Media Value Added and False-Positives

I believe that the overwhelming majority of beat reporters do their best to do a good job on a regular basis. Personal idiosyncrasies, biases, and the occasional incentive to shirk and fabricate information is present, but I don't think that these problems are overrepresented by journalists compared to any other field. I also think that most journalists on most days do a pretty solid job of collecting, analyzing and disseminating a basic level of information to their readers. But there are some basic problems that occasionally pop-up and I want to address them here.

Reporters have several levels of value add that they contribute to the goal of informing the population of the reality that surrounds them. The first, most basic and least valuable is reporting simple, straight facts such as the Penguins won last night in Ottawa, or the weather in Pittsburgh is dreary and depressing today with cold rains buffeted by northerly winds. These tasks are essential but possess low value because almost anyone who is interested in Pittsburgh weather can stick their head out the window and see that it is miserable.

The second level of value that journalists add is the creation of some individual expertise and familiarity within a narrower field of fact. For instance Pittsburgh is bankrupt and several journalists at the major media outlets in the city have developped a fine appreciation of what the different oversight boards will allow the city to do, and therefore they can analyze and inform the public whether or not a proposal is even feasible due to the fiscal constraints of the city. It has taken these reporters a significant amount of time and diligence to develop either the personal expertise, sources with the acknowledged and demonstrated expertise, or most likely a combination of personal and network expertise.

A third level of value that most journalists want to contribute is the developed sense of the unusual and odd. These two things are by definition news and the subject matter of the profession. And here is where the greatest value-added can be extracted and distributed to the general public, but it is also the locus of negative value when poor judgment advances a story that really is not that odd.

The incentive structure of journalism encourages writers and content producers to advance stories that are differentiated from the day to day. Most Pulitzer Prizes are given to work that ran an odd or unusual set of events into the ground and thus changed local public discourse. Journalists are in the position to receive plenty of potentially unusual and interesting tidbits of data. For instance Dennis Roddey of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette saw some interesting information that led him to write two articles on strange GOP fund-raising in Allegheny County. This was new information that I as a political junkie would never have been able to sort out of the morass of other data that I see, but Mr. Roddey through the combination of diligence and the combination of his local expertise and his network of expertise noticed something strange and than he ran with it. This is good journalism.

However not everything that initially looks unusual actually is unusual. Matt Yglesias noticed a good example of a false positive 'unusual' event written up at the Politico. I'm stealing his summary below:

• Klaus Scharioth, Germany's ambassador to the United States, is trying to meet the major presidential candidates.
• A guy named Frank Loy who's active in US-German issues and the Obama campaign, arranged for Scharioth to attend an Obama fundraiser without contributing to his campaign.
• Politico's Kenneth Vogel heard about this, decided he smelled smoke, and thought he'd poke around for fire.

At this point, Vogel came up with absolutely nothing. But instead of not writing the story, he wrote an exhaustive account of a dozen different things that might have been improper or politically damaging about this. None of these things, however, are actually true. But rather than admit that he has no story, Vogel chose to write it up as if he's uncovered something and then -- bam! -- his story becomes the lede item on the site further implying there's something here.

Mr. Vogel seems to have engaged in an act of the sunk-cost fallacy which propelled him to write a bad story. He had performed the proper role of a curious and competent journalist when he heard about something that sounded a little unusual; an attendee at a fundraiser who did not contribute. So he followed his instincts and ran it done. However he saw an innocent and innocuous explanation. Instead of shrugging his shoulders and looking for another story elsewhere, the false lead became a story.

Good journalists with a wide network of sources, a strong stomach for archival research or an excellent system of memory recall will receive numerous leads about potentially strange and unusual events. The real value that these journalists can offer to the American public at this point is not the rumor or the hint of the interesting, but the judgment to sift through the incoming information and identify what truly is unusual, and what is usual that is dressed slightly differently.

When there is a failure to do so, the public discourse weakens in both the short term due to accidental misinformation added to the discussion and in the long term as there is less credibility available when something truly unusual is found.