweeted yesterday, the only unusual thing I ever noticed about his work was a knack for locating my misplaced openings and highlighting them.

My theory of why careful readers have been blind to Romenesko’s incomplete attribution isn’t really my theory. I’ve pinched it from Richard A. Posner, a judge on the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. He lays it out succinctly in his 2007 volume, The Little Book of Plagiarism.

Now, nobody at Poynter has accused Romenesko of plagiarism. I am not accusing him of plagiarism. I bring up the word, and Posner’s meditations on it, to help explain 1) why nobody previously noticed non-attribution in Romenesko columns and 2) why we shouldn’t be upset with Romenesko for his technique. Posner writes:

A judgment of plagiarism requires that the copying, besides being deceitful in the sense of misleading the intended readers, induce reliance by them.

By reliance, Posner means that the reader does something “because he thinks the plagiarizing work original” that he would not have done if fully informed of the full truth of the work’s provenance. “Lawyers call this ‘detrimental’ reliance,” Posner continues, “that is, relying to your detriment on a falsehood.” Posner gives the example of reader who would not buy a book if he knew it contained “large swatches of another writer’s book.” Instead, the reader would buy the original author’s book.

Moving from Posner back to Romenesko, it’s obvious to me and thousands of other readers that Romenesko made no claim that the primary findings in his posts were originally his. Quite the contrary, the style of his attribution—a link back to the original story, inclusion of the name of the publication and often that of the author—advertises in every possible way that the Romenesko version is the derivative, not the original. Indeed, the Romenesko gestalt has been to steer readers back to the original. His whole enterprise since 1999 has been to alert and direct reader attention to original work, from Manhattan to the boonies! Far from exploiting the work of others and hyping his product, Romenesko always seemed to tamp down the most excitable aspects of the work he summarized. He never tried to distort or sensationalize like our friends at Business Insider and Huffington Post. In his hands, a story about the coming Apocalypse would be summarized as impending bad weather.

We can argue whether Romenesko is guilty of “over-aggregation.” I’m not as bothered by over-aggregation as other journalists, a sentiment I expressed a few months ago at Slate. I’d also be more impressed by over-aggregation charges against Romenesko if the complainants were journalists he has summarized. But my anecdotal evidence is that they’re not. Yesterday, 15 or 20 minutes after the Poynter piece went up, the usual gang of press writers, whose every cough and fart end up in Romenesko’s column, stood up for the blogger on Twitter. They rendered a basketball court verdict of no harm, no foul.

Erika Fry, the Columbia Journalism Review staffer whose inquiries stirred Poynter to action against Romenesko, published her piece this afternoon accusing other Poynterites of over-aggregation. Based on the evidence Fry presents against them, again I’d say no harm, no foul here, too.

If Romenesko is guilty of over-aggregation, I hope he continues the practice when he gets www.jimromenesko.com rolling.

******

Please aggregate my Twitter feed and send email to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. 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: Marcus Lewis (L) of the U.S. fouls Kelvin Pena of the Dominican Republic as they jump for a rebound during their men’s preliminary round basketball game at the Pan American Games in Guadalajara October 26, 2011. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Yesterday, The Daily was first to name Karen Kraushaar as one of the two women who worked with Herman Cain at the National Restaurant Association and accused him of sexual harassment. As the Poynter Institute’s Kelly McBride wrote, Business Insider and the Daily Caller repeated the Daily‘s report that Kraushaar had made the sexual harassment claim, and NPR got her to confirm her identity as “Woman A.” Shortly thereafter, Kraushaar was talking to the New York Times, and the whole world knew who she was.

For what good reason was Kraushaar’s identity concealed in the first place?

Politico, which broke the sexual harassment claims story on Oct. 31, didn’t really explain why it did not name the accusers in its scoop, reporting only that it had “confirmed the identities of the two female restaurant association employees who complained about Cain but, for privacy concerns, is not publishing their names.”

Why grant accusers anonymity for reasons of “privacy,” but not the accused? It makes no sense, especially in the Cain episode. No legal finding of sexual harassment was made, and the only evidence that Cain committed sexual harassment is that cash settlements of $35,000 and $45,000 were reportedly paid to the two accusers. But that’s no evidence at all—the cost of defending a sexual harassment charge is so steep that paying severance of $35,000 is a bargain even if a case has little merit.

Mind you, I’m not saying that the charges against Cain have no merit. I’m as open to the argument that he created a hostile environment of sexual harassment as defined by the law as I am to other interpretations of his alleged conduct (that he’s fresh, that he’s a masher, that he’s a creep on autopilot, that he’s wicked Uncle Ernie, that he’s stepped out of line too many times, and that you’d rather have your daughter walk 10 miles home barefoot in the snow than to accept a ride home from him).

But I’m also open to the possibility that he’s no rampaging sexual monster—and you should be, too.

Politico’s decision to bestow a privacy setting on the accusers put Cain in a tough position. If he names them in an attempt to refute the charges he opens himself to charges of “violating” their privacy. By not naming them, he resigned himself to fighting phantoms.

As a phantom-fighter, Cain has not impressed, I should add. Combing through the various defenses he mounted, I was struck by their non-denial denial quality. Cain kept saying that he had not committed sexual harassment and that appears to be legally true. I know of no legal finding of sexual harassment against him. By definition, his alleged encounter with Sharon Bialek would not rise to a case of sexual harassment because she wasn’t working for him or with him at the time. (It may qualify as sexual assault, although it would have been difficult to prove as many have noted.) The question people want answered is not whether his behaviors fall under the definition of sexual harassment but whether he routinely violates current socio-sexual norms in the workplace. And Cain knows it.

Another Cain accuser—one who did not file a sexual harassment complaint—told her story to the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal last week. “She said the behavior included a private invitation to his corporate apartment” and that he had “made sexually suggestive remarks or gestures,” according to the AP. Both the AP and the Journal gave the woman anonymity because she feared “retaliation.”

Retaliation? What sort of retaliation? The accuser described in the AP and Wall Street Journal no longer works for Cain, so he can’t directly retaliate. Obviously, he could hire detectives or others to stalk and bully his accusers. But assuming that Cain knows who has made the charges—and I think that’s a safe assumption—he’s already in a position to stage such retaliation if they ask reporters for anonymity. The fears of retaliation are a journalistic fig leaf, designed to serve reporters who want to coax a story out of reluctant sources. Few sources are ever beyond the long arm of the accused bent on retaliation.

You could say that Bialek and Kraushaar are suffering a kind of retaliation now as the press questions the motives of Cain’s accusers. The AP reports today that Kraushaar filed a second complaint against employers at the job she got after leaving the National Restaurant Association, making her look like a bit of a serial accuser. Bialek, meanwhile, is being cast as a post-bankruptcy gold-digger in the press.

I doubt very much whether any of the accusers are much appreciating the scrutiny being directed at them. I know I wouldn’t. But that doesn’t mean the press should conceal their identities. Under our system of law, bringing accusations of wrongdoing and other acts of whistleblowing is not an easy thing, nor should it be. It requires stamina and patience, and a willingness to be cross-examined. As it should! Sometimes false accusations are brought and the accused is innocent. He is just as deserving of justice as the accuser.

The shape of the Cain debate and the press treatment of the accusers both imply that we think sexual harassment is such an incendiary offense that we must observe a taboo against naming accusers. It also implies that we think that those accused of sexual harassment are so all-powerful in today’s culture that they can destroy accusers via “retaliation.”

I reject both of those views with the same vehemence that I reject the idea that women who bring civil charges of sexual harassment in the workplace must be treated like delicate flowers that will wilt and expire if scrutinized. If you’ve ever filed criminal or civil charges—or sat on a jury—you don’t need me to tell you that justice is never easy. The accused have the right to meet their accusers in court, even when it makes the accusers uncomfortable, a standard that the press—allegedly a bastion of openness and reproducible results—should observe, too. Privacy for accusers is a cop-out.

******

I sketched out some of these thoughts this afternoon in a Poynter chat with Kelly McBride and Mallary Tenore. Make your complaints against me public by tweeting at my Twitter feed. Or send them via email to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. 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: Sharon Bialek speaks during a news conference accusing Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain of sexual harassment in New York, November 7, 2011. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

As a man of habit, I resist all change, especially the change that’s forced on me. So this week I got steamed when one of the tools I rely on to do my work and nourish my brain, Google Reader, got a complete makeover and was pushed onto me whether I wanted it or not.

Which I don’t.

We users had been warned for weeks that a redesign of the popular (and free) RSS reader was in the making, so the appearance of a new version didn’t come as a shock. The only shock was how terrible the new version is. It subverts users’ needs in favor of Google’s. The company wants to fight Facebook with a uniform interface for its free suite of services—which also includes Gmail, Calendar, and Docs—that will encourage sharing of content on its newish social-networking product, Google+. But in making the whole Google product line visually consistent, the company has crippled one of its best offerings.

Seeing as Google doesn’t charge for its RSS reader I can’t complain much more than if a bar serving free beer suddenly switched from Sierra Nevada Pale Ale to Old Milwaukee. But to extend the metaphor, I don’t have to drink Google’s swill unless I want to.

Which I don’t.

I’m not the only user carping about the new Google Reader. Foster Kamer of the New York Observer collated the dissatisfaction yesterday, pointing to the critique blogged by former Google project manager Brian Shih titled “Reader redesign: Terrible decision, or worst decision?” The voices at Wired.com, Information Week, the Atlantic Wire, and Forbes all hammered Google Reader. Among the complaints: Its unique “shared feeds” feature is gone; it loads slower than the old Reader; it’s hopelessly gray; a giant, red, near-useless “Subscribe” button hogs valuable screen real estate; and there’s a lot of noise about how Google has reduced it to an adjunct to Google +. The former lead designer of Google Reader offered yesterday to rejoin the company for the three months it would take to fix his baby, writing:

Reader should not fall by the wayside, a victim to fashion. …

I will put my current projects on hold to ensure that Google Reader keeps its place as the premier news reader, and raises the bar of what a social newsreader can be.

What drew me to Google Reader five years ago was its compression. It wasn’t the ideal RSS reader, but it worked well with your Gmail sign-in and it condensed an extraordinary amount of information about publications and new posts into a single Web page. With a couple of clicks on my tiny netbook, I could catch up on the 116 news feeds that I follow, add a few new ones, or “star” the ones I wanted to save. Like an old couch, its shape had conformed to my dimensions. As a Google engineer described it in 2006, it was like an inbox for the Web.

Here’s what the old Google Reader looked like:

Here’s a view of the new Google Reader:

Have you ever seen such an exercise in loosey-goosey white space? White space is wonderful when used as a design element in magazines and books, but it’s absolute crap when brushed onto a pure-data medium like an RSS feed. Adding extravagant white space to Google Reader is like adding white space to the phone book. It defeats the mission of densely packing information. Just imagine if Microsoft decided that the new default setting for Excel spreadsheets provided for extra leading between lines, and the default was unchangeable. The nation’s accountants would storm Redmond and lynch Steve Ballmer and bury him in Elliott Bay.

In the old Google Reader regime, I could see about 13 headlines on my netbook without scrolling. Now I’m down to eight, which means endless scrolling to catch up on the news. Brian Shih puts it best with his rant about the new Reader’s misplaced priorities. “When you log into Reader, what the hell do you think your primary objective is?” he writes. “Did you answer ‘stare at a giant header bar with no real estate saved for actual reading’?” If you did, the new Reader is your prize.

I’m not a fussy person. I don’t fly off the handle every time Facebook or Twitter or Microsoft Word undergoes a redesign. I don’t much like the “new look” that Google has given Gmail and Calendar, but it’s not going to cause me to dump those applications. For one thing, the new Calendar isn’t that bad and if the new Gmail interface gets on my nerves I can always use Outlook to read and send from my account.

But there are other RSS programs out there which, unlike the new Google Reader, put the reading experience first. My Reuters colleague Anthony De Rosa recommends newsblur.com and I’ve grown accustomed to reading my feeds with NetNewsWire on the family iPad.

It’s been a great five years, Google Reader. I feel a little jilted by your crazed pursuit of the social media market, but I can’t be too angry with you for providing such a fine, free service for all that time. Thanks.

But with my thanks come retaliation: Somebody must pay for this corporate misdirection. I happily occupied Google Reader for five years. Today, in protest, I unoccupy it.

Addendum, 5:45 p.m.: I missed this Atlantic Wire piece about the effort to build a Google Reader replacement.

******

What RSS reader do you use? Send nominations to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. Did you know you can use RSS to subscribe to 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 last refuge of a bogus trend story is the claim that it “got people talking.”

If the author and editors of “A Last Bastion of Civility, the South, Sees Manners Decline” from today’s New York Times have adjourned to a coffee shop to eavesdrop on the conversation, I suspect they’re hearing what I’m thinking: Does that bold assertion come with evidence?

Here are a few examples from the  “growing portfolio” of behaviors the Times draws on to plot the decline of Southern manners.

·         Two black men drinking at a bar were asked by a bartender to surrender their seats to two white women. They declined and a lawsuit ensued.

·         A professor of history and Southern culture at the University of Mississippi tells the Times, “Manners are one of many things that are central to a Southerner’s identity, but they are not primary anymore. Things have eroded.”

·         The South’s make-up has changed: More Northerners have moved in; modern communications technology has made parts of the South less insular; and changing politics and the recent economic upheaval have made the place more contentious and insecure.

·         A “media specialist” says manners have dropped so low that African-Americans can no longer automatically trust other African-Americans.

·         A second grade teacher in Birmingham says today’s classroom manners have drooped lower than any time in her 36-year career.

·         A wedding planner (and graduate of the Emily Post Institute!) says brides and grooms are more selfish than ever.

·         Gov. Nikki Haley, R-S.C., was mean to 10 state lawmakers.

·         Charlotte, N.C., is the home to “road rage,” “rudeness,” and NASCAR “riots.”

Hmmmm. Blacks who won’t give up their seats to whites. A professor who thinks things aren’t what they used to be. A “specialist,” a middle-aged teacher, and a wedding planner who agree that standards of Southern behavior have shifted.

I wouldn’t want to go to trial with this case.

If you really needed to establish that Southern manners aren’t what they used to be, you’d first have to pick a baseline period for exactly when “used to be” was. Was it 1980? 1960? 1940? 1840? But the Times piece never pegs the golden age of Southern civility. Even if it had, journalistic anecdotes like these aren’t any way to reliably measure changes in civility.

The piece wisely concedes at a couple junctures how “courtesy and deference” have been used to control women and blacks, and to limit public debate. One voice in the piece holds that Southern civility was a coping mechanism designed to mask animosity. “If someone is polite, you better be careful and consider what that politeness veils,” says William Ferris, a University of North Carolina folklorist. This provocative comment, and the failure of the Times to fully explore its meaning, reminds me of the way Interview magazine conducted interviews during the Warhol era: Whenever the interview subject said something remotely interesting, the interviewer would quickly change the subject.

Other examples of bogosity: The Times cites a source to assert that Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Herman Cain all benefited from their “ability to pour Southern charm over the political process.” This is news to me. I missed Carter’s charm, saw through Clinton’s, and if anybody thinks Cain is charming, they’re crazy. The notion that Southern politics was once a bastion of good manners, a theme the story bangs on a couple of times, will jolt anybody who ever followed the careers of George Wallace, Lester Maddox, Strom Thurmond, Orval Faubus, et al.

Anecdotal news accounts charting the decline of this thing or that thing often include a counter-example, a stick-figure who functions like the Japanese soldier hiding in the jungles of the Solomon Islands who won’t surrender, demonstrating that against all odds, some people just won’t give up the faith. The Times observes this tradition by concluding the piece by visiting Dorothy McLeod, a 70-year-old who teaches ballroom dancing and etiquette to Augusta, Ga., children.

“I will not give up,” she says of her struggle to instill kindness and manners in unruly children.

As bad as the Times piece is, it could be worse. It could be about the return of Southern civility. Maybe next week.

******

Seen a bogus trend piece that needs a good beating? (Thanks to reader Matt Jezior for suggesting this one.) Forward it to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter, your reliable source of bogus-trend anti-venom. 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: A window washer cleans the windows above the front door of the New York Times building in New York, March 26, 2010. REUTERS/Gary Hershorn