CNN says graph shows what viewers think, but can we digest all that?

The Perception Analyzer will analyze the reactions of about 30 “uncommitted” Ohio voters tonight. (CNN / October 6, 2008)

The two people on TV are arguing, but you’re transfixed by the colorful lines squiggling across the bottom of the screen like dueling EKGs.

How fascinating! How distracting!

As it has for the two previous campaign debates, CNN will put its moving graphs on full, hypnotic display Tuesday night when Barack Obama and John McCain meet for their second faceoff. CNN’s focus group will have about 30 “uncommitted” Ohio voters turning the dials of a Perception Analyzer to register whether they like what each speaker is saying. Those reactions set in motion the lines labeled “Men” (green) and “Women” (orange).

So CNN viewers wind up weighing their opinions against those of strangers—all while the words are still leaving the debaters’ mouths. Reflection is not an option.

“Those lines add to the value of watching the debate,” says CNN election coverage producer David Bohrman. The squiggles are new to CNN. The now-defunct CNNfn experimented with full-screen graphs four years ago, and the network’s Headline News channel tried them in a primary debate last year too. Bohrman says viewers now are “used to dealing with deconstructed information coming at them.”

University of Chicago psychologist Howard Nusbaum says your brain can’t devote its full attention to what the debaters are saying and what you’re seeing. “It becomes as if you’re skimming the debate,” he says.

Viewers may also be swayed by the human desire to seek consensus, says Washington, D.C.-based psychologist Alan Lipman. “It’s kind of like the difference between watching a movie and watching a movie with commentary,” he said. “It’s going to affect your perception and beliefs.”

But Frank Luntz, who runs similar debate focus groups for Fox News (which simulcasts the results only online), defends the meters: “I think people are as interested in what other Americans are thinking as they are in their own reactions.”

Still, thinking for yourself is most important, right?

Um, let’s check the line.

– By Mark Caro, Chicago Tribune

Popularity: 1% [?]

No Comments »

Though the U.S. economic crisis dominated general news coverage—and indeed became one of the biggest stories we’ve ever recorded—it was another event, the Oct. 2 vice-presidential debate, that drove the 2008 campaign narrative.

From Sept. 29-Oct. 5, the financial meltdown and efforts to fashion a bailout package filled 45% of the overall news coverage examined by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Not only was that significantly more coverage than the campaign—which filled 34% of the newshole. The financial crisis received the most attention from the media for any non-campaign story in a given week other than the Virginia Tech massacre in April 2007.

Yet campaigns for the presidency can take on narratives of their own. And last week, storylines surrounding the Oct. 2 debate between vice presidential contenders Sarah Palin and Joe Biden eclipsed the economy as the No. 1 campaign narrative. The various events connected to the debate accounted for more than half (52%) of last week’s election coverage, according to PEJ’s Campaign Coverage Index. The biggest storyline was the debate itself, at 45% of the newshole. Other related themes included Katie Couric’s much-discussed interview with Palin, (5%), which helped establish the stakes and expectations for the debate. A flap over whether debate moderator Gwen Ifill might harbor a bias toward Barack Obama accounted for another 2%.

The debate’s central role in last week’s election coverage was also reflected in the competition for media exposure. Last week Palin led all the candidates in coverage, registering as a significant or dominant newsmaker in 51% of the campaign stories. That represents a major increase over the previous week when she was a significant or dominant factor in only 15% of the campaign stories. Biden, who has largely been ignored by the media, was a significant or dominant factor in 30% of the stories last week. That more than doubled his previous high water mark (13%), which occurred the week he was added to the Democratic ticket.

At the top of the tickets, Obama and John McCain were virtually tied in the race for exposure last week. The Democrat was a factor in 41% of the stories, just ahead of the 39% for his Republican rival. After consistently trailing Obama in these weekly coverage tallies throughout the general election season, McCain has now run about even with or ahead of his opponent for three straight weeks.

While their running mates grabbed the media spotlight, the candidates’ response to the economic crisis—including their Senate votes for the bailout bill—was still an important element of the campaign. It constituted 15% of last week’s election coverage—less than one-third of the debate coverage. The week’s much more extensive focus on debate-related themes once again reinforces the fluidity and episodic nature of the campaign narrative.

When the economic crisis began to dominate the campaign dynamic three weeks ago, observers wondered whether an issue had finally emerged that would overwhelm all other subjects. What last week illustrated was that another event, such as an eagerly anticipated debate, could supersede even the financial crunch, at least temporarily. And if John McCain’s strategy, as news reports suggest, is to “change the subject,” last week’s example suggests he might have a chance.

Much of the media buzz about the Oct. 2 debate started well before the event itself. In Palin’s case, her shaky responses to some of Couric’s questions on CBS helped spike rampant speculation about her debate performance. Given his famous proclivity for gaffes and verbosity, Biden also triggered plenty of pondering about how he would fare on the podium.

The broad media consensus was the both candidates had done better than expected. And the widely accepted view among pundits was that the debate was not a game changer. The snap media polls taken after the debate, by contrast, showed that the public thought Biden had won. In either case, the result shifted the focus back on the presidential rivals, who are to debate for the second time Oct. 7.

With all these expectations at play, strategy and horserace storylines last week accounted for 11% of the campaign coverage—and much of that tactical coverage was good news for Obama. The top tactical storyline, at 5%, was coverage of swing state strategies, with the big news being McCain’s decision to pull out of Michigan. Another 4% of the campaign newshole was filled by coverage of polls as a number of surveys showed Obama opening up a significant lead over McCain.

These findings are part of PEJ’s running content analysis of media coverage, called the News Coverage Index (NCI). During the election year, PEJ has added special coding to more closely examine coverage of the race for President and renamed the work the Campaign Coverage Index. (The full NCI data appear at the bottom of this report.) The CCI measures both the nature of the campaign narrative and the amount of coverage devoted to each candidate. The race for exposure is measured by the number of stories in which a candidate plays a significant role (as a subject of between 25% and 50% of the story) or a main newsmaker role (at least 50% of the story). The campaign storyline of the week—the specific themes that make up the campaign coverage—are measured as a percentage of overall coverage, or newshole.

For the week of Sept. 29-Oct. 5, the campaign was the No. 2 story—behind the financial crisis (34% of the newshole). That marks the third week in a row that the economic situation generated more attention than the campaign. The campaign was the No. 1 story last week in only one media sector, radio, where it accounted for 45% of the airtime examined. The race for the White House generated slightly more attention, 47%, in cable news. But the economic meltdown accounted for 49% of all the cable time studied, marking the first time all year, the campaign was not the top story in that platform. The intersection of the presidential campaign and the economic crisis emerged early last week when the Obama and McCain camps had to figure out how to respond to the stunning defeat of the bailout bill in the House on Sept. 29 and the resultant 777 point drop on Wall Street.

“White House rivals John McCain and Barack Obama combined television attack ads with statesmanlike appeals to bipartisanship on Tuesday as they vied for political gain in the shadow of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,” said an AP story posted on Yahoo! News on Sept. 30. “The intense maneuvering came one day after the House defeated a bipartisan bailout bill and the stock market responded with its largest one-day drop in history.”

Both senators returned to Washington to vote for a bailout package that ultimately was signed into law. And while the two candidates were essentially on the same side of the issue, the week’s political narrative had Obama gaining ground as a result of the public focus on the troubled economy.

During the Oct. 1 edition of Anderson Cooper’s show, CNN electoral map-ologist John King pointed to new polling numbers that showed Obama ahead in such key battleground states as Virginia, Florida and Nevada. “Remarkable new numbers,” said King, noting that the CNN map now had Obama at 250 electoral votes compared with 189 for McCain. “They show, in the midst of this economic crisis, the map is trending toward Barack Obama.”

With that strategic narrative as a backdrop, the media spotlight shifted to the Oct. 2 showdown between Biden and Palin, with particular focus on the Alaska Governor.

“All eyes on Palin in VP debate: She needs to undo damage from recent interviews—Biden must keep it simple,” declared the front-page headline in the Oct. 2 San Francisco Chronicle. The story noted that “both Democrats and Republicans have reason to be nervous about the high stakes, performance and potential pitfalls their candidates face” in “the most anticipated vice presidential debate in history.”

The television audience seemed to confirm that when an estimated 73 million viewers made it the second most-watched political debate in U.S. history—behind only the 1980 Carter-Reagan contest. And the post-mortems came fast and furious. There was a fairly divergent range of views, but the congealing media consensus was that the folksy Palin and the more knowledgeable Biden both accomplished their respective missions.

“With winks, smiles and shrugs, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin tried hard to charm voters in her first and only debate with Democratic opponent Joe Biden,” declared the story posted on MSNBC.com on Oct 3. “Polls indicated she didn’t win — but the absence of gaffes meant she didn’t lose either.”

“During the 90-minute debate from the campus of Washington University, both candidates appeared at least initially to have met the goals set by the campaign at the outset,” read the Oct. 3 account in the Los Angeles Times. “Neither candidate appeared to make a career-altering gaffe.”

The Washington Post’s Oct. 3 analysis made the point that in the absence of a dramatic debate stumble, the campaign would now revert to the more traditional mode with the focus on the men atop the tickets. “The vice presidential debate came with high interest and big expectations and certainly delivered, though not as some had predicted,” the Post story stated. “That leaves it to Obama and McCain to argue it out for the next 32 days.”

And now, in the rest of the week’s news:

Overall, the economic crisis and bailout bill scramble on Capitol Hill was the No. 1 story, accounting for 45% of the newshole from Sept. 29-Oct. 5. It was the No. 1 story in newspapers (47%), online (43%), network news (43%) and cable (49%). In breaking down the coverage of the economic crisis, the top storyline—the political effort to get passage of a bailout bill—accounted for 54% of the space and time devoted to that subject.

After the campaign, which filled 34% of the newshole, there was a steep drop down to the No. 3 story, the discovery of the plane in which millionaire aviator Steve Fossett died (2% of the newshole.) Next, at 1%, came coverage of the U.S. economy not related to the credit market meltdown. The fifth-biggest story of the week involved Pakistan (1%), where the U.S. appears to have stepped up military activities. Last week’s news menu was a reminder that when two major stories vie for attention, there is little room left on newscasts and front pages for coverage of much else.

Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ

Campaign Storylines of the Week

 

	Total Percent of Campaign Newshole
VP Debates	45.1%
Financial Crisis Reactions	15.5
Swing States Strategy	4.9
Couric Interviews Palin	4.6
McCain v. Obama Polls	3.9
Profile of McCain	3.2
Total Number of Campaign Stories = 381

 

Top Overall Stories of the Week

Rank	Story	Percent of Newshole
1	Financial Crisis/ Fed Bailout	45%
2	2008 Campaign	34
3	Steve Fossett	2
4	U.S. Economy	1
5	Pakistan	1
6	Immigration	1
7	Events in Iraq	1
8	Afghanistan	1
9	Ted Stevens Trial	1
10	Paul Newman Dies	1

Click here to see the top ten stories for each media sector.

Click here to see the methodology for the Campaign Coverage Index

Popularity: 1% [?]

Share and save this post: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

No Comments »

The FBI has blocked two of its veteran counterterrorism agents from going public with accusations that the CIA deliberately withheld crucial intelligence before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

FBI Special Agents Mark Rossini and Douglas Miller have asked for permission to appear in an upcoming public television documentary, scheduled to air in January, on pre-9/11 rivalries between the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency.

The program is a spin-off from The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, by acclaimed investigative reporter James Bamford, due out in a matter of days.

The FBI denied Rossini and Miller permission to participate in the book or the PBS “NOVA” documentary, which is also being written and produced by Bamford, on grounds that the FBI “doesn’t want to stir up old conflicts with the CIA,” according to multiple reliable sources.

Bamford, contacted by phone, said he could not comment because his publisher has embargoed his new book for release around Oct. 10.  

The author of two other ground-breaking books on the NSA, Bamford also said his general policy is not to discuss his negotiations for interviews with intelligence agencies.      

Pre-9/11 intelligence mishaps have been generally attributed to bureaucratic screw-ups — a “failure to connect the dots,” exacerbated by spy agency rivalries. 

But Rossini and Miller, who were assigned to the CIA-run Counterterrorist Center during the run-up to the 9/11 attacks, are prepared to describe on camera how the CIA blocked them from sharing crucial intelligence with FBI headquarters - and then later pressured them not to tell the truth to investigators.

The first allegation is not entirely new, having been reported by author Lawrence Wright in his 2006 book, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, among other places.

But what is new is that Rossini and Miller — who still hold sensitive jobs in the FBI, and are identified here for the first time — are prepared to say publicly that, under pressure from the CIA, they kept the full the truth from the Justice Department’s Inspector General, which looked into the FBI’s handling of pre-9/11 intelligence in 2004.

“There was pressure on people not to disclose what really happened,” said sources close to the IG investigation. 

Rossini, in particular, is said to have felt threatened that the CIA would have him prosecuted for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act if he told the IG investigators what really happened inside the CTC. 

CIA officials were in the room when he and Miller, as well as a sympathetic CIA officer, were questioned. 

The IG investigators showed them copies of CTC intelligence reports and e-mails.

But the FBI agents suddenly couldn’t remember details about who said what, or who reported what, to whom, about the presence of two al Qaeda agents in the U.S. prior to the 9/11 attacks, 

The IG investigators were suspicious. 

Indeed, their report, which used pseudonyms for the CIA and FBI agents its interviewed — Rossini and Miller were called  “Malcolm” and “Dwight,” a CIA analyst was dubbed “Eric” — hinted at a cover-up. 

“When we interviewed all of the individuals involved about the CIR [Current Intelligence Report] they asserted that they recalled nothing about it,” it said 

The focus of the IG was what the CIA had witheld about the movement of two al Qaeda operatives, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, from Malaysia to the U.S. in early 2000.

Dwight told the OIG that he did not recall being aware of the information about Mihdhar, did not recall drafting the CIR, did not recall whether he drafted the CIR on his own initiative or at the direction of his supervisor, and did not recall any discussions about the reasons for delaying completion and dissemination of the CIR. Malcolm said he did not recall reviewing any of the cable traffic or any information regarding Hazmi and Mihdhar. Eric told the OIG that he did not recall the CIR.

Subsequently, Rossini and Miller were not subpoenaed by the 9/11 Commission to tell what they knew, even though sources say they were eager to do so.

But he and Miller did come clean during an internal FBI investigation, which remains under wraps. 

Sources with direct knowledge of the FBI’s internal probe say that the agents provided the bureau with unadulterated versions of their CTC experiences, including orders they were given by the center’s then-Deputy Director, Tom Wilshire, to withhold intelligence about the movement of al Qaeda operatives into the country from the FBI.
 
When the agents asked permission to tell that same story on television, the FBI initially agreed, but then cancelled at the last moment, two sources involved in the deliberations said, with the explanation that it didn’t want to risk inflaming the CIA.

The FBI’s top spokesman, Assistant Director John Miller, did not address that issue directly.

But he said that the FBI had withheld permission for the agents to be named in various reports on 9/11 intelligence out of security and privacy concerns.
 
“These questions were examined extensively by several independent agencies and commissions,” he said via e-mail Wednesday. 

“It was determined that the two FBI employees would not be named in those reports because they continue to hold sensitive positions in the FBI as well as Privacy Act issues regarding current and former personnel.”

Agent Douglas Miller has said that he doesn’t have “a rational answer” to explain why the CIA blocked him from sharing information with the bureau, particularly a report of such obvious magnitude about al Qaeda operatives in the U.S.  He speculated that CIA officials at the CTC were annoyed that he had encroached on their territory. 

A CIA spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, ridiculed the allegations.

“I have every reason–every reason–to believe that’s complete garbage,” he said in a brief telephone interview. “Not only did the 9/11 Commission look at the matter in detail, but former Director George Tenet wrote about it at some length in his book.” 

But the Justice Department Inspector general contradicted Tenet’s assertion that the CIA shared its intelligence on al Qaeda operatives in a timely fashion with the FBI. 

“We reviewed whether this information was in fact passed to the FBI by the CIA, and based on the evidence, concluded that while the CIA passed some of the information about Mihdhar to the FBI, it did not contemporaneously pass the information about Mihdhar’s U.S. visa to the FBI,” the IG report said.

“We concluded it was not disclosed by the CIA until late August 2001, shortly before the September 11 terrorist attacks.”

Another intelligence source said the CIA feared that if FBI headquarters learned of the suspects’ arrival in the U.S., it would try to arrest them — and bust up a sensitive CIA operation to penetrate al Qaeda.  

Mihdhar and Hazmi were plotting an attack outside of the United States, the CIA believed, and wanted the FBI to stay clear of them.

“They said it has nothing to do with the FBI, the next attack will be in Southeast Asia,” said a source familiar with the details. “They said, ‘It’s none of your business.’”

Rossini and other FBI counterterrorism agents were furious, according to a knowledgeable source. The FBI is responsible for investigating domestic-based plots.

“They’re here!” Rossini protested to his CTC bosses. “It is FBI business.”    

The IG report criticized Douglas Miller (”Dwight”) for not ignoring CIA objections and sending his crucially important report on Mihdhar to FBI headquarters. 

But Miller, who held the relatively low rank of GS-12 at the time, told investigators that it was unthinkable for him to violate the orders of his CTC superiors. He would have been fired, “sent home,” he told them.

Miller would be happy to give CIA officials the benefit of the doubt in a television interview, he has told friends, conceding that there may have been good reasons for their decisions that he was not aware of.

He has described the CTC as place filled with dedicated professionals who were “America’s lowest paid professional workers on an hourly basis,” for all the pressure-packed time they spent trying to detect terrorist plots.

But unless the FBI changes its mind, he’ll have to keep that story to himself.

– By Jeff Stein, SpyTalk

Popularity: 1% [?]

2 Comments »

Federal regulators are looking into allegations that a number of military analysts failed to disclose their ties to the Pentagon when they appeared on television to discuss the Iraq war, according to U.S. News & World Report.

“In its letter signed by the chief of the investigations and hearings division enforcement bureau, the FCC suggests that TV stations and networks may have violated two sections of the Communications Act of 1934 by not identifying the ties to the Pentagon that their military analysts had,” the magazine says in its Washington Whispers column.

The Wall Street Journal says an FCC spokesman confirmed the letters, but wouldn’t otherwise comment on the investigation, which appears to have grown out of a New York Times report that said the Pentagon was using former commanders and current contractors to influence public opinion.

– By Mike Carney

Popularity: 1% [?]

1 Comment »

In Israel, “newspaper headlines are often about future events rather than past events.”

That peculiar assertion is presented by the DNI Open Source Center (OSC) in a new report on Israeli news media (pdf). The new report provides descriptive accounts of many major and minor Israeli news outlets, noting their ownership, circulation, political orientation and other distinguishing characteristics.

The OSC report also considers sensitive topics such as military censorship (which it says is “rarely exercised”), ethnocentricity in media accounts, stereotypical treatment of immigrants, and the impact of the internet.

Like most other OSC products, the new report has not been approved for public release by the Central Intelligence Agency, which manages the OSC. But the report is unclassified, is not copyrighted, and does not constitute an input into strategic decisionmaking. Therefore the refusal of the CIA to release it does not command respect. A copy was obtained by Secrecy News.

See Hebrew- and English-Language Media Guide, Open Source Center, September 16, 2008

At its best, Israeli journalism can be very good indeed and can justify the attention of non-Israelis as well. Today in Haaretz, one story considers the growing financial crisis from the perspective of homeless people in Washington, DC. Another story looks at the limits of Israeli nuclear deterrence, with a citation to a classified 1999 report from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.

The OSC statement that Israeli news headlines often refer to future events (which recalls an old Twilight Zone episode) was not immediately confirmed by a review of today’s headlines.

Update: A related article on “The Evolution of Israeli Media” appears in The Middle East Review of International Affairs, September 2008.

– By Steven Aftergood

Popularity: 1% [?]

No Comments »

The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), the European group of the International Federation of Journalists, said today it is worried about some proposals made by the French President Nicolas Sarkozy as he launched a national discussion on print media.

After the launch of the “Etats généraux de la presse écrite” (a national forum on written press that is organized by the government to consider changes in the sector) the unions, the EFJ and the IFJ are particularly concerned about proposals that could increase media ownership concentration and decrease journalists’ rights over their own work.

“We are amazed by some contradictions in Mr. Sarkozy’s speech,” said Arne König, Chair of the EFJ. “How is it possible to declare at the same time that ‘the press is not and will never be a product like the others’ and defend a relaxing of the rules on media concentration?”

Sarkozy asked the States General to “learn about the media sector in countries that can be compared” to France.

The EFJ can already confirm that most countries in Western Europe don’t leave the media simply to “market forces.”

It is not by increasing ownership concentration in France that we will expand the reach of French media companies abroad, says the EFJ, which is also astonished by Sarkozy’s decision to give all leadership roles in the national discussion to the press owners.

In light of the “Etats généraux” and the French Presidency of the European Union, the IFJ and the EFJ are requesting a meeting with President Sarkozy to present to him these concerns shared by the IFJ, the EFJ and the French unions, the SNJ, the SNJ-CGT and F3C-CFDT.

For more information contact the EFJ at +32 2 235 2200

The EFJ represents over 250,000 journalists in over 30 countries worldwide

Popularity: 1% [?]

1 Comment »

Ministers are considering spending up to £12 billion on a database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain.

GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre, has already been given up to £1 billion to finance the first stage of the project.

Hundreds of clandestine probes will be installed to monitor customers live on two of the country’s biggest internet and mobile phone providers - thought to be BT and Vodafone. BT has nearly 5m internet customers.

Ministers are braced for a backlash similar to the one caused by their ID cards programme. Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, said: “Any suggestion of the government using existing powers to intercept communications data without public discussion is going to sound extremely sinister.”

MI5 currently conducts limited e-mail and website intercepts which are approved under specific warrants by the home secretary.

Further details of the new plan will be unveiled next month in the Queen’s speech.

The Home Office stressed no formal decision had been taken but sources said officials had made clear that ministers had agreed “in principle” to the programme.

Officials claim live monitoring is necessary to fight terrorism and crime. However, critics question whether such a vast system can be kept secure. A total of 57 billion text messages were sent in the UK last year - 1,800 every second.

– BY David Leppard

Popularity: 1% [?]