Reporter Toobin Lashes Out At Reporters Who Use 'Stolen' Documents; Leaves Out His Own History Of Doing The Same

from the it's-just-not-civilized-to-do-real-reporting dept

David Carr, over at the NY Times, has a good article looking at how many of the people who have been involved in reporting on recent leaks concerning government abuses -- from Wikileaks to the Snowden leaks -- have been attacked by more "traditional" journalists, like David Gregory of Meet the Press and Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and the New Yorker. Carr says that this is the war on leaks, "pitting journalist v. journalist," but others have noted that it's a little more involved than that. Ryan Singel simplified it down to journalists vs. sycophants, since those complaining about Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Julian Assange and others tend to be "insider" journalists -- those who rely on good relationships with government officials to "report" the news. Mathew Ingram, similarly, noted that the old school journalists were dealing with "the shock of inclusion," in that journalism is now done in a different way, and they don't like it.

The unavoidable sense one gets — not just from Carr's piece, but from all the other responses by Gregory and others to the NSA story and to WikiLeaks, and even to events like Reddit's attempt to contribute to the reporting around the Boston bombings — is of an "us vs. them" mentality, in which bloggers like Greenwald or more extreme personalities like Julian Assange are treated like invaders storming the barricades of the journalism establishment. As Carr puts it:

“The larger sense I get from the criticism directed at Mr. Assange and Mr. Greenwald is one of distaste — that they aren’t what we think of as real journalists. Instead, they represent an emerging Fifth Estate composed of leakers, activists and bloggers who threaten those of us in traditional media. They are, as one says, not like us.”

Carr also has this interesting exchange with Toobin, who has been among the angriest haters against Snowden, Greenwald and the rest:

Mr. Toobin agrees that an important debate has been joined, but says no story, no matter how big, justifies journalists’ abetting illegal acts, saying, “Journalists are not above the law.”

“The Jane Mayers, Sy Hershes and Walter Pincuses have all done superb work for decades without the rampant lawlessness that was behind these stories,” he said, adding later, “I’ve never heard any of those journalists endorsing the wholesale theft of thousands of classified government records.”

That seems especially ironic, given that just last week it came out that Toobin himself has been accused of taking a ton of classified documents for a book he was writing:

In journalist Michael Isikoff’s book, Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter’s Story, he described how Toobin was caught “having absconded with large loads of classified and grand-jury related documents from the office of Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh” in 1991:

Toobin, it turned out, had been using his tenure in Walsh’s office to secretly prepare a tell-all book about the Iran-contra case; the privileged documents, along with a meticulously kept private diary (in which the young Toobin, a sort of proto-Linda Tripp, had been documenting private conversations with his unsuspecting colleagues) were to become his prime bait to snare a book deal.   Toobin’s conduct enraged his fellow lawyers in Walsh’s office, many of whom viewed his actions as an indefensible betrayal of the public trust.  Walsh at one point even considered pressing for Toobin’s indictment.

Toobin was “petrified” that he would have to face criminal charges for stealing information for a rather dubious book deal. According to Isikoff, he either “feared dismissal and disgrace, or simply wanted to move on.” Toobin “resigned from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Brooklyn (where he had gone to work after Walsh) and abandoned the practice of law.”

Read that again, then go back and read Toobin's whining to David Carr. And try not to choke back the laughter. Toobin isn't upset that documents were taken as a part of journalism, since it appears that he, himself, had no problem with that. He's upset that it's used in a way that he doesn't like.

It is true that there are differences between many of those old school journalists and the new school who are breaking all of this news. The old school tried to buddy up with government sources to get their story. The new school would rather get the story. Apparently that upsets the old school, because it makes their stenography "reporting" a bit less interesting.

Filed Under: activism, david carr, glenn greenwald, jeffrey toobin, journalism, laura poitras, leaks

David Carr Explains Why Everyone Should Be Against SOPA

from the too-much-collateral-damage dept

NY Times media columnist David Carr -- who it should be known has been a critic of "free" economics in the past -- has put up an interesting new column explaining why even those who are vehemently against copyright infringement should be concerned about SOPA and the unintended consequences it will cause for the internet. He takes Hollywood's (somewhat laughable) numbers of jobs at risk and "losses" from infringement, to note that there is a real problem, but he still worries that SOPA's solution will make things worse. It won't actually do much to slow down or stop infringement -- but it will (almost certainly) create massive problems for the rest of the internet.

I like my movies (and music and television) as much as the next couch potato, probably more. And I wouldn’t steal content for any reason, in part because I make a living generating a fair amount of it. But it’s worth remembering that the film industry initially opposed the video cassette recorder and the introduction of DVDs, platforms that became very lucrative businesses for them and remarkable conveniences for the rest of us.

Given both Congress’s and the entertainment industry’s historically wobbly grasp of technology, I don’t think they should be the ones re-engineering the Internet. The rest of us might have to just hold our noses and learn enough about SOPA to school them in why it’s a bad idea.

While SOPA supporters have been bending over backwards to insist that anyone who points out the problems of these bills are "siding with the pirates," the fact is that many, many people are recognizing the serious collateral damage that SOPA (and PIPA) would have on the internet. The key reason much of this is happening is actually explained earlier in the article. You have those who don't understand and fear the technology trying to legislate that technology. And it's become something of a generational thing:

There is also a cultural divide at work, according to Yancey Stickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, a Web site that helps raise funds for creative projects, and a critic of SOPA.

“The schism between content creators and platforms like Kickstarter, Tumblr and YouTube is generational,” he wrote in an e-mail. “It’s people who grew up on the Web versus people who still don’t use it. In Washington, they simply don’t see the way that the Web has completely reconfigured society across classes, education and race. The Internet isn’t real to them yet.”

The debate has highlighted how little Congress knows about the Internet they are proposing to re-tool. In a piece often cited on the Web, the computer culture journalist Joshua Kopstein watched the debate in Congress in which members bragged about their online ignorance, and he wrote an open letter on the technology Web site Motherboard titled, “Dear Congress, It’s No Longer O.K. to Not Know How the Internet Works.”

I'd argue that is true of some in Congress, but there's another element as well. There are, certainly, some in Hollywood who have a basic grasp of the technology. The issue there is more that they just don't like it. SOPA is an attempt to try to put things back into Pandora's box. The problem there isn't that they don't necessarily understand how the internet is being used... but that they don't understand how technology progresses, and how you can never take away features that consumers want once they know those features and capabilities exist.

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, david carr, internet security, lobbying, pipa, protect ip, sopa

My Debate With The NY Times' David Carr Over Journalism Business Models

from the so-serious,-batman dept

Mark Glaser, from PBS's MediaShift invited me and NY Times columnist David Carr to have a back-and-forth debate over email, concerning business models for newspapers -- specifically questioning whether micropayments or a paywall of some kind makes sense. Carr supports some sort of "user pays" model for content, whereas I tend to think the idea would backfire badly. PBS has published the two part debate here:

• Part I, where we disagree about what people will pay for, and talk a bit about newspaper economics (they're bad...).
• Part II, where we continue to go back and forth, but eventually reach a bit of common ground in the middle (no, really!)

There's probably not that much surprising to folks around here if you read this site regularly, but it was a fun debate.

Filed Under: content, david carr, journalism, micropayments, paywall