Super PACs raised about $181 million in the last two years — with roughly half of it coming from fewer than 200 super-rich people.

That’s the news from a study called “Auctioning Democracy” jointly conducted by Demos, an organization that says it practices “advocacy to influence public debate and catalyze change,” and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. Both groups seek to strengthen, if not compel full disclosure and expenditure rules.

Super PACs’ power stemmed from the U.S. Supreme Court’s July 2010 SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission decision. The Court’s Citizen United decision further strengthened corporations’ claim to personhood and weakened the requirement for full disclosure of donations to super PACs.

Politico’s Ken Vogel and Abby Phillip’s analysis of the study noted that

A relatively few wealthy backers are keeping super PACs afloat — and they’re saying so. Last year alone, individuals gave super PACs $63 million.

The news only worsens.

Again, from Politico:

That includes 15 people who gave $1 million or more, such as DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, who gave $2 million to Priorities USA Action, the super PAC supporting President Barack Obama, and John Paulson, a hedge fund billionaire who gave $1 million to a super PAC supporting Mitt Romney’s GOP presidential campaign, according to FEC reports.

The figures don’t even include the $10 million that Adelson and his wife gave from their personal accounts to the super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich’s GOP presidential campaign after the year-end FEC reports.

And from the Demos/USPIRG report itself:

For-profit businesses use Super PACs as an avenue to influence federal elections. 17% of the itemized funds raised by Super PACs came from for-profit businesses—more than $30 million.

Because Super PACs—unlike traditional PACs—may accept funds from nonprofits that are not required to disclose their donors, they provide a vehicle for secret funding of electoral campaigns. 6.4% of the itemized funds raised by Super PACs cannot be feasibly traced back to an original source.

Super PACs are a tool used by wealthy individuals and institutions to dominate the political process. 93% of the itemized funds raised by Super PACs from individuals in 2011 came in contributions of at least $10,000, from just twenty-three out of every 10 million people in the U.S. population.

And still more from the report:

Nearly 20% of active Super PACs20 received money from untraceable sources in 2011. Six out of the 10 Super PACs that raised the most money in 2011 received money from untraceable sources. [emphasis added]

I have nothing to add except revulsion and disgust. Is this the method the Founders imagined would provide the United States with its best and fairest political leadership?

I know, I know, who is going to believe Unilever, one of the largest food and consumer products companies in the world, is Socially Responsible? What does that even mean, anyway? Well, leaving that aside for the moment, I’ve been following this area for a while, and in fact Unilever does spend a fair amount of time and money (relatively speaking) in this area. Why? Because there are an increasing number of investors that are demanding it. There are a whole raft of investment funds that specialize in SRI (Socially Responsible Investing) or ESG (Environmental/Social/Governance) issues, and while they’re not huge in the scheme of things, they are getting bigger. Not only that, but large pension funds, including government pension funds, have been taking an interest in these areas for some time as well, and this interest level continues to grow.

This is generally good news. Companies are out there to make a profit for someone, of course, usually their shareholders, but there have been stirrings of some emergence of broader thinking here. Most of the companies I pay attention to as an analyst are European or British, and most of them file big fat reports at year end called “Sustainability Reports,” in which they detail their measures across a range of issues, like improved recycling rates, emissions reduction other measures to reduce carbon footprints, labour relations, employee benefits, a whole lot of things. Siemens’ 2010 Sustainability report was 104 pages long—but Pirelli’s was even longer, much of it taken up with company and industry measures being undertaken to reduce the problems associated with getting rid of old tires and reducing energy inputs in the tire-making process, which is extraordinarily complicated and very energy intensive. You can find these reports on any company’s Web site. (Here’s the link to the Siemens 2010 Sustainability Report—it makes interesting reading.) Now, admittedly, much of this is work that the companies would have to report to appropriate regulatory bodies anyway—emissions of various substances, for example. And some of it is sheer gloss. But much of it is above and beyond what is minimally required, and some of it is downright impressive. I have to say that European (particularly the German, the Dutch and the Swedish) companies are light-years ahead of their US counterparts in this regard, for a number of reasons. There are few global warming deniers over here.

Now, this is interesting, but there’s an old debate here too, which Tett drags out again, which is why should companies be doing this stuff in the first place? Shouldn’t governments be doing this? And Tett actually has this to say, quoting the opposite viewpoint (although she ends up coming down in the middle somewhere):

But there is a powerful counter-argument, too: some business leaders retort that companies would actually do better to focus on their primary function – namely the business of making money – and leave governments to worry about those bigger social goals. After all, governments are elected to make countries better, so why do unelected company executives feel any duty to reach into other areas of life? “The fact that companies are doing all this CSR stuff just shows that government has failed,” muttered one British manufacturing executive.

Actually, it’s not just business leaders. It’s often portfolio managers and investors, too, who wonder why these two domains are being intermingled. Now, there’s a defensible argument here—if you want to give money to SRI things, including charities, invest in whatever will give you the best return and then given the money directly to wherever you want. It’s defensible, as I said, but not compelling, for any number of reasons, worth a post in their own.

But back to Tett’s column, because it raises some issues she doesn’t address. What’s missing here? Well, any kind of context, first of all. This is a nice airy-fairy conversation to have over wine at Davos, but Tett could at least have acknowledged a couple of things. First, governments are under a lot of stress to deliver services at any kind of appropriate level now—is there a European or North American government that isn’t cutting services right and left these days? It’s all fine to say “let the government do it” when the government can afford to do it. What about when governments can’t afford to do it any more, especially as the result of a number of totally unnecessary military actions that no one wanted to pay for at the time? Tett’s later comment that “governments are blatantly failing to pursue many of their core responsibilities, forcing companies to step in” ignores a fundamental economic reality right now—many governments are “failing” their responsibilities (to the extent that this is even true—Tett cites no examples) because they don’t have the money.

The other piece of information that Tett could have acknowledged, but didn’t, is just why governments don’t have that money. Well, there are many reasons, presumably, but one of them is certainly the fact that corporations continue to pay a lower and lower level of taxes to governments around the world. If, as Tett acknowledges elsewhere in her column, business leaders are increasingly concerned about growing “income disparity,” then the straightforward solution is for companies to pay higher taxes in order to give governments more money than they have right now to accomplish what governments are supposed to accomplish.

That hasn’t exactly been the recent pattern, though. In the US, corporate taxes as a share of federal government revenues continue to decline, and we had some famous instances in the press not all that long ago—General Electric being the most egregious example, but certainly not the only one. Tax rates actually don’t mean all that much when there are a multitude of ways to get around taxes, as there are in the US. The US has high corporate tax rates, but this actually means little. And the corporate share of taxes collected by the US government has been steadily declining, as this nifty little table from the IRS indicates:

In Europe, it’s a bit more complicated, simply because there are many more countries with a wide range of corporate tax rates (which the EU has been attempting to harmonize). Corporate tax rates have fallen in many countries, but overall tax revenues remain high, because individual rates are higher, and there are VAT taxes. Here in the UK, corporate tax rates have declined markedly since the 1970s, and in fact, continue to decline—from 28% in 2010 to 24% in 2013. In the EU-27, the decline in average corporate tax rates from 1995 has been meaningful, from nearly 36% to just under 24% in 2011. Even so, unlike the US, corporate taxes have remained roughly the same percentage of total taxation during this period, although they dropped in 2009 (and presumably since then) as a result of the recession. At no point since 1995, however, did corporate taxes in the EU-27 exceed 7% of total taxation. Note that this average masks a wide variance across individual countries—the UK had the highest percentage on average, but corporate taxes still never exceeded 10.6% of total taxation during this period.

It’s easy to say “raise their taxes,” but a bit more problematic to actually do it, given the extensive interests that have grown up specifically to prevent corporate taxes from rising anywhere at any time for any reason (this is a major industry, as well as an apparent object of religious faith, in the US these days). Given that, we might expect a bit more realism to accompany comments about governments abandoning their responsibilities than we got here. It ‘s certainly the case that what some corporations are currently doing in some of these “social” areas is a band-aid at best, and some of it is pure gloss.

But there is also some serious thinking going on here in a number of areas, particularly in areas such as transportation policy and sustainability and energy efficiency, what these mean, what are realistic goals and time frames, and how to achieve these–thinking that is just as incisive as found in any university, think tank or government agency. The people who run these companies—mostly men, of course—all go to Davos too, they all know the score on global warming and its implications for things like food and water supplies globally, and the world that their grandchildren might inherit, and many of them are as nervous about all of this as the rest of us. The difference between them and us, aside from the fact that they’re all much, much richer than we are, is that they’re in positions where they can actually do something tangible that can have broad impacts. Good behavior should be acknowledged and encouraged on those occasions when it emerges, and if it helps the share price, so much the better.

Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier

even now, if coal could be produced without pregnant woman dragging it to and fro, I fancy we should let them do it rather than deprive ourselves of coal. But most of the time, of course, we should prefer to forget that they were doing it. It is so with all types of manual work; it keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its existence.

Orwell lives his story. “[B]y no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner; the work would kill me in a few weeks,” he quickly realizes. He doesn’t just “tell,” though; Orwell is a master of the “show.”

It was not only the dirt, the smells and the vile food, but the feeling of stagnant meaningless decay, of having got down into some subterranean place where people go creeping round and round, just like blackbeetles, in an endless muddle of slovened jobs and mean grievances.

Particularly in the context of the hard lives of the working class, Orwell suggests that his own trade seems soft. “Words are such feeble things,” he says.

It’s hard to take him at his word about that, though, because Orwell writes description about as well as any writer could dream of. His opening sequence, set in a boarding house, rolls right into it: “Hanging from the ceiling here was a heavy glass chandelier on which the dust was so think that it was like fur.” Suspicious tripe, coal-black fingerprints on slices of bread, crumbs so long unbrushed from the kitchen tablecloth that “I used to get to know individual crumbs by sight and watch their progress up and down the table from day to day”—Orwell doesn’t miss a trick when it comes to setting scene.

The second half of the book grinds down into Orwell’s treatise on the pros and cons of socialism, although for this he can be forgiven. After all, Wigan Pier was written for the Left Book Club, and Orwell explicitly wrote his piece with the idea of social change in mind. “I would not do it if I did not think that I am sufficiently typical of my class, or rather sub-caste, to have a certain symptomatic importance,” he says. This portion of the book was, I admit, of less value to me as I look at the was creative nonfiction writers write about place, although I did go through it just for the sake of enjoying Orwell’s clarity of thought.

Orwell’s social consciousness and his sense of responsibility as a journalist went hand in hand—powered by incredibly literary skill. In Orwell’s hands, words are never such feeble things.

Contrary to what Komen’s highly-paid PR crisis hacks and gullible headline writers at newsdesks around the nation would ask you to believe, The Susan G. Komen Foundation does NOT promise to fund Planned Parenthood in the future. They promise to let PP APPLY for grants in the future. Applying and receiving are different things, as anyone who ever applied and got rejected for a job ought to know.

…

The announcement is timed beautifully – just before Super Bowl Weekend – and they’re hoping that the combination of the pretend apology and the big game will insure that, come Monday morning, nobody will remember what they did. They can then find a reason to deny those future Planned Parenthood grant apps when nobody is paying much attention.

The title of that post wonders if the American public will be stupid enough to fall for it. Perhaps the question I should have been asking was this: why are America’s copy editors stupid enough to fall for it? Witness the headlines from some of the nation’s more prominent purveyors of journalism:

• Komen Drops Plans to Cut Planned Parenthood Grants – ABC News
• Komen reverses Planned Parenthood move – angering antiabortion activists – Philadelphia Inquirer
• Komen reverses move to cut Planned Parenthood funding – Reuters
• Komen backs off decision on funding cuts – msnbc.com
• Komen Reverses Stance on Planned Parenthood – Bloomberg
• Web Fury Spurs Komen Reversal, $3 Million for Planned Parenthood – BusinessWeek
• Cancer Group Backs Down on Cutting Off Planned Parenthood – New York Times
• Komen does about-face on cuts to Planned Parenthood – The Seattle Times
• Komen changes course on Planned Parenthood funding – Atlanta Journal Constitution
• Charity Does an About-Face – Wall Street Journal
• Komen Caves Under Pressure, Reinstates PP Funding – Forbes
• Komen Charity Reverses Planned Parenthood Grant Cuts – PBS News Hour

It’s frightening how much journalism has changed in a generation. For instance, there used to be a subtle game of cat-and-mouse between the PR hacks who wanted their clients’ stories told a certain way and the journalists who wanted the story told the right way. The pros would tune up a pitch and present it to a reporter or editor so that it put the organization in the best light. There was something of a negotiational process. And the publisher went to press with a headline (written by the copy desk) that, in their view, best summarized the nuts and bolts of the story. The PR pro/journalist relationship was a professional one, with each side understanding the demands of the other’s job. A good PR exec would work to make the reporter’s job easier by making sure the pitch was tailored to the publication’s audience and the reporter understood that the PR industry could be a helpful source of information – after all, communities have a vested interest in the businesses and private organizations that serve them, right? Reporters often resented the high salaries that PR professionals earned (and any number of reporters eventually migrated over to “the dark side” for this very reason – in fact, most of the best PR people I have known in my career followed precisely that path), but there was a productive symbiosis that worked well so long as everyone did his or her job well.

I remember the frustration on the 50th floor at 1801 California in Denver back in the late ’90s when US West would go to the press with a story and they’d spin it differently than we wanted. This happened often enough, and especially with quarterly earnings reports. The Media Relations and Investor Relations teams would hone the story to a fine edge, release it to the world, and what appeared in the papers the next day often bore very little resemblance to what we had put out. Why? Well, the PR group’s job is like that of a lawyer – represent the client’s interest, period. The reporter, on the other hand, was more like the judge, making sure that due attention was paid to the facts themselves. The audience was the jury.

That was then, and this is now. While the nature of financial reporting is such that you still get some actual journalism when earnings are released (thanks to the laws and regulations around corporate finance), the rest of the newsroom might as well be on the payroll of the PR firm doing the pitching. My colleague, Dr. Denny, spent 20 years on the copy desk and has dedicated significant energy here at S&R to explaining why our papers are increasingly populated by unedited PR copy (and to the corrosive impact this exerts on our democracy). The next time you’re thinking of buying a book on why the republic has gone to hell, save your money. Just click that link above and spend a few hours reflecting on his analysis. It’s more illuminating than just about anything on the virtual shelves at Amazon. And it’s free.

I don’t want to put words in Denny’s mouth, but I suspect had yesterday’s “reversal” story broken on a day when Denny was running the copy desk he’d have taken the time to:

• actually read the release;
• consider the established context of the story and the motivations of the players involved (no, he wouldn’t project his politics into the story, but he would be aware of the politics of the organizations because that’s at the center of the controversy);
• take a moment to think about the importance of the story to the community he served – what was their interest?
• Oh, yeah – he’d consider how much space he had and whether there were other more pressing stories.

Then he’d have edited the story according to these factors and he’d have written a headline that summarized what Komen had actually done. If, in his professional judgment, Komen was legitimately reversing field, that’s what the headline would have said. If, on the other hand, he had read the facts of the case the way I do, he would have ignored the cleverly crafted 48-point bold headline that Komen’s PR folks had put at the top of the page.

But yesterday, all across America, copy editors who are in too many cases inexperienced, poorly trained and swamped with more responsibility than one person can reasonably manage, did what they usually do. They took the headline at face value and ran the press release pretty much as-is.

And what landed in front of the public, flying under the banner of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Seattle Times, and, the gods help us, the PBS News Hour, was unfiltered crisis PR put together by hacks paid not to think about the best interests of the public, but about the financial and political agendas of their client. Put in the terms of my courtroom analogy above, it’s like we’ve made the defense attorney the judge and jury, as well.

The lesson, sadly, is that with this story (and just about all other stories of importance to the citizens of the US), we cannot look to the press for help. They have become nothing more than the publication arm of the American public relations industry. Typists. Transcriptionists. Gofers. Foot soldiers.

So it’s up to us to read closely, to think critically, and to keep each other plugged in, using whatever tools are available, so that we can make informed decisions in the public interest. If we don’t, nobody will.

After feeding twenty-six books into my head in thirty days, I’d like to say that I’m letting my brain decompress, but I’ll be honest: I’m still reading. In fact, I have two books going right now, Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself and Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tucson. I want to hit up Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams and Wendell Barry’s agrarian essays, too, and I want to spend some time with David Cushman’s book on The Wilderness, Bloody Promenade. Maybe then I’ll be done. Maybe.

But there’s David Gessner’s Sick of Nature. There’s Susan Jane Gilman’s Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven. There’s George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier. And there’s still John Muir looming over everything, a backdrop to much of what I’ve read, as significant as the Sierra Nevadas, as significant as Thoreau and Walden.

So many books, so little time.

I’ve been cramming books into my head at an alarming rate–so fast that I literally lost count. Only after I finished did I realize I’d counted two books at #14 and so had, unbeknownst to me, finished a day early. My effort to jam in a final book before midnight on the last day turned out to be gravy, and I didn’t even know it. (I’ve since gone back in true Orwellian fashion and corrected the record–a little ironic since I didn’t get to Orwell yet, although he’s on the list.)

I’m a voracious reader, but even by my standards this reading endeavor has been grueling. But it’s also been intellectually rewarding and, just as important, fun. I even had the author of one of the books I reviewed write to say he was “pleased to see such a
thorough understanding of what I was getting at vs the BS I’ve seen in other reviews. Please pass along my kudos….” That was gratifying.

As I read these books, I was looking, specifically, at the way creative nonfiction writers write about place. So what did I learn?

Upon first reflection, there seemed to be three different ways to approach the notion of place: One could travel through it, one could be in it, or one could piece it together indirectly. For purposes of simplicity, I’ll refer to travel writers and nature writers. As you might guess, the travel writers travel through a place; nature writers exist in a space. I’ll hold off on talking about the third category for a few minutes.

Travel writers and nature writers tended to write about place in much different ways:

1) For a travel writer, a place is something to be experienced. For a nature writer, a place is to be reflected on. Certainly a travel writer may try to figure out what his/her experiences mean as he/she passes through. A nature writer might, indeed, have very meaningful experiences to reflect on, but it seems the real objective is to figure out what the place means.

2) Travel writers tend to weigh their travel experience against what they know about home. They contrast the new with the familiar. In doing so, they frequently learn something about both places, and they learn something about themselves, too. Nature writers tend to examine humankind’s relationship with nature and their own place within that larger scheme. They contrast the natural with the man-made. In doing so, they learn something about the relationship.

3) Travel writers tend to get energized by their experiences, as exhausting (and sometimes scary) as travel is. Nature writers tend to get inspired by nature but then get frustrated and/or depressed when they realize how unrelenting humankind is when it comes to pillaging the planet.

4) Travel writers tend to “show” by recounting experiences; nature writers tend to “show” by evoking mood and wonder. I didn’t read many “poetic” travel writers, but I read lots of beautiful nature writing. Likewise, I didn’t read a lot of humorous nature writing, but I read a lot of funny travel writing. (Bill Bryson falls into both categories, I think—and he’s freakin’ hilarious.)

5) Nature writers tend to value place for its intrinsic worth, while travel writers tend to value place for the experience they can get out of it. That comes across in the ways in which various writers interact with a place and communicate their reflections about it.

Those are all, of course, generalities, and they’re based on a sampling of twenty-five or so books. I’m noting the patterns that jumped out at me, but any other collection of twenty-five books read under saner conditions would, no doubt, produce different patterns for different readers.

The third category of writers I encountered created a sense of place through travel and occupation, and through experience and reflection, but the journey was the destination, so to speak. They created cultural landscapes. I’m thinking of Andrew Ferguson’s Land of Lincoln—what is Lincoln’s America and who is America’s Lincoln? Or Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself—what are these crazy, quirky everyday experiences that comprise the experience of living in America? Or Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic—what do “North” and “South” look like today? Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tucson is shaping up to be that kind of book, too.

I think of the definition of “creative nonfiction” offered by Philip Gerard, a writing prof at the University of North Carolina and author of Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life. He says a creative nonfiction piece must have an apparent subject and a deeper subject—that is, what’s the story about on the surface and what’s really going on, what does it really mean. It’s like plot and theme in a way. That’s exemplified in the relationship between fact and truth. The “apparent subject” might include the history, geology, geography, and ecology of a place; the “deeper subject” might turn that place into a metaphor or a symbol that relates to the writer’s inner journey. Successful pieces balance the two.

Travel pieces worked best for me when they didn’t just overload me with the apparent subject (the trip) and all the factual information that went with it. For example, Maarten Troost’s Lost on Planet China was obviously a travel book, but the focus of Troost’s trip always came back to his quest to understand the potential impact China’s awakening was going to have on the world—and on him.

Other books, like Julian Smith’s Crossing the Heart of Africa gave lip service to the deeper subject (“Who am I?”) and emphasized the apparent subject (getting from this place to that place and offering background about the places as he goes).

Nature books that were most effective used the apparent subject (life at Walden Pond, the travails of a flooded wildlife refuge) as a way to contextualize the deeper subject (self-sufficiency, coping with loss).

Linda Hogan’s Dwellings almost entirely abandoned the apparent subject (the natural world) to reflect on the deeper subject (how to redefine our thinking about our relationship with the natural world). John McPhee’s grounded his Pine Barrens in the apparent subject (the pine barrens and the people who live there) and let largely left it to readers to find their own deeper subject (the importance of the barrens as a unique landscape).

As I mull over these things, I realize that they’re just convenient constructs for me to organize my thinking. I could easily look past these conveniences and set these books into conversation with each other (and with me) in other ways. For instance, I could reframe my thinking so that I could look at how writing about place helped these writers understand the human condition.

I will spend the next week and a half mulling over these and other connections between the books. I’ll step back and, like Tom Hanks’ character from The DiVinci Code, wait for more patterns to materialize for me out of thin air. Then I’ll write a long, long paper about it for my doctoral program and see if I can make some cohesive sense out of all of it.

And then I’ll start reading another book.

————

For anyone keeping track, here’s the original list I chose my books from. I’ve indicated which ones I read, and I’ve made note, too, of any book that got added in after I compiled the initial list.

Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire.

Berry, Wendell. The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry.

Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail.

Bryson, Bill. I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away. (In progress!)

Carson, Rachel. The Edge of the Sea.

Carson, Rachel. The Sea Around Us. (added)

Carson, Rachel. The Sense of Wonder. (added)

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring.

Casey, Susan. The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks.

Cushman, Stephen. Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle.

Dennis, Jerry. The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas.

Elder, John. Reading the Mountains of Home.

Elder, John. The Frog Run: Words and Wildness in the Vermont Woods.

Ferguson, Andrew. Land of Lincoln. (added)

Gilman, Susan Jane. Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven.

Gessner, David. My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism.

Gessner, David. Sick of Nature.

Heinrich, Bernd. A Year in the Maine Woods.

Hogan, Linda. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World.

Horwitz, Tony. Confederates in the Attic.

Junger, Sebastian. The Perfect Storm.

Kingsolver, Barbara. High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never. (In progress!)

Kohnstamm, Thomas. Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism.

Lopez, Barry. About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory.

Lopez, Barry. Arctic Dreams.

McKibben, Bill. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

McPhee, John. selections from The John McPhee Reader and The Second John McPhee Reader.

McPherson, James. Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg.

Muir, John. Nature Writings.

Orwell, George. Road to Wigan Pier.

Smith, Julian. Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Life and Adventure.

Tayler, Jeffrey. Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness.

Thomas, Emory. Travels to Hallowed Ground: A Historian’s Journey to the American Civil War.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Maine Woods.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden.

Troost, J. Martin. Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Finding Beauty in a Broken World.

Yeah. This is a sweet gig. I want to stay here. In fact, I want to … move up. Be in the leadership. Be a mover and shaker. Now how am I gonna do that beyond kissing the speaker’s ass (and those of his damn deputies, too) and voting however he (or she) tells me to?

It will take money for that Republocrat to ascend higher in the House’s toadying ladder of leadership. Lots of money. And as we know, House members (and senators) have a vehicle to collect and dispense money to other House members — the leadership political action committee. A principal reason for the existence of leadership PACs to is buy friends and influence on Capitol Hill. Apparently, hard work and intelligence are insufficient.

For example, suppose our young Republocrat wants to donate money to another incumbent (or challenger identified by the National Republocratic Party as worthy of being admitted to the club) or to the national party itself. As a private citizen, she can only give the legal maximum of $2,100 to her would-be friend’s campaign committee. But if that incumbent has a leadership PAC, then she can give $5,000 per year from her leadership PAC to that PAC.

If our Republocrat’s sitting in a safe district, she can encourage donors to give to her leadership PAC instead of her re-election campaign committee. She can use the donations in the leadership PAC to make friends with others in the House — by giving $5,000 to the leadership PAC of someone she wishes to be friendly with (or buy, to be blunt). The more money in her leadership PAC, the more influence she can peddle.

As the Center for Responsive Politics notes:

By making donations to members of their party, ambitious lawmakers can use their leadership PACs to gain clout among their colleagues and boost their bids for leadership posts or committee chairmanships. Politicians also use leadership PACs to lay the groundwork for their own campaigns for higher office. And some use their PACs to hire additional staff—sometimes even their family members—and to travel around the country or eat in some of Washington’s finest restaurants. The limits on how a politician can spend leadership PAC money are not especially strict. Also, lacking a requirement that lawmakers disclose their affiliations with leadership PACs, these committees have been able to slip under the radar for years.

And big money is involved. And big donors chip in. Contributions to politicians’ leadership PACs reported to the Federal Elections Commission from 1990 and into the 2012 election cycle total $286,110,856. Only about $3.5 million came from individuals; $268,358,732 came from other PACs. On the Hill, outside PACs feed leadership PACs at five grand a clip. That adds up over time.

Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision of two years ago, so-called super PACs are getting most of the media attention — even though super PACs were created as a result of the Court’s July 2010 SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission decision. Leadership PACs have been overlooked because, it appears, super PACs raise (and hide) a helluva lot more money. But leadership PACs, over time, have raised enormous amounts of moolah.

Super PACs differ from leadership PACs, according to the center. Such PACs, also known as independent-expenditure committees, may raise as much money as they want. No limitation are placed on the size of donation a contributor may make. Super PACs may not donate money directly to political candidates. But they can spend as much money as they want to “overtly advocate for or against political candidates.” According to the center, at least “290 groups organized as Super PACs have reported total receipts of $32,008,813 and total expenditures of $34,335,760 in the 2012 cycle.” (See the list here.)

The 2012 election cycle is far from over, with the greatest amount of spending yet to come. But in a little more than a year and a half, super PACs have pulled in more than $32 billion. You’ve seen how that money has been used in advertising to support or, more often, attack presidential candidates in the primaries so far. Florida’s a pricey state for ad buys, so super PACs will raise even more and spend even more.

So far, in the 2012 election cycle, leadership PACs have pulled in nearly $12 million, a third of the identified super PAC donations. But in the 2010 election cycle, the leadership PACs hauled in more than $52 million. That’s a lot of $5,000 checks.

The current speaker of the House, Rep. John Boehner, wrote plenty of them. In fact, in 2006, when he wanted Republicans to vote for a free-trade agreement with Oman (Oman? Really?), he had already “invested” in the vote of my then-congressman. Boehner’s leadership PAC, the Freedom Project, gave my then-House rep $10,000 — $5,000 in the 2004 election cycle and $5,000 in 2006. From a post I wrote in 2006:

In fact, Rep. Boehner’s leadership PAC since 1997 has disbursed more than 530 checks worth $5,000 each to House incumbents and GOP House candidates. That’s more than $2.6 million of largesse spread among the faithful. The PAC shipped off more than $189,000 in 64 smaller checks. And there’s the $15,000 sent each year since 2002 to the National Republican Campaign Committee.

Here’s the list of recipients of checks from the Freedom Project.)

Boehner is speaker in significant measure because he spread the wealth and, in turn, received political support as he climbed higher in the House. (But apparently he didn’t spread enough to the tea party conservatives swept into the House in 2010. They’ve balked several times at his leadership. And they’re learning how to play the PAC game.) That’s the primary role of leadership PACs: financially support other incumbents and candidates in return for political support later.

You’ll read a great deal in coming months about super PACs and their big-money influence on the 2012 elections. But over the long term, political power in Congress is heavily influenced by leadership PACs and how they’re used.

Oh, by the way, leadership PACs are regulated — but loosely. Funds in leadership PACs cannot be allocated to personal use. But after a senator or representative leaves Congress, that prohibition no longer applies.

Here’s the lede from a November 2010 New York Times story by Eric Lipton about abuses of leadership PACs:

Henry Bonilla, a Texas Republican and former member of Congress, has tapped into his political piggy bank to fly around the United States, eat at some of San Antonio’s finest restaurants and to cover bills at luxury hotels like The Breakers in Palm Beach, Fla. [emphasis added]

And later in the story:

Former members are largely free to spend the money left over in their political action committees however they choose. [emphasis added]

Apparently, you can take it with you.

Nice gig, eh?

I don’t know much about Brazil beyond the fact that the Creature from the Black Lagoon lived there on some branch of the Amazon. I also know that a different branch of the Amazon, the River of Doubt, nearly killed Teddy Roosevelt. And I know Rio is there, but what happens in Rio stays in Rio, so I don’t know many details.

So when I stumbled across Kohnstamm’s book about being a travel writer in Brazil, I thought it would be a good chance to learn something about the country. The book looked interesting, too, because it implied a good ethics lesson: Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?

Well, I didn’t learn much about Brazil, and I didn’t get to ponder writerly ethics so much as a get a pretty explicit lesson on what not to do, but Kohnstamm kept me entertained with his Thompsonesque antics. This was “travel hedonism” at its gonzoest.

Paul Theroux once said that travel writing is really about the person who’s traveling. If applied literally to Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?, then this is a book about Hunter S. Thompson. Kohnstamm’s life seems to be an unending stream of sex, drugs, and rocky roads. In fact, he has a self-declared black-belt in long-distance bus travel, “hauling ass at double capacity on potholed highways full of oxcarts, rickshaws, and other buses laying head-on games of chicken in our lane; [peering] out the window at the burnt wreckage of other buses…in mountain valleys below….”

He doesn’t mention Thompson by name, although he does invoke Kerouac, Hemingway and Bruce Chatwin. “They were true writers coming to terms with the struggle of the people, the living history, the challenges of their generation—all while reflecting on the universal human condition with nothing but a journal, a drink, and pen in hand,” Kohnstamm says.

He starts the book trying to come to terms with his own existential crisis. He’s in his mid-twenties and restless. Is it him? Is it his generation? Is it Americans? “Escape is our action of choice,” he says: “escape through pharmaceuticals, escape through technology, and plain old running away in search of something else, anything else.”

He chooses escape of his own, ditching a cubicle-bound life at a Wall Street law firm to answer the siren song of the travel bug. The trip, right from the start, swells with the Thompsonesque quest of Fear and Loathing: the so-called search for the “American Dream.” “It could also be called the New American Dream,” Kohnstamm says. “Fuck the simple pursuit of financial stability. Here’s to finding fulfillment in novelty, excitement, adventure, and autonomy.”

Long story made short: He careens across eastern Brazil, city to city, town to town, hostel to hostel, restaurant to restaurant in a mad dash to cram in as much information as he can for a guidebook for Lonely Planet, eventually resorting to just making shit up because he can’t cover enough ground. His hijinks lead to hedonistic misadventure after misadventure, and in the end, he’s left with just over a week to try and produce a manuscript.

“I must be some kind of masochist,” he admits. “But in the end, I really loved all of it, every triumph and every setback—at least in retrospect. Experiences were had. Repertoires were expanded. Boundaries were pushed. Beverages were consumed. Ladies were bedded. And several hundred pages were written, all of which potentially affected some local economies and several thousand travelers’ itineraries.”

By that definition, chok-full-o good intentions as it is, then Kohnstamm is going to hell, indeed. After all those same good intentions make for great pavement. But damn if it wasn’t a gonzo trip.

If I want background on Brazil, I guess I should get his travel guide—or maybe not, knowing now just how much of it is made up of bullshit. “There is a huge gap between what is required of the author and what the author can realistically do with the alloted time and budget,” Kohnstamm writes. “Is this due to weak editorial direction, or willful ignorance on the part of the travel publishers, who choose to disregard how underpaid and overstretched the writers are in order to keep production costs down? I cannot say. A little of both, I guess.” Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? offers the behind-the-scenes results of that disconnect. It’s not a book about Brazil, it’s a book about writing a book about Brazil.

As a memoir, its veracity is also highly suspect, but Kohnstamm lays out the groundrules right up front. “In order to distill the chaos of life down to a clear narrative, it was necessary to omit certain events, rearrange and compress chronology, and combine a few of the characters,” he says in the author’s note. “I have changed most of the names and identifying details of the characters in this book to protect their privacy. Much of the dialogue and many e-mails have been recreated, but all are based on real conversations and correspondence.”

However, if I want to look at how writers write about place, Kohnstamm certainly provides a useful, entertaining lesson.

“The majority of travel books fall into three basic groups,” he says:

1. There are earnest writers who become enlightened…. A more holistic approach to life is discovered and the universe is balanced.
2. On the opposite side of the spectrum are the smug writers who mock how backward plumbing and transportation are anywhere outside North America…. Such writers should give Orlando or Long Island a try for their next vacation, as both have abundant new cars and functional flush toilets with soft two-ply paper.
3.  Last but not least are the…guys who attempt solo ascents of mountains without telling anyone where they’re going, are forced to amputate their appendages with a spork, and then expect us to appreciate their triumph of human spirit.

Kohnstamm’s falls into a category of its own. It’s a triumph of human…something. Perhaps the New American Dream, discovered by whirling like a dervish across the globe, living life to its top. Thompson, I suspect, would approve of the comparison.

The five are fired football coach Joe Paterno, former president Graham Spanier (who remains a tenured faculty member, as does Paterno), assistant coach Mike McQueary (who is on paid leave), former vice president for finance Gary Schultz (who resigned), and former athletic director Tim Curley (who is also on leave). The latter two are facing criminal charges of perjury and failure to report alleged sexual abuse. Penn State is reportedly paying for their legal defense, as well.

Pennsylvania’s freshly minted public records law, which was revamped and updated in 2008 and took effect January 1, 2009, does not mandate the disclosure of all public employee salaries. Michigan, to its credit, does, as it should. In fact, Michigan’s freedom of information law specifically states that public universities, school districts and community colleges “shall upon request make available to the public the salary records of an employee or other official of the institution of higher education, school district, intermediate school district, or community college.” Taxpayers fund, at least partially, state located public universities. And what these employees are being paid should be available to the public.

The four “state related institutions” listed in Pennsylvania’s statute are Penn State, Temple, the University of Pittsburgh and Lincoln University. (The University of Pennsylvania – aka Penn – is a private university founded by Ben Franklin).

The law requires that by May 30 every year these four universities have to report their IRS Form 990s, the salaries of the officers and directors, and the highest 25 salaries paid to employees of the institution who were not included in the list of officers and directors. Spanier made $813,855 in 2009. Paterno’s pay was more than $1 million, which is not unusual for football and basketball coaches at schools like Penn State. What the others made is anybody’s guess.

What is unusual, or at least unconscionable, is Penn State’s refusal to release salary information. Penn State is a public university supported, at least in part, by its tuition-paying students and the taxpayers of Pennsylvania. It should reconsider its stand on this and opt for transparency. The school will be in the crosshairs as a defendant in a whole lot of civil lawsuits as the alleged victims and their families  sue for millions in damages. Penn State is more collectable than Jerry Sandusky.

Several key officials apparently kept a dirty little secret for years. Transparency now is a small step in a positive direction.

“Editor’s note: Today’s “Non Sequitur” strip was withheld because it was deemed objectionable by Plain Dealer editors. A replacement strip was unavailable by press time.”

I knew I was going to find that message–my husband had already seen it (and written a letter to the PD editor, Debra Adams Simmons). I asked what the problem was and I expected something about religious or political content. He described the cartoon: two men and a rabbit sitting at a table with a police line-up in progress. On the other side of the two-way mirror: a cat, a bear, a wolf, and a snake. The rabbit’s line, “OK, I know how bad it sounds, but they all really do look alike to me.” You can see the original here on the Seattlepi.com website.

The contents of the rest of the PD, including the comic section, make that bit of censorship seem ludicrous.

I’m not sure who made the decision about the comics page. Ms. Simmons is the editor, but the choice could have been that of the features editor or a combination of people. It seems as if someone saw the cartoon as racist, racially offensive, or just patently offensive because of the line “they all really do look alike to me.” We all understand that the phrase in question can be highly charged and insensitive.

But if that were the case, and the issue was really the offensiveness of the rabbit saying, “they all really do look alike to me,” then why did the PD run the Mutts cartoon on the same day? The January 13th Mutts panel featured the cat character continuing his search for two identical snowflakes. The cat gets all excited because he may have found his quarry and his dog friend asks for confirmation. The cat’s response? “I dunno. . . . They ALL look the same to me.” Seattlepi.com also has that strip online here.

Perhaps the paper was being sensitive because Monday will be Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Perhaps Ms. Simmons (who is African-American) or another editor was particularly offended by the line-up image but overlooked the identical line in a reference to snowflakes. But there was obviously no consistency, even in the same section on the same day.

It’s not as if Non Sequitur’s Wiley is a stranger to controversy, either. Within the past six weeks, there was the Klansman with the “Cain for President” sign, a reference to the pepper-spraying cop, and a solid jab at the Tea Party.

But why include the announcement about the offensive content unless the purpose was to draw attention to it? Why not just leave it blank, move the cartoons around and put an ad on the page? I know–layout costs, etc.

So, what else was in the paper on Friday? On the front page there was a gallery of floating heads illustrating the major players in the ongoing county-corruption scandal. One of the faces was greyed out, but she is described as having “provided sexual favors” to the current defendant in exchange for a job. Today’s paper contained a detailed account of the defendant’s Las Vegas trip, complete with prostitutes, a dip in the “Bare Pool” at the hotel, and descriptions of topless women in the pool.

I guess none of that is “objectionable.” A bit nauseating, perhaps, when you know that the defendant in question probably tips the scales at 350 pounds plus and is quoted as saying, “I came in with a proper pristine image and I’m leaving a man whore.” But this kind of objectionable sells papers.

So I’m waiting for an explanation. Maybe the explanation is that I’m just insensitive. I don’t think that’s it–but I’m looking for the official answer.

No one seems to know when “creative nonfiction” emerged as a genre, but John McPhee’s name is frequently cited as one of the seminal figures. I decided I should check out his work. Rather than hit up one of his twenty-five-plus books, I decided to dip into a pair of John McPhee readers so I could get a wide sampling, looking at essays that specifically dealt with places.

I first came across McPhee’s work while I was waiting for an oil change. A member of the university’s English faculty happened to come in, and we started chit-chatting. This colleague’s particular expertise rests with Milton, so I was surprised when the conversation turned to McPhee. “Your work reminds me of his,” he told me.

I had no idea at the time what an immense compliment that was. I ordered one of McPhee’s readers from Amazon so I could see for myself, but by the time it arrived a week later, I’d already gotten caught up in another project and wasn’t able to delve into the book. It has sat on my shelf, patiently waiting, ever since. It’s been years.

I came across McPhee’s work again last spring in the book In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction, edited by Lee Gutkind, the so-called “Godfather of Creative Nonfiction” and editor of Creative Nonfiction magazine.

“McPhee’s work is distinguished by his ability to see the world through the points of view of other people and communicate them intimately and intricately,” Gutkind wrote. “But he also recognizes the compelling nature of personal history and the insight into character and the human condition it can provide.”

McPhee’s work reminded me very much of Lilian Ross’s “fly-on-the-wall” reporting. Ross, a predecessor of McPhee’s at The New Yorker, was an innovator in that regard, although as journalism scholar R. Thomas Berner points out, her innovation has since become standard practice. Ross is present in her stories, but she functions as an observer. She interacts with her subjects but doesn’t offer commentary about them.

“To this point, McPhee has pretty much kept himself and his life out of the narratives,” Gutkind says. McPhee sometimes interacts with his subjects, but when he does, he avoids overt commentary, although his descriptions are so evocative it’s impossible not to start drawing conclusions. In The Pine Barrens, for instance, he describes a man named Bill:

In a straight-backed chair near the doorway to the kitchen sat a young man with long black hair, who wore a visored red leather cap that had darkened with age. His shirt was coarse-woven and had eyelets down a V neck that was laced with a thing. His trousers were made of canvas, and he was wearing gum boots. His arms were folded, his legs were stretched out, he had one ankle over the other, and as he sat there he appeared to be sighting carefully past his feet, as if his toes were the outer frame of a gunsight and he could see some sort of target in the floor. When I had entered, I had said hello to him, and he had nodded without looking up. He had a long, straight nose and high cheekbones, in a deeply tanned face that was, somehow, gaunt. I had no idea whether he was shy or hostile. Eventually, when I came to know him, I found him to be as shy a person as I have ever had a chance to know.

It’s harder to explain McPhee’s descriptions of place because, it seems, in some of his essays everything always seems to come back to place. The Pine Barrens, as an example, is about place, and McPhee explores it through research, history, culture, and adventures with people who live there. “The picture of New Jersey that most people hold in their minds is so different from this one that, considered beside it, the Pine Barrens, as they are called, become as incongruous as they are beautiful,” he writes. He engages readers with his pieces by juxtaposing what they think they know with the discoveries he wants to share with them.

In “Traveling Through Georgia,”

pine trees kept giving us messages—small, hand-painted signs nailed into the loblollies. ‘HAVE YOU WHAT IT TAKES TO MEET JESUS WHEN HE RETURNS?’ Sam said he was certain he did not. ‘JESUS WILL NEVER FAIL YOU.’ City limits, Adrian, Georgia. Swainsboro, Georgia. Portal, Georgia. Towns on the long, straight roads of the coastal plain. White-painted, tin-roofed bungalows. Awnings shading the fronts of stores—prepared for heat and glare. Red earth. Sand roads. House on short stilts. Sloping verandas. Unpainted boards.

He not only picks vivid details, he pieces them together with a real ear for rhythm. Consider part of his description of Anchorage, Alaska in Coming Into the Country:

Roads are rubbled, ponded with chuckholes. Big trucks, graders, loaders, make the prevailing noise, the dancing fumes, the frenetic beat of the town. Huge rubber tires are strewn about like quoits, ever ready for the big machines that move hills of earth and gravel into inconvenient lakes, which become new ground.

As I explore McPhee’s work, the thing I’m coming to admire most is his meticulous attention to craft. His pieces are splendidly well-written. Rhythm, vocabulary, sentence structure, description—it all falls into perfect place. He’s not a flashy stylist; in fact, I’d be hard-pressed to describe his style at all. He writes with clarity and a lack of literary pretension. Perhaps a kind of journalistic formality? His voice isn’t there, yet it is.

I’ve also come to appreciate his versatility. I read something last week that described Barry Lopez as America’s most versatile reporter, but I’ve gotta think McPhee set the bar. Aside from The Pine Barrens and Coming Into the Country, I particularly enjoyed Oranges, The Control of Nature, and a blurb I read from Founding Fish (not in the readers).

I’ve also come to appreciate just how crazy my colleague from the English Department is. While incredibly flattered by the comparison, I’m so far below McPhee’s league that I shouldn’t even share a last initial with him.

I only got a sampling, but I’ll have to go back for more.

#19

I never read The Perfect Storm until I saw the trailer for the 2000 movie. There, on the big screen, a fishing boat tried to bull its way straight up—literally straight up—a gigantic wall of water. “Did you see that?” I said to my wife, smacking her lightly on the shoulder. “Did you see that? Straight up a wall of water!”

That same image would appear on movie posters when the film finally came out a couple months later.

I had to get the book.

By then, The Perfect Storm had been released in paperback, and I was able to find a copy whose cover had not yet been co-opted by the movie studio. The edition did benefit from a new afterward by the author, Sebastian Junger, which has proven to be one of the most useful “case studies” on literary journalism that I’ve ever read.

When Junger chose to write about the loss of the swordboat Andrea Gail out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, he was, in effect, choosing to write about something unknowable. Andrea Gail, lost at sea in October 1991 during a storm of cataclysmic proportions, left no final trace. Junger had a few final radio conversations to draw on, but what happened to the boat and the five men aboard in its last hours was a mystery.

“I’ve written as complete an account as possible of something that can never be fully known,” Junger said in his afterward. “It is exactly that unknowable element, however, that has made it an interesting book to write and, I hope, to read.”

Along with the challenge of piecing together the story of the boat and crew, Junger had to explain the way of life aboard a swordboat. He had to recreate the way of life in a Massachusetts fishing village. He had to delve into the meteorological facts that explained “the perfect storm.”

“On one hand, I wanted to write a completely factual book that would stand on its own as a piece of journalism,” he said in his introduction. “On the other hand, I didn’t want the narrative to asphyxiate under a mass of technical detail and conjecture.”

And here’s why I’ve come to admire the book so much: Junger immerses himself in the story (much the way Tony Horwitz did for Confederates in the Attic). He spent a lot of time hanging out in The Crow’s Nest, the Gloucester bar where the Andrea Gail’s crew hung out. “By and large it’s a bar of people who know each other; people who aren’t known are invited over for a drink,” Junger wrote. “It’s hard to buy your own beer at the Crow’s Nest, and it’s hard to leave after just one….”

While there, Junger spent time soaking up the atmosphere. His presence there over weeks allowed him to eventually earn the trust of locals so they’d open up to him and talk about their lives, their jobs, and their experiences at sea. “Look, I don’t know a thing about fishing,” he’d say. “So if you don’t tell me about it, I’m going to get it all wrong.”

Sometimes they’d talk to him; sometimes not. Sometimes he’d have his pen and notepad out; sometimes he’d have to excuse himself, run the men’s room, and scribble a few notes there in private. Some people, like Ricky Shatford, the older brother of crewmember Bobby Shatford, didn’t take kindly at all to what they saw as the intrusion. “I told people I was going to kill you,” Shatford eventually told Junger when they’d made piece with each other.

By that point, the book had come out and become a bestseller. Shatford had finally been able to see for himself that Junger treated the story—and his younger brother—with respect.

“Had they not lived the lives they did, and agreed to talk with me about them, the book would not exist,” Junger conceded in his afterword.

He constructed his narrative by gathering everything he could through interviews and research. In instances when he couldn’t answer a question directly—like, what must it have been like for guys on the boat to be caught in the storm—he interviewed people who’d been in similar situations. He never takes that information and projects it onto the crew of the Andrea Gail, but he does suggest parallels and lets readers draw their own conclusions.

In the end, Junger sticks to facts “in as wide-ranging a way as possible,” he said. As a result, there are “varying kinds of information in the book.”

For instance, he uses direct quotes for anything he recorded in a formal interview, but dialogue, based on people’s recollections, appear without quotation marks. “No dialogue was made up,” he emphasized. For radio conversations, he uses italics. He incorporates a lot of research from reading, although he typically doesn’t cite any of his sources, an attempt on his part to keep the narrative lean and readable. In fact, it reads much like a novel, and he uses present tense to keep the story immediate.

Except for the first-person introduction and afterward, Junger keeps himself entirely out of the book. By some definitions, that means The Perfect Storm doesn’t qualify as “creative nonfiction.” By other definitions, Junger’s style of “literary journalism” does qualify. (I realize that’s a question more germane to my own reading at present than it is for most readers, who probably don’t give a rat’s ass how to categorize it!)

In the context of “place,” which is the lens I’m using to look at these books, The Perfect Storm certainly captures a good sense of Gloucester and, even better, of the sea. However, it’s most useful to me now as a model of how a writer interacts within place as he attempts to capture it.

When I first read it, The Perfect Storm was a watershed book for me. It helped show me what else nonfiction could be. It showed me how to tackle some of the ethical questions that arise from being a writer in pursuit of a story. Those are lessons I still reflect on, and pass along to my students, to this day.

“Writers often don’t know much about the world they’re trying to describe, but they don’t necessarily need to,” Junger concluded. “They just need to ask a lot of questions. And then they need to step back and let the story speak for itself.”

#17

If there’s one book I’ve wished I’d written, it’s Confederates in the Attic. Of course, Tony Horwitz already wrote it, nearly two decades ago (I can hardly believe it’s been that long). Here’s a guy who wandered around the South, talking to people about the legacy of the Civil War. He asked questions, had conversations, observed, listened, and explored the landscape for himself. He immersed himself in the story.

This, I tell my students, is what good feature writers do. They take the time to do the story justice—and a story as complex as this one requires a lot of time if you’re going to be thorough and fair. That’s what I respect most about Horwitz’s work on the book: he takes the time to make an honest attempt at trying to understanding that which, I suspect, can never fully be understood.

Horwitz had a lifelong interest in the war, but it had lain mostly dormant throughout most of his adult life. Then, one morning without warning, he awoke to the sound of gunshots in the street outside his home. A group of Civil War reenactors were filming a TV documentary on the battle of Fredericksburg, and during a break in the action, they collapsed in Horwitz’s yard. Horwitz brought them fresh coffee, and that’s when the questions began.

The “hardcore” reenactors “didn’t just dress up and shoot blanks,” Horwitz discovered. “They sought absolute fidelity to the 1860s: its homespun clothing, antique speech patterns, sparse diet and simple utensils. Adhered to properly, this fundamentalism produced a time-travel high….”

One reenactor brags about soaking his brass buttons overnight in a saucer filled with urine, which oxidized the brass to make it look like a button from the 1860s. “My wife woke up this morning, sniffed the air and said, ‘Tim, you’ve been peeing on your buttons again,’” the man told Horwitz. (Reenactor friends of mine have since told me urine doesn’t really work, but it sure makes a colorful story.)

What makes these men tick, Horwitz wondered. Why does the war hold such sway over them. In fact, he thought, why does the war hold such sway over so many people?

And thus begins one of the oddest of odysseys. Horwitz submerges himself in the South, since that’s where most of the war was fought, to find out for himself. The resulting exploration of place turns into a memorable cultural portrait of the South.

Horwitz decides to start in Charleston, South Carolina, at the site of Fort Sumter, where the war’s first shots were fired, but the War waylays him well before he gets there. On his way south, through North Carolina, he’s sidetracked into the world of the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy, some of whom attend Civil War-related meetings seven nights a week. To commemorate “Lee-Jackson Day,” a holiday once widely celebrated across the South that combined the birthdays of long-dead Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, the folks play Civil War trivia games.

At times, Horwitz acts as a fly on the wall as he takes in the things going on around him. But at his best, he is a full-blown participant, taking sides in the trivia games, dressing up for a reenactment, and offering his unique, submerged perspective on what he sees and experiences. Best of all, he strikes up conversations everywhere he goes, asking, asking, asking.

Horwitz tracks down the legend of Tara from Gone with the Wind. He meets the last living Confederate widow. He rushes through Virginia with a hard-core reenactor, Robert Lee Hodge, hitting as many Civil War sites as they can in a week, what Hodge calls a “Civil Wargasm.”

In one of my favorite encounters of the book, he talks with Shelby Foote, the Memphis writer who penned the sweeping three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative, and who gained national exposure as a kindly grandfather-looking “Voice of the South” in Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary. “It’s the sort of experience we never forget,” Foote told him. “I was in a lot of fistfights, maybe fifty in my life. The ones I remember with startling clarity are the ones I lost.”

While Horwitz discovers that the Civil War is very much alive throughout the South, he also discovers that it’s a Cold War. The lines are no longer just geographic, either: they’re racial, social, and economic, too.

That’s what helps make Confederates in the Attic more than just a fascinating collection of eccentric people—although that is what makes it so captivating. Horwitz manages to write an intensely thought-provoking book. Every eccentric brings a new shade of meaning to the discussion. For every hardcore reenactor like Hodge, who can lay on the ground and “bloat” to look like the dead Confederates in wartime photos, there’s a Michael Westerman, the nineteen-year-old victim of a racially motivated murder, killed while flying a Confederate flag from the bed of his pickup truck. Citizens of Richmond who debate the placement of a statue to the late tennis great Arthur Ashe bring up incredibly nuanced arguments that transcend notions of mere “pro” and “con.”

Horwitz doesn’t shy away from any of it. Confederates in the Attic astutely explores racism, political correctness, national and regional identity, and the relevance of our own history as a way to understand ourselves. Like any good journalist, Horwitz doesn’t pretend to have any answers, but he lays out as many sides to the story as possible so readers can think for themselves.

Horwitz does get a few facts wrong, and sometimes his interpretation is shaky (I take particular exception to the way he tends to portray Stonewall Jackson as a total crackpot). He leaves a few things out, and he stirs up trouble, too. I know some of the people involved in some of the stories, so I have the inside scoop on a few things. Horwitz commits no unpardonable sins, though, and I can forgive much because of the earnestness with which he approaches his quest.

“The present is just a split second,” Hodge tells Horwitz. “The past lasts forever. You can keep going back to it.”

Indeed, Confederates in the Attic is much the same. This marked my fifth or sixth time through the book. It stands as a landmark piece of feature journalism and was  easily one of the best books of the 1990s. Although almost twenty years old, I can keep going back to it, over and over.

————

Cross-posted at Emerging Civil War.

On Nov. 8, the [student] newspaper published a full-frontal photo of a streaker who ran onto the field during that weekend’s home football game. The decision prompted outcry from some readers and from university administrators who said it was “in very poor taste.”

If this photo was so controversial and in “very poor taste,” why did the university require two months to decide to give Isom four hours to clean out his office and get outta Dodge?

No doubt lawyers were consulted. After the photo was published, the university’s vice chancellor for student affairs, Virginia Hardy, presaged what would come to pass:

We will be having conversations with those who were involved in this decision in an effort to make it a learning experience. The goal will be to further the students’ understanding that with the freedom of the press comes a certain level of responsibility about what is appropriate and effective in order to get their message across.

Learning experience my ass. The goal of the lesson being taught here is to warn student journalists and their advisers to not cross the university when it comes to maligning its image.

First Amendment be damned; protect the good name of the university — and its abilities to maintain a flack-polished, positive public image so that it can recruit and retain students and faculty and continue to raise money for the university’s endowment and other needs.

I wonder what Sandra Mims-Rowe, retired editor of The Daily Oregonian and a six-time Pulitzer Prize receipient; Dan Neil of The Los Angeles Times, another Pulitzer Prize recipient; Margaret O’Connor, former photo editor of The New York Times and two-time Pulitzer Prize recipient, and Rick Atkinson, journalist, author and three-time Pulitzer recipient, think about canning the adviser. These distinguished journalists are graduates of East Carolina University touted on the university’s website.

The university’s blunt message to student reporters and editors (and future student media advisers) is obvious: Journalism is about maintaining others’ standards of taste rather than their own editorial judgments on how to depict reality. In other words, protect the university’s image.

The university is wrong here: Publishing photos of a person who streaked nude across Bagwell Field at Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium in a game against the University of Southern Mississippi is news occurring in a public forum. Security staffers tackled the man at the 50-yard line. The photos depicted that. Thus the photos provided a visual account of how security staffers handled themselves in a difficult situation. That’s what newspapers do: Hold government (in this case, the university) accountable for its actions.

The editor, Cailtin Hale, defended the newspaper’s decision:

This decision was made because we felt that our audience, which is primarily the ECU student body, should have access to unedited and factual photos of the streaking incident at last Saturday’s ECU football game. While the photos may be seen as offensive to some, the photos were not meant to be seen as sexually suggestive or insulting, but instead an accurate account of Saturday’s events. [emphasis added]

But the newspaper’s editors did not stop with merely publishing controversial photos. This is a cops and courts story: The paper followed the court case, covering the arrest of the person accused of being the streaker, and doing a follow-up on the court appearance in which the accused was given back his clothes and allowed to apologize to the court.

But all this doesn’t hand Isom, the student media adviser since 2008, his job back.

Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, said firing a man who has advised student publications professionally since 1994 raises First Amendment concerns. From a center press release:

“There’s no camouflaging what this is, which is retaliation for an editorial judgment made by the students that was completely within the students’ authority to make,” LoMonte said. “They’re clearly punishing the adviser for something he not only didn’t control, but legally couldn’t control.”

Isom said he has no problem fighting his termination, and isn’t ruling out legal action against the university.

“If I was not willing to stand up for a First Amendment issue, then I wouldn’t have been advising them the way that I was advising them,” he said. “I would have told them, ‘Yeah, don’t run any controversial pictures, don’t make anybody mad.’”

In my teaching career, I have advised three collegiate newspapers. Students occasionally err in judgment. Such errors in student judgment are the cost universities must bear if they offer journalism programs and encourage independent student newspapers. But not all decisions universities find appalling are errors in student judgments.

This ECU case was not an error in judgment by editor Hale and her staff. They captured a reality that occurred in full view of fans sitting in a 50,000-person stadium. I would have been disappointed in a judgment to not run photos of an event with so many witnesses.

Isom should sue. He did nothing that warranted the university stripping him of his job and his reputation. The university should save itself the cost of defending against the lawsuit and hire him back. Immediately.

Then again, this is the university that graduated Vince and Linda McMahon, founders and chief executives of World Wrestling Entertainment. Maybe the university prefers to wrestle in the mud of public opinion.

by Robert S. Becker

Stay ‘til the end – and a rich payoff of Carl Sagan’s gemlike insights. A little clean-up work first, to clear the palate.

I don’t regularly read Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer (CK, as in crank), often regret when I do, ending with gnashing teeth. From time to time, perplexity or hilarity moves me to the dark side, hunting out the loopy logic behind the latest fringe skullduggery. I used to read that wily conservative wordsmith, Peggy Noonan – a far better stylist – until I gagged at her unctuous Vatican sycophancy.

So, I brightened suspiciously at Krauthammer’s seemingly apolitical title, “Are we alone in the universe?” Ah-ah, I guessed, are greedy oligarchs, having written off the Middle East quagmire, reigniting manifest destiny into space? Doesn’t commerce that follows expansion, like Columbus or our interminable invasions, pay back venture capital that ventures far and wide? Imagine the military cash blast from space voyaging, as in W.’s fantasy pitch for actual Mars landings. What overstretched empire desperate for a larger purpose wouldn’t drool to conquer the moon, awarding itself an armed catbird seat to spot evildoers “from above,” like gods?

CK opens with confusion, puzzled why we haven’t yet found intelligent life elsewhere despite the huge sample pool – billions of stars, an infinity of solar systems. I was itching to hear him pontificate about not finding intelligent life scattered across his own party’s goofy field of candidates. But no, instead the Crank posited that advanced civilizations are rare because they self-destruct, ironically killed off by their own “intelligence.” And then the shocker: he cited the hallowed authority of Carl Sagan. Sans proof or citation. Right, sounds just like the scientist Sagan I recall, the indefatigable founder of the whole SETI program – the Search for Extraterrestrial Life. Why would this incredible space enthusiast waste decades and large budgets if he believed there was nothing to find? The world’s most famous scientist of his generation wrote a book called Intelligent Life in the Universe.

Finally, out of this Krauthammer morass emerges this leap of logic, a defense of rational, life-affirming politics:

if we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction . . . in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations —[politics] is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it. Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history. It will determine whether we will live long enough to be heard one day. Out there. By them, the few — the only — who got it right.

Is this it, a covert campaign pitch, implying redemption, indeed survival, depends wholly on smarter politicians? How can he blithely ignore a contradiction the size of Jupiter? How can politics be “sovereign” when CK’s own frantic fringe, the creeps who defy compromise on national debt or paying our bills, torpedo the process? Where’s the illusory sovereignty of politics when the right holds only contempt for unhinged, lying liberals? How can CK evoke politics when his demented fellows play demotion derby, denigrating huge threats like global warming or worldwide pollution plus any sort of political solutions? Right, the sovereignty of politics drowned in a bathtub.

That dead end aside, there’s more nonsense afoot, like Krauthammer’s claim any search for space life “betrays a profound melancholy, a lonely species in a merciless universe [that] anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence”? Utter silence, like the key “background noise” that revealed the Big Bang? CK whines this void of contact is “maddening” because “it makes no sense.” Wait a minute. Doesn’t scientific curiosity, not melancholy, drive our space investigations, as Sagan’s illustrious career proved? Since when is science about self-pity, not wonder or desire for knowledge? Testing, testing, earth to CK.

Second, considering the brevity of the SETI hunt (a few decades), the vast distances, and the rarity of the life-sustaining Goldilocks habitats, jumping to any big conclusions is absurd. Results: not maddening, nor surprising, certainly not unexpected. Further, our “lonely species” is maddeningly overpopulating our shrinking planet, thus dying from disease, malnutrition, and poverty. The poorest among us aren’t melancholy or anxious because no wizard found any chatty playmates lights years away, but because desperate earthlings are bereft of resources. This supposedly “smart rightwinger” obviously skipped way too many science classes.

Then, from bad logic he shifts to chicanery, as my research failed to establish where “Carl Sagan (among others) thought that the answer is to be found, tragically, in the final variable: the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.” Would Sagan the evidence-driven scientist make such specific predictions about absent civilizations about which no one knows anything? True, Sagan the strong critic of nuclear arms – and the Vietnam War, plus damage to the earth – imagined dire results for this very planet. But he had evidence galore, even before 1996 when he died. Readers, any help here?

CK’s distortion reflects his hijacking lines from Sagan’s novel, Contact (pgs. 358-360), especially fanciful dialogue between Ellie (human scientist) and the Alien, to whom she asks how his imaginary “advanced civilization” might respond to cosmic threats.

[Ellie] “If the Nazis had taken over the world, our world, and then developed interstellar spaceflight, wouldn’t you have stepped in?”

[Alien] “You’d be surprised how rarely something like that happens. In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always.”

First obvious fallacy: fictional characters speak for themselves, not their creators. That’s why essays exist. Second, the Alien only cites “aggressive” civilizations prone self-destruction, thus they’re the exception: “You’d be surprised how rarely something like that happens.” I resent when cranky mental midgets, for their own needs, misrepresent what mental giants “say” in novels. Wrong and stupid. There’s only one correction to such intellectual crimes: Sagan’s own lucid wisdom, full of important ideas and opinions, even wit, without sounding strident or self-righteous.

Here’s a summary of Sagan quotations, and a few favorite Sagan’s treats, tasty enough to drive away the bitter taste from getting Kraut-hammered:

Gems in Sagan’s World of Wonders:

“We are star stuff harvesting sunlight.”

“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

“What a marvelous cooperative arrangement — plants and animals each inhaling each other’s exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million kilometers away.”

“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”

“The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”

“A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.”

“The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.”

“I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.”

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”

“The prediction I can make with the highest confidence is that the most amazing discoveries will be the ones we are not today wise enough to foresee.”

“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”

“The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by ‘God,’ one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying … it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”

“Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become space-faring – not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive … If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds.”

“Long ago, when an early galaxy began to pour light out into the surrounding darkness, no witness could have known that billions of years later some remote clumps of rock and metal, ice and organic molecules would fall together to make place called Earth; or that life would arise and thinking beings evolve who would one day capture a little of that galactic light, and try to puzzle out what had sent it on its way. And after the earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it’s burned to a crisp, or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being — and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth.”

“We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.”

“Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication, and courage. But if we don’t practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us — and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along.” 

#1: The Devil’s Teeth by Susan Casey

When The Devil’s Teeth was published in 2005, I thought Susan Casey had stolen the ideal writing project from some hidden corner of my brain and had then proceeded to live it out: she attached herself to a group of biologists studying great white sharks off California’s coast. She got to live among them as they worked up-close with one of the planet’s most magnificent creatures, and then she got to come home and write a book about it.

I want that life!

The Devil’s Teeth stands as a great example of a writer willing to plunge headlong into a story, literally heart and soul, living it in order to really tell it.

But it’s a cautionary tale, too. How far is too far? What are the repercussions of being so involved in the story?

It really is, as the book’s subtitle suggests, “A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks.” I thought the use of attention-grabbing buzzwords was merely intended to titillate readers into buying. It was a sales ploy, I thought. But no, Casey really is obsessed, and it drives the central action of the second half of the book.

Casey, then an award-winning editor with Time (and now editor-in-chief at O, The Oprah Magazine), saw a special on the BCC about the Farallones’ shark population and got hooked. So, she went out to do a story. Then she went back for a longer trip the next season as a follow-up. The next year, she went back again, this time to live on a boat offshore, to really be part of the action.

Casey has prime material to work with. First, she has the sharks. Great whites have become archetypal in our collective unconscious. “[W]hite sharks represent the terrible, powerful unknown,” Casey says.

They live in a different element than we do, they’re not cute, they’re not at all cuddly, and on some level they seem like the closest things we have to living dinosaurs. Their otherness is what both compels us and scare the pants off us. That, and their several sets of teeth. It’s a complicated relationship.

Along with the sharks, Casey has the Farallon Islands, a small archipelago of craggy granite islands twenty-seven miles due west of the Golden Gate Bridge. The islands jut from the Pacific “like the fangs of a sea monster badly in need of dental work,” says Casey, who quickly learns how inhospitable the islands really are. “The water was a fathomless black,” she writes; “fog crept through savage rock archways.” Thirty-knot winds, blanketing fog, and fifteen-foot seas are standard, she discovers. “The place gets regular lashings of the meanest weather the Pacific can dish out,” she says.

From August through September, the water around the Farralones gets unbelievably sharky. Great whites congregate off the islands in thick swarms for reasons biologists have yet to figure out. Casey fills her book with stories about the water’s infamous sharkyness, and it’s the central question she and the researchers continue to investigate through the entire book.

One thing that draws them, obviously, is the abundance of sea lions that populate the islands’ shores. The islands are also home to hundreds of thousands of sea birds. In fact, it’s the islands’ role as a bird habitat that affords it special protection as a National Wildlife Refuge, which makes the islands off-limits to everyone except the small group of scientists who stay there seasonally to study the seabirds. They just happen to study the sharks as a side project, too, and their bird-work gets largely ignored in the book.

Casey has a great talent for working technical information into her narrative, so the first half of the book is full of interesting information about great white sharks. As a shark lover, I couldn’t get enough—and she offered plenty.

The second half of the book, where she becomes personally invested in the story, focuses less on shark biology and background and more on her personal experience. Her desire to be around the sharks develops into what she describes as a need—and from there springs her obsession, which grows like a barnacle to amazing size.

Without spoiling any plot points, Casey ends up putting her life in jeopardy, putting someone’s boat in danger, and putting scientists’ careers at risk. The story she so desperately wants to tell takes a back seat to her own story of obsession and survival. “That single-mindedness colored everything I did, and ended up extracting a heavy toll,” she admits.

It is compelling stuff, no doubt, and it provides a convenient narrative structure for what would otherwise be a book-length musing about great white sharks.

Casey’s musings, though, offer the best reason for reading. Action story aside, and writerly ethics aside, too, Casey ponders some deeply important questions about humankind’s relationship with the natural world. The Farallones offer her many lenses through which she can examine those questions:

• the research of the scientists,
• the protection (and lack of it) afforded by the wildlife sanctuary and the surrounding marine sanctuary,
• the exploitation of marine life by fisheries,
• the impact of ecotourism on the sharks,
• the impact of ecotourism on the research being done on the sharks,
• the effects of pollution (including nuclear waste dumped by the Navy),

and on and on.

She comes to no conclusions—the questions are as big as the seas themselves, of course—and her expedition ends in ruin, but she does try to wrap up the book on a hopeful note.

The Devil’s Teeth could not have happened anywhere other than the Farallon Islands because of the unique ecological system at play there. By diving into that story, she was able to capture that ecology, which in turn helped capture the Farallones themselves. She makes it easy to see how she became fascinated with them (which, of course, works to her advantage because it’s then easier to see how fascination devolves into obsession—and “when the wheels come off,” as she says, it’s easier to see her as sympathetic).

Most importantly, The Devil’s Teeth offers sharks, sharks, sharks! But beyond that, it offers a moderately interesting tale of survival, and a slightly more interesting tale of obsession. What’s important, really, are the questions that arise from that obsession: what are the things that obsess us, culturally and socially, and why? How do those priorities and those devotions affect our interaction with the natural world?

Sharks have survived for hundreds of millions of years, but Casey’s questions make one wonder if sharks will be able to survive us.

The number of jobs eliminated in the newspaper industry rose by nearly 30% in 2011 from the prior year, according to the blog that has been tracking the human toll on the industry for the last five years.

Mutter, working with data from Erica Smith, author of the Paper Cuts blog, notes layoffs have been horrific over the past four years.

Since Smith began her running count of publishing layoffs in the middle of 2007, 39,806+ newspaper jobs have been eliminated. This represents 11% of the all the jobs in an industry that, according to the Census Bureau, employed 360,633 individuals in 2007.

Worse, Mutter points out, the number of journalists in America’s print newsroom is at an all-time low. The layoffs, over time, have taken a staggering toll on newsrooms.

Nowhere has the toll been higher than in newsrooms, where staffing has slipped each year since 2005 to successively new modern-day lows.

Nearly 1 in 3 newsroom jobs have been eliminated since the number of journalists peaked at 56,900 in 1989, according to an annual survey by the American Society of News Editors. At the end of 2010, only 41,600 scribes were left on the industry’s payrolls.

If only a fifth of the cuts identified by Smith in 2011 were in newsrooms, then barely 41,000 journalists will be left at America’s newspapers at year’s end.

I’ve written repeatedly about the increasing need for good — even great — journalism and the declining ability of the newspaper industry’s ability to provide it.

The reason’s no secret. A decimated business model that a decade ago arrogantly wrote off the Internet as a credible competitor and a tectonic shift in technology that turned Everyman into a supposed journalist killed the industry’s centuries-old reliance on ad revenues. According to Mutter, 2011 was

a year that many newspaper people had hoped would be a time of relative stability after five years of successive revenue declines. Instead of steadying, advertising sales slid throughout 2011 and likely will come in at less than half of the record $49.4 billion achieved as recently as 2005. [emphasis added]

With the number of journalists half that of the historical high, who will produce the local stories that matter those tens of thousands laid off no longer do? As one of my colleagues at S&R advises me, the citizen journalist and the neighborhood blogger are inadequate replacements to produce quality local news.

Citizen journalists … say they will do for free what journalists used to do for money, e.g., cover school board meetings. Whether they do or not is another matter, but as a general rule, in any industry where people are willing to work for free, you end up with a bimodal distribution of returns — a few who make it very rich, and the many who make almost nothing. Examples include writing, acting, music, fashion, etc. It appears that journalism, or at least column writing, has become one of those industries.

Plenty of opinions on how to fix the news biz exist (see here, here, here, here, and here). Recent attempts to revive industry revenues have met with uneven success — permeable and impermeable paywalls, dalliances with social media, and so on. Foundations and non-profit organizations have taken up the mantle of investigative reporting on regional and national levels. But good local news is a vanishing commodity.

I wish I had answers. I wish more than 41,000 journalists will be holding governments and corporations accountable — that’s the job that needs to be done — in 2012. But the trend suggests the next year will bring more dismal news for those remaining in newsrooms. If you value good local news, you’re likely to be increasingly disappointed.

Cases in point. As I’m scanning the headlines today looking for fodder, I find what appear to be three relevant articles. The first is a blog article by Robert J. Ambrogi, a media and technology lawyer in Rockport, MA, “1st Circuit Rules Public Has Right to Videotape Police,” August 28, 2011.  The second is an article by Richard Chirgwin published in The Register on December 6, 2011, “‘Blogger not a journalist’ says Oregon court: The $2.5 million defamation distinction.”  The third article, “Crystal Cox, Oregon Blogger, Isn’t a Journalist, Concludes U.S. Court–Imposes $2.5 Million Judgement on Her,” was posted by Curtis Cartier at SeattleWeekly Blogs on December 6, 2011.

On reading the Ambrogi article, I felt a certain exhilaration at discovering that no matter how the police may try to distort the law to shield themselves from accountability, the courts could and would come to the rescue of the common citizen, or, in this case, the “citizen journalist.” In Simon Glik’s words:

In 2007, while walking through Boston Commons, I saw a teenager being arrested by Boston police. After I took out his [sic] cell phone and recorded the arrest, I was myself arrested and charged with felony of “illegal wiretap”. This arrest was a vindictive attempt by some unscrupulous cops to suppress citizens’ right to record, observe and comment on police actions.

Ambrogi highlights the significant bits of the decision as they pertain to citizen journalism. For me, the joy-inducing line was, “The First Amendment right to gather news is, as the [Supreme] Court has often noted, not one that inures solely to the benefit of the news media; rather, the public’s right of access to information is coextensive with that of the press.” Now that is empowering.

As I was riding high on this new-found citizen power, the Internet quickly stuck pins in that bubble, the pins being the Chirgwin and Cartier articles. In the case reported by them, a “citizen journalist,” (at least as I thought I understood it from Ambrogi and the First Circuit) Crystal Cox, is sued by plaintiffs for defamation and the plaintiffs win. Cartier provides a bit more detail about the case than Chirgwin does, yet both home in on the same relevant aspect, that U.S. District Judge Marco A. Hernandez decided that Cox does not enjoy protection under Oregon’s shield law because she is neither media nor a journalist.

Here’s the language as quoted by Chirgwin:

[A]lthough defendant is a self-proclaimed “investigative blogger” and defines herself as “media,” the record fails to show that she is affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system. Thus, she is not entitled to the protections of the law”, wrote US District Judge Marco A Hernandez in his judgment.

Here it is as quoted by Cartier:

. . . although defendant is a self-proclaimed “investigative blogger” and defines herself as “media,” the record fails to show that she is affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system. Thus, she is not entitled to the protections of the law

On its surface, ignoring the punctuation for the moment, the quote pricked my bubble because it seems to fly directly in the face of what I thought I’d just learned from the Glik case. From Glik I understood that the First Amendment right to gather news does not inure solely to the benefit of the news media and that the public right of access to information is coextensive with that of the press. Yet here is a judge that seems to make the case that the right to gather the news does indeed inure solely to the news media and that the public right is not coextensive.

But am I just reading that all wrong? Maybe the right is to gather but not to report the news? Now wouldn’t that be odd? Journalists, by that measure, would only be protected in the role of researcher but not in the role of reporter.

It’s when I took the next apparently obvious step of reading Judge Hernandez’ judgment that I came to two conclusions. First, there’s occasionally something rather specious about Judge Hernandez’ reasoning and second, there’s something a bit peculiar in the reporting by Chirgwin and Cartier. The latter is where we go back for a moment and look at minor punctuation issues and their disproportionate effect on the sense of quotations.

Both Chirgwin and Cartier appear to be sounding an alarm (or maybe that’s just me seeing more RoadWidgets) by emphasizing Judge Hernandez’ distinction between Cox (bloggers) and journalists. There’s rather a bit more to it than that, however. Look at that variant punctuation again. “[A]lthough” and “…although” obviously imply something came before. Chirgwin’s comma at the end may not imply anything, but Cartier’s missing period certainly implies more follows. Here’s the actual quote from the judgment:

First, although defendant is a self-proclaimed “investigative blogger” and defines herself as “media,” the record fails to show that she is affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet,news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system. Thus, she is not entitled to the protections of the law in the first instance.

Ah-hah! Granted, I feel I should be bothered to read the judgment anyway, else I’d just be reporting and opining on the reporting, but even were I not inclined before, I’d be inclined now since the judge obviously has so much more to say.

This case appears to bear out the old adage that a lawyer who represents herself and her client are both fools. In her pro se representation, Cox makes several arguments to defend herself while missing a very simple and obvious piece of the law. Judge Hernandez does a meticulous job of shredding the majority of those arguments without any apparent controversy. It seems Cox would do well to either better educate herself on such matters as the definition of “public figure” and when to submit certain types of motion or to get herself some qualified legal representation. She may have spared herself some grief, or not.

She argued that the plaintiffs shouldn’t even be eligible for damages for defamation because they never demanded a retraction, so she never had the opportunity for the non-compliance that would have justified the damages. As fairly noted by Judge Hernandez in support of his first ruling, Oregon law hasn’t caught up to the Internet yet, so blogs aren’t protected by the retraction statute, see O.R.S. 31.205, and O.R.S. 31.210. Here I take umbrage at what appears to be a lack of journalistic integrity on her part. If her only reason for not issuing a retraction (were she to have a reason) was that they didn’t ask, well, shame on her. As I see it, if I write something and later discover it to merit retraction, it behooves me to do so without waiting for a demand. In any case, her argument makes it sound like it’s possible she would have caved to such a demand for fear of the financial consequences, even were she to hold to her alleged factual basis. Or maybe she would have just rolled over on her alleged source.

Cox argued that the claim against her must be dismissed under Oregon’s Anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) statute.  In explanation of his third ruling, Judge Hernandez dismantles her argument on two fronts. First, she dropped the ball procedurally. Second, he’d already determined that plaintiffs are entitled to proceed on one of the offending blog posts, presumably because he sees a probability that the plaintiffs will prevail.

Cox then demonstrates a misunderstanding of “absolute privilege.” Perhaps an attorney would have made the difference for her on this point, but I doubt it given the case law cited by Judge Hernandez. He quite tidily points out that while statements made in a judicial proceeding enjoy absolute privilege, i.e., aren’t subject to defamation claims, at least in this context, republishing same may indeed expose the publisher to defamation claims. To top it off, he then points out that even were there some privilege afforded in that case, it wouldn’t apply because the defamatory statements in her blog post weren’t even such republications.

Implicating First Amendment rights, Cox tries to place the burden of proof on the plaintiffs as “public figures” when it comes to the  assertion that she published the allegedly defamatory statements with actual malice. In his fourth ruling, Judge Hernandez schools Cox for several pages as to the court’s role in determining public figure status and just how they do it. Adding insult to injury, he even goes so far to point out that it’s the defendant’s burden to prove that the plaintiffs are public figures, which she clearly failed to do.

Also implicating First Amendment rights, Cox tried to cover her bases on the public figure issue by further making the claim that, because she is “media,” even if the plaintiffs are not public figures they may not recover damages without first proving negligence on her part. In part B of his fourth ruling, Judge Hernandez does something I find rather peculiar. First, he states:

Defendant cites no cases indicating that a self-proclaimed “investigative blogger” is considered “media” for the purposes of applying a negligence standard in a defamation claim.Without any controlling or persuasive authority on the issue, I decline to conclude that defendant in this case is ”media,” triggering the negligence standard.

Then, while so declining to conclude she is media, he proceeds to indicate just how she is NOT media:

Defendant fails to bring forth any evidence suggestive of her status as a journalist. For example, there is no evidence of (1) any education in journalism; (2) any credentials or proof of any affiliation with any recognized news entity; (3) proof of adherence to journalistic standards such as editing, fact-checking, or disclosures of conflicts of interest; (4) keeping notes of conversations and interviews conducted; (5) mutual understanding or agreement of confidentiality between the defendant and his/her sources; (6) creation of an independent product rather than assembling writings and postings of others; or (7) contacting “the other side” to get both sides of a story. Without evidence of this nature, defendant is not “media.”

Here is the first (second chronologically) instance where I think both Chirgwin and Cartier dropped their own journalistic balls. If, as the First Circuit concludes (if I understand that correctly), the journalistic rights of individuals is coextensive with those of the press, then where, exactly, is the codification of these seemingly arbitrary distinctions of true journalism? Where Judge Hernandez does a great job citing case law after case law throughout his judgment, on this matter his citations are strikingly…missing. Now, I’m sure that bona fide journalists replete with degrees from duly accredited institutions, undisputed affiliations with legitimate media, and adherence to all manner of professional standards likely have some serious grounds for contending that bloggers are not true and genuine journalists. I’d also be willing to place a gentleman’s wager they would cite their sources.

When Judge Hernandez implicates education in journalism, does he only mean formal education under the auspices of an accredited program? He fails to say, but seems to imply such. Would he then discount the journalistic authenticity, if only on the grounds of education, of an editor of a small-town local rag who learned journalism the hard way, by practice?

When he questions her lack of credentials or proof of affiliation, does he mean to imply that such is sufficient to validate a journalist as a journalist? I submit for your consideration…Jason Blair. Excellent affiliation, to be sure, for someone now distinguished as a life coach.

When he challenges her adherence to standards, such as editing, fact-checking or disclosure of conflict of interest, does he bother to indicate her failings at a) editing with an example, b) fact-checking with an example, such as a reminder of her absolute privilege goof (even were she to have it, her defamatory statements were not republication), or c) conflict of interest disclosure with any indication of such a known conflict?

When he challenges her on the keeping of notes from conversations and interviews, did he bother to ascertain that she didn’t?

When he challenges her on the mutual understanding of confidentiality between defendant and source, does he conveniently forget her claim to protection under the shield laws for that very reason? If not, then why even suggest there was no mutual understanding of such, especially when she invokes that protection to her own detriment?

When he challenges her on the distinction between creation of an independent product and assemblage of writings of others, what exactly is he even saying about the nature of the created work? Should authentic journalists NOT assemble a collection of resources, connect the dots and make something of it? Or does he mean to find fault with intellectual property law that protects works like directories, which are solely such assemblages? Does he make a case that in her blog articles she only creates assemblages without contributing anything of her own? Does he consider that, were that the case, clearly the defamatory comments were necessarily extracted from others as sources?

When Judge Hernandez challenges her on whether or not she contacted both sides of the story, where is the assertion that she did not? For that matter, if this is such a critical issue, is he actually thus making the legal claim that Fox News is not media? If so, I would concur, but that’s beside the point.

Most especially, however, for a judge that makes a case again and again on whether there exists a burden of proof and, if so, where it falls, how does he magically determine that the burden of proof falls on her to meet his apparently arbitrary criteria?

As if to make up for these glaring oddities of jurisprudence, Judge Hernandez proceeds, in part C of his fourth ruling, to shoot down her contention that the offending blog post refers to matters of public concern and thus affords her First Amendment protections. He does so with more case law and more clear explanation. It’s rather as though part B of his fourth ruling is neatly bracketed with giant red neon letters stating “What lies between is different!”

The gentle reader may have noticed that I skipped blithely past his Honor’s second ruling. I like to think I saved the best for last.

Regarding the application of Oregon’s shield laws, Judge Hernandez goes so far as to open his comments with the citation to O.R.S. 44.520(1), which reads:

[n]o person connected with, employed by or engaged in any medium of communication to the public shall be required by . . . a judicial officer . . . to disclose, by subpoena or otherwise . . . [t]he source of any published or unpublished information obtained by the person in the course of gathering, receiving or processing information for any medium of communication to the public[.]

He goes further and clarifies the essence of “medium of communication” by including the following definition from O.R.S. 44.520(2):

“Medium of communication” is broadly defined as including, but not limited to, “any newspaper, magazine or other periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system.”

There’s the hook. There’s the line. Now for the stinker, which just happens to be the source of almost all the substance to be found in Chirgwin and Cartier:

Defendant contends that she does not have to provide the “source” of her blog post because of the protections afforded to her by Oregon’s Shield Laws. I disagree. First, although defendant is a self-proclaimed “investigative blogger” and defines herself as “media,” the record fails to show that she is affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system. Thus, she is not entitled to the protections of the law in the first instance.

Were he to have omitted this one little paragraph, I think Chirgwin and Cartier would still be looking for an article to write. More’s the pity, because by including this little gem, Judge Hernandez opens up a line of inquiry which Chirgwin and Cartier left alone. Had Judge Hernandez just jumped to the next paragraph and stated his denial of the protections of the shield law in this case solely on the basis of O.R.S. 44.530(3) which rules out the shield law defense in civil cases for defamation, he could have dusted off his hands and moved merrily along.

No, he included this gold nugget so I’d have something to play with in these, my first faltering forays into the world of citizen journalism.

First, by including this bit of interpretive nuance, he fails to take into account what he only just included moments ago from O.R.S. 44.510(1): “[n]o person connected with, employed by or engaged in any medium of communication to the public…” [emphasis mine]. Please correct me if I am mistaken, but isn’t the Internet a medium of communication to the public? Further, if one posts content to the Internet without password protection, presumably to limit access to said content to a nominally private or more selective audience, isn’t it safe to say, especially in the case of blogging, that the content is intended for public consumption? On it’s face, (1) here starts down the path to suggesting that bloggers do, indeed, enjoy the protections of Oregon’s shield laws.

Second, by including this paragraph, he fails to take into account what he only just included from O.R.S. 44.510(2): “‘Medium of communication’ is broadly defined as including, but not limited to [emphasis mine],…” If a subset of Communications Media is such that the subset includes the elements A, B, C and D, but the set is broadly defined as including the subset but not limited to the subset, why does Judge Hernandez imply that such a limitation exists when he states that she fails to show affiliation with “any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet,news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cabletelevision system.” This is the first of two occasions (the second previously examined above) where he places the burden of proof on the defendant to show that she is media by some arbitrary measure when there isn’t even a requirement to do so at all. Worse, it’s the more damaging of the two, insofar as he goes out of his way to suggest that bloggers, by no stretch of the imagination, are journalists, no matter the standard to which you hold them, and thus neither they nor their sources enjoy any shield law protections.

This, I would think, will have a chilling effect on First Amendment rights as they apply to the blogosphere. Unless, that is, we relegate ourselves to being mere unoriginal collators of others’ works. I don’t care. I’m keeping my Mitsuyota RoadWidget. It’s fun to drive. It’s empowering. And I hope to see someone drive one just like it right into the Supreme Court of the United States.

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If I have committed errors or omissions typical of the rank amateur, I beg your indulgence and both encourage and welcome your esteemed corrections lest I become a blight on the face of the blogosphere. In keeping with the spirit of Judge Hernandez’ arbitrary section, “How Do You Tell a Witch Journalist?” I feel I should volunteer the following:

Education: I have read an article on a wiki. I’m not sure which one. I submit that this is hardly an accredited program. My only degree, advanced, at that, is from The School of Hard Knocks. This article is part of my post-doc work.

Credentials/Proof of Affiliation: For credentials, I submit that I possess an original long form birth certificate and a drivers’ license. No, you may not see them. As for affiliation, oh, hell, do I really need to implicate S&R so soon?

Proof of Adherence to “Some” Journalistic Standards: a) Editing – I have indeed strived to eliminate as many errors from this article as I am able. I cannot account for my stylistic excesses. b) Fact-checking – As evidence of some modicum of effort in that regard, I submit everything I have linked in this article. I admit that I have not bothered to look up Crystal Cox’s blog. If her pro se failings are indicative of other kindred failings in writing, life is too short. Besides, my issues, as presented, aren’t with whether or not she defamed or whether or not she writes well. c) Disclosure of Conflicts of Interest – I am a self-proclaimed blogger, investigative or not, and have written this piece in hope of publication at one blog of which I am not an editor and assurance of publication in my own. As far as I know, I will not receive any financial reward for this work.

Notes of Conversations/Interviews: While I did, indeed, talk to myself rather a lot during this effort, I made no recordings. I will, however, email the article itself to myself, if only because I am silly like that.

Mutual Understanding of Confidentiality Between Self and Sources: Nothing was related in confidence to me during the crafting of this article. I am sure, given the state of Internet privacy, or the lack thereof, that there is more information held on theInternet about me and my searches for information than I hold pertaining to my online sources. Further, I’m quite sure my information has been mined and will be sold in aggregate.

Creation of Independent Product: Views and opinions in this article that are not attributed to sources are my own independent product. If you did, somehow, manage to compel me to formulate these views and opinions, I really need to get my tinfoil hat adjusted.

Assemblage of Writings/Postings of Others: Well, yeah. Then I added a ton o’ stuff. Had I not, the article would be far less verbose.

Contact of the “Other Side”: No thank you. My Ouija board is packed up at the moment and quite far away. As for journalistic integrity, I meant to write a position piece in support of First Amendment protections and shield law protections for bloggers. I think at least one other side of the issue has been presented quite thoroughly, and in his own words, throughout, with reference to his full judgment.

Frank Balsinger is a rank beginner of a blogger and feels rather passionately about the last remaining shreds of his Constitutional rights.

“That Cain collapsed in a heap of allegations of sexual impropriety and titanic levels of muddled messaging — all of which culminated in his decision to suspend his campaign Saturday — is proof that an unconventional approach to politics can only get you so far.”

So, flipped over, the proof that an unconventional approach to politics can only get you so far is that Cain collapsed in a heap of allegations and poor messaging. It’s only because he was unconventional, you see, that his real or alleged past caught up with him. It was his lack of conventionality that led him to spout one inane, idiotic thing after another. Forget mixed messaging, even if he’d had “fixed” messaging, he’d have just sounded like a consistent moron.

If the allegations are true (we may never know, whatever we may feel about them), the alleged behaviors are all too conventional. If true, nothing about sexual harassment, sexual assault, or philandering has anything to do with taking an unconventional approach to politics. As for garden variety stupidity, that hardly needs allegations. He was his own best witness on that front. This, too, is far too conventional, and also has absolutely nothing to do with taking an unconventional approach to politics. No relation, no causation.

Let’s not muddle the messaging by suggesting Cain failed because of unconventionality. He broke under the weight of his own conventionalism. Even innocent of the allegations, some of his most damning character flaws showed through very clearly in his responses. His only failure in “unconventionalism” was lack of the necessary political savvy to slap the right lipstick on the right pig at the right time. Sadly, we have too much of that conventionality at hand. If only more candidates would collapse from such a lack of savvy.

I’m sure there’s an excellent article waiting to be written about the demise of Cain’s candidacy. This wasn’t it.

Portrait by Paul Szep.

Wicker wrote good stories and abhorred the practices that produced bad stories. From The Times‘ obit:

Mr. Wicker’s “On Press” (1978) enlarged on complaints he had made for years: the myth of objectivity, reliance on official and anonymous sources. Far from being robust and uninhibited, he wrote, the press was often a toady to government and business.

In his honor, please permit me to revisit a post I wrote about Wicker some months ago. What makes a good news story? Or a bad one?

Nearly a decade ago, my university’s journalism school gave an award to Wicker, whose “In The Nation” column ran in The Times from 1966 through 1992. His columns were sufficiently critical of Richard Nixon to earn Wicker a place on Nixon’s enemies list.

In accepting our modest award, Wicker said, “Find out what you can and tell the people what you know.”

That’s what good journalists are trained (and love) to do — find out stuff. (Other occupations, such as scientists and explorers, do that too, but journalists do it in a hurry, on deadline, hoping sources aren’t lying, and … make mistakes in doing all that.) Wicker, and journalists everywhere, get that: People need accurate information from credible sources — that’s the traditional content of good news stories. But that’s changing, it seems.

In those same remarks, Wicker explained the mission of journalism: “We stand against privilege and we must question power.” Few understood as well as he the necessity of holding the powerful accountable for their words and deeds.

Now, for Wicker and tens of thousands of journalists who began plying this trade before the arrival of the Age of Internet Experts On Everything, this has been our calling. It’s what journalists must do in exchange for First Amendment protection against government interference. It’s why every day, my news editor, David James, wore a button on his leather vest proclaiming “Question Authority.”

Back then, for us, a good story explained to readers why we were telling them this, and why now, and why readers should care. Good stories provided context. That required a sufficient number of carefully chosen words (not merely 140 characters). Even USA Today these days needs several hundred words per story despite its “write tight, write bright” philosophy.

We needed still more carefully considered words to include who, what, when, where, why, how and so what — all by deadline. And, of course, all these stories were “objective” (wink, wink). I’ll return to that in a moment.

But the days of these “good” stories bred over decades of traditional journalistic practices were numbered. Well-written and researched context is suffering the most. Wicker saw this coming before most folks did. In the preface to the 2002 edition of his book “On The Record: An Insider’s Guide to Journalism,” he wrote:

I once thought of naming this book Lost in Cyberspace, and for good reason. The old-fashioned craft of journalism, after all, seemed out of place in the astounding modern world of digital wizardry, global communications, the World Wide Web, e-mail, chips, bauds, dot-com addresses, electronically contrived backgrounds, million-dollar IPOs for techno-firms yet to earn a dollar, nerds too young to vote and too rich to care. In such a new-fashioned world, journalism itself seemed dated and deservedly so, an ill-reputed relic in an e-attic, on the shelf with the rabbit-ear antennae and eight-track audio.

Wicker saw this eight years ago, before most of us realized that the hundreds-of-years-old business model of corporate-owned newspapers had begun to crumble because arrogance prevented recognition of the Internet as a viable business competitor or a credible provider of content — as defined by old-school diehards (you know, like me).

In those eight years, the ability to transmit information has changed in remarkable ways. It can be done instantaneously. An individual with virtually no technical training can toss a factoid into the Internet ether sans editor instantly and with minimal reflection on meaning or context. The technology permitting this is exceedingly small, relatively inexpensive and easy to transport. The big news van from Channel 7 is obsolete. The staff photographer of a newspaper who doesn’t write or cut video is history. One man, one woman, can absorb all the functions that once required several people in a newsroom a mere five years ago.

But technological change has increased the probability that a story will be bad.

Speed kills. Accuracy dies when hordes of people, each with an electronic device capable of transmitting a story, strive to be first to tell the world what they found out — without necessarily checking its veracity.

Context dies. Because speed is the premium of the Internet era, the patience for explaining what this means is vanishing.

Tweets kill. Successive waves of 140-character messages are unlikely to carefully convey context, meaning and depth and breadth of description. It’s ironic that a generation branded with a short-attention span waits breathlessly for a succession of tweets — about what? And why?

Yet technology can also enhance the probability that a story will be good.

Video reveals. Iranian, Egyptian, and Syrian protests, campus shootings, man-made and natural disasters. A cell phone with an 8-megapixel camera can transmit digital video and audio worldwide. The omnipresence of small devices capable of near-broadcast-quality video has ended the monopoly of broadcast and cable networks on news viewers can see. That’s bred CNN’s world of “iReporters.” (That, and because it costs nothing to put amateur video on the air rather than parachute at great expense a team into the news zone.)

Massive amounts of video reveals more. So much nuance has been brought to millions because so many people in dangerous situations, with little to gain for themselves, pointed a cell phone camera at a riot, a flood, a fire, a protest where police are firing real bullets, a crime scene. With the degraded size of the professional press corps, these many cell phones bring more eyes, minds and hearts to that which is news.

Whether I like it or not, the definition of a good news story is changing because telling news is no longer the exclusive province of professionals produced at journalism schools.

Hundreds of millions of people with blogs are all speaking and shouting and showing video and telling the world that this is what The Truth Really Is. They’re all telling stories. Are those stories good or bad? And by what standards should we assess them?

Again, Tom Wicker:

And since any clever hack can fill the Internet with gossip, propaganda, rumors and lies, what’s the use of trained reporters and editors? In a universe moving inexorably into fakery — the virtual, the simulated, the hyped — who needs an old-world craft devoted, at its infrequent best, to merely reliable information, dispassionately presented?

We all know why the number of good news stories by professional journalists has declined (but not disappeared). In the past few years, tens of thousands of experienced journalists have been turned out on the streets. Mostly the young and less experienced remain. The work load is high: Where a reporter used to be required to seek out four or five sources for nuance, context and cross-checking for source credibility, now he or she may call just one. That produces really bad stories.

There remains the ingrained reflex to be “objective” — the “he said, she said” journalism. That means a reporter will call one representative of millions of people who believe X is True for a comment, and then call one representative of only a hundred people who believe X is False — and treat both reps the same in number of words, column inches, or minutes and (or more likely) seconds of air.

That’s not a good news story. Says ABC’s Christiane Amanpour:

Objectivity means trying to give all sides a hearing. It does not, in my view, mean treating all sides as equal.

Sadly, virtually all sources who provide us information we want and need are subjective, providing information colored by their points of view. Does that mean all news stories whose authors are deliberately subjective are bad?

Not necessarily. If a story’s subjective bias is explained (and I mean fully), then I have a context within which to determine its credibility. After all, the youthful roots of American journalism were deeply infused with the subjective fertilizer of ideology and rampant deceit. Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain!

What’s a good story? Credibility and utility of a story lie in the eye (and wisdom) of the beholder. If you’re Jesse Ventura, former pro wrestler and former governor of Minnesota, here’s your opinion of journalists: “They’ve always been dirtbags, and they still are.”

If you’re William E. Schmidt, assistant managing editor of The Times trying to defend your newspaper’s credibility during the Jayson Blair scandal, here’s what a good story does: “Reporting is going out and getting facts and telling stories truthfully.”

Kathleen Parker, a Pulitzer-winning columnist and a self-described conservative, after receiving a Tribune Company memo announcing the elimination of 200 jobs in the news division, said American journalism just plain sucks:

Let me be blunt. Newspapers bite. The work isn’t much fun anymore, thanks to the soul-snatching corporate culture that has euthanized newspaper personalities. Most papers reflect that numbers-crunching, cubicle-hunkering mentality. We’re boring, predictable, staid, and out of touch with the folks with quarters.

Yet journalists of all stripes — us old newsroom hacks, freshly minted J-school grads, and bloggers with brains — still have a job to do, and that’s to produce damn good stories.

Need reasons? Iraq. Afghanistan. The legacies of the Bush administration. The many unfulfilled promises of the Obama administration. The hypocrisy of Congress. Occupy Wall Street. The apparent rise of Newt. The ghastly poverty rates and sky-high teen unemployment. The decline of public education in America. Climate change. State budgets billions of dollars in the red, affecting the budgets of your city or town or school system. Energy. Nuclear waste. Racism. Gender inequalities in virtually every aspect of life. Health care. Deficits.

Phil Bronstein, editor-at-large for the San Francisco Chronicle, nailed it:

Governments are in the business of manipulating information to achieve their goals. We are in the business of illuminating reality. Those two objectives are often in conflict.

Now just add “and corporations” after “government” and you’ll see the need for good, really well done news stories.

As for me, I’ll stick with the philosophy of Lazarus Long, a fictional character created by sci-fi writer Robert A. Heinlein, in “Time Enough for Love”:

What are the facts? Again and again and again — what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what ‘the stars foretell,’ avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable ‘verdict of history’ … What are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!

So what is a good (meaning well done) news story? My answer revolves around three important concepts: useful information people don’t know, adversarial purpose, and appropriate, meaningful context. That’s the legacy of Tom Wicker.