Is Radical Journalism the New Disrupter?
When traditional journalism alone no longer works.
BuzzFeed publishes an unverified dossier. Social media pee storm follows. BuzzFeed gets a schooling from the old schoolers.
Last Tuesday, BuzzFeed published a story along with a 35-page dossier that contains unverified damaging allegations about President-elect Donald Trump’s personal and financial dealings and his deep ties to Russia. The dossier, according to BuzzFeed, was put together by a person who claimed to be a former British intelligence official and alleged that Russia has compromising information on Trump.
It was everything a Trump-hater could ask for — allegations of conspiracy, bribery, blackmail and golden showers.
Within minutes, social media blew up and Trump was quickly renamed #PEEOTUS and his slogan revised to #MakeAmericaUrinateAgain
And I was giddy. Sure, I teach journalism but I do not support Trump.
I think he’s an unqualified misogynistic nincompoop. No secret here.
So for a few minutes, (okay, maybe an hour or so) I laughed at the pee jokes and prayed to the God I lost touch with decades ago that if the information in the dossier were true, I’d go back to church.
But soon the responsibility of my profession paralyzed me like a kidney stone as my students started texting me. “Toni, should BuzzFeed have published something that couldn’t be verified by other news organizations?” “Isn’t this unethical?” “Is this really journalism?”
“NO…? MAYBE…? YES…? NO…?”
Here’s the thing. When America elects a reality star billionaire with zero political experience as president, shit’s gonna change. Covering someone like Donald Trump is so far from the norm of anything this nation has experienced (take Richard Nixon and inject steroids with a double dose of paranoia, bigotry, and misogyny) that it has reporters either preparing for battle or considering new careers.
We’ve all witnessed members of the media pandering, showing a lack of integrity in exchange for access, or rushing to repeat every lie that comes out of Trump’s mouth and the tips of his fingers at 3 a.m.
Why? Because Trump is entertaining and he brings in traffic. Just ask CBS executive chairman and CEO Les Moonves. “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” Moonves said of the presidential race. “I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say, but bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”
NPR’s David Folkenflik tweeted on Oct. 24:
The way the election was covered throughout this campaign set the standard for what we’re seeing today. It’s been a goddamned circus.
The Washington Post took a look at whether coverage of the Trump/Clinton campaign was biased. They interviewed Jack Beckwith and Nick Sorscheron from the team at Data Face about some new analysis that measured media election coverage of Clinton and Trump dating back to July 1, 2015 through the end of August 2015. Data Face is a website created by Beckwith and Sorscheron that employs a team of three data journalists who investigate topics in music, politics and sports.
For this analysis, the team compiled a total of 21,981 articles, and to be included in the data, each article had to reference either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in its headline (but not both). The articles came from the websites of eight major media outlets: the New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Slate, Politico, Fox News and the Weekly Standard.
Across the eight outlets, they found Trump’s name mentioned in a total of 14,924 article headlines from July 2015 to the end of August 2016. Clinton was mentioned in less than half that amount.
So why am I rambling on about the media’s fixation on Trump? Because it sidetracks the press from looking at the truth behind the headlines and tweets. And this fixation has made journalists Trump’s puppets. He orchestrates and the puppets act accordingly.
So enter BuzzFeed and the unverified dump of information. It didn’t take long for senior journalists to piss all over BuzzFeed for its lack of journalistic integrity and irresponsibility.
“This is not journalism,” they said.
Well, maybe it isn’t in the traditional sense, but it might be where journalism is headed. This is 2017 and Americans (along with Russia’s help — verified) have elected a demagogue as president. Trump has made it clear that there will be no transparency. It may take an unorthodox approach like BuzzFeed’s to uncover the truth. This approach shouldn’t take away from the fundamentals of journalism, nor should it indicate that journalists should change the way they report, but as Washington Post reporter Margaret Sullivan wrote on Monday, “Journalists are in for the fight of their lives.”
Just look at Trump’s first press conference since the election. Any news reported that is negative about the President-elect is deemed “fake news.” Trump calls any journalist who disagrees with him “unfair and dishonest,” or much worse. When confronted by reporters who are attempting to do their job by questioning Trump, his team steps in to threaten and intimidate. When CNN’s Jim Acosta asked a question regarding a report CNN released stating Trump was presented with a two-page summary by the intelligence chiefs revealing claims that Russia had compromising information on him, Trump refused to take the question and called CNN “fake news.” Acosta later said that White House press secretary Sean Spicer threatened to toss him from the press conference if he interrupted again.
Journalist and Nieman Fellow Issac Bailey came down on BuzzFeed hard. “When your first sentence includes the words ‘explosive’ and ‘unverified’ and ‘allegations,’ that’s a strong clue you should not publish. Even telling your readers that a potentially damaging but unverified report about the incoming president exists raises ethical concerns and has to be done with extreme care, if at all. To publish the actual report is a violation of every basic standard imaginable.”
Really? I’d like to draw a comparison to the way the media handled the Comey revelations days before the election and BuzzFeed’s publishing of the unverified dossier. It took only seconds for the media to publish Comey’s new allegations against Hillary Clinton attaching words like “bombshell” “shocking” and “explosive.” There was little regard as to whether or not there was anything new or damaging in the emails. Journalists took Comey’s words at face value with the innuendo that there was damaging evidence concerning Clinton without any proof as to what was in the emails.
After all the outrageous headlines and the nonstop coverage by journalists who droned on for days with speculation and assumptions, nothing was eventually found in those emails. But it sure caused damage to Clinton’s campaign and her integrity. Some may argue that Comey’s announcement was valid because it came from the FBI, but even Comey said that he doesn’t come out with information during an investigation until it’s complete, which is hypocritical considering how it sabotaged Clinton.
The New York Times devoted five of its six above-the-fold stories to FBI director James Comey’s letter to congressional leaders indicating that the Bureau is “reviewing additional emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.” As Matt Gertz wrote on Media Matters in October, “By providing such prominent coverage, the Times has indicated that the letter is news of the highest possible significance — in spite of the Times’ own reporting that FBI agents have yet to read the emails and determine if they are significant and the letter “did not reopen” the investigation.” Eric Boehlert wrote on Media Matters “the press’ initial reaction was instantly GOP-friendly and often way off base.”
Journalists were quick to break the story on social media, resulting in a slew of inaccurate tweets. USA Today claimed the email probe was reopened. It was not. CNN’s Jim Sciutto called for Hillary Clinton to apologize without any idea of what, if anything, was in the emails.
Journalists often run with breaking news without verifying a story in its entirety. They break the story based on the source of the information and its credibility. As the story unfolds and more information is gathered updates follow. It’s the nature of the 24-hour, report in real time news cycle.
CUNY’s Carrie Brown writes that verification is the most important thing that journalists do. I agree. I also agree with her that gatekeeping and verification are not the same thing.
BuzzFeed got hold of documents that other news organizations had in their possession but had decided not to publish. Their call.
But BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith made a different call. When questioned by CNN’s Brian Stelter about the decision to publish the dossier, Smith said, “If you want your audience to trust you, our job is not primarily to be gatekeepers, to decide what to suppress and keep from our audience; it’s primarily to share with our audience what we’ve got.”
Smith wrote in a memo to his staff, “Publishing the dossier reflects how we see the job of reporters in 2017.”
BuzzFeed stated clearly that the information was unverified, which is hardly the same as dumping something out there as truth. Information contained in the dossier was valid enough for intelligence agencies to deliver a report to the President and President elect.
That same day the NY Times reported that Trump had received an unsubstantiated report that Russia had damaging information on him. CNN reported that “US intelligence agencies have now checked out the former British intelligence operative and his vast network throughout Europe and find him and his sources to be credible enough to include the information in the presentations to the president and president-elect a few days ago.”
And The Guardian reported that the FBI took the allegations seriously enough to apply for a wiretap warrant on several of Trump’s aides. “An official in the US administration who spoke to the Guardian described the source who wrote the intelligence report as consistently reliable, meticulous and well-informed, with a reputation for having extensive Russian contacts.”
And what was Trump’s response?
How can journalists cover Trump like other politicians when he’s incredibly deceptive and has successfully vilified the press as biased against him?
The way Jack Shafer of Politico sees it, Trump is making journalism great again. According to Shafer, Trump’s anti-press stance has helped to simplify journalists’ mission. “Instead of relying exclusively on the traditional skills of political reporting, the carriers of press cards ought to start thinking about covering Trump’s Washington like a war zone, where conflict follows conflict, where the fog prevents the collection of reliable information directly from the combatants, where the assignment is a matter of life and death. In his own way, Trump has set us free.”
Shafer cites new opportunities and ways news organizations will cut through Trump’s great big wall of obfuscation, and that’s a good thing.
But it’s not the only way to report the news. With this new regime, journalists may need a bulldozer to break through the wall that Trump is building.
Trump and his coterie have made it clear that any news article that criticizes their administration is by definition fake news, thus discounting any truth in the criticism. They have threatened, bullied and ostracized legitimate news outlets to allow only their administration-friendly outlets to be heard. They are moving to block any objective reporting of their fallacies and to keep the press corp from access to the White House. Business as usual will no longer work in this oppressive environment.
Sharing information that the reporter has with their readers while letting the reader know the story is not yet verified but is being investigated allows for open conversation. And we need this open dialogue now more than ever. Is this journalism as we know it? Not at all.
Fortune’s Matthew Ingram made a great case in support of BuzzFeed’s decision to publish the dossier.
“The case against publishing is tantamount to arguing that journalists are the only ones who are qualified to see such allegations, and that only a handful of media organizations are entitled to make the decision about what is credible and what isn’t. Like it or not, that isn’t how journalism works any more. Information of all kinds emerges in a variety of ways, and then we all get to apply our critical intelligence to it — in public, in real time.”
I have to agree with Ingram. This isn’t how journalism works anymore and maybe this is a conversation we need to be having.
