Academic Identity
I am assistant professor of Sociology at Barnard College. My book (and my dissertation research) is a comparative study of technology and futures trading, an ethnography of open outcry and electronic traders. My current research is on how art specialists price cultural commodities, particularly how categories and commensuration work in the secondary/resale fine arts market. I teach courses in economic sociology, organizations, and gender.
Professional Identity
I occasionally consult, focusing on organizational change, the future of technology and financial markets, and environmental markets. I do strategic assessments of markets, technology and organizational design, with qualitative and quantitative components. If you are interested, please email me.
Personal Identity
I grew up outside Chicago, and went to school(s) at Wesleyan University, USC, and Northwestern University. I currently live in New York, with a partner who is a marketing manager for an educational nonprofit. I love movies, like to cook, and I can do a mean lindy swing out. I am INTP.
April 2, 2008
Failure of Journalism
Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 11:37 am
Lisa DePaulo, writing in the GQ blog (ht political wire) demonstrates how to do bad work. I realize this is not the NYT, but I don’t care. You interview politicians, you are doing politics. From an interview with Karl Rove:
I get the sense you respect Hillary more than you respect Obama.
Off the record?Please don’t go off the record.
Off the record… [Yeah, it's good. Sorry.]Damn! Now say that on the record.
No. Nope. Nope. Nope.Let’s try again, then: on the record. I get the sense you respect her more than him.
Uh, I know her better than I know him. And I just, uh—she has been around public life a lot longer and has demonstrated, you know, more involvement than he has.
This is different from confidentiality in social sciences, which affords us no protections under the law and is not, you know, an important institution of a free society. What a good, non-hack journalist would say is, if you can’t tell me on the record, don’t tell me. Otherwise, stick it back in your pocket. Again, I don’t care if it’s a style magazine, in some ways it is even worse since it has the style of journalism without any of the standards.
More generally, and this is not limited to DePaula, is the insider nature of the press compared with the outsiders they consider their readers - i.e., us. What makes these kinds of things so galling is that people in the press either fail to see how they are being used (which makes them idiots), or else know they are being used and use that to advance their careers without actually doing their jobs (which makes them craven - lacking even the rudiments of courage).
2 Responses to “Failure of Journalism”
Leave a Reply
This site is hand-woven, and heavily borrows from the wonderful blueprint framwork. Rock on, grids!
Not quite
, but getting there..
April 5th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Meh. DePaula [waving] “Look a me, I am an insider! Woo!”
I much prefer a system where interviews are either off the record or on the record. Interviewees (and reporters) shouldn’t get to decide to flip in and out of this mode as they please.
April 7th, 2008 at 6:33 am
Well, sure in this case, who cares about DePaula’s desires to be an insider.
But jeez, this is so endemic. And what’s to keep the more ‘open’ journalists, whose model is so very very 2.0, from deciding that ‘insider’ is better than ‘inform the rest of us’?