War on Wikis: Critical Standards and Standards of Criticism

A Wikipedia article summing up the common objections and answering them.

Also see Wikipedia's article on Why Wikipedia Is So Great.

And, of course, their article on Why Wikipedia Is Not So Great.

Information aside, the interesting thing here is the attempt at honest self-criticism. This is another important difference between the practices of the new media at its best and the way things are done in the old media world.

The standard for the new media is that criticism should be frankly acknowledged and frankly answered. It should not be ignored, dismissed or overborne by claims of expertise.

To say this standard is an ideal rather than universal practice is putting it mildly. A lot of new media practitioners don't do it this way and some of them are pretty scathing in the way they apply the older techniques.

The difference is they suffer for it much more.

The web is in essence a conversation. Communication is two way and neither of the participants has such an overwhelming advantage they can drown out the other party.

This was one of the first things I noticed when I started writing for the web over a decade ago. Articles on web sites drew a lot more comment, especially critical comment, than I was used to in magazines and newspapers.

Personally I thought this was great. While my fear of being wrong in public approaches an obsessive-compulsive disorder -- not uncommon in those schooled in the journalistic paradigm -- I appreciated the fact that I could learn from my readers. For one thing, it meant I could target future articles more accurately to what my readers were interested in. That's very hard to do with a magazine where there is a several-month lag between writing the article and getting the letter to the editor.

If you are writing for the web, or blogging, or social networking you have to accept the fact that your work is exposed to the opinions of others -- and those others have equally powerful channels to express their opinions.

In conventional journalism one party controls both ends of the conversation by deciding what gets into print. While letters to the editor are theoretically welcome, objections and comments are still filtered by the side with the publication.

As A.J. Leibling famously said: Freedom of the press belongs to he who owns one.

This produces some unfortunate behavior. Newspapers, for example, tend to alibi their mistakes rather than admitting them.

I remember one occasion when, as energy reporter for a major metro daily, I covered the explosion of a pole-mounted transformer belonging to the local power company. Such explosions aren't uncommon since the transformers can overheat in use. In themselves they're pretty harmless. What made this one newsworthy was that the transformer was one of the old ones whose cooling oil was laced with PCBs. That meant it was a hazardous material spill in a residential neighborhood.

Fine, but how much hazardous material? PR guy at the utility told me it was "several quarts" so that's what I used in the story. The next day I got a call from a reader who informed me the actual amount of oil in such a transformer is about five gallons. After confirming that independently, I told my assistant editor, implying that we needed to run a correction.

His response was that five gallons is the same as several quarts so we didn't need a correction.

It was his call, but to this day I think that story was misleading. However the assistant editor wanted to keep from printing a correction. The prevailing theory at newspapers and magazines in those days was that if you didn't admit a mistake you hadn't made a mistake.

While that attitude is still with us -- witness The New Republic's response to the wildly inaccurate stories from Scott Thomas Beauchamp in Iraq -- it works a lot less well even for the print media. Beauchamp's fables were quickly exposed by bloggers with military experience and The New Republic made itself a laughing stock with its lame and dishonest attempts to defend its position.

(Note: Because I'm rushed for time, and because the material in the blogosphere on this is so extensive, I am not going to provide specific links. For the military blogger's point of view I'd recommend 'Blackfive'. For an series of summaries of the controversy, see Michael Goldfarb's articles in the "Weekly Standard". Not an unbiased source, but a lot of links to blogs and other sources. And of course there's "The New Republic's" own statements. For an example of why TNR is a laughing stock, take a look at the investigation into TNR's "investigation" of whether a Bradley Fighting Vehicle could run over a dog in the manner Beauchamp described. For a summation of the culture at TNR that led to all this, as well as an example of the journalistic CYA mentality at work, see "How The New Republic Got Suckered"

The smart new media folks have learned this lesson already and public reaction is teaching it to the others. If you make a mistake, face up to it and deal with it honestly. Because if you don't it will be thrown back at you with hurricane force.

Fungal Journalism, Michael Yon and his ilk

If you want to understand Iraq, Michael Yon is indispensable.

Yon has no formal journalism training and never worked for a media outlet. He is, however, an enormously talented writer who has embedded himself with American troops in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and for the last two years provided the American public with the kind of reporting on the war and the US troops in it the likes of which we haven’t seen since the late, great Ernie Pyle covered World War II from the soldier’s perspective.

The comment that struck me was:
“Clearly, context like this is not well-served by the adversarial frame of “mainstream-versus-alternative-news.” Reporting from this war is deadly serious business. Deadly for the reporters, but how they report can also be deadly for us all.”

Michael is a ground truth kind of guy. You no more read his reports for comment on broad societal issues than you read Ernie Pyle (Michael’s spiritual father) for enlightenment on the grand strategic issues of World War II.

However if you look at the view from 10,000 feet, Michael’s work exemplifies another kind of truth. His recent dispatches exemplify that there is a “mainstream-versus-alternative news” split. And the truth is that division is critical to the free flow of information a democracy depends on.

Fungus Among Us
To understand why, let’s back up a couple of times around Robin Hood’s barn and start our voyage of journalistic exploration with a humble fungus.

Bipolaris maydis is about as un-sexy as you can get. It causes a disease called Southern Corn Leaf Blight, which was a well-known and very minor disease of corn.

Was until 1970, that is. Suddenly the disease exploded through the United States corn crop. An estimated 12-15 percent of the corn was lost, food prices skyrocketed and suddenly we had a national crisis on our hands.

The thing that turned a minor nuisance into a near-disaster was monoculture. Since the introduction of hybrid corns about 1950, American farmers had been growing more and more corn of fewer and fewer varieties. By 1970 about 90 percent of the corn grown in the US was of a few hybrid varieties, all of which shared a gene called Texas Sterile Male (TSM). It turned out that TSM corns were extremely susceptible to Southern Corn Blight and the rest, as they say, is history – and a billion-dollar loss.

The needle sharp point of this excursion into agricultural mycology is that monoculture of any sort brings trouble in its wake. It usually provides benefits, but it leaves the entire culture terribly susceptible to predators, parasites and other evils.

This is true in any ecology, be it biological or cultural. Including journalism as it is formally practiced.

And modern journalism is largely a monoculture. This has much less to do with politics than standards and education. Every reporter and editor, from the looniest right to the moonbat left, is trained in the same methods and held to the same standards. This monoculture covers everything from what is ‘news’ to how it is to be gathered and reported, what constitutes a source and nearly every other aspect of modern journalism.

Of course not everyone follows those standards. There are slackers, crooks and mavericks in every culture. And of course there are reporters and editors who cheerfully sell out those principles for a pot of message, be it on the left or on the right. But in the long run that doesn’t matter any more than the resistance of occasional corn plants to Southern Corn Blight in 1970.

I know because I am a product (I hope an escapee) from that very same monoculture. My degree is in journalism and for nearly a decade I was a reporter and editor for the Associated Press, small community dailies (including a three-year stint as managing editor on one) and the largest daily in my state. In that time I saw a lot less political bias than most people associate with the media, but I saw the effects of journalistic monoculture every day.

This isn’t because the journalistic leaders don’t try to avoid the effects. Journalism schools, trade publications like Editor and Publisher and Columbia Journalism Review and good editors everywhere emphasize the traps that journalists can fall into and try to keep them on the straight and narrow. This is about as effective as the scientists who bred TSM hybrid corn. That is, they can protect from the major diseases, but the minor stuff becomes major as the ecology changes.

Playing Journalistic Pinball

The result of this monoculture is that if you know what you’re doing you can play the mainstream media like a pinball machine. By understanding the process and the mindset you can insert toxins into the flow of information as surely and as ruthlessly as Bipolaris maydis invades the stomata of corn plants. The fungus destroys the energy producing centers of cells. The journalistic attackers hijack the process to spread their own propaganda.

Ironically, while the government and industry are enthusiastic players in this game, they are seldom as effective as the non-governmental organizations. For one thing they are less likely to display the kind of conviction displayed by everyone from the Religious Right to the PETA. They are also hamstrung by their own bureaucracy.

(How do I know? I also spent a brief, inglorious stint committing public relations for a major utility building a nuclear power plant.)

What is happening now is that America’s enemies are applying these techniques with the same ruthlessness they show in beheading their own people on spreading stories about baked children served to their parents. And they are damned good at it.

Foreigners have attempted this before, generally without a lot of success. In the 30s, 40s and 50s Communists in the United States tried. But the domestic Communists, under the direction of the Soviet government, were inept clowns when it came to media manipulation. They were blinded by their own culture and preconceptions so most of their efforts came off as weird or silly. The Nazis were even worse.

The Islamo-fascists, on the other hand, have done an amazingly successful job of manipulating the media. This is especially ironic when you consider that most of these groups are so far off the intellectual main sequence they make Hitler at his nuttiest look sane and many of their leaders make Stalin look like a bleeding heart humanitarian.

This is another effect of the globalization of information. Al Qaeda and their brethren my have an insane view of the world and a foaming, rabid hatred of the West, but they know us. They read our web sites, newspapers, they listen to American television and radio. They may be crazy as a gang of bedbugs, but they most assuredly are not stupid.

The people who handle their propaganda know exactly how to impact American opinion through the media and they apply that knowledge with every car bombing, every faked story and every suborned stringer that are responsible for. (Of course the X-Random Looney-bin-Nutcase militants who show up on the 6 o clock news don’t get it at all, but those aren’t the ones running the operation.)

In fact one of the striking things about Al Qaeda is how much of their campaign is aimed directly at American public opinion through their manipulation of journalism. The Viet Cong stumbled into something similar after the Tet Offensive, which they lost overwhelmingly on the ground, and won equally overwhelmingly in the “Living Room War”, but Al Qaeda has based at least half its total military effort in Iraq on attacks through fungal journalism.

In a weird sick way, the Islamic terrorists are internationalists. Saddam Hussein, by contrast, had an almost utterly parochial view of the world. He didn’t understand the United States at all and that got him invaded and hanged.

(The Israelis? In the beginning they were pretty good at manipulating the American media, but their effectiveness has declined in the last 20 years or so. I suspect because of creeping corporatism in their approach.)

Meanwhile, Back On The Home Front

International terrorists may be the latest players of Fungal Journalism Pinball, but they still aren’t the only ones. Increasingly our media is held captive by the manipulators and sometimes the results are truly absurd.

Take, for example, a strange little Irish company called Steorn which claims to have invented a ‘free energy machine’ – perpetual motion, plus, in other words. Which is, of course, thermodynamic nonsense, as even the most scientifically illiterate reporter should know.

In spite of that, thanks to a brilliant campaign of journalistic manipulation, Steorn’s ‘discovery’ and upcoming demonstration received international publicity from such respected media as Fox News, the Guardian, the Observer, as well as technical publications like ZD net. (There was also a lot of coverage on the web, but with the exception of the further out sites, it was generally of the eye-rolling variety.)

I doubt seriously that even the reporters for the mainstream media really believed that this thing would work. So why did they publish such a nutball story?

Blame fungal journalism. In this case the attack was directed against the basic journalistic notion that the reporter is not an expert on whatever he/she covers. Therefore, the reporter has no business judging whether something is true or not.

Normally that is simply good sense. To understand how good the sense is you’d have to know reporters and how much many of them really know about the subject they cover. But it provides an opening for a fungus attack. If Dr. Moonbat von Nutcase claims that the sky is falling, and he has even a scintilla of standing and a half-convincing rap, then the story flashes around the world that the sky is falling.

Okay, I’m oversimplifying. There are a number of other factors that come into play which insure that every single member of the tinfoil beanie brigade doesn’t get his or her vaporings into print. But all too often this kind of fungal journalism attack succeeds. Very often it succeeds even if the reporter in question suspects he or she is being played.

The Answer

This has potentially disastrous consequences for the United States because a democracy utterly depends on a flow of accurate information to its citizens to function effectively. Increasingly fungal journalism has systematically distorted that flow, poisoned it as effectively as the Southern Corn Blight Fungus destroys the energy producing centers in corn plant cells.

Fundamentally this is a product of our journalistic monoculture. Journalists can be played because their commonalities leave them vulnerable to these attacks.

The obvious solution is more of the same. That is for journalists, journalism teachers, editors and such to shore up the obvious weaknesses in the system. Unfortunately that doesn’t work. The bad guys can always find new weaknesses to exploit and the fungus continues to spread through the monoculture.

The real solution to monoculture, as any ecologist will tell you, is to break up the monoculture. Different species have different combinations of strengths and weaknesses. By mixing them up you control the spread of pathogens and offer alternatives.

And finally, after a long, exhausting chase, this brings us to the role of the new media. Bloggers like Michael Yon aren’t part of the monoculture. Many of them have different approaches, different standards and different techniques. They all have their weaknesses, it is true, but by and large they are not the same weaknesses as traditional journalism.

What the new media offer are alternative channels of information. By combining those channels with traditional journalism, we can obtain much more of the ground truth that Michael Yon values – and we so desperately need if we are to succeed.

Resources:

For Michael Yon in his own words, see his blog here:
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/wp/tabula-rasa.htm

The article on the massacre at al-Hamari (warning! Graphic)
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/wp/bless-the-beasts-and-children.htm

The follow up on the media non-reaction to al-Hamari
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/wp/update-on-bless-the-beasts-and-children.htm

The report that motivated this blog
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/wp/second-chances.htm

You can read more the 1970 Corn Crisis here
http://www.cbwinfo.com/Biological/PlantPath/BM.html

and here:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/171/3976/1113

and more about the perils of monoculture in agriculture here:

http://aboutbiodiversity.org/agbdx/cornblight.html

and here:
http://oregonstate.edu/~muirp/cropdiv.htm

For an account of Steorn and Orbo, see here:
http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/13359/1103/

for a list of stories, see:

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Steorn_Free_Energy#Other_Press_Coverage

The Guardian reporter indicates skepticism, but the overall tone is favorable and the paper published it anyway. A classic example of a successful fungal journalism attack.
http://environment.guardian.co.uk/energy/story/0,,1858172,00.html