David Herrera's blog » new york times

Are journalists corporate spies?

David Herrera — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:35:20 +0000

A thought experiment:

When journalists investigate private businesses for wrongdoing, or upcoming products, or rumors, etc., do they commit corporate espionage? By “corporate espionage” (or “industrial espionage”), I mean simply when one business attempts to obtain information about another business for competitive gain.

Journalists usually work for privately-held media. Learning about other companies helps journalists against their competition by spawning fresh, potentially exclusive, stories to go on their websites or into their newspapers.

Journalists could argue that they provide a public service.

Probably, but:
- That doesn’t necessarily cancel out their engaging in business-against-business intelligence work.
- Couldn’t the businesses that journalists investigate also argue, under the dominant ideology in this country, that they provide a public service by offering goods in the marketplace? If so, do they contribute better public services than do journalists?
Journalists could argue that, if the corporation is clearly harming the public, then the journalist has a stronger moral claim to investigate them.

But, journalists can’t know about the corporation’s harm until after their investigation. Their investigation could demonstrate that the reporter’s hunch was incorrect, in which case we would have to go back to whose public service was greater.

Does it matter whether journalists are considered corporate spies?

If journalists coordinated with law enforcement before investigating private businesses (given that we rely on the government to watch over business otherwise), thereby working on behalf of a public agency, would their work stop being corporate espionage? [1]

E.g., the journalists in Dietemann v. Time, who coordinated with the Los Angeles District Attorney before investigating a quack doctor. ↩

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Randomized home page: One solution to filter failure

David Herrera — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 04:12:56 +0000

I use mostly RSS for online updates — except for day-to-day, “what’s happening worldwide” hard news.

For my RSS reader to present me with 100+ unread stories from the BBC, Al Jazeera, Reuters, and The New York Times, two or three times a day, simply overwhelms.

I tried, unsuccessfully, to adopt Dave Winer’s river of news mentality. I can’t shake the pressure to try each story when I see the list of unreads, however irrational a task it is to try.

So, the problem: Wanting the variety of those four sources (and whatever ones I fall into later) without having to confront everything they offer each time I check in. In short, I wanted a better filter.

My solution: A random page home page generator, created using a mix of HTML and Javascript.

Each time I open a new browser window, or click to my home page, I see one of my four sites. The amount of news with which I’m confronted is decreased by 75% of what it was with the RSS firehose. Yet, I keep source diversity through encountering a different news site every time.

I’ve unsubscribed from the four news sites in my RSS reader, and I’m enjoying the results so far. I wanted to share the code so that you could create a similar page if you wanted to. Here are the steps.

Create a new plain text document (Mac users, open TextEdit and, from the Format menu, select “Make Plain Text.” Windows users, try Notepad).
Paste the following:
Unless you’re interested in the code itself, the only lines you have to worry about are the ones in square brackets, and the one with “Math.floor.”

(If you are interested, the code says: When the browser opens this page, run the function called ‘homepage.’ ‘homepage’, in turn, chooses a number at random between 0 and 3, then opens the URL associated with that number in the ‘pages’ array, where the BBC is 0, Al Jazeera is 1, etc.)
In the square brackets, paste the URLs of the sites you want included in your random site generator. Be sure to follow correct syntax: Enclose the URL in quotes, and separate each URL with a comma.
In the line below the URLs, change the number in var page = Math.floor(Math.random()*4); to equal the number of URLs you included above. I have four URLs, so my number is “4″. Be sure to write the numeral, not “four.”
Save the file as “home-page.html”. Ignore any warnings about saving your file as .html.
Place the file wherever you want on your hard drive. Remember where you stored it.
This is the tricky step, if you’re unfamiliar with how your Web browser can also navigate folders on your hard drive.

In your Web browser preferences, set your home page to the file you stored on your hard drive. This is different on different computers; on my Mac, the address is file:///Users/dave/Documents/home-page.html. Perhaps a Windows user could post where one might find the file if you put it somewhere in your user folder.
Open your home page. Hopefully, you’ll be spirited away to one of your chosen sites.

Alternatively, you could save yourself a few minutes and download my home-page file, which I’ve posted as a zip file here.

Questions or improvements? What do you think?

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On argumentation in reporting

David Herrera — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 15:57:27 +0000

Perhaps I’m being unfair to journalists, or to writers in general, but I can’t understand how an article like “Labor Campaigns Against Tax on Health Plans,” in The New York Times, could make sense as a piece of writing trying to inform me of something.

Consider (what I think is) the article’s conclusion:

Having failed to persuade President Obama to scrap a proposed tax on high-cost health insurance policies, labor leaders took their case Tuesday to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and they said they received a more favorable response.

“[Labor leaders] said they received a more favorable response [from Pelosi].” Shouldn’t this be an extraordinarily easy argument to prove? All I need is a to read a labor leader telling me how they were received by Obama, and how much better their reception from Pelosi was.

But what are we told about the reactions of “labor leaders”? Only Andrew Stern saying: “I love the House, and I love the speaker.”

By what rules of logic and argumentation can we reach the conclusion from Stern’s statement?

If no such rule exists, why should we believe what the article is arguing? Why couldn’t the article have simply featured a few quotes?

What upsets me is that the kind of logic on display seems to be common among journalists–those who describe their role as helping people know about what their government is doing. It frustrates me that what passes for political journalism is appears to be devoid of basic argumentative skill.

But, I can’t back up with data the feeling that this writing style is common. It is just memory talking. So, I would welcome arguments to the contrary.

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Media partisanship?

David Herrera — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 05:44:26 +0000

Just what is John Harwood of The New York Times trying to say in his recent piece on partisanship in cable news? I can’t figure it out. The opening lines seem to me riddled with ambiguity and offer no clear conclusion to the article. Why bother?

• Is this the conclusion?

“The Obama White House’s decision to challenge Fox News appears driven equally by strategy and frustration.”

I don’t think so. Harwood doesn’t provide any argument regarding why the Obama administration is choosing to act against Fox.

• Is this the conclusion?

“It is also a test case for politicians in both parties…Future Republican presidents will have to decide, as Team Obama has, how to buck or accommodate that trend.”

Harwood does tuck in a reason for this statement: “That is because partisan fragmentation throughout America’s news media and their audiences has grown significantly.”

But this reason assumes that politicians must, or at least should, react to growing partisan fragmentation in the media and their audiences. Harwood doesn’t justfy this assumption. One would have hoped the justification would have come in his previous statement, regarding why the Obama administration has chosen to react; Obama’s reasoning could then inform us as to why reaction was necessary. But we don’t see any of that here.

• More confusion:

Fox News has attracted the most attention because of its “fair and balanced” challenge to its competitors and its success. But the audiences of its competitors have tilted sharply in the other direction.

Wait, what? Is he trying to say that the audiences of Fox’s competitors are now less “fair and balanced” (a bit of a broad statement, not to mention random)? Or, that the audiences of Fox’s competitors have tilted away from Fox (which is just redundant)?

• Finally:

Press critics worry that the rise of media polarization threatens the foundation of credible, common information that American politics needs to thrive. Will Feltus, a Republican specialist in voter targeting, does not.

If it complicates the choices facing leaders in Washington, Mr. Feltus argues, it also decentralizes political communication in a way that is both inevitable and healthy in the information age. “I feel no hand-wringing about it,” Mr. Feltus said. “People are smart enough to understand what color filter is over the lens.”

If anything, I wonder whether Feltus has it backwards: Polarization does not decentralize, but rather that decentralization leads to polarization (for this position I rely on Lawrence Lessig’s Republic.com.

Regardless, is it not a little silly to be talking about decentralization when Harwood’s article is talking about Fox News, a station owned by a massive conglomerate?

I give up. Let me know in the comments if I’ve erred.

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