I woke up Sunday morning thinking about a column on the uproar over the U.S. port debacle. I may very well still get around to exploring that subject after breakfast. But here’s a heads up on something that I’ve been holding off doing for some time and now must deal with.

The Birmingham News today ran an article, a column and a number of photos that have been buried in a closet since the early 1960s dealing with the civil rights movement in “Bomingham.” At least a couple of those photos were taken by photographer Spider Martin, one of my best friends in the world who decided to take himself out of the world almost three years ago on April 8, 2003, on the 30th anniversary of his hero Pablo Picasso’s death.

Due to the self-serving and revisionist nature of the paper’s handling of this issue today, it now becomes imperative that I tell the story I learned about how the news buried the news during the civil rights days. But this will take some time, so check back later to see the result.

In the meantime, you can read the News story on the subject, along with executive editor Tom Scarrett’s weak column on the issue, and view some of the photos on the Newhouse corporate chain Web site. While we are glad the News had finally decided to admit some errors from those days, thanks to the work of an intern, do not be fooled by their balderdash. The News was a racist institution then, and there’s not much evidence it is that much better now. This is PR to try to save the newspaper by boosting circulation with black readers. Nothing more, nothing less…

From Negatives to Positives
Photos Speak Volumes
Photos: Unseen, Unforgotten

New York Times reporter James Risen illustrates in his new book how the CIA ignored information that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction, according to the Associated Press.

State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration describes secret operations of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism. The major revelation in the book, according to the AP, has already been the subject of SOME reporting by the New York Times: The so-called revelation that the National Security Agency eavesdropped on Americans’ conversations without obtaining warrants from a special court - at the behest of President George W. Bush.

In October 2002, the U.S intelligence community issued a National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, according to the book. Quoting extensively from anonymous sources, Risen says the NSA spying program was launched in 2002 after the CIA began to capture high-ranking al-Qaida operatives overseas and took their computers, cell phones and personal phone directories.

Full AP story

But the relevant story doesn’t stop there.

Byron Calame, the New York Times public editor, a recruit from the conservative Wall Street Journal, wrote a column on Sunday taking issue with the stony silence on the issue by Times Executive Editor Bill Keller and Publisher Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger Jr.

“For the first time since I became public editor, the executive editor and the publisher have declined to respond to my requests for information about news-related decision-making,” Calame wrote.

Behind the Eavesdropping Story, a Loud Silence

As we have reported here before, as a free-lance reporter for the New York Times national desk out of New Orleans in 2002, I personally tried to tell the New York Times their reporting leading up to the war in Iraq was on the wrong track. They listened to Judith Miller instead, and now the paper’s reputation has suffered yet another blow.

One of the things I learned about journalism in the first of four communications programs I have participated in over the past 25 years is that a reputation for accuracy is very important. These days, critics on the right and the left are attacking the credibility of the press like never before.

Of course it seems to be a fact about the world we live in today that everyone is a critic - whether or not they have any qualifications or facts to back up their attacks.

But it seems to me that the managers of major newspapers especially should seek out experienced help on stories such as these rather than hiding behind their office walls in New York and attacking bloggers.

Someone will eventually unearth and publish the truth, whether it is on newsprint or book paper or a Weblog online.

But as George Orwell once said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”

The revolution has already begun . . . whether or not they like it or admit it in New York or Washington.

American journalism must take some of the blame for this “accursed war” in Iraq, according to the New York Observer’s Nicholas Von Hoffman.

Some of the blood is on the hands of the reporters and editors who sold this war, he says. This is one time when they cannot defend themselves by telling us not to kill the messenger. In this tragedy, American journalism didn’t act as the messenger but as co-instigators, co-propagandists, co-warmongers. Instead of being the messenger, they were the message.

There’s Nothing Glorious About Today’s Journalism

by Glynn Wilson
Editor and Publisher
LocustFork.Net

The great playwright William Shakespeare once wrote this now famous stanza in Hamlet.

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

It is a profound question and you may interpret it as you will. No doubt events in Shakespeare’s life prompted him to write those lines, and perhaps he contemplated war and death due to the events of his time.

As a mere journalist, there are some events making the rounds of the press and the blogosphere which cause me now to ask this question.

To believe or not to believe, that is the question. Or, what is more worthy of belief, a newspaper or a Web site? Does one technology by its nature somehow engender more trust than the other?

Let’s examine a few cases and see if we can answer the question to anyone’s satisfaction.

For starters, it recently came to the attention of everyone who is anyone that a prankster posted false information into a Wikipedia entry about John Seigenthaler Sr., a former editor of The Nashville Tennessean newspaper.

According to the New York Times’ own account of the case, a fellow by the name of Brian Chase, 38, “who until Friday was an operations manager at a small delivery company,” admitted to Seigenthaler that he had written the material suggesting Seigenthaler was involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.

Wikipedia is the world’s most comprehensive encyclopedia. It was set up as a nonprofit organization and is published online only. It is written and edited by thousands of volunteers, as opposed to newspapers, which are written by reporters who are supposedly hired for their qualifications and paid for their work. Some call newsworkers professionals. Others call them crafts people.

Mr. Seigenthaler recently discovered the false entry and wrote an op-ed piece about it in USA Today. He said he was especially annoyed that he could not track down the perpetrator because of Internet privacy laws, which touched off a debate about the reliability of information on Wikipedia - and by extension the entire Internet - and the difficulty in holding Web sites and their users accountable, even when someone is defamed, according to the Times.

In a confessional letter to Seigenthaler, Mr. Chase said he thought Wikipedia was a “gag” Web site and that he had written the assassination tale to shock a co-worker, who knew of the Seigenthaler family and its illustrious history in Nashville.

The incident prompted New York Times business editor Larry Ingrassia, a recent hire from the Wall Street Journal, to write to the Poynter Institute’s media links guy, Jim Romenesko.

“We shouldn’t be using it to check any information that goes into the newspaper,” Ingrassia wrote to the staff.

For an objective observer who has worked for newspapers for many years, including editors under Ingrassia at the New York Times, and who has taught journalism at universities and published online for many years, this dispute is quite interesting - especially considering the recent scandals at the Times.

You may recall there was a Times reporter named Jayson Blair not long ago with a huge cocaine habit who liked to write his stories from his messy apartment in the Bronx, even when he was supposed to be in Texas or Virginia, and who perpetrated a similar fraud heard around the world and damaged the newspaper’s credibility.

You may also have seen the stories about Judith Miller, a reporter who used one anonymous source approved by the Bush administration to make the case that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in the run up to the war in Iraq. She recently left the paper, either under duress or to retire and go spend more time with her family, depending on who you believe, after spending some time in jail to ostensibly protect a White House staffer who was another anonymous source.

On the face of it, doesn’t it seem a bit hypocritical that Ingrassia would come out so publicly attacking the credibility of the Internet, as if the medium is the message, as former communications scholar Marshal McCluin claimed?

(For the sake of accuracy, Wikipedia is not “published” ON “the Internet” per se. It is published on the World Wide Web, which people access via the Internet in a Web browser. So we’re wondering why Mr. Ingrassia is so bold as to comment on this at all, since he clearly does not know the difference).

But the real question is this. If Wikipedia should be totally discredited for making one mistake, perpetrated by one rogue member, should we not ask the same question of the New York Times? Why should anyone believe anything in the newspaper?

Should the fact that it is printed on paper, or on a Web site, make a real difference when readers come to judge its credibility?

Or is this just the tip of the iceberg so to speak, an early skirmish in the wars between print newspapers, which seem to be on their deathbed finally, and the Web, which seems to be taking off?

Here are a couple of other cases worth considering before we try and make up our minds.

While lurking on a local peace and justice coalition listserv recently, I was surprised to see the head of the anti-war group question the veracity of a news account that seemed to agree with his own views against President George W. Bush.

Someone had posted a link to a story in the online news site Capitol Hill Blue, which claimed to have three sources who attended a meeting with Bush on the Patriot Act, who all confirmed that Bush said the Constitution of the United States is “just a goddamned piece of paper.”

Of course the story was not picked up in any so-called “family newspaper,” since they would never publish the word goddamn.

I blogged about it myself.

The activist leader interjected into the listserv discussion that Capitol Hill Blue was an “unreliable Internet rumor mill.”

So I e-mailed the editor, Doug Thompson, a former newspaper reporter and editor, who claims to publish the “oldest surviving news site on the Internet.” I wanted to see how he would respond if I questioned the veracity of the account myself.

He wrote me back. Here is what he said:

“We have doubters every time we break a story. They doubted our stories in 2003 that questioned the Iraq WMD intel. They doubted our stories last year about Bush’s temper tantrums. In most cases, we are eventually proven right and on those rare occasions when we make a mistake we admit.

“We stand by our story as printed. If, and when, any of our sources decides to go public we will print it.”

Sounds like what any newspaper reporter or editor would say when challenged. Read about the online news site here.

Then, to top it all off, try this case on for what to believe or not believe.

The Birmingham News carried a story this morning saying a Christian talk show host from Mobile, who sued to reinstate former Judge Roy Moore after he was ousted as Alabama’s chief justice, has decided not to support Moore’s run for governor (my headline).

Roy Moore’s Campaign Loses Support of Mobile Radio Talk Show Host

The paper included the Web link for Kelly McGinley.

Here is where the story really gets interesting.

Ms. McGinley, who apparently has no journalism experience or training, makes all kinds of wild claims. She says Judge Moore is planning to get elected governor of Alabama to force President George W. Bush to send in the National Guard - so we can fight the War Between the States all over again.

She includes links to stories about troop deployments to Alabama to get ready for this Civil War. We suspect she is just not particularly informed about how pork barrel politics works, but it certainly makes for interesting reading.

Radio is 95 percent entertainment, after all, and only 5 percent information.

She also has links to stories claiming there is a gay Republican conspiracy run amok in the land.

Hey, it may be true, considering the existence of the so-called Log Cabin Republicans - and the Secret Service logs showing that gay male prostitute Jeff Gannon spent the night in the White House. Remember Gannongate?

Then, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, there is this thing called Google Alerts. You can enter search terms and Google will conduct the search for you every day and send you the Web links via e-mail.

This popped into my inbox today, a column by Bill McClellan in the formerly great newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Me paid off? Maybe I should be insulted, or join the crowd

At one point he wrote:

“Never has the press been held in such low repute. Much of the disdain has been well-earned. I think of the scandals at the New York Times - Jayson Blair making stuff up, Rick Bragg putting his byline on other people’s work, Judith Miller’s unhealthy reliance on administration officials, who, in essence, planted stories in that once-august publication.”

I e-mailed Mr. McClellan and tried to inform about the problem of lumping Mr. Bragg in with Blair and Miller, but he was totally uninterested in the facts.

At least the owners at Wikipedia responded to the Seigenthaler story and promptly fixed the problem. The New York Times has gone to all kinds of lengths to fix the problems there, although they clearly still exist.

I have not heard back from the peace activist, so I’m not sure whether he is really interested in the truth, or not.

As for Mr. McClellan, I’m wondering what qualifies him to write a column in the newspaper, when he is so woefully uninformed and uninterested in the facts?

So, back to our original question. To believe or not to believe? Who are you inclined to believe?

Make up your own minds, but here’s my advice.

Believe the former newspaper reporters who have now mastered this new technology called the Web. As you can see from this post, we are able to sort out the facts in short order and entertain just as well as anyone who has ever written for a newspaper, without the space limitation.

Now if only we can get more facts onto talk radio. . . . Stay tuned!