The Mainstream Media Has No Shortage Of Resources

from the doing-less-with-more dept

You regularly see people in the newspaper business, as well as some professional media critics, complaining about the terrible consequences of falling advertising revenues in the mainstream media. There seems to be a worry that as the Internet makes the news business more competitive, traditional media organizations won't be able to afford to do "real" reporting any more. It's not a crazy argument, but more often, the opposite seems to be true. Take the recently-completed Democratic Party convention. Ezra Klein points out that there were a ton of reporters who had to justify their presence at the convention, and so rather than focusing on what was happening on the stage (which they could have just as easily done by watching it on TV) they wandered around looking for trumped-up controversy to cover, giving undue attention (in Ezra's view) to a few disgruntled Clinton supporters. Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias points out that CNN appears to have flown its stars to Denver, put them up in hotels, and constructed an elaborate new set for them, all so they could "cover" the convention in precisely the same way they would have covered it if those same stars had stayed at home in Atlanta or DC. Far from having inadequate resources, on the most high-profile news stories, the mainstream media seems to squander vast sums of money on things that only marginally improve the quality of their coverage. There are a variety of factors that may be undermining the quality of mainstream media coverage, but at the moment, a lack of resources doesn't seem to be among them.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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LA Times Embarrasses Itself With Kozinski Coverage

from the digital-dumpster-diving dept

Last week we wrote about the hoopla surrounding some racy images and videos Judge Kozinski had accidentally made public on his personal web server. This week, it was announced that a panel of federal judges will be investigating Kozinski's conduct. I don't understand why an investigation is needed because it's pretty clear what happened, and that Kozinski did nothing wrong. My colleague Jim Harper links to a defense of Kozinski by Larry Lessig. I share Lessig's conclusion that the treatment of Kozinski has been disgraceful, but I don't think the analogy Lessig uses is especially apt. Lessig analogizes the situation to a man who climbs into Kozinski's den through a poorly-secured window and makes copies of the materials he finds within Kozinski's house. He also uses the term "hack" to describe the process of accessing Kozinski's files. I don't think this is quite right. It was a public web server; the files were readily available without a password to anyone who went looking for them. What was done to Kozinski was unsavory, but it wasn't illegal, and it's not analogous to breaking and entering.

A better analogy is dumpster diving. What happened was the digital equilvalent of somebody combing through Kozinski's trash and discovering an issue of Playboy. No respectable respectable newspaper would publish a front-page story about finding porn in a federal judge's trash. It's no more newsworthy that Kozinski inadvertently made some racy images available on his personal website. Kozinski's wife, Marcy Tiffany, wrote a letter about the affair that's well worth reading in full. She claims (and others agree) that the files were unearthed by an attorney with a grudge against Kozinski, who obtained the files months ago and has been shopping them around to different newspapers ever since. The LA Times apparently had this story months ago, but waited until Kozinski had finished the grueling work of impaneling a jury for a big obscenity case (it's hard to find a dozen people willing to watch hours of defecation and bestiality videos) before putting the story on its front page.

Even worse, the LA Times coverage appears designed to cast the material on Kozinski's computer in the worst possible light. For example, it describes one video as depicting "a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal." This description prompted a number of follow-up reports, including one in the San Francisco Chronicle, to describe the contents of the video as "bestiality," despite the fact that the video in question obviously doesn't depict bestiality. (The Chronicle story was here, but the word "bestiality" has since been deleted) The LA Times really ought to apologize to Judge Kozinski for needlessly dragging his reputation through the mud.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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