Media: Still Anti-Streeter

TORONTO, ONTARIO - While long-time readers of this blog are probably tired of references to past posts, it is undeniable that I have long railed on this blog against the practice of "streeters," or man-on-the-street interviews, in news programming. Most notably, I heavily criticized CBC Television for the practice about a year ago. Someone asked me if my opinion would change if I actually heard a new idea from a man-on-the-street. I doubt it, but haven't written anything in case that scenario actually took place, since maybe it would.

I still haven't had that happen (whereas new ideas come up fairly regularly on quality talk radio programs), but an interesting "streeter" aired and forced some exploration of the topic anyway. In this Global Toronto piece about taking down portions of the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto, the man-at-a-gas-station forty seconds into the piece just happens to be someone I know. Amongst his lesser-known credentials are successful letters written to the city about traffic flow issues resulting in the city making suggested changes. As an enthusiast of sailing vessels and railways, one might call him a transportation expert.

It made me wonder if, by virtue of the greater emphasis on ideas in Canadian culture, Canadian "streeters" might actually be of greater value than "streeters" in the United States. Whereas the "man-on-the-street" in the United States would be more likely to express emotion, the "man-on-the-street" in Canada might be more likely to actually make an argument of some value. (Of course, the "Jaywalking" phenomenon on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno of finding absolute idiots on the street in California might over-emphasize such a distinction.)

Yet, I think this case pretty much seals it for me that the "streeter" is always a waste of time. In this segment, Global got lucky--they stumbled upon a guy who could probably argue the case for keeping the Gardiner Expressway as well as any traffic engineer, and communicate it in more vernacular terms ideal for the television audience. So what do they choose to air? "Tearing it down is the dumbest thing in the world." Trust me, it's almost guaranteed that he said something more specific than that, even than the next sentence that they aired, though I haven't asked him. They chose the most controversial sentence to air--it's that simple.

It reminds me of a time during a teacher's strike when I was in middle school. One of my teachers, who had traveled to the state capitol for a big protest, talked to a reporter there for about ten minutes about what they hoped to achieve in the strike, what some of the concessions might mean in the classroom, and how they thought the strike could end quickly. What made it to television? "I'm just really discouraged right now." In that case, the actuality wasn't even representative of what she had been saying--it was just what the reporter wanted for his story.

So, I'm back to my standard themes on this topic. "Streeters" are lazy reporting. If reporters want an opinion expressed, they should find an expert that voices such an opinion. Man-on-the-street interviews add nothing to a news broadcast, and they should not appear in a hard news broadcast, even in Canada. Period.

Media: Is There A Difference?

TORONTO, ONTARIO - A casual viewer of CBC Television's "The National" late last week would have been left with the impression that Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report" is a serious conservative show (the program appears on The Comedy Network in Canada). In talking about the announcement by "The Daily Show"'s Jon Stewart of a "Rally to Restore Sanity" in Washington D.C. on October 30th, the report claimed that Stephen Colbert's "March to Keep Fear Alive" was a conservative response to Stewart.

Admittedly, Colbert has created some degree of confusion ever since his show debuted in 2005. Based on the popularity of "The Daily Show" and its satire of a news program, "The Colbert Report" has been a parody of conservative political pundit talk shows in general, and "The O'Reilly Factor" in particular. While most of the humor is so over-the-top that it would be difficult to mistake for a serious show (I mean, who would ever hold a "March to Keep Fear Alive"?), some of it is subtle enough that some conservatives have been known to say they agree with Colbert's character.

Meanwhile, on KUOW's The Conversation with Ross Reynolds last Thursday, Daily Show creator Lizz Winstead stated that she had talked to a pair of Canadians who thought that "The Glenn Beck Program" on FOX News was a great parody show. Clearly, there is a sizable portion of the United States citizenry--at least 87,000 of whom (if not 300,000) attended Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally last 28-August--that take him seriously. The Canadians found the show "hilarious parody."

Yet, Winstead's observation raises an interesting question--is there really a difference between Glenn Beck and Stephen Colbert, other than the network on which they are broadcast? Beck has been an entertainer his entire life. For a long time, he advertised his syndicated radio show as "infotainment." While I have no reason to question Beck's sincerity, do we really know what is real in his presentation and what is acting, just like seen on the Comedy Channel? Would an observer from a culture outside North America be able to tell the difference between Beck and Colbert if they were just shown the two shows? If Glenn Beck were on Comedy Central with a laugh track and Stephen Colbert were on FOX News without a studio audience, would we notice?

Granted, context is important in all media, but when a foreigner has trouble telling a parody show from a show hosted by a person regarded by some as the effective leader of a political party, that doesn't reflect well on anyone referred to in this sentence.

Media: Still Need the Editors

TORONTO, ONTARIO - One might think that I, of all people, would understand the value of an editor in the modern media environment. During my undergraduate years, every week during the academic year (and for some periods, every week of the year), I compiled a 500-750 word summary of the week's news called "News Beyond the Farm." Besides being widely distributed by e-mail on campus at Stanford University, whose students were its original intended audience, "News Beyond the Farm" was also published in the student newspaper of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Newspeak. If this web page is to be believed, it was the most popular column in that paper in early 1996. While the official web page of the publication disappeared with the cancellation of my "leland" account at Stanford, a number of issues live on in the WPI archives; it looks like the last one they published, about four months before publication stopped entirely, is still posted here.

"News Beyond the Farm" wasn't popular because students lacked information. Most newspapers had all their important content on-line by time I ceased publication, but I was still getting new subscription requests. The value of the publication was in the compact format appropriate to the student lifestyle, and in the trust of the editor. The vast majority of the readers didn't know me personally, but they knew I was a student just like them whose filters were likely compatible with their own. The editorial choices that I was making were the key to the popularity.

A recent interview on the TVO podcast Search Engine with New York University professor Jay Rosen had me thinking back to "News Beyond the Farm." Rosen has been one of the thought leaders in interpreting Wikileaks. He's pointed out that Wikileaks had to provide its massive dump of United States war documents to a handful of news organizations first before full release because otherwise, with all that free information available to all, the "supply" of information would be so large compared with the demand that it would likely be ignored. Wikileaks needed the editors of reputable news organizations to make its information valuable in the information marketplace.

As time goes on, the Internet is making almost all information, now even state secrets, available to all. However, the world has long since passed the stage in which any given individual could process the information that becomes available. While search engines, RSS feeds, and other technology aids make it more tractable, there is still a need for people who know how to best utilize those tools to find the information that people will actually find interesting. In most cases, it's still multiple layers of people, in fact. A subject matter expert may use informatics tools to process the information on the Iraq war, and then a journalist may extract what the general public is likely to find interesting in what the expert has found, and then a meta-journalist (or, as I called myself fifteen years ago, a compiler) may put it in a form that someone will actually read and trust.

The two ends of that equation may be radically changing. A "stateless media" like Wikileaks didn't exist in 1997 to provide massive amounts of documents, and nobody was reading News Beyond the Farm on an iPad in 1997. However, what goes on in between is largely the same, and where the value in the information is ultimately created. The business models need to evolve--and it is still hard to see how that happens--but in the end, it doesn't seem possible to change that reality of value creation. Thus, it's possible to see how journalism has the economic basis to continue to exist. The Internet can't destroy it after all.

Media: Not the CBC's Credit (Again)

TORONTO, ONTARIO - The abrupt departure of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)'s head of English services, Richard Stursberg, on Friday, has opened discussions on his impact on Canada's public broadcaster and what changes his successor may bring. While most of the facts surrounding this event have yet to come out, emotions about Stursberg are flowing freely. Most people seem to view his largest impact on the CBC to be an emphasis on ratings--for better or for worse, ratings for CBC Television and Radio One are clearly up during his tenure (Radio Two, er Radio 2, is a different story with declines in nearly every major market after re-formatting). Most attention will be paid to television, which costs more and was the focus of Stursberg attempt to bring in more revenue through advertising, which required more viewers. However, there is a point to be made about the increase in ratings of CBC Radio One, the news and information network, in recent years.

Much like similar trends in the United States, where public radio stations are at the top or near the top of the ratings in many major markets including Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., CBC is not gaining in the rankings because its programming is getting better. Instead, in my opinion, it is attracting listeners because the commercial alternatives are becoming less enticing.

The trend may be easier to follow in American cities, where the decline in the quality of stations like KIRO (now FM) in Seattle and WBZ in Boston is clear. Two decades ago, I could leave the radio on either of those stations for hours and not become bored. Now, one news cycle (we can argue if that is really 30 minutes or 15 minutes on these stations) is about all I can stand before the repetition of stories and injection of tiresome personality takes its toll. With talk stations generally vapid, that leaves turning to public radio if one does not want music.

Here in Toronto, just spin the dial in the morning. News 680 is okay but like its analogs south of the border is generally only listenable for a half-hour news cycle before it becomes repetitive, AM 640 is generally spewing unlistenable anger about local politics, Radio 1050 is simulcasting television news (never a formula for great radio), and Newstalk 1010 takes on far fewer serious topics than it did just four years ago when I moved here. Furthermore, those information alternatives are on AM--some young people I know have portable radios that do not even have AM capability, just MP3's and FM. On the FM dial, about the only information programming is on CBC Radio One. So, between dial placement and the competition, there's little wonder that Metro Morning on the CBC does well in the ratings with those seeking information, which during morning drive is a sizable portion of the audience.

The story is similar across Canada. In major markets, most often the real commercial competition for CBC Radio One (which is now on FM virtually everywhere) is on AM, and has declined in quality. If anything, CBC Radio One has declined in quality, with more repeat instead of original programming and decreased budgets. However, that decline pales in comparison with the decline in commercial radio, and results in net increased ratings for CBC Radio One.

It would be nice to credit the CBC (or even Stursberg) for the change in radio ratings, but I'm afraid it is not their doing, just like the flow of talent discussed here some months back. It's the decline in commercial radio that has led to increased ratings for CBC Radio One.

Media: No Podcast, Forget It

TORONTO, ONTARIO - The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS)'s radio division in the United States, which has gone by a variety of names in recent decades, has had a poor history with the Internet. When the reviled Mel Karmazin, now CEO of Sirius XM, was running CBS radio under the Infinity name, he stated that he would never put a CBS station in the Internet, and indeed none of the famous CBS news or music stations were available on-line.

After Karmazin moved on, all that changed. The big CBS news stations, from KCBS in San Francisco to WINS in New York, started live streams on the Internet, and so did their music stations. A few stations went all-out for podcasting, with WCBS in New York creating a variety of podcast streams, even including the CBS network's Dave Ross commentaries. Over time, a variety of CBS podcasts, from the weekly 60 Minutes and Face the Nation to the four-times-daily Osgood File, made it onto my podcast list.

The signs that trouble was coming started when The Osgood File began to feature advertising. It really didn't bother me that much, since the radio version has a minute and a half of advertising associated with it, and the podcast had only thirty (later forty-five) seconds. If that's what it takes for the podcast to continue, so be it. The information was still free, just like the radio broadcast, and it was easy to listen to at my convenience.

Then, in mid-July, the CBS-owned-and-operated news station in Boston, WBZ-AM, dropped the podcast of its Jon Keller commentaries when it revised its web site. There remained a Jon Keller blog on the web site, but the audio was no longer available as a podcast. One had to visit the web page and click on the link so that an advertisement would show in a special window as the commentary played. I e-mailed to complain and pointed out that Keller's commentary was worthwhile to me if it came as an automatically-downloaded podcast, but if I had to actively go to their web site and click around, I wasn't going to bother. Indeed, I don't know what Keller's cynical mind has contemplating since.

Today, I discovered that they've done the same thing with the network Dave Ross commentaries. The podcast is gone. The commentaries remain on the WCBS-AM web site, but one has to click on them to listen, and an ad comes first. I'm not going to bother--I might think about doing that when I'm home in the evening, but there's no way I'm going to do that while traveling and my time on the Internet is limited.

If CBS is going to stop podcasting, then I'm going to stop listening to CBS programming. There's too much quality programming out there that I can get more easily. The really annoying thing is that they already have a model for incorporating advertising--used for the Osgood File of incorporating the advertising into the podcast--that serves the same purpose of accommodating advertising. They don't need to eliminate their podcasts in order to get advertising revenue. They're making their content harder to access, and I won't be the only one that will ignore it as a result.

Some companies don't get it, and it appears that CBS is in that category again. I've spent my whole life enjoying CBS programming, but it looks like that era may be coming to an end because they're going backwards in their use of the Internet and eliminating podcasts.

Media: News Balance Report

TORONTO, ONTARIO - As part of its own self-evaluation program, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recently released an interim report on balance in its news programming. While most were paying attention to the political balance of its reporting (which proved statistically the same as its commercial competition), I found some of the items in its executive summary to be far more interesting.

Take the issue of the province balance in national news stories. Ontario will receive a strong bias as a result of Parliament being in Ottawa (and, in fact, I think the statistics would have been more useful had stories on the Federal government been separated from other stories from Ontario), but the extent of the bias is stunning. Fully 37% of stories on "The National" had a "primary location" in Ontario--which sounds ridiculous until one realizes that 39% of the population is in Ontario, and then it seems rather unremarkable. Only Quebec is grossly under-represented, in terms of population, being the origin of just 10% of stories while being 22% of the population, and that is largely explained by the anglo-franco linguistic divide. The most over-represented location was British Columbia, with 20% of coverage on 13% of the population, but that was biased by the Olympic games. The other networks show similar trends, with even more over-representation of British Columbia and, if anything, under-representation of Ontario.

I've commented before that the CBC has a large number of female hosts, and this study put numbers to it. Overall, the faces and voices that appear on the CBC are about 60% female and 40% male--compared with 40% female and 60% male on the commercial networks. That's a significant difference, and one that is hard to explain on the commercial side if the studies that show men actually prefer information presented to them by women and that women don't have a strong gender preference are actually true and applicable to news broadcasting.

What really floored me, though, was the balance of genders in the news stories themselves. Because of the dominance of men in politics, I wasn't surprised to see that males were the subject of stories more often than females, but the difference was enormous. On the CBC (and commercial television), 70% of stories had a male figure focused on, while 30% focused on a female. At the commercial radio, it was 84% males and just 16% females. It's hard not to view that as a bias against the importance of women in society.

If the opponents of the CBC were hoping for a smoking gun in this report, they didn't find it. Progressives, though, may have found statistical demonstration of gender bias in Canadian society.

Media: The Early Days of Streaming

TORONTO, ONTARIO - A friend wrote to me recently raving about a WiFi radio. The concept of a WiFi radio is pretty simple--being able to tune into any radio station in the world that has an Internet stream, instead of being limited to local stations. All one needs is the WiFi radio and either a wireless or a wired Ethernet connection to the Internet, and one can tune in anything from KGO in San Francisco to ABC Newsradio in Australia to RPR-1 in Germany, and everything in between.

Personally, I don't find the concept of a WiFi radio that interesting, since I already have a computer and can tune in any of these stations on the computer, and then use a low-power FM transmitter to broadcast it to any radio in my residence. I've been doing that for more than a decade, and I don't see how a WiFi radio improves over that arrangement. In fact, it would actually be a step backward, as the radio sits in only one location and the FM transmitter goes to every room.

It wasn't that long ago that we had no such options. I remember when I was the head teaching assistant of an Analytical Chemistry lab at university that had an evening section. Some of the experiments were rather tedious, so sometimes the evening section leader and I would let students stick around and continue an experiment, and we'd work on our own homework. The lab did not have a radio, but it did have a computer. So, one night approaching midnight, I decided to try to find some music.

Google didn't exist yet, so I went to Yahoo for radio station listings (in fact, I think Yahoo may have still been at http://akebono.stanford.edu/, a few buildings away on campus). There weren't a lot of music options--the most popular station with students in that era, for example, Alice@97.3, was not on-line, but eventually I found something that the handful of remaining students could stand.

It was WZYP, a hit music station out of Huntsville, Alabama. 104.3 on the FM dial there, it had a Real Audio stream on the Internet that enabled us to hear it in California. The music was enough to keep us awake, and the overnight disc jockey (DJ), whose name has disappeared from my memory, kept us entertained with his southern accent alone.

The moment that would etch itself into my memory came when the morning DJ came on the air (er, the Internet) and announced "It's 5 AM in Huntsville--Good morning!" Being two times zones over, it was 3 AM in Palo Alto. That was significant, however, since only a minority of students actually went to bed before midnight--according to the unofficial "Pacific Stanford Time," the day actually started at 3 AM. WZYP was telling us we were in all-nighter territory.

It wasn't long before the students wrapped up their experiments and went home, and the teaching staff followed. I don't think I've listened to WZYP since the night labs, as more familiar stations eventually came on-line. Yet, by being one of the first music stations available on-line, WZYP earned a place in my life story, and I doubt I'll ever forget it.

Media: Trend Away from Commercial, Not to CBC

TORONTO, ONTARIO - In the past year, there seems to have been quite a flow of broadcasting talent to the public broadcaster in Canada, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), at the expense of privately-owned media. Amanda Lang and Kevin O'Leary jumped ship from CTV's BNN (Business News Network) to the CBC News Network, blogger Kady O'Malley went from Maclean's to the CBC, and most recently, in Vancouver, Tony Parsons appeared on the CBC's local newscast after leaving the local Global BC organization.

These moves don't compare with the overall trend of the last generation which went the other direction, perhaps most notably when Lloyd Robertson jumped from the CBC to CTV in 1976, and nobody is expecting Robertson to jump back before he retires. While the CBC may have become somewhat more aggressive in recruiting outside talent instead of promoting its own, it seems more likely that the real change is elsewhere.

Advertising revenue for broadcasting has gone down by 8% between the recession and the incursion of the Internet. While that has led to the cuts at the CBC as well, the pressure is even greater at the private broadcasters. While there has not been any reported salary reductions for top talent, it's not hard for people to see the writing on the wall. With more unions in place, the CBC starts looking like a more secure employer, and hence a more attractive one.

Of course, at least on the television end of things, the modest trend has had not any impact on ratings. The only CBC show in the top 30 nationally last week was a hockey playoff broadcast. If a broadcaster, particularly in news, wants to be seen by the masses in Canada, they still have to be on CTV or Global, and that will probably remain true as long as television news is a popular information source.

Politics: On the So-Called Summit

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Presumably, others will better cover the political aftermath of the so-called "Health Care Summit" held in Washington, DC earlier today, not that much appears likely to come of it. I want to offer just three points.

First, Wyoming senator John Barrasso obviously did not watch the NTV interview with Newfoundland and Labrador premier Danny Williams available at this web site. Williams made it very clear that he was satisfied with the provincial health care that had found his heart problem and offered him options for addressing it. He chose to take the option of going to the United States because he was in a hurry and wanted to minimize recovery time in order to get back to work. Basically, he was an elitist--he spent extra money to get a world-class procedure. Did the Wyoming Republican really want to emphasize costly, discretionary procedures, such as that obtained by Williams in the US?

Second, and following closely from that point, I don't understand why more isn't made of the fundamental contradiction in the Republican argument about quality of care. They go off about the United States having the best health care system in the world, and then say they want to focus on cost control. Why do the people that live and breathe the free market not seem to understand that "you get what you pay for." If one doesn't fundamentally reform the system (say, to a single-payer system that minimizes overhead), the only way to reduce costs in a fundamental way is to avoid expensive procedures and minimize payments to health professionals and providers. Yes, liability reform would help at the margins (and I wish the Democrats would include it in their proposals just to get it off the table, even if it isn't a panacea), but fundamentally, the only way to make the system less expensive while maintaining the health insurance industry is to pay less for it. Pretending that won't affect quality is disingenuous.

Finally, I am greatly disappointed with the media coverage of this event. Granted, I didn't sit through the hours of what might best be described as bickering, but most coverage sure didn't even try to get at the substance of the day. Even CBC radio and television, as well as the commercial networks, focused on the silly exchange between President Obama and Senator McCain in which they referred to the election being over. In video coverage, only the the PBS NewsHour chose to air any of the few moments of agreement during the day and generally tried to capture the strongest points raised by both sides. Is there really only one outlet for real journalism left in North America?

Media: Just Like CBS

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Upon moving to Canada, I shortly discovered that I found many aspects of the CBC Radio One schedule comforting. This wasn't really a surprise; after all, I had long listened to CBC programming since first discovering what was then "Sunday Morning" (now "The Sunday Edition") and "Quirks and Quarks" while in college, and had just added more as time went on. What it took me some time to realize, though, was that one of the reasons that I found the CBC schedule so comforting was that it resembled the CBS radio news of my youth.

Once upon a time, CBS ran a fifteen-minute news program (which ran without commercials in some, mostly minor, markets) at 7 in the morning (Central and Pacific time, anyway; it ran at 8 Eastern and 6 Mountain, which is to say it aired twice, once for most of the country and once for the west coast) called the CBS World News Roundup. Apparently, this broadcast was inaugurated in 1938, hosted by Robert Trout. In my lifetime, it was hosted by Bill Lynch until his retirement. The broadcast in fact survives to this day, shortened in length to eight minutes of content on weekdays and available as a podcast hosted by Nick Young. The CBC has a similar broadcast, "World Report" which airs ten minutes (until recently, twelve) of news at the top of the hour in morning at 5, 6, 7, and 8 (9 on weekends). I just felt like I was listening to the World News Roundup.

In the evening, CBS used to have a similar broadcast that always had commercials but had over ten minutes of content, the World Tonight. Airing at 6 Pacific (6 Eastern, 5 Central and Mountain, so it was fed three times), it was hosted by Christopher Glenn until he moved to the morning Roundup. This show also survives as the World News Roundup Late Edition with Bill Whitney (now just seven minutes of content, fed once at 7 Eastern/4 Pacific). The CBC does even the CBS of the past one better, with nearly a half-hour of news in "The World at Six". Listening to Bernie McNamee is just like listening to Christopher Glenn.

It goes beyond the special news broadcasts, though. CBS used to air a Saturday morning show a half-hour in length (not carried in many markets) called "Seven Days" that summarized what had happened that week in Congress. That should sound familiar to CBC listeners--substitute parliament and that's pretty much the premise of the 48-minute "The House", airing at 9:10 Saturday mornings. I'm not sure when "Seven Days" was canceled, but the House is still running strong.

Of course, there's plenty that CBC does that CBS has never done in the modern era--everything from the news magazines ("As It Happens", "The Current", and "The Sunday Edition") to specialty shows like "Quirks and Quarks" and "White Coat, Black Art", and entertainment shows like "Vinyl Cafe" and "Definitely Not the Opera" (er, "DNTO"). One thing that CBS has always done well that CBC does not do is short-form commentary. Charles Osgood has been a staple my whole lifetime, but at different times, they've also run regular commentaries by Dan Rather, Judy Muller, Bill Whitney, Harry Reasoner, Charles Kuralt, Harry Smith, and in recent times Dave Ross. I wouldn't mind if CBC found a way to incorporate such two-minute features.

Presumably, CBS pioneered the formats and the CBC adopted them and improved them over the years. In any event, the CBC is keeping alive a radio feel that is largely gone from CBS, even if some of the programs survive, and I appreciate that.

Media: Wikitruth

TORONTO, ONTARIO - I've written before on this blog about my frustration with people that take information on the Internet more seriously than actual primary sources. It turns out that the root source of this trend had already been written about extensively and I had just never bothered to read it. Well-known Boston technology writer Simson L. Garfinkel wrote an article in the MIT Technology Review (unfortunately not available for free) that's the best I've seen describing the Wikipedia standards for truth and the problems they create.

Wikipedia's standards for inclusion basically come down to verifiability. The best source of information in the Wikipedia world is a web page. The best web page is in the English language. So, if there's an English-language web page with the information, it can be accepted as a reference, even if the content is completely wrong.

The really disturbing thing is that people finding mistakes in the Wikipedia world cannot actually just fix them, as Wikipedia touts. If the article is on something that you have any sort of connection to--most profoundly an article on you, but also any organization you might belong to or anything you might be perceived as having a financial stake in--then you are considered a biased source, and you are not allowed to fix it and your English-language web page cannot be considered valid source material. This might make sense for subjective aspects such as whether a public incident constitutes a scandal, but it also means you can't correct your own birthdate, the number of children you have, or your profession. Is there really any bias possible in things that are just incontrovertible facts?

So, basically what the Wikipedia view world does is reinforce that whoever is most vocal in the media space speaks the truth. If one can get one's friends to post an apparently-unrelated-to-you assessment of your life that is actually completely fabricated, that would be accepted in Wikipedia as a valid source of information. But, if you can't convince a third-party to post on the web that information on someone else's web site about you is slander, then that slander is considered the truth, not the actual reality.

This personal aspect may not be of much concern to the average person, but the problem is much broader. If a web site decides to publish that the MD-80 was an Airbus aircraft, then Wikipedia can repeat that as truth. That might seem absurd, since it is common knowledge that it was a McDonnell-Douglas aircraft derived from the Douglas DC-9, and in this case those correcting the article (as long as they aren't associated with successor Boeing!) could cite other web sites with the correct information and the fix would be accepted. But, on more obscure topics, on which information is not readily found on the web, the information would become accepted truth. This is an especially large potential problem in science, as much scientific data is currently available on-line only through paid peer-reviewed journal sites and therefore isn't valid as Wikipedia references. As far as the Wikipedia world is concerned, the best peer-reviewed version of scientific truth doesn't exist.

It's not hard to understand where the phenomena I take issue with comes from in this world. People that turn to Wikipedia for information implicitly accept the Wikipedia version of truth, even if they would disagree with the policy. Generation Y and younger, growing up in an open-source and crowd-sourced world, have minds that work the same way that Wikipedia does, in which if they can find the information, then that's the information they will accept. There's no sense in further investigation to figure out the validity of the information--who has time for that?

The implication of this conception of truth in a world in which governments (not just those as aggressive as China) and commercial interests (the whole open access controversy is about commercial interests favoring certain web sources over others) increasingly control the Internet is profound. It may actually be harder to find accurate facts on the future Internet than it was before we had that resource and had to turn to things like researched encyclopedias.

One obvious action that will help is working to make scientific information freely available as quickly as possible so that it can be cited outside of research communities--that should be easy to solve, but the broader problem is not so easy. Garfinkel suggests not relying on crowd-sourced information such as Wikipedia, period. Yet, one wonders if there actually be any choice. If Wikipedia doesn't modify aspects of its policies on what constitutes valid information, it may have serious long-term negative consequences for society. I think the consequences are already appearing in the guise of people accepting the Wikipedia version of truth as their own world view.

Media: Remembering YPAHMTS

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Thanks to all the repeat programming that I don't need to hear again around the holidays, I've been spending some time digitizing old radio shows that I had recorded on tape for posterity. In many cases, it became really obvious why I decided to keep these programs. A case in point was the Soundprint episode Young People Against Heavy Metal T-Shirts (YPAHMTS).

For those who would rather read the story of YPAHMTS than listen to the radio show, refer to this article by Matthew Thompson. In it, he explains how the fake movement started, how a variety of media including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation took it seriously, and how even some of his friends helping perpetuate the ruse started to believe in it. Having pulled my own, much less compelling deception in the same era, the story didn't surprise me at all.

To me, the key passage of the whole saga was this:

All the media attention and the talkback response was a crash course in human nature. If an idea comes along that requires patience and thought, most people will skim straight over it, missing the main points, or they'll switch to something else that offers instant drama. Without the discernment and attention span to think matters through, the average punter's focus is stolen by triviality after triviality. You can go a hell of a long way by using an entertaining delivery of emotive words - regardless of the inherent content. If you can do this, you'll find it easy to manipulate and distract people - make them think it's more important that we debate tax reform in Australia than consider what it means to have our government and some of our large corporations happily splitting the profits from the near genocide of the East Timorese people with the Indonesian government.

Insert your favorite contemporary triviality and profundity into the last sentence, and that paragraph could have been written today.

If all this doesn't seem disturbing enough, note that the whole YPAHMTS saga took place more than a decade ago, before the impact of broadband media and the decimation of newspapers and even broadcast media. One might say that bloggers would uncover the ruse much more quickly today, but in the meantime--and it would take some time--I suspect the broadcast media would give it even more play, seeing how it would be an easy topic to produce and their lack of resources makes them fundamentally lazier in choosing topics.

Whether or not the exact YPAHMTS experience could take place today is really not the point. Thompson's fundamental point that vacuous stories told skillfully distract from real issues is an age-old truth, but with the general population more and more distracted by electronic devices and the media having fewer resources to try to break through with substantive, in-depth stories, it is an increasingly serious concern for which I continue to see no solutions, even hard-to-implement ones.

Media: Stating the Obvious

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Sometimes it is nice when the obvious is reported as news. In a recent issue of Chemical and Engineering News, an article cited the Chemjobber blog (right there making me wonder what passes for news these days) which noted that the number of industrial positions advertised in the mid-September issue of the trade magazine for chemists and chemical engineers had dropped from nearly 60 in 1989 and just over five in 2007 to ZERO in 2009. It had occurred to me about mid-September that I hadn't responded to an employment ad or pointed a friend to an ad the entire calendar year of 2009. During the turmoil in which the business I was working for was shutting down in 2005, I don't think a single week went by when I didn't at least forward someone a lead from the magazine's classified ads.

An interesting graph that they didn't print, and I am too lazy to generate myself, would be a graph of industrial positions advertised each month that were outside the United States and Europe. It is my impression that the number of these positions (mostly, but not exclusively in China) has remained essentially steadily since the onset of the current recession. So, when it was broadly reported recently that China's growth rate may be 8% for 2009, that didn't really strike me as big news, either. Yet, the obvious had not yet been reported.

There's no big message here. While it is true that print advertising is suffering relative to on-line job boards, in technical fields, trade journals have been relatively inert to the phenomenon compared with newspapers. The number of academic jobs advertised in Chemical & Engineering News has "slowed too" according to the magazine's director of advertising sales, but not nearly as much. (Funny how the article didn't quantitate that.) If the academic advertising decline served as a baseline for the move away from print, then the trends observed are simply reflective of the current job market. The market isn't as bad in China, so the decline in ads isn't as great. It doesn't necessarily mean that the whole chemical industry is moving to China.

We complain a lot about how the media try to sensationalize stories and try to make them mean something profound. If I did that more often (and I have done it--look through the archives), this blog would probably be more widely read. Sometimes, though, it's refreshing just to see something obvious reported at face value, for the record.

Media: **NO** Streeters, Peter

TORONTO, ONTARIO - On Tuesday's edition of CBC Television's The National, the flagship news broadcast of the network, host Peter Mansbridge basically admitted that they had been fooled. In a piece on the swine flu, they decided to air a number of man-on-street (funny how that hasn't been changed in the vernacular to "person-on-the-street") reactions to the lines at clinics. One of the comments that made it to the air in the initial edition of the program was one accusing the federal government of not having been organized. It turns out that the person who made that comment was an operative of the official opposition party. When the piece aired, someone at the CBC recognized him and the footage was pulled from subsequent editions of the program. To their credit, the CBC owned up to situation, and summarized it on their show, inviting viewer feedback.

I've been over this topic before, most notably in this post last April. I see absolutely no news content in a "streeter" (as "man-on-the-street" interviews are called in the trade). They don't answer any of the journalistic questions. I turn to newscasts for hard facts and analysis, not opinion. Furthermore, in this era of talk radio and blogs, there are plenty of places to read opinions, so there's no need to include them in a newscast. As the CBC event demonstrated, the "streeter" is especially vulnerable to contrived opinions by people just wanting to get on television, or with an agenda to promote--I find the prospect of commercial manipulation of "streeters" by corporate publicists to be especially frightening. Basically, I don't see any good reason to air a "streeter," and I see plenty of reasons not to air them.

When it comes right down to it, "streeters" are lazy journalism. Rather than using the limited time of a broadcast to include more information on a story, or taking the time to find an expert who might have an informed opinion, the reporter just talks to people on the street, and uses that to fill out a report. It might have entertainment value, but it does not have journalistic value.

One of the new features on "The National" is Wendy Mesley "asking provocative questions about the news stories." In one of the first installments last week, Mesley went to a location on Queen Street West in Toronto near the "Hug Me" tree to ask people to prioritize education versus space exploration. The sidewalk she chose for this "streeter" is the same place where I have observed Naked News reporters doing the same thing. So, basically, the CBC has stooped to the level of the Naked News, except clothed.

I don't understand why there is any controversy about this. The CBC should not be airing "streeters," period.

Media: Not Enough Female Hosts?

TORONTO, ONTARIO - One of the clear themes in early comments about the new CBC News Network on cable television was that people were surprised that all of the mid-day hosts were women, with Heather Hiscox, Anne-Marie Mediwake, Suhana Merharchand, and Carole MacNeil back-to-back. Relatively few people complained, but just about everyone noticed. The CBC in general has tended to be quite good at putting many women on the air--the flagship Radio One program As It Happens has had all female regular hosts since 1997, and the national morning news magazine, The Current, has been hosted by a woman, Anna Maria Tremonti, since its inception in 2002.

Unfortunately, the CBC is the exception in this regard. One of the few comments I've ever actually received about the Ideal Radio Schedule that I first posted in 1998 and have updated over the years is that outside of news shows, the only women on the schedule are talk show hosts Christine Craft and Lynn Samuels, both in weekend slots. Why? While an idealized schedule, my idea was to take the best of actual programs on the air (or previously on the air), and in the real world, the vast majority of programs are hosted by men.

Take KGO Newstalk 810 in San Francisco as an example, regarded by many (including me) as one of the best talk stations in the world. Its only female general talk show host is Pat Thurston, who appears overnights on the weekend. (Joanie Greggains also hosts a fitness show on Saturday mornings, and Craft frequently fills in, but that's it.) The entire rest of the schedule is all men.

The situation is worse elsewhere. WABC in New York? All men except for Monica Crowley's show on Saturday. WLS in Chicago? No solo female hosts. KFI in Los Angeles? All men. (Bryan Suits no longer has Kennedy as a co-host.) KIRO in Seattle? All men. Even liberal network Air America has no female radio hosts on their network (they do air Rachel Maddow's MSNBC television show). Is it any wonder that my ideal schedule has so many men on it?

Anyone that says that there is no gender discrimination in the media in the twenty-first century just has to spin the radio dial a bit to get ample counter-evidence. Outside of the CBC, it's still a man's world, and I just don't see how that could possibly be a good thing.

At this point, the next time I update my ideal schedule I plan to add only two personalities, Martina Fitzgerald and Connie Sinclair (yes, from the broadcasting family). Both are news reporters from the CBC. See a pattern here?

Media: 20 Years Ago Today

TORONTO, ONTARIO - One of the reasons that I kept this blog going in 2009 was the fact that I knew I had a lot of twenty year-old material that could be recycled. In 1989, prompted originally by extra time at home provided by snow days, I ended up recording 395 audio commentaries of about two minutes in length, a practice that I kept up, if less prolifically, for four more years until I became an undergraduate. My model for these commentaries were The Osgood Files, a set of four, two and a half minute commentaries that Charles Osgood had been producing for the CBS Radio Network since 1987 that continue to this day. (Osgood had been doing reporting and commentaries in some form for CBS since 1971.) I called my flagship commentaries "The Glitchon Files," usually recorded in the morning before school.

By chance, 1989 turned out to be a pretty incredible year to be doing commentaries on the news, with the Tiananmen Square Massacre in China, the invasion of Panama, and the fall of the Berlin Wall among major world events. Most of the time, I would write up my script ahead of time and then record it (I once even did a commentary on my routine for doing a commentary), but sometimes I would simply take out my tape recorder and try to do a coherent summary of a breaking event as information came in about it. Most often, I would do this for a report that I only did certain days that I called "Highlight," recorded in the early evening.

Such was the case twenty years ago today. Just one hour after what came to be known as the Loma Prieta earthquake took place, I did a "Highlight" report without a script, the core of which was the following:

At 5:03 pm Pacific Daylight Time today, an earthquake hit and shook up all of northern California, especially the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area. The quake was felt as far as Sacramento and 120 miles away in Fresno and has caused major damage. A fifty foot portion of the Bay Bridge has collapsed in the double-deck section. Candlestick Park itself where the baseball game was to take place seems to be structurally sound; we know that because there were so many reporters there to cover the World Series. It seems ironic that everyone was there ready to cover the world series and then another very newsworthy event occurred. There are many fires including the Berkeley Library which is on fire which is unfortunate considering what a university library contains. There are several fires in northern and northwestern San Francisco, and the Ferry Building, one of the buildings that survived the 1906 earthquake is still intact, except for its flag pole. It is unknown at this time if anyone has been injured, but it seems inevitable. There were people spotted in the bay but a Coast Guard cutter has picked them up. It's a very sad day in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The report seems rather disjointed and incorrect in its emphasis twenty years later until one considers that it was filed just an hour after event from a location about 850 miles away.

Much of the information I had reported came from the radio station that at the time called itself KCBS Newsradio 74. Local station KIRO in Seattle had chosen to directly broadcast the feed from KCBS for quite some time, giving people in the Seattle area the same information that those directly affected by the quake were receiving. Television images of the collapsed section of the Bay Bridge, and what later proved to be the collapsed "Cypress structure" of I-880 in Oakland were repeated throughout the evening, as the sun soon set on San Francisco within a couple hours of the earthquake.

While this blog in many ways is the reincarnation of "The Glitchon Files," one of the nice things about this medium is that it is much easier to cite sources in the Internet era, as many may simply be linked to, and others can be referenced with less distraction than in an audio commentary.

I've missed most of the major event anniversaries from 1989 to present again in this blog in favor of contemporary thoughts. However, don't expect that this entry will be the last to draw on my old material--there will be 20-year old material through 2013, and then it will all start being 25 years old.

Politics: Where's the New Media?

TORONTO, ONTARIO - A year ago, the mainstream media stood in awe of how then-Senator Barack Obama was using social media on the Internet to move his presidential campaign forward. Even the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's magazine, Technology Review, came out with a feature article explaining how Obama's campaign had set up its infrastructure and how its use of social media had been different than that of his rivals. That article speculated how "MyBO," Obama's analog of MySpace, and other resources might be used if he won the presidency to create a new level of citizen engagement in presidential initiatives. Obama may have become the 44th president of the United States, but eight months into his presidency there is no sign of any effective use of social media, and arguably right-wing opposition has been much more effective in its use of modern technology.

What happened? There's no surprise in the reality that governing is different--and much harder--than campaigning. A key aspect of Obama's effective use of social media was calling people to action--tweets and other text messages from the campaign told their supporters what to do to help support Obama. When it was time to unite the party after Hillary Clinton suspended the campaign, word went out to invite Clinton supporters to unity parties. When it was time to counteract specific Republican disinformation, accurate information was sent out with instructions in how to spread it. People are willing to take such actions in a time-limited campaign, but not so willing to do so in their daily lives. So, it was clear that less advantage could be taken of the social networks built by the campaign during the administration--but using it less often is different than barely using it at all, which is what has seemed to happen. Practically the only outward change over previous administrations has been that the weekly radio address has appeared on YouTube.

The biggest factor seems to have been the strategy taken by the administration for passing legislation. Most prominently on the issue of health care, but really for every legislative initiative except some of the early, emergency economic measures, the Obama administration has made the decision to let legislators hash out the details of the legislation into a form that could actually pass Congress. Where many presidents would have proposed legislation and then let Congress change it, Obama has acquiesced to the reality that most details are hashed out by Congress anyway and let them do it from the start under the apparent idea that it would cost the President less political capital and that it would make the legislation more likely to pass. This may yet prove to be an effective legislative strategy (or perhaps a failure), but in taking the initiative away from the administration, the onus for building support for legislative specifics is also taken away, and thus there is no reason to exercise the citizen's network utilizing social media.

However, one of the most effective things about the Obama campaign's social media was that there was centralized messaging emanating from the strategists (through text messages and the web site), but the implementation of citizen action was largely taken care of by the people out in the field deciding on their own how to take the supportive actions. The campaign would say to contact five friends and inform them about Obama's economic plan, say, but it wouldn't specify how to contact them or exactly what to say. Without the centralized messaging, the network isn't empowered to do anything. Without specific legislative initiatives, there is no centralized messaging.

Most dramatically in the health care debate, this has left the door wide open for opponents to activate their own networks, whether social media-based or very old-fashioned. When the opposition started gaining traction with their points, Obama's network was left to sit on its hands with no message to spread in response. The result has been that the Obama "magic" has been seemingly completely absent.

There seem to be two obvious ways for the Democrats to re-capture the buzz of the campaign. If all the initiative is to be left to Congress, then the Congressional leadership needs to develop its own social media networks to help it pressure its own members and take advantage of the activism and concern that does exist in the country, even if it will be less intense than during a quadrennial campaign. Considering that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi can't seem to agree on anything, this doesn't seem to be a realistic possibility.

The other option is for the President to get back involved in the process directly, start fighting for specifics in the legislation, and activate his network to pressure Congress to back up his positions. Arguably, the President may have been waiting for the right moment when the legislation was well enough formed to proceed with strategy. The trade-off is that every day of waiting allows the opposition to keep spreading its message.

One big story in the wake of Obama's election was whether or not he could keep his BlackBerry mobile device. The Secret Service did not find it secure enough, but Obama wanted it to avoid being in a media bubble. In the end, a compromise was reached in which the President was able to use a specially-secured mobile device, but the upshot seemed to be that something had been lost in the battle and the modifications. If the President does not want that story to become symbolic of his use of social media, he needs to start activating social networks before his legislative initiatives suffer any more than they already have from the networks' absence.

Media: Changing Branding in Toronto Radio

TORONTO, ONTARIO - The big media story this week in Toronto has been that what was once the city's premier radio station, CFRB, will be called that no longer. In conjunction with a schedule shake-up that amongst other things places possible mayoral candidate John Tory on afternoon drive, what has been "Newstalk 1010 CFRB" will now become simply "Newstalk 1010," not using its heritage call letters.

Calls letters are not nearly the big deal in Canada that they are in the United States. Whereas the Federal Communications Commission requires US stations to give an identification strictly formatted with the call letters and city of license (e.g. "WCBS, New York") once an hour, Industry Canada does not enforce similar rules here (though apparently they do exist). As long as the station is clearly identifying itself in a way that it can be identified, they look the other way on the format and frequency of the identification. On what has been CFRB, "Newstalk 1010 in Toronto" will likely draw no sanction.

The change in branding is no more than that--a change in branding. To Canadian Radio-television Commission and Industry Canada, the station will still be CFRB (at least until it applies for a change in legal call letters, which seems unlikely). However, owner Astral Media has decided that brand of "CFRB," once the strongest in Toronto, no longer matches what they want to do with the station.

The change has attracted so much attention because the "FRB" does stand for something. Once owned by the Rogers media empire, the call letters derived from "First Rogers Batteryless" for the new outlet-based radio that the Rogers Vacuum Tube Company was selling at the time the station went on the air in 1927. (The "F" was not really a choice but a convenient coincidence, as "CF" was one of the codes assigned to Canadian stations.)

Ironically, the station named after Rogers was sold after Edward Rogers Sr.'s death in 1941. It had been owned by Standard Broadcasting until that company became part of Astral Media in late 2007. Ted Rogers, of the current Rogers media empire, had always wanted CFRB to once again become part of the family's holdings, but he died in 2008 without having achieved that goal--but also without hearing the call letters dropped from the station branding.

In the large scheme of things, a change in branding without a change of legal call letters is not all that uncommon. Any multitude of examples could be given; one of my favorites was KPLZ in Seattle. Branded for most of my youth as "K-PLUS" (KPLS was already taken), it became "Z 101.5" in the mid-1980's, and then "STAR-FM" in the mid-1990's, still retaining the KPLZ calls to this day.

For those that remember the Rogers founding of CFRB, though, the current branding change seems like a big deal for Toronto radio.

Media: No Audience for Facts

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans has been surprisingly limited in the mainstream media (and that includes the CBC). While most "national" papers in the United States (e.g. the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor) have followed up on the story well, the broadcast media has not. The only two audio programs that have consistently reported on New Orleans have been Open Source (first in radio form, then as a podcast) and, of all programs, Harry Shearer's satire show LeShow.

Last week in an appearance on the Dave Ross show (from KIRO-FM in Seattle, Washington), Shearer talked about his attempts at concrete activism surrounding New Orleans. His main critique of the mainstream media was that they had not reported on the fact that I had heard many times on his show that the levies did not collapse because of Hurricane Katrina per se, but because they weren't built properly in the first place. He had the opportunity to ask Brian Williams, anchor of the top-rated NBC Nightly News, why it had never been reported on his program. Williams' response, which Shearer commended for its honesty, amounted to "our audience is better served by personal stories."

In other words, the "tell me a story" approach to news pioneered by 60 Minutes' recently-deceased Don Hewitt does indeed run NBC's evening news broadcast. While I do not have an issue with using such a strategy for a magazine show like 60 Minutes, I do have a problem with it dominating a hard news show like a network's nightly newscast. Editors should be choosing the most important news of the day, and THEN the reporting staff should figure out the most compelling way to present it.

I find it especially galling in this particular case because it seems to me there is a good story to tell here. (In fact, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Shearer have told it.) The fact that a government agency--the US Army Corps of Engineers--had failed to properly build levies cries out for an investigative report showing how widespead the problem is across the country or how specific circumstances in New Orleans made this failure possible. Done right, it should be a very interesting story to tell.

Implicit in Williams' statement is not just a preference for story-telling over fact-reporting, but that the audience doesn't want facts but does want human interest stories. Hogwash. NBC is being lazy (as are all the other networks, for that matter)--they aren't putting in the time to figure out how to make facts turn into compelling stories. It's easier to take a known human interest story and present it, sometmes much harder to take a set of facts and figure out a story-telling version of it. Nothing is holding them back other than their own talent. (Some would also argue that money is holding them back, but I contend that with adequate talent, the stories to tell could be found at existing budget levels.)

The sad part is that audiences don't even know what they are missing, unless they also partake in alternative media. If New Orleans feels forgotten, it's for good reason. The mainstream broadcast media in the United States has decided that there are no good stories to tell there, even when some of the basic stories have not been told.

Politics: Nobody Knows What Happened

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Yesterday, I was asked what I thought about President Bill Clinton's recent trip to North Korea. I didn't have much of an answer. We really don't know what happened. The only facts that are clear are that Clinton did travel to North Korea and met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, that Kim subsequently pardoned US journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee who had been held for five months and sentenced to hard labor for entering the country illegally, and that Ling and Lee returned with Clinton to the United States. It is entirely possible that there isn't anything else to the story other than those facts. It is also entirely possible that Clinton also made specific promises to North Korea that prompted the subsequent actions by Kim. We don't know, and we may never know. It may not end up mattering very much--the only thing that clearly matters is that the two US citizens are no longer in a North Korean prison.

That's why I was so upset that the BBC decided to interview former United Nations ambassador John Bolton after Clinton's return to the United States. True to the form that made Bolton so controversial when he was nominated to the UN post by then-President George W. Bush (and notably never confirmed--he served only as a recess appointment), Bolton claimed in a Washington Post op-ed piece that the Clinton visit was "poorly thought-out gesture politics" "rewarding dangerous and unacceptable behavior." Bolton believes that now all nuclear states will take US hostages and use them to gain the audience of former US presidents to get whatever it is they wanted from the United States. To Bolton, who denies the label neoconservative but seems to think like one, the action diminished the strength of the US and severely damaged its ability to deal with rogue states like North Korea.

The only problem with all this is that the Obama administration claims that Clinton traveled as a private citizen. While it would be reasonable to assume he had an official mandate, it is not inconceivable that he simply traveled because it had been communicated that his presence would be required to get the incarcerated US citizens released, so Clinton made the trip and they were released. We don't know that it wasn't that simple. I don't know if it was or not, and neither does John Bolton.

The day after the BBC ran the Bolton interview, they aired angry feedback from listeners that thought the inclusion of Bolton was inappropriate. In this case, I have to agree--Bolton is basically a discredited figure after his failure to win Senate confirmation to the UN post. While criticism of the Clinton trip to North Korea was appropriate to air, turning to a figure with limited credibility like Bolton was not the right way to bring it out. I'm used to being disappointed with John Bolton--I'm not so used to being disappointed in the BBC.