The bailout’s for the banking industry are a failure.  I say this because we don’t have a set of goals to accomplish.  The government just hands over billions of dollars to the same people to messed up the financial industry and says, have fun, don’t fuck up.  As investors in these banks, the public has no oversight, transparency, or accountability all of which the government promises.  This is, of course, nothing new with our government, and is why I partially blame the news media.

I was optimistic when David Cay Johnston wrote about how journalists need to change their approach to the financial crisis, saying “let’s not make the same mistakes as were made with the run-up to the Iraq War, and the PATRIOT ACT that so eroded our credibility, in terms of how we cover this financial crisis.”  But nothing changed.  The news media was incapable of covering such a complex and nuanced story.  Same for our politicians.  For eight years, politicians and news media have been teaching the public to accept one liner answers and he said/she said narratives.  No filter, no analysis, no answers.  Should we go to war, not go to war. Should we protect ourselves from terrorists or not protect ourselves from terrorists.  The financial crisis couldn’t be broken down to simple platitudes making it impossible for 24-hour news channels (and many newspapers) to fully inform the public.

Without a news media, there is no accountability in democracy.  Sure people can vote every couple of years in the polls, but that doesn’t change the system.  Public shaming is a powerful tool. That’s why accountability in the bailout matters.  AIG has already spent billions on vacations and retreats for the same executives who wasted billions before.

I’m late to the bailout bashing, but felt there are still lessons to learn and things to do, especially since there’s more bailing out to be done (credit card companies, the second round of mortgage failures). First, let’s understand the goals of any bailout.  If it’s simply to save jobs, then save jobs (most of the banks and car companies are already having massive layoffs even after bailout payments).  But let’s have some publicly stated goals so we, the public and news media, can judge progress.  And have the news media follow up on politicians passing these bills.  Create websites to follow who’s getting money (banks and politicians) so the public can see the full story.

I’m not expecting change as the same people who screwed up before are still in power, at the banks, in government, and at news organizations.  But I still have hope for change.

While newspapers, it seems fun to find alternative news outlets.  Twitter gets lots of hype for being the newsroom of tomorrow. The most recent example is Twitter users being the first post about the LA earthquake.

But Twitter is not a newsroom. It’s not meant to be a newsroom. It helps news spread, but so do water coolers and and town criers.  But 140 characters of information doesn’t make a newsroom, but it helps the newsroom find news.

Newspapers are in trouble so looking for the next thing is a popular topic, but trying to anoint something as the “Future of…” is shortsighted. Twitter is still an experiment, one that doesn’t make money and gets crushed by its popularity. Twitter could be replaced by the next-big thing in a few months.

Twitter should, for now, be another tool in a journalists arsenal. A tweet alluding to an LA earthquake should send the journalist to their phone for confirmation.

News can be an bit of information, but a newsroom provides more. A newsroom needs to provide relevant information, context, what has happened, is happening, and will happen next. A tweet can’t provide that.  Even rapid fire wire services like AP and Reuters churn out several hundred words on events that happened minutes or hours before. Tweets might help cut that response time down.

The key difference is journalists should read Twitter. Everyone else will still read the journalists.

There’s been a parade of newspaper layoffs from these past few weeks, big and small, with cuts upwards of 10 percent of each paper’s workforce.  What’s puzzling is how constant layoffs are going to help the industry.  The philosophy seems to be charge more for less.  They’ve been trying this for almost ten years and yet here come more layoffs.

How are these layoffs meant to help the companies and industry?  Many leaving these papers are excellent journalists.  Why not have them write for the website?

Newspapers still view their websites as supplements to the paper rather than extensions of each other.  It’s frustrating going to a newspaper’s website looking for news and only finding the top stories from this morning, without links or ways to find more information.  All these people newspapers are laying off could be generating content, from blogs to exclusive articles that keep the website fresh and connected.  I can’t understand why all columnists and journalists don’t blog.

Newspapers aren’t dying.  Just big ones that charge too much for too little.  Free dailies have been steadily growing in the United States after years of success in Europe, helping bring in new readers who don’t read regular newspapers.

Newspapers need to plan long term.  That’s hard to do with investors watching every quarter, but no one’s going to be happy with another 10 years of plummeting revenue.  They should use the staff they already have, train them, and build quality on and offline news organizations.  Try offering more than less should be the first step.

Last week I wrote about an unknown user who first reported Tim Russert’s death on Wikipedia. That “junior-level employee” worked for the Internet Broadcasting Systems who provides web services to NBC affiliates, has been suspended (earlier reports said fired, but NBC disputes this) for updating the Wikipedia page. The employee thought the information was public record.

Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider wrote:

It’s one thing for a news organization to decide to delay reporting news of a staffer’s death out of deference to his or her family (this makes sense). It’s another for the organization to expect other organizations to follow the same policy. And it is yet another thing for someone to deliberately strike accurate facts from a collective record to appease an upset client, which is what someone at IBS apparently did.

The world has changed in last 15 years, and the genie isn’t going back in the bottle. If NBC wants to maintain its tradition with respect to staffers’ deaths, that’s fine. In the meantime, it should recognize that its chances of controlling a story this big are–and should be–infinitesimal and that “citizen journalism” has long since gone mainstream. If the employee at IBS who updated the Wikipedia entry did not learn of it via a confidential NBC communication, moreover, NBC and IBS owe him or her an apology and a job.(Emphasis his)

As Mathew Ingram writes “The lesson is that as long as there is news, people will try to share it. (Note: The NYT story says that NBC tried to hold back the news).”

As I said last week, Wikipedia provided rapid information while NBC took 40 minutes after Wikipedia to report Russert’s death. Information thanks to the internet moves faster. NBC can try to keep its exclusive stories, but it can’t be surprised if some younger, sprier website scoops it.

NBC announced yesterday Tom Brokaw will moderate Meet the Press during the election season, taking over for the recently deceased Tim Russert. The obvious benefits Brokaw are his decades of experience, headlining NBC Nightly News for more than 20 years. Steve Boriss of Future of News points out, this as a step backward.

NBC has decided to take a step backward, replacing Tim Russert with dino-anchor Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press. Actually, the decision was made for them because a step forward, or even a step to the side, does not exist. Network news is over.

Brokaw is an amazing journalist that my parents loved. And my grandparents. Network news wants raise its audience, but playing to the aging baby boomers is short term thinking (not to be too morbid here). There are several generations of people under 40 who don’t care about network news.

Brokaw is especially ironic in an election season pitting the old versus the new. John McCain and Hillary Clinton push the standard baby boomer sales pitches in an election season when Obama’s change mantra became as refreshing as a politician knowing how to use a computer. Tom Brokaw is network news answer to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

The problem is there isn’t a new generation of reporters to take over for Russert. Even if Brokaw is only temporary, there aren’t many options to replace him (Aaron Brown please?).  Few journalists today have the years of experience as foreign correspondents and hard news junkies that shaped the last generation of news anchors, giving us credible newsmen. NBC had to move backwards because there isn’t anybody in front.

As part of my now ongoing series picking on the Associated Press, numerous examples of the organizations hypocrisy are coming to a broil.

The Associated Press is demanding bloggers follow guidelines on how to cite A.P. articles, requiring payment if even 5 words are copied. Michelle Malkin offers some magic math to see how much the Associated Press owes her for plagiarizing her blog posts.

Malkin finds A.P. articles from April and May quoting her posts, without providing links back. Malkin also reports the A.P. quoted the blog Patterico on Monday, the same day they were outlining their pay-for-fair-use program.

And both times the A.P. didn’t provide links back (print mentality), unlike us generous bloggers. Both Malkin and Patterico are kind enough to link to the A.P. articles plagiarizing them. I’ll stick with linking to just the blogs.

One theory about the A.P.’s attack on bloggers is it’s posturing against its own customers; newspapers who might realize they don’t need the A.P. anymore. The A.P. was formed to help local papers share reporting resources to cover major, national stories, but on the internet, the A.P. has become competition to these same papers. Suddenly, one user can see the same A.P. story on a dozen websites. Dorian Benkoil writes:

[Cleveland Plain Dealer Editor Susan Goldberg] said she was no longer reliant on The Associated Press for her stories from the region but instead was getting the original versions direct from the other sources around the state rather than paying “a big chunk” of her budget, about $1 million for rewritten AP stories. Picking up directly, on the Web, and putting other papers’ stories directly in the newspaper was also better quality, she said, and readers were noticing:

“I mean, we’ve always had access to news from all over the state. It was just, you know, it went through the AP mill. I frankly think we’re getting better, more distinctively written stories because they’re not going through the AP mill.”

Steve Boriss writes how the A.P.’s stance against linking is a sideways attack to prevent newspapers from just summarizing and linking to A.P. stories instead of paying for them.

Newspaper trying to cut its costs could theoretically drop its AP membership, keep its exclusive content to itself, and start each big story “According to the AP,” lifting as many words as possible then paraphrasing the rest. By cracking down now to limit the number of lifted words, the AP is making the price for defecting members higher.

Basically, the Associated Press, a non-profit organization formed to benefit the United States’ newspapers, is worried about its solvency and longevity (as it should be) and doesn’t want to evolve - it wants to maintain its cushy position of power. Unfortunately, this short term thinking is going to backfire as newspapers and other wire services, like Reuters, pioneer new web-friendly business models leaving the A.P. where it is - obsolete.

Last night’s Daily Show reveal the news media’s true goal this election cycle - to make it never end. Asif Mandvi had his fingers crossed as Hillary Clinton, on the night Obama won enough delegates to claim the nomination, refused to concede defeat. If she ends her campaign, how will three 24-hour news channels fill up their time?

This entire primary season has been an effort in futility for anyone seeking information. Beyond the wasted time on out of context quotes, inflammatory relationships, and flag pins, the media punditry has desperately tried to frame this election as a horse race where if you turn away for a second, you’ll miss the crucial turning point. The result has been a ratings boon for the cable networks, with CNN seeing 90 percent increases over last year’s first quarter. MSBNC grew 68 percent. Fox News hasn’t benefited as much, with a 14 percent increase. The Democratic candidates had shut out the station from interviews until Hillary Clinton went on Bill O’Reilly’s show, giving his show a 30 percent boost in total viewers.

The 24-hour news networks relied on the image of a close race to build its ratings and are continuing the mirage heading into the general election. I don’t mean to say Hillary Clinton and John McCain had/have no chance of winning, but the odds were/are so against them. The media knows a close race is better television than a sure thing and that is causing them to be unobjective in their reporting, often overblowing non-issues in the hopes that flag pins and Reverend Wright would keep the race going.

The general election looks be a Democratic landslide even as polls show Obama and McCain are in a statistical dead heat. These polls do not account for a unified Democratic party, one this split between rabid Clinton and Obama supporters who, very likely, have no intention of voting for anti-abortion, pro-war Republican McCain even though they say so now in polls. McCain has already collected support his primary challengers just as Obama will once Clinton accepts her 2nd place finish. The result will be an unprecedented coalition of the two biggest voter and fundraising networks in history, a network McCain can’t catch up to even if he didn’t have a fundraising issue.

The other point ignored by polls is that the electoral college counts, popular vote doesn’t. I think the popular vote will end up close between Obama and McCain. The electoral college will be a Democratic landslide benefited by anti-war and anti-Republican sentiments, McCain’s lackluster appeal to hard conservatives, and Obama’s massive appeal to the youth and African-Americans. Democratic wins of special elections in Illinois (Dennis Hastert, former speaker of the house’s seat), Louisiana, and Mississippi (Trent Lott’s seat former seat), by sizeable margins spell doom for Republicans. McCain might toy with winning states like New Jersey, Michigan, and New York, but he has to hold prior swing states like Ohio, Florida, and Iowa while playing defensive in Virginia, North Carolina, Nevada, New Mexico, and in optimistic circles, Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, Kansas, Montana, and Texas. Short of an Obama imposition, it’s impossible to see an electoral scenario where McCain can win.

But the news media doesn’t want to entertain electoral math. It’s more fun to pretend Obama has a white problem (how many African American’s live in Montana, Iowa, and Wisconsin?) or highlight how much independents love McCain. It keeps the race looking closer than it really is.

I don’t want CNN to call the race for Obama or ignore McCain as an also-ran. Their responsibility should be to inform us of the facts of the campaign - who did what when and why. What if questions or conjecture have no place in objective journalism. Blogs, on the other hand, can go conjecture crazy. Without some source for objective, investigative reporting on both candidates, this election is going to once again defined by talking points, 527-organization, and out-of-context crap that doesn’t matter. Change and leaders we can believe in requires a media to change and lead.

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Environmental activists threw pies at New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman while he was speaking about energy at Brown University Tuesday. Friedman spoke about the need for green and sustainable technology (his Power of Green article is a must read), believing developing green technology will make America “stronger, more innovative, [and] more energy secure.”

Protestors threw two green-colored pies at Friedman at the start of his speech, though he managed to dodge most of the dessert. A flier circulated by the protestors said:

“Thomas Friedman deserves a pie in the face because of his sickeningly cheery applaud for free market capitalism’s conquest of the planet, for telling the world that the free market and techno fixes can save us from climate change.”

I want to know what the protestor’s alternative is to Friedman’s suggestions. Alterative power sources are inefficient and expensive still. Even as oil jumps in price, coal remains cheap but dirty and developing nations like China just want power, at the cheapest price. In the Power of Green, Friedman’s argument for market forces is the need for green technology at the “China price,” namely at the price China currently pays for coal plants. China could make cleaner coal plants, but they cost 40 percent more to build and are 20 percent less efficient. And when they’re building two 500-megawatt power plants a week, they need every drop of power they can get.

It’s not that China, India, or America don’t want to become green (well, certain oil companies might be against it). The problem is we don’t want to sacrifice. China estimates pollution costs its economy $67 billion, so fixing the problem is in the nation’s interest, but it’s just too expensive - the technology isn’t there yet. Friedman wants the government, especially the American government, to take an active role in developing green technology at the China price, creating something like the Manhattan Project but around green offering a market incentive to get companies and technologists working on the climate crisis.

Friedman regularly promotes free market ideals, recognizing benefits from outsourcing and free trade helping build up developing countries to match the developed world faster. I agree oil companies, who are making record profits, have little incentive to invest in new technology - its likely we’ll have enough oil during current oil executive’s lifetimes (even if it costs $10 a gallon). With government leadership and incentive, in the form of tax breaks and research grants, can spurn a new green industry that can literally save the planet.

But throwing pies is totally rational. After all, it’s not like we’re also in the middle of a food crisis.

Update: April 24th, 2008, 2:50 p.m. - Here’s a shaky video of the pieing.

Another primary, another exit poll, and more pundits proclaiming the what ifs that have yet to become reality.  Mississippi voted yesterday and its sizeable black population gave Barack Obama a sizeable win.  But his modest turnout of white votes are once again giving pundits pause.

I ask why?  Time.com’s Michael Duffy writes "Only a Democrat who could win 35 to 40 percent of the white vote, while holding onto a lopsided percentage of blacks, could put the state in play in a head to head match with a Republican in the fall" saying Obama’s 30 percent of the white vote falls short.

But politics is not a zero-sum game.  White votes for Clinton do not instantly transfer to John McCain in the general election, just like Clinton’s wins in swing states Ohio do not mean only she is allowed to win it come November.  Exit polls in Ohio showed 44 percent would be satisfied with either candidate.  50 percent of them voted for Clinton.

Also, exit polls are showing just how hard it is to predict some states and voting groups.  Obama faired poorly with whites in Mississippi and Ohio but won the white vote in the larger Virginia, a once solid Republican state that will be a major swing this year.  And how many black people voted in Iowa and Wisconsin?

This election cycle has simply proved how little all the pundits (including myself) can know and predict.  But that hasn’t stopped the predicting and analysis which is captivated by the fight at hand without considering how things we didn’t predict will change everything else.  And remember votes don’t disappear after they’re cast.  We get to do this all over again in November.  I can’t wait.

I had avoided watching political debates this cycle mostly because I hate the canned rhetoric and lack of real debate. The rules are so strictly prepared by the candidates, the debates are in my cynical opinion, a badly scripted reality show. But I caved Tuesday and watched the debate on MSNBC.

While the debated seemed one notch above reality TV (a game show maybe), I found both Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama engaging. It was the moderating journalists that looked like idiots.

NBC Nightly News host Brian Williams and Meet the Press host Tim Russert went back and forth in a subtle battle for who could ask the least relevant question.

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