I promised to write something about the Blogging, Journalism & Credibility conference this week. I've made several promises recently, and I've done a poor job of keeping them. I'm simply squeezed for time right now.

Jay Rosen has posted a series of three entries about what attendees gained from the conference. Rather than write a lengthy response of my own, I'd simply like to second one of the developments: Let's open the archives America's newspapers so that citizens (and search engines) may have free access. The time has come.

I was unable to follow the conference in real time, but I did learn two things from Rosen's subsequent coverage:

1. I learned about podcasting. Not only did I learn about it, I'm now doing it. This entry is my first podcast--that's what the little button is at the top of the entry. It links you to an .mp3 file. My RSS feed embeds the file so that it may be picked up by portable .mp3 players and newsreaders. Since the Radio Rhetorica show is only one hour each week this semester, I'll be podcasting them. I'll also try to work up a few other amusing tidbits in the weeks ahead.

2. I learned about tagging. That's what those new ugly buttons are in the sidebar. I added them after midnight last night. They look like the work of someone operating on too little sleep. I'll fix them later this afternoon.

Oh, and one other thing. Open-source journalism is here. I've begun the groundwork to create such a project at SMS for my journalism students. My goal, at the moment anyway, is to launch an interactive and converged project for the fall 2005 semester. I'll keep you posted on these developments.

UPDATE (11:15 a.m.): Hmmmmm...my RSS 2.0 feed doesn't look right.

A rigid approach to staying on message and a clampdown on access for reporters and the public have been increasingly used by the executive branch, a trend that began to take shape during the Reagan administration, if not earlier. The current Bush administration has shown that the method can be perfected, with little to no downside for the White House.

Rhetoric is always open for reinterpretation, so I'd be wary of any claims that rhetorical choices have no downside. The reason we academics treat texts in the present tense (Plato claims such and such...Aristotle responds this and that...) is that we understand that messages don't stop communicating. So let's wait and see. Be that as it may, while I would like to see any administration allow journalists nearly unfettered access to information, I understand the reasons why the Bush administration continues the trend toward message control.

The administration's message control, however, is not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about how reporters ought to respond to effective message control.

Toward the end of the article, much too late in my estimation (but, then, I would have written a different article), we get this:

Mike McCurry [President Clinton's press secretary from 1995 through 1998] suggests that the press could make some changes as well. When there's such a premium on discipline and message control, he says, it "cries out for some new reporting techniques to break the barrier."

This seems like mere common sense to me. McCurry offers some good advice. Judging by some reporters' reactions to message control, however, McCurry's idea may be more radical than I suppose. Here is my suggestion:

Tell a different story. Yes, the president is news. No question about that. But it seems that the press too often forgets that what a president does (or what government does) affects citizens. Our lives change when governance happens. Want a good story about Social Security? Avoid trying to sort out "private" versus "personal" accounts (unless you're willing to get at the policy behind this semantic snit). Go find out how the facts affect real people. Go discover the facts, and eschew the spin.

The facts are rarely discovered by calling the White House, or some bureaucrat on a short leash, for a comment.

Spin. That's what message control is. The press doesn't need it to do its job well. Spin hurts good journalism. The facts are out there. The people affected by the facts are out there. And they ought to be the protagonists of the real story.

I like this sentence. It represents for me all that's good and ugly about Bush's second inaugural address. I've already dealt with some of the ugly. Today I'll deal with some of the good.

You may notice that Bush makes an error. The pronoun "our" should be "its." But, like so many stylistic conventions in English that masquerade as rules of grammar, this error is hardly worth getting upset about because no meaning is lost. In fact, it's doing interesting rhetorical work; it's making meaning; it's intended.

Bush teams "America" with "our" throughout the address--not all instances break the pronoun reference rule.

I'm torn about this next one. Read one way, it could be a mistake. Read another, it's perfectly acceptable:

"For a half century, America defended our own freedom by standing watch on distant borders."

If America is something separate from we the people, or more than we the people, then the rule is not violated. But looking at it that way would violate the rhetoric of the other instances. Bush is specifically reinforcing the equation America = We The People. And he's quite willing to break stylistic conventions to do so.

I like that. I like the message and the image. It fits what I believe about America, and it fits the traditional purpose of the inaugural address: to unite the country following a divisive (they're all divisive) election. I like it because, beyond the political message, it says that rhetoric wins in the battle for meaning and persuasion over stylistic rules. That's an empowering idea for speakers and writers of English dialects other than the academic standard.

Get out your red pen and give that address a close reading. You'll find more "errors." Here's another one:

"You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs."

This sentence is not parallel. The final clause should be "and courage is triumphant." But following the stylistic convention creates a political problem. We haven't triumphed yet. We're in the middle of the triumphing process. So Bush chooses the verb instead of the adjective. Perhaps he learned his lesson with "mission accomplished."

Correction: Get out a green pen (the color I use most often for grading). Red is fascist. Red accepts the ridiculous notion that errors are always wrong and unintended, that errors do no work other than to destroy meaning or make the writer appear uneducated. These examples I've cited are not errors. These are intended because they do rhetorical work. While I find this address on the whole a poor effort considering the gravity of the moment, I admire the willingness of the writers to break the rules on the biggest stage in the world.

"Crossfire" didn't cause the ideological divisions in this country. It reflected them. Sometimes it reflected them so well that people got angry, and they shouted. But that anger was usually genuine. These were people doing democracy the honor of feeling deeply about it. That's not so terrible.

Kinsley is confusing what people do on TV with what people who watch TV do.

What we need in our democracy is a little more deep thinking to go with that deep feeling. Otherwise, yes it is so terrible.

Balance and objectivity have become code words to propagate the insidious and cynical moral disengagement that is destroying American journalism. This moral disengagement gives equal time, and sometimes more than equal time, to those who spread falsehoods and distort information. It tacitly sanctions the dissemination of lies. It absolves us from making moral choice. It obscures and often shuts out the truth.

Hedges is not talking about objectivity as process. The target of his ire is objectivity as stance plus a third use of "objective" that I have not dealt with very much here, i.e. objectivity as a synonym for "fairness." Using the term this way further confuses an already terribly confused debate. (via Sisyphean Musings)

As a bonus, the book discusses the ethics of blogging--an ethics based on the form of blogging as it had evolved to that point. It's a topic of much interest right now. Here's an example: Link to your sources. This ethic springs from what the web is (a network of links) and what blogs started as (daily links to interesting stuff on the web).

For the most part, I agreed with the ethical behaviors Blood identified but with one exception: I disagree that errors should be left for all to see even after correction. Let's use my post from yesterday as an example. I misspelled "compliment," or, rather, I did something I tell students not to do, which is I relied on a spell checker. I wrote "complement."

A reader publicly pointed out the mistake in a comment. By my ethical standards, I prefer to point out such silly little errors in private e-mail (and only to those I have a good blogging relationship with) because I intensely dislike causing embarrassment to others. And, frankly, the middle class fetish with correctness is so ingrained in our society that the thought of making what amounts to silly, inconsequential errors gives people the nervous sweats. It also makes teaching writing and journalism more difficult.

(In case you're wondering: No, I do not teach journalism students that it's okay to make mistakes. I teach them that it's not okay to make others feel stupid about making mistakes. And I teach them that standard academic English is one dialect among many. I don't want them operating in the public sphere with the pernicious notion that people who speak and write differently from them are not smart and not worthy of attention.)

Here's what Blood might suggest I do: "I consider that effort a great complement compliment."

One could use the same technique to correct all kinds of errors--from grammatical to stylistic to factual. I simply do not see the need. If a blogger is running an otherwise open and honest blog, errors of fact--the important stuff--may be challenged and debated. A public record is created. This just makes for better and more interesting blogging.

I wonder about the possibility of asserting an ethical code for blogs in general. There is no institution, only a medium.

Journalism has an institution of sorts. And most news organizations follow the code of the Society of Professional Journalists or something close to it. Few organizations exist for bloggers. But look how many of those SPJ ethical standards good bloggers accept as a matter of course!

Group blogs form institutions and perhaps operate with ethical standards understood, if not articulated, by the authors. And individual bloggers may assert individual ethics. I do. You may read them here.

It seems to me that attempting to establish a code that covers the diversity of weblogging is an endeavor much like herding cats.

UPDATE: (6:40 p.m.): I'll write a little next week about the Blogging, Journalism & Credibility conference.

1. I installed a MovableType a plugin to insert the rel="nofollow" attribute into third-party links created in comments and trackbacks. The links work, but the bots from Google, Yahoo, and MSN do not follow them or count them for site rankings (as I understand it anyway). This takes away the biggest reason to leave comment spam: increasing search engine ranking.

2. I installed a plugin that blocks comments from open proxy servers.

For the moment, anyone may leave a comment on Rhetorica, even those who do not have a TypeKey username. Any comment made will have to wait for my approval unless you sign in with TypeKey. This allows readers who would rather not use TypeKey to comment on Rhetorica.

Blog spam is apparently now completely automated. Within moments of changing my TypeKey configuration--I'm talking 2 minutes--comment spammers attempted to leave 5 comments. I walked away from the computer for one hour to see what would happen. I came back to find 120 attempts to post spam. Wow.

So you can see the problem and, I hope, why TypeKey is necessary--at least for a while longer.

I made this prediction: President Bush's second inaugural address will be one the finest speeches of his presidency and may be remembered among the best inaugural addresses--possibly right up there with the likes of Kennedy's, FDR's first, and Lincoln's second.

I made this prediction for these reasons: Bush has obviously worked hard at delivery. He has proven himself capable of delivering the kind of address that befits presidential leadership in a time of national challenges.

Great inaugural addresses happen when eloquence, unity of purpose, and great political/social moment combine. And this moment had it all.

But what we heard was turkey.

There exists in inaugural address a gaping trap that must be avoided. Inaugural addresses are purely ceremonial--delivered by tradition, not by law. There is nothing frivolous about the ceremony of the inaugural address because the purpose is noble: To reunite the country following a divisive election, to get us all back on the same page. We may still be in different paragraphs, but that's to be expected.

Jimmy Carter fell into the trap. He delivered an inaugural with a little too much policy. If you want to start your presidency as a divider and not a uniter, this is the way to do it.

My one fear was that Bush--flush with his "mandate" and his party's control of, well, everything--would hammer home the policy. I was happy to see that he avoided the trap and stuck with tradition. Now, if he could just have delivered a better speech.

Problem #1: His performance in terms of delivery was flat and dull. Review a tape of address and pay particular attention to the (over-written) applause lines. Bush is so flat that in several crucial moments the audience waits until they're sure he has paused before clapping and cheering. Bush gave them little inflection to work with.

Problem #2: Eloquent? That word has apparently lost a lot of meaning. The Bush speech is certainly full of adjectives, but these do not eloquence make. According to the textual analysis program Diction 5.0, Bush's "embellishment" score is off the charts--22.3 out of the standard deviation. The embellishment score is a measure of the ratio of adjectives to verbs. The writing advice you probably heard in school fits speech writing, too: Use strong nouns and verbs. If you're interested in computer-assisted text analysis, I've posted the results of the Bush second inaugural and the Kennedy inaugural for comparison.

Further, an eloquent speech should be free of silly clinkers such as these:

"The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations."

"We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation:"

Those are mild compared to this failure to hit the proper rhetorical heights:

"America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies."

Who wrote this stuff?

Bullies? Big meanie-pants bullies? Geez...this line began with the potential to be one of the best of the speech--a truly eloquent statement of solidarity with those oppressed for their desire to live free. I can't even imagine a competent speech writer thought "bullies" either 1) accurately and concretely names, well, tyrants, and 2) sounded as if belonged in the same sentence with chained dissidents and humiliated women.

Problem #3: What the heck is "freedom"? It must be important because he 1) uses the term (and the related "liberty") 36 times, and 2) suggests, despite the differences of cultures and religions, that it is something that burns in every human heart. Seems to me that something that important deserves a simple, concrete, powerful definition. But this is the great (to use an over-used Bush adjective) enthymeme of the entire speech. He speaks these words (over and over and over again) and we hear what we want to hear. The problem is the rest of the world hears what it wants to hear, too. What are they thinking about this in Taiwan tonight--or China? Who cares? Well:

"All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.

Democratic reformers facing repression, prison, or exile can know: America sees you for who you are: the future leaders of your free country."

Go ahead, Taiwan! Declare your independence. We're ready to stand by you (against the largest army in the world).

Problem #4: Over-writing creates gibberish. Today's editorial in the local paper called the speech a cryptic riddle. I found no riddles; riddles are complex word-plays pregnant with meaning. This is merely bloated with gas:

"From the perspective of a single day, including this day of dedication, the issues and questions before our country are many. From the viewpoint of centuries, the questions that come to us are narrowed and few. Did our generation advance the cause of freedom? And did our character bring credit to that cause?"

What's beautiful about this is that it could mean so many things. Take your pick, and enjoy yourself.

The antepenultimate paragraph is simply nonsense:

"We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner "Freedom Now" - they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty."

Lemme see if I get this straight: We can be confident freedom will triumph despite history not running on the wheels of inevitability. We make history. Oh, and God, too. We are confident that history is moving inevitably toward freedom because it is an ancient hope meant to be fulfilled (meant by us? God?). History doesn't move with inevitability (except, apparently, when mankind or God want it to), but it has a visible direction with an ebb and flow of justice. Yep, makes perfect (non)sense to me.

The problem here isn't the idea (as best we can tease it out). I think Bush made the right choice of theme. I think he was reaching for the right tone--one befitting his position and this historical moment. But he reached too far. Here's what happens (in the penultimate paragraph):

"When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, "It rang as if it meant something." In our time it means something still. America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof. Renewed in our strength - tested, but not weary - we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom."

Good start. Powerful anecdote. Then look what happens. Bush tries to end with a bang and clinks instead. Let's leave sermons to the clergy--they write that stuff better anyway. We're now "proclaiming" liberty? Why not simply live it as an example to the world? What happened to the shining city on the hill--now there was an image Americans loved! And, finally, in a magnanimous gesture of inclusiveness, Bush proclaims liberty to the world AND to the people (thereof!). Not just one or the other. Who says the Republicans don't have a big tent?

Next week: What I liked about the speech.

As a matter rhetorical theory, I'd be happier if Sting had switched the positions of "logic" and "eloquence" in this lyric, but that would have screwed up the meter.

I'm thinking of these words this morning as I continue to work on my analysis of the Bush inaugural address. I plan to post it this afternoon no later than 6:00 p.m. CST.

I have read a few analyses and editorials indicating the writers were impressed with the eloquence of the speech but had a difficult time figuring out what it all means. For example, here's what the Springfield News-Leader wrote:

President Bush's second inaugural speech was a lyrical, flag-waving tribute to freedom. But it was also a cryptic riddle, with the substance lurking between the lines.

So Sting's lyric springs to mind. I won't promise to explain any cryptic riddles. I did not find any. What I did find will, however, challenge the notion that this was an eloquent speech.

For a sneak peek (or would that be a sneak listen?), tune in to Radio Rhetorica today at 1:30 CST. Just click the "on air" button to the left, and choose audio stream #1.

UPDATE (9:40 a.m.): Here's a preview from USA Today. I'm very interested in the context of this line: "We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands."

Bush begins with a passive construction, but uses subordination immediately to name the agent. This emphasizes the agent in a way that an active construction could not--by making the agent seem inevitable. This inevitability relies on the authoritative tone one may create with the passive voice. The clause following the colon completes the enthymeme. The syllogism that we might construct is tricky. Bush's stated conclusion appears to me to be the major premise. We'll have to wait for the full passage to complete it. But remember: the power of the enthymeme comes from leaving one or more elements out of the underlying syllogism, thus asking the auditor to complete it. (via Political Wire)

But, more important, my JRN270 and MED581 classes begin blogging for real this week on Bang It Out! and The Golden Mean.

Mr. Moonves said the moves were likely to include a shift toward multiple anchors and away from what he called the "voice of God, single anchor" format that has been used throughout most of the history of network television news.

He's talking about changing the ethos of the news, i.e. the character of the product. This is no minor consideration. I think his instincts regarding the "voice of God" fit well with the changing noetic field. Voice-of-God anchors project an ethos of authority that has become difficult to maintain in our increasingly transactional world, in which citizen journalists may effectively fact-check and talk back to mainstream media. We are seeing the death of the conduit metaphor of civic information and the emerging of the web metaphor.

But this is just dumb:

But Mr. Moonves said he was looking to install something more "cutting edge" this time. As part of the overhaul he indicated he would even consider a role for Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's "Daily Show." Mr. Stewart has emerged as both a late-night comedy star and a biting commentator on the news.

Jon Stewart is not a journalist. He'd be the first to tell you that. In fact, he's used his not being a journalist to great comic effect when real journalists have tried to interview him as a pundit. The strength of his punditry springs from his comedy.

I have said, and continue to believe, that Stewart and The Daily Show offer some of the best media critique found on television (or anywhere outside of academia). Two things make it good: 1) It's on point and 2) It's funnier'n hell. A deal with CBS would kill #2. Stewart would be a fool to accept. I just don't see it happening.

Changing the ethos of the news is certainly substantive. But any concept of "cutting edge" in journalism ought to have more to do with logos than pathos. Hiring Stewart would surely be pathetic.

The crowning ideal of the American news business--that there is such a thing as objective journalism--persists amid the terrible pressures to cut corners in the shortsighted lust for competitive advantage.

I agree about the importance and necessary persistence of objectivity if what we're talking about is objectivity as process rather than objectivity as stance. The philosophical ideal of objectivity (stance) is clearly impossible to achieve. But we may achieve objectivity in human terms (process), i.e. we can describe the world in human ways from human perspectives for human purposes.

The product of the process of objectivity may be described as having political and social utility for a particular discourse community. The product of American journalism aims to provide exactly this utility for citizens (and pundits). As Gitlin says:

Despite the evident frailties of mainstream journalism, even those who operate around its margins--bloggers, Op-Ed writers, even some of the more opinionated sectors of cable--are still completely dependent on it and still believe they're getting some truth there. (Where would Bill O'Reilly or Al Franken be without a daily newspaper?)

Hmmmm...I wish he hadn't used the T word. Using "truth" confuses the two objectivities by suggesting, falsely, that objectivity as stance is possible or that objectivity as process should be informed by the ideal.

But it is clear that, for the most part, Gitlin is talking process because it leads to something like truth, i.e. statements about the world with a high degree of utility. Speaking of the report on CBS:

Boccardi, Thornburgh and their lawyer collaborators relied on journalistic fundamentals to try to get to the bottom of what went wrong at CBS News. They interviewed sources, assessed their motives, canvassed experts, tried to resolve discrepancies. They made factual claims, asking why as well as who, what, where and when. They didn't pop off — they investigated. They were not guilty of the "myopic zeal" for a scoop of which they convincingly accused the program's producers. They pursued not attitude but truth.

Yes. Objectivity as process. But I hesitate to call its product "truth" without qualification.

It's doubtful Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack really wants the 2008 Democratic presidential nominating process to start with the Iowa caucuses. Oh, he may say he does, but deep in his soul he'd love it if the whole thing began someplace else.

Reason? He might run for president himself in 2008. Instead of being a springboard for the hometown boy, Iowa's caucuses could be a deathtrap.

Here's how it works: The conventional wisdom is that if Vilsack ran for president in 2008, he would be an early front-runner in Iowa because it is his home state. Everyone would "expect" him to do well and even win big.

First, note the passive voice and pronoun placeholder in the first sentence. Yepsen wants to hide his own pop-psychobabble and apparent ability to peer into the souls of mortal men. He didn't learn those skills in j-school.

The second paragraph could lead to an interesting discussion of Iowa's out-sized role in the presidential nomination process. Instead, we get a lesson in conventional wisdom that Yepsen fails to explain is purely a construction of the press. Who is this everyone he speaks of? Everyone as in every citizen of Iowa? The midwest? The United States? No. This mean everyone in the political press and the spinners who feed them propaganda and nonsense. Citizens are not included in "everyone."

Conventional wisdom is a form of thinking by commonplace that pervades political journalism. Because such thinking is pervasive, opinion journalists pass it along to citizens unexamined. Reporters pick up on it and pass it along in the form of unexamined spin. Citizens are left out of the process, treated in political coverage with the assumption that they also hold the same commonplaces and expectations. Perhaps they do. And perhaps they wouldn't if political journalists could find a way to escape the shallowness of their own thinking.

My suggestion: Tell a different story--the story of citizens and their experiences with governance, not politics. (via Political Wire)