31 December 2006 @ 4:21PM >> On April 9th, the New York Times Magazine ran an article claiming that a woman named Carmen Climaco was serving a 30-year jail sentence in El Salvador. According to the Times, she received the sentence for having an abortion; a caption under her picture noted that she “was given 30 years for an abortion that was ruled a homicide.”

However, today’s New York Times contains an eye-opening revelation from public editor Byron Calame:

It turns out, however, that trial testimony convinced a court in 2002 that Ms. Climaco’s pregnancy had resulted in a full-term live birth, and that she had strangled the “recently born.” A three-judge panel found her guilty of “aggravated homicide,” a fact the article noted. But without bothering to check the court document containing the panel’s findings and ruling, the article’s author, Jack Hitt, a freelancer, suggested that the “truth” was different.

[...]

The care taken in the reporting and editing of this example didn’t meet the magazine’s normal standards. Although Sarah H. Smith, the magazine’s editorial manager, told me that relevant court documents are “normally” reviewed, Mr. Hitt never checked the 7,600-word ruling in the Climaco case while preparing his story. And Mr. Hitt told me that no editor or fact checker ever asked him if he had checked the court document containing the panel’s decision.

Why did the Times article contain such a blatant error? Perhaps it had something to do with a translator hired by the author:

Paul Tough, the editor on the article, acknowledged in an e-mail to me that in reporting this story, Mr. Hitt used an unpaid translator who has done consulting work for Ipas, an abortion rights advocacy group, for his interviews with Ms. Climaco and D.C. This wasn’t ideal, he said, but the risk posed for sources in this situation required the use of intermediaries “to some degree.”

Ipas used The Times’s account of Ms. Climaco’s sentence to seek donations on its Web site for “identifying lawyers who could appeal her case” and to help the organization “continue critical advocacy work” across Central America. “A gift from you toward our goal of $30,000 will help Carmen and other Central American women who are suffering under extreme abortion laws,” states the Web appeal, which Ipas said it took down after I first contacted the organization on Dec. 14.

When the public editor started digging further into the story, the publisher’s office asked two editors—Craig Whitney and Gerald Marzorati—to draft a response to the concerns about the story’s accuracy:

The response said that while the “fair and dispassionate” story noted Ms. Climaco’s conviction of aggravated homicide, the article “concluded that it was more likely that she had had an illegal abortion.” The response ended by stating, “We have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts as reported in our article, which was not part of any campaign to promote abortion.”

But when confronted with the court documents themselves—which were never reviewed by the author—Marzorati, the editor of the Times Magazine, made an astonishing admission to Calame:

The article was “as accurate as it could have been at the time it was written,” Mr. Marzorati wrote to me. “I also think that if the author and we editors knew of the contents of that third ruling, we would have qualified what we said about Ms. Climaco. Which is NOT to say that I simply accept the third ruling as ‘true’; El Salvador’s judicial system is terribly politicized.”

I asked Mr. Whitney if he intended to suggest that the office of the publisher bring the court’s findings to the attention of those readers who received the “no reason to doubt” response, or that a correction be published. The latest word from the standards editor: “No, I’m not ready to do that, nor to order up a correction or Editors’ Note at this point.”

One thing is clear to me, at this point, about the key example of Carmen Climaco. Accuracy and fairness were not pursued with the vigor Times readers have a right to expect.

So now we know the editorial standards at the Times: an article is “as accurate as it could have been” even if the facts are completely wrong. Even if the original court record was never checked. Even if crucial interviews were translated by partisan activists. Even if those activists then use the resulting article for fundraising efforts. At the Times, none of that matters. None of that’s worthy of a correction, even after the article’s facts have been proven wrong.

No, it appears that the only standard that matters at the Times is whether the author’s conclusions are considered correct by his higher-ups.

Kudos to Calame for doggedly pursuing this. And shame on the rest of the editors at the Times for pretending that facts don’t matter.

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Update: The New York Times has since corrected the article. However, for some reason, Times corrections are only available on the web for one day, so I can’t link to it.

29 December 2006 @ 12:54PM >> Another media scandal refuses to die:

The AP claims [Jamil] Hussein is a captain in the Iraqi police force and works in the Baghdad region. Between April and November, he was used as a source in 61 AP stories. In one of his last starring roles, he provided an account of an alleged Shiite militia attack on a Sunni mosque in Baghdad on Nov. 24.

According to that AP dispatch, 50 men blew open the front of a mosque and dragged six Sunni worshippers outside, where they poured kerosene on the six and set them on fire. If true, the story would seem to be yet another incident that reflects badly on the U.S. efforts in Iraq. It feeds the media-generated perception that Iraq is a Vietnamlike quagmire from which we cannot escape.

There’s evidence, however, that the story might have been embellished, because Capt. Jamil Hussein of the Iraqi police force may not exist. U.S. military officials told the AP in a letter that they checked out the captain and were told by the Iraqi Interior Ministry that no one by the name of Jamil Hussein works there or as a police officer.

Armed forces officials also said the U.S. was unable to confirm the media reports that the six Sunnis were burned to death. Military officials further said in the days after the alleged incident that neither Iraqi police nor coalition forces had reports of the event.

So far, no Iraqi authorities have been able to confirm the existence of Jamil Hussein, a man the Associated Press says is an Iraqi police captain. Nor have any authorities been able to confirm the story of six Sunnis being dragged from a mosque and burned to death. And despite a month of investigation into this story, the Associated Press has still been unable to prove he even exists, despite their continued insistence that he does.

More made up news from the establishment media? As each day passes with no sign of Jamil Hussein, that’s looking more and more likely.

28 December 2006 @ 1:46PM >> From Canada’s National Post:

Dr. Tawfik Hamid doesn’t tell people where he lives. Not the street, not the city, not even the country. It’s safer that way. It’s only the letters of testimony from some of the highest intelligence officers in the Western world that enable him to move freely. This medical doctor, author and activist once was a member of Egypt’s Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya (Arabic for “the Islamic Group”), a banned terrorist organization. He was trained under Ayman al-Zawahiri, the bearded jihadi who appears in Bin Laden’s videos, telling the world that Islamic violence will stop only once we all become Muslims.

[...]

He is now 45 years old, and has had many years to reflect on why he was willing to die and kill for his religion. “The first thing you have to understand is that it has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with poverty or lack of education,” he says. “I was from a middle-class family and my parents were not religious. Hardly anyone in the movement at university came from a background that was different from mine.

“I’ve heard this poverty nonsense time and time again from Western apologists for Islam, most of them not Muslim by the way. There are millions of passive supporters of terror who may be poor and needy but most of those who do the killing are wealthy, privileged, educated and free. If it were about poverty, ask yourself why it is middle-class Muslims — and never poor Christians — who become suicide bombers in Palestine.”

[...]

He leans back, takes a deep breath and moves to another area, one that he says is far too seldom discussed: “North Americans are too squeamish about discussing the obvious sexual dynamic behind suicide bombings. If they understood contemporary Islamic society, they would understand the sheer sexual tension of Sunni Muslim men. Look at the figures for suicide bombings and see how few are from the Shiite world. Terrorism and violence yes, but not suicide. The overwhelming majority are from Sunnis. Now within the Shiite world there are what is known as temporary marriages, lasting anywhere from an hour to 95 years. It enables men to release their sexual frustrations.

“Islam condemns extra-marital sex as well as masturbation, which is also taught in the Christian tradition. But Islam also tells of unlimited sexual ecstasy in paradise with beautiful virgins for the martyr who gives his life for the faith. Don’t for a moment underestimate this blinding passion or its influence on those who accept fundamentalism.”

A pause. “I know. I was one who accepted it.”

[...]

“The sexual aspect is, of course, just one part of this. But I can tell you what it is not about. Not about Israel, not about Iraq, not about Afghanistan. They are mere excuses. Algerian Muslim fundamentalists murdered 150,000 other Algerian Muslims, sometimes slitting the throats of children in front of their parents. Are you seriously telling me that this was because of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians or American foreign policy?”

He’s exasperated now, visibly angry at what he sees as a willful Western foolishness. “Stop asking what you have done wrong. Stop it! They’re slaughtering you like sheep and you still look within. You criticize your history, your institutions, your churches. Why can’t you realize that it has nothing to do with what you have done but with what they want.”

27 December 2006 @ 10:49PM >> A newspaper purchased in 1998 for $1.2 billion has just been sold for $530 million. Noting that the paper, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, lost over half its value in less than a decade, a Goldman Sachs analyst commented that the “valuation is a bearish signal for the newspaper industry.” No kidding.

Perhaps one of the problems with the Star-Tribune is the caliber of the columnists in the paper’s employ...and the quality of the writers who come to their defense.

23 December 2006 @ 5:55PM >> A Columbia student forwarded me this e-mail from university President Lee Bollinger (link added):

Now that final exams have concluded, I would like to bring everyone up to date on what we have done to respond to the October 4 student event featuring speakers from the Minuteman Project. At the time, I said that the disruption of that event constituted a serious breach of faith against an academic community built on the freedom to think, speak, debate, and disagree.

Since then, we have taken a number of steps to enforce our University Rules of Conduct with respect to the individuals involved and to ensure more broadly that everyone at Columbia understands and appreciates the essential ethos of tolerance on this campus.

[...]

As a result of [the] investigation, the University has notified a number of Columbia students that they will be subject to discipline for having violated the Rules of University Conduct.  The Federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), however, strictly prohibits the University from divulging details of disciplinary proceedings, including the identities of participants.  That may feel unsatisfactory to some who would like to see a public announcement of specific punishments, but we must adhere to federal law in these matters of student privacy.

[...]

Finally, I want to again thank the many people in the University who have devoted time and energy to repairing the damage our community has sustained and to strengthening our shared academic values. Many students come to Columbia because we are a diverse academic community in the most diverse and global of American cities.  Even though this is a place of academic reflection, we have always been a place of lively engagement in the issues of our time and often a crucible for the heated debates that pervade society at large—locally, nationally, and globally.  We all know that words can cause pain and discomfort.  And every idea poses a risk of action, for good or bad.  But what is hard to learn and hard to live by is the single idea that words are the better way in which to work through conflict and danger.  This is certainly true for universities, but also for healthy, free societies.

I hope that Columbia is stronger for having recommitted itself to the common right of every member of this community and our guests to speak freely, on even the most difficult and contentious issues of our day.  We must now work together to ensure that we always put this core principle into practice.

I can understand President Bollinger’s reluctance to announce a punishment if indeed doing so violates federal law. But universities often act swiftly and tout punishments when doing so is what the administration desires. There was plenty of publicity when Duke University shut down the lacrosse team over a supposed rape that now seems pretty clear never happened.

Bollinger’s letter contained many words that, if taken at face value, signal a strong support of the free exchange of ideas at Columbia. So while Bollinger may claim that he can’t discuss the punishments handed down—actually, he doesn’t even say any punishments were handed down, just that some students will be subject to discipline (more future tense...even though the incident occurred nearly three months ago)—then why doesn’t he at least come out and say what will happen in future cases where students physically assault a speaker for the purpose of silencing him?

A little guidance from the university on what punishments would be meted out in the future could go a long way towards deterring another near-riot next time the College Republicans invite a speaker whose views fall outside the campus orthodoxy. Assuming, of course, that such speakers really are welcome on campus.

18 December 2006 @ 6:38PM >> Today’s New York Times contains a lengthy article discussing the financial woes of Air America Radio. The Times, which describes Air America as a “liberal network” created to be “an alternative to right-wing talk radio,” says that the now-bankrupt network “was engulfed in a series of financial crises.”

But the paper—whose famous tag line is “all the news that’s fit to print”—inexplicably fails to mention the most significant of those self-inflicted crises.

In July 2005, word leaked out that the New York City Department of Investigation was looking into Air America Radio for its role in diverting hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Bronx charity. The Attorney General of New York later opened an investigation over allegations that Air America ended up with $875,000 intended for underprivileged kids at the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club. The scandal eventually caused the club to shut down after having its charter yanked.

In August 2005, I noted that major establishment news outlets—including the New York Times—were ignoring the Air America scandal.

Here we are, well over a year later, and the Times is still doing everything it can to gloss over that scandal. In an article that measures over 1,600 words—an article whose unifying theme is the financial mess that is Air America—the Times can’t even bring itself to print word one about the fact that the supposed champions of the dispossessed felt no compunction about ripping off inner-city kids so they could keep their million-dollar hosts on the air.

All the news that’s fit to print? Or all the news that fits their ideology?

17 December 2006 @ 9:49AM >> According to a government report, daily use of the Internet has become more common among Americans than newspaper reading.

13 December 2006 @ 7:18PM >> Some thoughts on the future of newspapers from The Atlantic Monthly:

[T]op reporters and columnists at major newspapers are realizing (or will realize soon) that their fates are not necessarily tied to those of their employers. As portals and search engines and blogs increasingly allow readers to consume media without context or much branding, writers like Thomas Friedman will increasingly wonder what is the benefit of working for a newspaper—especially when the newspaper is burying his article behind a subscriber wall. It will require only a slight shift in the economic model for the Friedmans of the world to realize that they don’t need the newspapers they work for; that they can go off and blog on their own, or form United Artists-like cooperatives to financially support their independent efforts.

So what should newspapers do? They could stop printing. It may happen eventually, or perhaps newsprint will find a financially sustainable market among the elite and elderly (or perhaps it will have a nostalgic vogue not unlike that of, say, heirloom tomatoes), but that’s not what I’m getting at. The current Web-publishing model that newspapers are using isn’t likely to become financially viable anytime soon. With few exceptions, the media businesses thriving on the Web either are low-cost blog-like efforts or follow a many-to-many model, in which communities create, share, and consume content. Publishing an article on the Web gets you one click; getting your users to write the article for you gets you a thousand clicks, and costs less to boot. In other words, turning your users into contributors increases their engagement with your site—each click is, after all, also an “ad impression”—while simultaneously generating more content that you in turn can sell to advertisers.

That, I’d venture, is how you start rethinking the newspaper business. Not only do you allow your reporters to blog; you make them the hubs of their own social networks, the maestros of their own wikis, the masters of their own many-to-many realms. To take but one example, Kelefa Sanneh is the pop-music critic for The New York Times. He is very likely the best music critic in the country, and certainly the best new Times music writer in years. Let’s say that Sanneh creates his own community around the music he likes. Or The Washington Post’s Dana Priest creates an interactive online universe around her intelligence reportage. With editorial oversight only for libel and factual accuracy, Sanneh or Priest are allowed to do whatever they want on their sites (while their mother ships pour their resources into marketing them). In Sanneh’s case, allow other people to write music reviews under the Times/Sanneh “brand.” In Priest’s case, turn the site into a clearinghouse for global intelligence information, rumors, conspiracy theories, and so forth (obligatory disclaimer: “The views of posters do not necessarily represent those of the Washington Post Company”). Go even further: incentivize the critics and reporters by allowing them to profit based on the popularity of their sites; make it worth their while to stick around.

[...]

Playing this logic out, the next task would be uniting the Sanneh or Priest site to the Times or Post whole. You could essentially self-syndicate, sending your regular Times or Post headlines to Sanneh’s and Priest’s sites, luring readers back to the mother ship while increasing the number of times each story is read. Indeed, the logic could be (and in some circles already is being) played out even further. What if you essentially exploded the central function of the newspaper and “microchunked” (to borrow a current term) the content, syndicating all of it to bloggers or other news sites in return for a share of any advertising revenue each site generates? The Associated Press has made this the centerpiece of its digital-age strategy: it recently signed a potentially breakthrough deal with Google, in which Google will pay the AP for access to its stories; and the AP has launched a broadband player that Web sites can use to access AP video content. Its content goes where the readers are, and the AP gets paid, no matter what. Remarkably, this most old-school of services is a lone bright spot in the MSM landscape. The AP’s revenues have increased from more than $593 million in 2003 to more than $654 million in 2005; its digital revenue grew at a rate of 66 percent from 2004 to 2006. Of course, the AP has always been a syndicator, so no conceptual leap of faith (indeed no leap whatsoever) was required to move the business from analog to digital.

8 December 2006 @ 8:59AM >> E-mail as we know it today is facing certain death. Not at the hands of a newer technology that provides more features, but because the software protocols that drive Internet e-mail today are causing us to be buried in mountains of unwanted e-mail spam. More >>

6 December 2006 @ 9:40PM >> Filmmaking cohort Stuart Browning has posted a new short video over at the On The Fence Films. A Short Course in Brain Surgery looks at the plight of Canadians under their “single payer” health care system.

When things don’t work out so well under Canada’s government monopoly, you know what some Canadians do? They come here, to get treated in a matter of days for procedures that they wait months or years for just a few miles further north.

I have no doubt that the new Democratic majority will eventually try to bring Canada’s system here. Before they do, every American should see A Short Course in Brain Surgery and the earlier companion film, Dead Meat.

(Next on the plate for On The Fence Films: a trailer for Indoctrinate U. Finally!)

5 December 2006 @ 8:32AM >> Blogger Bill Rogio is embedded in Iraq:

While waiting to manifest on the flight to Fallujah, CNN played a news segment of President Bush announcing there would be no “graceful exit” from Iraq, and that we’d stay until the mission was complete. Two sergeants in the room cheered. Loudly. They then scoffed at the reports from Baghdad, and jeered the balcony reporting.

In nearly every conversation, the soldiers, Marines and contractors expressed they were upset with the coverage of the war in Iraq in general, and the public perception of the daily situation on the ground. The felt the media was there to sensationalize the news, and several stated some reporters were only interested in “blood and guts.” They freely admitted the obstacles in front of them in Iraq. Most recognized that while we are winning the war on the battlefield, albeit with difficulties in some areas, we are losing the information war. They felt the media had abandoned them.

During each conversation, I was left in the awkward situation of having to explain that while, yes, I am wearing a press badge, I’m not ‘one of them.’ I used descriptions like ‘independent journalist’ or ‘blogger’ in an attempt to separate myself from the pack.

What a terrible situation to be in, having to defend yourself because of your profession. I’ve always said that the hardest thing about embedding (besides leaving my family) is wearing the badge that says ‘PRESS.’ That hasn’t changed. I hide the badge whenever I can get away with it.

4 December 2006 @ 12:27AM >> A study of how the media has been distoring war reporting since the September 11th attacks:

Convincingly and without resorting to partisan politics, [study author Jim A.] Kuypers strongly illustrates in eight chapters “how the press failed America in its coverage on the War on Terror.” In each comparison, Kuypers “detected massive bias on the part of the press.” In fact, Kuypers calls the mainstream news media an “anti-democratic institution” in the conclusion.

“What has essentially happened since 9/11 has been that Bush has repeated the same themes, and framed those themes the same whenever discussing the War on Terror,” said Kuypers, who specializes in political communication and rhetoric. “Immediately following 9/11, the mainstream news media (represented by CBS, ABC, NBC, USA Today, New York Times, and Washington Post) did echo Bush, but within eight weeks it began to intentionally ignore certain information the president was sharing, and instead reframed the president’s themes or intentionally introduced new material to shift the focus.”

1 December 2006 @ 8:52AM >> Fifty-eight days since a mob of Columbia students stormed the stage and shut down the speech of a guest invited by the school’s College Republicans, and the university is still silent on the results of its alleged investigation.

A reader e-mailed me with an observation that the wheels of justice don’t always turn so slowly at Columbia; in fact, just a month before the near-riot that required Minuteman speaker Jim Gilchrist to be whisked off the stage by security, the university very quickly suspended the entire men’s hockey team for a much less threatening offense: posting recruitment flyers that contained the phrase “don’t be a pussy.”

Free speech is very clearly not alive and well at Columbia.

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Update: Christopher Edele, the reader who pointed out the hockey team suspension, followed up with a note that negative attention ultimately caused Columbia to reinstate the hockey team. However, it is still telling that Columbia’s first inclination is to silence unpopular speech, and to stay silent after student goons did the same.