First, the “news.” New York Times reporter James Risen, who has fought an order from the Obama administration to identify a source of his that made the CIA look bad, called the current president a unique First Amendment adversary in a column published this weekend.
How can [the president] use the Espionage Act to throw reporters and whistle-blowers in jail even as he defends the intelligence operatives who “tortured some folks,” and coddles his C.I.A. chief, John Brennan, who spied on the Senate and then lied to the senators he spied on about it?
“It’s hypocritical,” Risen said. “A lot of people still think this is some kind of game or signal or spin. They don’t want to believe that Obama wants to crack down on the press and whistle-blowers. But he does. He’s the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.”
This charge, that Obama is “the greatest enemy to press freedom,” has been shared plenty on social media — as of Monday afternoon, it was a “top trending” story on Facebook.
Second, the context. Risen made essentially the same comment during a conference some time ago.
Almost five months’ worth.
From the Poynter Institute, March 24, 148 days removed:
New York Times reporter James Risen, who is fighting an order that he testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer accused of leaking information to him, opened the conference earlier by saying the Obama administration is “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.” The administration wants to “narrow the field of national security reporting,” Risen said, to “create a path for accepted reporting.” [Any one] journalist who exceeds those parameters, Risen said, “will be punished.”
The comment was circulated widely then. The Poynter story garnered 1,600 Facebook likes, and The Daily Caller, which specializes in speedily reporting such shock quotations, featured Risen’s assertion in a brief article that attracted its share of Facebook and Twitter love, itself:
Additionally, prominent Google search results show that FOX News, The Blaze and Mediaite reported the comment at the time, and the Washington Times and Washington Post both published the comment in pieces about Risen.
All of this is to say that Risen’s statement in Dowd’s column, which he made verbatim almost half a year ago and was reported by widely read outlets, is not news. News is supposed to be timely, or at least fresh. This comment, taken alone, is neither — it is rather the exemplar of old news. That the web has treated it differently has implications.
Stories that trend on social media are the equivalent of articles that receive column inches on the front page of the newspaper, and they serve the same daily function: to “drive the conversation.” What that means for online media is that they are rewarded for covering the day’s trending stories. By just mentioning James Risen’s name and his five-month-old quotation in the headline of this piece, we expose ourselves to a wider audience than the one we would garner from non-trending news — news is that is actually news, even.
This distracts from journalism’s mission. Instead of being encouraged to seek out or produce new information, the Internet is encouraged to regurgitate what is redundant; instead of being ignored because it is not new, news from March is an A1 story in August.
News is Dowd’s column: an interview with a harried reporter who provides perspective on an administration that intimidates authors of unflattering scoops but praises journalists and purports to support transparency when politically expedient. What is not “news” is a single quotation from 150 days ago repeated in that piece, which no matter how sexy, no matter how clickable, is only a recycled headline.
It’s a frontpage story because of a failure of news judgment and a system that rewards shares and “likes” irrespective of context. It’s how YouTube videos from 2012 can go viral in an instant two years later. Sometimes this is good, such as when an enterprising reporter unearths an obscure clip that is relevant to a political campaign. Sometimes it is trifling, such as when an ace headline writer repackages a cute puppy video with an irresistible hook. Sometimes it is bad, such as when a repeated line is treated as new, and it takes its place as news of the day. All times it is the Internet: often a popularity contest, not exactly a meritocracy.
