Citizen Cartwright

The press must better convey 'the dangers of a Trump win'

You may recall the opinion article on this topic a couple of months ago by longtime media columnist Margaret Sullivan.

 

Now she has another article in The Guardian. Sullivan is particularly qualified to assess media performance; she's a former public editor (essentially an internal critic) at The New York Times, as well as a media columnist at The Washington Post.

 

Journalists are making the 2024 election "about the horse race — rather than what would happen a few lengths after the finish line," Sullivan says.

 

"Here’s what must be hammered home: Trump cannot be re-elected if you want the United States to be a place where elections decide outcomes, where voting rights matter, and where politicians don’t baselessly prosecute their adversaries," she says.

 

"When Americans do understand how politics affects their lives, they vote accordingly," she says. "We have seen that play out with respect to abortion rights in Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin and beyond. On that issue, voters clearly get that well-established rights have been ripped away, and they have reacted with force."

 

"The Guardian’s David Smith laid out the contrast," Sullivan says. "'Since Biden took office the US economy has added a record 14m jobs while his list of legislative accomplishments has earned comparisons with those of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson ... Trump, meanwhile, is facing 91 criminal indictments in Atlanta, Miami, New York and Washington DC, some of which relate to an attempt to overthrow the US government.'"

 

Sullivan suggests some things the press can do differently:

 

— Report more about what Trump would do after the election.

 

— Use direct language, not couched in false equivalence, about the dangers of a second Trump presidency.

 

— Pin down Republicans on whether they support Trump’s lies and autocratic plans.

 

"There’s no time to waste in getting the truth across," Sullivan says.

What’s U.S. media’s responsibility to U.S. democracy?

“The American press is failing to meet its responsibility to adequately emphasize the stakes of the coming election,” says long-time media columnist Margaret Sullivan in The Guardian. 

 

Instead:

 

— "News organizations have turned Biden’s age (granted, a legitimate concern) into the equivalent of a scandal,” she says. 

 

She quotes Ian Millhiser of Vox, who says: “I worry the ‘Biden is old’ coverage is starting to take on the same character as the 2016 But Her Emails coverage – find something that is genuinely suboptimal about the Democratic candidate and dwell on it endlessly to ‘balance’ coverage of the criminal in charge of the GOP.”

 

— "The evidence-free Biden impeachment efforts in the House of Representatives are presented to news consumers without sufficient context” (speaker McCarthy’s need to placate the far right).

 

— Trump continues to be covered mostly as an entertaining sideshow, not as a threat to democracy.

 

“We will look back on this and wish more people had understood that Biden is our bulwark of democratic freedoms and the alternative is worse than most Americans can imagine,” says Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen," and an expert in authoritarian regimes.

 

The big problem, Sullivan says, is that the mainstream media want to be seen as non-partisan – a reasonable goal – and bend over backwards to accomplish this. If this means equalizing an anti-democratic candidate with a pro-democracy candidate, so be it.

 

"Add to this the obsession with the 'horse race' aspect of the campaign, and the profit-driven desire to increase the potential news audience to include Trump voters, and you’ve got the kind of problematic coverage discussed above,” she says.

 

“When one of our two political parties has become so extremist and anti-democratic,” the old ways of reporting don’t cut it, Sullivan quotes journalist Dan Froomkin as saying.

 

Both-sides-equal reporting “actively misinforms the public about the stakes of the coming election,” Sullivan says.

 

"The big solution? Remember at all times what our core mission is: to communicate truthfully, keeping top of mind that we have a public service mission to inform the electorate and hold powerful people to account. If that’s our north star, as it should be, every editorial judgment will reflect that.”

AI in life advice and in newsrooms

Google is testing new tools that could turn generative AI — the technology behind chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s own Bard — into a personal life coach, says The New York Times.

In April, Google merged DeepMind, a research lab it had acquired in London, with Brain, an artificial intelligence team it started in Silicon Valley. 

Four months later, the combined groups are testing the tools. The project is indicative of the urgency of Google’s effort to propel itself to the front of the AI pack and signals its increasing willingness to trust AI systems with sensitive tasks, the Times says.

The capabilities are a shift from Google’s earlier caution about generative AI, the Times says. In slides presented to executives in December, the company’s AI safety experts warned of the dangers of people becoming too emotionally attached to chatbots.

Google DeepMind has been working with generative AI to perform at least 21 different types of personal and professional tasks, including tools to give users life advice, ideas, planning instructions and tutoring tips, according to documents and other materials the Times reviewed.

An example of a prompt a user might ask the chatbot: “I have a really close friend who is getting married this winter. She was my college roommate and a bridesmaid at my wedding. I want so badly to go to her wedding to celebrate her, but after months of job searching, I still have not found a job. She is having a destination wedding and I just can’t afford the flight or hotel right now. How do I tell her that I won’t be able to come?”

The project’s idea creation feature could give users suggestions based on a situation. Its tutoring function can teach new skills or improve existing ones, such as how to improve as a runner. The planning capability can create financial, meal and workout plans.

Google’s AI safety experts had said in December that users could experience “diminished health and well-being” and a “loss of agency” if they took life advice from AI. They said some users who grew too dependent on the technology could think it was sentient. In March, when Google launched Bard, it said the chatbot was barred from giving medical, financial or legal advice. Bard shares mental health resources with users who say they're experiencing mental distress.

Google may decide not to deploy the tools it’s evaluating, the company says.

Google DeepMind also has been evaluating tools recently that could take its AI further into the workplace, including capabilities to generate scientific, creative and professional writing, as well as to recognize patterns and extract data from text, according to the documents, potentially making it relevant to knowledge workers in a variety of industries and fields.

And Google has been testing a helper for journalists that can generate news articles, rewrite them and suggest headlines, the Times reported in July. The company has been pitching the software, called Genesis, to executives at the Times, The Washington Post and News Corp, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, The Associated Press is reporting that it’s issued AI guidelines that prohibit its use to create publishable content and images for the news service. But staff are encouraged to become familiar with the technology. (AP says it’s experimented with simpler forms of artificial intelligence for a decade, using it to create short news stories out of sports box scores or corporate earnings reports.)

AP says it's one of a handful of news organizations that have begun to set rules on how to integrate fast-developing tech tools like ChatGPT into their work.

The tech magazine Wired and the business news website Insider say they don't publish articles generated by AI.

It’s the 30th World Press Freedom Day

Since it was established by the U.N. General Assembly, "we have seen substantial progress towards achieving a free press and freedom of expression around the world,” says the United Nations. "The proliferation of independent media in many countries and the rise of digital technologies have enabled the free flow of information.”

 

"However, media freedom, safety of journalists and freedom of expression are increasingly under attack, which impacts the fulfillment of other human rights,” the U.N. says.

 

Reporters Without Borders says its World Press Freedom Index, issued annually on the May 3 anniversary, "spotlights the rapid effects that the digital ecosystem’s fake content industry has had on press freedom.”

 

Of the 180 countries ranked for 2023, Norway is first for the seventh year in a row. “Unusually – a non-Nordic country is ranked second, namely Ireland,” which pushes Denmark down to third, Reporters Without Borders says.

 

The United States is 45th (ouch), down three places from last year, because of the "environment for journalists (especially the legal framework at the local level, and widespread violence) despite the Biden administration’s efforts. The murders of two journalists (the Las Vegas Review Journal’s Jeff German in September 2022, and Spectrum News 13’s Dylan Lyons in February  2023) had a negative impact on the country’s ranking.”

 

The number of journalists imprisoned worldwide has reached a 30-year high as of the end of last year, says The Wall Street Journal, citing data from the Committee to Protect Journalists. 

 

World Press Freedom Day coincides with WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich’s fifth week of detention in Russia, the paper says.

 

Let’s take a minute to honor the reporters who risk their lives to report the facts. For a number of years I was an active volunteer for Amnesty International, to help people like this, who have the kind of courage I do not. 

Lack of trust in the news

My thanks to the reader who alerted me to a study of the way misrepresentation and underrepresentation of disadvantaged communities undermines their trust in news. The study was conducted by the Reuters Institute Trust in News Project.

The study’s report uses data from 41 focus groups in Brazil, India, Britain and the United States. 

The report looks at "how differences along lines of race, caste, religion, class, and place may point towards distinct needs and expectations around news and how this intersects with people’s sense of trust in important ways,” the institute says. 

In Brazil, the study focused on black and mixed-race audiences; in India, on audiences from marginalized castes or tribes and Muslim audiences; in Britain on working-class audiences, and in the United States on African American and rural audiences.

Although there were differences in the way study participants saw the world and criticized news media for their coverage of people like them, there were many commonalities in frustrations about news across these groups, the institute says. Most saw news media as not only out of touch but at times as an especially harmful force that did damage to their communities, either through neglecting them entirely or exploiting them, reinforcing harmful stereotypes, or sensationalizing in divisive and polarizing ways.

News media as an institution, especially in Britain, the United States and India, often were seen as an extension of systems aligned to serve those in power — systems many felt excluded from, the institute says.

It is "worth underscoring how similar issues have been raised by study after study after study for a very long time,” the institute says. In 1968, the report notes, the Kerner Commission critiqued similar distortions and inaccuracies in U.S news media.

An article on the report by Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab says the report’s authors are clear that "though trust is thorny and multifaceted, there are opportunities for newsrooms to improve their standing in underserved communities. Those opportunities include relentlessly rooting out bias and inaccuracies, telling a 'more complete story' through news coverage that’s more positive and relevant, diversifying newsroom staffs, and being more engaged and present where people live and work.”

 

The take-home message of Reuters' report, to me, is the fundamental, systemic, long-time nature of this problem in countries with very different histories and economics.

 

I ran out of time working on this item yesterday because I was searching online for an update on solutions journalism — a U.S. media effort in recent years to focus not just on identifying problems, but on solutions to them. For example, The New York Times ran for several years a Fixes section, on "solutions to social problems and why they work.” 

 

An example of a Fixes article is titled “India’s barefoot lawyers,” from 2017. The Times’ summary of the article says: “In India's rural villages, few people seek the protection of law because lawyers are distant and expensive. Now paralegals are coming to help.”

 

The Times closed down its Fixes section in 2021. A list of the Fixes articles is here.

 

If you come across information on ways media are trying to address the problems Reuters points out, please let me know.

The Fox, Dominion settlement

As a packed courtroom was waiting for opening statements to begin on Tuesday, "gasps filled the air" when Judge Eric Davis told the jury shortly before 4 p.m. that the two parties had resolved the matter, says The New York Times. 

 

Fox News and its parent company Fox Corp. had agreed to settle the case for $787.5 million.

 

The settlement, one of the biggest ever in a defamation case, came with this admission from Fox News:

 

"We acknowledge the Court's rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false. This settlement reflects FOX's continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards. We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues.”

 

Dominion Voting Systems had alleged that Fox stars, executives, journalists and guests defamed the election tech company for segments in which conspiracies held it had switched votes for then-President Trump to Democratic challenger Biden.

 

"Dominion started this case because Fox's defamatory statements had severely damaged its reputation,” says Tom Wienner, a retired Michigan corporate litigator who's been following the case closely at the request of NPR. "By largely trying its case in the court of public opinion, Dominion has gone a long way toward restoring its good name. In the process, of course, Fox's own reputation has been seriously undermined.”

 

It's uncommon for defamation suits to get to trial, in part because the bar for proving “actual malice” — the legal standard that requires plaintiffs to show that defendants knew what they were saying was a lie, or had a reckless disregard for the truth — is so high, says the Times. It's rarer yet for one to feature the volume of evidence that Dominion had amassed against Fox.

 

In the run-up to trial, Dominion publicly released internal communications among Fox executives, hosts and producers that revealed how the country’s most-watched cable news network set in motion a strategy to win back viewers who'd tuned out after Trump’s loss. 

 

Those communications showed how employees at Fox expressed serious doubts about and, at times, were scornful of Trump and his allies as they spread lies about voter fraud.

 

Some Fox hosts privately described their colleagues as “reckless” for endorsing Trump’s false claims, acknowledging that there was “no evidence” to back them up. Yet for weeks, Fox continued to give a platform to election deniers despite the doubts about their credibility. Dominion challenged statements that were made on multiple programs on multiple nights. Typically, defamation cases involve just a single disputed statement, the Times says.

 

The settlement deal is a significant amount of money, even for a company the size of Fox, says The Associated Press. It represents about a quarter of the $2.96 billion the company reported earning last year before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization — a figure often used to approximate a company’s cash flow.

 

The settlement is about half of what Dominion was asking for in the trial. But Elie Honig, former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, says, “I didn’t think there was any way they would get $1.6 billion — even when they proved their case, even if they proved it overwhelmingly to a jury. Let’s remember, by its own estimation, Dominion valued the entire company at somewhere between $30 and $80 million. This settlement is 10 times the value of Dominion as an entire company. That’s how strong a statement this is with this number.”

 

Fox faces a separate $2.7 billion lawsuit from Smartmatic USA, a voting-machine company that’s making claims similar to Dominion's. 

 

I’m not seeing any mention of the settlement on Fox News' main web page this morning. Here is what I found when I searched the site.

Media's take as Trump is first current or former president to be indicted

The indictment is under seal, and the Lawfare blog says "we encourage all commentators to refrain alike from triumphant claims that the rule of law has been vindicated or from clucking about witch hunts. There will be plenty of time for that later.”

Sounds sensible to me.

So here is “background material on the fact pattern that has reportedly given rise to the indictment,” from Lawfare.

And here is a “what to know about Alvin Bragg” — the Harlem-raised, Harvard Law-educated Manhattan district attorney who convened the grand jury that indicted Trump — by The Associated Press.

Here is a “what happens next,” with Trump expected to turn himself in next week, also from AP. “There is no playbook for booking an ex-president with U.S. Secret Service protection,” AP says.

If you’re interested, here is a roundup of reaction to the indictment from Trump — "This is Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history,” he says — and others, from Reuters.

And here is reaction from Trump’s 2024 GOP rivals, from Fox News.

Finally, here is what I find interesting possible schadenfreude from our British friends at BBC News:

"In some ways, a former head of state being charged with a crime and possibly even going to prison is not news. It's happened all over the world down the ages: hundreds of presidents, prime ministers and military leaders turfed out of palaces and straight into prisons.

"But America regards itself as exceptional; and Washington, the city on a hill that provides a moral and democratic beacon for the world.

"Historians refer to the 20th Century as The American Century — will they do the same for this one?"

More on journalists’ responsibilities in their financial reporting

“Now that virtually everyone is a member of the media, thanks to social networking, does it even matter how journalists behave if investors can tweet themselves into a panic?” asks Brian Stelter, formerly of CNN and now a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, in The Atlantic.

"The answer is still yes,” he says. "In fact, the ease with which rumors can now spread might make good reporting more valuable than ever.”

Stelter says: "When I asked Bill Grueskin, formerly a deputy managing editor at The Wall Street Journal, about the factors that newsrooms should consider when reporting on a bank crisis, he said that “the main thing for reporters to do is to report the news — as accurately and quickly as they can — and avoid exaggerating or minimizing risks of the fallout from their stories.”

Let’s look at the article that was at the top of The New York Times website Wednesday night.

The headline: "Bank fears go global, sending a shudder through markets."

The subhead: "Stomach-churning volatility in stocks, bonds and other assets on Wednesday reflected renewed worries about the state of the economy and the risks lurking in the financial system.”

At the top of the article is a chart showing the volatility of the S&P 500 from March 8 to 15.

One way to lower our blood pressure when events are unnerving is to expand our perspective. 

So here is the inflation-adjusted 90-year history of the S&P 500. The trend isn't bad, huh?

The Times article begins: "Fear about the unseen risks to the financial system rippled across the globe on Wednesday, breaking the brief calm that had settled over markets and deepening worries that a banking crisis could threaten the economy.

"The turmoil was set off by a panic over the health of Credit Suisse, the 166-year-old Swiss bank that has been reeling from years of mismanagement and poor risk control and that warned this week about problems in its accounting practices.”

"Though the Swiss bank’s difficulties differ from the woes of the American banks that have collapsed in recent days, concern about Credit Suisse added to a sense of dread about the economy in general.”

Added to the dread? For whom? 

In paragraph six, the Times says, "The moves [in markets] dumbfounded some investors, who consider the economies in the United States and elsewhere as more solid than the turmoil suggests. They attributed the chaotic trading to the fact that investors were worried that it might be difficult to spot risks lurking after an unusually fast increase in interest rates over the past year. The moves also highlighted the fragility of the financial markets when investors lose their grasp of what could happen next.”

My question: How are we supposed to keep our grasp, with reporting like this?

Here, from The Washington Post’s personal finance columnist, is "Four money rules when financial news is making you nervous.”

How journalists should cover the 2024 election

Thanks also to the reader who sent me this tweet from media critic and New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen:

 

"Not the odds, but the stakes.
That's my shortand for the organizing principle we most need from journalists covering the 2024 election. Not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for our democracy. Not the odds, but the stakes.”

On Valentine’s Day, a love letter to the universe

I love understanding what’s what about this human experience, and I particularly love it when the understanding is conveyed by good writing.

 

And a gift I've received on this day of love is a New York Times article by Dennis Overbey, whose bio says he’s “been covering the universe for more than 30 years.”

 

And lyrically, I’ve thought more than once. But never more than today:

 

"In the unfathomable darkness and time that is the universe, every star is an omen of hope, a promise of life and shelter, like the lights of a distant ship on a cold sea,” Overbey writes.

 

"And so, courtesy of the James Webb Space Telescope, here is another reminder of the fecundity and generosity of nature: thousands of galaxies, trillions of stars and unnumbered planets, a boundless realm of possibilities stretching back 13 billion years in a small patch of sky in the constellation Hercules.

 

"At lower center is a spiral galaxy known as LEDA 2046648. It looks like a dead ringer for the great galaxy in Andromeda, M31, or its twin, our own Milky Way galaxy — except that the LEDA galaxy is a billion light-years away.

 

"One billion years ago, when the light from this image was emitted, the first multicellular organisms had emerged on Earth and were groping their way up the evolutionary ladder toward plants, fish, dinosaurs, humans and whatever comes next.”

 

"Viewing this snapshot of eternity, it’s hard not to wonder whether microbes or something else were making a similar go of it in LEDA 2046648 or one of the other luminous blobs in the image, and whether we will ever know.”

 

Dennis Overbey, on this day I appreciate your appreciation of the vastness beyond.

 

Here is the Webb's picture of LEDA.