Process Assertions
The general goals of the yet-to-be-realized Assertion Processor
are being embraced in many corners of the blogosphere. I had discussed this
idea
with Ben Hammersley on December 9th. That led to several posts between
Ben and me on the subject, and some good comments helping us along.
Blaser: 12/15; 12/17; 12/19; 1/06
Hammersley: 12/19; 12/28
Our most recent posts respond to
Danny Ayers' important contribution - his QuestionGarland
concept.
The idea behind the Assertion Processor is to extend an article's
RSS feed with a few new data tags to suggest the character of an
article's content, not just where the content appears in it. In other words,
what are the phrases that get our attention?
Adopt a Campaign Journalist
On January 10, Jay Rosen reported on a distributed suggestion
he saw developing in late December:
Adopt a Campaign Journalist in 2004: The Drift of a
Suggestion
Over the holidays, an idea gained some Net traction:
webloggers "adopting" a
campaign reporter. That means you monitor and collect all the reporter's
work, and then... And then what? Follow the turns as the suggestion is
taken up and debated.
Saturday Night, Jan. 10: Link flow and blog authority
have been combining
in the atmosphere. In sequence:
Dec. 23. At the Daily
Kos, Vet 4 Dean
reacts to discussion at Blog For America, the Dean campaign's main gig:
Earlier today on DFA, there was a good bit of discussion
of the latest piece of "journalism" committed by Ms. Jodi
Wilgoren in the NY Times. Well, I decided it was time to lose my
blogging virginity
and created The
Wilgoren Watch.
Dec. 23. And he does. The
Wilgoren Watch: "Dedicated
to deconstructing the New York Times coverage of Howard Dean's
campaign for the White House." (The inaugural post.)
Dec. 28. At Steve Gilliard's News
Blog, Gilliard
says he has had enough: Time
to Take the Gloves Off:
The media in America
lives in a dual world, one where they want to hold people accountable,
yet flip out when people do the same
to
them...
I think it would be a really, really good idea to track
reporters, word for word, broadcast for broadcast, and print the results
online. Not
just for
any one campaign or cause, but to track people's reporting
the way we track other services....
Keeping score of who's
right and wrong, how many times they repeat cannards like Al Gore
invented the Internet and make
obvious
errors. Not accusations
of ideology, but actual data and facts.
Dec. 30. Reacting
to Gilliard's idea, Atrios gives it a second. Hardball: "We
should have an 'adopt a journalist' program. As Steve suggests,
people should
choose a journalist, follow everything they write,
archive all their work, and critique and contextualize it where
appropriate."
It's a terrific chronicle of the birth of a new weapon in
the war on hierarchy - Read Jay's catalogue at PressThink
or at Blogging of the
President. Both have a good review of the reactions. Most are intrigued,
but also concerned about the establishment of "truth squads." Even Jay takes
the idea with a grain of salt:
Why I Love the Adopt-a-Reporter Scheme. Why
I Dread It.
A weblog devoted to watching the work of a journalist
is democracy in action. It is bound to be educational, for the watcher
and perhaps for the journalist
who is watched. But there are reasons to worry.
All the ideas, examples
and disputes are here: Adopt a Campaign Journalist in 2004. It has
more than thirty links. I stayed out of that post because
I wanted to know what others think. So... no illustrations in this one.
Use the links and fill in any details you need.
Why I Love It.
It's practical. People can do it, and
they don't need permission or oversight. Tracking a reporter's work
is a good thing for a very
simple reason.
It's participation in the presidential campaign, and in politics.
It's doing
something useful with your own civic time. It's what Thomas Jefferson,
the botanist,
did-- observe nature, and record what you find. Except that culture
is our nature now and media a surrounding sea. So we observe
this, and try
to sense
its motion...
...Why I Dread It.
I have this question, seriously intended:
What makes media hate any better, any more "okay," than other
forms of politicized hating? Nothing in my field of vision. Check yours.
Don't
tell me it doesn't exist--floating hatred for The Media, (which has
no address) addressed to individuals who in someone's eyes represent "the" media--because
I can find occasional evidence for it in comments here at PressThink.
You can find it at a million Web pages in public view. Bipartisan
evidence,
too. Is the contempt deserved? A lot of intelligent people think
so, and they
act on that belief. They write of it. They sometimes commune around it.
Is there contempt for an intelligent lay public by the press? There
is, but
right now I am not discussing it.
Processing my Assertion
The Assertion Processor is conceived as a general-purpose
tool to catalogue any set of assertions, whether a single article, a series
on the same topic by different writers, or, as in this example, all articles
by the same writer. What we continue to lack is a good enough agreement on
the interesting tags that elicit what there is about a story that gets our
attention.
In my last
post on the Assertion Processor, I more-or-less jokingly suggested a
few data tags to get at the attention-getting.
- <moneyPaid>
- <payor>
- <payee>
- <scapegoat>
- <wretchedExcess>
- <cynicalGreed>
- <whiningVictim>
- <statuteViolated>
- <wrongedSpouse>
- <fiduciaryViolation>
- <rampantConflictOfInterest>
My amateur opinion is that every writer projects her bias
on her audience by the whats and hows she details. I asked Jay to help us
out
on
the concept:
We are drawn to the media based on its power to push
our buttons. There is a characteristic to outrage as there is to beauty
and grace. Just because they're hard to describe is no excuse to abandon
the quest.
These are the elements that journalists strive for even
as they attempt to push their master
narrative of omniscience and objectivity–the
dominant myths of the press, as Jay
Rosen is so masterfully teaching
us.
Jay, could you put an oar in here? I'm sure there's
some small set of tags that captures the traditional six Perry White
questions included
in Danny
Ayers' QuestionGarland but also feeds out the crucial elements of cynicism,
greed, Pollyanna optimism and self-victimization that marks our delusional
responses to life's challenges.
And Jay responded in the comments:
I would love to help you out, Britt. But I am afraid
you reached the limit of my processor-- i.e., brain. I do not quite understand
what you are up to here, or what you are really asking. It seems to be
what kind of narrative structures indicate a sexy, readable, outrageous
story likely to get reactions.
If that is the case, I think there are
too many. Sure, we could probably lay down some predictable ones, (conflict-of-interest)
but for anything worth
knowing the unpredictable ones would be as valuable. But then some items
in your list are not story elements, as far as I can tell, but critics'
reactions and categorizations ("Smith is being made the scapegoat
for...")
Who, what, when, where, why and how ("the 5 w's and
an H," as journalism
textbooks put it) are "elements" in a simple news story, yes.
But what people often care about is another element: what it all means.
This
too is an element in the more sophisticated news accounts: who did (or
said) what, when was it done, where did it happen, why did it happen and
how did
it happen are supplemented with: "what does this mean for the outcome
of the New Hampshire primary?"
If I knew what I was asking, Jay, I'd be more useful. I don't
know journalism, but I know what gets my attention. Everything that makes
a story meaningful is
an attribute in the 5 <w>'s and the <how>. The RSS feeds that our blog
software generates automatically already tell us who the author is, headline,
etc., but there's a legitimate need
for the qualitative tags as an option, and without the requirement for an
overly determined standardized namespace to define all tags.
I'm going to be thinking of 3- 6 attributes for each of the
w's and the how tags. Perhaps there's just a few straightforward characteristics
of each that we'll recognize when we see them, but which are not obvious
yet.
1:33:33 AM 
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