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MEDIA - OTHER

4/25/04 <link>
With U.S. media: caveat emptor 
The evidence that key sections of the media in the U.S. is not just incompetent, but ready to be gamed, continues to grow. Via Kevin Drum (Political Animal/Washington Monthly), here's a stunning op-ed on "astroturf op-eds" by William Adler in the Washington Post that reflects both on how the media is easily gamed, as well as how academic standards are sometimes so poor. 

Everyone has quirks. Among mine is an obsession with matters nuclear: weapons, power, waste. I've been writing about little else for several years. So I was intrigued not long ago to run across an opinion piece in my hometown daily, the Austin American-Statesman headlined "Funds for nuclear waste storage should be used for just that."
The March 4 op-ed by Sheldon Landsberger, a University of Texas professor of nuclear engineering, argued trenchantly that the government is fleecing electric-power ratepayers, who for more than two decades have been contributing mandatory fees for the development of a proposed national nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Landsberger charged that a portion of the fees earmarked for the Nuclear Waste Fund is diverted to the U.S. Treasury. "Denying the Yucca Mountain project an adequate level of funding," he wrote, "is stealing money from taxpayers who were required to support the waste management project."
Strong words. Familiar ones, too. So familiar that I was sure they were entombed in the towering file of articles on nuclear waste that I, ahem, maintain. I knew I could excavate the words eventually. Or I could Google them. I typed in "Yucca Mountain" and "stealing money"; 0.11 seconds later, I had my cite: A Dec. 9, 2003, op-ed column in the State, the Columbia, S.C., daily. It appeared under the byline of Abdel E. Bayoumi, chairman of the department of mechanical engineering at the University of South Carolina. Wrote Prof. Bayoumi: "Denying the repository project an adequate amount of funding is essentially stealing money from the taxpayers who were required to support the waste management project."
Other sentences were identical, as was the entire last paragraph, but this was no case of garden-variety plagiarism; Landsberger had not appropriated the words of Bayoumi. Instead, as I was about to learn, Landsberger and other engineering professors at universities great and small had been sent op-eds over the past decade or more and asked to sign, seal and deliver them as their own to their local newspapers. The opinion pieces were written not by the academic experts, but originally by a PR agency in Washington, D.C., working on behalf of the nuclear energy industry.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I called Landsberger, but he was away for spring break. So I called Bayoumi, who was indignant that someone might have lifted his words. "I didn't consent to let anyone else use it," he said. "I told the State it was only for the State."
Finally, I reached Landsberger. He told me he was unaware of Bayoumi's column. Indeed, he was taken aback when confronted with the similarities between the two pieces. His defense was odd but convincing. He admitted immediately that he had not written his column. "It was something which was written for me," Landsberger said, but he wouldn't say by whom. "I agreed with it, I went over it, read it a couple of times, took all of 15, 20 minutes." Nor was it the first time he'd lent his good name and academic credential into the service of an ideal in which he believes: a nuclear-powered world.
"I've written five to 10 [such] articles over the last five years," he said. "They come maybe two or three times a year, particularly when there's a hot-button issue." They came to him? Again, he wouldn't say from whom.
I returned to Bayoumi's column and typed its final sentence, "The government should get on with it," into the LexisNexis newspaper search engine. Up popped the same plaintive wail in a Buffalo (N.Y.) News op-ed published July 26, 1993 -- fully 10 years earlier. (Bayoumi's column featured other lockstep language as well.) Back to the phone. I asked if he had written the piece. He said yes. "All the writing is my own," Bayoumi said. "I have no knowledge of that [Buffalo News] column. I have no idea who did what 10 years ago."
I believed him, just as I'd believed Landsberger when he said he was unaware of Bayoumi's column. Nevertheless, I wondered what was really going on.
Eventually it would become clear. Landsberger divulged that he had received the op-eds from a fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Energy Department's nuclear research and development facility in Tennessee. He wouldn't name his correspondent, but he did allow that the man worked with Potomac Communications Group Inc., a Washington-based public relations firm.
A quick visit to Potomac's Web page delivered the news that among its clients is the Nuclear Energy Institute, the mighty industry-funded lobby. On the NEI's Web site is a list of experts whom reporters are encouraged to call for comment or technical assistance with a story. One of those experts is Sheldon Landsberger; another is Theodore M. Besmann, a nuclear engineer at Oak Ridge National Lab.
You're nobody without a Web page, and Ted Besmann is no nobody. His page on the Oak Ridge Web site helpfully mentions that since 1985 he has moonlighted as a consultant to Potomac. Besmann, although not overjoyed to hear from me, acknowledged that Potomac pays him to ghostwrite letters to newspaper editors and to broker op-ed pieces to engineering colleagues around the country. (He also is a prolific correspondent under his own name; The Washington Post, for instance, has published four of his letters, most recently in 2001. His letters identify him as a "researcher" or "head of a research group" at Oak Ridge National Lab, but not as a consultant to the industry.)
I started searching LexisNexis and other databases for op-eds written by academics the NEI touts as experts. I printed out a healthy sampling, grouping them chronologically and by subject area. Searching on key phrases led me to other academics' op-eds. Once sorted, it didn't take a forensic crime lab to determine that one person's literary DNA is all over those articles.
Take the argument that the increased use of nuclear power leads to fewer greenhouse-gas emissions. Op-eds on that subject, for instance, ran between 1997 and 1999 with different bylines in three newspapers. Each writer dismissed the claims of "environmentalists" or "skeptics" that greenhouse-gas emissions "can be reduced" without nuclear power. "They are dreaming," said one op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Dec. 2, 1997. Yes, concurred another in the Record of Northern New Jersey on Jan. 5, 1998: "They are dreaming." And Dallas Morning News readers awoke on April 5, 1999, to learn from Landsberger that those lazy enviros were still in the sack: "They are dreaming," he wrote.
Or take the campaign to locate low-level nuclear waste facilities in various states. Between 1990 and 1996, three academics and a physician writing op-eds in newspapers in four states -- Nebraska, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Texas -- all assured readers that nearby sites would "be among the safest and best-engineered" waste facilities in the country.
Fascinated by all of this, I phoned the news editor at the weekly Austin Chronicle, who told me to lace up my roller skates and get going on a story -- which it published April 16.
The op-eds are ginned up by a prodigious copywriter at Potomac Communications Group named Peter Bernstein, who works out of an office in Alexandria. Bernstein did not return several messages tat I left for him over a two-week period, but I did hear from his boss, Bill Perkins, a Potomac founding partner. Perkins told me it makes no difference whose byline is on an op-ed column; it's what the piece says that matters. "Whether the words are largely theirs, or largely not theirs, the views are. Nobody would submit an article if they didn't totally agree with it," he said.
Besides, Perkins added, everyone does it. "I doubt that there is a public affairs campaign by any advocacy group in the country that doesn't have some version of this," he said. "The op-ed pages are one of the ways people express their views in these debates." But, I argued, these professors are not just expressing their views; rather they express and adopt as their own those of the nuclear lobby. Said Perkins: "This is fairly conventional. It does sound as if you've got a fairly strong opinion on this for a reporter."
Well, yes, I was upset to learn that the "by" in a scholar's byline may well be a ruse, a duplicitous means of inducing a lobby-authored, lobby-funded piece into print and onto the public agenda. And sure, I recognize that many politicians don't utter a word that a ghost didn't write and a focus group didn't approve, but academic rules require that scholars' research and writing be original. (And isn't that why PR firms recruit scholars to sign the op-eds -- precisely because of their status as independent experts?)
Perkins said that it served no purpose to debate me, and there he was right. One man's "editorial resource" is another's op-ed mill, I suppose.
I hereby propose that the nation's editorial page editors ask at least these two questions of outside contributors: 1) Did you write this piece? 2) Are you a consultant, paid or not, to an organization or interest group with a vested interest in your column? I'm not advocating that editors bar from publication those who answer affirmatively, only that their connection and/or interests be disclosed in the author's bio.
On April 13, the Austin American-Statesman printed a letter of apology from Landsberger. "Although I am in complete agreement with the contents of the article, in my exuberance to have it published I failed to state that it was not written by me," he wrote.
An "A" for exuberance, however, does not earn one a pass from compliance with academic guidelines. The University of Texas relies on the federal Office of Research Integrity's (ORI) working definition of plagiarism -- which includes the substantial unattributed textual copying of another's work , according to Sharon Brown, the university's associate vice president for research. ORI defines such copying as "the unattributed verbatim or nearly verbatim copying of sentences and paragraphs which materially mislead the ordinary reader regarding the contributions of the author."
A week before his published apology, Landsberger had told me it was he who felt victimized. He had no qualms about using a ghostwriter -- until he learned the ghost was two-timing him. "When I started doing this, I was under the impression that, rightfully or wrongfully, I was the only guy."
Is it acceptable, then, to slap your name on writing not yours, as long as no one else declares it his or hers? "I had no problems with them coming to me," he said, until he learned that other professors were staking their claims to the same material. "I felt betrayed, duped, whatever the word is."
I know the feeling, and either of those words will do.

6/1/03 <link>
Anti-democratic media consolidation vote outrage perpetrated by FCC Chair Michael Powell and supported by Bush
This issue has generated intense opposition from the left, right and center and snippets from a couple of articles written recently are featured here.

Thane Peterson (Business Week) (via BuzzFlash)

Ted Turner (Washington Post)

2/17/03 <link>
Google buys Blogger.com
This is most interesting news because Google now has the power (if it wanted) to unleash an alternative media on the Internet - using bloggers who will publish news that mainstream journalists won't. This is the only chance for non-mainstream bloggers to challenge the established mainstream press and its biases.

2/6/03 <link>
Worldwide rankings of Press Freedom for the Sep 2001 through Oct 2002 period
U.S. ranks in the top 20 in spite of post-Sep-11 patriotic fervor, but below Slovenia and Costa Rica. We reproduce the entire ranking table below. Not surprisingly European nations (and Canada) dominate at the top of the list. Some comments reproduced from the rankings:
"...The poor ranking of the United States (17th) is mainly because of the number of journalists arrested or imprisoned there. Arrests are often because they refuse to reveal their sources in court. Also, since the 11 September attacks, several journalists have been arrested for crossing security lines at some official buildings...."

10/6/02 <link>
Washington Post's ombudsman concedes its bias
One may even try to understand this if media bias is manifested by avoiding coverage of personal opinion pieces by journalists; however, the kind of bias shown by the Post in actually restricting coverage of events and speeches by major opposition leaders is unacceptable and something the Post's ownership should be ashamed of. 

9/10/02 <link>
U.S. Newspapers ranking and circulation
An interesting reference for the future. Note how the top newspaper (USA Today) only has a circulation of a little over 2 million! (We won't complain since the more trees saved the better).