July 2010

At the White House, Losing a Game of Phone Tag

The White House switchboard -- able to conjure up Santa Claus at a moment's notice for a young Caroline Kennedy -- is famous for its ability to track down anyone, anywhere, anytime. But last week, both the White House and the secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, were unable to muster that switchboard magic to reach Shirley Sherrod, the Department of Agriculture official who was forced to resign based on an edited video clip that made it look as if she had discriminated against a white farmer.

"The White House operator tried on at least two occasions last night and was both unable to reach her and unable to leave a voice mail," the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said in a briefing Thursday. Some presidential historians said they were shocked at how long it took a White House that prides itself on being tech savvy to get through. Other historians and political strategists said they found it hard to believe that though the Agriculture Department managed to call Ms. Sherrod (three times, she says) on Monday to ask her to tender her resignation via BlackBerry, the White House could not reach her until Thursday. At that point it finally got through with a text message saying that the president had been trying to reach her since Wednesday night. She called him back at the White House. Critics suggest that the administration may have been shading the truth to buy more time, as it raced to belatedly gather more information about Ms. Sherrod and figure out how to handle the situation.

When Race Is the Issue, Misleading Coverage Sets Off an Uproar

In the last couple of days, Andrew Breitbart, a conservative Web site operator, has been called a liar, a provocateur, a propagandist — and even a race-baiter. But he says he knows who the true race-baiters are: some Democratic activists.

He says there is an election-year strategy under way to "falsely malign opponents of the Democratic party as racist" and that he will continue to fight it. "It's warfare out there," he said in an interview. The "warfare" is happening partly in the conservative media, where Mr. Breitbart has shown an uncanny ability to play on the issue of race and have it amplified on news shows, talk shows and blogs. The Sherrod episode is hardly the first charge of reverse racism that has been raised by conservative media figures, nor the first that Mr. Breitbart has had a hand in. But it is an open question whether conservative media outlets risk damage to their credibility when obscure or misleading stories are blown out of proportion and when what amounts to political opposition research is presented as news.

Journalists, Provocateurs, Maybe Both

Where once there was a pretty bright line between journalist and political operative, there is now a kind of a continuum, with politicians becoming media providers in their own right, and pundits, entertainers and journalists often driving political discussions.

There have been times when it seemed that Rush Limbaugh was acting as de facto head of the Republican Party, as the Democrats picked up talking points from Rachel Maddow. And Sarah Palin, through Facebook and Twitter accounts, has become an important source of political wisdom for many Americans. Bill Adair, who is the editor of PolitiFact.com, a fact-checking Web site run by The St. Petersburg Times, said that, at the beginning, his Pulitzer Prize-winning site vetted only pronouncements of government and party officials. But that soon proved to be out of step with how politics actually works. "We realized that we had created an artificial wall, and that talk show hosts, Web sites and pundits were as much a part of the discourse as politicians," he said. So now the site also truth-squads talking heads from Glenn Beck to Ms. Maddow.

Even the most tradition-bound journalists would concede that while watching the world spin, they like to nudge it every once in a while. Why, after all, would someone spend their professional life enmeshed in the civic conversation unless they had a stake in it somewhere? But what is emerging is more of a permanent crusade, where information is not only power, but a means to a specific end. As content providers increasingly hack their own route to an audience, it's becoming clear that many are less interested in covering the game than tilting the field.

Adding Punch to Influence Public Opinion

The Harmony Institute wants to change your mind -- at the movies. In the last few weeks, a little-noticed nonprofit with big ideas about the persuasive power of movies and television shows quietly began an initiative aimed at getting filmmakers and others to use the insights and techniques of behavioral psychology in delivering social and political messages through their work. Harmony, based in New York, was organized by John S. Johnson III, a co-founder of the Buzzfeed.com viral media site and a descendant of a Johnson & Johnson founder, Robert Wood Johnson, and by Adam Wolfensohn, an investment banker who was a producer of the climate change documentary "Everything's Cool." It was a favorite at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007. Johnson said the institute was born from his own perception that environmental and social messages in films and television shows were often ineffective.

Screenvision to Revamp Preshow Ads at Cinemas

Those ads that appear on movie theater screens before the lights go down come with the rarest commodity in marketing: a truly captive audience. Then why are advertising "preshows" usually so terrible?

Screenvision, which sells and programs in-cinema advertising, wants to spice up the preshow experience. Last week, the company unveiled its plans for a redesigned 20-minute "advertainment" block to marketers in a private presentation in New York. Consumers -- Screenvision says it reaches 45 million moviegoers a month -- will start to see it at local cinemas in September. Instead of the usual assortment of trivia, banner ads and snack-bar enticements, the new advertising preshow will rely more on celebrity and sponsored entertainment. Most important, Screenvision is working to make the experience more interactive by incorporating extensions for mobile devices.

Hackers With Enigmatic Motives Vex Companies

The world of hackers can be roughly divided into three groups. "Black hats" break into corporate computer systems for fun and profit, taking credit card numbers and e-mail addresses to sell and trade with other hackers, while the "white hats" help companies stop their disruptive counterparts. But it is the third group, the "gray hats," that are the most vexing for companies.

These hackers play it any number of ways, which can leave a company vulnerable to lost assets as well as a tarnished reputation as security breaches are exposed. These gray-hat hackers surreptitiously break into corporate computers to find security weaknesses. They then choose whether to notify the company and stay silent until the hole has been patched or embarrass the company by exposing the problem. The debate among all of these groups over the best course of action has never been settled and will be an undercurrent at the Def Con 18 hackers conference starting Friday in Las Vegas.

Parents don't need the FCC to protect their children

[Commentary] Where are you likelier to encounter dirty language and coarse culture -- in unregulated newspapers or regulated broadcast television?

Standards have only fallen since the federal government started monitoring broadcasting for indecency in the 1970s. This month a federal appeals court invalidated a generation's worth of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations on indecency (a distinct legal category from obscenity, which is outside of First Amendment protection). The court stressed that technology had changed so much there was no longer a rationale for regulating programming -- that broadcasting, like print, is also entitled to be free of government control. If other courts follow this ruling and the FCC reduces its monitoring of decency standards, what will be the result? The Hollywood Reporter's headline on the opinion predicted, "Primetime to get racier after FCC ruling," but it's already plenty racy. This fall CBS plans a show called "$#*! My Dad Says," based on a Twitter feed whose name includes a word unsuitable for a family newspaper -- and, apparently, still for CBS. The better argument is that the FCC unintentionally contributed to the coarsening of the culture by claiming the ability to parse which words used when are decent or indecent. If there are seven dirty words, does that make all the others decent -- and indeed government-approved? Broadcasters now shirk responsibility for a family environment by saying they try to abide inherently vague federal standards. And parents may wrongly assume that FCC monitoring will prevent indecency such as the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show.

No medium is likely ever to be as pervasive as broadcasting once was. Technology makes it easier to block seven or any number of dirty words. It helps parents who prefer that children instead watch Thomas and the other trains for life lessons from W.V. Awdry. Taking the FCC out of regulating indecency might just lead to more decency by refocusing responsibility where it belongs: on broadcasters and parents.

Enough right-wing propaganda

[Commentary] The smearing of Shirley Sherrod ought to be a turning point in American politics. This is not, as the now-trivialized phrase has it, a "teachable moment." It is a time for action.

The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that "fairness" requires treating extremist rants as "one side of the story." And there can be no more shilly-shallying about the fact that racial backlash politics is becoming an important component of the campaign against President Obama and against progressives in this year's election. The traditional media are so petrified of being called "liberal" that they are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment editors. Mainstream journalists regularly criticize themselves for not jumping fast enough or high enough when the Fox crowd demands coverage of one of their attack lines.

The Sherrod case should be the end of the line. If Obama hates the current media climate, he should stop overreacting to it. And the mainstream media should stop being afraid of insisting on the difference between news and propaganda.

Downtime in the Digital Age

[Commentary] What are you doing on your summer vacation? Relaxing at the beach? Enjoying friends and family? Or are you checking your smartphone every five minutes?

It's the essential predicament of the Digital Age. Even on vacation. It's tempting to blame our tools, the BlackBerrys and the iPhones that keep us so connected and busy. But the real problem isn't the technologies; it's us. We've convinced ourselves that the more connected we are, the better. We never give ourselves a break. But we're human beings, not machines. To think clearly, work well and truly enjoy our lives, we need regular respites from our connected lives.

Digital alarmists are wrong

[Commentary] Google is not making us stupid, PowerPoint is not destroying literature, and the Internet is not really changing our brains. But they may well be making us think we're smarter than we really are, and that is a dangerous thing.

[Christopher Chabris is a psychology professor at Union College in New York. Daniel Simons is a psychology professor at the University of Illinois. They are the authors of the new book, "The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us."]

Benton

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