Chapter 3
Tools and Techniques for the Mediactive Consumer Now that we’ve considered some principles, let’s get practical and put those principles into practice. The key is going deeper into the news, leveraging your skepticism and curiosity and common sense toward that moment when you can say to yourself, “Ah, I get it.” What’s involved? Mostly an adventurous spirit; remember, this is about exploration. Among other things, you need to: Find trustworthy sources of information. Vet sources you don’t already have reason to trust. Join the conversation(s). As always in this book, what follows is far from comprehensive. Rather, it’s a surface-level look at an almost infinitely wide and deep topic. Look for many more specifics and examples at the Mediactive website. Finding the Good Stuff At first glance, my daily media routine may sound timeconsuming: I look at a few news-organization websites, including the home pages traditional enterprises such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, clicking through to articles of particular interest. I periodically glance at headlines in Google Reader and similar services, which collect links from a variety of sources, traditional and new, and are related to a variety of places and topics I’ve designated. I scan my email for items—articles, blog posts, videos, data and the like—that friends or colleagues might have flagged. I keep an eye on several Twitter lists, and I check to see what a few Facebook friends are discussing. If there’s breaking news I care about, I check back with sites I consider authoritative or at least reliable. 32 Mediactive Actually, all of that doesn’t take too long. I used to spend more time reading a couple of newspapers each morning and watching the news in the evening. But I’m vastly better informed now. I don’t believe everything I read or hear, because I apply the principles in Chapter 2. And when I need to be absolutely sure about something, I dig deeper. Given the relatively short time that we’ve been living in a digitalmedia world, it’s common wisdom to say we’re in the earliest days of figuring out how to sort through the flood of information that pours over us each day, hour, minute. But we already have many ways to be better informed. I use a variety of tools and methods each day, applying the principles outlined in Chapter 2 through a variety of filters and tactics. But the main tools I use are my brain and my instincts. The most essential filters are people and institutions I’ve come to trust. In the days of overwhelmingly dominant mass media, we had little option but to put some trust in those sources. We soon learned that they were deeply flawed institutions that, all too often, led us grossly astray or failed to address vital matters, global to local. But they also did, and continue to do (though less and less these days), some of the most important journalism. They’d have held more trust if they’d been less arrogant and more transparent. But there’s real value, even now, in understanding what a bunch of journalists, including editors, believe is the most important news today in their own communities. Aggregation—someone else’s collection of items that you might find interesting—has become an absolutely essential filter. There’s computer-assisted aggregation and human aggregation, in various combinations. Let’s look at a few of them. Google News, relentlessly machine-based, isn’t bad as a zeitgeist of what journalists around the world believe is important (or was important in the past 24 hours or so), but Google’s almost religious belief in the power of computer to displace humans has detracted from the service’s usefulness. Yahoo! once was the undisputed leader in aggregation, because it understood the value of human beings in this process better than others in its arena. It’s still reasonably good, but it’s slipping. Topic-specific aggregation is rising in importance and quality. For example, I’m a fan of TechMeme for aggregating what’s hot in the tech world, in part because Gabe Rivera, its founder, has clearly seen a vital role for human input in the form of an editor. (And while every media junkie has been reading the Romenesko blog for years, MediaGazer, a TechMeme site, is moving up fast as a must-follow service.) Dan Gillmor 33 Search has always been useful, but now it’s vital. Google, Yahoo! and Bing offer useful news-search systems, letting you use keywords to flag stories of interest. When you settle on searches you find useful, you can scan the results for items you may want to check further. I search for things like digital media, entrepreneurship (which I teach) and many other topics that are of interest to me. Bloggers are some of my best purely human aggregators. The ones with expertise in a particular domain, plus the energy to keep on top of the news, have become valuable brokers in my news consumption. If you’re not following the work of bloggers who go deep into areas you care about, you can’t be well informed, period. Twitter has become a must-have alert system—but you should realize that it’s the antithesis of slow news: a rapid-fire collection of ideas, thoughts and links, sometimes useful, sometimes not. The best “tweeters” keep up a flow of headlines—the 140-character limit on tweets doesn’t allow for much more—that have links to deeper looks into what they’re flagging. Probably the most exciting development in the Twitter ecosystem is precisely that: It’s becoming an ecosystem in which others are creating tools to make it more useful. I’ll talk more about how I publish using Twitter in an upcoming chapter. If you follow more than a few Twitter-folk, you can easily get overwhelmed. My suggestion is to use the service’s “lists” feature, which lets you create or follow—outside of your regular Twitter stream— different subgroups of people who pay attention to specific topics. I follow several lists created by other Twitter users, including Robert Scoble’s “Tech News People,” a list of 500 technology writers. An essential tool for keeping track of everything we aggregate is RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. It’s been around for more than a decade, and from my perspective only grows in value despite some suggestions that it’s fading in importance. Essentially, RSS is a syndication method for online content, allowing readers of blogs and other kinds of sites to have their computers and other devices automatically retrieve the content they care about —and giving publishers an easy way to help readers retrieve it. Those are only a few of the ways you can find reliable news and information, of course, and the tools, especially for aggregation, are still somewhat primitive, especially in aggregation. Later in this book I’ll discuss the need for much better combinations of human and machine intelligence; for example, tools that can measure by subtler yardsticks than popularity will give us vastly better ways to understand what’s happening in the world. 34 Mediactive While we have ever more and better ways to find the “good stuff,” as it were, there’s a problem: We’ve also never had so many ways to find information that’s useless, or worse. What could be worse than useless? Information that’s damaging if you act on it, that’s what. So we’re going to spend some time on how to avoid falling for things that are either wrong or come under the category we might call “dangerous if swallowed.” A Trust Meter The first defense is our innate common sense. We all have developed an internal “BS meter” of sorts, largely based on education and experience, for dealing with many of the daily elements of life—including older kinds of media, from the traditional news world. We need to bring to digital media the same kinds of analysis we learned in a less complex time when there were only a few primary sources of information. We know, for example, that the tabloid newspaper next to the checkout stand at the supermarket is suspect. We have come to learn that the tabloid’s front-page headline about Barack Obama’s alien love child via a Martian mate is almost certainly false, despite the fact that the publication sells millions of copies each week. We know that popularity in the traditional media world is not a proxy for quality. When we venture outside the supermarket and pump some quarters into the vending machine that holds today’s New York Times or Wall Street Journal, we have a different expectation. Although we know that not everything in the Times or Journal news pages is true, we have good reason to trust what they report far more than we mistrust it. Online, any website can look as professional as any other (another obviously flawed metric for quality). And any person in a conversation can sound as authentic or authoritative as any other. This creates obvious challenges—and problems if people are too credulous. Part of our development as human beings is the cultivation of a “BS meter”—an understanding of when we’re seeing or hearing nonsense and when we’re hearing the truth, or something that we have reason to credit as credible. We might call it, then, a “credibility scale” instead of a BS meter. Either way, I imagine it ranging, say, from plus 30 to minus 30, as in the figure below. Using that scale, a news article in the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal might start out in strongly positive territory, perhaps at 26 or 27 on the scale. (I can think of very few journalists who start at 30 on any topic.) Dan Gillmor 35 Now consider a credibility rating of zero. Sometimes I tell myself I have no reason to believe or disbelieve what I’m hearing, so I either discount it and move on, or resolve to check further. This says nothing about the material beyond an absence of information about and/or experience with the creator. On my mental scale, it’s entirely possible for someone to have negative credibility—sometimes deeply negative. For example, an anonymous comment on a random blog starts off in negative territory. If the comment is an anonymous attack on someone else, it’s so far in the hole as to be essentially irredeemable—say, minus 26 or 27. Why on earth should we believe an attack by someone who’s unwilling to stand behind his or her own words? In most cases, the answer is that we should not. The anonymous commenter—whether on a random blog or a traditional news site — would have to work hard even to achieve zero credibility, much less move into positive territory. (More on that below.) Conversely, someone who uses his or her real name, and is verifiably that person, earns positive credibility from the start, though not as much as someone who’s known to be an expert in a particular domain. A singular innovation at Amazon.com is the “Real Name” designation on reviews or books and other products; Amazon can verify the identity because it has the user’s credit card information, a major advantage for that company. Almost invariably, people who use their real names in these reviews are more credible than those who use pseudonyms. Not always, however: Andrew Breitbart did not hide when he “broke” the Shirley Sherrod story, as described in the Introduction. Still, his name was a warning signal to immediately put the story deep in negative territory on the credibility meter; the self-described provocateur’s record for deception and inaccuracy was already well established. And the story turned out to be the reverse of the truth. 36 Mediactive We can carry skepticism too far. Some people develop such deep distrust of some media that they reject all that they report and, conversely, believe whatever comes from media they see as offering the opposite view. For example, some on the political right reject anything the New York Times reports and uncritically believe anything offered by Fox News; and some on the political left reject anything reported in The Weekly Standard and uncritically believe anything they read at Daily Kos. It’s a mistake to give uncritical acceptance to any source—this can make people vulnerable to manipulation by untrustworthy people who appear to share their political perspectives. Many of the emails that bounce around the Internet—likely including the fiction about Oliver North and Al Gore, set in the Iran-Contra hearings, that opened Chapter 1—fall into this category, and they can come from the right or the left. Checking It Out In late 2009 a journalist in Tennessee wrote a shallow and illinformed column (no longer available online) about citizen journalism, or rather what he imagined it to be. He discussed me and my work for several paragraphs and got almost everything wrong, including a) misspelling my name, b) misidentifying my current academic affiliation, c) claiming I’d left the news business when I stopped writing a column, and a number of other things. He capped this cavalcade of mistakes by advising everyone looking at citizen journalism to do what “real” journalist do: to check things out before believing them. I nominated him for the (nonexistent) Irony Hall of Fame (Media Wing). I got no reply to my email requesting corrections.* The experience reminded me, not for the first time, that the news field would greatly improve if every journalist was the subject of this sort of poor journalism—there’s nothing like being covered to understand how flawed the craft can be. It also highlighted two issues you need to consider when you want to gauge the quality of the information you’re getting. One is simple accuracy; in this example, the misspelled name and wrong employer were egregious. The other is the choice of topic and the slant of the reporting; the Tennessee columnist wanted to promote his own craft while slamming something he considered inferior.
I took the newspaper editor, Tom Bohs, to task at greater length on the Mediactive blog in a post entitled, “That Hallowed Standard of Accuracy: Oops.” Dan Gillmor 37 Factual errors are part of the journalistic process. They happen, and in a deadline-driven craft we can understand why. But when errors are blatant and careless, they call into question everything else the journalist does. Worse, when they’re not corrected promptly and forthrightly, is the message of arrogance they send to the audience. Of course, you can’t check everything out yourself. (Although you can and should, as I’ll discuss later, be careful about what you create in your own media.) But when you’re looking into something where being wrong will have consequences, and if you are unsure of the source of the information, you have every reason—even an obligation—to check further. Howard Rheingold, an author and friend, has been at the forefront of understanding the digital revolution. In a terrific 2009 essay called ”Crap Detection 101”(riffing off a long-ago line from Ernest Hemingway), he wrote about some of the ways to check things out. Here’s a key quote: The first thing we all need to know about information online is how to detect crap, a technical term I use for information tainted by ignorance, inept communication, or deliberate deception. Learning to be a critical consumer of Web info is not rocket science. It’s not even algebra. Becoming acquainted with the fundamentals of web credibility testing is easier than learning the multiplication tables. The hard part, as always, is the exercise of flabby think-for-yourself muscles. Fortunately, crap detection tools are far more powerful today than they were a decade ago; the bad news is that too few people know about them. That has consequences: Many more people have started to rely on the Web for such vitally important forms of information as news, medical information, scholarly research and investment advice that the lack of general education in critical consumption of information found online is turning into a public danger. So, no, Bill Gates won’t send you $5 for forwarding this chain email. The medical advice you get in a chat room isn’t necessarily better than what your doctor tells you, and the widow of the deceased African dictator is definitely not going to transfer millions of dollars to your bank account. That scurrilous rumor about the political candidate that never makes the mainstream media but circulates in emails and blog posts probably isn’t true. The data you are pasting into your memo or term paper may well be totally fabricated. There are innumerable tools and techniques that you can use to winnow out the falsehoods, and people who work hard to help you 38 Mediactive understand what’s real and what isn’t. Here are a few of my favorites. (As always, we’ll be compiling a much longer list, broken out by topic area, at mediactive.com.) Checking Out a Web Page Howard Rheingold’s Crap Detection instructions are a great place to start. Similarly, Scott Rosenberg (another author and friend) has come up with a long list of ways to check out a given website. A sampling: Does the site tell you who runs it—in an about page, or a footer, or anywhere else? Is someone taking responsibility for what’s being published? If so, obviously you can begin this whole investigation again with that person or company’s name, if you need to dig deeper. Check out the ads. Do they seem to be the main purpose of the site? Do they relate to the content or not? Look up the site in the Internet Archive. Did it used to be something else? How has it changed over the years? Did it once reveal information that it now hides? Look at the source code. Is there anything unusual or suspicious that you can see when you “view source”? (If you’re not up to this, technically, ask a friend who is.) Detecting Accuracy Remember the bogus email in Chapter 1, where the writer was claiming things about Al Gore and Oliver North that weren’t true? Snopes.com helped me learn the reality. This site is all about confirming or debunking the stories that race around the Internet every day. Look around Snopes, and be amazed. UrbanLegends.about.com, a site run by the New York Times, is also helpful for sorting out paranoid nuttiness from truth. FactCheck.org, a political fact-checking site, and its FactChecked.org companion site for students and teachers, will help you sort through a few of the political claims tossed around our republic. Your best bet, I’d suggest, is to assume that everything you see in any political advertisement is at best misleading, especially if it’s an attack on a candidate or campaign. QuackWatch.org is invaluable for debunkery of, you guessed it, bad information about health. Dan Gillmor 39 In the experimental category I’m a fan of MediaBugs.org (another project on which I serve as an advisor). Scott Rosenberg, with the help of people like you, is compiling a database of journalistic errors, including notes on whether or when the mistakes are corrected. If he can get enough buy-in from journalists at all levels in his early experiment in the San Francisco Bay Area, this could become a national resource of note. Detecting Slant The Center for Media and Democracy, which leans left politically, has created an invaluable information trove about the organizations that seek to persuade us to buy or believe. It’s called SourceWatch, and I frequently check it out. The mass media consistently misrepresent science and medicine. Ben Goldacre, a British doctor, writer and broadcaster, runs BadScience.net, where he routinely demolishes bad reporting in ways that help readers understand how they can be more discerning themselves. If you follow his work you’ll more easily spot bad science reporting yourself. Fabrice Florin‘s project Newstrust.net, aimed at persuading communities of readers to grade reports based on a variety of criteria, is a promising approach. I encourage you to join and add your own knowledge to the database. (Note: I’m an advisor to the project.) Again, this is the briefest of lists. The key point is that the more something matters to you—the more you have at stake—the more you need to investigate further. I’ll be adding a fresher and more extensive list to mediactive.com.
“I don’t want to be a guy who says ‘This is good and this is bad,’” Goldacre told me. Rather, he wants to help people understand how they can go about being more careful in their media consumption. “The reality,” he said, “is you’ll never be able to have a set of rules for whether someone is reliable or not. What you can derive clearly are heuristics: time-saving devices and shortcuts. They are reasonably accurate, but they misfire sometimes. People try to game our heuristics. This is what quacks do when they buy fake doctorates. “What’s interesting about reading online with linked text is that heuristics become quicker. One of most powerful heuristics I use is whether someone writing about scientific research links to the original paper or at least to the press release. If not, I won’t waste any time reading it.” 40 Mediactive Risks, Statistics, Lies Asking yourself whether something makes sense is especially relevant in understanding risk. Journalists have been, as a trade, beyond negligent in explaining relative risks. Local television news, for example, has been almost criminal in its incessant hyping of crime even during times when crime rates were plummeting, helping persuade people that danger was growing when it was in fact shrinking. While the individual crimes and victims are all too real, the overall incidence of crime has been grossly overstated. And legislators, all too happy to “do something” in response to media-fed public fears, often pass laws, such as Draconian sentencing for non-violent crimes, that do much more aggregate harm than good. Medical news reports, moreover, tend to vary from ill-informed to downright crazy; the unwillingness of a significant portion of the American population to get vaccinated for the H1N1 flu, based on paranoid rumors and media reports, is downright scary. Panic is often the greatest danger, because it leads to bad responses, and when the media fuel panic they are doing the greatest of disservices. Statistics are a related problem. Too few people understand statistical methods or meaning. If you hear that such and such product or substance is linked to a 50 percent rise in some low-incidence disease, you need to also understand that the likelihood that you’ll get that ailment remains vanishingly small. These are issues of slant, not accuracy. But they have everything to do with our understanding of the world around us. I can hear you asking this important question: Who has the time to look into all of this, anyway? No one does. But when you’re looking at something you care about, or when you’re just suspicious, isn’t it worth taking a little extra time to check just a bit further? The bottom line is to start with common sense. Heeding that first bit of skepticism can save you a lot of pain later. Sidebar: The Wikipedia Question In May 2009, the Irish Times reported a story that made journalists everywhere cringe. The article, entitled “Student’s Wikipedia hoax quote used worldwide in newspaper obituaries,” began: A Wikipedia hoax by a 22-year-old Dublin student resulted in a fake quote being published in newspaper obituaries around the world. The quote was attributed to French composer Dan Gillmor 41 Maurice Jarre who died at the end of March. It was posted on the online encyclopedia shortly after his death and later appeared in obituaries published in The Guardian, the London Independent, on the BBC Music Magazine website and in Indian and Australian newspapers. Hoaxes are not new in journalism, but Wikipedia haters, who are vocal if not all that numerous, were thrilled with this one. It gave them another reason to attack the online encyclopedia. Certainly, the site’s relatively open nature was instrumental in the student’s ability to pull off the hoax in the first place. But a closer examination, including a long note to readers by The Guardian—one of the publications that fell for the hoax—suggested a different lesson. In fact, as Siobhain Butterworth, the newspaper’s “readers’ editor,” observed, the Wikipedia community performed well in a) discovering the lie and 2) fixing the article: Wikipedia editors were more skeptical about the unsourced quote [than newspaper editors who printed obituaries based on the false information]. They deleted it twice on 30 March and when Fitzgerald added it the second time it lasted only six minutes on the page. His third attempt was more successful— the quote stayed on the site for around 25 hours before it was spotted and removed again. Still, the invented quote was widely used, and by people who should have known better. In The Guardian, there was apparently no citation, even to Wikipedia, which would have been a tip-off in the first instance. As The Guardian’s Buttersworth also noted, “The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn’t use information they find there if it can’t be traced back to a reliable primary source.” That applies to everyone, not just journalists. Wikipedia’s own policies call for all information to be traced back to authoritative references, and articles are routinely flagged when they lack such references: Content should be verifiable with citations to reliable sources. Our editors’ personal experiences, interpretations, or opinions do not belong here. 42 Mediactive I say this again and again, to students and anyone else who’ll listen: Wikipedia is often the best place to start, but the worst place to stop. It’s the best place to start because you’ll often find a solid article about a topic or person. It’s the worst place to stop because that article might be wrong in some particular. A 2005 article in Nature magazine, comparing Wikipedia to the Encyclopedia Britannica, only muddied the issue, and not because it didn’t conclusively resolve the question of which is more accurate. The point here is that you should not assume the particular fact you check at a particular moment is true. But every decent Wikipedia article has something at the bottom that should also appear on newspaper articles online: a long list of links to original or at least credible outside sources, including news articles. And every Wikipedia article has a record of every change, down to the smallest detail, going back to the day it was first created. Moreover, Wikipedia articles of any depth are accompanied by “meta” conversations about the articles themselves, where the editors discuss or argue among themselves about the quality of the information going into the articles and often about the credentials of the editors who have been making the latest changes. Yes, use Wikipedia—and lots of other sources. Just make sure you understand both its advantages and its limitations. And if you see something that’s wrong, fix it! (More on that ahead.) Anonymous Versus Pseudonymous As the 2008 presidential campaign wound down, a Fox News TV report relayed a variety of negative attacks on Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate, that it attributed to members of presidential candidate John McCain’s campaign staff. Palin denounced the attackers—all of whom had been granted anonymity—as cowards. Palin was right to be angry. The TV report was a perfect example of why anonymous critics should not be taken seriously—in fact, of why they should usually be flatly disbelieved. Anonymous sources are one of professional journalism’s worst habits. Their constant appearance, especially in newspapers and broadcast news outlets that ought to know better, turns otherwise
*Who agrees with me? Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder, among others. I’m posting a video interview with him on the Mediactive site where he says so. Note: He’s a friend, and I’m an investor in his privately held company, Wikia. Dan Gillmor 43 respectable institutions into gossip mongers and invites audiences to doubt what they’re being told. Ombudsmen at the Washington Post and New York Times have repeatedly scolded their colleagues not just for their incessant use of anonymous sources, but also for the journalists’ flouting of internal policies banning what they’re doing. It makes no difference, apparently, because the “anonymice,” as media critic Jack Shafer calls them, just keep on appearing. Shafer notes that he’s no absolutist on these things, understanding that in some kinds of situations anonymous sources are vital. We learned about the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping program against Americans because someone spilled it to the New York Times (though the newspaper unaccountably held the story for a year before publishing it). But before the U.S. invaded Iraq we also “learned” via anonymice quoted in the same paper—the quotation marks are deliberate—that Saddam Hussein’s regime had weapons of mass destruction. These, of course, were lies laundered through the newspaper by an administration that was hell-bent to create a case for war. One of the more ridiculous ways news organizations pretend to be more transparent about an inherently opaque practice is to offer reasons why the sources can’t allow themselves to be identified by name. Occasionally it makes sense, as a former Times Reader representative, Clark Hoyt, noted when a Good Samaritan at a New York assault didn’t want his name published because the assailant was still at large. But Hoyt was too much the gentleman when he termed “baffling” a story in which a source was granted anonymity “because he was discussing drug-testing information.” I have a rule of thumb. When a news report quotes anonymous sources, I immediately question the entire thing. I’m skeptical enough about spin from people who stand behind their own words, but downright cynical about the people who use journalist-granted anonymity to push a position or, worse, slam someone else. When someone hides behind anonymity to attack someone else, you shouldn’t just ignore it. In the absence of actual evidence, you should actively disbelieve it. And you should hold the journalist who reports it in contempt for being the conduit. New media are a wider world of anonymous and semi-anonymous claims and attacks. The blogger who refuses to identify himself or herself invites me to look elsewhere, unless I’m persuaded by a great deal of evidence that there’s good reason to stick around. And, as I said earlier, the anonymous commenters on blogs or news articles deserve less than 44 Mediactive no credibility on any BS meter; they deserve to start in deep minus territory. Where would I put the attacks on Palin? Well, given the sources (Fox and the anonymous people launching these verbal grenades), I’d start below zero and wait for some evidence. Pseudonyms are a more interesting case, and can have value. Done right, they can bring greater accountability and therefore somewhat more credibility than anonymous comments. Content-management systems have mechanisms designed to require some light-touch registration, even if it’s merely having a working email address, and to prevent more than one person from using the same pseudonym on a given site. A pseudonym isn’t as useful as a real name, but it does encourage somewhat better behavior, in part because it’s more accountable. A pseudonymous commenter who builds a track record of worthwhile conversation, moreover, can build personal credibility even without revealing his or her real name (though I believe using real names is almost always better.) Ultimately, as we’ll discuss later, conveners of online conversations need to provide better tools for the people having the conversations. These include moderation systems that actually help bring the best commentary to the surface, ways for readers to avoid the postings of people they find offensive, and community-driven methods of identifying and banning abusers. For all this, I want to emphasize again that we should preserve anonymity when used responsibly, and appreciate why it’s vital. Anonymity protects whistle-blowers and others for whom speech can be unfairly dangerous. But when people don’t stand behind their words, a reader should always wonder why and make appropriate adjustments. Talking with Journalists (of All Kinds) More and more print journalists are posting their email addresses in the work they publish. They are acknowledging their role in a broadening, emergent media ecosystem, recognizing that news is becoming a conversation instead of a lecture. (Broadcast reporters, for the most part, aren’t nearly so willing to join conversations; their loss.) Mainstream journalists are congenitally thin-skinned; insecurity seems almost a precondition to employment in traditional newsrooms. This has always been a notable irony, given that the journalism business routinely shoots people off their pedestals, often after helping install them there in the first place. So when you contact a journalist, you’re Dan Gillmor 45 likely to get him or her to listen if you’re polite; attack mode is almost always the wrong approach. The best journalists do want to listen, and sometimes they even want your help. In Ft. Myers, Florida, the local newspaper asked its readers for help on a local story involving the water and sewer system. The readers responded, and the newspaper was able to do much better journalism as a result. Joshua Micah Marshall, creator of the Talking Points Memo collection of political and policy blogs, has done much of the best work in this arena. He regularly asks his readers for help poring through documents or asking questions of public officials. (In a later chapter I’ll describe how journalists could do this as a matter of routine, and the kinds of results we might get.) The ProPublica.org investigative site, meanwhile, has asked its users to add their expertise in a variety of ways. Its 2009 “Stimulus Spot Check”—a deeper look at whether and how states were using road and bridge construction money from the federal economic stimulus package enacted earlier in the year—was assisted by dozens of volunteers from the site’s ProPublica Reporting Network. The professional journalists obtained a random sample of the approved projects and asked the volunteers to help assess what had happened. If you live in a community with particularly smart media organizations, you may be able to join them in a more formal way. American Public Media’s Public Insight Network, best known for its work in Minnesota and the upper Midwest, has signed up some 70,000 people who’ve agreed to be sounding boards and sources for the journalism created by professionals (and ultimately, one hopes, the citizens themselves). The New Media Watchdogs In the previous chapter we noted the sad state of media criticism in traditional circles and the heartening rise of online media criticism. We should do more to make it an integral part of mediactivism. If you’re not a fan of The Daily Show’s media criticism, you’re just not paying attention. Jon Stewart and his producers routinely skewer the media, often beating traditional media and bloggers alike to the punch; the program scooped everyone with the news in November 2009 that Sean Hannity’s Fox News program had, as Daily Show producer Ramin Hedayati told PoynterOnline, “used footage from Glenn Beck’s 9/12 rally to make his [November health-care] rally look bigger…. We were 46 Mediactive surprised that no one else caught it.” (Just an inadvertent mistake, Hannity later said after admitting it.) It’s a commentary in itself that, according to several surveys, many younger adults say they get a great deal of their news from The Daily Show. Some of the best and most ardent online criticism is coming from political partisans, though you have to keep in mind that they’re criticizing from a distinctly one-sided platform and adjust your expectations accordingly. Sites such as Media Matters for America are earning big audiences with their dedication, as that site proclaims, “to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.” The site’s stated bias helps us understand its reports, which strike me as some of the most thorough of their kind, especially in their deconstructions of television news and commentary. While Media Matters is prone to hyperbole in interpreting the facts, as far as I can tell it rigorously checks those facts. Likewise, George Mason University’s Stats site, with a firmly libertarian-right world view, does useful analysis of media misuse of statistics. People and organizations with grievances about the way they’ve been covered have better options than ever before. It’s increasingly common for companies and public figures to tell their side of stories on their own sites. Intriguingly, the Obama White House embarked on a media-criticism campaign of its own early on, specifically taking on Fox News as a propaganda machine, not a “real” journalism organization. Whether a president should be arguing with individual news operations is a separate issue, but I welcomed the administration’s effort to explain to Americans what people paying attention had already learned. Bigger media organizations have legions of critics. (You can even find a long Wikipedia article devoted solely to criticism of the New York Times.) Yet even in smaller cities and towns, you’re likely to find someone (ideally, several people) blogging about local media. Remember the credibility scale, of course, when you read the critiques. But do read them, and decide as the facts shake out which ones are worth continuing to read. Some might argue we have too much media criticism in a world where bloggers are constantly on the attack against what they perceive, often accurately, as inadequate journalism. But one of the healthier aspects of the rise of bloggers as media watchdogs has been the way journalists have had to start developing thicker skins—not ignoring their critics, but also not reacting with the pure defensiveness of the past. Professionals still tend to be sensitive about all this. Dan Gillmor 47 Happily, at least a few have started listening, and are joining the conversation on their own blogs, Twitter streams and elsewhere. The truth is that we need even more media criticism, at every level. What drives traditional journalists especially crazy is being attacked unfairly. (Pot, meet kettle….) Comment threads under big media articles, which are so often unmoderated wastelands of evil spewings from nearsociopaths, become Exhibit A for journalists who don’t want to participate in conversations with readers. So the bias, even today, is to stay away from genuine contact with audiences. While media people are joining some conversations, they’re still avoiding genuine discussion of their own failings. Bloggers often have skins as thin as any traditional journalist’s, and some have a tendency to respond to even mild critiques with the kind of fury that only makes them look worse. But bloggers also have an instant feedback mechanism that traditional media people rarely use: the comments. You almost never find a mass-media journalist participating in the comments on his or her organization’s website. Bloggers do tend to participate on their own sites, and on Twitter and other forums. Escape the Echo Chamber One of the great worries about the Internet is the echo chamber effect: the notion that democratized media have given us a way to pay attention only to the people we know we’ll agree with, paying no attention to contrary views or, often, reality. This is no idle worry. But the same digital media that make it possible to retreat into our own beliefs give us easier ways to emerge, and engage. A key principle introduced in the first chapter was the idea of going outside your comfort zone. This has several, related facets: Learn from people who live in places and cultures entirely different from your own. Listen to the arguments of people you know you’ll disagree with. Challenge your own assumptions. You need to be somewhat systematic about the first and second of those points, but also opportunistic. While I make it a point to read political blogs written by people who make my blood boil, and read 48 Mediactive journalism from other parts of the world, I also make the best possible use of that elemental unit of the Web: the hyperlink. Even the most partisan bloggers typically point to the work they are pounding into the sand. If a left-wing blogger writes, “So and so, the blithering idiot, is claiming such and such,” he links to the such and such he’s challenging—and you can click that link to see what so and so actually said. Contrast this with what happens when you watch, say, Fox News or MSNBC on televison. The TV set, at least today’s version, doesn’t come with links; and clearly the commentators don’t want you to consider world views other than their own. The link culture of the Web is part of the antidote to the echo chamber. But you have to click. Do it, often. If you do, there’s a good chance you’ll discover, from time to time, that you either didn’t have a sufficiently deep understanding of something, or what you thought was simply wrong. There’s nothing bad about changing your mind; only shallow people never do so. I engage in a semi-annual exercise that started more than a decade ago, when I was writing for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper. I kept a list in the back of a desk drawer, entitled “Things I Believe”—a 10-point list of topics about which I’d come to previous conclusions. They weren’t moral or ethical in nature. Rather, they were issue-oriented, and about my job as a business and technology columnist. Every six months or so, I’d go down the list and systematically attack every proposition, looking for flaws in what I’d previously taken for granted. For example, one longstanding item on my list was this: “Microsoft is an abusive monopoly that threatens innovation, and government antitrust scrutiny is essential.” From 1994 until I left the Mercury News in 2005, I continued to believe this was true, though a shade less so by the end of that period than at the beginning and during the software company’s most brutal, predatory era. Since then, though, conditions have changed. Given the rise of Google and other Web-based enterprises, not to mention Apple’s growing power and the controlling and anticompetitive behavior of the huge telecommunications companies, I’ve modified my views about what the chief tech-world worries should be. Microsoft is still powerful and sometimes abusive, but it’s not nearly the threat it once was. (No, I don’t make my list public, though I talk about many of its points in my Mediactive blog from time to time, which is almost the same thing.) The next time I update the list, I’ll probably move Apple above Microsoft on my list of companies worth watching closely in this way. Dan Gillmor 49 Consider creating your own list of “givens” that you will challenge on a regular basis. This is especially vital when it comes to political beliefs. My basic political grounding combines elements of liberal, conservative and libertarian doctrine, and I vote according to a collection of issues, not remotely by party. But I’m constantly reassessing. The late Carl Sagan, in a wonderful essay called “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” put it this way: Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.