Voice of San Diego: Investigative Journalism In Our Own Backyard

On June 7th, Washington Post blogger Leonard Downey, Jr. commemorated the Watergate scandal on it's 40th anniversary. It's lead investigators, Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were also commemorated for their large role in the case.

Watergate is still considered "the biggest political scandal in American history". It is also considered the one of the most prominent examples of investigative journalism's influence on public institutions.

However in the contemporary period, the practice of investigative journalism within top national newspapers has severely declined. This has resulted from the large costs and the often-controversial findings that leave powerful institutions and advertisers uncomfortable.

On June 5th, veteran investigative journalist Jeff Brazil claimed that this decline leaves leeway for large corporations to commit indecent crimes without being caught. Jeff's assertion may be bleak, but not all hope is lost. With the decline of top newspaper support came the spawn of local non-profit organizations that support investigative journalism efforts.

One of these organizations is in our own backyard. The Voice of San Diego is a local non-profit that is dedicated to, "tell the stories no one is telling or to tell them in a way that's not being told. The Voice of San Diego covers, "the crisis at San Diego schools, the skyrocketing cost of affordable housing and the city's pension problems as long as necessary." 

This discovered information is significant for any San Diego citizen to know, as it is influencing them directly. For example, the Fact Check Blog posts about political stories in San Diego County. It's author, Keegan Kyle, fact checks what politicians say and rates the story with comprehensible ratings that range from "true" to "huckster propaganda", the key and definitions is seen here: 

 

Most notorious investigative journalism cases focus on a story that has national impact, but it's also significant to know the facts behind the processes of your local institutions. Voice of San Diego's Fact Check Blog can have a large influence on local elections. The non-profit as a whole could drastically change how a San Diego citizen views their community and possibly provoke change. 

Jeff Brazil said that investigative journalism is needed for democracy to work. How else would we know this information behind public institutions to make an informed decision about the community we live in? How else can we provoke change on the things that matter most?

Fox News Creating Political Ads

The Fox morning show Fox & Friends aired a four minute video attacking President Obama's term in office that was created by Fox News executives.




Fox News, which is continually criticized for its right-leaning reporting, is the highest watched news channel in the nation. This is a problem when American journalism purports itself as unbiased, and Fox news itself claims to be "fair and balanced." Fox executives claim that they had no knowledge of the video, that they dealt with it, and that they subsequently removed the video. This is not the first time that Fox has produced an attack ad against Obama; they played one before his State of the Union Address in January.

According to this article in MediaMatters,

The network helped launch the tea party movement, was instrumental in Republicans taking back the House in 2010, and basically served as the unofficial venue for the 2012 Republican presidential primary. 

This brings up the question of bias in journalism--if overtly biased sources can claim to be journalism and news, can news claim to be unbiased?

Google Doodles Do More

Google Doodle from May 23, 2012.

 The Google Doodle has become an icon. Many casually enjoy them while others eagerly look forward to their appearances. They are festive, fun, and exhaustingly entertaining.

In the last twelve years, Google has created over 1000 "Doodle" designs for their search engine home page. Each one is meticulously sketched, colored and finessed by a creative team known as the Google "Doodlers." Lately the company has enlisted engineers and designers to animate these images and in some cases, like the May 23, 2012 Moog Synthesizer Doodle the creations are becoming increasingly more interactive.

In addition to being festive and fun, the Google Doodles are chosen specifically due to content and timing. The cultural occurrences represented by Google vary from memorializing historical figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. to informing users about events like the 50th anniversary of the first man in space and Earth Day. Most commemorate social or historical phenomenon and are linked to information about the subject for further investigation should the viewer desire to learn more.

Various Google Doodles.

 Fun and educational, Google is also entering a journalistic grey area with these inforgraphic images and new game like application. By choosing their Doodle of the day, Google is essentially replacing their traditional logo with one that represents an "important" (by their standards at least) topic of the day. These topics often coincide with headlines that one might run across in the human interest section of a periodicals and professional blogs, for example the History Channel's "This Day in History."

This lends to analyzing Google's current role in making news, reporting news, or controlling news . Although influenced by news and current events, often the chosen Google Doodle will actually spark journalistic coverage of the topic as is the case with the Moog Synthesizer Doodle, and others like it, where an article will be written about the Doodle itself. In these cases, it appears that Google is actually creating news by generating interest in a story through visual and programing platforms.

Essentially they are accomplishing all three simultaneously.

Google creates a Doodle to visually represent a story of interest which may or may not be presently covered by news media. The Doodles in turn are written about which causes that story they wanted told to be written about as well. Breaking this down further, here's what Google has just accomplished:

• they became a journalistic force by choosing to tell a story through their infographic Doodle without having to actually be a journalistic entity
• they instigated news coverage by generating their own story and being written about, thus manipulating media consumption
• and they spread their brand through the very media coverage they generated

That is a huge amount of power and influence for a little doodle. There is clearly more to these Google Doodles than meets the eye, although they sure are fun to look at.

The War on Drugs

A short documentary, included below, was published on Youtube yesterday that showcases a new dangerous drug sold in the black market named Scopolamine. Although the movie is based in Columbia, where the drug was found, people in the United States also have had access to this drug. What's even more alarming is some have used the drug on others with criminal intentions.

One man in the video claimed that while he was under the influence of the drug, he woke up to his emptied out apartment and didn't remember a thing. When asking the doorman what happened the night before, he explained that him and three friends were moving out his stuff. The man became livid, yelling why would you let me do such a thing, and the door man replied that he told him that he was moving out with his friends.



This is an example of the more significant side effect of the drug, you lose your free will to people.

They exclaim several times in the video that this is the new date rape drug, and it looks exactly like cocaine. Horribly enough, 1 gram can kill 10-15 people. This video provides information that Americans need to know to keep aware.

However, when I searched for further news on the subject, I pulled up articles from online-only alternative news forums such as "Mail Online", "International Business Times"and "RedOrbit". How about the New York Times or Los Angeles Times, the newspapers most Americans read?




Have you read articles from these websites before?

Why isn't this news more distributed across the mass media, let alone the Internet? This information should be better disseminated so we are able to protect ourselves and know of it's existence, especially if criminals are using it against their victims' will.

The war on drugs is the right to know this knowledge immediately, to be educated and be protected from what's out there so more lives are saved in the long run.

Revisiting Bin Laden's (Imagined) Assassination

Exactly one year ago, the contemporary world was informed that after ten years of hiding, US Navy SEALs assassinated Osama bin Laden, the individual who claimed responsibility behind the 9/11 attacks. The decade-old event, which forever affected our understanding of security both domestically and internationally, also changed news production and consumption practices. As so, the continuing debate over his actual death, a mission otherwise known as Operation Neptune Spear, and the public's understanding of it was not engaged solely through news articles and press releases, but through broadcast media's incessant pitch for immersive news.

President Obama in the Situation Room, May 2011

Nonny de la Pena, yesterday's featured journalist and professor at the USC Annenberg School of Communication, expanded on these practices through a history of virtuality in news dissemination and civic discourse by concentrating on her past work with virtual news stories.

Using the same software technology, Second Life, which De la Pena described, consider the following YouTube clip on bin Laden's assassination in relation to the nature of virtual news. Given the strict confidentiality prohibiting any media coverage prior and during the event, it is understandable that virtual media was an inevitable choice to attract viewers to tune in to the news. With dynamic scenes, rich audio and music, and crafted storytelling viewers were undoubtedly immersed in the environment of SEAL operation, despite the video description disclaiming, "this is not meant to portray actual events".  Since the public was censored of proof of his death, the next best thing was to recreate it.

The CBS video below more effectively illustrates the event using animated maps, infographics, archived footage, press releases, and most importantly, a simulated reenactment of the operation.

Though the simulation was constructed according to a collection of interviews between soldiers and White House officials, its accuracy can only be contested as much as its purpose as a simulation and not actual footage. The continually digitizing world increasingly demands virtual footage due to content output pressures, however its usefulness and accuracy must be negotiated between both journalists and viewers.

Journalists and 24 Hour News Cycle

When I first connected my Twitter account to my phone, I was amazed at the barrage of news I was receiving.  Then I was getting news from Chile at midnight, China at 2a.m., Libya at 4a.m. and it didn't stop.  Needless to stay, I changed the settings to create a set time in which to receive tweets, yet every morning I would wake to anywhere between 20 to 40 new tweets, sometimes even more, and these tweets were stored from the night before to greet me every morning on the happenings of last night.  Journalists now have to compete with a 24 hour news cycle, and for  Joe Weisenthal, he is a shining example of the man versus the 24 hour news cycle.  Weisenthal, along with many other journalists, now have Twitter accounts and the rate at which they release  tweets are astounding.  

Journalists are not just required to report, they blog, they tweet, they vlog.  This also does not include the research and information that they sift through a on a daily basis needed to articulate much of the content that they produce today.  In short, once a story hits the internet, it's already old.  For the average reader today, who consumes data and information at higher rates then our predecessors, the news can't come faster.  In one infograph, it shows how consumers are now getting their news, and the trend is showing a rise in the importance of social media as a means of keeping up to date with the world.  (Click to enlarge the image below.)

However, if one was to look at the bottom of this infograph, it still shows that this data has been compiled from various articles from various sources.  So what consumers are trying to find a better way to aggregate their news into comprehensible trends and data, much like Weistenthal does.  Information and data are at the touch of almost any tech savvy person's hand, but the next big trend is not just social media, but ways to aggregate the news and data, much like through phone apps such as Pulse or infographs such as the one above.