Bullshit on Parade

Recently some coy, anonymous Occupy types got their knickers in a twist about the cover/content of a shitty, puerile comic publication called Vex.  So they took all the papers from news stands, slapped stickers with a flower and a proclamation that Vex is lame and their position is awesome on the covers and inserted a rebuttal to Vex's position into the pages.

Then it was Vex's turn to get pissed off and melodramatic, so they started loudly proclaiming that the vandalism was a violation of their First Amendment rights to anyone who would listen.

All of which annoyed me in about a million different ways, so I started writing about it, but realized that it was actually so obnoxious that I couldn't even muster a real post, so here's what I have to say in lazy-blogger bullet-point-list style:

• The cover was lame.  In response to the city's decision not to sell Congress Square to the Eastland hotel, they made a typically barf-tastic comic illustration of a scale with a drunk homeless bottle collector on one side (the weighted side) and a carpenter, businessman, and waitress on the other with the headline, "PORTLAND POLITICIANS PREFER BUMS OVER JOBS." Maybe it's the nature of the format or maybe Mort Todd and company are just looking to get a cheap rise out of people, but it's pointless and reductive to pretend that anyone thinks Congress Square is just fine the way it is. It's gross and kind of scary sometimes, but giving up already-limited public space for a ballroom/convention center when we're already building a huge complex on Thompson's Point and renovating the Civic Center is one of the dumbest solutions to the problem.

• The Occupy response was lame.  I think it's awesome when people are passionate about a cause and take action in support of it, but not all action is created equal.  What was the intended audience for this particular stunt?  Presumably people who are either on the fence about the ballroom thing or think it's a reasonable idea.  What was the intended effect?  Presumably to sway those people to support your position.  So did anyone involved really think that the punked out guerrilla 'zine approach was going to win friends and influence people?  Anyone who thought the city missed an opportunity by denying the sale is way more likely to see it as a bunch of disgruntled, unemployed hippies trying ineffectively to stick it to the man, identify with the man, and become even less likely to support discussions about creative, progressive uses of the space.

• Okay, free speech, for crying out loud?  Nice try, but the argument wasn't silenced.  The majority of the drawing and the headline remained intact and the argument easily identifiable.  Vex got its point across.  I'd be with them on this one if the issue hadn't been recirculated at all (they do allege that some number appear to have gone missing) but that wasn't the case. As Todd noted in this week's edition, the number "missing" would have marked a jump in circulation if they went out legitimately, which means they didn't expect that many to be picked up by readers anyway. It's likely that there was an issue, albeit modified, available to anyone who cared to have one.  I worked at the USM Free Press when Sigma Nu followed the circulation vehicle and removed every copy of the paper from both campuses in order to suppress bad publicity for a sorority: that was arguably the squelching of free speech.  As for whether you can steal something that's given away free, an argument people sympathetic to the vandals have made, the FP introduced language in the masthead limiting the number per "customer."  It's virtually unenforceable, but it does offer protection if someone makes off with all of them.  Which didn't happen here, but if I were Vex, I'd prepare for that possibility.

• As I mentioned right out of the gate, no one's taking credit for these shenanigans.  So again the question of intended consequences comes up.  If you're trying to convince people of the righteousness of your cause, and insist that you've done nothing inappropriate, acting like furtive weirdos might not be the most effective route.  I doubt very much that this was ever about the actual issue at hand.  It looks very much like someone taking a swing at Vex because they find them intolerable and not very much like an earnest attempt to communicate.

• As ludicrous as I find Mort Todd's free speech complaint, Rob Korobkin (author of the inserted essay but not, he says, the mastermind behind this escapade)'s attempt to claim that this wasn't vandalism is equally laughable.  The aforementioned mastermind(s?) may not have obscured Vex's message, but they did mischievously and maliciously alter it. That's vandalism.

So that's that. The whole thing is just so riddled with petulance and buffoonery that I want to clonk all their heads together and tell them to spread out, Moe Howard-style. 

To be clear, I'm philosophically with the Save Congress Square crowd and was a believer in the Occupy movement.  One of the most effective aspects of early Occupy was its insistence on making radical thinking and participatory, direct democracy accessible to people who might be alienated by the angry-punk image of G8 protesters:  The message didn't change, the approach did and it succeeded in drawing a stronger, wider base than any protest movement in recent history.  Watching that good will squandered on what appears to be a petty personal beef is quite sad. 

I think Vex's approach to the homeless, many of whom are mentally ill and/or badly substance-addicted is callous and inhumane. I find much of the content of the magazine at large childish and distasteful.  It's unclear to me whether Mort Todd's intention is to talk meaningfully about ideas or just fuck around indulging a snide and vaguely fratty sense of humor. Hopefully it's the second, because at least he's succeeding there.  Either way, I avoid it, because the result is distasteful to me.

 But in this case, everyone's behaving badly.  As much as both sides want to pretend this spat is about some universal, more meaningful issue, it's just schoolyard dust-up that ends up making everyone involved look small. 

The Portland Press Herald is Bad at teh Internetz.

Photo: www.pressherald.com                    Permission: Copyright Holder

 

Here is a very basic summary of a thing that happened:

Reporter Steve Mistler (and it bears saying that Mistler isa seasoned and respected journalist, a feather in the cap of the Portland Press Herald which spent the better part of the past decade running its credibilityand relevance into the ground) got a tip for a story, along with a link to a Flickr account that contained photographic evidence supporting the tip.  It’s unclear how close to deadline he got thisinformation but the story ran in the August 7 edition of the paper along withphotographs from the Flickr account.  

The owner of the Flickr account, Audrey Slade, was unaware of the use of her photos until a friend sent her a link to the article.  So here's where the dispute starts.

One of Slade's main contentions is that the paper never tried to contact her prior to publication, a contention that seems reasonable given that she never heard a word about it until after the piece went to press.  

The PPH has a rather more Clintonian approach to the word "tried."  Their position appears to be that they looked at the flickr page, didn't see a link that said, "This page belongs to Audrey Slade, click here if you're the Portland Press Herald and would like to contact her." That's maybe the snidest possible way to put it, but pretty close to the spirit of the paper's response which was that they were unable to figure out who the page belonged to and how to contact her by deadline, so they seized the photos marked "All Rights Reserved" (that, by the way, is the link for "how to request use of Flickr content) under the Fair Use exemption of copyright law and called it a day.

I have zero interest in examining the Fair Use claim.  I have no legal expertise and copyright law is an endlessly complicated field, particularly where the internet is concerned.  But I do care deeply about journalism, and newspapers specifically, so I will take issue with the procedural and ethical questions at hand.

So then. The claim that it was impossible to determine ownership/contact info because of deadline constraints would be laughable, if the paper wasn't doubling down on that assertion, behaving as though the legitimate questions raised by the photo's owner and others aren't worth their consideration.  In an op-ed response today, they let fly some of their pent up contempt. In response to criticism that they'd failed at a simple task:

"However, we neglected to click the message button on Flickr, which presumably would have sent an email to the account holder."

Allow me to translate, "Ugh, yeah, we GET it, there WAS an obviously marked link to contact the owner.  You just can't understand how much BIGGER our concerns are than your stupid 'process.' 'Presumably' we could have contacted her by clicking the envelope on the Flickr page, but how could anyone know whether, 'send a message' would send her a message?"  Riiiight. PPH is bad at teh internetz. Why don't you go write a twit about it or something?

Welp, PPH, you may not have sent a message on Flickr, but your larger message that we should sit down and shut up is coming through loud and clear. But I just can't when you're being so all-fired ridiculous.

Look, even if a message on Flickr went to an account the owner never checks, it would have constituted a reasonable attempt to contact her.  But fine, let's suspend disbelief, pretend it's reasonable not to do that, and go back to examining the apparently inscrutable nature of identity on the internet. Let's point out that the pseudonym on the Flickr account, the one that apparently stymied them (I picture fact-checkers in the newsroom closing the phone book with a thump: "Nope. No JadeFrog_01 in here!") is the SAME AS HER TWITTER HANDLE.  Close to deadline or no, Mistler wrote enough words to buy them time to send a tweet.

But all of those are red herrings, because they absolutely knew who she was.  They cited her by her job title while at Husson, "the former administrative assistant to Rodney Larson, dean of the School of Pharmacy," so the claim that they couldn't identify her is not only silly as noted above, but completely, utterly, unapologetically false. Unless they're as bad using Google as they are at Flickr...or, um, at asking that guy what his assistant's name was.

The bottom line is that the Press Herald knew they were in the wrong but didn't expect any pushback, or, just as bad, it didn't cross their minds that this was an issue.  Since they tell us they did try to contact her, it appears it was the former. 

What galls me at least as much as the initial breach has been their response.  Their first response was to insist that they weren't malicious, just incompetent, and when it was pointed out to them that no one is that incompetent, they dropped the "aw, shucks" routine and went straight for the "you people just don't understand the importance of the work we're doing."

From today's response:

Lost among these comments is the media's obligation to inform the public on matters of vital public interest.

Okay, fine.  But let's get real about the burning importance and timeliness of this particular story.  Rev. Bob Carlson is dead.  If this piece had waited one day while they contacted the owner of the photos, it would not have meant that Carlson was free to roam the campus for another day. William Beardsley is now the former president of Husson.  If this piece had waited one day while they contacted the owner of the photos, he would not have had one more day to make inept policy decisions.   The only reason that this story worked to this deadline was for the gratification of the PPH breaking it.  That they did it at the expense of reasonable, responsible journalistic procedure, made themselves look like incompetent buffoons in their excuses and continue to a) leave the picture up despite being asked by the owner to take it down (it's online, guys, you can link to the Flickr account if you want, but you can't pretend it's yours) and b) pretend that their position is reasonable is pathetic.

Several years ago there was a quiet discussion among professional photographers I know about the Press Herald's tendency to use their photos, particularly in listings, without notice, compensation or credit, and I recall the paper's response being a similarly disingenuous, "Golly, mister, is that yours?  I just found it on the ground on the internet."

If the PPH wants to distance itself from its reputation lo these past many years as ideal for housebreaking puppies and wrapping fish and not much else, they're off to a rocky start.

EDIT: Speaking of journalistic ethics, I should mention in the spirit of full disclosure that I did two freelance concert reviews for the PPH back at the dawn of time, which is to say in my early twenties.