Gateway Journalism Review Vol. 44, Issue 334

St. Louis Journalism Review Presents:

INSIDE THIS ISSUE Journalism’s infatuation with Glenn Greenwald

By William H. Freivogel, page 7 U.S. drone use hovers on boundaries of First, Fourth amendments

By John Jarvis, page 12 Spring 2014 • Volume 44 Number 334 • $8

Working in the footsteps of legends: The Hannibal (Mo.) Courier-Post

By William A. Babcock & Paul Van Slambrouk, page 18 Post-Dispatch’s Bill McClellan: A storyteller extraordinaire

By Terry Ganey, page 29

Media Accountability

News councils’ demise leaves black hole in journalism accountability

by William A. Babcock When a journalism institution dies, there is a black hole in the mass media universe, regardless of the size of the journalism constellation.

And with the death of more and more magazines and newspapers, these black holes appear to be increasing at an astronomical rate.

True, new-media galaxies are also rapidly forming as websites proliferate, but voids – often traditional or legacy media voids – remain.

Media accountability tools also are being extinguished. Ombudsmen, for example, are on decline, as discussed in this space in the last GJR. And although there are dozens of news or press councils around the globe, there are, as of May 31, no longer any news councils left in the United States.

The now-nascent National News Council had a shelf life if some 10 years. Norman Isaacs, a founder of the NNC, was a distinguished Pulitzer Prize-winning editor and author who created the nation’s first newspaper ombudsman. But even such a respected journalist as Isaacs was unable to keep the NNC afloat once it came under attack from the New York Times and CBS, whose executives and journalists refused to participate in (and support) council activities and hearings. The NNC closed its doors in 1984.

Unfortunately, the 21st century has been particularly unkind to U.S. news councils: • The Media Council Hawaii, formerly the Honolulu Community Media Council, was established in 1970. Today it seems to be a council in name only.

• The Minnesota News Council, founded in 1970 by the Minnesota Newspaper Association, finally shuttered its doors three years ago. As did most news councils, the MNC fielded complaints by the individuals and organizations thinking they had been harmed by the media. The MNC considered itself to be a “forum of fairness,” having and desiring no punitive powers or legal authority.

• The New England News Council, established in 2006, eventually changed its name to New England News Forum, and decided to no longer hear public complaints against media outlets, but rather to host discussions about news-coverage issues.

• The Southern California News Council, despite receiving $75,000 in seed funding by the Knight Foundation in 2006, never got off the ground because of a lack of support from California State University, Long Beach, which was to have been its home base.

• And as of May 31, the Washington News Council is closing after a 15-year run.

(See accompanying story by John Hamer on next page.)

Although dozens of press councils still operate around the world, Hamer, president and executive director of WNC, admitted in a recent interview with the Poynter Institute that America’s last news council had a “fragile existence.” Indeed, WNC existed largely because of a $100,000 matching grant from the Gates Foundation.

The Minnesota News Council, the nation’s granddaddy of press councils, reported that some 90 percent of the complaints it received were resolved without hearings. The remaining 10 percent of complaints were resolved at council hearings, comprising equal numbers of public and media members. During its 41-year existence, the council ruled in favor of the public about half of the time, and for the media about half the time.

Gary Gilson, MNC executive director, said it had become increasingly difficult to raise money to support Minnesota’s council. The Star Tribune newspaper for many years contributed thousands of dollars to MNC. The local Cowles Media Co. sold the paper in 1998 to McClatchy, which subsequently resold the paper eight years later. With each sale, the interest in and financial support of the Minnesota news council on the part of the newspaper’s new owners diminished.

“After 2000, local corporations lost interest in supporting media accountability,” Gilson

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said. “And with the advent of emails, people could communicate directly to reporters. But communication to reporters is in secret.”

By contrast, news council hearings and deliberations were open to the public. Council decisions, while they could be embarrassing to the media, carried no punitive sanctions, and news councils regularly informed the public of media mistakes. News council supporters point out that this is preferable to legal suits, which can cost the media hundreds of thousands of dollars to litigate.

And as news council hearings were in no way legal or governmental, no plaintiffs’ or defendants’ attorneys were involved, and no billable hours were ever generated. It’s little wonder that most attorneys seldom were big fans of news councils.

As opposed to legal hearings, “cases” coming before news councils did not need to be legally actionable. Rather, issues of fairness, balance, responsibility and accuracy generally were taken up by news councils, instead of cases involving libel.

That said, such media ethics forums are all now extinct in the United States, even though one-time detractor Mike Wallace of CBS eventually changed his tune and called for a national news council. Later in his life, Walter Cronkite also advocated for statewide news councils.

Despite such prominent news council proponents, modern-day corporations, institutions and well-endowed prospective individual donors increasingly were reluctant to financially support media accountability organizations such as news councils.

Too, 21st century news councils in the United States found it difficult to accommodate tweets, social media, journalists unaffiliated with traditional mass media – and, in general, a world where journalism and journalists are ever changing.

One can only hope that American news council’s one brief, shining moment is not forever extinguished during the current newmedia explosion, and that a new accountability star might eventually be born. 

Media Accountability

Last news council in U.S. passes torch for accountability forward to citizens Editor’s note: More information about the closing of the Washington News Council can be found online at http://wanewscouncil. org/2014/04/09/washington-news-council-to-close-on-may-31/

by John Hamer The Washington News Council closes its doors May 31 after 15 years of holding the news media in the state of Washington publicly accountable for accuracy, fairness and ethics.

Why? The media ecosystem has changed dramatically and is still evolving daily. Having an independent citizens’ organization review and vote on complaints about media malpractice became unmanageable.

A “cyber-tsunami” of news and information floods us 24/7, and we struggle to keep from drowning in the deluge. But who can be trusted for accuracy, fairness, balance, professionalism and ethics? What happens when a story is wrong, unfair and damaging? Libel suits are always an option – but good luck winning one, especially if you’re a public figure. Letters to the editor, op-eds, online comments and angry phone calls might help, but do they ever really set the record straight? If you’re smeared in the media and the story goes viral online, where do you go to get your reputation back?

The WNC’s complaint and hearing process, modeled after that of the Minnesota News

Council (which folded in 2011 after 41 years), gave complainants a chance to make their cases in an open public forum. Our council voted on the merits of the complaints – although our decisions carried no legal weight or sanctions.

In recent hearings, we invited the live audience (including journalism students) to vote, too.

We even webcast our last hearing so people could vote and comment worldwide, which many did. That was truly unprecedented.

But today we need to “crowdsource” media ethics. Concerned citizens should “talk back” to journalists, whether in print, broadcast or online. The news is no longer a lecture, but a conversation. Social media have created an online global village.

The WNC’s “TAO of Journalism” (http:// taoofjournalism.org) project will continue. If you’re a journalist, a blogger or a social-media user, take the “TAO Pledge” to be transparent, accountable and open. Post the TAO seal in print or online. Urge your local newspaper, TV and radio stations, and local websites to do the same. Hold them to it. Demand that they live up to some basic media ethics code.

The Washington News Council is passing the torch to citizens who care about high-quality journalism, which is vital to our democracy.

Let a thousand embers burn. 

Spring 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 3

Deep pockets lure high-profile journalists from traditional media outlets • By John Jarvis • Page 5 Journalism’s infatuation with Glenn Greenwald • By William H. Freivogel • Page 7 William H. Freivogel Publisher

Charles Klotzer Founder

William A. Babcock Editor

John Jarvis Managing Editor

Evette Dionne Graduate Assistant

Aaron Veenstra Web Master

JP Rhea Graduate Assistant

Terry Ganey St. Louis Editor

Nicholas Burke Lead Designer

50 years on: Landmark Supreme Court case was rooted in civil rights struggle • William H. Freivogel • Page 8 Paper competition in Pittsburgh recalls days of newspaper wars • By Steve Hallock • Page 16 Working in the footsteps of legends: The Hannibal (Mo.) Courier-Post • By William A. Babcock • Page 18

Steve Edwards Artist

Media coverage of Ukraine’s crises: War for people’s minds • By Katerina Sirinyok-Dolgaryova • Page 20

Board of Advisers: Roy Malone, Jim Kirchherr, Lisa Bedian, Ed Bishop, Tammy Merrett, Don Corrigan, Rita Csapo-Sweet, Steve Perron, Eileen Duggan, Michael D. Sorkin, David P. Garino, Rick Stoff, Ted Gest, Fred Sweet, William Greenblatt, Lynn Venhaus, Daniel Hellinger, Robert A. Cohn, Michael E. Kahn, John P. Dubinsky, Gerald Early, Paul Schoomer, Moisy Shopper, Ray Hartmann, Ken Solomon, Avis Meyer, Tom Engelhardt

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Hyperlocal news ‘aggregators’ shake up Chicago reporting scene • By John McCarron • Page 21 Former Patch editors find new journalism digs at First Click • By Benjamin Israel • Page 22 Former Patch editor refuses to abandon hyperlocal coverage • By Benjamin Israel • Page 23 TV station’s reputation takes hit in aftermath of school safety ‘test’ story • By Tripp Frohlichstein • Page 24 School story involving ‘passive deception’ worth doing, despite lockdown • By Walter Jaehnig • Page 25 Insider view of Pentagon Papers battle describes First Amendment in the making • By Mark Sableman • Page 27 Commentary on changing times: Historical society gets Engelhardt cartoons • By Terry Ganey • Page 28 GJR publisher highlights undisputed points • By William H. Freivogel • Page 31 Letter to the editor from Post-Dispatch takes issue with recent GJR article • By Gilbert Bailon & Adam Goodman • Page 31 Circuit attorney responds to Post-Dispatch’s letter to the editor • By Jennifer M. Joyce • Page 33 Letter writer to readers: Decide for yourselves • By Eddie Roth • Page 33

New Media

Deep pockets lure high-profile journalists from traditional media outlets

by John Jarvis Major League Baseball fans know that team owners with the deepest pockets can afford to hire the best talent available for their clubs, no matter their previous affiliations. It now seems the media world is taking a lesson from the sports arena, as some big-name writers and editors have switched allegiances to work for newly minted moguls vowing to remake the media landscape.

Continued on next page

Spring 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 5

New Media Continued from previous page Consider the following journalism “free agents” who changed teams recently: • Glenn Greenwald, who built his bona fides at the Guardian newspaper by breaking the news about the National Security Agency’s electronic surveillance efforts (with the help of information provided by Edward Snowden), has joined a new journalist venture, a “digital magazine” called the Intercept, which is bankrolled by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Intercept is designed as a nonprofit entity, with both a charitable and commercial aspect to its operations. Omidyar said last fall that he aimed to put up $250 million to the Intercept’s parent company, First Look Media, which will encompass other digital magazines and media products. (Omidyar’s wealth has been estimated by Forbes magazine to be close to $8.5 billion.) Greenwald’s co-editor at Intercept is Laura Poitras, a documentary film maker who helped him obtain the Snowden leaks. Intercept also has attracted another big-name journalist to its fold: Matt Taibbi, who built his reputation reporting on the recent financial crisis as a Rolling Stone contributing editor. Intercept also boasts such media luminaries as Dan Froomkin, who has written for the Washington Post and the Huffington Post; Peter Maass, whose stories have been printed in the New Yorker and the Times Magazine; and Jeremy Scahill, who penned a book titled “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield.”

• Bill Keller, the former editor of the New York Times, has a new gig with the Marshall Project, a nonprofit investigative news site. Neil Barsky, a former reporter at the Wall Street Journal who made his fortune as a hedgefund manager, is the initial financial backer for Keller’s new gig. Keller’s staff will grow to about 30 when all is said and done, according to media reports. The Marshall Project’s website notes that the United States “has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. From spiraling costs, to controversial drug laws, to prison violence, to concerns about system racial bias, there is a growing bipartisan consensus that America’s criminal-justice system is in dire need of reform.

As traditional media companies cut back on enterprise reporting, the Marshall Project will serve as a dynamic hub for information and debate on the legal and corrections systems.”

• Ezra Klein, the creator of the Wonkblog at the Washington Post, announced earlier this year that he would be leaving the Post to join a digital start-up, Vox Media, which is the home to the sports website SB Nation and the technology website the Verge. Klein will be joined at Vox

by Melissa Bell and Dylan Matthews, who were his colleagues at the Post, as well as Matthew Yglesias of Slate, whose stories have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington

Monthly and other publications. Klein described the reason behind his decision to leave the Post this way: “New information is not always – and perhaps not even usually – the most important information for understanding a topic. The overriding focus on the new made sense when the dominant technology was newsprint: limited space forces hard choices. You can’t print a newspaper telling readers everything they need to know about the world, day after day. But you can print a newspaper telling them what they need to know about what happened on Monday. The constraint of newness was crucial.” He added that “the Web has no such limits. There’s space to tell people both what happened today and what happened that led to today.”

• Nate Silver, who built his reputation with his FiveThirtyEight political blog at the New York Times, launched his joint enterprise with ESPN, www.FiveThirtyEight.com, on March 17. Notable hires to accompany Silver in this endeavor include lead writer Mona Chalabi (formerly of the Guardian), features editor Lisa Chow (formerly of National Public Radio) and senior editor Micah Cohen (formerly of the New York Times). Initial reactions to Silver’s new website were tepid; the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, in his “The Conscience of a Liberal” blog, wrote March 18 about FiveThirtyEight’s first stories thusly: “You use data to inform your analysis, you let it tell you that your pet hypothesis is wrong, but data are never a substitute for hard thinking. … Tell me something meaningful! Tell me why the data matter!”

What makes all these “free agent” moves so newsworthy is that it’s the Major League Baseball equivalent of a star player at the peak of his career leaving the New York Yankees – with the fame, fortune and attending media market that goes with the job – and agreeing to relocate to Podunkville, USA, to play for a no-name team in the middle of nowhere. Journalists of all stripes dream of someday making it to the elite media organizations that these reporters and editors are abandoning, which makes these moves all the more perplexing.

When any new lineup takes shape, whether in sports or in news, a little bit of uncertainty greets the announcement. For these media moves, that uncertainty centers on what it means for a journalist to be “objective.” That debate, in turn, begs the question: Is it more important for a journalist to hide the bias in the stories he or she writes, or is it better to admit the bias up front?

It also remains to be seen whether these changes will result in more revenue streams in what lately has been a money-losing industry. But in a February blog post in the New Yorker, John Cassidy wrote that “despite their differing origins and sources of funding, however, the Marshall Project and First Look Media share one thing in

Page 6 • Gateway Journalism Review • Spring 2014

common: a commitment to high-quality, independent journalism, which tackles serious subjects and, when necessary, upsets powerful interests.”

A story written by Ben Cardew and posted to the Guardian’s website March 2 quoted news industry analyst Ken Doctor as saying of the idea behind the philanthropic model of journalism: “We’ve seen foundations and individuals bankroll, for start-up and beyond, sites from ProPublica to the Center for Investigative Reporting to MinnPost to Texas Tribune. Nonprofit philanthropically funded journalism has gotten new life in the digital world. It will work as long as the money flows.”

Cardew, whose story is titled “Can Greenwald’s digital magazine Intercept help to reinvent journalism?” reported that Greenwald sees this financial independence as key to helping the Intercept and other First Look journalism endeavors succeed.

“A lot of news organizations are desperate to avoid litigation with governments and big corporations, because it is expensive to do that,” Greenwald said. “Or they are afraid to publish aggressively about huge corporations for the fear of getting sued. Part of the idea of having a really well-funded news organization is (being) someone who has the resources to defend these principles.”

These changes hold the promise to shake the established narrative of media being a moneylosing venture – and, at the same time, remind all of us that what is happening is nothing new. Paul Waldman, a contributing editor for the American Prospect, penned an article titled “Glorious, Ghastly News” that was posted to the Prospect’s website March 4. In it, Waldman refers to “a major study of the way information sources affect people’s views” with regard to politics, and he detailed how the “researchers found that voters gravitated to media they knew wouldn’t challenge their opinion.” The twist in this tale is that Waldman revealed that “this study, by Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues at Columbia University, was conducted nearly three-quarters of a century ago,” before the 1940 presidential contest between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his challenger, Wendell Willkie.

Waldman’s point is that the media landscape has always been in a state of change. What is different now, he wrote, is that we are moving away from “mass” media, where fewer choices meant more homogeneity in viewership, to “niche” media fueled by the Internet, where we can pick and choose what information (and from whom) to consume in a kind of “information snowflake” that is as unique as we are.

So if these journalism “free agents” do manage to serve the public good while also managing to reinvent how we deliver the news, then so much the better. 

Publisher’s Column

Journalism’s infatuation with Glenn Greenwald

by William H. Freivogel Don’t misunderstand. The Washington Post’s Pulitzer was wellThe journalism world’s embrace of Glenn Greenwald and his advocacy reporting is now complete with the award of the Pulitzer Prize to the Guardian for Greenwald’s disclosure of Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency secrets.

As with many youthful infatuations, the journalism world has rushed headlong into this relationship without listening to the alarms that surely went off in the heads of veteran journalists. Some journalists may be ambivalent about Greenwald’s ethics, but not ambivalent enough to withhold journalism’s top prize – or even to publicly debate whether it should have been awarded to his former newspaper.

The Pulitzer’s rules are broad. They require adherence to “the highest journalistic principles,” which are explained as “values such as honesty, accuracy and fairness.”

Did Greenwald live up to the highest journalistic principles?

The Society for Professional Journalists’ code of ethics requires that journalists “distinguish between advocacy and news reporting.”

The Association Press Managing Editors state that “the newspaper should strive for impartial treatment of issues and dispassionate handling of controversial subjects.” The American Society of Newspaper Editors demands “impartiality” and states that “every effort must be made to assure that the news content is accurate, free from bias and in context, and that all sides are presently fairly.” National Public Radio demands its reporters adhere to “impartiality as citizens and public figures. … We are not advocates.”

Yet Greenwald is unabashedly and proudly an advocate who ridicules traditional journalistic ethics, as well as those, such as Bill Keller, the former New York Times editor who espouse those ethics.

As Greenwald put it so very elegantly: “If the U.S. government said you shouldn’t publish this, and you shouldn’t publish that, and you shouldn’t publish this other thing, because to do so will endanger national security, Bill Keller proudly said the New York Times didn’t publish it. He was … beaming, like a third-grader that had just gotten a gold star from his teacher.”

In addition to ridiculing Keller, Greenwald said he was fundamentally dishonest and

deserved. The Snowden revelations printed in the Washington Post and the Guardian were clearly the biggest news story of the year. And that’s what the Pulitzer is supposed to reward. “deceitful” for trying to be impartial. Greenwald calls instead for “a looser, more passionate form of new media reporting.”

He is passionate.

At the time his first stories were published a year ago, Greenwald made overblown claims about what he had found. He maintained that the NSA could “monitor every single conversation and every single form of human behavior anywhere in the world.” He also stated that “the claim that current NSA spying is legal is dubious in the extreme.”

In fact, the NSA program primarily collected metadata, not the content of telephone calls – a distinction many critics missed – and it had been approved by Congress, the president and most courts.

Don’t misunderstand. The Washington Post’s Pulitzer was well-deserved. The Snowden revelations printed in the Washington Post and the Guardian were clearly the biggest news story of the year. And that’s what the Pulitzer is supposed to reward.

The Snowden disclosures are more important than the Pentagon Papers. Disclosure of current abuses of privacy is more significant than a multiple-volume history of the Vietnam War. The Snowden leaks forced President Obama to admit that the data collection had not been as effective as claimed in stopping terrorist incidents. And it has forced the president to call for reforms – although having phone companies hold onto metadata instead of the government may be insignificant.

All of these are strong reasons to justify giving the Public Service Pulitzer to the Post – and possibly the Guardian.

Nor have many Greenwald critics provided good reasons for denying the Pulitzer to the Guardian. Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., called Snowden a “traitor” and Greenwald an “accomplice,” for example.

Snowden is not a traitor, and Greenwald is not an accomplice. Snowden probably violated the World War I-era Espionage Act by

disclosing government secrets he was sworn to protect. But that’s not treason. And Greenwald’s reporting of the government secrets is exactly what the press is supposed to do when it comes upon secret government practices that the American people should know about. In some ways, Greenwald harkens back to such icons as I.F. Stone, the legendary leftist critic of the American military. But Stone never won a Pulitzer for news reporting.

Greenwald, by turning his Rio residence into a repository for Snowden’s documents and parceling them out to news outlets, has skated close to the line of accomplice. But he has taken care to play a journalistic role in connection with the stories based on the documents he was distributing.

Nor have ad hominem attacks on Greenwald been persuasive. Some critics pointed out that he spoke to Socialist groups and took anti-Israeli positions. Tom Hicks, the Pulitzer-Prize winning national security reporter, tweeted recently, “Glenn, any comments from you or Edward Snowden on the recent round of media shutdowns in Russia?” This may be clever, but it has nothing to do with the substance of the disclosures.

What matters is whether the journalism community, in its crush on Greenwald and Snowden, has forgotten first principles.

Greenwald’s call for more transparent, passionate reporting has more emotional appeal than traditional journalism’s call for objectivity, impartiality and disinterested observation. Greenwald’s are hot words; traditional journalists are stuck with cold ones. He and his fellow advocates, such as Jeremy Scahill and Amy Goodman, may be winning the debate.

But Keller had some good advice for Greenwald last year.

“Humility is as dear as passion,” he wrote. “So my advice is: Learn to say, ‘We were wrong.’ ” Journalists, like everyone else, are in dangerous territory when they believe they have a monopoly on the truth. 

Spring 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 7

Law

50 years on: Landmark Supreme Court case was rooted in civil rights struggle

by William H. Freivogel New York Times v. Sullivan was one of the greatest victories in history for free speech and a free press. But what is lost in the mists of time is that the Supreme Court viewed the case more as a civil rights case than as one

about the First Amendment.

The case was argued Jan. 6, 1964, with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the courtroom. Five months earlier, King had led the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The largest crowd in United States history marched on the National Mall for civil rights.

Five months later, Congress passed the Civil

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Rights Act of 1964. On the day of the oral argument, Justice Arthur Goldberg sent King a copy of King’s book of the Montgomery bus boycott – “Stride Toward Freedom” – asking for an autograph.

Half a century after the court’s decision, Sullivan is more about press freedom than civil rights. The decision constitutionalized defama-

Law tion and just about insulated the press from suits over stories about public officials or public figures – whether or not the stories were true.

To win, a public official or public figure must prove not just falsity but also “actual malice,” by which the court meant “reckless disregard of the truth” or knowledge of the falsity of the allegation. The decision was a monumental blow on behalf of what Justice William J. Brennan Jr. called the necessity of providing “breathing space” for democracy by allowing the media to make mistakes in their pursuit of a story.

“We consider this case,” wrote Brennan, “against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials. … Erroneous statement is inevitable in free debate, and (it) must be protected if the freedoms of expression are to have the ‘breathing space’ they ‘need to survive.’ ”

Poisoning discourse?

To most First Amendment advocates, New York Times v. Sullivan is a touchstone of press freedom. Without it, timid editors would pull their punches and self-censor to avoid costly libel suits. Public officials would use libel as a way to punish media with the temerity to portray them in an unfavorable light – the way that public officials and public figures use defamation in Great Britain.

But not all First Amendment advocates are entirely pleased with the results half a century later.

“I wonder if there is libel anymore,” said former New York Times lawyer Jim Goodale at a public ABA event commemorating the 50th anniversary of Sullivan. Sullivan – together with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act governing online defamation – have resulted in “egregious examples of outrageous libel,” he said, adding: “You have 2 million people libeling each other all day long.”

Geoffrey Stone, the noted First Amendment expert and professor at the University of Chicago Law School, said at the same event that Brennan’s blow for giving the democracy “breathing space” may have instead damaged political discourse. When Brennan wrote Sullivan, he was “thinking about mainstream,

To most First Amendment advocates, New York Times v. Sullivan is a touchstone of press freedom. Without it, timid editors would pull their punches and self-censor to avoid costly libel suits. professional reporters,” said Stone, who was a clerk for Brennan. Now, with the Internet, “people engaged in professional discourse ... are not professional at all. … Instead of dealing with professional reporters, it now includes every Tom, Dick and Harry on the Internet. …

One can make the argument that the long-term consequence of Sullivan is to destroy credibility, and that has a damaging impact on democracy. … Sullivan was situation-driven; it was about the civil rights movement, not the First Amendment. … But, as a First Amendment decision, it left a lot of the justices uncomfortable. … Its consequences for public discourse became much more problematic. … False statements don’t advance public discourse … they poison discourse.”

As a result of New York Times v. Sullivan, the law is more protective of free expression than are the ethical codes of major news organizations. The decision protects those who carelessly make false allegations about public figures and public officials. For that reason, it can protect poor, careless, unethical reporting that violates journalistic norms. Yet Brennan’s call for protecting the “breathing space” of a democracy is a kind of utilitarian “greater good” argument that democracy will work better protecting the freedom to be wrong than it will be if the media are afraid to disclose the wrongdoing of the powerful.

‘Heed Their Rising Voice’ Sullivan was about civil rights from the start. The controversy began with a mistakeriddled full-page advertisement in the New York Times with the stirring title “Heed Their Rising Voice.” The ad had been placed by southern ministers – urging support for King and civil rights protesters – and by noted entertainers such as Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier and Marlon Brando, and celebrities such as

Jackie Robinson and Eleanor Roosevelt.

The ad contained several mistakes. Most were minor, but at least one could have justified a libel judgment even under the actual malice standard. The minor mistakes were that King had been arrested four, not seven times as the ad had stated. Students were not singing “My Country ’Tis of Thee; they were singing the National Anthem. Students at Alabama State were expelled by the State Board of Education, but not for leading the demonstration at the Capitol; rather, they were expelled for demanding service at a lunch county in the Montgomery County Courthouse on a different day.

Most of the student body, not the entire student body, protested the expulsion. They did it by boycotting class, not refusing to re-register.

The biggest mistake was the claim that armed police had ringed student protesters at Alabama State and padlocked their dorm to “starve them into submission.” The dorm had not been surrounded, nor were the officials trying to starve the students.

The New York Times advertising department made no effort to check the facts, instead relying on the good name of civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, who vouched for the signatures on the ad. Had the Times checked its own morgue, it could have discovered the errors.

A ‘Confederate’ jury Almost no one read the ad in Alabama.

Only about 394 copies of the editorial circulated in the state, about 35 of which were distributed in Montgomery County where L.B. Sullivan was the police commissioner. Sullivan was not named in the ad, a fact that became important in the decision.

The person who noticed the ad and got the controversy started was himself a journalist, Grover C. Hall Jr., editorial editor of the Birmingham Advertiser. Hall wrote an editorial condemning the ad, titled, “Lies, lies, lies.”

Continued on next page

Spring 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 9

Law Continued from previous page Hall, who opposed segregation, was the son of a Birmingham Advertiser editor who won the Pulitzer Prize for opposing the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. But Hall Jr. thought that northern pressure caused pushback from the South. He also was irritated that the northerners turned a blind eye to racism in their own backyards.

The judicial handling of Sullivan’s lawsuit against the Times was infected by segregationist bias. First, the Times had trouble finding a lawyer who would represent it in Alabama.

Then the trial judge, Walter Berman Jones, denied the Times’ efforts to remove the case to federal court, even though that ruling was contrary to legal treatise on the subject of jurisdiction that Jones himself had written. The 100th anniversary of the Confederacy fell during the trial, and Jones allowed the jurors to wear Confederate uniforms and pistols to court to commemorate the occasion. Sullivan could not prove damages, but several witnesses testified that they knew the ad referred to him because he was in charge of the Montgomery police. The jury returned a verdict of $500,000 – a large sum at the time.

Nor was the verdict the only one that the Times faced in the South. Harrison Salisbury, the legendary Times reporter and editor, estimated that the Times faced about $3 million in libel and criminal libel verdicts in the South, all flowing from civil rights coverage. This situation came at a time when the nation’s leading newspaper was financially vulnerable, having just started to recover from a financially damaging strike. George Freeman, a former New York Times lawyer, said that the advertising side of the Times argued in favor of the paper pulling out of the South editorially because of the financial threat of the libel suits.

Brennan addressed the issue of self-censorship in his opinion.

“Whether or not a newspaper can survive a succession of such judgments, the pall of fear and timidity imposed upon those who would give voice to public criticism is an atmosphere in which the First Amendment freedoms cannot (survive),” he wrote, adding: “A rule compelling a critic of official conduct to guarantee the truth of all his factual assertions – and to do so on pain of libel judgments virtually unlimited in amount –

leads to … self-censorship.”

More than once, Brennan alluded to the civil rights backdrop of the case. He wrote that the ad communicated “information, expressed opinion, recited grievances, protested claimed abuses, and sought financial support on behalf of a movement whose existence and objectives are matters of the highest public interest and concern.” And later, he wrote that “the present advertisement as an expression of grievance and protest on one of the major public issues of our time, would seem clearly to qualify for the constitutional protection.”

Brennan gave several reasons for providing more protection for speech critical of public officials than private individuals. One was that American history demonstrates that the First Amendment does not permit seditious libel. Seditious libel punishes criticism of the government. Brennan referred to the famous crisis of 1798 regarding the Sedition Act. That law made it a crime, punishable by prison and steep fines, to criticize public officials, including the president, then John Adams. The law was used to jail newspaper editors who supported Adams’ political opponent, Thomas Jefferson. Brennan noted that the Sedition Act never had been tested in the Supreme Court.

The controversy preceded the establishment of judicial review in the 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision. But Brennan said the “attack upon the Sedition Act’s validity has carried the day in the court of history” and that “its invalidity has been assumed” by the justices of the Supreme Court.

Brennan’s fight to save Sullivan Although Sullivan appears today to be firmly rooted in the law, it faced severe challenges in the 1970s and 1980s on the court and in society. Lee Levine, the noted First Amendment lawyer, told the ABA forum on the 50th anniversary of Sullivan that the threat was real.

“Yes, there definitely was a time and place when Brennan was afraid Sullivan was at risk,” he said.

“The Progeny,” a book published on the 50th anniversary of the decision, describes Brennan’s successful effort to nurture and save Sullivan. The book is written by Levine and

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Steve Wermiel, the former Supreme Court correspondent for the Wall Street Journal who conducted extensive interviews with Brennan before the justice’s death. The book injects an ironic footnote to history: There was a striking difference between the public Brennan who believed passionately in the press and the private Brennan who had an uncomfortable relationship with the press.

Brennan confided that he didn’t think the press did a good job of reporting on legal issues because reports on the Supreme Court lacked depth. He thought the press did not respect people’s privacy, and he refused to hold press conferences because of the risk of being misquoted or misconstrued. The press coverage of Abe Fortas that led to his resignation from the court hurt Brennan. Brennan himself invested in a real estate trust recommended to him by another federal judge. When that became the subject of press reports, Brennan sold his interest, canceled all speaking engagements, quit the American Bar Association and the New Jersey bar as well.

But, on the court, Brennan continued his all-out effort to defend Sullivan against former allies and new conservative opponents.

Justice Byron R. White, who had joined Sullivan, soon served notice within the court that he did not entirely buy into the decision.

He had been on board in Sullivan partly because of the civil rights backdrop. White had been President John F. Kennedy’s assistant attorney general for civil rights before joining the court. But that same year he had grave reservations about the application of Sullivan in Garrison v. Louisiana. That case involved Jim Garrison, the controversial district attorney from New Orleans who later went on to claim he had found proof of a New Orleans conspiracy that led to the assassination of President Kennedy. The libel case did not involve the Kennedy assassination, however. Garrison had been in a fight with the judges in his parish, and held a press conference in which he attributed the big backlog of criminal cases to inefficiency, laziness, and excessive vacations of the judges. He also accused the judges of refusing to cover the expenses of undercover investigations of vice in New Orleans. He said: “The judges have now made it eloquently clear where their sympathies lie in regard to aggressive vice investigations by refusing to autho-

Law rize use of the DA’s funds to pay for the cost of closing down the Canal Street clip joints. … This raises interesting questions about the racketeer influences on our eight vacationminded judges.”

Garrison was convicted under Louisiana’s criminal libel law.

White drafted a strongly worded dissent saying that he would not protect the malicious liar’s calculated falsehood. Brennan simply coopted White by adopting much of the language from White’s dissent about calculated falsehoods, while reaffirming Sullivan.

But the overall ruling was that Louisiana’s criminal libel law violated Sullivan and was unconstitutional.

“The New York Times rule is not rendered inapplicable merely because an official’s private reputation, as well as his public reputation, is harmed,” Brennan wrote. “The public-official rule protects the paramount public interest in a free flow of information to the people concerning public officials, their servants. To this end, anything which might touch on an official’s fitness for office is relevant. Few personal attributes are more germane to fitness for office than dishonesty, malfeasance, or improper motivation, even though these characteristics may also affect the official’s private character.”

Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who came on the court after Sullivan, took steps to deny Brennan the chance to write opinions in defamation cases. When most of the court was ready to rule for the press, Burger would join the majority so he could assign the opinion to someone other than Brennan.

By most accounts, the justices resented the obvious gamesmanship and appreciated the more straightforward way that Burger’s successor, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, assigned opinions.

The differences between White and Brennan were particularly sharp in Dun & Bradstreet Inc. v. Greenmoss Builders Inc. in 1985.

In that case, the credit-reporting service reported to five clients that Greenmoss was about to file for bankruptcy, and that the company had fewer assets that it actually controlled.

Greenmoss won actual and punitive damages from the Vermont Supreme Court. White initially wrote a strong draft dissent in which he said that Sullivan had been wrongly decided. A worried Brennan wrote an elaborate defense of

his landmark opinion. But that defense never saw the light of day because Justice John Paul Stevens came to Brennan to say he did not feel comfortable with it and that it was unwise to publicize the split on the court over Sullivan.

Brennan pulled back.

The press should kiss Rehnquist Even though Rehnquist had appeared to be a threat to Sullivan, he ended up expanding it in an important decision involving parody: Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, 1988.

The Rev. Jerry Falwell was a nationally prominent and politically influential preacher who frequently provided important support to conservative candidates and causes.

Larry Flynt, the publisher of pornographic Hustler Magazine, printed an ad parody patterned after the Campari liquor advertising campaign, in which celebrities talked about their “first times.” Although the ad suggested through double entendre that the celebrities were talking about the first time they had sex, the ads actually talked about the first time that had drunk Campari. The Hustler parody said that Falwell’s first time having sex was with his mother in an outhouse when they were both drunk. It also said Falwell only preached when he was drunk. A label in small type at the bottom of the ad read: “Ad parody – not to be taken seriously.”

Falwell sued for emotional distress and had home-court advantage in his home state of Virginia, where he won a big judgment against Hustler for infliction of emotional distress – $100,000 in compensatory damages along with additional punitive damages.

What few people knew about Rehnquist was that he had once been an avid amateur cartoonist in his days at Stanford University. One of the influential amicus briefs in the case was filed by the nation’s editorial cartoonists. They pointed out that exaggeration, parody, sarcasm and hyperbole were their bread and butter. One cartoon that the lawyer preparing the brief left out was drawn when Rehnquist was in the midst of a difficult confirmation fight.

That one showed Rehnquist in Ku Klux Klan robes trying to deny blacks the right to vote in his native Arizona. The cartoon played off of Rehnquist’s controversial role as a young Re-

publican election judge challenging the voting credentials of African-Americans in Arizona.

The brief – minus the Rehnquist cartoon – was obviously influential, as Rehnquist cited it in his opinion providing First Amendment protection to the Hustler cartoon. The chief justice wrote about the long history of hyperbolic political cartoons dating back to the cartoons that ridiculed Boss Tweed during the Tammany Hall corruption of the 19th century.

He wrote: “The political cartoon is a weapon of attack, of scorn and ridicule and satire; it is least effective when it tries to pat some politician on the back. It is usually as welcome as a bee sting, and is always controversial in some quarters. … Several famous examples of this type of intentionally injurious speech were drawn by Thomas Nast, probably the greatest American cartoonist to date. … The success of the Nast cartoon was achieved ‘because of the emotional impact of its presentation. It continuously goes beyond the bounds of good taste and conventional manners.’ ” Rehnquist conceded that “there is no doubt that the caricature of respondent and his mother published in Hustler is at best a distant cousin of the political cartoons described above, and a rather poor relation at that. If it were possible by laying down a principled standard to separate the one from the other, public discourse would probably suffer little or no harm. But we doubt that there is any such standard.”

Rehnquist extended the Sullivan actual malice standard to parody and other hyperbolic speech. It is a somewhat unusual application of a standard that requires proof of actual malice, reckless disregard of the truth and knowledge of falsity. The Hustler ad was published with the knowledge that the claim of having sex with his mother in an outhouse was false.

Wermiel, the “Progeny” author, said Brennan was ecstatic with Rehnquist’s opinion.

“Rehnquist … wrote an opinion that Brennan could have written,” Wermiel said.

“Brennan said the press should just kiss Rehnquist for his opinion in Hustler v. Falwell. He could leave the court in peace. If Rehnquist could write that opinion, New York Times v. Sullivan was safe.” 

Spring 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 11

Drones

U.S. drone use hovers on boundaries of First, Fourth Amendments

by John Jarvis As journalists, we know the power of words.

The phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword” was coined for a reason – and when the words we employ are backed up by facts and evidence gathered with all the tools at our disposal, they can have a significant impact. How then, ethically, will we use the new technology of unmanned aerial vehicles – a.k.a. drones – to wield the power of the pen to tell our stories?

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Drones To answer that question, we first must try to define what the word “drone” encompasses.

In the spring 2013 issue of News Media & The Law, Lilly Chapa provided this description: “Technically, any aircraft that is controlled remotely is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), or drone. Most modern drones are controlled

by Global Positioning System-based commands programmed through a computer. Drones can cost anywhere from $300 to $5 million and can be as small as a dinner plate or as large as a Cessna. They can be equipped with a variety of tools, including cameras, GPS trackers, infrared sensors and weapons.”

A group with a focus on the future of drone journalism has made it its mission to keep the attention on ethics. The Professional Society of Drone Journalists, which formed in 2011, bills itself on its website as “the first international organization dedicated to establishing the ethical, educational and technological framework for the emerging field of drone journalism.” The organization’s founder is Matthew Schroyer, a drone expert who works for a National Science Foundation grant at the University of Illinois. In a July 2013 interview posted on the website of International Human Press (http://www.ithp. org/articles/droneexpert.html), Schroyer said he has developed a preliminary code of conduct for drone journalism. His hope is that the code will be interactive at some point, so members of the society can alter the code to keep up with developments in the drone journalism field.

The code lays out the additional responsibilities that drone journalists take on when controlling these unmanned vehicles, and it also emphasizes the potential risks of operating UAVs in populated urban areas as the speed, range and size of these machines undergo further development. Being able to take aerial photographs when reporting on a story makes a drone a valuable resource, but in this regard the code also warns that the chance for abuse – especially when it comes to matters of privacy and safety – is also increased.

New technology for an old idea Whenever the subject of drones comes up in American society, ethical conflicts and controversies follow. Consider the uproar regarding Americans’ privacy when Amazon’s Jeff Bezos announced Dec. 2 to CBS’s “60 Minutes” correspondent Charlie Rose that his company aims to someday use “octocopters” to deliver packages to customers.

In the United States, the conflict over drone use involves First Amendment and Fourth Amendment freedoms and state and municipal legislation to rein in what can be done with these machines. It’s a complicated issue with no immediately obvious answer as to what is “right.”

The drones do not have pilots sitting in front of a screen to fly them to their destination, Bezos said. Unlike a remotely piloted aircraft, these devices use GPS coordinates to zero in on their landing sites. His announcement prompted members of Congress to introduce legislation to deal with this potential invasion of privacy. U.S. Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, had this to say not long after Bezos’ interview: “Think how many drones could soon be flying around the sky. Here a drone, there a drone, everywhere a drone in the United States. … The issue of concern, Mr. Speaker, is surveillance, not the delivery of packages. That includes surveillance of someone’s backyard, snooping around with a drone, checking out a person’s patio to see if that individual needs new patio furniture from the company.”

At present, there’s a future Whether Americans are ready for them or not, drones are already being deployed within the borders of the United States. They’ve been in use by the Customs & Border Protection agency along the U.S.-Mexico border and by law enforcement personnel as well, prompting the American Civil Liberties Union to post on its website that “rules must be put in place to ensure that we can enjoy the benefits of this new technology without bringing us closer to a ‘surveillance society’ in which our every move is monitored, tracked, recorded, and scrutinized by the government.”

Meanwhile, the Federal Aviation Administration, under the aegis of the 2012 FAA Modernization and Reform Act passed by Congress, has been tasked with integrating commercial drones into U.S. airspace by 2015. The FAA estimates that 7,500 commercial drones could be flying in national airspace in just a few years, and that number could rise to 30,000 by the year 2030, agency officials reported. FAA officials said the agency does not have the authority to make or enforce any rules related to privacy concerns.

All these attempts by municipalities and states to regulate how drones are operated by media organizations could eventually involve issues of prior restraint. The First Amendment Handbook of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the

Press says “a prior restraint is an official government restriction of speech prior to publication.”

The First Amendment protects drones equipped with cameras that are engaged in communicative photography. But the drones could face obstacles posed by considerations of property law, public safety and trespass, to name a few. The right of free expression using drones for filming events currently is constrained by reasonable time, manner and place restrictions that may be imposed on their use.

Follow the money Part of the drive behind the expanded use of UAVs in the United States seems to be driven by capitalistic ambition. A Bloomberg.com story written by David Mildenberg and posted online Dec. 16 examines the competition among two dozen U.S. states to win the right to open testing facilities that will determine whether drones can operate in the same airspace as passenger jets. In his story, Mildenberg reveals just how much is at stake, financially, for companies such as Amazon that enter into the drone arena. Almost a quarter-million UAVs are forecast to be in use by the year 2035, according to a study by the U.S. Transportation Department, and less-stringent regulations could lead to the creation of 70,000 jobs over the next few years. Mildenberg also revealed details from a report drawn up by the Teal Group Corp. – a Fairfax, Va.-based aerospace research company – that predicts expenditures on civilian and military drones worldwide will total $89 billion during the next decade.

Drones also have the potential to save news organizations cash. Matthew Waite, director of the drone journalism program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, told Chapa that the helicopters used by morning television programs to report on the rush-hour traffic jams are a huge waste of money. The money spent on the maintenance of the aircraft, plus fuel and insurance, in addition to the pilot’s salary, can make the yearly cost hover in the millions. But, for much less money, these same news programs could buy and fly a drone with a camera that could do the exact same job.

Continued on next page

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Drones Continued from previous page As these UAVs have begun to show their potential as useful tools that can be wielded by journalists and non-journalists alike, there has been an attempt to ease Americans’ fear of drones. One such effort involved the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International’s three-day trade fair at the Washington Convention Center Aug. 12-15. The event, which took place less than a mile away from the White House, featured more than 500 exhibits whose main intent was to show how these pilotless machines and other robotic inventions can participate in law enforcement maneuvers, searchand-rescue operations, traffic control, the sale of houses and real estate, checking remote and inaccessible areas for pipeline problems and forest fires, and much more.

A d(r)one deal Overseas reporters already have revealed glimpses of the future of drone-enhanced journalism. For example, a video on CNN’s website, shot from a drone and narrated by reporter Karl Penhaul 10 days after Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the Philippines in early November, showed what the people of the community of Tacloban, Philippines, had to deal with in the storm’s aftermath. The video in which Penhaul appears, titled “A bird’s eye view of Haiyan devastation,” could be considered a glimpse of the future of journalism.

In the United States, journalism students are experimenting with how to use UAVs to gather information for stories. At the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, students are taking courses that are designed to teach them how to operate drones for news reports.

In February 2013, GJR’s St. Louis editor, Terry Ganey, spoke to professor Bill Allen, a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, who said the university has a class in which journalism students are cutting their teeth on the use of “J-bots,” which is the term he uses to describe these “journalism robots,” or drones. The students are using the J-bots to take drone-based photography and video, all in an attempt to see if the machines will be useful to their chosen profession.

Schroyer, in a story posted Nov. 19 on the SPDJ website, used a drone to capture aerial footage of the devastation in Gifford, Ill., after an outbreak of severe weather swept across the nation’s midsection. His article noted that the video was shot with remote-controlled heli-

copter that has four motors and can be bought online. A camera capable of shooting 720p video was attached to the drone, and the video footage was transmitted to an Apple iPad on the ground. (He noted, too, that the iPad also was used to control the drone.) Schroyer said he believes that his story represents what drone journalists are capable of doing through the use of these low-cost systems.

Schroyer added a disclaimer at the end of his story that said the drone’s flight followed the protocols laid out in FAA advisory circular (AC) 91-57. The FAA document, dating from June 9, 1981, addresses the subject of “model aircraft operating standards.” The full text can be found online at http://www.faa.gov/documentlibrary/ media/advisory_circular/91-57.pdf.

Waite, who worked for the St. Petersburg Times (which changed its name to the Tampa Bay Times on Jan. 1, 2012) and Politifact, told Chapa he envisions a time in the not-too-distant future when news organizations have several of these UAVs at the ready to use during breaking news, such as a traffic accident or a house fire. The device could be sent out and flown over the news scene where it could take a photograph or video and let the workers in the newsroom evaluate whether the story warrants further involvement.

Privacy concerns In the United States, the conflict over drone use involves First Amendment and Fourth Amendment freedoms, possible issues of prior restraint by the federal government, privacy issues with regard to new technology, and state and municipal legislation to rein in what can be done with these machines. It’s a complicated issue, with no immediately obvious answer as to what is “right.”

The use of drones as a surveillance tool by journalists and law enforcement officials also has stirred up privacy concerns at the state level, drawing efforts by legislators to limit their use in 43 of the 50 states as of Jan. 22, according to information posted on the American Civil Liberty Union’s website by advocacy and policy strategist Allie Bohm. Of those 43 states, nine have enacted drone legislation, and bills were still active in five more. But because these drones are being operated in public, there’s little in the way of U.S. privacy laws that prevent their use. The Fourth Amendment, which only applies to the government, not news organizations, provides the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers,

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and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” But is that enough in the face of this technological advancement?

For some, including the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, it isn’t. In an article written for the Guardian and posted online March 29 of last year under the headline “Domestic drones and their unique dangers,” he wrote that the increasing use of domestic drones for surveillance purposes has not engendered concern among civilians because their use can be equated to the same type of work that police helicopters and satellites perform. Greenwald said “such claims are completely misinformed,” and added, “as the ACLU’s 2011 comprehensive report on domestic drones explained: ‘Unmanned aircraft carrying cameras raise the prospect of a significant new avenue for the surveillance of American life.’ ”

Legal considerations The prospect of a federal law governing the use of UAVs in the United States is a bridge too far for some. Margot E. Kaminski, in an article published in the May 2013 issue of the California Law Review Circuit, wrote that the use of drones by non-public entities constitutes the most difficult pieces of the privacy puzzle. Kaminski, executive director of the Information Society Project, a research scholar and a lecturer in law at Yale Law School, said laws governing the use of civilian drones could restrict the ability of private citizens to conduct legal information gathering. Laws that restrict how drones can be used will offer up privacy concerns as the stated purpose behind them, but she contended that the laws still will constitute restrictions on free speech.

Kaminski added that courts have not determined yet whether privacy rights or freespeech rights will ultimately win out in this debate, and it also remains to be seen how privacy and speech interests interact. She advocates a “drone federalism” approach to legislation, where states take the lead in enacting privacy regulations for UAVs. This will allow for what she terms “necessary experimentation” on how to balance privacy concerns with First Amendment rights.

The issue of invasion of privacy is at least a century old in American society. As an example, M. Ryan Calo, director for privacy and robotics at the Center for Internet & Society, wrote an article for the Stanford Law Review that considered the role of drones in the privacy debate surrounding these machines. In

Drones his article, posted online Dec. 12, 2011, Calo noted that Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis had a good idea of what a violation of privacy looked like when they wrote their 1890 article “The Right to Privacy.” The “yellow journalism” that employed the use of “instantaneous photographs splashing pictures of a respectable wedding on the pages of every newspaper” was their way to represent a world where technology ran rampant. It was the reason they gave to advance the cause of privacy law in the United States.

In his article, Calo said drones could provide the impetus to refine privacy law to fit modern-day realities, since it’s not too farfetched to imagine a time when everyone from hobbyists to policemen could be using UAVs. It will be up to privacy advocates to ensure that privacy rights are not further eroded.

Entrenched resistance Public radio reporter Scott Pham, in an article posted online July 28 at the website Mashable.com, wrote down what he thinks is the most obvious use for drones in journalism: covering events that pose the most difficulty for photojournalists on land, including public protests and natural disasters. Pham, who noted that he played a role in getting the Missouri Drone Journalism Program (a collaboration that involves the University of Missouri’s Information Technology Program, the Missouri School of Journalism and National Public Radio member station KBIA in Columbia, Mo.) off the ground in 2012, said Americans’ resistance to drone use within their country’s borders could be worn down by showing how UAVs could be used for good instead of evil. But Pham reported that he misread the situation regarding drones. He said he deeply underestimated the drone skeptics, including members of the Missouri General Assembly who introduced legislation to ban the use of UAVs in the Show-Me State. The Missouri bill says that no person, group or organization, including journalists and news organizations, will be permitted to use an unmanned aircraft to conduct surveillance of any individual or property without consent.

In a separate article, Pham called the bill “anti-free speech, anti-journalism and altogether backward.”

Pham acknowledged that the use of drones in American is a very controversial topic, but he said he had hoped people would not be threatened by the use of a drone by a public

Part of the resistance to the widespread deployment of UAVs appears to stem from the surreptitious nature in which they can be deployed. radio station, which he regards as one the leastthreatening entities that could deploy one of these unmanned machines in civilian airspace.

The FAA sent a letter to the drone journalism programs of both the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Missouri, spelling out different standards that the schools would have to follow to fly their UAVs. This standard, designed for public entities, requires a “Certificate of Authorization” for any outdoor flight of a drone – a process that can take a minimum of two months to complete, reported Yahoo News’ Rob Walker in a story posted online Aug. 28. Walker’s story noted that the new FAA hurdle makes turning out even a timely feature story much more difficult than it should be, especially in the context of an academic semester. Walker, who described the process as a “blunt regulatory instrument,” said the FAA missed out on a chance to advance the use of drones in a responsible fashion. To bolster his argument, he pointed to the abundance of unauthorized drone experimentation taking place with increasing frequency, which is completely the opposite of what these news programs are attempting to do.

An abundance of caution Part of the resistance to the widespread deployment of UAVs appears to stem from the surreptitious nature in which they can be deployed. After all, people sunbathing in their own backyards can be filmed by a cameraman flying aloft in a helicopter just as easily as by a drone – and with the exception that the aircraft cannot be less than 500 feet off the ground, where private property protection ends, there is nothing illegal about that cameraman being up in the sky. (The U.S. Su-

preme Court, in the 1946 case United States v. Causby, ruled 5-2 that the ancient common law doctrine that land ownership extended to the space above the earth “has no place in the modern world.” Justice William O. Douglas’ opinion noted that, if the doctrine were valid, “every transcontinental flight would subject the operator to countless trespass suits. Common sense revolts at the idea.”)

Schroyer, in his International Human Press interview, said people have every right to be cautious about drone use, but the rules and regulations being formulated in the state legislatures – and even down at the municipal level – sometimes don’t grasp the reality of the situation. He added, though, that states are passing good laws that allow for the use of drones by law-enforcement personnel only when those agencies obtain a warrant.

Could these UAVs operated by law enforcement agencies be weaponized for certain uses in the United States? Information obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the federal Customs & Border Protection agency shows that idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds. In a 2010 “Concept of Operations” report for its drone program, obtained through the EFF’s FOIA lawsuit, the CBP noted that it has considered equipping its drones with nonlethal weapons designed to neutralize “targets of interest,” according to information posted in a weblog by EFF senior staff attorney Jennifer Lynch. Lynch noted in her post that this is the first that anyone has heard of a federal agency proposing to use weapons in a domestic setting.

In a May 6 article for Slate, Rothenberg wrote that the debate over drone use by journalists in the United States encompasses much more than the potential privacy threats that some experts foresee in the United States. It also includes how the UAVs have become symbols of the disorder, uncertainty and threats that surround us in a rapidly changing world.

To Rothenberg, the greatest challenge we face in our society is how to conduct the debate over this emerging technology in a way that acknowledges the very real fears some people have about these machines. From this learning experience, he said, will come a better, more educated way to regulate drones.

The recent controversy about drones – and the ultimate impact they will have on journalists and American society as a whole – will continue to raise legal and ethics issues for journalists to consider for some time to come. The debate over these issues is only now just beginning. 

Spring 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 15

Newspaper War

Paper competition in Pittsburgh recalls days of newspaper wars

by Steve Hallock The downtown billboard a block up from the newsroom of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette near the convergence of the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers into the Ohio River symbolizes the vigorous newspaper rivalry in this city. “We do things right. Here.” The billboard message is a double entendre symbolizing not only the Tribune-Review’s conservative political bent but also its in-the-face competitive stance challenging the Post-Gazette’s once dominant newspaper presence here.

The scenario is an enviable one for most communities in the nation: two newspapers locked in a death grip to the finish, battling each other for subscribers and advertising revenue in a newspaper war reminiscent of the Hearst and Pulitzer news combats long ago. Enviable because most towns and cities in the country, outside of New York, Chicago and maybe Los Angeles, are fortunate if they have even one financially stable newspaper – let alone a newspaper that fields an investigative reporting team, local columnists, lively cultural, arts and sports reporting, and a distinctive editorial voice.

This robust newspaper competition has been the situation in Pittsburgh since industrialist Richard Mellon Scaife in the early 1990s stepped into the void left by the closure of the Pittsburgh Press to establish the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in direct competition with the Pittsburgh PostGazette. So for the last decade and a half or so, readers have enjoyed the old-time benefits of a newspaper rivalry. These include: • Dueling government reporting that produces old-fashioned scoops and watchdog reporting.

• Subscription deals that help keep down the prices of newspapers.

• And, yes, the most obvious and socially beneficial public good of all: a diversity of political, cultural and informational voices in a thriving marketplace of ideas imagined by John Milton, who defined the concept in 1644 when he opined that truth would prevail “in a free and open encounter” involving competing ideas.

Or, in more modern terms as put to me

by Scaife in a telephone interview I conducted with him for a research article seven years ago: “I think the people of this region need a choice.

Compare it to being in a supermarket. How would you like having one choice of ice cream

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or one choice of soda? Pittsburgh is fortunate to have the choice of more than one newspaper.

Most cities don’t offer that choice.”

As my research then found, Scaife and his rival, the Block family of Toledo and Pittsburgh (owners of the Post-Gazette in Pittsburgh and the Blade in Toledo), produce newspaper journalism that is quite diverse in topic selection, more theoretically known as gatekeeping and framing choices, and, of course, political viewpoint. The Post-Gazette leans Democratic, despite its wince-producing endorsement of Republican Tom Corbett for governor four years ago, and the Tribune-Review not only leans but heavily tilts Republican – despite its equally angst-causing endorsement of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary contest in the 2008 election (this from a newspaper that hired a full-time reporter to do nothing but investigate the Whitewater affair during the presidency of Bill Clinton, though Scaife and Clinton now enjoy, ironically, a friendship). Again, though, let’s let the journalist pugilists explain the rivalry in language that clearly underscores the animosity – and that’s a polite description – of these two journalistic camps.

“I would actually go a step further,” Tri-

Newspaper War bune-Review editorial page editor Colin McNickle said back then of Post-Gazette editorial page editor Tom Waseleski’s description of his newspaper’s editorial stance as “moderate.”

“I would … argue that the (Post-Gazette) isn’t so much liberal as it is socialist,” said the editor, whose editorial following the death of Pete Seeger this year denounced the popular folk singer as a communist in language reminiscent of the “red scare” of the 1950s.

Writers from both papers insist that editorial policy does not invade the news pages; this is a newspaper competition waged by coverage and marketing. And editorial stance aside, this is a long-haul war, judging by their expenditures.

Scaife’s strategy has included buying up a string of smaller daily newspapers and weeklies that circle the city, now classified as zoned editions equivalent to the Post-Gazette’s weekly zoned and Sunday giveaway editions for circulation-counting purposes, lending the Post-Gazette the image of an army surrounded. And as the Post-Gazette has cut its unionized reporting staff, which now stands at about 196, including downsizing its investigative projects, the rallying cry at the Tribune-Review has been “Ready, Aim, Hire.” The Tribune-Review recently hired an investigative reporting team to buttress its award-winning enterprise and investigative reporting efforts, and its full-time, non-unionized staff now numbers 320.

For its part, the Post-Gazette is preparing to start up a new printing press on off-site property, because unlike joint operating agreements that other competing newspapers have established in the past, Post-Gazette owners don’t want to put their rival in charge of printing their paper even though they share a delivery service. And the Post-Gazette recently adopted the Wall Street Journal’s model of charging for Internet news content on its website – a move the TribuneReview has so far avoided, just as it has continually kept its news box prices lower for the daily newspaper. Even pennies make a difference in this rivalry. Just weeks ago, in an attempt to cash in on the region’s natural gas fracking environmental and regulatory angst in the midst of the natural gas drilling boom here, the Post-Gazette launched a weekly section devoted to energy.

Newsroom executives at both newspapers, cite what they view as other key differences. David Shribman, executive editor of the Post-Gazette for more than 11 years, takes pride in the public forums his newspaper sponsors, “which now amount to about 10 a year, during which we have sessions on vital issues, sometimes attracting 400 people, sometimes as many as seven,” he said during a recent email interview. “The last three I

The newspaper environment in the city of three rivers harkens back to the good old days in St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and other Midwest industrial cities that once supported thriving competing daily newspapers. recall were on the presence and role of religion in the public square; an exploration of diverse voices in the arts in Pittsburgh; and an examination of the African-American experience in sports.” He also pointed to his internship program, which he encourages colleges and universities across the nation to underwrite “so their students can have a quality summer experience. We have had enormous success.” And he noted a numerical domination in first-place and total honors over the past two years over “any other large-circulation newspaper in the state” in Pennsylvania’s Keystone Press Awards and the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors competition.

Ralph Martin, chief executive officer of Trib Total Media, says the Tribune-Review excels in “first-hand national and international news as we are more likely to dispatch reporters to big news stories and not merely rely on the AP or Reuters.” The Tribune-Review and its affiliated community newspapers, he said during a recent email interview, “also has more local reporting through its smaller community dailies and dozens of weeklies that provide a hyper-local connection for readers in specific communities and those local stories can be fed to the metro.”

What both of these executives describe is a newspaper environment in the city of three rivers that harkens back to the good old days in St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and other Midwest industrial cities that once supported thriving competing daily newspapers. Indeed, as former Tribune-Review reporter John Temple, now an academic at West Virginia University, told me during my initial research seven years ago, the Pittsburgh newspaper competition is “as vigorous as almost any in the country, in part because the two newspapers are so different and really dislike each other. They’re not longtime competitors in a comfortable JOA. Rather, they are two completely different papers with contrasting histories, staffs, pay levels, visions, readerships and editorial policies. What’s been overlooked about this is the big picture: that Pittsburgh has become a two-newspaper town once again, which it hasn’t been since the Press expired. Whatever people think of the politics or

business tactics of Richard Scaife or the TribuneReview, this (was) an unusual move – perhaps unprecedented in the last couple of decades – for a major metro area to actually increase its number of dailies. This should be heralded as a major move in the right direction.”

Readers benefit from the rivalry, based on a stronger marketplace of ideas. Content analysis of the two newspapers’ editorial pages that I conducted in 2008 revealed a stark and measurable difference not only in editorial opinion but in selection of story topics, and in focus of topic in terms of local, national and international subjects. My findings led me to conclude in a study published by the Newspaper Research Journal that the sort of direct competition found in this lively newspaper market “encourages a marketplace of ideas that flourishes at the local level.”

Thus, it produces journalism that not only serves the readers but, in the larger picture, serves the community and the democratic process because of the richness and diversity of reportage and opinion it provides to a community that depends on this information. Readers need to be informed of governmental doings and wrongdoings, of financial and political triumphs and misdeeds; they thrive on informed commentary regarding their local arts, cultural, entertainment and sports scenes. A well-informed community is an enlightened community more able to make intelligent spending, political and policy decisions.

Scaife and Shribman, though, are not so sure when it comes to reader service – a commodity that Shribman called “very hard to measure, particularly since there is virtually no overlap between the readers of these two newspapers.”

“Sometimes,” the Tribune-Review’s Martin said, “I think the readers benefit from competition but sometimes I think the opposite is true. The papers can deploy resources to cover the same events when without the competition perhaps more events could make the paper by spreading the resources futher into the community; too much duplication in coverage (unbiased, balanced news reporting) doesn’t serve the

Continued on page 35

Spring 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 17

Fond Memories

Paul Van Slambrouck Mary Lou Montgomery is the editor of the Hannibal (Mo.) Courier-Post. The paper has gone through dozens of name changes since its inception in 1838.

Working in the footsteps of legends: The Hannibal (Mo.) Courier-Post Editor’s note: Newsrooms are disappearing. The digital world is transforming how and where journalists work. Offices are taking on a technology sheen, more befitting Silicon Valley than the front page. GJR thinks surviving newsrooms are places that should be chronicled in photographs.

Here we present the second in an ongoing photojournalism series of Midwestern newsrooms that still look something like they have for the past century. If you know of a classic small-town newsroom that deserves to be part of this series, let us know.

Page 18 • Gateway Journalism Review • Spring 2014

Fond Memories

by William A. Babcock Editor Mary Lou Montgomery has been with the Courier-Post newspaper in Hannibal, Mo., for nearly 39 years. She has a news-editorial staff of two: a reporter and a sports editor/writer.

That’s it.

Hannibal’s morniang daily has gone through dozens of name changes since its beginnings in 1838. And it’s been home to countless journalists – everyone from one writer whose pen name was Stern Wheeler to owner Orion Clemens and to Orion’s kid teenage brother, Sam, the paper’s “printer devil,” or apprentice.

That would be Samuel Clemens, later known to the world as Mark Twain, who grew up in Hannibal, now a touristy shrine

to the author of “Huckleberry Finn.”

But while this Mississippi River community continues to attract thousands of people each year interested in knowing more of the roots of a certain whitewashed wooden fence, Tom Sawyer and “Injun Joe,” fewer residents today follow the local daily paper, whose newsroom once buzzed with a staff of a dozen journalists.

Local residents now submit much of the paper’s news copy.

“I thank them for helping develop a community newspaper,” Montgomery said as she multitasked, listening to a police scanner telling of a fire a few communities away, taking notes, checking her old Mac Pro and chatting with Gateway Journalism Review reporters. “They also

Paul Van Slambrouck Personal items mix with business materials on one of the desks.

send us ‘grip-and-grin’ photos.”

None of the three-person news staff has received a raise in years, and Montgomery says Facebook now is

“the competition” of this award-winning paper of some 5,000 subscribers.

“We’ve stayed true to our integrity,” she said. “We’re still journalists.” 

Paul Van Slambrouck Empty newspaper boxes greatly outnumber the number of newsroom workers now employed at the paper.

Spring 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 19

International

Media coverage of Ukraine’s crisis: War for people’s minds

by Katerina Sirinyok-Dolgaryova It now is evident that Ukraine has been noted on the world’s map by a vast majority of Americans. From “somewhere near Russia,” it has moved to “between Russia and the European Union” – and this awareness happened thanks to coverage in all renowned national and local media in the United States and beyond. Since December, Ukraine’s political crisis has shown how some media play with information – and how journalism is dependent on geopolitics.

Journalists’ work Being a Ukrainian native, I was monitoring media from different parts of the world in how they have covered the Ukrainian crisis, paying special attention to those countries involved in resolving the issue: the United States, Europe, Russia and Ukraine itself. Ukraine became a newsmaker ever since unrest grew at Euro-maidan (Kiev’s main square) from what started as peaceful protests against delaying the EU/Ukraine-associated membership deal by pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych in November. The unrest evolved into a bloody anti-government conflict, with more than 100 killed, thousands injured, and pre-war relations between Ukraine and Russia (de facto Russian military aggression) over the Crimean peninsula annexation.

From December to February, Kiev was a dangerous place for journalists to work. The first journalist to suffer injuries was Tetiana Chornovol, who worked for the anti-government online publication Ukrainska Pravda. She was beaten by unknown attackers in late December.

In January, tension and street violence rose. It seemed that attacks by special police forces were aimed against the least-protected and most vulnerable people because of their work conditions: journalists and paramedic volunteers. Ukrainian Espreso.tv provided videos where police and snipers’ weapons purposely targeted the word “press” and red crosses on protective waistcoats.

Forty-six journalists were reported injured, and two dead, after clashes in Kiev.

The journalists’ most recent work has be-

come entangled in controversy and obstacles as the Crimean conflict escalates. A Ukrainian journalist from the weekly magazine Ukrainsky Tuzhden and a freelance photographer were kidnapped and tortured in Crimea. A group of journalists from Ukraine’s national TV network 1+1 was deported from Russia after shooting video in North Ossetia, a territory annexed

by Russia from Georgia in 2008. A similar story happened with journalists of the channel Ukraine in the unacknowledged republic of Abkhazia, which has been controlled by Russia since 1993. Journalists still are doing their jobs, but now very differently.

U.S. coverage and the European angle Among the first media that started covering Ukrainian events were the U.S. newspapers the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and the broadcast network CNN. Attempts to localize news and give pointed opinions prevailed over “pure” informing. As the conflict spread beyond the Euromaidan protests to Ukraine as a whole, with a major hot spot in Crimea, the United States stepped in as a mediator between Russia and Ukraine. American media exploded with all kinds of stories, ranging from very supportive and positive toward Ukraine to negative ones as well. The New York Times’ leading opinion pieces, as well as CNN’s news and commentaries (including Anderson Cooper’s firsthand reporting from Ukraine), mostly expressed neutral and supportive positions. For example, the New York Times ran an opinion column from Nicholas Kristof in which he deliberately explained why the “villains” are the Russian troops in Crimea. The Washington Post published Condoleezza Rice’s opinion story urging a stronger U.S. position in this conflict.

Opinion pieces challenging U.S. involvement and support of Ukraine appeared in the Los Angeles Times, including those by Paul Whitefield, who contrasted American internal financial needs with providing monetary support to Ukraine.

European media, not surprisingly, showed more in-depth coverage on Ukraine’s crisis, as

Page 20 • Gateway Journalism Review • Spring 2014

geographical closeness still is a crucial factor for world media to involve their foreign reporters in firsthand coverage. The BBC created a special section on its website, with live updating on events via Tweeter, Facebook, other media and its own correspondents. The same kind of attitude to covering Ukrainian events was expressed by the Guardian in Britain and Germany’s Douche Welle. In an edition for non-stop Ukrainian coverage, Poland’s most influential newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, had special issues published in the Ukrainian language, showing its support in that way.

Despite the different angles in coverage, a general message sent by Western media is that Ukraine is divided within the framework of Ukrainian versus Russian languages and ethnic issues. In fact, this generalization was a case in pre-revolutionary Ukraine. Events from recent months have dramatically influenced people’s views and self-identifications. Newscasts and analytical articles on the nation’s uniting during the conflict are missing in Western coverage, while it is widely shown by Ukraine’s media.

This notion of national division has been played for centuries by politicians and historians. Now it is being widely exaggerated by the Russian government to justify that country’s intervention into Ukraine’s sovereignty in Crimea.

Russian propaganda The portrayal of Ukraine in Russian media cannot be called anything else than propaganda. The majority of Russian television networks (with the only possible exception being Dozhd’ [Rain], which is an opposition TV channel) shows an alternative reality to the coverage from the rest of the world.

The recent facts of pro-government propaganda and press freedom persecution in Russia include a series of resignations from wellknown media. The first occurred when Russia Today anchor Liz Wahl quit her job on-air because of unfair coverage of the Ukrainian crisis.

A week later, 39 staff members – including 32 journalists and all of the photo editing staff – resigned from Lenta.ru, the oldest liberal online newspaper in Russia. The staffers quit in a show

Continued on page 34

Hyperlocal

Hyperlocal news ‘aggregators’ shake up Chicago reporting scene

by John McCarron Who says journalism can’t be outsourced?

Or even automated?

Anyone who thinks the reporters’ craft is immune from sweeping changes roiling the U.S. job market – changes driven by technology, globalization and a single-minded focus on corporate efficiency – needs to check out what’s happening in Chicago.

Both major metropolitan dailies there now have corporate affiliations with hyperlocal news “aggregators.” These separate companies have engaged young, modestly paid but techno-hip freelancers to harvest local news items from websites and e-releases. The welter of information, from school lunch menus to home sales to event listings, is then formatted for publication by their more traditional affiliates, notably the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times.

Leadership at both aggregators, the Tribaffiliated LocalLabs and the Sun-Times affiliated Aggrego, insist they aren’t out to supplant the more sophisticated reporting provided by fulltime journalists at the dailies. If anything, they argue, their services liberate the pros to work on more substantial stories. More fundamentally, it’s argued their efficiencies and lower pay scales are helping metro journalism survive as dailies continue to lose audience and advertisers.

“We free our subscribers to do the stories they need to do with feet on the ground,” said Hanke Gratteau, vice president for media services at Chicago-based LocalLabs (the new name for the aggregation services of what had been called Journatic). “Newspapers are having a terrible time. We don’t need to see more media companies go out of business because they can’t afford reporters.”

Not surprisingly, that benign interpretation is getting a nervous “hoo-ha” from many fulltimers at the newspapers.

Last summer the Chicago Newspaper Guild filed an unfair labor practice charge against SunTimes Media for using non-guild members from Aggrego “to do guild work,” especially by providing content to the mother company’s chain of suburban newspapers.

“We’re saying we have enough evidence to show that Aggrego is controlled by the same

management group as Sun-Times Media,” the guild’s executive director, Craig Rosenbaum, said in a statement.

He asserted that Aggrego’s contribution to the chain’s Pioneer Press suburban papers includes uploading website content, collecting police blotters, writing stories, compiling community events, and writing Q-and-A pieces.

“They’re using Aggrego as a way of deliberately displacing our work,” said Rosenbaum, who hopes the National Labor Relations Board complaint leads to a federal court injunction.

“Our concern is that they will continue to displace our workers.”

Like LocalLabs’ Gratteau, Tim Landon, the chief executive officer of Aggrego, argues that technology-enabled aggregation, along with other services his company provides, such as helping advertisers compose advertorial messages for integration into news sites, ultimately enhances the survival chances of traditional journalism.

“Aggrego is building the future of community media,” Landon said.

He argues that traditional shoe-leather methods of news gathering cannot cost-efficiently mine the fine-grained details sought by the readers and viewers of thousands of local media outlets across the country.

Nor, he might have added, the local advertising dollars to be tapped nationwide – a market Aggrego estimates at $135 billion. So they have expansion plans. Earlier this year it was reported that millionaire Irish investor Denis O’Brien has put up $10 million to help Aggrego expand beyond Chicago.

Then again, the use of lower-paid stringers is nothing new, especially at non-union shops such as the Tribune. But what’s going on in Chicago – and spreading rapidly to other markets – takes it to a whole new level. Besides hooking into public databases, for instance, the aggregators are canvassing nonprofits and other community institutions and asking them to, in effect, self-report so their doings can be posted and printed with minimal editing. They also help advertisers write and produce “advertorials,” once the province of ad agencies.

All of this is highly unsettling to those who see experienced reporters with real sources and a grounding in ethics being displaced by Web-savvy neophytes skilled mainly in data mining.

Dark suspicions were confirmed in the summer of 2012, when the Tribune announced it would cease using content in its TribLocal sections provided by Journatic, the forerunner of LocalLabs. This after National Public Radio disclosed the service – since reengaged by the Tribune – had been making up quotes and plagiarizing from AOL’s Patch local reporting service.

It also was reported that Journatic had engaged workers in the Philippines – call-center style – to retype police blotters, reformat public records and gather data, all sent to its U.S. freelancers and staff copy editors for assembly into stories. Phony bylines were used.

Such issues have been cleaned up, said LocalLab’s Gratteau. A former respected managing editor/news of the Tribune, she was hired in March of last year to enforce mainstream news procedures – and, like the name-change, re-establish credibility. She said earlier criticisms of the operation were “overblown.”

Yet all this is happening at a time when fulltime news veterans continue to be laid off or leave the profession via early retirement. Last spring the Sun-Times, in one cost-cutting bloodbath, fired its entire staff of photographers … though four recently were rehired.

So is all this downsizing and outsourcing a necessary effort to save metro print journalism?

Or is it further evidence of the laying off and dumbing-down of Americans as corporate leaders push technology to maximize shareholder value?

In a recent column about the guild’s NLRB filing against Aggrego, journalism critic Michael Miner of the weekly Chicago Reader suggested it may be a bit of both.

“What separates the Aggrego kids from the (newspaper veterans) is simply that they’re younger, nonunion, and – in the eyes of the veterans – stealthily threatening their jobs,” Miner wrote. “And furthermore, they’re doing their work on behalf of a company that would rather be known as a digital start-up than a chain of newspapers. ... It isn’t just contractual, it’s cultural.”

Miner is a civic treasure and never one to pull a punch. But the Reader is now owned by the same Wrapports conglomerate that calls the shots at the Sun-Times and at Aggrego.

It’s a not-so-Brave New World out there. 

Spring 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 21

Hyperlocal

Former Patch editors find new journalism digs at First Click

by Benjamin Israel While not carrying on the hyperlocal coverage of Patch, four former Patch editors have found a home in a startup, First Click, which produces the website www. realtimestl.com, or RT/STL. The site provides links to news of local interest – and often the reactions of tweeters and bloggers.

The site uses proprietary software to monitor social media to find out what “was really happening in the St. Louis area based on what people were actually buzzing about, and without regard for whether the content came from a major publisher or an independent blogger or merely a tweet,” Kurt Greenbaum, RT/STL’s editorial director, wrote in an email. “The idea was to find it in one place, so it was easy for readers to get what they wanted. And it was paramount that we added value to what the publishers provided, respected their content and drove traffic to their websites.”

Greenbaum, the former St. Louis regional editor for Patch, wrote that the idea originated with Jason Fiehler, the founder of Infuz, from which RealTime/STL spun off. Infuz is a St. Louis-based digital advertising agency that started STL Tweets and STL Index in 2009 to monitor social media and gather metadata, according to Heath Harris, creative director at Infuz, writing in the online publication the St. Louis Egotist.

“What sets this apart from your traditional local TV and newspaper sources is the freedom we have to publish anything we want.”

“In a way, those were R&D (research and development) for this project,” Harris wrote. “Fiehler has always been as interested in producing our own original digital products as much as turning out great work for our clients.”

Last October, when Patch laid off all its St. Louis editors, Harris wrote, Fiehler jumped at the chance to hire Greenbaum and Gabrielle Biondo, who edited the Town and Country/Manchester Patch. They make up half the full-time staff that includes curator-in-chief Erica Smith and John Callahan, who is in charge of selling ads. Two more former Patch editors are among “about a dozen part-time curators,” Greenbaum said.

As curators, these experienced journalists do not produce content.

“Within our content management system, the curators add additional metadata to the content, such as ratings, relevancy to our subsections, tags and other details,” Greenbaum said. “They customize the headline and tease for our audience.”

Before launching the site, Greenbaum said, RealTime/STL approached local media outlets about its plans and reassured the media that “we will not sell ads on the content pages that have other pub-

Page 22 • Gateway Journalism Review • Spring 2014

lishers’ content. We are not in the business of trying to monetize other publishers’ content.”

As of press time, RealTime/ STL had not run any ads.

“We will be advertising-supported,” Greenbaum said, noting that the site was still new.

On March 24, First Click’s front page (what subscribers see when they open the daily email) featured an accidental shooting death from Jefferson County; the top 10 articles from the previous week; a survey question for First Click’s readers; a feature about Saint Louis University’s basketball team and its coach; an interview with St. Louis Cardinals left fielder Matt Holliday; and an article about startup businesses.

By clicking on the words “Read more on RT/STL,” the reader will see links to dozens more stories.

“What sets this apart from your traditional local TV and newspaper sources is the freedom we have to publish anything we want,” Harris wrote. “We can publish a video from YouTube that maybe only has 150 views right next to the front-page story from stltoday.com. In our RT/ STL world, both pieces of content are valuable, if they are about, or from, St. Louis.” 

Around the Arch

Former Patch editor refuses to abandon hyperlocal coverage

by Benjamin Israel On Oct. 16, one day after AOL fired all its local St. Louis editors, hyperlocal coverage continued in only Brentwood and Maplewood. That’s because Doug Miner, the Patch editor for those two cities and one of those fired, decided to continue to cover the same beat on his own. He named it 40 South News – the two cities lie just south of Highway 40.

He has kept at it since.

Now, on a typical day, subscribers can expect three to five dispatches – usually short – to land in their email boxes. Miner writes nearly all of them (or maybe just edits the output of local government bodies, organizations and business and sends them out).

Miner declined to answer questions emailed to him for this article.

Miner, a former Suburban Journal photographer, often accompanies the articles with pictures or video clips. He sometimes posts photos with what amounts to photo captions.

For example, a March 22 article, headlined “Maplewood council Tuesday to consider liquor license for Marietta Ave. building,” consisted of two sentences about a craft brewer’s proposed “tasting room,” with a picture of the building.

Another paragraph mentions two other agenda items: a bid on a park improvement, and a vote to approve proposed increases for admission to the city aquatic center and other user fees for park facilities. The article contains a link to the city council’s agenda and related

official documents.

A fourth paragraph lists three Brentwood government meetings scheduled for the same week.

There’s not much reporting there, but readers who want more can follow the link to the agenda and attached documents. One can hardly fault Miner for not reporting the story more deeply. He posted 24 items in that week alone, and his byline appeared on 20 of them.

Miner has a few correspondents.

Doug Houser has one byline from that week. The website identifies Houser as a retired autoworker, a Maplewood resident since 1975, and an advocate of the arts and historic preservation.

Houser’s posts often include centuryold photographs of Maplewood.

His March 18 article is about the old Big Bend Quarry of nearly a century ago. It includes photos of the quarry and of it as a landfill, as well as one of 10 stone homes on Big Bend Boulevard built near the quarry, presumably made of materials from across the street.

One of the other four, under the headline, “APA welcomes Jennifer Blome as Director of Humane Education” carried the byline “by Natalie Partenheimer.” Partenheimer is a development associate for the Animal Protective Association of Missouri, according to the APA website, but no mention of her affiliation accompanies the article. Further down on the left side of the page, a list of bloggers includes Natalie Partenheimer Animal Protective Association.

As if writing, editing, shooting, and posting 20 articles in a week is

not enough, Miner also sells ads. The website asks potential advertisers to contact him and no one else.

In an email Miner sent to Patch subscribers announcing the start of 40 South News, Miner wrote, “I’m partnering with an advertising service that offers editable ads kept up to date through Facebook status changes.”

The ads run on the right side of the posting and are updated through postings on Facebook and Twitter.

When a doughnut shop sells out for the day, or when a bookstore plays host to a novelist, it’s posted with pictures added after the reading starts.

Many of the articles provide links to news from other sources: stltoday.com the St. Louis Business Journal and local television stations, as well as city halls. Miner also compiles a weekly feature called “Media Mentions,” providing links to stories on other media.

Miner has no wall between the news and advertising sides of his business. What he does is reminiscent of many 19th century weekly newspapers that served small towns or minority communities, updated to the Internet age. However, unlike Miner in 40 South News, those papers usually unabashedly expressed the political opinions of the individuals who owned them.

Readers of 40 South News should expect no major investigative pieces, and a cozy relationship between editor and advertisers. However, they continue to get access to news about Maplewood and Brentwood more quickly than residents of the suburbs AOL abandoned. 

Spring 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 23

Around the Arch

TV station’s reputation takes hit in aftermath of school safety ‘test’ story Editor’s note: Tripp Frohlichstein has been retained by Kirkwood High School in the past, but not on this incident. He also had two sons go through Kirkwood’s school district.

by Tripp Frohlichstein This is the story of a good idea gone bad.

It is the story of a series of mistakes made by a television station attempting to conduct an undercover investigation.

And it is the story of lessons learned by a school district.

On Jan. 16, KSDK Channel 5, the St. Louis NBC affiliate, was investigating security at five different schools in the area. One of the schools was Kirkwood High School (KHS).

The station’s misguided undercover effort would result in a lockdown at the high school, angering students, staff and parents – and ultimately forcing an apology from the station.

The details of this story are pieced together from interviews and previous accounts as Channel 5, when asked for an interview, said it had no further comment and that all the station had to say had already been said.

The incident began around lunchtime. A photographer from Channel 5, John Kelley, entered the high school unchallenged through a door on the south side of the building.

Channel 5’s website reported later that day that “one of our employees assigned to this investigative report visited KHS. He entered and walked his way toward the office, asking a teacher for directions after a few minutes.

There, he asked if he might discuss the school’s

security. He identified himself by name and gave the office his phone number.

“When the security official could not be reached, our employee left the premises without escort. Approximately an hour later – after our visit – the high school was put on lockdown.

“This lockdown certainly was not the intent of our visit.”

The high school has acknowledged the lapses in security and says they have been fixed.

Even though Channel 5’s undercover effort led to changes, the question is this: Did they do it in the right way? Did they violate the code of ethics for the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ)? The SPJ website (http:// www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp) notes that “the SPJ Code of Ethics is voluntarily embraced by thousands of journalists … and is widely used in newsrooms … as a guide for ethical behavior. The code is intended not as a set of ‘rules,’ but as a resource for ethical decision-making.”

One tenet of that code is this: “Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information, except when traditional open methods will not yield information vital to the public. Use of such methods should be explained as part of the story.”

That does not appear to have been a policy Channel 5 followed.

The problem began after Kelley left his contact information and asked for directions to the bathroom. However, a secretary noticed he went a different direction.

They were not sure if Kelley had left the building, so they called the number he left.

Kirkwood District communications director Ginger Cayce says, “We called the reporter’s phone once. His voicemail message said he worked for Channel 5.”

So Cayce says she called Channel 5 three times to confirm his identity. She says the per-

son at the assignment desk refused to verify his identity or if he was on assignment.

Cayce says Channel 5’s Leisa Zigman, who narrated the on-air story, later told her the assignment desk had not been told about the investigation because station officials were concerned that, if the identity of the Channel 5 staffer was confirmed, one school district might tell another and ruin the story.

Even if the assignment desk was unaware of the investigation, why employees would not even confirm Kelley worked as a Channel 5 photographer remains unanswered. This desire for secrecy was a costly error. During the lockdown, people were scared.

On Jan. 17, 2014, the Riverfront Times reported that “Dan Sammartano says his freshman daughter spent all 40 minutes of the lockdown believing she was going to die.

‘I have never heard her this shaken up in my life,’ Sammartano posts on Facebook.”

By the time the story aired, social media were alive with substantial criticism of the station and its tactics, though a few supported the station.

“The story upset parents, and we’ve received your angry calls on this Newschannel 5 report,” said anchor Mike Bush as he introduced the story. “We knew this would be a difficult task, and we spent a lot of time determining how to approach it from a procedural and legal standpoint.”

Perhaps not enough.

The total story was given a whopping seven minutes, a lifetime by local news broadcast standards. This included an interview with Charles McCrary (formerly with the city police department and city schools) discussing more school safety points and why Kirkwood had messed up.

Even though Channel 5’s undercover effort led to changes, the question is this:

Did they do it in the right way?

Page 24 • Gateway Journalism Review • Spring 2014

Around the Arch

School story involving ‘passive deception’ worth doing, despite lockdown Editor’s note: Walter Jaehnig is the retired director of the School of Journalism at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He was a reporter and editor with the Louisville Courier-Journal, and taught reporting and media ethics at Indiana, Wyoming and Southern Illinois University.

by Walter Jaehnig In late February, NBC’s “Today” show hired two teenage-looking actors (both aged 21 or older) and sent them to a liquor store in New Jersey. The actors loitered outside, asking customers entering the store to buy beer

for them. All male customers refused, but several women took their money and purchased their six-packs.

This was not a huge story and probably proved nothing. It did, however, stimulate discussion about the adult role in underaged drinking, especially when the “Today” staffers interviewed the president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving about the implication that women were more willing than men to provide teens with alcohol.

Television newspeople love this kind of story – and, because of their visual dimension, can do it very well. But news stories that involve reporters as active participants in making the news also raise ethical questions, as can be seen by the controversy resulting from KSDK’s investigation of security at five St. Louis-area schools. KSDK, an NBC affiliate,

was not alone in this caper. According to a report in the New York Times, WNBC in New York and the “Today” program did similar investigations of school security.

Were they wrong to do so? What ethical principles did they violate in producing these stories? Is this a case in which the ends – an investigation of security in our public schools – justified the means the reporters used?

Investigative journalism has a time-honored place in the U.S. media system. Since Nellie Bly had herself admitted so she might examine conditions in lunatic asylums of the 1880s, reporters have gone undercover to discover the truth about the meat-packing industry, child labor, prison life, drug rings, supermarkets, airport security and a host of

Continued on next page

Spring 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 25

Around the Arch The first question to consider is whether this story was worth doing. Unfortunately, names such as Newtown, Columbine, Arapahoe and Roswell, and many others, have been hammered into the American consciousness recently because of tragic events in these communities. Gun control and school security have become matters of public concern and debate.

Continued from previous page other disturbances in the American dream.

Actually, Bly was not even the first; New York Tribune reporter Julius Chambers had arranged his own commitment to an asylum 15 years earlier. And just as the power and popularity of investigative journalism has grown with advances in computing and surveillance technology, so has the debate over the methods of investigation that are appropriate for reporters to use.

The first question to consider is whether the KSDK story was worth doing. Unfortunately, names such as Newtown, Columbine, Arapahoe and Roswell, and many others, have been hammered recently into the American consciousness because of tragic events in these communities. Gun control and school security have become matters of public concern and debate.

While it might be questioned whether sending reporters to open school doors is the best (or only) way of reporting this story, it nevertheless is a story of public importance, and it might well be significant that the KSDK reporter found that four of the five schools he visited had effective security systems in place.

Parents and pupils from these schools must draw reassurance from this.

What about the method KSDK used? In Tripp Frohlichstein’s accompanying article, this is referred to as an “undercover investigation.” In fact, it was nothing of the sort.

Some years ago Edmund Lambeth of the University of Missouri published a fine article on the ethics of investigative reporting.

Lambeth used the phrase “passive deception” for what KSDK did: the reporter appeared as a public citizen might, sampling a restaurant (food critic) or film or auto repair garage – or, in this case, checking to see if anyone could walk into the school unimpeded. At Kirkwood High School, he could – and so could anyone else.

Lambeth distinguished “passive deception” from “aggressive deception,” which involves role-playing (pretending to be someone else) or a form of lying. The “Today” program experiment described at the beginning of this article is a form of aggressive deception, which can be

less acceptable in an ethical sense. The KSDK reporter was not in disguise and acted as could any member of the public, armed or not.

Lambeth also discussed the notions of “benign” and “invasive” deception. Benign deception refers to cases in which the reporter gathers information without altering the context of the situation, performing mainly eyeball surveillance. He distinguished this from “invasive” deception, in which the reporter misrepresents his identity or provides falsified information, such as incorrectly filling out a job application so the reporter might obtain a position. These invasive acts change the context – and, in doing so, might alter the story that is reported, and therefore raise a new set of ethical questions. Again, using Lambeth’s ethical standard, KSDK’s benign reporting did not alter the context of the situation in the schools, and therefore was not, on its face, unethical.

Frohlichstein castigates KSDK for failing to meet the standard of the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethics code that suggests “undercover and other surreptitious methods” should be avoided except in exceptional circumstances, such as when there is no other way of reporting the story. The SPJ code is only one ethical system available to journalists, among many – and, as shown above, it does not apply in this case, as the KSDK reporter was not “undercover” or using surreptitious means.

Ethicist Sissela Bok suggested that a “test of publicity” might be used in determining whether investigative methods are ethical. According to Bok, this is an issue of transparency: to what extent is the reporter or news organization willing to assert and defend publicly the methods used in generating information?

In this case, KSDK explained quite explicitly what its reporter had done in approaching the schools, seeking entry, identifying himself to authorities, and leaving the scene. This worked in four of the five cases. KSDK’s procedures broke down when the reporter encountered the one school with no apparent security system in place. But this does not mean the station’s work fails Bok’s test.

In Frohlichstein’s article, KSDK is taken to task for what happened after the reporter

Page 26 • Gateway Journalism Review • Spring 2014

left the scene at Kirkwood. This is a purely consequentialist argument, trying to make the reporter responsible for what happened after he reported the story – a classic case of blaming the messenger. Is it the reporter’s fault that the principal put the school on lockdown?

That a teacher incited his students by promising to stand at the door and sacrifice himself in protecting them? That another teacher told a student to arm himself with scissors and be prepared to kill the person if it came to that (the student’s mother reported this on Facebook)? That another student spent 40 minutes thinking she was going to die? Clearly, the school administration and faculty were caught unprepared, just as they were unprepared earlier when the reporter was able to enter the school, walk past several occupied classrooms, ask a teacher for information without being questioned, and the school was unable to locate the security officer when the reporter finally reached the main office. In this circumstance, should parents and students be angered by the television station that exposed this remarkable level of unpreparedness, or the school officials who failed to provide them with better protection?

KSDK probably was guilty of one error of judgment: selecting Kirkwood High School as one of its five schools. Kirkwood lies in the heart of middle-class St. Louis, the comfortable home of many members of the city’s media industry.

Frohlichstein himself previously has been employed by KHS, and two of his children attended Kirkwood schools. Putting this obvious conflict of interest aside, one is left with two thoughts: • We are given the impression that KSDK’s reporting of this story led to a storm of public disapproval, but why do we not hear about the parents and pupils at the other four schools? Were they unhappy with the station and its reporting in the same way?

• Would the media establishment be attacking KSDK if it had substituted a high school in South County or North St. Louis for Kirkwood in checking on school security?

Then again, given the value of public attention to ratings, maybe KSDK knew exactly what it was doing. 

Book Review

Insider view of Pentagon Papers battle describes First Amendment in the making

by Mark Sableman Jim Goodale could have titled his book, “Present at the Creation of Modern First Amendment Law.” As in-house counsel for the New York Times, he led that paper’s litigation of two tide-turning media cases of the late 1960s.

Goodale provides a fascinating blow-by-blow insider’s description of the Pentagon Papers case – and, to a lesser extent, the contemporaneous reporters’ privilege case that he, a New Yorker and Times loyalist to the core, insists on calling United States v. Caldwell (because that was the Times case in the trilogy that the Supreme Court decided under the Branzburg v. Hayes name).

The reporters’ privilege fight – itself a big issue with few precedents – was under way when the Times received, and began to write about, the Pentagon Papers.

Knowing the Nixon administration’s hatred for the Times, and its love of secrecy, Goodale feared legal action. The potential claims were hard to divine. Espionage Act? But that wasn’t meant for newspapers. Executive order? But that applied only to government employees. The defense was obvious – no prior restraint – but Goodale wasn’t confident about the few precedents and how they would be applied under the political pressure of the late ’60s.

The case truly resembled a “battle” as suggested in the title, “Fighting for the Press: the Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles.” The Times’ longstanding law firm refused to help.

Goodale pieced together a litigation team on the fly, including a law professor who had never tried a case or argued an appeal (Alexander Bickel) and a young law firm part-

Publisher: CUNY Journalism Press, N.Y. Paperback: $20 260 pages ner (Floyd Abrams) then practically unknown in the media law field.

The case proceeded in a crazy manner in the early summer of 1969 – trial with two days’ notice; appeal with one day’s notice; surprise evidence; partially closed hearings.

But it ended gloriously, with a 6-3 Supreme Court decision that set a landmark of extra-strong protection against any prior restraint of publication.

A story more than a legal analysis, the book includes price-

less vignettes: • Goodale as a young inhouse lawyer, realizing the scope of the case, ordering his publisher, Punch Sulzberger, back from Europe to stand up to the government.

• The Times’ overnightbefore-trial examination of a special last-minute government submission – and the team’s joy when a reporter finds that some of the supposedly most super-secret documents had previously been pub-

lished in a Congressional report.

• The lawyers’ difficult grappling under pressure for standards to propose for unprecedented situations, and the heady success of having their proposal, or something very close, adopted by the Supreme Court as constitutional law.

Ultimately, of course, a reader scrutinizes these pages closely for answers for today’s Pentagon Papers counterparts: the WikiLeaks and Snowden disclosures. Goodale sees Julian Assange of Wikileaks as akin to the Times editors, and his book’s publication deadline apparently predated Snowden’s revelations to the Guardian – and, indirectly, the Times.

Goodale warns of government obsession with secrecy. He’s alarmed at post-9/11 actions by Bush – and, even more so, Obama.

The prior restraint freedom he won could be eviscerated if criminal leak prosecutions, of officials and recipients, chill reporting on abuses and mistakes made in the name of national security.

Goodale was present at a remarkable creation for U.S. press freedoms. Today, as the Internet, WikiLeaks, and Snowden are showing us, we encounter a different media world. The media that reach us are worldwide, and far more diverse, including many non-institutional, even anarchic, participants such as Snowden and Assange. Yet law remains national, meaning that U.S. constitutional protections end at our border and hardly control the new global media.

Wherever and whenever the decisive battles are fought over the creation of a new global legal order for new media, we can hope that the participants act with the same level of courage and creativity as did Goodale and his colleagues in 1969. And that they keep good notes, for those inevitable fascinating memoirs. 

Spring 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 27

Around the Arch

Commentary on changing times: Historical society gets Engelhardt cartoons

by Terry Ganey Sometime next spring, the State Historical Society of Missouri plans to publish a book containing a selection of the editorial cartoons created by Tom Engelhardt during his 35 years at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

An exhibition of some of the cartoons, to take place at about the same time as the book’s publication, also is in the planning stages, according to Joan Stack, the society’s curator of art collections at the University of Missouri in Columbia. The problem is in the winnowing: Engelhardt drew about 8,000 cartoons during his career, and selecting the best of each of those years is a major undertaking.

“We are working on it,” Stack said. “You’ve got a lot cartoons, and you’ve got to find a way to narrow it down. Hopefully there will be one cartoon for every year. We just went through the cartoons of the ’60s, and we narrowed it down to eight. It will need to be narrowed down again.”

Between 1962 and his retirement in 1997, Engelhardt used pen, ink and paper to argue – and illuminate – political issues of the day: civil rights, elections, the Vietnam War, Pentagon spending and political corruption, among other subjects. When he retired, the newspaper’s editorial page said, “Mr. Engelhardt’s mild personal manner belies the heart of a lion. An unapologetic liberal, Mr. Engelhardt never tolerated injustice, never lacked sympathy with the poor and never feared to attack wrong.

There is no higher compliment.”

Last June, Engelhardt and his wife, Kath, moved out of their house and into an apartment. In the process, the archival boxes containing many of his original drawings were donated to the State Historical Society of Missouri. Engelhardt’s Post-Dispatch predecessors, Daniel Fitzpatrick and Bill Mauldin, also had donated some of their original work there.

The society is now custodian of 7,452 of Engelhardt’s original drawings, 1,769 created

by Fitzpatrick, and 10 examples of Mauldin’s work.

Engelhardt, now 83, succeeded Mauldin when he moved to the Chicago Sun Times.

Engelhardt said that sometime in the mid-1960s he got a letter from the man who then was the director of the Missouri society.

“He asked if I would considered contributing my cartoons to them,” Engelhardt said. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. We started making contacts back and forth over the years, and it just seemed logical because Fitzpatrick and Mauldin had already given theirs that I should keep up that continuity. I don’t know what I would do with them. After I died, it would be a mess for my children to sort through them.”

Stack said the collection has been indexed for preservation, and that a project to digitize the images was now underway.

“I’m a strong believer in the original artwork having a special value,” Stack said. “When you actually see these cartoons, you actually see the care and the beauty of the tone, and all those things that don’t come through in photo reproductions.”

Engelhardt grew up in St. Louis and graduated from St. Louis University High School.

He said that from the time he was 3 years old he knew he wanted to be a cartoonist. He studied art at various institutions, and after service in the Air Force, used his GI Bill benefits to pay for instruction at the School of Visual Art in New York.

“They had instructors who did nationally syndicated cartoons,” Engelhardt said.

Engelhardt is the last of a dying breed. The Post-Dispatch no longer has its own editorial cartoonist, and other newspapers have dropped artists from their staffs to save money.

“Right now, I think editorial cartooning is in a deplorable state,” Engelhardt said. “When you go back and look at the Fitzpatrick cartoons and the Mauldins, they were hard-hitting

Page 28 • Gateway Journalism Review • Spring 2014

– and they usually made an impact.”

“We really contributed to the political and social dialogue,” he added. “Today, too many of the cartoons are ‘gag cartoons,’ what I call a laugh pasted on a headline. I think they just don’t want to offend anybody, and I thought that was my business, offending. I think it’s important for people to see what the old-time cartoonists were doing.”

Stack said that’s what the society plans to do with Engelhardt’s work.

“We’re hoping we can make more people familiar what a great artist Tom Engelhardt was, and what a great resource he was to our state and our nation,” Stack said. “And he’s not just a great artist. He was somebody who had a keen political sense who was able to capture fairly complex political ideas visually. His work will have a special place with us. His cartoons will definitely live on and continue to inspire people, and help us to understand who we are in our history.” 

Around the Arch

Post-Dispatch’s McClellan: A storyteller extraordinaire

by Terry Ganey It’s Tuesday and Bill McClellan is desperate. He owes the St. Louis Post-Dispatch a column for the next day’s paper. Three possibilities swirl in his head, but he doubts all the elements for any of the three stories can be assembled to meet his deadline.

“I’m probably going to have to punt and write something off the top of my head,” McClellan admits. For more than 30 years, this has been McClellan’s vocation, scrambling to serve up slices of life for St. Louis readers in 800word increments, four times per week: Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.

At 66, McClellan still manages to feed the beast, but he doesn’t plan too far in advance.

“I’ve never been much in the way of plans, beyond like what I’m going to be doing next,” he says. “ ‘Well, I think I’ll work on this story next.’ That’s about as far out as I go. First I have to see what I’m going to do Sunday, and then I can think about Monday. It’s just flying by the seat of my pants all the time.”

On this particular Tuesday, he’s hustling to find a woman who can provide context for a tale about a man who was about to be sentenced for a crime he may not have committed.

At the same time, he’s lining up information about a 25-year-old case in which a 17-year-old girl was raped and murdered. One man convicted for that crime is about to be executed, while his accomplice nears parole.

“And then I’m working on a story about a woman with an autistic child who is about to age out of the Special School District, and I have some urgency on that,” he says.

While most columnists are pontificators offering opinions on the events of the day, McClellan is a storyteller. Facts, quotes, history and observations of real people in real situations are the ingredients he needs. He says that pursuit – the hunt for story elements – gives him the vitamins necessary to maintain his enthusiasm.

“Running around and trying to find people and talking to people takes up most of my time,” he says. “But it’s the most fun part of it.

Sometimes writing the column is almost a necessary nuisance to keep the license to be able to run around on these stories.”

Since he began writing the column in 1983, McClellan has held a mirror to the St. Louis com-

Bill McClellan munity, filling the role of town crier, historian, humorist, soothsayer and seeker of justice.

“He’s sort of our Mark Twain,” observes Mike Murray, a professor of media studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. “The back of my office door contains many McClellan columns. So, if I’m having a bad day, I sometimes close the door, read a few of those and, as they say these days … laugh out loud.”

Even when he “punts,” as he did for that Wednesday paper, McClellan manages to bring smiles to readers’ faces.

As with many of his “off-the-top-of-myhead” tales, McClellan examined an episode of his home life, his relationship with his wife, Mary, and how the bathroom shower door was broken – and how he was content to live with it, while Mary wanted it repaired.

“Perhaps it was my imagination, but there seemed to be a note of reproach in her voice,” McClellan observed.

McClellan pointed to his anemia in the manly art of home repairs.

“As regular readers know, I long ago realized that I have Neanderthal genes,” he wrote.

Unable to find the right repair part at the hardware store, a place McClellan considers

alien territory, “the next day, my wife hired a Homo sapien to fix the sliding glass door.”

The wooly and rumpled McClellan has the ability to poke fun at himself, and it’s one of his drawing cards. It also enables him to poke fun at others: politicians, celebrities and sports figures. But behind his disheveled demeanor, and the seemingly scattered approach to his craft, there’s the realization that his writing demands discipline and clarity of thought.

He must have been given a gift for delivering messages simply and clearly with an engaging style. How else could you explain the 160 columns that he wrote last year, or the 4,800 columns since 1983, which equal roughly more than 3.8 million words?

McClellan attributes some of his success to the fact that he’s a Baby Boomer who writes like he talks.

“I’m such a middle-brow person,” he says.

“What interests me in a column is what interests a lot of people. My interests are very pedestrian. I’m an average Baby Boomer – and if something interests me, it will probably interest a wide swath of people.”

Continued on next page

Spring 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 29

Around the Arch Continued from previous page Columnists seek subjects begging for comment, satire or illumination. McClellan sometimes finds topics among the absurdities of the justice system or the hypocrisy of politicians.

One example: Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon’s refusal to grant clemency to a man who had served 20 years of a life sentence for buying marijuana.

Another: the dissembling of a haughty state representative named Casey Guernsey, who drove around in his Hummer with expired license plates and then lied about it.

McClellan’s columns jump from whimsical topics such as the weather, daydreaming and talking to dogs to serious issues, such as public education, race relations and the need for bone-marrow donors. He has written touchingly about an elderly couple with one spouse affected by Alzheimer’s disease. He features a 79-year-old man who retired from his job of bagging groceries. And he has commented on Lee Enterprises’ chief executive officer, Mary Junck, receiving an exorbitant salary as the newspaper’s staff has been cut.

He can offer a ridiculous idea to explain a point.

For example, on discussing Missouri’s cultural divide (and the real reason why some pronounce the state’s name “Missourah” and others “Missouree”), he suggested St. Louis be attached to the state of Illinois. The rest of Missouri could remain as it is.

“We’ll take urban street crime,” he wrote.

“They can have the meth labs.”

For his own part, McClellan’s favorite columns are those that right wrongs.

“There have been a few columns over the years that have actually helped people,” he says.

“Like somebody who was getting beaten out of their pension, and then I would write something, and they would get their pension.”

Last fall, under the headline, “Crime and Punishment in the Wal-Mart World,” McClellan wrote about a young man who had lost his $9.95-per-hour job at the store because he failed to pay for a $1.78 energy drink. The employee said he had attempted to swipe his debit card at the cashier’s station, but it failed to go through. He thought the cashier had made up the difference. The young man was fired and led out of the store in handcuffs. After McClellan inquired, he got his job back.

“So every now and then, a story will have a good response,” he says. “Usually, no. People look at this as the court of last resort. Often you write a story and nothing happens. But now and then something happens. So I like those stories.”

Columnists seek subjects begging for comment, satire or illumination. McClellan sometimes finds topics among the absurdities of the justice system or the hypocrisy of politicians.

Regular readers of his columns soon know McClellan’s life story. His wife, Mary, is a dentist, and they have two children, and now a grandchild. McClellan was raised in Chicago, and his father was an electrician. Going back further, the family has roots in northern Ireland.

As for his political beliefs, McClellan is a liberal with a tinge of conservatism. He supports working people, believes in collective responsibility and is in favor of laws that protect the environment. He supports the ACLU and the rights of the accused. But he’s also in favor of the death penalty.

“I believe that a person who has been fairly convicted should be punished,” he wrote. “I have served as a state’s witness at an execution.”

It’s because his then-girlfriend and now wife went to dental school at Washington University that McClellan ended up in St. Louis.

He had flunked out of the University of Illinois and was drafted into the Marine Corps.

After his service he moved to Phoenix, where he worked as a bartender and attended Arizona State University.

“Mary, my girlfriend, decided to become a dentist, and there’s no dental school in Arizona,” McClellan says.

When she was accepted at Washington University, McClellan agreed to follow her to St. Louis.

He tried out for a spot at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, but he never heard back.

He managed to work himself into a slot as the night police reporter for the Post-Dispatch. His opportunities grew when columnist Jake McCarthy left the paper.

“They decided to replace Jake, but they wanted somebody who had more of a background in hard news,” McClellan says. “The night police reporter job helped me immeasurably with the columns. I had a great familiarity with a number of cases and knew the cops well, and then got to know the prosecutors and the defense attorneys, so I had a big advantage. For all these years I’ve been able to do a lot of crimi-

Page 30 • Gateway Journalism Review • Spring 2014

nal justice stuff, and really it’s all from that time when I was night police reporter.”

Editors who have worked with him say the voice in his columns reflects the person McClellan is – down to earth, amusing and humble. That cannot be said about all columnists.

“Bill should have won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary a long time ago,” says Ellen Soeteber, who was the Post-Dispatch’s editor from 2001 to 2005. “When you have a columnist as smart and consistently good as Bill, the top editor can pretty much leave him alone, which I’m sure he prefers. I thought he should get free rein except in cases of potential libel, inaccuracy or a cheap shot that misses the mark. On the rare occasions that Bill even approached any such infraction, he was wise enough to recognize the possibility himself and seek advice – even a few times from me. I respect him for that.”

McClellan became something of a media celebrity in 1987, when Martin Duggan, the host of “Donnybrook,” asked him to be one of the regular panelists who discuss issues of the day on KETC-TV Channel 9 in St. Louis.

“He was indispensable on ‘Donnybrook’ because of his judgment, opinion, manners and appearance,” Duggan says. “He’s the most even-tempered person I’ve ever known.”

In addition to his columns and his TV work, McClellan has written a true-crime book, “Evidence of Murder,” and his columns have been assembled into three collections: “Slogging Towards the Millennium,” “Through the Glass Darkly” and “Gently Down the Stream.”

When asked about his enthusiasm for his work, McClellan compares himself to a fictional character named “Martin Daugherty,” a columnist for the Albany Times Union, in William Kennedy’s “Billy Phalen’s Greatest Game.”

In the book, Daugherty is seen rushing out of his house without breakfast: “I’ve got a hell of a story, I think, Mary. I’ll call you.”

“What about your coffee? What about your eggs?”

But he was already gone, this aging firefly who never seemed to his wife to have grown up quite like other men, gone on another story.

When McClellan was asked how long he planned to continue writing, he replied, “That’s a good question. I don’t know. I’m not sure. Not a heck of a lot longer, that’s for sure. But, you know, I don’t have (a) date set out, like quit when I’m 67. Not a heck of a lot longer. Whatever that means I don’t know. I’m surely not going to be doing this at 70 or 69. I can’t see myself doing this at 68.

So that closes it down.” 

Letter to the Editor

GJR publisher highlights undisputed points Editor’s note: William H. Freivogel is a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter and editor, and a colleague of Eddie Roth and the Post-Dispatch reporters and editors involved in the series.

Top editors of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote a letter to the editor of the Gateway Journalism Review taking issue with a recent story about the paper’s “Jailed By Mistake” investigation.

The GJR is publishing the entire letter to provide the newspaper a full airing of its views and because the letter is an extraordinarily detailed defense of a major newspaper project.

The letter does not complain of inaccuracies, but rather the GJR’s “absence of analysis, its lopsided ‘he said, she said,’ nature of reporting.”

A legendary editor at the St. Louis PostDispatch advised young reporters in the 1970s and 1980s to never overwrite their facts. Over four decades of reporting, the wisdom of that advice became apparent to this reporter – hence the inclination not to draw broad conclusions.

Nevertheless, amid the “he said, she said” claims, many important points are uncontested:

• Post-Dispatch reporters Jennifer Mann and Robert Patrick are enterprising, crusading reporters who strongly believe their stories are accurate, true and important.

• Mann and Patrick identified scores of cases where innocent people were mistakenly locked up for days because actual criminals – often relatives or friends – had used their names as aliases.

• Locking up innocent men and women is a fundamental injustice and an important story that warrants close attention from judges and prosecutors.

• Stories Mann and Patrick wrote in 2012 that disclosed the first cases of mistaken jailings also uncovered serious problems in the city’s method of identifying people unjustly imprisoned.

It also is uncontested that: • About half of the 100 cases identified by the Post-Dispatch were five years old or older; only about a dozen related to the past two years, during which time police made some 60,000 arrests.

• Post-Dispatch editors refused to pay the $750 to $1,000 required to obtain computerized records that could have updated their story.

• The Post-Dispatch did not talk to most of the 100 people who the paper said

were wrongly jailed. It talked to about a dozen defendants or their lawyers. One person whom the Post-Dispatch did not talk to initially, Cortez Cooper, never had been jailed.

• The paper has not reported the detailed challenges that St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce has mounted to several of the paper’s examples; instead, the paper has disputed the prosecutor’s findings in a letter to her.

Resolving disputed claims about individual cases is impossible because the answers depend on records closed to the Post-Dispatch and GJR. It would take an official inquiry, with access to the court records, to clarify the dimensions of the threat to the justice identified by the PostDispatch’s stories.

In addition to the Post-Dispatch letter, the GJR is publishing a response from the paper’s main critic, Eddie Roth, Mayor Francis Slay’s deputy chief of staff, and a former Post-Dispatch editorial writer. In addition, Gateway Journalism Review is publishing a letter from prosecutor Joyce. The GJR invited Roth and Joyce to respond because of the detailed criticisms of them in the Post-Dispatch letter.

William H. Freivogel Publisher, Gateway Journalism Review

Letter to the editor from Post-Dispatch takes issue with recent GJR article March 7, 2014 Letter for publication Dear Mr. Babcock: We had trusted that the Gateway Journalism Review’s recent article, “Social Media Campaign by former P-D writer alleges P-D mistakes in series about mistakes” (Winter 2014), by publisher Bill Freivogel would finally offer a fairer and more complete assessment of our “Jailed by Mistake” project than your previous online efforts. Instead, we unfortunately found a disappointing lack of critical thinking, balance and independent reporting.

The most disturbing failures of the article were its absence of analysis, its lopsided “he said, she said,” nature of reporting and its author’s willingness to accept without question assertions and

spin by the very public officials who oversee operations that mistakenly put innocent people in jail. They are not neutral observers.

Let us be clear just in case some of your readers may have been confused by Mr. Freivogel’s language that the newspaper “at first stood by its stories,” as if we don’t any longer. The Post-Dispatch still stands by its stories and its reporting. In fact, we remind Mr. Freivogel and your audience of our investigation’s key and indisputable findings – all of which were prominently displayed in our main article: • Police failed to verify the identity of people they arrested, especially those who provided someone else’s name. In almost every wrongful arrest found, police and other officials overlooked a fingerprint report warning that they either had

the wrong person or someone who used an alias.

• The protests of those wrongly arrested often were ignored.

• Officials failed to differentiate between the people who gave false names and the people who suffered for it.

• Authorities played down the cases where their own mistake caused a wrongful arrest.

• Officials failed to correct errors in records, setting up repeated wrongful arrests and leaving authorities unsure of who they were holding or who committed which past crimes.

Continued on next page

Spring 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 31

Letter to the Editor Continued from previous page We’re not sure why neither Mr. Freivogel nor the critics he cites avoid discussion of these recurring systemic problems. Instead, Mr. Freivogel’s reporting relies largely on the comments and complaints of mayoral aide Eddie Roth, who had been Mayor Francis Slay’s point man on the wrongful-arrest issue.

Mr. Freivogel also repeats an initial broadbrush claim to him by St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce about errors in the story based on a “survey” of 10 percent of the cases and repeats Mr. Roth’s criticism that the Post-Dispatch has not reported her claims. But he fails to note that she made no such claim to the newspaper. Mr. Freivogel also seemingly did no research on his own, even though the reporters provided him with names and criminal case numbers of mistake examples, and the newspaper’s detailed response to the handful of cases that Joyce’s office did single out and submit in a letter to the newspaper.

Mr. Freivogel also accepted unchallenged a public official’s claims that records exist to dispute the newspaper’s results, but the newspaper, and by extension the public, “does not have the legal authority or legal access to the documents needed to verify the accuracy of the documents you are representing to the public.”

Ms. Joyce says that a newspaper project based on public law enforcement and court records is wrong, but then says that the proof of error is in law-enforcement records too secret to reveal. Moreover, in our particular project, the reporters had turned over their findings to Ms. Joyce and other officials weeks before publication, hoping for a well-informed response rather than stonewalling. And, as we have pointed out to Ms. Joyce, certain case-specific information that actually was provided to us beforehand proved to be erroneous. Moreover, the circuit attorney has turned down more recent requests to sit down and go through the cases with her or her staff.

Mr. Freivogel also passes along Ms. Joyce’s call for an audit of the newspaper’s methods and findings, without asking her why she has made no effort to correct errors or whether she would agree to submit to a similar audit. Any audit without disclosure of more records in their control would be folly.

Mr. Freivogel twice repeats Mr. Roth’s claim of our “grudging” approach to correcting errors, specifically in the case of Cecil and Cor-

tez Cooper. We followed and continue to follow standard corrections procedures. As we have said before, we stand ready and willing to correct any factual errors in the stories, but we do need documentation and accurate evidence to do so.

That’s not grudging; that’s common sense.

Moreover, the Cooper correction was made in the traditional way, running on page A2 of the newspaper. We also updated and corrected online versions of the story. But Mr. Freivogel apparently didn’t bother to verify Mr. Roth’s claim.

Speaking of the Cooper case, let’s set a few things straight. We made and acknowledged a significant error by saying Cortez Cooper had been held in jail on brother Cecil Cooper’s drug charge. Cortez’s name had appeared on arrest records because his brother had used his name before being released on pending charges. Despite a fingerprint report within 21 hours showing that the wanted man was really Cecil, an arrest warrant was issued two months later for Cortez.

Police arrested and jailed Cecil for 36 days under the name of Cortez. The real Cortez ultimately had to go to court to get his name released from the case by a judge. Our error was in not discovering that the “Cortez” officials had listed in the arrest warrant and jail records was not the real Cortez whose name was cleared by the court. To this day, it is unclear whether police and jailers at the time knew they had Cecil rather than Cortez in custody.

Unfortunately, those inaccurate law-enforcement records continue to dog Cortez, who has no arrests of his own. As our follow-up story explained, when Cortez went to police headquarters to see if his record had been fixed, police put him in handcuffs. They released him only after he produced the judge’s earlier order.

While we deserve scrutiny for the error, we note some oddness in Mr. Freivogel’s focus on the Cooper case. He describes that particular case as “cited prominently” in our original story.

There is no excuse for any error wherever it is in a story, and we goofed on this specific case.

But “cited prominently” seems a bit overstated.

The Cooper brothers were mentioned in two paragraphs of a 145-paragraph main story (paragraphs 44 and 45) and as one example in a chart of about 100 cases.

Who was prominent in our story – and somehow never mentioned at all in the GJR article or in public officials’ criticism – was Shannon Renee McNeal, the bus driver who was featured in our story and who in 2009 was taken away from her children, arrested

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and jailed under a felony drug warrant intended for another woman who had died seven months earlier. Not only did our series lead off with McNeal’s tale and photo, we also included a separate sidebar on her. In fact, Mr. Freivogel’s article also failed to mention even once any of the four additional people whom we did prominently profile in our package.

Nor did Mr. Freivogel apparently talk with some of the unbiased court officials in the story who had firsthand knowledge of mistaken jailings. As far as we know, Mr. Freivogel did not speak with Judge Michael David, who freed Sylvester Williams from jail in another man’s drug-related case after noting that “even a casual review” of their photos “would clearly indicate to any person (even one of limited mental capacity) that these are not the same two people.” Nor did he apparently speak with Judge Joan Moriarity who released the 10-fingered William E. Willis whom she determined was not the eightfingered William L. Willis charged in a vehicle theft and burglary.

Late in the article, Mr. Roth says that the newspaper is uncomfortable “with the give-andtake of serious social media,” but Mr. Freivogel doesn’t critically examine that claim either. He fails to note that the only social media being utilized in Mr. Roth’s personal PR campaign is Mr. Roth’s private Twitter and Facebook accounts, or note that Roth’s Facebook page is largely private.

Mr. Freivogel might have asked why the city’s officialdom and its official social media apparatus have been mostly silent about the story and the issues raised.

In the words of Joseph Pulitzer, Post-Dispatch reporters and editors will continue to “never tolerate injustice” and “never lack sympathy for the poor.” We have and will continue to hold officials accountable. We have and will continue to diligently investigate any claims of errors. In sum, we stand squarely behind our stories.

We are sorely disappointed in your latest reporting effort on the subject. We hope this response fills some gaps and provides important information excluded from your winter issue.

The attacks on our series have been limited to two sources directly involved in the government operations in question. The public, through social media or other elected officials, has not shared in their criticism.

Sincerely, Gilbert Bailon, Editor Adam Goodman, Deputy Managing Editor

Letter to the Editor

Circuit attorney responds to Post-Dispatch’s letter to the editor Dear Editor: I am writing to offer my thoughts in response to the letter you recently received from the [St. Louis] Post-Dispatch regarding your publication’s analysis relating to the Post-Dispatch’s “Jailed by Mistake” articles. I believe Mr. Freivogel worked diligently to capture the perspectives of this complex situation in the Gateway Journalism Review (GJR). I am troubled by the response of the Post-Dispatch editors to this piece as it seems to be based on some substantial inaccuracies.

My position regarding the items included in the March 7, 2014, letter sent to the GJR by Messrs. Gilbert Bailon and Adam Goodman of the Post-Dispatch have been well documented over the past several months with by both the Post-Dispatch directly and with the GJR. • In a letter to the Post-Dispatch dated November 26, 2013, I shared the findings of my sample review of 10 percent of the cases reported in their article.

• I have clearly outlined the confidentiality restrictions and closed-records laws that prohibit me from sharing with reporters specific documents they dismissively refer to as “too secret to reveal.” Violating the law in an effort to prove the Post-Dispatched published inaccu-

rate data is not on my agenda, as the accuracy of their publication is not my responsibility.

• I also offered to discuss this matter and the legal obstacles Post-Dispatch reporters face if Mr. Bailon was so inclined. I have yet to hear from him.

• Last year, I dedicated more than 100 hours of taxpayer resources (at no charge) to assist reporters in researching data for this story because I believed the issue of mistaken arrests is an important challenge to the criminal justice system. I certainly wouldn’t characterize this amount of effort as “stonewalling” or uncooperative.

• Contrary to claims, my office provided accurate information within the legal and ethical restraints placed on our system.

• I will not dedicate any additional resources to correct or clarify the Post-Dispatch data – most of which concerns matters outside of my office.

• In our office, we are constantly reviewing our policies and procedures to ensure the right people are held accountable for the crimes they commit. It is my understanding that other agencies, specifically those that arrest and jail suspects, are conducting their own review.

Over the last 13 years since I became cir-

cuit attorney, my office has provided substantial data, information and cooperation for PostDispatch stories at various reporters’ requests.

It certainly doesn’t appear as though editors questioned my “bias” when using data from my office as a source in the hundreds of stories involving crime in the city. It is only when I offer criticism of their research methodology that I suddenly become a “biased” source.

In hindsight, if I could go back to when reporters first asked us to verify the data in their spreadsheet of over 100 people they claimed had been wrongly arrested, I would politely decline. We made a good-faith effort to cooperate and contribute to this story like we do with other reporter inquiries. Unfortunately, I now find my office in a position where our efforts to assist – rather than leading to accurate coverage of an important topic – have largely been misrepresented.

As I’ve stated many times before, the issue of mistaken arrests is an important challenge to the criminal justice system that should be taken seriously.

Sincerely, Jennifer M. Joyce Circuit Attorney City of St. Louis

Letter writer to readers: Decide for yourselves To the editor: Joseph Pulitzer uttered three words that occupy an even more exalted place in the ideals of the working journalist than the poetry of his Platform: “Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy,” he said.

The prize that bears Mr. Pulitzer’s name embeds in its rules another pre-eminent value of professional journalism: fairness.

The Post-Dispatch has fallen woefully short of these standards. Its editors approved publication of reports that are grossly unfair, that are full of errors and that fundamentally

misrepresent the system of criminal suspect identification in St. Louis.

They mishandled a story that, when responsibly told, is serious and important.

They perpetuate their mistakes in their letter of complaint to the Gateway Journalism Review.

No amount of senior editor indignation or grave intonation alters this reality.

But don’t take my word for it – or theirs.

Reread the Post-Dispatch stories. Read the factual record I assembled and the critiques I prepared. Then reread the GJR stories and Messrs. Bailon’s and Goodman’s letter.

Decide for yourself.

Messrs. Bailon and Goodman are correct about one thing: My Facebook postings are not available to everyone. To gain access and post comments, you must be one of Facebook’s more than 1 billion users.

Read the postings here: h t t p s : / / w w w. f a c e b o o k . c o m / n o t e s / eddie-roth/p-ds-one-sided-view-of-onesidedness/10152627262553858 Eddie Roth St. Louis, Missouri

Spring 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 33

International Media Crisis in Ukraine Continued from page 20 of support for chief editor Galina Timchenko, who was fired for the paper’s independent position and replaced by a pro-Kremlin editor.

Misleading and unfair reporting prevail throughout Russian media, regardless of whether the platform is print, broadcasting or online.

Until recently, Russian media on the Internet stayed the least controlled by the government and the most open to publishing diverse opinions. But now it also is being repressed by the government: oppositional websites are banned, as well as blogs and live-journal accounts of prominent oppositional leaders Alexei Navalny and Garry Kasparov, the website of radio station Echo of Moscow, and more.

Since March 1, when thousands of unidentified troops (in uniforms that resemble those of Russian troops) appeared in Crimea, Russian TV channel Russia 24 reported that thousands of refugees from Ukraine were on the RussiaUkraine border. In fact, however, they provided archival video that showed cars lined up at a Polish-Ukrainian customs checkpoint. Officially, just 89 Ukrainians have asked for asylum in Russia during the first two weeks of March.

Later, other television networks, while reporting devastating clashes between pro-Russian forces and Ukrainians in Simferopol, used archival video from Kiev’s February protests instead.

The most recent evidence of Russia’s goals to invade and monopolize Ukraine’s informational space includes the military capture of Crimean Tatar’s TV channel ATR, dumping Ukrainian channels from cable networks and replacing them with Russian ones, and the closing of Ukrainian radio stations in Crimea. All this happened at the same time as preparations were made for the illegal referendum about the annexation of Crimea by Russia. While officials in Moscow refuse to take responsibility for these actions, their origins are more or less obvious.

Inside view from Ukraine Staying fair, objective and transparent has been the hardest task for the Ukrainian media. In this situation, when media conglomerates comprising major television networks and publishing houses are controlled by billionaires that were close to Yanukovych’s administration, obeying the duty of objective journalism is hardly achievable. For instance, during the riots in Kiev, the reality of Yanukovych’s official position was presented by the TV channel Inter

European media, not surprisingly, showed more in-depth coverage on Ukraine’s crisis, as geographical closeness still is a crucial factor for world media to involve their foreign reporters in firsthand coverage. (which is controlled by pro-Kremlin oligarch Dmytro Firtash, who recently was imprisoned in Austria as a result of Interpol and FBI investigations). Nevertheless, the majority of national media remained fairly balanced in covering the events. Moreover, the newest positive processes in Ukrainian journalism occurred.

First, almost immediately after the beginning of the clashes at Euro-maidan, the special television online channels Espresso.tv and UkrStream started streaming around the clock from the epicenter of the events. This is a new phenomenon for Ukrainian television, and most of the Ukrainian networks borrowed and retransmitted videos from these channels to cover the events in Kiev.

Second, after 20 years of useless discussions and lost attempts to create public media, a self-organized public service broadcasting online channel, Hromadske.tv, was created.

Indeed, the boundary conditions of the new revolution forced journalists into this unprecedented step in Ukraine’s history. Prominent journalists from mainstream Ukrainian print, broadcast and online media share their free time after their full-time work assignments to contribute to this public service initiative. So far, it works only in a form of online streaming from one self-maintained studio, combining studio interviews and analytics with onsite webcam streaming by journalists, and Skype interviews/ videoconferences. Perhaps the most-viewed streams were those from ousted President Yanukovych’s residency Mezhihir’ya, where journalists were picturing the royal-like wealth of its former owner. Besides the ethical nuances of this reporting (along with the fact that the majority of national, and some international, media did stories on the treasures of corrupted officials by invading their outcast private residencies), it generated huge social interest. The special public website YanukovychLeaks was created by journalists and civil activists for investigating the corrupt schemes of the former president and his government.

The booming popularity of this longawaited initiative led to the recent development where Hromandske.tv started broadcasting as a joint project of the television channel First,

Page 34 • Gateway Journalism Review • Spring 2014

which is the oldest national TV network (it has a penetration rate of 95 percent of Ukraine’s territory and is the former “mouthpiece” of the Ukrainian government). This example of cooperation has been followed by another project of Ukrainian television that aims to unify Ukrainian society.

Social media: So who controls the people’s minds?

The Ukrainian revolution happened with great help from (or because of) social media.

Social media are widely used as informational sources now, since it already has been accepted practice for major media players across the globe to disseminate news through them. But personto-person interaction made Facebook and Twitter, along with Ukrainian and Russian local social media (Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki) key platforms for negotiating the public gatherings at Euro-maidan protests in November. They were used for further coordination of protests.

Dozens of pages that supported and confronted the protests, and that followed the Ukraine-Russia conflict, were created in social media in recent months. Politicians and public figures post comments and tweet about events online. YouTube also is a main platform for the newest streaming videos and the output of public television channels, which shortly after appearing online become widely known in Ukraine. Such use of social media for the needs of mobilizing and influencing people cannot have stayed unnoticed by those interested in information manipulation. The signs of informational war have already been seen in Ukraine, as constant denial-of-service attacks on some of Ukraine’s most-viewed news sites (such as Channel 5, Hromadske.tv and Ukrainska Pravda) and their YouTube channels are reported.

Traditional media are not the main players in this war anymore. One should be very picky in choosing sources of information to get the sense of the truth. This might be one of the most obvious inferences about role of Ukraine’s crisis in today’s media world. 

Contributors William A. Babcock Editor of Gateway Journalism Review.

He is the senior ethics professor of the SIU Carbondale School of Journalism.

Steven Hallock Is a former newspaper editor. He is director of the School of Communication at Point Park University in Pittsburgh.

William H. Freivogel Publisher of Gateway Journalism Review and director of the SIU Carbondale School of Journalism. He is a former editorial page deputy editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and contributes to the St. Louis Beacon. He is a member of the Missouri Bar.

John Hamer Is executive director and board president of the Washington News Council, which he co-founded in 1998. He was formerly associate editorial-page editor at the Seattle Times and associate editor at Editorial Research Reports/ Congressional Quarterly in Washington, D.C.

Tripp Frohlichstein Previously was a St. Louis Journalism Review contributor and worked for Channel 4 from 1974 to 1986. He is the owner of MediaMasters, a company that specializes in training people to give better presentations, give better interviews to reporters and develop messaging.

Benjamin Israel Freelance writer living in St. Louis. He was a regular contributor to the St. Louis Journalism Review. Four decades ago he was news director of KDNA-FM in St. Louis.

His work has appeared in more than a dozen Missouri publications. He formerly covered St. Louis courts for Bloomberg News.

Terry Ganey St. Louis editor of Gateway Journalism Review. He has more than 40 years of experience as an investigative reporter and political correspondent, and he has worked for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Newspaper War Continued from page 17 community as well as being able to provide the community more broad coverage of more stories that impact readers’ lives. In other words, so as not to get “bet” we each rush to the big news events (along with TV and some radio) and proceed to cover the heck out of those events at the expense of other stories important to readers.”

Nonetheless, the goal of both major Pittsburgh newspapers is not to encourage this flourishing rivalry, but to end it by bringing about the demise of the other. While conceding that this battle made his competitor a better newspaper that tried “a little harder,” Scaife told me in my initial interview with him that nonetheless the Post-Gazette was “on their last legs.”

But circulation numbers, which drive the allimportant ad revenue, tell a story not so much of “last legs” for either newspaper but of an evening out today compared to the period in which I conducted my research. According to the ABC/AAM reports for the two newspapers, the combined average circulation for Trib Total Media, which includes its community subsidiary newspapers, was 103,810 as of March 31, 2006, compared to 200,502 as of March 31, 2013, an increase of

Walter Jaehnig Is the retired director of the School of Journalism at SIU Carbondale. He was a reporter and editor with the Louisville Courier-Journal and taught reporting and media ethics at Indiana, Wyoming and SIUC.

93 percent. The numbers for the Post-Gazette for those two dates, respectively, were 227,789 and 177,411 – a decline of 22 percent. The Sunday circulation numbers saw similar changes. PostGazette Sunday circulation as of March 31, 2006, was 382,845, declining 21 percent to 300,982 as of March 31, 2013. For that same period, Total Trib Media experienced a 37 percent increase in Sunday circulation, from 155,257 to 213,067.

Martin said that population trends in the Pittsburgh region don’t indicate major changes in circulation.

“The total number of readers in the ‘pool’ that is Greater Pittsburgh has declined and will probably continue to decline,” he said in our email interview. “We are growing and the PG is losing readers, but overall the pool of potential readers declines – slowly. The available advertising dollar is shrinking more rapidly than the pool of readers, making it difficult to continue to keep business as usual. I think inevitably there will be one newspaper in the city of Pittsburgh, but I’m not necessarily sure the survivor will be the ‘best’ paper or even a good newspaper depending on how long two newspaper burn resources competing.”

Shribman sees only two possibilities: “the survival of both papers or the transformation of

John Jarvis Managing editor of Gateway Journalism Review. He has worked as a writer, copy editor and editor for newspapers in Texas, Indiana and Arizona.

He is an M.S. student at SIU. Roy Malone Former reporter for the St. Louis PostDispatch and the former editor of St. Louis Journalism Review.

John McCarron Contributing columnist for the Chicago Tribune and an adjunct professor of urban journalism at DePaul University.

Mark Sableman A lawyer with Thompson Coburn LLP in St. Louis. He is a member of Gateway Journalism Review’s board of advisers.

Paul Van Slambrouck Former editor of the Christian Science Monitor and a Pulitzer-winning journalist who is an associate professor in mass communication at Principia College in Elsah, Ill.

Pittsburgh into a one-paper town. I am confident that if the latter were to occur the Post-Gazette would remain. I suppose our rivals across the river may feel differently. But we have no plans to go away, and no plans to make plans to go away.”

That statement speaks to both camps’ determination emerge victorious. The outcome, of course, remains to be seen in this city, which, in this newspaper rivalry, is a laboratory of sorts offering evidence of the benefits of a rapidly disappearing informational format – a thriving competition of ideas, which contributes to an informed citizenry of a democracy, that is on the wane. Unfortunately, just as any war has a victor and thus a loser, the major victim in one of these newspapers’ triumphs will be the community, and its readers and leaders – as citizens of other communities that have experienced a loss of meaningful newspaper coverage can testify.

We can only hope that emerging reporting voices, including foundation-based Internet enterprise reporting found at organizations such as the Beacon in St. Louis and PublicSource in Pittsburgh, along with public broadcast reporting, will backfill the reportage holes left by newspaper decline (along with the virtual disappearance of meaningful reporting at local commercial television and radio stations). 

Spring 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 35