WikiTribune has a vacancy for our next “photographer-in-residence” based in London to work with the team and set our photographic look and feel.

We intend this to be a three-month appointment — with potential to roll over — for an ambitious and talented photographer. The idea is to bring in someone early in their career or who might not otherwise get an opportunity to work on a new media project like WikiTribune.

Our first photographer-in-residence was Francis Augusto who has had assignments to document stories, produce his own photography essays and work alongside feature writers to produce combined text-and-image pieces. Francis has also written a guide for the team on images for the site.

“Working at WikiTribune has been brilliant learning, with experiences and responsibilities that have fundamentally enabled me to develop. The role has so much scope to grow and be instrumental in the rise of WikiTribune and its visual position in news,” Francis said when I asked him today.

It is a position comparable to a paid internship and is currently 21-hours a week. There is some flexibility on hours depending on the experience of the successful candidate and the photographic needs of the site. It’s likely the next appointment will start from early December with a handover with Francis.

WikiTribune has a diversity statement on the site which will also be applied to the recruitment process.

If you’re interested please send a CV/resume plus a one-page statement on what you’d bring to the job and some links to or examples of your work to: jobs@wikitribune.com

Catalonia defiant against Madrid’s threat of direct rule

By George Engels, WikiTribune

Spain’s most pressing political crisis since its rocky transition to a democracy 40 years ago entered a new phase after Madrid laid out plans to impose direct rule over the semi-autonomous region of Catalonia. In Barcelona, leaders of the independence movement said any attempt at central control would be ignored and opposed.

On October 21, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy announced his government’s plan to temporarily dissolve Catalonia’s autonomy by applying Article 155 (link in Spanish) of Spain’s constitution, a first in the country’s history since the death of fascist dictator General Francisco Franco.

But elected politicians in Catalonia responded defiantly. The president of the regional government, the Generalitat, Carles Puigdemont, said his parliament would debate Madrid’s move, but declared it “the worst attack against the institutions and the people of Catalonia since the military dictatorship of Francisco Franco. On BBC radio, the region’s foreign affairs minister said officials would reject direction from Madrid.

“It’s not that we will refuse (orders). It is not a personal decision. It is a seven million-person decision,” Raul Romeva told the Today programme.

Speaking at a press conference after a two-hour meeting with his Cabinet on Saturday, Rajoy said the decision was taken to “protect the general interest of the nation”, Spanish newspaper El Mundo reported.

The prime minister intends to sack Puigdemont, and his executive leadership, place the region’s police force, public media and finances under Madrid’s control, and temporarily curb the Catalan parliament’s powers until regional elections are held sometime in the next six months.

It is now up to the Senate to decide whether to authorize the measures proposed by the prime minister (link to El Mundo in Spanish). But the upper house, which is controlled by Rajoy’s Popular Party (PP), is widely expected to ratify his decision in a session set for October 27.

Calm before protesters react

As Rajoy spoke, ordinary people in the streets of Barcelona took little notice of the potentially momentous news. People sat outside cafes eating lunch, parents took their children to the park, and tourists ambled through the city center.

But only a few hours earlier, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators congregated on the Passeig de Gracia — one of Barcelona’s main thoroughfares — to protest Madrid’s plan and demand the release of two imprisoned Catalan independence leaders.

Protesters waved the separatist Estelada flag, chanted “independence” and “freedom”, and held up “Free [the] Jordis!” signs distributed by pro-independence volunteers.

Jordi Sanchez of Asamblea Nacional Catalana (ANC) and Jordi Cuixart of the Omnium Cultural organization were jailed last week by Spain’s National Court. The pair are being investigated for alleged crimes of sedition as this piece from The Washington Post details. If found guilty, they face up to 15 years in prison.

Joan Fabregat Badia, 84, attended the demonstration in his wheelchair. He told WikiTribune he came to express his solidarity with the two imprisoned separatist leaders and Catalonian independence.

“They’re not delinquents, they’re not politicians, they’re normal people — like me,” he said.

Mercè Esteve, 45, brought her whole family to protest. She told WikiTribune: “The only thing Puigdemont’s government can do is attend to what the [Catalan] people is asking, the popular mandate. No other politician does that.”

Not all want independence

But not all Catalans are against Rajoy’s plans. Francisco Oya, 60, said he was totally in favor of Spain applying Article 155: “Not only am I in favor, but I also think that it should have been applied much earlier. We wouldn’t be in this situation had it been applied before.”

On October 1, Catalonia held an independence referendum that Spain’s Constitutional Court had ruled illegal. Although 90 percent of voters backed independence, the total turnout was 42 percent. Many who stayed at home are thought to have done so to boycott the event. The referendum was also marred by police repression, which left hundreds of people injured, as well as by voting irregularities.

The Catalan leadership condemned Madrid’s actions. Carmen Forcadell, the president of the region’s parliament, strongly criticized the Spanish government’s refusal to “dialogue” with separatist leaders and said Rajoy’s plans amount to a “de facto coup d’état”.

Carles Puigdemont struck a defiant tone in his defense of Catalan independence and said the region would not accept direct rule.

“The Catalan institutions and the people of Catalonia cannot accept this attack”, the regional president said. “With the support of the Socialist Party and Ciudadanos, [Rajoy] has embarked on the worst attack on Catalonia’s institutions and the Catalan people since the decrees of the military dictator Francisco Franco”.

Franco’s long shadow

The memory of General Francisco Franco’s dictatorship casts a particularly long shadow in Catalonia. The region was a bastion of doomed Republican resistance during the country’s civil war (1936–1939) and had its language and many of its traditions forcibly suppressed by Franco, who ruled until his death in 1975.

Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE) and Ciudadanos, the country’s second and fourth largest parties, support Rajoy in his bid to apply Article 155. PSOE leader Pedro Sánchez said: “The PP has an idea of Spain that is totally different to ours, but [the notion of] territorial integrity unites us both”.

Puigdemont also appealed to European Union (EU) citizens. “If European foundational values are at risk in Catalonia, they will also be at risk in Europe,” said Puigdemont. “Democratically deciding the future of a nation is not a crime.”

But the President of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani, rebuffed Puigdemont’s plea at an event organised by Italian newspaper Il Foglio on October 22.

“No European country will recognise Catalonia’s independence,” said Tajani. The EU official added that the crisis is “not about [Catalan] autonomy, but a proclamation of independence that is in contempt of the rule of law and against the Spanish Constitution.”

WikiTribune in Barcelona was originally published in WikiTribune on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

WikiTribune reporter Jack Barton picked up a nice lead on a story which I thought I’d share with you all because it has a shelf-life that’ll be over before we launch, very shortly. It also ran in the clever new pop-up newspaper in the UK, The New European today — our first partnership with a publisher. We’ll welcome feedback on the story below and we’ll be out soon with the real site.

Médecins Sans Frontières asks troubled PR guru Lord Bell to change new firm’s name

By Jack Barton

International aid group Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) — or Doctors Without Borders — has asked Britain’s best known and most controversial public relations expert to change the name of his new firm, saying it could put its humanitarian work and staff at risk.

Lord Bell, formerly Tim Bell, is famous as the marketing brain behind Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Off the back of that he created a worldwide network which only last month collapsed in a scandal over influence-peddling and corruption in South Africa — a crisis he insists had nothing to do with him and everything to do with executives who took over the firm.

Last year he launched Sans Frontières Associates as a communications and advisory consultancy as he disconnected himself from his eponymous firm, Bell Pottinger. That firm had, over time, developed a reputation for advising controversial clients such as the authoritarian government of Belarus. However, it effectively fell apart when it was ejected on September 4 from the UK’s public relations industry body over an advertising campaign in South Africa deemed to be racially inflammatory.

Médecins Sans Frontières has now written to Bell requesting he change the name of the new firm.

“We are concerned that this choice of name could cause confusion between our two organizations, with the potential to put MSF’s work and staff at risk as a result,” Vickie Hawkins, executive director of MSF UK, said in a statement sent to WikiTribune. “MSF’s reputation as an independent, impartial organisation is crucial to our ability to deliver medical aid around the world to those who need it the most,” she added.

PR without borders

The Sans Frontières phrase — meaning Without Borders — is used by several organizations in the civil society world, including the Paris-based freedom-of-speech group Reporters Sans Frontières or Reporters Without Borders. Médecins Sans Frontières is the most famous group associated with the concept and was founded by former French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner to offer medical services in the world’s most dangerous places.

“It is of utmost importance for MSF to safeguard clear identification worldwide and avoid potential risks of confusion between MSF and other groups who may not share the same values and respect the same code of conduct,” the MSF letter — shared with WikiTribune — said.

Bell told WikiTribune he has “no intention” to change the name of Sans Frontières Associates.

“Hundreds of companies use ‘Sans Frontières’ in their names. I’ve been using it for 15 years and it’s never caused any problems,” he said, pointing out that he had used the phrase for a division of Bell Pottinger.

Bell Pottinger plunged into crisis — and financial administration in September — after South African investigative journalists exposed its role in a social-media campaign which used racially inflammatory slogans as part of a program to support the economic interests of the controversial Gupta family which is close to President Jacob Zuma. The details of the case are in this report from the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ).

According to South Africa’s opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), Bell Pottinger’s ad campaign in support of Zuma — with slogans including “#whitemonopolycapital” — was aimed at “exploiting racial tensions.” The UK’s public relations industry body — the PRCA — stripped Bell Pottinger of membership on September, triggering a chain reaction that led to the firm going into administration, a form of bankruptcy under British commercial law.

Bell was involved in securing the South African contract but has tried to distance himself from the entire affair, accusing others at the firm of wrecking the business he created.

PR vultures circle

“I resigned from the company in August last year, published my resignation and I said one of the reasons I was leaving was because of the Gupta account,” Bell said in a television interview on the BBC. The interview instantly became a masterclass in how not to handle a public relations crisis, creating a delicious moment of schadenfreude for his many enemies.

When asked about the crisis engulfing his old firm, Bell replied to the BBC interviewer: “I think it can best be summed up by Walter Scott: what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”

Médecins Sans Frontières — which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999 — said that the aid group’s request for Bell to drop the similar name was not “in any way questioning the quality of the work conducted by your group and its members.”

When Bell left his long-term firm to launch Sans Frontières Associates last year, he brought partner Jonathan Lehrle with him. Lehrle became Sans Frontières Associates’ new company’s managing director in January. In total, six of the eight advisors profiled on the Sans Frontières Associates website previously worked at Bell Pottinger.

WikiTribune taster story #2: PR Sans Frontieres — or not was originally published in WikiTribune on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As the Global Editors Network 7th annual conference, the GEN Summit in Vienna is well under way, I thought it might be valuable to publish that extract on the GEN Medium publication to provoke discussion and point a wider audience to the report. All these issues are part of the Summit agenda with speakers including the Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron, Timothy Garton Ash, the Professor of European Studies at Oxford University and Amy Webb, Founder of the Future Today Institute. All sessions are available for replay here.

I am grateful for the work of Andy Kaltenbrunner of Medienhaus Wien and Daniela Kraus of FJUM for allowing me to reproduce this section of the report and for their work in assembling such a powerful statement on the current state of the media and its outlook. You can download a larger extract of the report from the Medienhaus Wien site. The full report will be published at the GEN Summit in Vienna next week.

Here are some bullet points from my commentary:

• The threat to basic tenets of journalism worldwide from the behaviour of Donald Trump and his administration is real
• Innovation is happening in collaboration, technology, fact-checking
• Technology platforms are waking up to their editorial responsibilities and immense power as communicators
• Fake news is as much a creation of politicians as it is a genuine phenomenon and media does have to re-establish trust with readers.

Here’s the piece in full:

Confrontation Drives Innovation and Tests Strength

An unprecedented confrontation between the leader of the free world and the global mainstream media is calling into question some of the basic tenets of the role of the fourth estate in civil society.

The deliberate undermining of trust and confidence in the media by the president of the United States is forcing journalists and publishers to reconsider their relationship to audiences and the methods by which they gather and deliver information.

It is sadly ironic that the greatest threat to press freedom in its theoretical home — the United States — comes at a time when decades of shrinkage in traditional advertising and subscription models have left many publishers weaker than ever financially.

It is no accident that the instinctive corporate power broker Donald Trump repeatedly calls the New York Times “failing” and attacks one of its shareholders, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. This is as much an attack on the diminished corporate power of media as it is against what the media might actually publish each day.

It is also why Trump has effectively held hostage the AT&T bid for Time Warner, using his disquiet at reporting by CNN, to see if he can none-too-discreetly influence the tone of the world’s most important television news outlet through its prospective new owner.

Enemy fights back

In public, the president’s description of the media as “the enemy of the American people”, seeks to delegitimise journalism itself. And if you think this is just a U.S. problem, think again. Cambodian strongman Hun Sen used Trump’s outburst as justification for his own crack down saying: “Donald Trump understands that they are an anarchic group.”

Trump is just the tip of the spear of an outright attack on the role of media in civil society worldwide. Other factors at work are the steady erosion of trust among the audience — which may be almost impossible to regain once it is lost — and the huge drift in attention to social media platforms and algorithmically-defined news sources, which vacuum up and aggregate hundreds of news brands into an amorphous brand-eroding stream of information.

Against the combination of political, economic and technological threats it is arguable that innovation has accelerated over the past 12 months as media companies, journalistic collectives, some thinking politicians and technology firms realise what is at stake.

Innovation worth mentioning in this vein could include:

• The Trust Project, led by the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics atSanta Clara University in Silicon Valley and backed by Google, a wide range of media outlets and media philanthropist Craig Newmark. It is going to the heart of the lack of trust and finding incremental changes to reporting methods, transparency and areas like fact-checking in an attempt to restore trust.
• The Washington Post, under new owner Jeff Bezos, is quietly revolutionising its underlying technologies, combining news metrics with news judgment to create new tools to get ahead of stories and detect public sentiment. It’s also turning itself into a technology vendor, offering its world-class content management system to others.
• Norwegian publishers have joined forces to create Faktisk, a new combined fact-checking standalone operation to use reporting methods to confront the likelihood of “fake news” and the usual misleading claims ahead of the Norwegian election. It is a great example of news groups collaborating without being directed by governments, which is the way the fake news issue is playing out in some other European countries.
• Collaboration was the big news of 2016 with the unprecedented work of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in coordinating the analysis, dissemination and publication of the Panama Papers. We can expect to see many more of these large and small collaborations, including entirely new arrangements such as the BBC in the UK working with local newspapers to defend home town journalism.
• Business models are also evolving with substantial input to journalism from philanthropic groups — from the Rockefeller Foundation supporting reporting on urban issues in The Guardian to multi-million dollar grants to investigative news outlets and fact-checking groups by U.S. businessmen Pierre Omidyar and Craig Newmark and others. Not to mention crowdsourced and member-funded projects like The Correspondent in the Netherlands and German investigative group Correctiv.
• Platforms, led by Google with Facebook now following it into this area, are also taking their responsibilities more seriously. Google has long supported mainstream and independent journalism and has invested in the Digital News Initiative to create a fund to support innovation in Europe. Yes, there is a public relations dimension to this, but it is clearly constructive. Facebook is also realising its own importance while it has yet to accept the responsibilities that come with being a publisher.
• Multi-talented newsrooms: one of the key innovations which has crept in over time but which, if you look at it over a decade, is remarkable, is the way newsrooms have retooled themselves. VG newspaper in Norway is now the primary source of breaking news in that market, The New York Times is now a leading video source, The New Yorker does podcasting, daily reporting and documentary films. Almost all newsrooms operate at a speed that was once the preserve of financial news agencies like Bloomberg and Reuters.

That record of historic and current innovation should stand the news industry in good stead (though none fully deal with the decline in the advertising business model, which is the subject of a different commentary).

However, when the greatest source of “fake news” is a president who has himself innovated and disintermediated the traditional role of the media, we have to stay on our toes and keep competitive with rivals and with our subjects.

Peter Bale, President, The Global Editors Network

About Peter Bale

Peter Bale is the President of GEN. He was until recently the CEO OF the Center for Public Integrity, a global nonprofit investigative journalism organisation based in Washington, DC. He joined the Center after three years at CNN International where he ran CNN.com and other digital products outside of the United States. The International edition of the CNN site recorded double-digit growth in users, engagement and revenue during his tenure heading teams in Atlanta, London, Dubai and Hong Kong.

How to deal with the journalism challenges of tomorrow? Here are some clues was originally published in Global Editors Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Now the director of Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts has come up with three additional proposed laws to bring greater humanity to the interaction between people and robotics. Coinciding with an astounding exhibition on robotics at the MAK, Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, has published the new rules to supplement the foundations of the Asimov “laws”.

Journalists and media figures attending the Global Editors Network annual conference, the GEN Summit saw the “Hello Robot” exhibition which embodies the technology and innovation inherent in the GEN approach to the challenges of modern journalism.

The additional “laws” Thun-Hohenstein has proposed are:
1. Intelligent robots must serve the common good of humanity and help us humans to lead an ecologically, socially, culturally, and economically sustainable life.

2. Intelligent robots may replace human labor only to the extent that this is compatible with humans leading a meaningful life of dignity, culture, and creative self-realization — except where this Rule conflicts with Rule 1. (Note: A conflict with Rule 1 would occur if, for instance, respect for human labor were effectively to prevent intelligent robots from serving the common good of humanity and from helping us humans to lead an ecologically, socially, culturally, and economically sustainable life; this proviso deliberately puts pressure on us humans to live such a life.)

3. Intelligent robots must be programmed to be cooperative self learning machines and to always function cooperatively — except where this Rule conflicts with Rules 1 or 2.

And a reminder of those original Asimov rules:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. More on Wikipedia.

New laws of robotics suggested by Austrian curator was originally published in Global Editors Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We talk to its former director general, Wadah Khanfar, about what’s really happening and why a TV station is at the center of a crisis pushing the Gulf states and Iran into dangerous territory.

Emboldened by Donald Trump a coalition collection of dictators and monarchs has launched an attack on the one source of Arab-owned independent information in the region, knowing few will object — certainly not Washington. Even even under moderate leaders the US has had an ambiguous relationship with the Qatar-funded television station, initially praising and then attacking its journalism and influence.

Khanfar headed Al Jazeera and was its guiding editorial leader, creating a successful and influential broadcaster in a region where sycophancy and conspiracy theories are what pass for news.

We asked Khanfar, a member of the board of the Global Editors Network, a set of questions, focusing on the Al Jazeera element of the diplomatic, economic and military pressure on Qatar.

Peter Bale: How big a factor do you believe anger at Al Jazeera is part of the Saudi-led initiative against Qatar?

Wadah Khanfar: It is very clear that the current crisis emanates as an extension of continuous fear of Al Jazeera, due to the independent and objective journalism it practices in the Arab world. Al Jazeera transformed Arab media from being natural extensions of intelligence and security agencies to independent sectors whose values were transparency, accountability and democracy. This is exactly what so many Arab regimes fear.

Al Jazeera Arabic has always been a different product with a different tone from AJ English. Can it say that it has reported the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia and Egypt fairly over the past few years or are there regrets about the balance or fairness of coverage?

Al Jazeera Arabic channel’s editorial policy towards Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf countries has been objective but not aggressive over the last few years. The major issue for the governments in the Gulf region is Al Jazeera’s coverage of Egypt, Libya and pro-Arab Spring forces. I view the current dispute as a continuation of the fallout from Al Jazeera’s coverage of the Arab Spring and its aftermath. The Government of Qatar didn’t share or endorse the policies of fellow Gulf countries to support counter revolutionary forces, which infuriated them, and in turn the Trump administration provided the opportunity for these Gulf states to settle their accounts with Doha and by extension Al Jazeera.

How significant do you believe the influence or permission of Donald Trump for this sort of action was and how does it fit in to his approach to human rights and freedom of the press issues outside the US?

Trump has been rewarded in Riyadh, he was welcomed by a huge reception and given a generous financial package of $480 billion in investment. This was a timely rescue package for a president that faced trouble back home. He gave his blessing to the Saudis and the Emiratis, thereby fulfilling their desire to redraw a new order in the region as they see fit. It is evident that this is a personal endorsement of Trump to regional monarchs’ and is not as a result of consensus within Washington DC. It is also clear from the onset, due to the various contradicting messages coming out of the different departments within the administration, that this is not part of coherent US policy towards the region. The current Administration is conducting foreign policy on a transactional basis that excludes values or even long term American interest. This is a short sighted and shallow approach, as it does not provide stability to an already troubled Middle East nor provide the sought security for the United States.

Why now and why Qatar? Given the history of Wahhabi support for extreme interpretations of Islam and the long-standing Saudi connections with Al Qaeda this seems a twisted logic at the very least to accuse Qatar of supporting extremism.

Accusing Qatar of supporting terrorism is the pretext of this campaign. Fighting terrorism is a common tool in the region, which they use to punish anyone they disagree with. Regimes in the region know that the Western approach to the Arab and Islamic world is centred around fighting terrorism; and is thereby a far easier pretext to justify their actions. The sad aspect of the Western approach is that it has eliminated the word democracy from its lexicon in relation to the Middle East, whilst hoping for stability and security.

The authoritarian regimes are comfortable with their current American approach, and now we are officially back to the pre-Arab Spring era. This is a resumption of an old fight: drying all the fountains of independent conscience in preparation for restoration of the old order in the Middle East. This time, however, the old order has tough new security powers, created by the war on terror and fuelled by support of a president who has jettisoned all US values.

You have talked about this finally stifling the sentiment of the Arab Spring? Do you see a direct connection between the destruction of political Islam in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the increase in extremism and worldwide support for ISIS?

The Muslim Brotherhood as movement was not perfect, they were immature in politics and may have made some major mistakes, but the big picture here is the following:

Peaceful transformation to democracy was the dream of Arab youth and the Arab Spring gave them a rare opportunity to do just that, but counter revolutionary measures have murdered this hope. The path to peaceful reform is now closed, youth are angry and desperate, and the Arab Spring has been hijacked by generals who are supported by wealthy Gulf states. Therefore, we are now heading towards a much more extreme and radical reality.

The fact is that dictatorial and corrupt regimes were the incubators of extremism in the region. Decades of suppressing liberties and violating human rights provided the oxygen for jihadi groups. While these regimes flouted the rule of law, they still enjoyed US support. As a result, the Middle East continues to be engulfed by conflicts and instability.

What do you think the outcome of this will be for Al Jazeera? When?

Any settlement to the current crisis may take several negotiations and can last up to a few months or even longer. However, whatever the outcome of these negotiations, it will not impact Al Jazeera’s editorial policies. This is merely another attempt to undermine Al Jazeera’s integrity but it will not succeed. The State of Qatar values the regional & global status of Al Jazeera, so I do not expect Qatar to succumb to such pressures.

Further reading:

• The blockade of Qatar is a move against the values of the Arab spring. The Guardian, an opinion piece by Wadah Khanfar
• Saudi Arabia is playing a dangerous game with Qatar. Financial Times $$.
• Arab powers sever Qatar ties, citing support for militants. Reuters
• The Middle East’s Crisis Factory. Foreign Policy
• Qatari crisis may destroy what little order remains in the Middle East. Middle East Eye
• Al Jazeera’s Future in Peril Amid Rising Mideast Tensions. Hollywood Reporter
• Inside Al Jazeera. Alternet, 2002
• Egypt, Qatar and the battle over Al Jazeera that has landed three journalists in jail. The Conversation, 2014.
• What the Muslim World Is Watching. New York Times Magazine, 2001.

Peter Bale is the president of the Global Editors Network (GEN), the leading association of international newsroom leaders dedicated to sustainability and innovation in journalism. GEN will hold its seventh summit in Vienna from June 21. Wadah Kanfar is now the president of Al Sharq Forum think tank.

Silencing Al Jazeera is focus of Qatar crisis was originally published in Global Editors Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Michael Wolff is a born reporter, driven to dig deep and to find out what makes his subjects tick and to disclose it. He loves gossip and unlike many modern reporters publishes what he hears, often with relish and a studied distance from his subjects, many times irritating the rich and famous.

He stands apart from the media circus, often bringing him into conflict with more staid (he would say self-righteous) members of the U.S. media establishment. Nowhere has this studied independence been more apparent than in his criticism of the U.S. media’s frenzy on the candidacy and ultimately the presidency of Donald Trump.

Wolff has conspicuously given Trump the time of day, recognised the remarkable story that was the campaign and the weird and compelling nature of the Trump presidency so far. Far from the expressions of disdain and horror among his colleagues and rivals, Wolff has reported on Trump with fairness and fascination in equal measure. No punches are pulled on the craziness but there is an even-handedness and perspective missing from some of the shrill editorialising in the rest of the U.S. media. (Many will argue Trump doesn’t deserve fairness but that is another story.)

Wolff argues that the U.S. media, in particular the New York Times, the New Yorker and the Washington Post are, in effect, playing to the tune of Trump and his rat-catcher-in-chief Steve Bannon, in questioning the president’s suitability and the decision of millions of U.S. voters.

He answered my questions in writing so each of his responses stands alone and unquestioned further at this point. That’ll come when he’s on stage in Vienna. As someone who has fearlessly bitten the hand of Rupert Murdoch and others I guarantee it will be entertaining but also informed: not fake news but calling out the fakes of the news business.

His most recent book is “Television is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age” — reviewed here. Right now he is working on a book about…Donald Trump.

Peter Bale: Michael, you’ve been highly critical of US reporters for putting themselves into a constant debate with Trump and his people — fact-checking him in real-time — isn’t that what they are there to do?

Michael Wolff: I have no problem with fact checking. But if you check facts and miss the story that’s certainly counter-productive. If the story is that he’s a hypester and a liar then that’s okay. But if the story is that he’s transforming or anyway jumping up and down on most operative political assumptions then I think “fact checking” quite misses the forest for the trees. Also, I don’t think it’s good for anybody in this business to make their mission to correct. It’s school marmish and unattractive and just cedes the floor to the larger and more passionate voice.

A writer on the Atlantic used the line during the election campaign that journalists took Trump literally but not seriously while his supporters took him seriously but not literally. Is that the essence of the media reaction to Trump, that they just can’t take him seriously?

I think this is already a cliche — so hard to tell what it means. In fact, I think the press often takes him seriously when he is not very serious. There seems to be too many realities that frequently collide but don’t much intersect. Somebody got elected president — democratically elected — who violates all the norms. He doesn’t talk like a President, he doesn’t look like a President, he doesn’t act like a President, and, so, in the press equation, he shouldn’t be President. And the press can’t find a narrative to understand how he could become President.

You seem to take what some may think of as an old-fashioned reporting approach to Trump where you regard him as a great story without yourself judging him as a fit or unfit person for office?

I should hope so. I have trouble quite thinking why or how the great mass of daily journalists would think it’s their job, or in their expertise, to make that judgement, especially in the earliest days of an administration

You know the people around Trump and you have reported on him as a New York fixture for many years. Are we watching a conspiracy unfold in a deliberate and planned way here or just plain chaos?

It certainly seems like much of the media has decided that it will have failed in its calling if it does not defenestrate him as soon as possible. I don’t know whether that represents a new sort of conspiracy or a new sort of religion.

Donald J. Trump on Twitter

Anybody (especially Fake News media) who thinks that Repeal & Replace of ObamaCare is dead does not know the love and strength in R Party!

How should the media react or handle a president who has grasped an unprecedented ability to go around, to dis-intermediate the media, by going direct to the public over social media? It seems to go so much further than a fireside chat or a broadcast.

I think that’s probably an incorrect or shortsighted view. This is obviously a president who cares passionately about the media. The media is his foil and his stage. Never before has a Presidency been run with such attention to the media. Even Trump’s social media attacks and faints are most of all directed at the media. So the real question is how does the media handle a President who is of the media, as good at or better than the media at making media, and who has used the media to turn himself into the world’s most famous person? Whether consciously or not he is the first meta President.

Come to Vienna to hear Michael and I go a little more aggressively into these areas. Who can tell where we’ll stand with Trump by then.

Jay Rosen—New York University

“I don’t think there are many parallels to what we’re seeing now. There’s so much about this situation that is completely strange and busts up democratic norms and exists far outside the normal swing of press relations.” (Poynter, 10 March 2017)

Margaret Sullivan—The Washington Post

“The role of the press ought to be looking hard at what Trump and his administration are doing, and to hold him accountable and be very clear about what’s going on.” (Recode, 15 December 2016)

Jennifer Rubin—The Washington Post

“Donald Trump may never face the media in a standard news conference. He may not even sit for interviews with legitimate journalists, preferring the sycophancy of “Fox & Friends” and the Fox non-News evening lineup. Trump still resorts to juvenile prevarication. So how does the media deal with a president who won’t deal with them?” (The Washington Post, 2 January 2017)

“Stop having a nervous breakdown about Trump” Michael Wolff tells the media was originally published in Global Editors Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Peter Bale

Each time I have tried to find the right moment to write a commentary on the phenomenon of “fake news,” some fresh outrage erupts and makes my thoughts at that moment instantly out of date.

As I write, the latest outrage is a burst of “fake news” direct from the source: the president of the United States asserting that his predecessor tapped his communications during last year’s election campaign.

Not content with making the claim on his Twitter feed, the president and his spokesman called for a Congressional inquiry, thus escalating a false claim — apparently based on a misreading of a clearly slanted story on the Breitbart “news” site — into a political and potentially judicial action.

President Trump has effectively abused his office with an unprecedented and provably wrong claim about his predecessor. [Even the much-maligned former head of the National Security Agency, James Clapper, has dismissed it.] Yet it is just the latest in an almost daily series of head-spinning challenges to the principles of judgment, facts and experience that typically underlie politics and journalism.

“We’re in the midst of a civilization-warping crisis of public trust,” U.S Senator Bob Sasse, a Republican, said in reaction to the latest Trump claims.

Rising to the challenge of the great faker

Professional journalists — ethical journalists if you will — face great challenges in confronting the phenomenon of the “leader of the free world” who is himself a stranger to the truth and yet seeks to denigrate those who would try to report the facts as spreaders of “fake news”.

I see several key factors at work in this crisis of truth, at least as far as the professional news media go.

First is the disintermediation of the mass media that the Trump campaign achieved and that has persisted since he entered the Oval Office. A single Tweet or Facebook post can set the agenda for the moment, the day and the week ahead, and get a Trump perspective — no matter how bogus — into widespread circulation before traditional media outlets have even drawn breath, as we know from the told saw that a lie travels around the world before the truth has its boots on. [Attributed variously to Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift and many others in.]

Or, perhaps this quote from Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” is spookily relevant: “The great masses of the people…will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one.” [Given reports he has the book, it may fit.]

The danger of the disintermediation is not just that it puts professional media entities on the defensive — forcing them to express doubt, fact check and risk sounding shrill and hyper-critical; it is that the unquestioned and often untrue message is out and in the heads of millions with no intermediation by anyone with a sense of responsibility for the facts, be it an honest press officer, a government official with direct knowledge, or a journalist.

If you’re not worried about Trump’s direct-to-consumer media style, you should be: @realDonaldTrump on Twitter has more than 26 million followers, and the nearly-as-barking @POTUS now has 15 million. On Facebook, his two official accounts together have more than 26 million followers.

The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!

Donald J. Trump on Twitter

FAKE NEWS media knowingly doesn't tell the truth. A great danger to our country. The failing @nytimes has become a joke. Likewise @CNN. Sad!

A scan of the comments and likes show he hits the target for many who prefer to believe him over the media.

Second is the deliberate framing of the media as the enemy. It is a classic tactic of fascists down the years to accuse journalists of lies or bias, to repeat it often enough to unsettle them and sow doubt in the mind of the public — the ‘Lügenpresse,’ of the Nazi era revived at Trump rallies. I could scarcely believe even Trump could, as president, tweet: “The FAKE NEWS media…is the enemy of the American people”. Yet it is a pattern: sow doubt, cast slurs, create a slogan, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Third is the impact of the roar of the crowd, the cacophony of social media of legitimate sources clashing with the illegitimate. The noise that surrounds everything in a deafening, unfiltered waterfall of fact mixed with opinion mixed with nonsense mixed with abuse. It’s hard for the media — the ethical media — to stand aside from that fray.

I don’t believe we are cognitively ready for all that white noise. Richard Evans, a British historian whose testimony condemning the Holocaust denier David Irving in a trial that was depicted in the recent movie Denial, believes we are in a new era of turbo-charged public vilification. There are few restraints on what would once have been angry letters to one now shared with millions.

“The level of verbal abuse that you find now in the public discourse is just astonishing,” Evans said in a recent interview with Slate.

“Our public discourse has been poisoned, and that’s very true of the kind of extremism, the lies, the insults, distortions you get in public discourse in Germany in the Weimar Republic.” [I recommend reading the piece.]

Fight fake facts with facts

So, how can a journalist, a media organisation or even a concerned individual cope and respond to this dizzying shift in which black is rendered white and facts become “alternative facts”?

Part of it is going back to the basics: facts, sources, proof and fairness.

As a vocation, we have to also look at our own culpability in the widespread mistrust of news which now makes it hard to call out the lies of the Trump administration and defend “real news” against “fake”.

Donald J. Trump on Twitter

Don't believe the main stream (fake news) media.The White House is running VERY WELL. I inherited a MESS and am in the process of fixing it.

Donald J. Trump on Twitter

Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!

In my opinion, half-baked commentary and often shrill opinion have taken precedence over hard and fair reporting. That’s not a new phenomenon but it exacerbates the “us versus them” tone of the clashes with the president, but more importantly with his supporters and the failure to recognise them.

We’ve also sacrificed basic journalistic principles in some areas of coverage. From show business to celebrity culture, sensation, shock and shame have replaced judgment, perspective and fairness. That’s tarnished the reputations of publications and journalists. The impact is most notable in the UK, where a judicial inquiry into media conduct exposed abuse, leading to demands for regulation in a country without the defences inherent in the U.S. First Amendment.

Wikipedia recently declared its news team would no longer regard The Daily Mail and mailonline.co.uk as a reliable primary source. It’s a highly questionable decision given the site uses Russia Today, for example, but also understandable given the Mail’s fluid approach to facts and stridency, for example in attacking judges in a Brexit case as “enemies of the people”. In a typical piece of vicious overkill, the Mail savaged Wikipedia without a trace of introspection, describing the person behind the decision as “one twisted oddball”.

There’s also an increasing amount of truth to the depiction of the media by Steve Bannon — formerly head of Breitbart and now a heartbeat from the president — as the opposition. In lieu of political opposition it may have to be.

“The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States,” Bannon told the New York Times two weeks into the Trump presidency.

To be clear, I’m not using this commentary to look at the industry of bogus news which came to the surface during the election campaign from “fake news” factories in Macedonia or to look at opportunists like a Maryland would-be political analyst who fabricated an entire site and story about ballot-rigging by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

I’m keener right now to look at how the real media — the ethical media — handles this “post truth” environment where the president of the United States undermines almost daily some of the foundations of the US constitution and post-World War Two order with dangerous consequences.

When George W makes sense

“I consider the media to be indispensable to democracy, that we need an independent media to hold people like me to account,” President George W. Bush said in a recent interview. “It’s kind of hard to tell others to have an independent, free press and we’re not willing to have one ourselves.”

As if to emphasise the implications of a U.S president calling the press the “enemy of the people” and locking CNN, the New York Times and others out of a White House briefing, Cambodia’s prime minister Hun Sen defended his government’s own increasingly restrictive stance on local media, noting: “In the United Sates itself, CNN and some others could not get into the White House because Donald Trump sees them as causing anarchy.”

Reuters news agency editor-in-chief Stephen Adler recently told his staff and readers that his team had managed for years to work in some of the most difficult environments in the world for journalists — from Turkey to Yemen and Russia — and would apply those same lessons to the new White House: “This is our mission, in the U.S. and everywhere. We make a difference in the world because we practice professional journalism that is both intrepid and unbiased.” His declaration was of old fashioned journalism values that are as valuable now as ever in my opinion as an old Reuters reporter.

I had the same reaction recently when another former Reuters colleague, now University of Indiana journalism professor Elaine Monaghan, used an online seminar by News Decoder to suggest that instead of “Mainstream News” — spanning a vast range of corporate and other outlets — we opt instead for a simpler definition: “ethical news”. For me it works like “fair trade” coffee or “ethically sourced” goods.

It’s about provenance: the care that goes into the product. Now, more than ever, we have to go back to some of those essential ingredients of respect for facts, accurate sourcing and fairness: even in the most trying of climates.

Thank you.

To read more on this subject:
It’s worth noting these resources to highlight or deal with the fake news debate and the loss of trust in media.
- The Trust Project, of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, a large scale attempt to promote best practice in sourcing, attribution and fact-checking
- Historian and freedom of speech academic Timothy Garton-Ash writing on the need for fact-checking in the post-truth age. [FT.com paywall]
- Guardian report on the BBC setting up a “Reality Check” team
- Channel 4 (UK) video on how to spot “fake news”
- CJR report of a Harvard study on the impact of right wing media in setting the agenda of the overall media in 2016. Out now.

About Peter Bale

Peter Bale is the President of the Global Editors Network. Until recently he was the CEO of the Washington investigative journalism non-profit, The Center for Public Integrity. He has also worked at CNN, MSN, Reuters and FT.com. This commentary is his personal view. In an earlier Medium piece he looked at the effectiveness of the Trump campaign’s use of social media.

Marty Baron—The Washington Post

“To use language that says we’re scum, that we’re garbage — You know, at one point, [Trump] said we’re the lowest form of humanity. That wasn’t enough, so he said we’re the lowest form of life itself. So I don’t know where we go from there. That’s apparently where we are.” (Recode, 14 February 2017)

Jill Abramson—The New York Times

“Most people believe there is truth and there are lies. ‘Alternative facts’ are lies. When you’ve spent your career being scrupulous about facts, it’s hard to adjust to life in Trump’s post-truth America.” (The Guardian, 23 February 2017)

Craig Silverman—Buzzfeed

“When I use it in stories, I cringe little bit because the term’s been so misused, it’s meaningless. So I try to use ‘hoax’ or ‘propaganda.’ If you write a story and use ‘fake news’ in the headline, you might be able to get more attention for it. But I worry about adding to the confusion.” (Digiday, 20 February 2017)

A personal view: Fight “fake news” with ethical news was originally published in Global Editors Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Donald Trump and the new dawn of tyranny, Time.com by Timothy Snyder.
Tim is a noted historian on fascism and modern Europe with books including Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. He has written pieces for my old team at CNN and was close to the Anglo/French/American historian Tony Judt who has had a great influence on me.
In this piece Tim looks at the historic precedents for the kind of people Donald Trump has surrounded himself with and the methods they use.

Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media, The Observer by Carole Cadwalladr worth reading alongside this more detailed perspective on the data company Cambridge Analytica by Motherboard at Vice, The Data That Turned the World Upside Down. Fascinating and concerning perspectives on the ability of shadowy Big Data firms to analyse and influence behaviour, particularly in politics, with Brexit and the U.S. election. Scientific American took the analysis of this area of Big Data and politics one step further with: Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence? It’s also been pointed out to me since I first wrote this that the impact of the Cambridge Analytica work has been called into question. This piece from The Register puts it in some greater context.

- Peter Bale is the President of the Global Editors Network. Until recently he was the CEO of the Washington investigative journalism non-profit, The Center for Public Integrity. He has also worked at CNN, MSN, Reuters and FT.com. This commentary his is personal view.

By Peter Bale, President of the Global Editors Network

WASHINGTON, DC, — Donald Trump’s insurgent victory upends the media business and journalism as much as it does politics.

We were already worried about what Silicon Valley types call “disintermediation” — the destruction of traditional media networks and models by new technology — but he has shown that break is far deeper and dangerous than anyone realized.

At least half the American population chose not to listen to what the media was telling them: no matter how factual, passionate or full of the warnings of history.

It wasn’t a failure to get the message out. It was that the audience didn’t want to hear it.

The man was the message and the message was the man.

I like my echo chamber

Social media — starting with Trump’s own 13.7 million Twitter followers and 13.2 million Facebook “likes” — is how this American “underbelly” of white, angry, disillusioned people fueled their discontent and found their messiah. Had we watched that more closely we might have understood what was happening as this piece pointed out.

In 1992, the The Sun, a British tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, famously declared “It’s The Sun wot won it” after Conservative Prime Minister John Major won what to the then media and political elite was a surprise victory over the Labour Party.

This time it was social media, Twitter in particular, wot won it, for Donald.

It was also the rise of echo chamber sites where the visceral (even if provably wrong) fears of a white Middle America under siege in an era when a black man can be president, gays can marry and American pre-eminence doesn’t seem so certain anymore.

Breitbart.com moved from a fringe site of paranoid lunatics into the semi-official voice of Trumpism with its chairman Stephen Bannon catapulted to Trump’s right hand and presumably now to a key role in the White House. Infowars.com, the toxic outpourings of arch conspiracist Alex Jones can now be considered almost mainstream with its anti-Semitic tropes such as “Globalists to attack Trump with economic collapse”.

Dog whistle politics — baiting anti-Semites, feeding conspiracies and fostering racism and misogyny — is now the mainstream. Trump’s last election broadcast was a thinly veiled warning of a global “Jewish-led” conspiracy of the financial elite. Soros, Yellen, Blankfein: what do they all have in common? No wonder one oaf made a name for himself at a Trump rally yelling “Jew-S-A, Jew-S-A, Jew-S-A”. Welcome to the post-politically correct world.

Of course in that reading of the world the mainstream media — in many cases owned, staffed and led by Jews and therefore reinforcing the anti-Semitic trope — is part of the conspiracy, part of the global elite that has misled and stiffed the honest white, Christian, God-fearing, gun-loving ordinary “folks” of the United States.

Beating ourselves up — for now

So, what went wrong with the media?

The self-flagellation started immediately. Jeff Jarvis, a prominent journalism commentator, City University of New York lecturer and unabashed Hillary supporter blamed himself, his industry, the education system and his profession: “Mostly, I #blame my profession, media. We must undertake a harsh, honest post mortem for journalism. But I don’t know whether it will help.” Javis said on his Twitter feed.

For me the determination of the audience to ignore the medias powerfully illustrated in a bizarre confrontation between a group of Trump supporters at a rally and a New Zealand television journalist who tried to interview them.

Paddy Gower, the unassuming and pleasant host of the Newshub show tries gamely to ask a couple of Trumpists what they think only to get this shouted reply: “I’m not talking to the Clinton media, you guys are sellouts. You’re part of the lying media.”

Paddy vainly explains he is from New Zealand.“What’s Zealand?” one guy replies.

In the background, a Trumpist with a “The Deplorables” T-shirt on to mock Hillary Clinton’s unwise attack on those who hitched themselves to Trump, videos the whole incident on his iPhone declaring: “Social media is the future, the mainstream media is going downhill. You guys are like the newspapers of the 1980s. It’s almost over for you. We are the reporters…this camera in my hand.”

That is the reality of the failure this election. Not that the Washington Post, the New York Times, USA Today and hundreds of other respectable media organizations didn’t point out the fascist, anti-Semitic, misogynist, homophobic undertones of the Trump campaign. They did. It is that the audience didn’t want to hear that message and turned it off. Deliberately.

The public in middle America — Trump’s public, chose to hear a different message, a message that spoke to their sense that the white middle and working class was losing ground in a demographic and economic confrontation of civilizations. That public firmly rejected the notion of post-World War Two liberalism and post-Bretton Woods globalism.

Having a different conversation

Peter Thiel, the libertarian Silicon Valley billionaire who bankrolled Trump and also destroyed Gawker Media, suggested in a speech at the National Press Club that the media and the public heard two different Trumps.

“The media is always taking Trump literally. It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally,” the Washington Post reported Thiel saying. What the public heard was something more nuanced, less extreme, not literally “build a wall” but “’We’re going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy.’ ”That disconnection, a sort of willful unwillingness to actually hear what Trump was saying and who it was appealing to is perhaps at the root of big journalism’s failure.

As Margaret Sullivan, media commentator of the Post said after the election, at least in her headline: “The media didn’t want to believe Trump could win. So they looked the other way.”

At CNN, veteran anchor John King, acknowledged the gaps the entire narrative of the election campaign that had blinded big media from even considering making a different call on the outcome: “We were not having a reality-based conversation,” he said on air.

With the possible exception therefore of the opinion polling industry — deceived again by voters who really don’t want to reveal just how mean-spirited they actually are — the media industry is a huge casualty of the Trump insurgency and now ascendency.

What to do? Get closer to the audience and learn all over again to listen as well as talk.

Ends

- A version of this commentary was published by English post-Brexit pop-up newspaper, The New European

- Peter Bale is the President of the Global Editors Network and at the time of writing the Chief Executive Officer of Washington investigative journalism non-profit, The Center for Public Integrity.

A curated list of other reporting Peter thinks worth reading — but doesn’t necessarily endorse on journalism and the Trump victory includes:
The Guardian: Facebook’s failure: did fake news and polarized politics get Trump elected?
Bloomberg News: War Between Trump, Media Seen Escalating With Presidency’s Power
Associated Press: For many supporters, Trump is a thing called hope
New York Times: How did we, how did the media, get this wrong?
New York Times: A ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ Lesson for the Digital Age
Washington Post: The media didn’t want to believe Trump could win. So they looked the other way.
Washington Post: Jeff Zucker’s singular role in promoting Donald Trump’s rise
Erin Pettigrew on Medium: How Facebook Saw Trump Coming When No One Else Did
Hollywood Reporter: Michael Wolff: Trump Win Exposes Media’s Smug Failures

“It was social media wot won it” was originally published in Global Editors Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.