“Practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience”
… assuming they have any.
1a: a written statement in which a plaintiff in certain courts sets forth the cause of action or the relief sought barchaic : a handbill especially attacking or defaming someone2 a: a written or oral defamatory statement or representation that conveys an unjustly unfavorable impression b (1): a statement or representation published without just cause and tending to expose another to public contempt (2): defamation of a person by written or representational means (3): the publication of blasphemous, treasonable, seditious, or obscene writings or pictures (4): the act, tort, or crime of publishing such a libel
We've all played a stupid amount of Master Chief's final push for victory, and we're here to spill the proverbial beans on our final thoughts and feelings. Were we all just caught up in the hype? Not likely! Read on to hear why we're still totally jazzed to be rocking 12-year-olds in the face with Spartan lasers.
"Clinton last week saw a 23-point lead over Obama in September fall to 14 points, according to a CNN/WMUR New Hampshire presidential primary poll. That poll came out a day after another poll in Iowa found Obama first in the state, although his lead was within the sampling error."
Bloggers Gain Libel Protection
Xeni Jardin 06.30.03 | 2:00 AM
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Tuesday that Web loggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can't be held responsible for libel for information they republish, extending crucial First Amendment protections to do-it-yourself online publishers.
Online free speech advocates praised the decision as a victory. The ruling effectively differentiates conventional news media, which can be sued relatively easily for libel, from certain forms of online communication such as moderated e-mail lists. One implication is that DIY publishers like bloggers cannot be sued as easily.
"Clinton also pointed fingers at Obama's health care plan, calling it "confusing," a day after the Illinois senator said his proposal would keep costs down more than any of his rivals' plans. "There's a big difference between Sen. Obama and me on health care. I have a health care plan that covers every single American. He does not," Clinton told reporters Sunday."
"We believe that all employees will find this information both interesting and important. Many employees have no idea that they may have rights in the protection of their personal reputation that are much stronger than their rights to their jobs. At will employees can be terminated at any time for no reason. This book points out that even if your employer can terminate you they cannot ruin your good name or your reputation as an excuse for terminating you, or as a side effect of your termination. Pay particular attention to the section dealing with performance reviews. Very enlightening."
Libel law changed forever in 1964 with the United States Supreme Court decision in New York Times v. Sullivan. That decision and others by the Warren Court established a clear concept of libel and one that guaranteed press freedom without eliminating libel entirely.
The Supreme Court held in the Times case that the Constitution, specifically the First Amendment, prohibits a public official from recovering damages for a defamatory falsehood related to his or her official conduct. The court included one qualification: malice, or actual malice. The definition given for actual malice was “with knowledge that it (the material in question) was false or with reckless disregard of whether if was false or not.”.:
The Supreme Court had no other choice in that case. Deciding otherwise would have shackled the press at the very time public debate was needed on important social issues. In the Times case the issue was segregation. Later it was to be the Vietnam War in the Pentagon Papers case, then President Richard Nixon’s right to withhold tapes and so on. Any other decision by the Supreme Court in the Times case would have changed history—and not for the better.
After establishing this new standard for public officials, the Supreme Court used other decisions to limit suits brought by public figures and private citizens.
Two cases were decided in one opinion in 1967. They were Associated Press v. Walker and Curtis Publishing Company v. Butts. In that decision the Supreme Court brought public figures under the umbrella it had created in Sullivan.
The court said that a public figure cannot collect damages unless malice is proved. The court established a guideline, “accepted publishing standards,” by which reckless disregard might be judged.
In 1971 in Rosenbloom v. Metromedia, Inc. the Supreme Court held that a private citizen involved in an event of public interest must prove malice to collect in a libel action.
"All in all, it was the most miserable, sleazy, cheap operation I have ever worked for," former Ampex employee Scott Cargle wrote on a Yahoo! message board in 2001 after he was laid off. "I just wonder how the crooks fooled everyone for so long." Soon after the words were posted, the company sued Cargle for libel.
The California Court of Appeals recently ruled in Cargle’s favor, which was good news for several Stanford students."
"Senator Obama has been able to develop innovative approaches to challenge the status quo and get results. Americans are tired of divisive ideological politics, which is why Senator Obama has reached out to Republicans to find areas of common ground. He has tried to break partisan logjams and take on seemingly intractable problems. During his tenure in Washington and in the Illinois State Senate, Barack Obama has accumulated a record of bipartisan success."
Clinton also pointed fingers at Obama's health care plan, calling it "confusing," a day after the Illinois senator said his proposal would keep costs down more than any of his rivals' plans.And that's how it goes.
"There's a big difference between Sen. Obama and me on health care. I have a health care plan that covers every single American. He does not," Clinton told reporters Sunday.
Obama was quick to swing back: "Senator Clinton's idea is that we should force everyone to buy insurance," he said in a statement released to CNN on Sunday. "She's not being straight with the American people because she refuses to tell us how much she would fine people if they couldn't afford insurance."
Our goal is to help both the journalists who produce the news and the citizens who consume it develop a better understanding of what the press is delivering. The Project has put special emphasis on content analysis in the belief that quantifying what is occurring in the press, rather than merely offering criticism and analysis, is a better approach to understanding.The website has other resources as well:
Directed by journalist Tom Rosenstiel, PEJ's broadened research agenda will include a new series of continuing content studies of the news agenda, plus tracking of key industry trends, and timely commentary and analysis of that trend data. At the same time, PEJ will also continue its existing research, including publishing the State of the News Media, an annual report on American journalism, conducting "opportunistic" content studies on press performance of key events, offering occasional analysis of press behavior and publishing the Daily Briefing, a digest of media news. PEJ's new website is designed to be an archive of that research and a place for people to conduct their own inquiries through the searchable and customizable functions built into the site.We'll be writing some heads on material available at Journalism.org.
Mihelich will teach a new television-production course at Benedictine University/Springfield College in the spring, and he says he will use his experiences at WICS and other news stations to teach students about the value of investigative reporting, the importance of quality rather than quantity, and how to turn a story into a presentable piece that people care about and may act upon.Read the IT stories and be ready to discuss them in class next week.
I fear that these developments [various forms of online publication and blogging] will endanger the role of the reporter. Of course, there will always be a need for news bunnies who can dash in front of a camera and breathlessly describe a lorry crash, or bash out a press release in 10 minutes. There will probably be a lot more news bunnies in the future. There will probably also be hyper-local sites — postcode journalism fuelled cheaply by neighbourhood bloggers. But not proper reporters.You probably figured out how to translate from the British yourself. But a "lorry" is a truck, and British "postcodes" are like our ZIP codes. "News bunnies" needs no translation. But "high street" might be less familiar -- it's like "Main Street" in small-town America.
... it -- but it -- it -- you know, and our concern is that -- and Carl makes this point, and it's a critical one, that the business of this kind of journalism, trying to get to the bottom of something complicated, hidden, scandalous, or important decisions by people who have lots of power, involves lots of sources. Not one source, not 10, but dozens or even hundreds.They went on from there, on Larry King Live. But for me the best obtainable version of truth has something to do with "the basic kind of police reporting and slogging and knocking on doors."
BERNSTEIN: You know, Bob said right after Watergate, that really, what this story was about, like all reporting, or good reporting, is the best obtainable version of the truth. And that phrase has always stuck with me about what real reporting is. When we did "All the President's Men," it turned out unintentionally it was maybe a primer on the basic kind of police reporting and slogging and knocking on doors.
The truth is often complex, very complex. “The best obtainable version of the truth” is partly about context and this is perhaps the greatest single failing of our journalism in media today. For too much of it is utterly without context. Facts by themselves are not necessarily the truth. Thus the gossip press, the tabloids, too much of what we see on the air, even when the facts are somewhat straight, they are often a form of misinformation, because their aim is to shock, to titillate, to distort, to give grotesque emphasis.How did journalists in the good old days -- which happen to coincide with Bernstein's reporting days -- find the best obtainable version? Bernstein suggests they looked for "thoroughness, for accuracy, for context." Hard to do, he adds, when an "idiot culture" demands 24/7 coverage of celebrities and political foodfights:
The hunger for gossip and trash and simple answers to tough questions in our culture today is ravenous and the interest in real truth, hard, difficult, complex truth, that requires hard work, digging, reporting, is waning In America our political system, and I think we are seeing it now, has been failing and with its failure we have been witnessing as well a breakdown of the comity and the community and the civility, that has traditionally allowed our political discourse to evolve. The advent of the talk show nation, not just on radio, but on television especially, with its standards of the grotesque and people screaming mindlessly at each other on the air is part of this breakdown.Does Bernstein overdo his critique? Probably. But does he have a point there? Probably. His speech has been covered by the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World and the Daily Texan, student paper at the University of Texas in Austin, among others.
In class Thursday we took a half-baked flier for The Sleepy Weasel, brainstormed heads for it and wrote a few. I'll post some of the more creative heads below. But first, time out for an experiment.As long as we're talking about The Sleepy Weasel, by the way, all of you are eligible to submit copy, too. A lot of the stuff in the magazine started out as a paper for somebody's class, in fact. Help us recycle, and help yourself to get a start on your portfolio. Here's a link to the gate page. Take a look around, and see what you've got on your hard drive to contribute.
Bobbing along on this swirling sea of opinions, I became increasingly convinced there is a place for newscasts that at least attempt to provide viewers with a straight set of facts. To be sure, these programs make subjective judgments, sometimes miss the boat and appeal to a demographic keenly interested in all those segments on back pain and hip replacements. But it would be a shame if, in an age of infotainment, the new generation of anchors can't find ways to keep their broadcasts vital as well as balanced. Without them, after all, there would be fewer targets for "The Daily Show" to mock.Read it. Might be a good one to print out for later use, in fact. I don't know how long The Post archives its stories on the open website.
