Is freedom of the press a basic liberty or just a special-interest protection? In the Boston Globe, Alex Beam calls out journalists and First Amendment advocates for their tepid--or nonexistent--defense of Nicholas Ciarelli, whom Apple is suing for reporting truthful information about the company's plans.
Where is the outrage?
Apple Computer sued 19-year-old journalist Nicholas Ciarelli in January for disclosing trade secrets on his Apple news website Think Secret. A typical Think Secret annoyance: The site correctly predicted the appearance of the Mac Mini, a small, low-cost Macintosh computer, two weeks before the product was officially announced.
Ciarelli is accused of doing exactly what reporters all over America are supposed to be doing: finding and publishing information that institutions don't want to reveal. Do you think the Pentagon would have released additional details about football hero Pat Tillman's death by friendly fire in Afghanistan unless pressed by Washington Post reporters? No, I don't think so either. To think that a 19-year-old man should face trial for engaging in behavior that is the cornerstone of our democracy is sickening.
Where are the always-vocal guardians of the First Amendment? Where is the American Civil Liberties Union? Where is the American Society of Newspaper Editors? Where, for that matter, is Harvard's Nieman Foundation? They have publicly supported the higher profile case of The New York Times's Judith Miller and Time magazine's Matt Cooper, who have been ordered to reveal the sources of their reporting on the contentious Valerie Plame case. But I found not a word about Ciarelli -- a Harvard undergraduate and a beat reporter for the Harvard Crimson -- on the Nieman Watchdog website.
Maybe it's time for the Niemans to stop playing footsie with the butchers of Beijing and start standing up to the control freaks of Cupertino. The Ciarelli case "really hasn't come to our attention in any significant way at all," Nieman curator Robert Giles says.
It gets worse. Read the whole thing.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 24, 2005 • Comments
Here's a thought experiment. Suppose, like Megan McCardle (among others), you think that Newsweek should have distrusted the Koran-in-the-toilet story, because it's hard to flush a book. But you'd like to know if your instincts are correct. So, in a CSI-style experiment, you buy a Koran, tear out some pages (my assumption, though not Megan's, is a two-step desecration), flush them down your own toilet, and see what happens. There are no Muslims present, you don't plan to advertise your actions, and your intentions are purely scientific. How many Americans would think this behavior is outrageous?
My guess is almost none. After all, nobody got hurt. While many Americans believe it's wrong to shock and humiliate Muslim prisoners by violating their religious taboos, very, very few Americans--mostly Muslims, of course--would themselves be horrified by the mere idea of flushing a Koran. And that, I think, is the real bias of the Newsweek report. American reporters, whether secular or religious, simply don't feel instinctive rage at the idea of Koran desecration and, hence, don't expect such reports to generate riots. Diversifying reporting staffs to include more red state types couldn't change that bias. By Western standards, it is, after all, completely idiotic--not to mention highly immoral--to kill people over the treatment of an inanimate object, however disrepectful the symbolism. The American idea of a "culture war" is an entirely verbal debate over whether it should be constitutional to impose a small fine on someone who burns the American flag or whether art like Piss Christ should get federal subsidies. We don't actually believe in killing people over these things. And, of course, few Americans, least of all religious Americans, think the Koran is terribly special.
With its Western biases, Newsweek thought it was writing about allegations of prisoner abuse, a human rights issue. Its overseas audience had a different reading. The differences between us and them really are bigger than the differences between us and us.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 23, 2005 • Comments
In his parting column, NYT public editor Daniel Okrent had this to say about people like me:
7. If you've been noticing more and more unfamiliar bylines in the paper, it's no accident. Additional sections, the demands of The Times's Web site and its television operation, and generalized economic pressures have spread finite staff resources across the requirements of a much wider mission, and have increased the paper's dependence on freelance writers.
Now, I've got nothing against freelance writers; I've been one myself, and tomorrow morning I'll become one again. It's a respectable way to make a living (even if a fiscally preposterous one). Though Times freelancers agree to abide by the paper's ethical rules and professional standards, there's no way someone who's working for The Times today, some other publication tomorrow and yet another on Tuesday can possibly absorb and live by The Times's complex code as fully as staff members. Unrevealed conflicts, violations of Times-specific reporting rules and a variety of other problems have repeatedly found their way to my office over the past 18 months.
The economic pressures on all newspapers are real, of course, and no modern newspaper can thrive unless it commits resources to new forms of distribution. I'm sure The Times devotes a larger share of its revenue to reporting than any other paper in the nation. But the price of stretching a staff too thin, and of patching the weak spots with day labor, could be much, much more expensive.
Damn straight I don't "live by The Times's complex code," since I have my own personal integrity--and brand--to worry about. I do, of course, abide by the provisions of my contract. Those provisions are not identical to those by which staffers are governed; if they were, I would have to quit, since I subsidize my writing with speaking. But Okrent is right about one thing: The Times does get my labor, and the labor of its other freelancers, dirt cheap (with no raises!). We also generally pay our own expenses. The upside is that we get to be independent thinkers and don't drown in a giant, semi-functional bureaucracy.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 23, 2005 • Comments
If I told a hard-nosed journalist that I saw a blimp hovering slightly west of downtown Dallas on Friday night, that journalist might be a little skeptical. Sure, the Mavericks were playing the Suns, but you can't see through the roof of American Airlines Center. Why send a blimp? A careful reporter wouldn't take my word for it. He'd check it out.
But, assuming he knew me to be a reliable source in the past, he wouldn't be completely negligent simply to take my word for it and report that a blimp was in the Dallas sky, or at least that some people had seen one. And the story would in fact be true. There was indeed a blimp over American Airlines Center on Friday night, as the game telecast confirmed.
But suppose I told the same journalist that I saw a flying saucer from outer space hovering in the same place. A mainstream reporter won't believe me at all. Unless he heard the same thing from a lot of other people, he probably wouldn't even look into the story and debunk my tale with the blimp explanation. He'd just think I was delusional.
Much--though by no means all--journalistic bias lies in reporters' assessments of what's likely to be true. Those assessments are based in part on experience with sources and in part on how the reporter understands the world. What do you believe about political motivations? What do you believe about the way the economy works? What do you believe about the likely behavior of U.S. soldiers in combat, or of business executives, or of the clergy, or of Republicans, or of Jews? What do you believe about human nature in general? About political institutions? About the corrupting influence of money? About the power of ideology? About the relative importance of genetics versus culture, nature versus nurture? About the prevalence or sustainability of discrimination? About the influence of violence on TV? About the effectiveness of conspiracies?
Journalists make such judgment calls all the time. So, in fact, does everyone. We can't make sense of the world, or evaluate new information, without some mental model of how things work.That's why audiences gravitate toward media that share their worldviews, and it's why journalists can be fair or accurate, but we can never be unbiased unless we treat every source, and every claim, as equally credible. Like most mainstream American reporters, I'm reluctant to believe in UFOs, apparitions of the Virgin Mary, Jewish plots, or a radio transmitter in George Bush's jacket. Call me biased, but these widely believed phenomena simply don't comport with either my life experience or with my mental model of how the world works.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 22, 2005 • Comments
In my March NYT column, I discussed the price-measurement dilemmas created by subjective quality improvements like more aesthetic hotel design. Back in August 2003, I wrote a column on the increasing value of intangibles; I noted there that technocratic regulation (in this case, energy-oriented lighting rules) rarely recognize that consumers get real benefits from qualities that are hard to measure objectively--unless, of course, you accept the subjective evaluations captured by prices:
Prices capture the relative value people put on intangibles. The price system lets individuals make trade-offs among goods, without having to articulate a "good reason" for their preferences. It rewards value you cannot easily count.
Some critics find that wasteful. "Addiction to a strict and unremitting valuation of all things in terms of price and profit" leaves executives "unfit to appreciate those technological facts that can be formulated only in terms of tangible mechanical performance," Thorstein Veblen wrote in 1921 in "The Engineers and the Price System."
On a trip to the supermarket today, I came across a good example of how the "same" product can take on different values, even to the same consumer (in this case, me). I bought a 12-pack of 12-ounce Diet Coke, a staple item in the Postrel refrigerator, for $2.98; that's about 2.1 cents per ounce or 24.8 cents per can. Since I run though a lot of Diet Coke cans, especially when I'm writing, I generally know where the good deals are and try to pay no more than $3 for a 12-pack.
Yet I also purchased a six-pack of .5-liter (16.9-ounce) bottles for $2.78: 2.7 cents an ounce or 46.3 cents a bottle. Unlike the "staple" cans for home consumption, I'll take these bottles with me in my purse or the car. I do generally treat a single bottle, regardless of its size, as one serving, but I like to be able to close the container to avoid spills.
Finally, I bought a cold 20-ounce bottle of Diet Coke for $1.08, or 5.2 cents an ounce, and drank it immediately. If I'd had the change, I might have bought a 12-ounce can of even colder Diet Coke from a vending machine for 50 cents, or 4.2 cents an ounce.
I can explain all these differences, but they aren't exactly "rational" in the engineering sense (even assuming you accept the rationality of drinking a dozen or so Diet Cokes a day). I doubt that Veblen would approve of these wildly different prices. But Friedrich Hayek would understand.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 22, 2005 • Comments
My latest NYT column takes a look at the economic reasons media bias may not only persist but intensify--even (or especially) in a highly competitive marketplace.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 18, 2005 • Comments
Observant readers may have noticed some changes to the website sections above. We've added two new ones, to cover my current research on glamour and on "the variety revolution." While he was working on the new sections, designer Adrian Quan also tweaked the site format a bit to make it easier for readers, most noticeably by expanding the column width. Narrow screen displays are fairly rare these days, and wider columns mean I can stop using smaller type for indented quotes.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 16, 2005 • Comments
In a fun interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, John Tierney, a Pittsburgh native, talks about life as a New York Times op-ed columnist. (Thanks to Martin Wooster for the link.) This bit may suggest why the NYT has made the otherwise puzzling decision to charge for online access to its op-ed columns.
Q: Everyone in our business is agonizing about what will happen to journalism because of blogs and the Internet. I don't want to be cruel, but it seems to me that opinion columnists in newspapers are the most vulnerable to incursions from the Internet. If you have 8 million blogs with people expressing their opinions, why would you want to go to the newspaper?
A: There certainly is lots more competition, but it's interesting that on the Times web site the op-ed columnists are usually among the top e-mailed articles of the day. I believe also that our Web pages are among the most visited. The cliche is that there is so much information out there that people are looking for someone to interpret it for them. Now there are plenty of blogs that will do the interpretation for you, but I think that the more sources there are, the more people want to find some common ground.
I was a freelance magazine writer for 10 years and I hated The New York Times because I would spend two months writing what I considered the definitive article on something and put all this effort into it and it would be in a national magazine, and then an article on the subject would be in The New York Times and it would get all this attention because that was the bulletin board people looked at. I think people still want that bulletin board. Also, I've noticed since I started the column that there are many blogs that start debates based on the columns and the old media.
Despite all those emailed columns, it seems likely that the Times is underestimating online readers' elasticity of demand and is risking its status as the most-talked-about (and blogged-about) newspaper in the world. Besides, as various blog commenters have pointed out, (examples here and here), since the columns are syndicated you can find many of them on other newspapers' sites.
Left out of the blog discussion is an important aspect of the new premium service: Home delivery subscribers like me get it free, and it includes access to the large NYT archives that now charge on a per-article basis. Also, the premium columns include not just those on the op-ed page but others elsewhere in the paper, including major business section columnists.
I can't blame the Times for trying to sell more home-delivery subscriptions, which should boost ad revenue, or for trying to generate some revenue from its website. Maybe if they get this to work, they can give me a raise. But I'm not optimistic--about either the premium service or that raise.
UPDATE: "Well, if they throw in the Crossword Puzzle, I might consider it," writes reader Ray Eckhart, reminding me that the Times has long charged for online access to its puzzles.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 16, 2005 • Comments
The new Carnival of Tomorrow is up, featuring links to future-oriented blog postings and stories (including one from this site). Check it out.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 12, 2005 • Comments
On his excellent Long Tail blog, Wired editor Chris Anderson puts the diversity of blogs (and the narrow imagination of their critics) in statistical context. His entry echoes some of the points in my recent Forbes column, which has a new, more easily accessible link.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 12, 2005 • Comments