David Spett

Earlier: Is this English?, Curious ad

Please stop asking me what I thought of Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo. I’m sure it was amazing, but I didn’t watch it. Lately I’ve had better things to do with my time, like growing a network of progressive student publications and planning three days of conferences featuring prominent journalists to train their staffs.

I’ve come to care less and less about Obama’s speeches because of the huge disconnect between his words and actions. Our president talks of turning the page on George W. Bush’s illegal imprisonment programs, all the while authorizing their continuation in Bagram, Afghanistan. He talks of his faith in the American court system, all the while advocating that Congress permit him to indefinitely detain anyone he wants. He talks of leading the most open government in our history, all the while refusing to release photos showing how we treat our prisoners — and even supporting legislation to change the law because it doesn’t permit the secrecy he desires.

The campaign for the White House is over, so it’s time to stop getting excited about rhetoric while ignoring the president’s actions. I’ll celebrate when Israel and the Palestinians make real steps toward peace, when a reformist candidate defeats Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, and when Afghanistan and Pakistan show at least some signs of stabilizing.

Until then, let’s talk about policy and actions to achieve those goals, not words and promises that make us feel good but actually accomplish little.

(Cross-posted at CampusProgress.org)

Rick Edmonds of Poynter argues today that you could “make a killing on Wall Street” by investing in newspaper stocks. He offers the following table:

COMPANY - THREE-MONTH LOW - MAY 11 CLOSE
New York Times $3.50 - $6.81
Gannett $2.00 - $5.35
McClatchy $.40 - $.69
Lee $.40 - $1.65
Media General $1.40 - $3.40
Washington Post $308 - $370
E.W. Scripps $.80 - $1.96
A.H. Belo $.70 - $1.61
Journal Communications $.40 - $1.66

After presenting some disclaimers – “don’t try this at home”! –  Edmonds concludes that well, maybe things are looking up after all.

I think some investors buy into my standard line when asked if there are glimmers of hope for the industry: “the recession will be over sooner or later.” Then advertising may bounce back, strongly in some categories like auto where nervous consumers have postponed purchases.

I hear this sort of logic a lot among old media-types (and, I admit, I used to believe it myself): “Everything will be OK if we can just ride out this storm.”

The problem is that print media’s woes have been brewing for decades. The internet is gaining readers, print is losing them, and newspapers don’t really have any plan to cope. Edmonds and his peers should be arguing the exact opposite: that journalists must ignore this uptick, assume the worst and respond to this recession with major efforts to innovate. Because eventually, there will be another recession, and journalism will need to survive that one, too.

There are several other problems here, some more minor than others: Edmonds’ table compares apples and oranges, since the first stock prices are from different dates during a three-month period; he assumes (wrongly, I’d surmise) that data from the past 90 days are indicative of future performance; and he assumes that rising stock prices suggest the newspaper industry is in better shape than it was 90 days ago (and it may well be, but a company’s health is based on much more than just its stock price).

The point should be that stock prices are irrelevant. A few – maybe most, and maybe even all – of the companies on Edmonds’ list are going to fail if they don’t make sweeping changes. This is no time to take a deep breath and relax.

I mean, seriously. Yet another display of my alma mater’s incompetence:

This ad ran beside today’s NYT story on the future of j-school.

See also: Badly-written Facebook ad

Every now and then, I wonder if the decline of newspapers could actually be good for democracy. Today was one of those days, with two pretty disturbing items in the Washington Post.

First, a superficial, uncritical front-page profile of Ben Bernanke. Dean Baker has a pretty good summary of what this misses (in a nutshell: even a passing mention of the possibility that Bernanke and his ideology might have some responsibility for the economic crisis). One passage particularly stood out:

[Bernanke's leadership] strategy has paid dividends. At the December meeting, Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher didn’t want to cut rates and initially dissented from the decision, sources said. At the last minute, in the spirit of public unanimity, he changed his vote.

Disturbingly, the writer implies dissent is bad, while Bernanke’s “strategy” must be the reason the Fed governors were unified. Like so many other stories in the MSM, this one’s littered with superficial, uncriticial (hate to use those adjectives again, but I really think they’re the best) assumptions mired in conventional wisdom.

The second concern from today’s paper: A response about halfway down in this online chat with WaPo congressional correspondent Paul Kane.

The anonymous questioner asks, “Care to defend yourself against this criticism from Media Matters” suggesting you didn’t provide proper context when quoting GOP Sen. Olympia Snowe criticizing Democrats?

Kane reacted strongly: “Someone tell Media Matters to get over themselves and their overblown ego of righteousness.” (Sensitive much, Paul?)

The real problem comes later. “We reported what Olympia Snowe said. That’s what she said. That’s what Republicans are saying. I really don’t know what you want of us,” Kane writes.

Unintended sexual innuendo aside, that response is ethically bankrupt. Have reporters no responsibility to provide some context and point out that these very senators criticizing Democrats for circumventing the filibuster, themselves circumvented the filibuster when they held a majority… and criticized minority Dems who disagreed? (To be fair, the doubletalk applies to both parties, but that’s not the point.)

If you’re just going to copy down what senators say, I might as well watch C-SPAN, and I see no reason to lament the loss of your job or the death of your industry.

I’ve been getting this ad a lot lately on Facebook. Are they really sure they want me back? Also, is this a guarantee that every Medill graduate will get jobs (note the plural)? Lastly, who hyphenates “multi-media”?

Missing from all the news stories about Obama’s pick for education secretary, Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan, is any mention of the fact that several dozen children in Duncan’s school system have been murdered or injured in each of the past few years, largely due to gun violence. In fact, the toll (more than three dozen) eclipses that of the Virginia Tech shootings in the spring of 2007.

Duncan proponents hail him as a visionary who’ll make a great education secretary. Maybe so. A fair argument can be made that since most of the violence occurred outside of school property, and since it doesn’t have much to do with education policy, he doesn’t deserve all (or any) of the blame.

Still, the mainstream national media’s downplaying of the killings — with a few notable exceptions — has always irked me. None of the murdered children were white or wealthy; if they were, we might have paid more attention, as we did with the Virginia Tech massacre. If the killings had been more sensational, or had they been less related to gang incidents in an inner city, they might have actually registered on a national level.

Whether or not Duncan deserves blame for the disturbing spate of violence against schoolchildren, they’re a part of his legacy as Chicago’s public schools chief, and they ought to be included in any news article about his nomination. Senators would be wise to address the issue in confirmation hearings as well.

Further reading: The Chicago Tribune published an interactive map chronicling the killings of the 07-08 school year. And a year and a half ago, I wrote about this issue for my school newspaper and interviewed a sociology professor about possible causes of the violence.

(Cross-posted at Pushback.org)

When a story about a college paper hits Jim Romenesko’s web site, a news hub for journalists, it’s a big deal–at least in the media world.

On Friday, Romenesko featured a Seattle Times story about a paper at the University of Washington that ran the following illustration alongside a column opposing gay marriage:

The student columnist, John Fay, argued his case:

Once you’ve legalized gay marriage, why not polygamy, incest, bestiality or any other form of union?

Students at the school were outraged, the Times reported:

Organizers of the campus group “Students for a Hate Free Daily” say they expect about 300 people to show up for a campus rally today after more than 1,000 signed up with the group online. The Graduate and Professional Student Senate, meanwhile, passed a resolution this week demanding the paper apologize. [...]

Freshman Kyle Rapinan, who is organizing today’s rally, said the column is homophobic and incites “fear and hate.” The Daily staff should take sensitivity training, he said, and have better protocols for dealing with delicate topics.

I’d agree that the column and accompanying illustration are wrongheaded, disrespectful, and irrational, and I admire the outrage of Rapinan and others. Yet I have to differ with my fellow progressives in blaming the student paper, which simply served as a medium for a conservative argument we’ve all heard before.

Frankly, when critics say the column “incited fear and hate,” I think they mean to say they were offended. So what? We should tolerate ideas that differ from our own and that we find abhorrent, just as we expect others to do for us. There’s no other option in a free society.

The appropriate response to a laughable, conservative argument like this one isn’t to stamp it out–it’s to engage it.

If progressives want to win the fight against homophobes and gay marriage opponents–and right now, we’re not winning–we need to convince people that legalizing gay marriage is not a slippery slope to bestiality, polygamy, and incest, among other things. (Another fine solution: Get government out of the marriage business.)

We can start by focusing criticism on the proper target: the incredibly strong forces working to perpetuate intolerance, not the mainstream student press for printing what has become, sadly, a widely-accepted belief.

(Cross-posted at Pushback.org)

I’ve just begun a job with the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C, administering the group’s program to fund and support college student publications. More on my About Me page.

I’m excited to work with college journalists across the country. No longer will I write and report every day, but I should be able to occasionally post to Campus Progress’ web site and Pushback.org.

HARRISBURG (Nov. 20) – When compared to other states, taxes and spending in Pennsylvania aren’t very high, according to a new study from the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center.

“Unlike what we hear in the Capitol, Pennsylvania is not the highest-taxed state or the highest spending state,” said Sharon Ward, director of the left-leaning think tank. “In fact, we are in the lower half of the country. We rank 32nd [highest] on taxes and 30th on government spending, as a share of personal income.”

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