Press Secretary Sean Spicer Holds Daily Press Briefing

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Opinion | Should the media boycott the White House? - The Washington Post

Editor’s note: In the wake of President Trump’s tweet calling the media “the enemy of the American people” and White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s exclusion of major media outlets from a briefing, some have called for the media to consider some kind of boycott of the White House. On Wednesday afternoon, Post Opinions digital editor James Downie moderated an email discussion on this topic between Post Opinions media blogger Erik Wemple and New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen. The exchange is reprinted below and has been edited for style and clarity.

Jay Rosen: It's easier for power to act upon the press than it is for the press to get its act together and respond to the designs of power. There are many reasons for this. The press corps is a "herd of independent minds." Its members think of themselves as highly competitive with one another. The institutions and leaders that might be expected to coordinate any push back — like the White House Correspondents' Association — are weak and not designed to prevail in a power struggle. So I am pessimistic that we will see any collective response, even when the case for it is strong.

For me the strongest case is refusing to cooperate when White House "officials" want to brief the press as a group (which means influence the story) without allowing their names to be used. I see no good reason for allowing this. Do you? When reporters go along with it they are advertising how meek and pliable they are. Here I would introduce a distinction that Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall employed a few days ago. "The rules of anonymous sourcing," <a href="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-folly-of-bashing-anonymous-sources" shape="rect" title="talkingpointsmemo.com">he wrote</a>, "need to take into account when the sources are not those who need protection from those with power but rather those with power who want protection from their claims being scrutinized." Bingo.

Journalists on the White House beat should not be collaborating with people in power who want protection from their claims being scrutinized. Let’s start with boycotting those situations and see what happens.

Erik Wemple: That's a strong suggestion whose merits have been obvious for decades, yet nothing of the sort has happened. There's a reason, too: Hundreds upon hundreds of news outlets — okay, thousands — are interested in following the happenings at the White House. Yet the number of news sources at the White House — people who know what's happening — is finite. Dozens maybe. With that imbalance hanging over the enterprise, it's hard for a group of reporters competing against one another to secure the upper hand.

Rosen:Right. So what you're saying is: It's clear what they should do, but they're too weak (in relative terms) to do it, so they persist with a practice that is indefensible.

To which I would add: The Trump White House has made that situation worse. By adding more highly ideological and Trump-aligned news organizations to the mix, Spicer and company have guaranteed that any “walk out” by the mainstream press would mean leaving the field — the room — to these players, which the mainstream press is loathe to do.

James Downie: During the campaign, and even since then, we have often heard from people telling us to scale back coverage of Trump. Do you think the refusal to boycott hurts the public's view of the media?

Rosen: I am in sympathy with those who say: "don't overreact to every provocation" and "don't let Trump's Twitter feed set your agenda." I think it's important to keep your cool and be guided by your own sense of what matters. If the president is being a cartoon hothead and conducting culture war while the press is calmly examining his claims and revealing his agenda, that is a win for journalists. At the same time, I don't agree with those who say: Pay attention to what he does, not what he says! For the American president, there are many ways in which words are deeds. What he says matters. You cannot not cover that.

But I find it hard to believe that the public at large cares about what goes on the briefing room, or in the tensions between the press and the White House. It matters to official Washington. It tells you something about the administration. It reveals the nature of the press corps. But that is all.

Wemple: I agree with that analysis. I think the real debate right now is what to do about the falsehoods and the lies. I've written that there really is no foolproof or even optimal way of dealing with White House emissaries who tell whoppers on live television. On the one hand, there's value in hearing what our government has to say about its actions and vision for the future. On the other, news organizations are responsible for the factual hygiene of their product. In some cases, those two imperatives just aren't compatible.

Peter

C-SPAN

National

Rosen: When Erik talks about "the public's estimation of the media," I think it's important to add that the fiction of a unitary public is under more and more strain. We can always force its appearance by referencing poll numbers for the whole public, including confidence levels in the press, but increasingly that is pure artifice. It's the breakdown along party lines, or Trump supporters vs. his critics that tells us what is really going on. There may be no such thing as "the public's estimation of the media."

Downie: Besides the question of a boycott, are there alternative approaches to dealing with the Trump White House that either of you would like to see media organizations try?

Wemple: That is a good question. While there are several challenges, I do believe that over the transition and into the Trump presidency, the media as a whole has done pretty good work, as opposed to a spottier record during the campaign. There has been a lot of shoe-leather reporting going on, and the great story thus far of the Trump White House is the willingness of people who work there to leak to the media. Perhaps that'll diminish as the inner circle does more and more phone checks and the like — but it's not as if the past five weeks have been a shameful run.

Rosen: I am on record with <a href="http://pressthink.org/2017/01/send-the-interns/" shape="rect" title="pressthink.org">"send the interns"</a> and shift to an <a href="http://pressthink.org/2016/12/prospects-american-press-trump-part-two/#p7" shape="rect" title="pressthink.org">"outside-in" approach</a> rather than inside-out. I would like to see those tried. But more fundamental than either of those ideas is the simple recognition that this time it's different. Covering Trump and his White House is not like covering previous administrations. While that may seem obvious, it has huge consequences. It means that normal routines may be completely inappropriate to the new situation. And it means that the White House press corps has to come up with new ideas in order to do its job. That's not what the members signed up for.

Wemple: Earlier Wednesday, CNN's Sara Murray <a href="http://www.mediaite.com/online/report-white-house-lied-to-journalists-about-trump-speech-in-misdirection-play/" shape="rect" title="www.mediaite.com">reported</a> that on Tuesday the White House devised a "misdirection" ploy: In a pre-congressional-address meeting with prominent news anchors, they discussed immigration reform and a path to legal status — though just as a way of keeping a positive news story in the media until the time of his address. Of course, the president didn't mention any such proposal in his address. Murray cited a "senior administration official" for the contention that the whole thing was an act of misdirection. I have no doubt that a legitimately senior administration official told this to Murray. I have more doubt whether it is to be believed. Given that this White House says so many things on the record that turn out not to be true, you have to proceed with the assumption that the account of a "senior administration official" is fully worthless, and the implications of this reality are infinite.

Rosen: To Erik's story of Sara Murray let me add the strange tale of Politico's Tara Palmeri, who asked a White House aide why she was being prevented from joining Sean Spicer's off-camera briefing on Feb. 24. Tara said she would have to write a story about this, because it was so unusual. The aide <a href="http://www.politico.com/media/tipsheets/morning-media/2017/02/scenes-from-the-sad-fakes-news-oscarstrump-v-zucker-spicer-v-leakershuffpost-newsroom-re-org-in-store-001222" shape="rect" title="www.politico.com">replied</a>, "You're threatening me." This is a weird event. The White House appears to be maximizing tensions and escalating things without any clear purpose in mind. There may be a plan, or it may be a symptom of internal chaos. It's hard to know. What is clear is that this is not a normal White House. There is no reason to think that the previous routines apply.

Kathleen Parker: An impossible job made even harder

Dana Milbank: Early surprise from Trump’s team

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/the-media-botched-this-trump-story-last-week--and-thats-bad-for-everyone/2017/02/05/e665271e-e974-11e6-bf6f-301b6b443624_story.html?utm_term=.a8a7d3040685" title="www.washingtonpost.com">Jackson Diehl: The media botched this Trump story</a>

Jackson Diehl: The media botched this Trump story

Jay Rosen has been on the journalism faculty at New York University since 1986; from 1999 to 2005 he served as Department chair. He is the author of PressThink, a journalism blog.

Jay Rosen

Erik Wemple, The Washington Post's media critic, focuses on the cable-news industry. Before joining The Post, he ran a short-lived and much publicized local online news operation, and for eight years served as editor of Washington City Paper. 

Erik Wemple

James Downie is The Washington Post’s Digital Opinions Editor. He previously wrote for The New Republic and Foreign Policy magazine.

James Downie

The Washington Post

Opinions

The Washington Post Opinions section features opinion articles, op-eds, editorials by the Editorial Board, global opinions and letters to the editor on the issues of the day. Offerings include columns by Washington Post opinion writers, political cartoons by editorial cartoonists Ann Telnaes and Michael de Adder and podcasts by Jonathan Capehart.

Opinion | Donald Trump is crashing the system. Journalists need to build a new one. - The Washington Post

Each week, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/">In Theory</a> takes on a big idea in the news and explores it from a range of perspectives. This week we’re talking about digital media ethics. Need a primer? Catch up <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2016/07/11/in-the-age-of-donald-trump-is-it-time-to-revisit-media-ethics/">here</a>.

Jay Rosen teaches journalism at New York University and writes the blog PressThink. Follow him on Twitter: <a href="http://www.twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu">@jayrosen_nyu</a>

Journalists commonly divide information from persuasion, as when they separate the “news” from the “opinion” section, or “reporters” from “columnists.” This is fine as far as it goes (and they get criticized harshly when they don’t honor this norm), but the distinction won’t help much in understanding why the 2016 campaign has been such an intellectual challenge for the media.

Everything that happens in election coverage is premised on a kind of opinion: that our votes should be based on reliable information about what the candidates intend to do if elected. Remove that assumption and the edifice crashes. But this is exactly what the candidacy of Donald Trump does. It upends the assumptions required for the traditional forms of campaign journalism even to make sense.

Take one of Trump’s most famous claims: that he will build a wall on the border with Mexico and get Mexico to pay for it. Is that a serious proposal? Should journalists review it as one? If they do examine it as a policy idea, are they helping us achieve greater clarity about the Trump candidacy (by taking a hard look at what he would do if elected), or are they distorting the Trump phenomenon by treating a parody of policy discussion, a kind of goof on the political class, as a genuine proposal?

“Mexico will pay for the wall” chips away at one of the foundations of campaign coverage: that running for president is serious business. If you take it seriously, you become the joke. If you don’t, then you let him get away with an absurdity. The fact that there’s no right answer should tell us something. Trump is crashing the system — violating norms and assumptions that were previously taken for granted because so far, everyone who had reached the point of consideration had obeyed them.

One of the newer parts of that system is fact-checking, but this is also a practice with a premise. The premise is that fact-checking will have some shaming effect on the kind of behavior it calls out. Notice I said “some.” While all candidates (including Hillary Clinton) will avoid inconvenient facts, make dubious claims or even lie at times if they think they can get away with it, they normally change behavior when a statement has been widely debunked. They may not admit they were wrong, but they will stop repeating the unsupportable claim, or alter it to make it more plausible. That’s what a “check” is supposed to be: it constrains a candidates’s power to distort the public dialogue.

Trump shatters this premise. As FactCheck.org <a href="http://www.factcheck.org/2015/12/the-king-of-whoppers-donald-trump/">put it</a>: “He stands out not only for the sheer number of his factually false claims, but also for his brazen refusals to admit error when proven wrong.” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-existential-crisis-of-professional-factcheckers-in-the-year-of-trump/2016/02/25/e994f210-db3e-11e5-81ae-7491b9b9e7df_story.html">Said Glenn Kessler,</a> The Post’s Fact Checker columnist: “What’s unusual about Trump is he’s a leading candidate and he seems to have no interest in getting important things factually correct.”

Under conditions like these, fact-checking may still be worthwhile, but not because it has any shaming effect on the candidate. In fact, it could even be useful to Trump in whipping up resentment against the media, a key part of his appeal. My point is this: When the assumptions underneath a practice collapse, the ethics of that practice may shift as well.

Traditionally, journalists have called out untruths. Here they may have to explain how untruths are foundational to a candidacy. Traditionally, journalists have thought it “ethical” not to worry about the consequences of election coverage: as long as it was truthful, accurate and newsworthy, all was well. Here they may have to worry that their checking actions have no effect, and regroup around that discovery.

One of the assumptions of campaign coverage was that candidates would never use their huge platforms to spread malicious rumors and <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-gop-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/05/trump-ted-cruz-father-222730">unreliable information</a> for which they have no proof: Too risky, too ugly. Trump has crashed that premise too. When called out on his rumormongering, <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-apologize-implying-cruz-father-kennedy-assassin/story?id=38865084">he just says</a>: Hey, it’s out there already. For journalists, this changes the practice of giving the candidate a broadcast platform. Just by granting that platform you may be participating in a misinformation campaign. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?

Imagine a candidate who wants to increase public confusion about <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/06/27/whats-the-status-of-donald-trumps-muslim-ban-the-media-cant-figure-it-out/">where he stands</a> on things so that voters give up on trying to stay informed and instead vote with raw emotion. Under those conditions, does asking “Where do you stand, sir?” serve the goals of journalism, or does it enlist the interviewer in the candidate’s chaotic plan?

I know what you’re thinking, journalists: “What do you want us to do? Stop covering a major party candidate for president? That would be irresponsible.” True. But this reaction short-circuits intelligent debate. Beneath every common practice in election coverage there are premises about how candidates will behave. I want you to ask: Do these still apply? Trump isn’t behaving like a normal candidate; he’s acting like an unbound one. In response, journalists have to become less predictable themselves. They have to come up with novel responses. They have to do things they have never done. They may even have to shock us.

They may need to collaborate across news brands in ways they have never known. They may have to call Trump out with a forcefulness unseen before. They may have to risk the breakdown of decorum in interviews and endure excruciating awkwardness. Hardest of all, they will have to explain to the public that Trump is a special case, and the normal rules do not apply.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2016/07/12/the-debates-gave-donald-trump-the-nomination-and-its-the-medias-fault/">The debates gave Donald Trump the nomination, and it’s the media’s fault</a>

The Washington Post Opinions section features opinion articles, op-eds, editorials by the Editorial Board, global opinions and letters to the editor on the issues of the day. Offerings include columns by Washington Post opinion writers, political cartoons by editorial cartoonists Ann Telnaes and Michael de Adder and podcasts by James Hohmann and Jonathan Capehart.

Facebook’s controversial study is business as usual for tech companies but corrosive for universities - The Washington Post

When I first heard about the Facebook study that subtly manipulated the news feeds of users to see if less sad inputs made for less sad outputs (you can read about the study <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/">here</a>, and the lessons of it <a href="https://medium.com/message/what-does-the-facebook-experiment-teach-us-c858c08e287f">here</a>) I was shocked but not surprised. This is shorthand for: I knew it was likely. Smart people had warned of it. But I never expected to see it play out in this way. As ‘The Awl’ <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2014/06/this-social-network-changed-how-news-works-but-then-it-made-some-news-of-its-own">put it</a>, paraphrasing a common reception: “Facebook screwed around with users’ emotions just to see what would happen, and because it could.”

I want to isolate what for me is the most troubling part of the swirl of events that brought the “emotional contagion” study to public attention. It involves the legitimacy of my own institution: the American research university and the scholarly enterprise that is based there. (I have a PhD in media studies and I am a journalism professor at NYU.)

My initial reaction when I read about the study: No surprise that Facebook experiments with user mood. This one sounds a little creepy but no different in kind from others we know about … Wait, this is an academic study? It appeared in a real, scholarly journal?

Quite real. “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion through Social Networks” was <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full">published</a> online and in print by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. It carries the names of two researchers from Cornell University, professor of Communication and Information Science Jeffrey Hancock and Jamie Guillory, a Cornell Ph.D. student at the time, now at University of California, San Francisco; plus a researcher from Facebook, Adam D. I. Kramer (“Core Data Science Team, Facebook, Inc.”) The article was edited for publication by Susan Fiske, a Princeton University psychology professor. It relied on experimental data that Facebook itself collected.

Universities have review boards for when their scientists experiment on human subjects. Their purpose is to make sure that human dignity and autonomy are respected and ethical disasters like the Tuskegee studies are avoided. Facebook had some sort of internal review but we know little about it, except that it’s “come a long way” from where it was in 2012 when the research in question was conducted. This <a href="https://www.facebook.com/akramer/posts/10152987150867796">according to</a> Adam Kramer of the data science team at Facebook.

In a statement this week Cornell <a href="http://mediarelations.cornell.edu/2014/06/30/media-statement-on-cornell-universitys-role-in-facebook-emotional-contagion-research/">said</a>:

Because the research was conducted independently by Facebook and Professor Hancock had access only to results – and not to any data at any time – Cornell University’s Institutional Review Board concluded that he was not directly engaged in human research and that no review by the Cornell Human Research Protection Program was required.

Not our data. No review required by us. That’s very different from: this research meets our seal of approval. So whose seal did it have? “I was concerned,” the editor for the scholarly journal, Susan Fiske, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/even-the-editor-of-facebooks-mood-study-thought-it-was-creepy/373649/">told</a> ‘The Atlantic,’ “until I queried the authors and they said their local institutional review board had approved it.” Her impression was incorrect. The Cornell board had approved their own faculty member’s participation, but only because he had not collected the data. Therefore the ethical burden fell elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Adam Kramer, the researcher from Facebook, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/akramer/posts/10152987150867796">expressed doubts</a> about the study:

The goal of all of our research at Facebook is to learn how to provide a better service. Having written and designed this experiment myself, I can tell you that our goal was never to upset anyone. I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my coauthors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused. In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety.

Notice how the worrisome development is an unexpected flood of “anxiety.” A Facebook experiment — never meant “to upset anyone” — did make some people upset. Problem! The worrisome thing is not: “This study evaded the system of controls that universities have put in place for when human beings are the ones experimented upon, but somehow still grabbed the legitimacy points that publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal confers on a work of research….”

The problem is not: When we experiment on people in this way, how do we know we’re being respectful of their full humanity? It’s: “We never meant to upset anyone…” (And underneath that, of course: will this tarnish the brand?)

When it comes to experimenting on human beings, we should distinguish between “thick” and “thin” forms of legitimacy. Research universities — including my own institution — must be especially attentive to this distinction. Their thing is “thick” legitimacy. Anything that takes them away from it undermines the institution.

Because it’s an Internet company, Facebook experiments on human beings non-stop. Doing so is part of its business model. One name for this practice is A/B testing. An Internet company with a consistent traffic base can easily test which headline results in more clicks. Or in the case of Facebook’s happy/sad study: which newsfeed inputs result in “less sad” user outputs. This is experimental research, of a kind. It’s not the same as peer-reviewed scholarly studies, but the data generated is real enough and it cannot be dismissed.

Thin legitimacy is when the experiments conducted on human beings are: fully legal and completely normal, as in common practice across the industry, but there is no way to know if they are minimally ethical, because companies have no duty to think such matters through or share with us their methods.

Thick legitimacy: when experiments conducted on human beings are not only legal under U.S. law and common in practice but also attuned to the dark history of abuse in experimental situations and thus able to meet certain standards for transparency and ethical conduct— like, say, the American Psychological Association’s “informed consent” <a href="http://www.apa.org/monitor/jun04/ethics.aspx">provision</a>.

For purposes of establishing at least some legitimacy Facebook relies on its “terms of service,” which is 9,000 words of legalese that users have no choice but to accept. That’s thin. Meaning: not nothing, but there is not a lot of choice there. Universities like Cornell, academic journals like the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, editors who are professors of psychology at Princeton: they have to do better than this thinned out, lawyers-in-charge standard. That’s what I’m calling “thick” legitimacy, the protection of which is their primary job.

Maybe when Facebook is a research partner they will have to enforce on the project a standard of “thick” legitimacy. Or Maybe Facebook one day decides that “thick” legitimacy is the better way to go. Questions of this kind did not arise in the case of the “emotional contagion” study. But they should have.

When the study’s methods became controversial in the public square, in the press, and in online conversation, that should be a moment for the university to shine. Our strengths include: Academic freedom. Knowing what you’re talking about. “Yes, we thought of that.” To the press or to anyone else who has questions about it, we should be happy to explain our research, including ethical issues as they arise. As academics, we pride ourselves on thinking these things through. And we have procedures! If you experiment on human beings you have to follow them. Academic research is not some free-for-all. It has to meet certain standards. When those standards become controversial in the public square we are happy to explain them. Because we know what we’re doing—

Except when we don’t. Reached by the Atlantic magazine, one of the academics researchers on the Facebook study <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/even-the-editor-of-facebooks-mood-study-thought-it-was-creepy/373649/">chose silence</a> rather than “let me explain our research design.”

Author Jamie Guillory responded but declined to talk, citing Facebook’s request to handle reporters’ questions directly. Early Sunday morning, a Facebook spokesman emailed me with this statement: “We carefully consider what research we do and have a strong internal review process. There is no unnecessary collection of people’s data in connection with these research initiatives and all data is stored securely.”

To me that’s… thin. Company boilerplate signifies, a Ph.D. and expert in the field defers. More serious is that we haven’t heard a word from the senior scholar on the study, Cornell Professor of Communication and Information Science Jeffrey Hancock. But we did <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everyth%20&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;%20ing-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373%20&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;%20648">hear this</a>: “One of the study’s authors told The Atlantic on Monday that he’s been advised by the university not to speak to reporters.”

That’s not how “thick legitimacy” institutions operate. Neither is: our guy didn’t collect the data, so we’re in the clear. Or: “I’d love to comment but we agreed to let Facebook handle the questions…” Thin, thin, thin. My fellow academics: this is not our niche!