Verification is a major issue for journalists; the American Press Institute, for example, talks about journalism as a “discipline of verification”. But alas, it is not as simple as that and, like so much else in journalism, it all comes down to the professional judgement of the individual journalist.
In the past, I have conducted training courses in developing countries with American colleagues and I often used to wince as I heard them say, as if it were an unbreakable rule, that journalists should not publish anything that hadn’t been verified by two independent sources.
It was nonsense then and remains so. If I receive a press release from Downing Street telling me that the prime minister has resigned, I do not need verification to put that story out (as long as I am sure of the provenance of the release). Even if the information comes from a “source”, if that source is reliable and had proved so in the past – for example, Alastair Campbell speaking on behalf of Tony Blair – then that too would require no further verification. If, on the other hand, a junior backbencher with whom I have had no previous contact had sidled up to me and whispered the same information into my ear, then I sure as hell would have wanted verification.
The recent case of the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, and the Queen’s attitude to Brexit is instructive in this matter. During the campaign, The Sun ran a story that the Queen had spoken out in favour of the Leave campaign – it was a major controversy and both the Palace and the press regulator IPSO condemned the paper. Speaking on the BBC’s Today programme more recently, Kuenssberg revealed that she had received similar information but had not been able to verify it and so had kept quiet.
So now we come to Donald Trump and his links to Russia – and all that this has allegedly involved. Buzzfeed’s editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, sent a memo to staff – which was subsequently released – in which he justifies publishing the information, while saying there is “serious reason to doubt the allegations”. His reasoning was that this information had been “in wide circulation at the highest levels of the American government and the media” and that publication “reflects how we see the job of reporters in 2017”.
Is he right? And what should other news outlets do about the story? Most have focused on the medium rather than the message – for example, that this information had been given by the security services to Trump, Obama and senior Republicans some time back. The information is being strongly challenged by Trump who has tweeted that it is “fake news”. So in this light – and without further verification – most of the “legacy” media have declined to provide their readers with any details about the report’s content, other than in the most general of terms.
Are they right? Well, up to a point, although there is a large whiff of “having cake and eating it” (as Britain’s foreign secretary is wont to say) about the legacy media’s treatment of the story. I read the full 35-page dossier thanks to The Guardian. In its story, it goes into great detail about who knew what and when, but the piece reveals little of the content of the report.
But it does, very helpfully, provide a link to the news website Buzzfeed. Now Buzzfeed might be a relatively upstart in the news game but over the past couple of years it has demonstrated that it is a reliable and robust news source – despite the listicles, the pet cats and the “funny” videos.
But Buzzfeed did much the same thing in its story as The Guardian, not giving many details about the content but helpfully providing a link to a PDF of the full document, with the key passages highlighted (by whom?). It was the same with the New York Times, though it has made the curious reader go through a more circuitous route, having to first click through to the CNN International site which then gave the link to Buzzfeed and the document.
Having noted all this, I remain unconvinced that the allegations should have been published. Buzzfeed admits they are unverified and that they think there is reason to doubt them. So, at this stage, the only verification comes from unnamed intelligence sources – would those be the same sources that told us about WMD in Iraq for example? We need intelligence services, but we should not trust them as unimpeachable sources whose information can be reported without verification. As I said at the beginning, it all comes down to judgement.
One final observation. It all would be deliciously amusing if these matters were not so important – for Trump describes the reports as “fake news”. This from, if not the founder, then one of the best exponents and major beneficiaries of the genre. A list of Trump lies would take up this entire article but suffice to say that, according to some estimates, during the three presidential debates with Hillary Clinton he lied on average once every 50 seconds.
So what goes around comes around. If, in this case, Trump is the innocent victim of “fake news” he has no one to blame but himself. On the other hand, if it is not fake news then that is even more troubling.
By Ivor Gaber, Professor of Journalism, University of Sussex
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Trump proudly praised the agreement as a “great deal for workers” and said that it was part of a larger approach to keep jobs at home, saying “this is the way it’s going to be.”
Having the chief executive of the United States negotiate individualized deals with corporations is certainly a new approach to economic policy nationally, though it is not without precedent. In fact, state governments have been negotiating targeted incentives with corporations for decades.
My research focuses on why states use incentives to attract and retain investment from corporations and whether they are effective. My work, as well as that of many others, shows that these deals do not create the jobs and economic growth they are purported to.
Every year, states spend billions of dollars to entice companies to create jobs within their borders. These inducements include some combination of property, sales and income tax credits and rebates, tax abatements, cash grants and cost reimbursements.
The deals are meant to reduce costs for the businesses that receive them in order to encourage their investment and job growth in a particular location. The most prominent packages usually grab headlines nationally.
In 2013, for example, Boeing received $8.7 billion in tax breaks from Washington state to secure the production of the 777x. This record-breaking package came shortly after Boeing had received $900 million from South Carolina for opening a new 787 assembly plant in Charleston.
Other examples include Tesla receiving $1.3 billion from Nevada in 2014 to subsidize a battery factory outside Reno and the Los Angeles Rams collecting $180 million in sales tax revenue from Inglewood for relocating there from St. Louis this year.
Just as Carrier threatened to move jobs to Mexico and promptly received a tax break, so too did Sears receive millions from Illinois to keep its headquarters in Chicago back in 1989.
From 1984 to 2012, incentive spending increased in the states from about $500 million per year to about $13 billion per year, according spending data gathered by the Good Jobs First Subsidy Tracker.
Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives thrown their way, many companies have still decided to move more manufacturing jobs and corporate headquarters overseas.
This is because corporations consider many other factors when making decisions about where to build a factory or establish a tax home. In a 2016 survey, incentives lagged behind skilled labor, labor costs, highway access, corporate tax rates, available buildings, construction costs, proximity to markets and quality of life as important factors for location decisions.
For example, scholars have found that the Sun Belt has been able to attract investment away from the Rust Belt because it has lower wages but similar access to the interstate highway system.
In other words, jobs move (or don’t) based on the overall range of costs facing employers, which are determined by larger economic trends and policies and not necessarily by individually negotiated deals. When subsidies do matter is when corporations are choosing between equally strong locations. In those situations, incentives serve as “deal sweeteners” but don’t change the fundamental reasons for why the location was considered in the first place.
In light of the realities of corporate location decisions, there is scant evidence to support the arguments that targeted incentives produce economic growth. Rather, the evidence shows that they tend to fail to achieve their intended goals.
Often, subsidies fall short of job creation targets and fail to create growth, even if they retain jobs. As University of Iowa scholars Alan Peters and Peter Fisher argue, based on a review of several studies of their impact, “incentives work about 10 percent of the time and are simply a waste of money the other 90 percent.”
One reason why scholars have struggled to measure the impact of incentives is because of the complexity of the economy. Economic growth is affected mostly by national and international forces. State economic development strategies have little effect when compared with broad national economic policies.
Subsidies still can have an effect on economic behavior, just not in the way they were intended, such as by encouraging rent-seeking.
Critics of the Carrier deal have already noted that Trump may have opened the federal government up to increased threats from companies to move overseas unless they receive more incentives (aka rent-seeking). In the days following the Carrier deal, Ford Motor (already one of the largest recipients of state-level spending) expressed a willingness to make a deal with Trump to retain jobs scheduled to move overseas. In a first move, Ford announced that it had canceled a planned investment in Mexico and will instead invest $700 million in its Flat Rock, Michigan, plant.
There is also some evidence that incentives can exacerbate economic inequality.
Incentives, when used to influence location decisions, tend to be awarded to the largest and wealthiest corporations. These corporations need the money the least of all businesses and usually receive the money for making investments they likely would have made anyway in order to remain competitive. The result is that fewer resources are available for education, workforce training and social services. As a result, the gap between rich and poor tends to grow.
While it is laudable that several hundred Indianans get to celebrate the holiday season with their jobs secure, evidence from the states raises red flags on the viability of targeted incentives as a national policy for growth.
Not only would Trump be needing to negotiate several packages per week in order to have a noticeable effect on the U.S. economy, doing so opens the government up to increased demands for subsidies, most likely from the wealthiest corporations, and could exacerbate income inequality in America.
By Joshua Jansa, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Oklahoma State University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The media licensed the mountebank for his latest star turn, upgraded him, credited His Fraudulence with a talent for lying when they were not marveling at his blunt originality. They presidentialized him, accorded him their most fulsome praise (interesting!), oo-ed and ah-ed at the spectacle of his shiny performances, surely (you have to admit!) a little bit different from the boring same-old-same-old policy proposals (and wasn’t that refreshing!). There were the favors of commission, like granting him a wad of unpaid broadcast time greater than that received by all the other candidates put together; the puffball “interviews” which he deigned to phone in to slavering “news” personnel; their fascination with his appearances even as their cameras showed — Breaking News! — crowds staring at empty platforms.
But I will not here review the manifold ways in which these dog-and-pony shows called “news” helped him hold a (for him) fortunately distributed 46 percent of American voters in thrall; the rapt attention they paid to his birther lie and many succeeding lies, fabrications and brazen flights from truth; their deference when he lied and repeated his lies; the false equivalencies, as if the many thousands of mainstream uproars about “Benghazi” and “emails” and “Clinton Foundation” were, in and of themselves, worthy of notice as magic hate triggers that did not have to be attached to true-or-false propositions to ring out as self-evidently newsworthy accusations.
There were also, of course, the favors of omission, especially TV’s shunting aside the seamier side of Trump’s background, his dreadful reputation in New York’s real estate world, his mafia ties, his thuggish ways with investors and contractors, his government subsidies and so on. So-called fake news wasn’t even the tip of the sewage rained down upon the nation day after day. The eyeball-catching sheer fabrications about Hillary Clinton passed on by money-grubbing hucksters in Macedonia and elsewhere abroad, amplified by Facebook and shielded by their “how-can-we-be-responsible?-do-we-look-like-a-media-company” self-protective rationalizations—the outright fakery was only, in truth, afootnote to the big story, which was the sheer breakdown of the truth-telling imperative that underwrites the democratic theory of media.
There were of course exceptional reporters and editors. They deserve celebration — I’ve done some of it myself — and, God willing, there will be more to celebrate in time. But the big story is that it’s the regulars who failed bigger-time — the professionals, the so-called “press corps,” the preening paragons of the First Amendment — who, in the face of the Nov. 8 disaster deposited upon the United States of America, stroked their beards and wondered what went wrong with their polls and how they had missed white rage (which they mistakenly assumed to be, centrally, operatively, white working-class rage), not how they had let this trickster and fraudster climb to the head of the pack before they realized he had run rings around them and the truth, by which time it was too late to vote him off the island. In the face of so-called “conservative media” eroding their audience, they caved.
To borrow words from the late, great truth-teller Leonard Cohen (Sept. 21, 1934—Nov. 7, 2016), who died one day short of seeing his adoptive country decide it was sick to death of democracy and would chart a new course, sailing straight onto the rocks of some unknown political system, I want it darker. Because the mainstream media are only part — a significantpart, but only a part — of an interlocking ecology of falsification that has driven the country around the bend.
It cannot be said too many times that the mainstream media rolled out the blood-red carpet on which Trump strutted to center stage to assume his throne amid the ruins of American democracy. But isn’t it obvious that the mainstream media did not by themselves manufacture the garbage that, for months, they fed to ravenous American suckers eager to clamor that they too were mad as hell and weren’t going to take “it” anymore — whether by “it” they meant uppity dark-skinned people, “crooked Hillary,” Barack Hussein Obama or the swampy flats where Washington’s pointy-headed bureaucrats (as George Wallace used to call the civil service) had the temerity to defy the good sense of El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago.
I want to go back where the swamp starts. (Not that I have anything against swamps, which are, after all, good ecosystems. But I’m working with the metaphor du jour.) So I’ve decided to devote myself this coming year to an effort to take seriously the far-flung warp-world, the force-field of distortion and derangement that generates and circulates propaganda, fabrications, sloppy thinking and straight-out nihilism which dominates the beliefs, if we can use that word, of the Republican Party, and which large numbers of Americans have come to accept as a baseline for what they call reality. What bent world do the purveyors live in? What’s the method to their legacy? Can we say anything to clarify what they’re on about? For as the man said, “there’s something going on.”
Over recent decades, a poison cloud of right-wing propaganda has been pumped into living rooms. The poisoners have been called an “echo chamber,” a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” Fox and Friends, “barking heads” or, most anodyne, “conservative media” — as if these amplifiers of bombast, distortion and venom actually invite anyone to conserve anything but corporate impunity, tax breaks for the wealthy, the privileges that their pink skin often (not always) buy them, and occasional fits of piety that they have the gall to trumpet as “Christian,” though their “values” corresponded to nothing Jesus of Nazareth had in mind. This propaganda enterprise owns a major political party which has floated crazy, fruitless, indictmentless investigations and insinuations with apparently permanent standing in the Congress of the United States and all over the airwaves for a quarter century now. Whitewater! Vince Foster! Benghazi! Emails! Emails! And by the way, America — so shrieked Fox News as recently as this week — have you heard about the latest batch of emails?
For one reason and another, none of the present labels for this warp-world where truth goes to die quite suits me. They’ve become stale from overuse, or they have too many syllables. The perpetrators do not necessarily meet. (The word “conspiracy” comes from the Latin that means “breathing together,” and the word evokes actual face-to-face encounters in seedy conference rooms in airport hotels or, say, atop golden towers or on Palm Beach golf courses.) But the interlocking perpetrators of our propaganda mills do not necessarily meet to shake hands.
So I am going to call the totality of this enterprise The Vortex, which stands for: VOices of RT-wing EXtremism. “Vortex” conveys linkage and “Voices” conveys multiplicity. The Vortex has both, but it is not a cabal of fixed membership. It is a cloud — and like clouds, has no fixed boundary. There’s never a moment when you can be certain, flying through it, whether you’re inside or outside. But the fact that it cannot be demarcated precisely — or walled in, you might say — does not mean that clouds do not exist.
The right-wing TV, radio and internet figures who can be summarized as The Vortex are not a closed club but a fluid universe. By the time this article is posted, there may very well be new entrants. [Editor’s Note: Fox News just announced that Megyn Kelly, who has opposed sexism throughout her career, will be succeeded in prime time by Tucker Carlson, who fits quite easily into the misogynist lineup of Fox’s favorite bullies with the choice soapboxes from which to harangue in behalf of white male supremacy.] One way to visualize this domain is to consult a revelatory diagram posted by Buzzfeed on Dec. 3, mapping the main hyperlinks tweeted by Trump’s personal Twitter account between June 1, 2015 (the month he announced his candidacy) and Nov. 17, 2016. These are the sources which Trump, or whoever he entrusts with this mission, considers important enough to beam outward to the 18.7 million (and counting) “followers” privileged to receive the digital effusions of @realDonaldTrump.
Of the 10 biggest sources in Trump’s universe, overwhelmingly the powerhouse, the center of gravity of Trump’s intellectual world, is Breitbart.com, whose proprietor, Stephen K. Bannon, last August took over his faltering campaign from the Republican hack Paul Manafort, who was in ill repute over his pro-Russian financial operations in Ukraine. Bannon will now (unless he proves too acrid a pill for normal collaborating Republicans to swallow) be installed in the West Wing of the White House as senior counselor.
Of the remaining nine top sites that Trump (or his minions) took seriously enough to retweet, according to Buzzfeed’s research, six are flamingly right-wing propaganda sites. Two belong to Rupert Murdoch, through Fox News and the New York Post; the other four are newsmax.com, dailycaller.com, washingtonexaminer.com, and dailymail.co.uk. (Rounding out the top 10 are The Hill, The Washington Post and Politico.) Even the inner Trump circle needs some sprinkling of actual reports gathered and edited by news organizations — even some normally considered part of the “lying media.”
Breitbart “News” and its fellow travelers do not belong to news organizations. There are no professional journalists there. They do not report. They do not sift and winnow. They rarely ask questions to which they do not already know the answers. They cherry-pick among news organizations’ reports, rumors or out-and-out fabrications, but that is for gloss. Their business is to circulate propaganda. And in this benighted age of low-cost internet access, they have a business model that works. By keeping their base in a state of simple frenzy, they win back, and back, and back their core of customers.
So, to take just one example this week, we are hearing the stories — but stories are all they are, since no one, not even Trump, knows what if anything he has in mind — that “Trump is now planning to restructure the Central Intelligence Agency, as he believes that the national intelligence office has become ‘politicized.’ The idea originated in a right-wing conspiracy theoryexplained on Fox News by a Breitbart author.”
The Vortex has lined up with alacrity in recent days. Sean Hannity, who in 2008 claimed on national TV that Bill Ayers wrote Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father (an assertion that could only have been made by someone unfamiliar with books written for grown-ups), spoke of the intelligence agencies’ belief that the Russian government of Vladimir Putin hacked American and transmitted disinformation “another liberal media fake news story that they’re all falling for.” Now that the line has changed, Breitbart goes big with the claim that “the Russian hacking story is ‘left-wing fake news’….Here are just 10 of the reasons the “Russian hacking” story is a sham — a left-wing twist on the red-baiting McCarthyism of the 1950s.” And Trump’s go-to rabbi of mayhem, Alex Jones, purveyor of 9/11 “truther” garbage (you know, the “inside job”), is sure that the CIA is lying now to cover up for the arch-demon Barack Obama.
The Joneses, the Bannons, the Hannitys are not lovers of freedom, democracy, justice or truth. Their cynicism is breathtaking. They believe in nothing but raw power, above all the power of their own braying. They believe in nothing else. Nothing. They are hatred incarnate in suits on the payrolls of billionaires.
So I will be exploring the Vortex this year, taking this as my resolution: We may not be interested in right-wing lunacy, but it’s interested in us, our republic and our capacity to know the truth. So we must know it to someday, somehow, set ourselves free.
