Annie
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- Nov 22, 2003
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http://www.dailypundit.com/newarchives/006074.php#006074
November 25, 2005
CNN, MSM, And PJM: Analysis of a Blogstory
Now that my CNN phone call story has reached a conclusion, I'd like to take a moment to analyze it as an example of how the blogosphere handles a news story, as versus the mainstream old media approach, and the implications of both for emerging new media organizations like Pajamas Media, the blog aggregation venture with which I am associated as a contributor.
First, the history of the story: On Monday, 11/21/05, Dick Cheney gave a televised speech. For the purposes of this account, the content of that speech doesn't matter, but the fact that a large, black X appeared covering Cheney's face, accompanied by a hard-to-read legend superimposed over the crawl at the bottom of the screen, did. This naturally caused a controversy that was thorougly chewed over by the blogosphere as well as the mainstream media, and resulted in a fast apology from CNN accompanied by the explanation that the X was a technical glitch.
The MSM dropped that story as soon as CNN apologized and explained, although the blogosphere, with its vastly greater technical knowledge and capabilities continued to work, photoshopping and manipulating the images until the mysterious legend had been deciphered. The results of that work tended to confirm the "technical glitch" explanation, at least to my mind.
That normally would have been the end of the story. But on Tuesday afternoon I received a link pitch from Real Teen of the blog Right on the Right, advising me of a press release from an obscure marketing firm that had appeared on PR Newswire. I get dozens of link pitches every day. I try to check them all out and, if I think the pitch is worth it, I either follow up with my own report and give a hat tip, or I link the pitching blog directly.
As Real Teen put it in his pitch,
"This is wierd [sic], but if it's true, CNN is going to go down."
The press release seemed amateurish, poorly written, and included references to the "Trilateral Commission," a long-standing bugaboo of right-wing whackjobs. That would have been enough for me to brush it off, but the release included a very interesting detail in its rambling account of a call to CNN wherein CNN purportedly told the caller that the "Cheney X" was an intentional exercise of CNN's "freedom of speech," as well as telling the caller to "Tell your President to stop lying." The detail was that the caller had recorded the call.
I replied to Real Teen:
Dude, do you have any corroboration of this at all? Is there a link to this mysterious tape? I called the Team Hollywood contact number, and got voicemail. Does this thing even exist? I googled Team Hollywood and pretty much came up with zilch. The name is mostly used by a bunch of street ballers.
I'm interested, but I'd need more than this. This press release reads as if it were written by a conspiracy-minded high schooler.
While I waited for a response from Real Teen, I got a call-back from Preska Thomas to the message I'd left on Team Hollywood's voicemail (the marketing firm who issued the original press release). We talked for a while and she confirmed that she had a tape. I asked her if she would play it for me so I could record it. She agreed, and did so. I thought I was recording, but my machine didn't pick it up, so I had to call back. This time Kevin Finn returned my call and played the tape again. It was at that point that I wrote my original story. Before I posted it, though, I tried to get reax from CNN. Their website has no obvious way to contact them by phone, so I Googled them and found a main phone number via Google Maps, and called. I couldn't get an answer, so I went ahead and posted my copy of the recording of the phone call here at 5:14 PM PT on Tuesday evening, the 22nd.
I continued trying to get through to somebody human at CNN, and in the process heard the disclaimer (I didn't hear it every time I called) to the effect that the customer service rep who would take my call "didn't speak for CNN." I added that fact as an update to my original post shortly thereafter, and speculated that "it's a likely possibility" that whoever Team Hollywood spoke with was one of these call-takers, and hence not an official CNN spokesman stating an official CNN position (which I thought was out of the park anyway - even if CNN did hold such a position, they would never articulate it to the general public).
At this point it became obvious to me that the story was morphing somewhat. The Team Hollywood people were pushing it as proof that CNN was officially admitting bias and stating that the X on Cheney's face was intentional, not a glitch. But simply listening to the tape itself made it clear that wasn't the case. The CNN rep even says "I didn't see it," when talking about the X. In fact, it was obvious the call-taker knew nothing about the X incident in the first place, assumed the caller was bitching about some intentional special effect a technical director had used, and was winging his reply.
Once I had my story posted, I pitched it for links to Glenn Reynolds and Charles Johnson, and, shortly after, to Roger Simon for possible use by OSM/Pajamas Media (it was in the process of morphing back right about then). A bit later I also pitched it to Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom and Kevin Aylward of Wizbang.
Around this time I finally penetrated the phone-tree wall protecting CNN and reached one of their reps. I explained who I was and the sort of tape I had, and asked if I could speak to somebody who could comment on the tape for CNN. The rep (who sounded astonishingly like the same one in the phone call) told me to go ahead and play the tape. I turned on the speaker phone and started playing. After about sixty seconds the rep simply hung up. Though I continued trying, I wasn't able to get a human answer again that evening.
One of my readers did email me with a contact number at CNN. I called it, and the contact was out of the office (this was going into Thanksgiving, remember, which helped to complicate matters considerably), but provided a different number for fallback. I called that number, got voicemail, and left a message.
The first "big blog" to link the piece was Emperor Misha, and the hits started rolling in. I keep my comments on the main page of Daily Pundit, so they essentially become an integral part of the blog. Very few blogs do this, but I think it exploits the "news is a conversation in realtime" aspect of the blogosphere that the MSM can't even come close to duplicating. It quickly became obvious that readers were noticing the oddities of the original press release, as well as looking into the backgrounds of Preska Thomas and Kevin Finn themselves. Several unsupported charges were made that Team Hollywood was a band of "anarchist artists" who specialized in hoaxing conservatives, but those charges were never substantiated with any concrete evidence and, in fact, other commenters on LGF turned up the fact that Finn had received the Ronald Reagan Gold Medal, which is essentially a bone tossed to substantial donors to the Republican Party. This tended to mitigate the notion that Finn or his company were a pack of street anarchists intent on a hoax.
At this point Wizbang also linked the story, and the hit counter began to rock and roll. I gave up on trying to reach CNN, and turned to other things.
The next morning, LGF linked, PoliPundit picked it up, and finally Glenn Reynolds, though expressing reservations to me in email and on his blog, linked the piece. Roger Simon also linked it, as well privately expressing reservations in view of the caveat I'd posted about the call-taker "not speaking for CNN." By then it was getting about 3000 hits an hour, and a fair amount of play throughout the right-blogosphere. The left blogosphere pretty much ignored it, which is unsurprising.
In my mind the story had moved on from "exposing" an official admission of biased intent on the part of CNN vis the Cheney X, and had become the story of a caller to CNN running into a stream of anti-Bush, anti-war invective from a customer service person representing CNN, if not officially speaking for CNN. Admittedly this was a much smaller story, but still of interest. As I said in my own comment replies to liberal naysayers, would it have been treated as lightly had it been a caller with a recording of a Fox News service rep saying that John Kerry should have been jailed for treason, or Al Gore was part of the most corrupt administration in history?
Anyway, the "hoax" charges were getting louder and louder, and so I called the Team Hollywood people back around 8:30 AM on 11/23, got Preska Thomas's strong denial that the tape was a hoax, as well as her offer to have the tape authenticated, and posted that info as an update to the original story, along with the recording of our conversation.
Not much else occurred until around 6:00 PM that evening, when I got a callback from Laurie Goldberg, the Senior Vice President for Public Relations at CNN. We chatted for a few moments, and then she emailed me the official CNN statement on the incident, which confirmed that it had occurred, and that CNN had fired the service rep.
I immediately posted that as an update, which, to my mind, completed the story. It's still getting some play, but not much.
What are the implications, then?
Well, this account shows how the Blogosphere can handle a genuine news story. I received a tip, saw a story potential in the tip, and started working the story. I posted the story to my blog, pitched it to "higher ups," got cautious reactions but links from them, which provided much greater exposure, and increased feedback from my own commenters, as well as analysis from other blogs and their commenters. As new information came in, I tried to address it, and in large part managed to do so, either with updates, or in my own comments mixed in with other comments appearing below the post. In the end the story was confirmed and completed by reax from CNN itself.
The entire process occurred in realtime over a period of about 48 hours. What did I do differently from the MSM? I was transparent. I posted stuff as I got it. I didn't just tell you about the tape (after "editing" my report to suit my own purposes), I posted a copy of the tape itself, so you could make your own judgements. By the way, I was once a customer service rep for a Baby Bell, and I've done thousands of calls with complaining customers. This specialized knowledge, not available to most MSM journalists, provided me with a gut hunch the recording was genuine - another advantage of having journalists who actually have something other than experience at being journalists.
I also posted a recording of my conversation with Preska Thomas, so you could judge her denial of a hoax for yourself. Finally, my own tone in reporting was somewhat different than I'd use if I were writing for a MSM newspaper. I used the personal "I," eschewed the faux third-person "objective" voice, and kept in mind that as a blogger a lot of this story was riding on my own credibility. And I named my sources.
One last note: I'm not certain what Pajamas Media intends to be, but I do know this: If it intends to function at least in part as a news organization that will "syndicate" reports from its member blogs, it played no roll in my story, which was, by any definition, genuine original news reporting. Everything that happened, including the links from Instapundit, Little Green Footballs, Roger Simon, Polipundit, Wizbang, Emperor Mischa, and all the rest, all the feedback and input from my own commenters, as well as other blogs and their commenters, would have occurred without Pajamas Media existing at all. As far as I know, no mention of this story ever appeared on the PJM portal, which was instead occupied with "news" that consisted of "liveblogging" of Thanksgiving Day parades, Turkey Day recipes, and suchlike.
If PJM is ever to be anything other than a loose band of blogs aggregated for the purpose of marketing advertising en bloc, it needs to address what I think was a failure here - not because the story was mine, but because any such story would probably have been ignored. That's sclerotic thinking, the sort of thinking we get from the MSM. And even though we may eventually supplant much of the MSM, it won't be by duplicating the failures of the MSM.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention the tail of the story. After the CNN spokesman had emailed me the official statement, she called me back to make sure I'd gotten it. I told her I had, and that it was already posted on my website. She said, "Wow, that's fast."
No, that's the Blogosphere.
