Jack Shafer

Having secured the nominations of their parties, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have set their campaign throttles to late-spring idle with a speech here, a speech there, a commencement address over there, and fundraisers and soft TV appearances everywhere. Eventually, the two candidates will stop coasting, but until they do, reporters will continue to lard their work with exercises in meta-journalism, such as today’s 1,800-word Politico piece, “Obama and Romney’s common foe.”

The common foe, don’t you know, is the press! According to Politico’s Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush, Barack and Mitt both “disdain” the “political news media” because they believe reporters are “eager to vaporize them for the sheer sport of it.”

Is there anything new about presidents and presidential candidates having bad feelings for the press? Does nobody recall John McCain’s low regard for the New York Times coverage of his 2008 campaign? Or of George W. Bush’s attitude toward the press? Bill Clinton’s scorn? George H.W. Bush’s hatred? Carter’s? Nixon’s? Johnson’s? Sometimes candidates do charm the press, as McCain did in 2000, and the anti-war candidates of 1968 and 1972, but it’s the exception, never the rule.

No, there is nothing new about presidents and presidential candidates having bad feelings about the press, something the Politico piece readily admits. As Haberman and Thrush write: “Media-hating has been an occupational hazard among presidential candidates for decades, and it’s deeply self-serving.”

Then, Haberman and Thrush abandon the idea of media-hating being a campaign constant in their next paragraph, writing: “But 2012 is shaping up to be an especially sour cycle for the campaigns and the media, amplifying the natural tension between candidates and the press in the absence of an uplifting storyline.”

Attacking Politico for contradicting itself or for confusing a lightning bug with lightning (hat tip to Mr. Twain) may seem to be a fool’s errand. The people who edit and write for the site know good journalism from bad, but that self-knowledge doesn’t prevent them from serving half-baked, rancid dishes like this. Politico, which has become influential and ubiquitous in our political culture, depends on patrons like me to send entrees like this back to the kitchen and to summon the health inspector to do his thing. Only then can America be safe.

The evidence presented by Politico that this campaign is “shaping up to be especially sour” is so thin it almost vanishes. Obama has said vague things about being disappointed by the press, such as in his commencement address at Barnard College, and he delivered a cheap shot about Huffington Post’s aggressive aggregation in his White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner speech. But that hardly constitutes press hatred. Straining to come up with material, the Politico piece quotes David Plouffe’s The Audacity to Win, the Obama adviser’s 2009 memoir about the 2008 campaign, on press-candidate relations. Exactly how Plouffe’s views on his candidate’s relations with the press in the last campaign help show candidate-press relations approaching some new “sourness” plateau in this campaign is not explained.

Indeed, it shows that Politico doesn’t really have the goods to prove its thesis, as the piece zigs back to note that there is at least one outlet the president admires: An anonymous “onetime Obama press adviser” tells Haberman and Thrush that Obama “likes the New York Times,” which he thinks is “serious” as opposed to “the rest of you guys.” Also, Obama told Rolling Stone that he read all the Times columnists.

Perhaps Politico has conflated Obama’s dislike of Politico into a hatred of the entire press corps? I hope Haberman and Thrush pursue this angle with the anonymous onetime Obama press adviser.

Establishing that Romney hates the press should be a cinch, but Politico doesn’t even try. It reports that Ann Romney didn’t like a 1994 profile done on her by the Boston Globe during Mitt’s failed run for the Senate. That would be admissible evidence if Politico were attempting to show that 1994 was the nastiest year in press-candidate relations, but that’s not what the site is up to here, is it? It also tells us that Romney “walled” himself off from beat reporters during the primary campaign, that he has kept reporters off his “rope line” to prevent them from asking questions, that his camp thinks the Washington Post story about his Cranbrook days was a hit job, that he dislikes the extreme scrutiny (such as what brand of jeans he’s wearing) and that he has a “handful of favorites” in the press, including Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin. This sounds less like conflict to me than baseline candidate-press relations.

As presented by Politico, Romney’s most urgent media problem isn’t the conventional press, it’s the world of conservative bloggers, “who view him as a moderate,” as well as other conservative writers. Only Politico would dare conflate a Republican candidate’s inability to please conservative bloggers and conservative writers into confirmation of a candidate’s poor relations with the press.

Veteran White House reporter James Deakin posited the inevitability of confrontations between the president and the press in his 1984 book Straight Stuff: The Reporters, the White House, and the Truth and documented them in their many flavors. Likewise, presidential candidates and the press are equally apt to mix it up, and do, as readers of Teddy White and his successors have learned.

When Politico asserts that “Romneyland, like Obamaland, is inherently mistrustful of the press corps,” it’s hardly breaking news. Of course Romneyland and Obamaland are inherently mistrustful of the press corps, as were Santorumland, Gingrichland and Perryland, and for good reason. It’s the job of the press to expose things about candidates that they would rather not have you hear.

As a practical matter, voters and readers need never worry about the state of candidate-press relations. Until, of course, the unfortunate day comes when Politico reports everybody is getting along swell.

******

It’s not the job of the press to be liked by anybody. Or did I make that point already. Send your hate-the-press notes to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. There’s plenty in my Twitter feed to dislike. 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: President Barack Obama’s teleprompter, with the White House press corps in the foreground, shown in the East Room of the White House in Washington, September 10, 2010.  REUTERS/Jason Reed

BuzzFeed, the aggregation/social-media site, has thrown itself into the content creation business with some big hires. Today, BuzzFeed’s co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti crowed about picking up Politico’s Ben Smith as its editor-in-chief. Smith, as Politico readers know, breaks news the way rioters break glass: Frequently and with glee. Last week, BuzzFeed added Whitney Jefferson and Matt Cherette from the Gawker enterprise, and a dozen new editorial hires are promised.

The addition of original content (also known as “journalism”) to the aggregator model isn’t without precedent. There are plenty of large Web sites that devote themselves to both, such as Huffington Post, Mediaite, Business Insider, Atlantic Wire, and Gawker, to name a few. But for an established aggregator like BuzzFeed to enter the original content sweepstakes at this point is a little like a slaughterhouse attaching a storefront to its entrance and opening a steakhouse in hopes of selling even more meat.

Actually, the BuzzFeed transition will be even bigger than from slaughterhouse to steakhouse. Today, it’s essentially an entertainment site, a place best known for its goofy distractions and silly videos. Smith tells Nieman Journalism Lab that his goal is to “hire reporters who get scoops the same way they have always have” with phone calls, “trips to Iowa, drinks with political operatives.”

The economics of adding original content to an aggregation site are strong. Take, for example, Fark, the popular social media and aggregation site that Drew Curtis started in 1999 and still runs. Curtis describes Fark as a bit of a closed loop: 96 percent of its traffic is “organic,” which means most of its users reach the site by directly entering its URL or by clicking a bookmark for it. Similarly, its inbound traffic of 50 million page views a month is equal to its outbound traffic of about 50 million clicks to other sites. This means that that on average, Fark visitors tend to click one link out to one original page for each page of Fark that they consume.

“I could double my traffic overnight if I started doing original content,” Curtis says. Original pieces would obviously attract additional page views. More elaborate summaries of other sites’s stories by staffers, especially summaries that are especially insightful or argumentative, could possibly capture many of the page views that Fark currently sends to the story originators (in its current iteration, Fark provides only a snappy headline for the outbound links).

Such a bundle of original copy and full-throated summaries could also attract links from search engines, something that the current Fark almost never gets. Curtis says he hasn’t staffed up with original content because he doesn’t have to—he’s self-funded with no investors to please. “We’re trying to retain what we’re doing,” Curtis says. Quantcast puts his monthly traffic at 1.7 million visitors, compared to 16.6 million for BuzzFeed and 62.4 million for Huffington Post.

“It’s difficult to self-fund that kind of expansion. I don’t have resources to hire 10 people right now unless there’s 100 percent chance of success because anything less would mean the increase in overhead would run us out of business in 3-6 months,” he adds.

BuzzFeed has a number of outside backers, making the editorial additions less of a gamble. According to the New York Observer, they include Softbank, Hearst Interactive, RRE Ventures, and Ken Lerer, who is Peretti’s BuzzFeed partner, and like Peretti helped found the Huffington Post.

The trick to leveraging BuzzFeed into a HuffPo competitor will be to 1) do what HuffPo does, only do it better or 2) do something HuffPo doesn’t do. BuzzFeed’s newsroom, which is outgunned by at least 10 to 1, can’t do what HuffPo does better. So it will have to settle for doing something different. Apparently that will be to use the social- and sharing-power of the site to, as Peretti told Nieman‘s Megan Garber, “build the definitive social news organization.”

How difficult will it be to attract the sort of readers who want to share political news or even care about it? The content tabs at the top of the current BuzzFeed home page tout “LOL,” “Cute,” “Win,” “Fail,” “OMG,” “Geeky,” “Trashy,” “WTF,” and “Random,” and the site’s official welcome to Smith gave him the extreme LOL treatment. That’s not to say that inserting a “Politics” tab into the mix will be impossible, but it will depend on BuzzFeed’s viral engine kicking in hard and Smith getting the scoops he promises.

I admire Smith’s work, so I have far fewer worries about him producing quality journalism than I do of him attracting the audience he deserves. Obviously, he can’t carry the site to new heights all by himself. BuzzFeed needs to add a couple more original content tabs—entertainment, business, tech, and lifestyle—just to pinch a few from HuffPo’s navigation banner, to make BuzzFeed a complete news destination rather than a fun niche.

And thus the daily newspaper is reborn again.

******

Don’t send LOL links to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com but feel free to socialize with 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.

ILLUSTRATION: Anthony DeRosa. Photo Daniel J. Sieradski via Flickr.

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.

******

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

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.

******

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.)