The Authority of a Spent Teabag

THE GATEKEEPERS SMELL YOU. They smell your stink, your mobsweat, your hunger for truth, your disdain for polish and kickback and they fear you. They fear for their own future and all that once was so pristine and in the green zone of yesterday’s News. But do they fear mostly for their cash or for the proliferation of Truth?

I read the AP’s recent load of lingual redirect which details its plans to strike back at the Dangerously Undammed and Uncontrolled flow information as well as throw a wrench into the link-hierarchy of the Internet and it pissed me right off. Not so much because I don’t understand their fear and their desire to protect their positions and cash flow, but because the page is so disingenuous as to utterly skirt around every single issue raised and replace the concern with a Rumsfeldian reframe that does nothing to answer, and everything to resist doing as much.

It begins

The Associated Press is a not-for-profit news cooperative that spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year gathering and sharing news of public interest from around the world. Licensing of this content by our members is critical to support our news operations. In the new digital content economy, however, a significant amount of AP news and news from AP members is used without permission or fair compensation. This situation has serious consequences: it dilutes the value of news for licensors and advertisers; it fragments and disperses content so widely that consumers end up relying on fragmented coverage to get their news despite the availability of comprehensive and authoritative coverage on a 24-hour basis.

There are so many ways to tear this page apart, but first let me just let me bold a few words. Because I think they highlight the problem AP is having more accurately than all the tongue-swishing the page does.

The Associated Press is a not-for-profit news cooperative that spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year gathering and sharing news of public interest from around the world. Licensing of this content by our members is critical to support our news operations. In the new digital content economy, however, a significant amount of AP news and news from AP members is used without permission or fair compensation. This situation has serious consequences: it dilutes the value of news for licensors and advertisers; it fragments and disperses content so widely that consumers end up relying on fragmented coverage to get their news despite the availability of comprehensive and authoritative coverage on a 24-hour basis.

Let’s just begin there. The new news model has outpaced you. The Internet and technology in general now allows the PEOPLE to talk to themselves, to become the media themselves, to dissect reporting and either support it or destroy it with other information, and this is all done in the service of truth, not in stealing your income. The one-way conversation where news is influenced and then decided in distant offices and absorbed by the People, is over. The AP will either adjust to the new way, or become greatly weakened and in fact adversarial to the new way. Now, I’ve yet to read the details on these plans or know exactly what specifics lie behind these broad strokes of rationalization and warning, so I can’t be sure what path their choice belongs. I am not saying bloggers can fly to Iraq and airdrop themselves into war zones, but I am saying that I doubt bloggers would have let us get there in the first place, whereas the AP, well. Did.

The tone I get from reading this page is decidedly…stodgy. I am tempted to butt in every other sentence just to clear my head and the air from the oh-so-honeyed semantic shtick they deploy. And can we talk about this word “authoritative” that rears up its irony-painted head nine times on the AP’s page? We should, because it’s used here to justify everything. It’s used to paint their actions from greedy/fearful/bossy with a coat of “benevolent” and then highly glossed with a thin veneer of “proper.”

But…why are AP news sources and preferred/paid outlets so damn Authoritative™? What makes them an automatic authority over some person with a blog? When a crisis hits a town or a nation or a state, is somebody from outside more authoritative a source than someone who lives in that town, has for years, knows the people, knows the history as one would live it and who happens to write a blog with perhaps only 25 readers? Why would news outlets want to shove that source into the shadows while yanking the spotlight back to themselves? They claim that the way news dispersion is changing, “it dilutes the value of news for licensors and advertisers,” but that “value” they speak of is CASH. When to the People, the value of news is reliable information from varied sources. To the people, the only value of News is Truth. And wasn’t the choice of the former idea of Value over the latter what got us in so much of today’s mess already?

When consumers look for news today on search engines, they often get directed in a random fashion to a wide variety of news sources, blogs and other Web pages. Searches on breaking news topics such as floods, earthquakes and shootings don’t dependably produce results from authoritative local news sources, and often not even to those media responsible for producing the news stories. AP will work with its member newspapers, broadcasters and other media to create a set of search-optimized pages that will guide users to the most timely, authoritative coverage related to their searches[.]

That’s two times they had to drop down this worth “authoritative” in just one paragraph.

And I love this “work with” phrase. (Three times that exact phrase appears and in the AP’s context seems to mean “force,” “instruct” or “prosecute,” more or less.)

I don’t know. To me, authority is garnered by more than a big puffed out chest or fat wallet. To me it is something else entirely. (Something of which blogs have shown the world they have much more lately than the formal PRESS.) And most of what I get from the AP on this page is a bunch of chest puffery and coin jangling.

Stuff like Safeguarding investments to gather and share news is critical to a democratic society is written, okay, quite “authoritatively,” and  yet it sets up a false dichotomy. AP ≠ “News” to the extent that there is no NEWS without AP! Many bigger shifts in our culture and our media have and are going on than a rejiggling of power in journalism. And you have to love this tone of panic and armageddon here, this “edge of civilization” thing they do. The presupposed arrogance in the logic is amusing. They talk of the millions they spend…and to what end? How many US citizens know about Hutto Prison and the children who suffer there? How many know of Reagan’s Project X? How many were warned how much fudging and fakery and active agenda had to be pumped into the facts pre-Iraq to make it feel at all that there was some kind of emergency that required our bombs?

Listen. We lived through almost a decade where the MSM was engaged in a constant teabaggery swarm under George W. Bush and helped sell us over a million bodybags and our “democratic society” (let’s not even go there right now) is still standing.

I don’t know. It just seems to me that so many agents and forces and groups, after letting the nation down, no strike that, after colluding with the corporate war machine for almost a decade in the most blatant and destructive manner possible, want to suddenly stand up for principles they sold down the river to much detriment and suffering. We have the Right suddenly up in arms about “civil liberties” and “taxation” fairness and the Unitary Executive type outrage, and we now have the AP telling us how much we need their integrity. The irony smells like sulphur. Or maybe that stink is the bodybags again.

10. Is AP trying to crack down on what many feel is fair use of news snippets?
As a newsgathering organization, AP understands the importance of fair use. Fair use is a complex analysis done on a case-by-case basis. It defies easy generalization. The AP initiative is not about this; it is about making it easier for consumer to access and engage with news content in more robust ways.

Again, Rummy would be proud. Let me try. “Do sites have the right under Fair Use to grab snippets of our News? Probably. Is Fair Use something we can agree on quickly and easily? No. Is this about Fair Use? No. This is about making it easier for you to engage with news content. In a more robust way!”

It’s a nice move, but you wouldn’t make it two minutes in a debate using this type of trick. It’s not “about this.” Do you know why they are working so hard to convince everyone “its’ not about this”? Because if it’s “about this,” they have no page of FAQ at all. As I joked on Twitter the other day, “Ah, honey, but it’s not about you cooking all the time for me, it’s about my hunger that keeps returning.”

11. Is this aimed at Google? At bloggers?
No. It is not aimed at any one company or Web site. We are eager to work with everyone to achieve a fair solution.

Didja like that move? Swift, eh? Or…not really. Another nonanswer. I think the page is really nothing but a propaganda piece dressed up as an FAQ. How darling. Who cares who it’s “aimed at”? That’s not something that can really be answered, could easily be argued forever, would never be answered so blatantly even if this move were initiated in response to the AP’s feeling that their power is being drained by both Google and Bloggers. And they could easily be “aiming at” bloggers AND Google and if so (which is the case of course), the answer “No, this is not aimed at any one company or web site” remains true, doesn’t it?

The dishonesty in this FAQ is an insult to any thinking person. And only sparks my interest deeper as to what they are up to. It’s damn clever and small of them, I think.

Oye, if they want to make a little box on the right of Google Search that shows News returns, fine. If they want to highlight news returns red or blue or purple, fine. Personally I don’t get their problem, as Google has two separate pages/searches. News and Web. Is that not good enough for the AP? And how do they resolve this conflict in logic that occurs when they claim they need to be higher on Google searches, but at the same time don’t want Google to have the right to use their snippets in searches?

Yeah. They can spend millions and millions and yet write a page that has so many holes in it you’d think they got it at a flea market for 15¢. Anyway, they aren’t going to stop millions of bloggers from quoting snippets, we know that. So I’m not sure what the plan is. Especially since if you cut Google and Blogs out of using snippets to point people to news items, who is going to be seeing your fine reporting? A lot less people, that’s for sure.

Regardless, let’s end with this unrelated news item:

The Washington Post has had plenty of scoops over the years. But over the weekend, the paper of Woodward and Bernstein lost out to a previously unknown website on a warm and fuzzy White House exclusive.

Pictures of the Obama family’s new dog were unveiled not by the Post, which says it had been promised the first look at the presidential pooch, but on a site called http://firstdogcharlie.com.

And then when you’re done, sing this:

“Don’t hate the media, become the media.”

—Jello Biafra

Today, the First Dog. Tomorrow, the world!