So last night I tune into the NBA playoffs on TNT. The Oklahoma City Thunder--a team I love to watch--are playing the Los Angeles Lakers at the Staples Center in L.A. And something odd starts to happen. The players are slipping. Kobe Bryant spins into the lane, his foot goes out from under him, he winds up on the floor, but still puts the ball in the basketball. Then it happens again to another player a few minutes. One slip like that means nothing. Two and it's: hmmm. The TNT announcing team--Steve Kerr, Reggie Miller (both former players) and Kevin Harlan--pick up on it. Kerr speculates that the decals on the floor might be the reason. Then it happens again, not near the decals. Three slips: woah. Four: problem!

The TNT team starts mentioning that there's ice beneath the floor because the Los Angeles Kings play in the same arena. Ice under the floor: that must be it! Except there's always ice under the floor during the basketball season in L.A, as there is in Madison Square Garden in New York and other cities. Something is obviously malfunctioning.

Near the end of the first half, Russell Westbrook of the Thunder, a fantastically gifted guard who ended up with 37 points, is simply running down the court without the ball, not even planting his foot to shift direction, and he hits a slick spot. He falls in a way that looks like a cheerleader trying a split she can't pull off. Now he lays there in agony. Obviously it's his groin muscle. He has to be helped off the floor. As the half ends, a key player might be gone.

Something is wrong with the floor, but what? The TNT guys broadcatsting the game have no idea. They mention the ice, cluelessly. They mention that there was a Clippers game, earlier in the day on the same floor. That actually is a clue, but it goes nowhere, because they have a game to call.

Now we shift to the TNT studio crew: Ernie Johnson, Kenny Smith, Shaq, and Charles Barkley, who log hundreds of hours during the playoffs "analyzing" the games. Ernie mentions the slipping and Westbrook's possible injury at the top of show. This is Barkley's cue to start clowning. He speculates that the ice under the floor is starting "to condensate." Ernie says the Clippers played earlier in the day on the same floor but no one was slipping. Barkely's says it's the weather! Then he goes: was it hot in LA today? He has no idea.

These are former NBA players: watching a situation unfold that is dangerous for the players. And they know nothing! And TNT knows nothing! It has no one on the phone who can explain the mystery. It makes no call to the league to find out what's going on. It has no expertise on hand it can tap. The people who run the Staples Center and are responsible for laying the basketball floor down over the ice are the same people that help TNT park it's trucks behind the Staples Center to broadcast the game. They can't get them on the phone? Like they don't have arena managers all over the country watching this game dying to help out? Professionalism at this network means show hosts and analysts who know as little as the fans speculating in fact-free fashion?

What I mean is: HOW ABOUT A LITTLE JOURNALISM, TNT?

The game concludes. The Thunder stages a furious comeback and wins. I tune into the post-game show and there's Barkley ranting about how the NBA should look into this slippery floor situation. As if his own network had no power to do so. As if his job is simply to clown his way through.

From the Los Angeles Times game story: "Compounding the fatigue factor for both teams was a slippery court that forced players to stumble throughout the game, with Westbrook sustaining a mild left hip injury late in the second quarter. He had to be helped off the court and received treatment at halftime, but he was able to stay in the game."

Right. I guess they have no way of checking it out, either.

Journalists tend to be obsessed with scoops, meaning: the first to break the news, and being seen as the first, which means getting credit for it among peers.

But not all scoops are created equal. I see four main types. The politics of credit-claiming vary, depending on which type of scoop we're talking about. 

Type One: The enterprise scoop. Where the news would not have come out without the enterprising work of the reporter who dug it out. A classic example: CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons. Dana Priest broke that story. If she hadn't, we would not have known about it. All credit should go to her, and when others report what she first reported they should say: "As first reported by Dana Priest of the Washington Post..." If they don't, they suck! This is the classical meaning of "scoop," and the one all others try to invoke when they use the term. It's the most important, the most valid, the most useful... and of course the rarest. We should be grateful to journalists who pull it off. So feel free to thank them!

Type Two: The ego scoop. The extreme opposite of an enterprise scoop is the ego scoop. This is where the news would have come out anyway--typically because it was announced or would have been announced--but some reporter managed to get ahead of the field and break it before anyone else. From the user's point of view, there is zero significance to who got it first. This kind of scoop is essentially meaningless, but try telling that to the reporter who feels he or she has one. Just today we had a classic example. Departure of Disney exec sparks Twitter spat over crediting scoops. Journalists who are defending an ego scoop are engaged in an intramural competition that has nothing to do with public service, and everything to do with bragging rights. Feel free to make fun of them! (I do.)

Type Three: The traders scoop. This is the most ambiguous of my categories. It recognizes that there can be situations in which, for the general public, "who got it first?" is next-to meaningless, but for a special category of user--the traders, investors, arbitrageurs--minutes and even seconds can count. A good illustration would be this false report on the death of Steve Jobs. Had it been true, it would have been market-moving information. It briefly affected Apple's share price even though it was wrong. Had it been right, the reporter who got it two minutes before anyone else would have had a scoop barely meaningful to the general public (which would have found out anyway) but extremely valuable to investors or potential investors in Apple stock. If you're a trader, be sure to follow such journalists. If you're not, feel free to ignore their credit-claiming games. Type Two scoopers will try to describe their scoops as Type Three, so watch out!

Type Four: The thought scoop. The most under-recognized type of scoop is the intellectual scoop: "stories with new insights" that coin terms, define trends, or apprehend--name and frame--something that's happening out there... before anyone else recognizes it.  ''When you can look at all the dots everyone can look at, and be the first to connect them in a meaningful and convincing way, that's something," said a New York Times editor in describing this kind of story, also called a conceptual scoop. One of the most famous examples is Broken Windows, an Atlantic magazine article that captured a different way of policing that turned out to have enormous influence on crime and punishment in the United States. Feel free to admire those who are capable of such feats. I certainly do.

I should probably mention a fifth type: the "forever exclusive." This refers to a story that remains exclusive--meaning, no one ever picks it up, or repeats it--because it turns out to be wrong. Not the kind of scoop a reporter wants to be known for. 

About a year ago I wrote: Anatomy of a Twitter Screw-up: My Own. It was a post about a serious error I made on Twitter, linking two things that had no connection and thereby suggesting that someone did something he did not do. Since then, I haven't screwed up like that.

Until last week: April 4th.

It started with this report in the Washington Post by Dan Zak: Woodward and Bernstein: Could the Web generation uncover a Watergate-type scandal? Zak's article is about a panel discussion at the American Society of News Editors, which was titled: Watergate 4.0: How Would the Story Unfold in the Digital Age? On the panel were Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, among others. Woodward told of a class of college students at Yale who were asked to write papers on a similar theme. The instructor sent Woodward the papers and asked if he could read them and talk to the students on speakerphone:

“So I got them on a Sunday, and I came as close as I ever have to having an aneurysm, because the students wrote that, ‘Oh, you would just use the Internet and you’d go to “Nixon’s secret fund” and it would be there.’ ”

“This is Yale,” Bernstein said gravely.

“That somehow the Internet was a magic lantern that lit up all events,” Woodward said. “And they went on to say the political environment would be so different that Nixon wouldn’t be believed, and bloggers and tweeters would be in a lather and Nixon would resign in a week or two weeks after Watergate.”

A small ballroom of journalists — which included The Washington Post’s top brass, past and present — chuckled or scoffed at the scenario.

I don't do political commentary. This piece--a departure from my normal work--will demonstrate why...

When I say brief, I mean 56 words. Here's it is:

A Brief Theory of the Republican Party: 2012

In so far as a political party in the United States can "decide" anything, the party decided not to have the fight it needed to have between reality-based Republicans and the other kind. And so it is having that fight now, during the 2012 election season, but in disguised form. The results are messy and confusing.

Given the state of our political discourse, one should expect to be misunderstood with a theory like this. There is no way to prevent that, but I will try to qualify some of the key phrases.

1.) When I say "reality-based Republicans" I mean those who recognize the danger in trying to make descriptions of the world conform to their wishes. By the "other kind" I mean those who don't. Or: members of the Republican coalition who exhibit certain behaviors F.A. Hayek wrote about in 1960. This quotation was dug up by Chis Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science. It is from Hayek's essay, "Why I am Not a Conservative."

Personally, I find that the most objectionable feature of the conservative attitude is its propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge because it dislikes some of the consequences which seem to follow from it – or, to put it bluntly, its obscurantism. I will not deny that scientists as much as others are given to fads and fashions and that we have much reason to be cautious in accepting the conclusions that they draw from their latest theories. But the reasons for our reluctance must themselves be rational and must be kept separate from our regret that the new theories upset our cherished beliefs. I can have little patience with those who oppose, for instance, the theory of evolution or what are called “mechanistic” explanations of the phenomena of life because of certain moral consequences which at first seem to follow from these theories, and still less with those who regard it as irrelevant or impious to ask certain questions at all. By refusing to face the facts, the conservative only weakens his own position.

2.) Readers will want to know what I have in mind when I refer to "members of the Republican coalition who do not recognize the dangers of trying to make descriptions of the world conform to their wishes." These four examples capture the tendencies I'm talking about, but it's the tendencies I'm talking about, not the examples! Still, here they are: The Birthers, a relatively "fringe" group who had a nice run for a while, though they were ultimately put down; global warming denialism, which is fast becoming a mainstream Republican position; the debt limit fight in the summer of 2011, which House Republicans started (so it's difficult to say that was "fringe...") and the claim that President Obama is actually a socialist, which is so common on the right as to almost sound banal these days.

Now it's not just that those things happened. It's that the people willing to believe that Obama wasn't born in the U.S.... that global warming isn't happening and the evidence for it has been faked by scientists with a political agenda... that the Congress could refuse to raise the debt limit and thereby send a message about fiscal discipline without wreaking havoc for the U.S. economy... or that the President isn't a mainstream liberal who believes in a vigorous role for government within an economy dominated by the private sector, but rather a full-on socialist who would if he could dismantle the system of lightly-to-tightly regulated capitalism that presidents of both parties have supported since the close of World War Two... these people vote, they volunteer, they donate money, they form organizations that are part of the fabric of the Republican party, they get elected to office, they hold hearings in Congress to make their points, they talk on the radio and try to influence other Republicans, they attack reality-based Republicans as apostates-- and in all these ways they loom larger and larger within the party.

3.)  For a representative figure among reality-based Republicans I would go with David Frum, the former speechwriter for George W. Bush and a conservative who cannot stomach what has happened to his party. But rather than become a Democrat or claim some sort of ideological conversion, Frum has taken up his pen, as with: When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality? There he writes:

Few of us have the self-knowledge and emotional discipline to say one thing while meaning another. If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don’t usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves. Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know—canny investors, erudite authors—sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration. It is not easy to fit this belief alongside the equally strongly held belief that the president is a pitiful, bumbling amateur, dazed and overwhelmed by a job too big for him—and yet that is done too.

Frum again:

Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action ­phony doomed to inevitable defeat.

Because he wouldn't stop with this kind of thing ("a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts...") Frum was dismissed from his position at the American Enterprise Institute, a leading Republican think thank, and dropped from further appearances on Fox News, though the network never announced or explained that decision. Frum is also a despised figure in the conservative blogosphere, where it is assumed that the reason he talks this way is that he wants liberals to love him. My point is that Frum is willing to have the fight that the rest of his party did not want to have. 

4.) F.A. Hayek is an intellectual god within the conservative moment. David Frum was a good soldier and solid citizen who worked in a Republican White House. My purpose in quoting them is to underline that what matters about the flight from reality within the Republican coalition is that it's an internal struggle. What liberal college professors like me think about it is irrelevant to the outcome of that struggle. What happened to David Frum matters; what I say about it does not. Reality-based Republicans will either realize the threat to their existence and fight it out with the other kind of Republican, or... they won't. So far they haven't. That's a mistake. It's bad for the country, it's bad for the political system, it's bad for the Democrats (because it breeds complacency and arrogance in the opposition) and it's catastrophic for the Republicans as a governing party.

5. So I'm not saying that the Democrats and progressives are the ones who are in touch with reality, while conservatives and Republicans are not. (But I guarantee you some will read it that way.) I'm saying that the tendency toward wish fulfillment, selective memory, ideological blindness, truth-busting demagoguery and denial of the inconvenient fact remains within normal trouble-making bounds for the Democratic coalition. But it has broken through the normal limits on the Republican side, an historical development that we don't understand very well. That is, we don't know the reasons for it, why it happened when it did, or what might reverse it. (We also need to know the degree to which it is a global phenomenon among conservative parties in mature democracies, or an American thing.) Political scientists: help!

6. Mitt Romney, the favorite to win the Republican nomination for president in 2012, is a reality-based Republican who cannot run as a reality-based Republican because he thinks he cannot win that way. Jon Huntsman's campaign is the proof of that calculation. All the candidates, including Romney, have to make gestures toward the alternative knowledge system, with its own facts. Overlaid on this pattern are the normal tensions between more ideological conservatives and what the press calls moderates, the usual conflicts among the libertarian strain, the corporate Republicans and the social conservatives. Journalists feel comfortable talking about these. They have no acceptable language for discussing reality-based Republicans vs. the other kind. So they don't. The result is a confusing mess.

These are the notes for my talk today to the Center for Public Intergrity.

What's different for people who want do serious journalism in the age of digital networks?

I have boiled it down to six things:

1. The subsidy system has been destroyed.

2. Audience atomization has been overcome.

3. Distribution has been democratized.

4. A power shift has taken place...

The audience

The sources

The platforms

.... all have more power.

5. Barriers to entry--and invention--have fallen decisively.

6. The nature of trust is changing.

What's worse for journalists about all this?

1. A crisis of employment.

2. Institutions have to rescale and some won't make it.

3. Far more noise and crap in the system.

4. The means for uninforming the public are greater than ever.

What's better about the emerging system?

1. Demand for serious journalism is very high.

2. The need is greater than ever.

3. The tools are better than ever.

4. The data is better than ever.

5. Creativity in journalism has a new lease on life.

6. The generation dynamics are healthier, with young people more able to contribute their talents.

7. To do journalism today you have to be really committed to it.

8. The more people who participate in it, the stronger the press will be.

In the normal hierarchy of journalistic achievement the most “basic” acts are reporting today’s news and providing current information, as with prices, weather reports and ball scores. We think of “analysis,” “interpretation,” and also “explanation” as higher order acts. They come after the news has been reported, building upon a base of factual information laid down by prior reports.

In this model, I would receive news about something brewing in the mortgage banking arena, and make note it. (“”Subprime lenders in trouble: check.”) Then I would receive some more news and perhaps keep an even closer eye on the story. After absorbing additional reports of ongoing problems in the mortgage market (their frequency serving as a signal that something is truly up) I might then turn to an “analysis” piece for more on the possible consequences, or perhaps a roundtable with experts on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer.I thus graduate from the simpler to the more sophisticated forms of news as I learn more about a potentially far-reaching development. That’s the way it works… right?

Wrong! For there are some stories—and the mortgage crisis is a great example—where until I grasp the whole I am unable to make sense of any part. Not only am I not a customer for news reports prior to that moment, but the very frequency of the updates alienates me from the providers of those updates because the news stream is adding daily to my feeling of being ill-informed, overwhelmed, out of the loop. I respond with indifference, even though I’ve picked up a blinking red light from the news system’s repeated placement of “subprime” items in front of me.

"Twitter invites casualness, yet it demands extra care." -- Science writer Carl Zimmer.

Yesterday I made a serious error on Twitter. Here is what happened. 

TechCrunch ran this story: AOL Asks Us If We Can Tone It Down. It said that a writer for TechCrunch, owned by AOL, had gotten an email from someone at Moviefone, also owned by AOL, asking for changes to a review of a movie that ran at TechCrunch. The writer for TechCrunch, Alexia Tsotsis, included the email in her post, leaving out the name of the person who had sent it. I saw the TechCrunch piece in the afternoon, and I wanted to send it out over Twitter, but I also wanted to say something about why this little incident was vexing to AOL. It took me a few hours to figure out a way to do that. Around 4:20 pm I posted this:

Techcrunch: AOL Asks Us If We Can Tone It Down. http://jr.ly/7yyq Problem for AOL is the Moviephone guy doesn't know he did anything wrong.

So far so good. Well, almost. I didn't actually know whether the Moviefone person was a guy. And I misspelled Moviefone. These were like little warm-up errors for what came next. 

A few hours later I was making dinner for my kids. They were doing their homework. While I waited for the meal to cook I was glancing at my laptop, and on Mediagazer I saw this post from film writer Scott Weinberg, whom I do not know.

Effective immediately, I no longer work for @moviefone. Here's why: http://tcrn.ch/eLmTwi I will always love @cinematical.

Wow, I thought to myself. The story is a few hours old and he's already gone! AOL must be serious about creating a cultural divide between editorial and promotion. Just before serving dinner, I posted this to Twitter:

Looks like that Moviephone guy who told Techcrunch to tone it down is already gone from the company. http://bit.ly/ehNlfX

Looking at it now, I recognize that I put "looks like" in there because in fact I wasn't sure of the causality. What I should have done is ask myself: well, Jay, what is the connection between Scott Weinberg leaving Moviefone and the Tech Crunch story he linked to? Do you even know? This I did not do. Instead I served dinner and watched a documentary on Nile River crocodiles with my kids. Big mistake. Because I didn't see this when it went up:

I think it's clear what that theme is. So I present the following without comment. Matthew Franklin on Twitter.

Sep. 7 @johnvacy ah come on you conspiracy theorists. U get more depth in political coverage from the Oz than any other paper.

Sep. 26 @oneplanetmikey So Gamut exists only as a counter to the Oz? Absurd. I like Gamut. But your Oz conspiracy theory is pathetic

October 1. @Pollytics Also sometimes wrong, not based on facts and often motivated by hatred or irrational conspiracy theories.

October 2. @thewetmale agreed. This is why people who attack Oz journos as tho we r all part of some conspiracy r wrong.

October 2 @thewetmale fair enuff. But the oz' harshest critics constantly misrepresent, verbal and fall for the great conspiracy theory.

October 3. @silvermullet Correct. Time to dump the bullying, bile and conspiracy theories.

October 6 @jayrosen_nyu You don't really buy into the big News ltd conspiracy theory do you? Don't you know how newspapers work?

October 6: @beardoc There is nothing for us to fear dude. That's just a conspiracy theory. What do I care? why would I care?

Finally, Matthew Franklin, October 6: Actually, I don't go for conspiracies and am not into attacking critics. U don't know me, do u

UPDATE, Dec. 6: There were some replies from the account of Matthew Franklin. 

Dec. 5  @jayrosen_nyu happy to stand by those comments. They weren't discourteous. Pity u won't engage on issues.

Dec. 5 @jayrosen_nyu I only urge u to engage on fact. If anyone calls u on that, u attck them.

(I had asked Franklin, "Would such be an example of the courteous, unassuming reply to criticism you urge upon me?" with a link to the post you are reading now. You see, to Matthew Franklin a post like this is an "attack," just as normal criticism of the Oz is a charge of conspiracy. There, now I have commented.)

It happened in a Q and A with readers of The Guardian. I am posting it to here to provide a place to comment, since it is clear from my Twitter feed that not everyone agrees. My own view is that he should have provided a serious, by which I mean a morally serious, response to JAnthony's question. That he did not disturbs me.  

What do you think?

JAnthony

Julian.

 I am a former British diplomat. In the course of my former duties I helped to coordinate multilateral action against a brutal regime in the Balkans, impose sanctions on a renegade state threatening ethnic cleansing, and negotiate a debt relief programme for an impoverished nation. None of this would have been possible without the security and secrecy of diplomatic correspondence, and the protection of that correspondence from publication under the laws of the UK and many other liberal and democratic states. An embassy which cannot securely offer advice or pass messages back to London is an embassy which cannot operate. Diplomacy cannot operate without discretion and the protection of sources. This applies to the UK and the UN as much as the US.

In publishing this massive volume of correspondence, Wikileaks is not highlighting specific cases of wrongdoing but undermining the entire process of diplomacy. If you can publish US cables then you can publish UK telegrams and UN emails.

My question to you is: why should we not hold you personally responsible when next an international crisis goes unresolved because diplomats cannot function.

Julian Assange:

If you trim the vast editorial letter to the singular question actually asked, I would be happy to give it my attention.

... And if you haven't seen it yet, here is my 14-minute video, The Watchdog Press Died; Instead We Have Wikileaks.

Time magazine journalist says, "Oh, grow up."

Politico journalist says, "Oh, grow up."

Daily Beast journalist says, "Oh, grow up."

Washington Post journalist says, "Oh, grow up."  (We mean it!)

Slate journalist says, "Oh, grow up."

Mother Jones journalist says, "Oh, grow up."

Business Insider journalist says, "Oh, grow up."

CNN journalist says, "Oh, grow up." (Correspondent Richard Quest: "Grow up and get over it has to be part of the rule for any adult person...")

Journalist at PBS.org says, "Oh, grow up."

Louisville Courier-Journal journalist says, "Oh, grow up."

Journalist at The Economist says, "Oh, grow up."

Put any similar examples you've found in the comments and if they qualify I will add them to the list.