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From Northeast Public Radio, this is the Media Project, a weekly discussion about issues
confronting the media.
Oh, newspapers and meets such interesting people.
They know the lowdown now it can be told.
I'll tell you, right, reliably off the record, about some charming people I have known.
Before I meet politicians and grafters by the score, killers play and fancy, it's really
quite a bar.
Oh, and these Superman meets such interesting people.
They wallow in corruption, crime and door, tingling, lingerie, desk, full press, full press,
extra extra read all about it, it's a mess meets the test.
Oh, and these Superman meets such interesting people.
Wonderful, the reprisal of the press.
On the Media Project this week, we're going to be talking about whether journalists have
given the press AIDS too much power, we're going to talk about covering rates, all kinds
of important issues.
Hello, welcome.
I'm Rex Smith at the Times Union here with Rosemary Armeo from you all the name.
Hello.
Noted investigative journalists and reporter and Dr. Alan Shartak, the CEO of Northeast Public
Radio, columnist, commentator, prognosticator, pontificator, etc.
Don't think I don't understand exactly what you're up to Mr. Ray Smith.
I do.
He says he does.
We need to start out with a do over here because a couple weeks ago when Alan was, Alan
is not complicit in this because he missed the show in case.
And when I'm not here, all things go wrong.
It's, it's true.
This is often, but we did, we did not do a good job with this.
Well, here's the deal.
We were talking about this rate that occurred in Stubenville, Ohio where some young men were
found guilty.
Two high school football players were found guilty of raping in your young woman who was
drunk.
And a writer from Albany makes a good point that she thought that we sounded too sympathetic
to the rapists themselves, right?
Well, we were sympathetic to the rapist.
Our idea was why can't you feel sorry for young men who mess up their lives in the same
way that you do for a young woman whose life has been messed up.
However, the specifics of that case were much more horrific than we let on or in fact
that I even knew about.
I went back and read a lot because of our reader, our letter writer.
It was a hideous case.
The boys humiliated the girl.
They posed her in certain positions.
They took lots of pictures of her, put it up on the internet, talked about it on Facebook
with their friends.
They laughed at the idea that they would be caught or held accountable for that.
It was a truly horrible case.
And I've gotten really interested in this.
This is what you did, letter writer, good thing.
It's made me look into the idea of rape culture, which has come up across the country.
It's a new global woman's movement.
And I actually brought this up to a colleague at work and he goes, well, yeah, but third world
country is not ours, right?
And I mentioned stupid, like, oh, it's the same thing.
That same attitude that those young men could get away with it is the same thing that happens
in New Delhi when men on a bus, commandeer a young woman, beater to death as well as
rape her multiple times and think that it's okay or that people in Egypt can grab women
because they're demonstrating for democracy on the street and sexually assault them and
think that they can get away with it.
It is part and parcel of the same idea.
And interestingly, you're seeing women rise up against this right now and say, okay,
enough.
You know, in in stupid field, there was an interesting element of this.
There's a hacker group that calls self-anonymous that somehow learned about all of it and they
actually brought back some videos and pictures.
The young men had put out there on the internet pictures of the young women in these poses.
They were actually bragging about what had gone on.
So the question is about the role of this group anonymous.
Their efforts at, if you want to call it, is that investigative journalism?
If this is an anonymous group that finds and in effect hacks things in order to expose
some modern day vigilantes.
And then they're going to be in a way because it may be outside the law, but they act as
if they're doing justice.
Those were sorts of records and reports that should have come out by the police and on
the press and it never did.
They were hidden away.
They were disguised.
No one knew about them until hacker.
But that is sometimes the fault of the reporters.
That's it is.
With all due respect, I don't know anything about who covers Stephen Villa, Ohio, but oftentimes
even evidence that's introduced to trial if a reporter's not on top of it because sometimes
buried then.
Or we've run into situations here where a judge will have evidence at hand and will simply
spirit it away in his own chambers.
And in lesser reporters, really, run on top of it.
You can lose evidence that should be exposed to the public.
And you know Rex, you've often spoken quite correctly about value journalism, for one
of a better word, citizen journalism.
The idea that you explain what's going on in the context of the story.
Now here we had a story about these athletes in a culture where athletes are glorified.
And as Rosemary points out, women can often be the exact opposite.
You know, made to be less of people than they are.
And then rape is a way of showing that power.
Yeah, rape is not about sex.
We need more men.
No, no.
You are hearing women are saying things like, how come at my orientation at school they're
telling women how to avoid rape?
Why aren't they telling boys don't rape?
There's a new PSA that's gone viral.
I mean, very interesting.
It's what to do with a drunk girl on your couch.
And it opens up with a guy kind of leering and there's a, you know, scantily clad woman
on the couch.
And he goes, guys, let me show you what I'm going to do to her.
And what he does is cover her with a blanket, put a pillow under her head in a cup of coffee
by her face and says into the camera, real man, respect women.
So you're seeing a backlash against boys.
It's not okay to do this.
You're absolutely right.
And everything you said, but I'm also thinking about the glorification of athletics in this
context that it's okay because there's stars.
Nobody's going to do anything to them.
And that, it seems to me, is a huge part of our culture.
Or are women like it?
Women want to be with these men and throw themselves at a double group, a phenomenon.
You know, the paper in Torrington, Connecticut, the right-of-the-sister citizen recently
had to apologize, in effect, for choice of terms.
There was a rape involving students there.
And in a headlight in the register citizen used the word scandal.
You know, scandal, you know, it's something juicy.
This is crime.
This is violence.
It's not scandal.
The editor said, well, we were talking about the way the school district handled it because
Alan, to your point, these were student athletes.
But in fact, they said, you know, we really need to be more careful about this.
And one of the things that they found was that a form that is appropriate, that is useful
for helping people understand it as a Q&A, to interact with readers about how you're
covering something.
And you've got something this controversial.
A little back and forth with your readers can really go a long way toward explaining
things.
I remember the Joe Patorno case when terms became a big issue.
Like, child rape, is that different than bumping against a body in the shower?
Do you remember all those?
We were trying to kind of pull back on the terminology because it's just so offensive
of what happened.
But in effect, when you do that, you're hiding the crime.
You often need to explain what you're doing to people.
And we have not traditionally done a very good job of that.
But sometimes, no matter what your best explanations are, there's a culture of journalism of
what we think is the way to do things that our readers don't understand.
I'm engaged, as we speak, in fact, with some readers who are upset that we included old
information from previous stories in a current story.
This often happens in the case of an obituary, say, somebody dies.
And in the story, you write about the person who's died.
You bring back the scandal that the scarredist version's life 20 years ago, or something
is related.
A relative is brought back into a story.
There's almost a law that I have experienced.
I really got beaten up quite badly on one of these obituary, as I said, I never cared
for the guy in the air.
Well, and I really got hit very hard because I think it was Abby Huffman and steal this
book.
And people said he's on his way out.
He can't defend himself.
And who the hell are you to kick somebody on the way out?
Now, Rex raises a very interesting point about journalists, which is that if the New York
Times, let's say, doesn't like Shartuck and Shartuck dies and on the way out.
And they find something to diminish the obit.
So either we have a rule that says on the way out, you get a free bus, or we have another
situation, unlike the one you're talking about, which we're talking about here.
And so Rex, it becomes very subjective is my point.
Yeah, the only thing I would take issue with there was if the New York Times doesn't like
you, this is personification that is inappropriate.
New York Times doesn't have a personality.
It doesn't not like someone.
So you don't think they have an S-list at the New York Times?
No, they have C-list.
Shartuck is on the top.
Yeah, that's it.
So they don't have an S-list, right?
And you don't have one at the time, right?
So when somebody like Joe Bruno passes, if he does ever, and I hope he doesn't, then
he scandals, scarred, speaker, and speaker dies.
Well, we will.
We will later.
We will.
That's actually a great example because you'll never be able to avoid the fact that here's
a guy who people love in the New York's capital region, who did a lot of things that people
really appreciate, but who was convicted of a federal corruption charge.
It all goes into the moment.
And O-Bit is a life story.
I objected to when both former presidents Reagan and Ford died.
I thought the coverage overall was faunting and just inaccurate.
It didn't point up all of the unrest and hatred and, you know, the opposition.
Well, this is it.
Because we're being nice to them.
Yeah, good point, but it's very interesting because now things have changed.
So if you want a good O-Bit in most newspapers now, Rex, you can correct me if I'm wrong,
you pay for it, right?
I mean, good O-Bit.
You pay by the way.
You want an O-Bit to say something sweet than you pay for it.
Almost every newspaper now, you pay the debt for the death notice.
Right.
So on the one hand, you get these long death notices about people gone to heaven and,
you know, what else?
And they're in great repose.
And next to it, you got Rex saying, now let me tell you about the scandal that Joe Bruno
went into.
So we have these two kinds of O-Bits now.
We have the official new O-Bits.
If you rise to the occasion that they write about you as opposed to that the grieving family
writes about you.
Joe Bruno's family could put in a really big one.
And people will.
And I'm sure that will be the case.
And, you know, if I were a, a, a, a,
grubbing for money, if I were on the advertising side of things, I'd say great.
This is a good thing, you know, let's have them do that.
The last thing that we'll ever accuse a commercial newspaper of doing is,
well, you know, you do what you have to to survive.
And then in our case, that is, you take a havertime.
Okay.
Here we go again.
We also got a letter Rex criticizing us for, you know, weeping in our beard too much.
Oh, somebody said they didn't like first to talk about the business side of journalism,
right, that we're talking too much about paywalls and that sort of thing, right?
Now we do it weak after weak after weak after weak.
Okay.
So let's give them something juicy.
Yeah.
Go ahead, Rex.
So speaking of women's issues being turned the other way at the BBC, they've gotten
so concerned that they don't have enough diversity in their source list that they've
actually created an expert women database to help journalists find women who they will
actually quote in stories.
First of all, a sense of, you know, did this once in the United States several years ago.
We were supposed to diversify our sources and you've had a little checklist.
Did you, did you look for an agent?
Did you look for a woman?
Did you look for an African American?
And what really, of course, is needed is extensive work by all the reporters, by all of
the news organizations to find out what's out there.
We all go back to the same sources all the time.
Yeah, but, but I do think that this is a point to be made here that there isn't enough
women representation, you know, in these places.
And that we have to make a conscious effort to do better.
Well, we do, but I'm not sure that binders full of women as former presidential candidate
put it is the way to do it.
Gail Collins, the brilliant former opinion pages editor, now Collins, the New York Times,
told Pointer Institute two years ago, one thing that's been consistently true is that women
don't put their hands up as often as men.
Yeah.
And to a certain extent, a factor of a cultural difference that doesn't have as much attention
being focused on women sources as men.
Not to sound like the complete feminist today.
I'm harping on this, but women don't write these editorials or columns either.
And that's, there's been a lot of study about exactly why not.
It's that same thing they don't put up their hand.
And Sherry Long is, hmm, I'll go ahead.
And if we have Carol Gilligan, who has written an academic treatise on this, many of
them.
And fascinating stuff.
Nevertheless, that doesn't excuse us in terms of doing our due diligence and making sure
that we have people.
Is there a point at which, and I think this was the question that Gennett was being asked
some years ago when, yes, they had their, what didn't they call it the key sources list
or something?
Gennett at the time had 100 newspapers.
And at each paper, you had to have certain sources and you had to have certain amount
of diversity in your stories.
So in some of these small communities, there would be, let's say, one Asian person with
some prominence in the business community.
That person would be called for comment on just every story.
Well, you know, our friend, yours friend, my friend, was my friend, a Gerald Benjamin,
who is the former dean at New Pulse and now runs a major institute down there in Brilliant
Guy.
He's called the upstate quote by the New York Times.
Yeah, upstate quote, right.
There he is.
Upstate quote, everything.
Low Benjamin.
It's just, it's lazy sourcing or inexperienced sourcing, you know, young reporters come in and
they're two or three good people who they can always go to to get something and you
don't go out and get more there.
And by the way, and by the way, you make a very good point because all journalists are
under pressure, especially when they're time journalists, time journalists.
And so there are certain things that count.
Now I'm regularly, you're fairly regularly called to be on the John Gambling show in New
York City on WOR.
And I think that one of the criteria is, will you call them back and fast?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
If you won't, you're out.
Absolutely.
Oh, yeah.
Timing makes everything.
If you're a broadcast producer and you can get somebody who's willing to go on the air within
a few minutes, then go.
Well, I think that's true of print journalists also.
So they need to find people who will call them back so that they can file their stories
in a timely fashion.
Now, lots of women, some men too, I don't mean to make it a, you know, completely gender
thing, but they want to, they don't want to just say something off the cuff.
They want to think about it and polish it a little bit and get back to you.
I don't think that's a gender thing.
That's pretty offensive.
I think that men, yeah, no, I'm more likely to be, yeah, rosemary, hit them full of BS
than women.
No, it is a full BS.
Oh, clicker on their feet.
Okay, no, but more confident.
But rosemary has a very good point.
Thank you, Ellen.
I'll tell you what it is.
And that is that we have a new show here on WAMC, which is the round table on the round
table.
It's a wonderful place in which we are transitioning from the hard news of morning edition to the
softer news that it goes on.
Joe Donnie who does these wonderful interviews, as we all know, with people who have things
like memoir writing, things like that.
And so, and so what ends up, and so what ends up, happy, why are you all laughing?
So, so what ends up happening is that we have this first hour.
Now your feminist instincts, I think, prove true because we love you to be on that show,
rosemary.
You're on because I call back probably.
No, because you are, you are willing to take, you are willing, if we're going to talk
about four subjects, you're willing, as you are here, to talk about four subjects.
Yeah.
There are other people who call back and say, now exactly what are you going to talk
about?
And I don't know anything about that subject.
Yeah.
That does, why should that be a qualification for speaking public radio?
That does not talk about anything.
I know that it will stop rosemary.
And that's what I love about her.
That's what I love about her.
Yeah, who she's now with Facebook, I'm sorry, I'm blanking on her name, wrote a book
called Lean In and she talks about that, that men will go after a job for which they might
be 60% qualified.
Women have to be almost 100% qualified before they'll ask for it.
It's the same thing.
It's your, you're just trained to be perfectly controlled, prepared and ready to go.
Yeah, but think about that for a second.
If you take a look, you mentioned Mitt Romney without mentioning his name before.
You take a look at this last presidential election and women were overwhelmingly democratic
in terms of the election where they voted.
They were overwhelming and supported Obama.
Yeah, that's right, right.
Which shows that women are very, very smart.
And what did, did I say something?
So, and prepared and do their homework.
I don't want to generalize, but many people do.
Okay, Dr. Shartak does what it generalize.
She doesn't know what she wants.
I just like, I really want to agree with you even though you're, you're reasoning, you
know, I would have to fault, but yeah, I like the conclusion there.
If you'd like to offer your thoughts media at wamc.org, we are the media project.
Dr. Alan Shartak, Rosemary Armeo and Rex Smith, here we are.
And you know, one of the things that we ought to talk about here, and it is often a factor
in the state capital.
We have a lot of political aids and advisors who try to manipulate news stories.
I was one such person for four years in my career, actually, when I was a young man, I became
a, a flack for an obscure Midwestern congressman before I got his name because you always
mentioned, always a great guy, Floyd Fithian.
Wait a second.
You have a little list of Floyd Fithian.
He was a great guy.
In fact, my one of the proudest moments we did a mailing to the agricultural mailing list
because there was a rural 14 county district.
Lots of farmers.
And so I probably wrote the headline on the newsletter, Floyd Fithian fights for farmers.
Just because I'm fascinated by this time, spell Fithian.
As FITHA and its Welsh, he's from a farming family in Nebraska, but he was representing
me.
He was a professor.
He was like you.
He was a professor at Purdue University, actually, before he was elected to Congress.
Now the late Floyd Fithian.
But back in the, what years were those?
Have you come up with an F for a little race?
The late Floyd Fithian.
The late Floyd Fithian.
Faded Floyd Fithian.
Anyway, press aids, it is said here.
Are those who are questioning about the power that journalists are giving press aids?
I guess you would say they're giving them power by seating to the manipulation, by being
too willing to yield to the...
Hey, you want a source?
And that's what they're doing.
Go here, sit here.
Give me your camera.
It's ridiculous that the reporters are going along with this.
And I loved that Joe Biden's people took on a reporter on the University of Maryland
or Lucy Doglish's.
They had a journalism school.
These swizziers had the reporters' committee on press freedom and she's dashed off in
no-tombs.
What do you think this is?
Some third-world country.
She's great.
And they apologized.
But it does go to show.
And I think Rex knows this, that the two often we get into trading relationships.
I'll give you information if you go along with me with what I want.
So the candidate does not want to be asked about this when you do your interview.
And how many people wanting the candidate don't go along with that and say, okay, I mean,
it's got to be tough and you've got to say, okay, then we don't want the candidate.
But you know, you want money.
We're witnessing a transition right now that is overdue.
It was about three or four months ago that the Times reporter Jeremy Peters wrote a story
that they played in the front page that exposed a practice that had become prevalent in Washington
that I wasn't aware of.
I don't think any of us here were quote approval that reporters would actually send in the
quotes that they had recorded that they had taken down from political sources and the
offices of those politicians would change the quotes or would approve them say, yes,
that's okay.
Which is an outrageous practice I hadn't heard of.
Margaret Sullivan, the new Times public editor who had been the editor of the Buffalo News,
made a big deal about this and her column, Prada the Times, and the Washington Bureau of
the New York Times and the managing editor announced that this practice would stop at
least as far as that newspaper is concerned.
I read a report last week suggesting that yes, the Times believes that a few sources have
dried up as a result.
Some politicians have refused.
They've missed some interviews that some other people have gotten.
But you know, that's just the way it's got to be.
I cannot imagine going along with this practice and saying, okay, you said this, but we're
not going to quote you if you don't want us to.
So of course, the negotiation has to be when the interview gets set up, does somebody
say, by the way, we want quote approval.
And if you say, yes, you can have quote approval, shame on you.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And if you say no, and they say, well, then we're not going to do it.
You say, okay, that's right.
That's the only thing.
Yeah, you can't really fault the press agents for trying to do this.
I'm very quick now.
The reporters who agreed to it.
That's right.
I very quickly want to go back and compliment you on one thing Rosemary that you said
before that I don't think we took enough notice of, which is that when you were talking
about the response somebody put up this thing on YouTube and it went viral, that's a very
important point that our journalism has now become sensitive to the fact that we're
not it.
You can get a million hits on something that goes viral and somehow people know that
it's there.
Yes, sir.
The past two days as the Supreme Court has been looking at the same sex marriage thing,
the internet has become red with a symbol.
It's a red background with pink and equal sign.
It stands for marriage equality.
People are putting it up in lieu of their picture on Facebook signing it off to each other.
That's another thing.
I can never say the word M E M E M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M
Yeah, that's what that is.
That's a meme.
And that's that it's like instantly signing on saying, hey, I agree with it.
My boy, John is annoyed about somebody who is being held prison or somewhere.
And so he's put the prisoners picture up where his picture should be.
Uh-huh.
And thousands of people suddenly think that Jonas is being held prison or somewhere.
Right.
That's what happened.
Why is he saying a lot of money?
No, I'm just kidding.
There is a lot of talk by real activists, however, about how this is all nice and you show
support, but that's not really activism.
You can put a picture up, but you really don't get action into that.
Well, it's better than nothing.
Well, I agree.
But, yeah.
But, you know, the interesting thing, the point of social media too with respect to this
notion of even a quote approval is how embarrassing for reporters, if you're exposed as being a gatekeeper
manipulator, let's say that's something that you agreed to let the off the record.
In fact, then finds its way into print or finds its way electronically out how embarrassed
would you be?
And so you have to think about that, even if that's not a realistic possibility, think
about the fact that if there were somebody else in the room with you listening to this
quote, how embarrassed would you be if you said, well, okay, never mind.
We won't do that.
What role of truth telling us that?
Okay, then.
Well, we're out of time.
We have to go.
We have to let Pete sing some more, which is really something we always look forward to here.
Don't we?
Oh, I do.
He's my hero.
Absolutely.
We're glad to have him on the Media Project.
Alan Shartak, Rosemar Mayo, Rex Smith here, and we invite you to join us again next week
right here.
I'm a living stage now.
I lose Superman, not such interesting people.
When they know they've got a people's fight to waste.
Tingle and linger, newspaper, girl.
Got a free new world of bill.
Meet the people.
That's a thrill.
All together fits the bill.
I lose Superman, not such interesting people.
It's one of the holy, rough, present, personal.
Now publishers are such interesting people.
Their policy is an acrobatic thing.
They claim to represent...
