Most journalists are primarily event-gatherers, picking and packing the choicest and freshest events to present to their audiences. Every time there is a sufficiently interesting or important event of some sort---a plane crash, say, or an earthquake---journalists rush in to relay the story. However, without an event to report, journalists are almost helpless. When there's no event, almost by definition, there's no news for them to report. As journalist Walter Lippmann put it in the 1920s:

It may be the act of going into bankruptcy, it may be a fire, a collision, an assault, a riot, an arrest, a denunciation, the introduction of a bill, a speech, a vote, a meeting, the expressed opinion of a well known citizen, an editorial in a newspaper, a sale, a wage-schedule, a price change, the proposal to build a bridge. There must be a manifestation. The course of events must assume a certain definable shape, and until it is in a phase where some aspect is an accomplished fact, news does not separate itself from the ocean of possible truth.

To a journalist, the event is a tyrant. It is the authority that grants him liberty to speak. And this liberty is typically only given for a short amount of time. Unless the event is extraordinarily salacious or deadly or important, the journalist must move on to other topics quickly, as his powers to attract an audience rapidly wane as the event ages. He has a day or two or three to talk about an explosion or child abductions before he must once more hold his tongue, at least until the next event.

To a reporter who's bubbling with ideas to write about, this can be terribly frustrating. Lots of interesting and important developments happen as a gradual trickle, rather than in a series of discrete, reportable events. However, journalists generally can't write about broad trends or abstract ideas until they find what is called a "news peg"---a timely event that the reporter can tie, no matter how tenuously, to the subject that he really wants to talk about. For example, a journalist who has a vague hankering to write about his suspicions that airline safety has been getting worse would keep an eye out for a news peg of some sort---any event that might provide a convenient excuse for publishing the story. A high-profile plane crash would be an ideal peg, but other lesser events---perhaps not newsworthy on their own---would also suffice. A near miss would do. So would an incident where a pilot gets fired for showing up on the job drunk. Reports are also good news pegs; the journalist probably wouldn't have to wait long before the FAA or some other government agency publishes a report or generates a new statistic about transportation that might imbue the piece with timeliness. Failing that, there's always an anniversary of some disaster or another; if desperate, the reporter can dust off TWA 8OO or the Andes plane crash or even the R101 airship disaster to write a piece at the appropriate time. For a news peg need not even be a real event; it can be a fake one.

A real event tends to be spontaneous rather than planned; news happens on its own timetable. Even if the event isn't a complete surprise (everybody knows that an election is coming, for example), its outcome is at least somewhat unpredictable. A real event can be complex; it might take months or years to tease out its significance and it might never be understood fully. A fake event---what historian Daniel Boorstin dubbed epseudoevent---tends to be just the opposite. Where real news is organic, pseudoevents are synthetic. A pseudoevent is planned rather than spontaneous. It occurs at a convenient time and at an accessible location. Any unpredictability is kept to a minimum. A good pseudoevent is simple and easy to understand. And it has a purpose. A pseudoevent like the presentation of a political speech or the orchestrated "leak" of a governmental memo is meant, at least in part, specifically for the consumption of the press---and once given an airing by the press, it is meant to get attention, to be talked about, and to shape public opinion. Though a pseudoevent might have information, that information has been massaged and molded with a purpose in mind. A plane crash has no hidden agenda; a speech from the president of Airbus certainly does.

Reporters make little distinction, if any, between events and pseudoevents. Both are useful; pseudoevents can serve as perfectly serviceable news pegs when an event is not readily available. A speech from the Airbus president can unshackle a reporter, allowing him to riff on the safety of airlines. Reporters are grateful for the freedom that the pseudoevents buy them, even though that freedom comes at the price of being manipulated by the creator of the pseudoevent. As a result, many corporations and government organizations have become adept at manufacturing pseudoevents that quickly get turned into pseudonews.

From the journalist's point of view, the poll is the ultimate pseudoevent---it is entirely under his control. Any time a news organization wishes, it can conduct or commission a poll, whose results it then duly reports. A poll frees journalists from having to wait for news to happen or for others to manufacture pseudoevents for them. Polls allow a news organization to manufacture its own news. It's incredibly liberating.*

What's more, polls allow reporters to bend real events to a convenient timetable, completely freeing them from the less than ideal timing of bona fide news events. During the doldrums of an election season, in the boring stretch when a vote might be weeks or months away, it might seem that news organizations wouldn't be able to talk about the election for lack of any events to report on. Not so. News organizations need only commission polls to give their reporters and talking heads something to pontificate about. Journalists chatter continuously throughout election season as if they were calling a horse race. Pundits spend countless hours rooting through the entrails of whatever national or local polls they can get their hands on, turning each little insignificant result into an important portent of future events. These polls allow the news media to keep their audiences tense and entertained even while crossing the vast, lonely electoral desert in between the results of the primaries---which usually aren't that interesting to begin with---and the general election in November. And as election day comes nigh, the polling gets even more intense. In days of yore, reporters had to wait until the returns were in before announcing the winner of an election. No longer! Exit polls allow the networks to declare a winner before bedtime. Polls are an incredibly powerful tool, and they've become a staple of modern journalism---and not just during election season.

* Polls aren't the only way for news organizations to synthesize news. Time's annual Person of the Year issue is a long-running exercise in pseudo-newsy attention grabbing. Top-ten and top-hundred lists are also very effective---and they seem to be proliferating rapidly.

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I would say just start with Bloom's Taxonomy:

1. Blog quotes from other articles, blogs, reports, etc. Shit, quote your own emails if necessary. No commentary, just a one sentence citation/context. If you can't do this, don't move on to the next steps (heck, if you can't do this, you clearly are not engaged at all with your work). Duration: 15 min (assuming light editing/anxiety over appropriateness)

2. Same quotes as #1, but this time lightly criticize, compare or contrast between them or somehow contemporize. If you've built up a collection of quotes, it's fairly easy to pull 2 contrasting ones and write a light paragraph to fit between them with your analysis. Length: 30 min.(assuming you already have the quotes and can bang out a quick explanatory connection).

3. Write down a conversation that has already taken place. This requires a higher level of literacy, but you're basically rehashing the arguments you've already made---with maybe a brief conclusion where you say "I should have explained x better" (but don't actually explain it, just acknowledge you recognize the holes and let them sit). Duration: ~1 hour (depending on complexity and your level of honesty in narrative)

4. Original analysis: avoid at all costs. People who can bang out 500-1000 words of original, longform analysis are in full-time academic, strategy, creative or executive roles where they can probably carve out 4 hours for writing (writing may be their only job) and be none the worse. Or else they are top 1% writers. Or are sociopaths. Duration: longer than most of our jobs allow.

I originally wrote Maslow's Hierarchy instead of Bloom's Taxonomy... but whatever, a pyramid is a pyramid.

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I earlier posted a picture from a project I was working on for journaling media usage. Below is the book I got back from POD (I used Lulu and am quite satisfied). I still have a few changes I want to make before I consider it “finalized”: increasing the gutter size (the gutter calculator is clearly configured for reading, not writing), optimizing the half-tones and gradients (I printed a test scale in the back of the book), and redoing the cover (I don’t think I had the DPI set properly for the only rasterized image I used in the entire project).

Also, after reading this piece by Kelli Anderson on documenting work, I’m trying to take better project and process photos. I took these photos on my porch, in 20° weather—but the natural sunlight made it worth it.

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This briefing is from last Spring, in response to a key government stakeholder asking us to justify our continued relevance after 10 years in the field:

The Transmission Project (before, the CTC VISTA Project) has focused on the Digital Divide in America since its inception. Although this divide continues to exist, its nature has become more complex. No longer are we just concerned about an individual's access to a computer; other factors such as broadband adoption and the digital participation gap can now have direct impact on a person's ability to change their socioeconomic status. Enabling individuals and communities to emerge from poverty today relies even more upon their ability to participate in the production and sharing of information through media and technology.

The role information, media and technology play in economic development is well-recognized within government programs. The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) project on the Future of Media and the Information Needs of Communities identifies both “the role of public and other noncommercial media in serving the information needs of the underserved, including language minorities, ethnic minorities, children, the disabled, and the economically disadvantaged” and “the infrastructure needs and assets of public and other noncommercial media in delivering information to communities” as areas for development.

Supporting media and technology is a key activity of social and economic development. Grantmakers in Film + Electronic Media’s (GFEM) newly released report “Funding Media, Strengthening Democracy: Grantmaking for the 21st Century” pushes for acknowledgement of the prevalence and impact of media: “Foundations and government agencies of all sizes and in all fields will benefit from recognizing the growing importance of media to the future of every field—education, health, the environment, and more.”

Recent economic stimulus measures recognize the economic benefits of investment in communications programs and infrastructure. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s Broadband Technologies Opportunities Program, (BTOP) seeks to “expand broadband access to unserved and underserved communities across the U.S., increase jobs, spur investments in technology and infrastructure, and provide long-term economic benefits.” BTOP funded programs and organizations are a priority area for the Transmission Project in our 2010-2011 program year.

The FCC’s National Broadband Plan goes so far as to recommend a new Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) initiative, a Digital Literacy Corps, which would “help people get connected—not only to broadband—but to the educational and economic resources that broadband can bring to the next generation of Americans.” Such an initiative would mirror the impact of capacity building and organizational development the Transmission Project has supported over its 10 year history.

But broadband should not be the only focus of development. The FCC also encourages “innovative uses of social media, gaming, Internet applications, citizen journalism, mobile technologies, and other technological and organizational innovations and the possibilities for new kinds of noncommercial media networks” as solutions to the information needs of communities—areas in which the Transmission Project has long-focused.

Capacity building in media organizations takes on a variety of roles. The report "Fighting Poverty: Utilizing Community Media in a Digital Age" includes the World Congress on Communication for Development recommendation that development institutions should provide assistance to build the capacity of community media through training, strengthening of networks and sector associations, technical assistance and investment in order to result in community media's contribution to long term social change.

The capacity-building needs of media organizations echo the needs identified by the CNCS’s own stakeholder dialogues on capacity building in nonprofits: “The most critical capacity building issues facing small and midsize nonprofits right now are sustainability (cash flow and consistent funding, particularly for infrastructure), leadership, ability to nurture partnerships and relationships, capacity to manage and retain volunteers, weak understanding of the role of governance, short-term thinking and stagnation, capacity to use technology, and capacity to manage and cultivate human capital, both paid and volunteer.”

The Transmission Project, with the support of CNCS, has long recognized the need for capacity building within organizations that use media and technology and the positive impact those organizations and their initiatives can have upon individuals and communities in poverty. The information needs of communities, and the role public media and technology has in meeting those needs, are ever more relevant and necessary today as they were 10 years ago.

There are a few turns of phrase that make me cringe---not to mention reliance on the comma---but overall I am very proud of this writing. It was a quick, 2-day turnaround project that relied heavily upon recent reports and studies we had previously quoted on the Transmission Project's blog. We never received a formal response, so I assume it was effective.

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My account of meaning is grounded in what real people do when they speak and write. When people speak or write successfully with each other it looks as though there is a transfer of meaning: the speaker puts the meaning into the words and the listener takes it out at the other end. If you look at it from the larger perspective this account is fair: the listener ends up knowing what the speaker wanted him to know and ends up knowing something he never knew before, and so it must be that the words put this knowledge into his head. But it is important also to take a closer perspective and realize that, strictly speaking, words cannot contain meaning. Only people have meaning. Words can only have meaning attributed to them by people. The listener can never get any meaning out of a word that he didn't put in. Language can only consist of a set of directions for building meanings out of one's own head. Though the listener's knowledge seems new, it is also not new: the meaning may be thought of as structures he never had in his head before, but he had to build these new structures out of ingredients he already had. The speaker's words were aset of directions for assembling this already-present material.

To change the metaphor. Meaning is like movies inside the head. I've got movies in my head. I want to put them inside yours. Only I can't do that because our heads are opaque. All I can do is try to be clever about sending you a sound track and hope I've done it in such a way as to make you construct the right movies in your head. What's worse, of course, is that since neither of us can see the movies in each other's head, we are apt to be mistaken about how well we are doing in trying to make the other person show himself the movie we have in mind.

We can let ourselves talk about words "having meaning" and even "carrying meaning from one head to another" as long as we now realize these phrases denote something complex: the words don't transport the contents of my head into yours, they give you a set of directions for building your own meaning. If we are both good at writing directions and following directions for building meaning, we end up with similar things in our heads---that is, we communicate. Otherwise, we experience each other's words as "not having any meaning in them," or "having the wrong meaning in them."

The question is then how these meaning-building rules operate in ordinary language. Meaning in ordinary language---English, for example---is midway on a continuum between meaning in dreams and meaning in mathematics. Dreams may be hard to interpret, but the nature of the meaning situation is very simple because there is no audience. Dreams are all "speaking" and no "listening": dreams are for the sake of dreaming, not for the sake of interpreting. Therefore, though dreams or dream-images have particular, definite meanings, they can mean anything. They have whatever meaning the dreamer of that particular dream built into them. The rules for dreaming are as follows: let anything mean anything. (We could be fancy and say that the meaning-building rules for dreams are the rules of "resemblance" and "association." But everything resembles everything else to some extent, and anything is liable to be associated somehow with anything else. Thus anything can mean anything.) If we dream of a gun or a steeple, we may be talking about a penis, but then again we may not. And we may dream about a penis with any image at all. In dreaming you can never make a mistake.

At the other extreme is a language like mathematics. Here people have gone to the trouble to nail down the rules for building meaning into symbols. Something may mean only what these publicly acknowledged rules allow it to mean. In mathematics there are mistakes, and any argument about what something means or whether there is a mistake can be settled without doubt or ambiguity. (Perhaps there are exceptions in some advanced mathematical research.)

Meaning in ordinary language is in the middle. It is pushed and pulled simultaneously by forces that try to make it fluid and dreamlike but also fixed like mathematics.

The individual user of ordinary language is like the dreamer. He is apt to build in any old meaning to any old word. Everybody has just as many connotations and associations to a word as he does to an image. Thus, as far as the individual is concerned, a word is liable---and often tends---to mean absolutely anything.

To illustrate this dream-like fluidity of ordinary language, notice that words do in fact end up meaning anything as they move through time and across mountain ranges. "Down" used to mean "hill" ("dune"), but because people said "down hill" a lot ("off- dune"), and because they were lazy ("adown"), finally hill means down. Philology, it has been said, is a study in which consonants count for very little and vowels for nothing at all. A word may change its meaning to absolutely anything.

But the mathematics-like force for order is just as strong. That is, though words in ordinary language can mean anything, they only do mean what the speech community lets them mean at that moment. But unlike the case of mathematics, these agreements are not explicitly set down and agreed to. That is, our rules for building meaning into words are unspoken and are learned by doing, by listening to others, and even by listening to ourselves. It's like one of those party games where people get you to start playing before you know the rules of the game and indeed part of the fun is learning gradually to understand the rules after you find yourself following them. When you pick up the rules you can play---you can send and receive messages with others who know the rules. These rules for building meaning may be thought to be written down in dictionaries. But dictionaries are only records of yesterday's rules, and today's may be somewhat different. And dictionaries don't tell all the meanings that speakers send to each other in words.

The dynamism between the dream characteristics and the math characteristics in ordinary language is important: there is a constant tug of war. The individual is tending to allow words to mean anything---just as he allows dream images to mean whatever he builds in. Not because he is naughty but simply because he is a meaning-building creature and cannot refrain from constantly building new meanings into everything he encounters.

But the speech community is constantly curbing this looseness. When an individual speaker means things by a set of words which the community of listeners does not "hear," he tends to give in to the community and stop meaning those things by those words: that is, when they don't build in at their end what he builds in at his, he either stops building it in or else remains unconscious of meanings of the words. Similarly, when an individual listener hears things in a set of words which the community of speakers do not mean, he also tends to give in to the community and stop hearing those meanings or stop being aware of having those meanings for those words. (The exceptions to this process illustrate it well. When there are listeners who are especially eager to know what is on someone's mind---someone like a specially loved child or a poet such as Blake---they will learn to interpret his words even if he talks like a dreamer. If there's enough utterance and enough care, the code can always be cracked.)

The history of meaning in a language is the history of this power struggle between dream characteristics and math characteristics. Rules for meaning-building change when some speaker is somehow powerful and makes people "hear" in an utterance what they never used to hear in it. And even a listener can be powerful in this subtle way (be an unmoved mover) and make people "mean" in an utterance what they had not meant before. When, on the other hand, the community holds its own, meanings don't change. Humpty Dumpty put his finger on it:

"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knockdown argument,' "Alice objected.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean---neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "who is to be master---that's all."

Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

The picture is oversimplified, however, if we talk of only one speech community. For actually there are many overlapping speech communities for each individual---building up to the largest one: all speakers of, say, English. Smaller subcommunities are in the middle in this power struggle. On the one hand, they exert stabilizing force upon the individual's dreamlike fluid tendency of meaning. But on the other hand, they are not as strongly stabilizing as the larger speech community is---that is, I can change the meaning-building rules of my friends sooner than I can do it to a larger community. And so, in fact, the smaller communities turn out to act as forces for fluidity upon larger communities.

This model implies that meaning in ordinary language consists of delicate, flexible transactions among people in overlapping speech communities---peculiar transactions governed by unspoken agreements to abide by unspecified, constantly changing rules as to what meanings to build into what words and phrases. All the parties merely keep on making these transactions and assuming that all the other parties abide by the same rules and agreements. Thus, though words are capable of extreme precision among good players, they nevertheless float and drift all the time.

Elbow does a better job than anyone in characterizing non-converging processes: change just is. And this is just about the meaning of words; add on to that form, structure, medium, authority and all the other trappings of rhetoric that are themselves constantly reconstructed.

But that is why I'm a language nerd: it's enjoyable to float on your back in the warm ocean with the sun on your face and feel the lapping of a million tiny waves pushing you about (and imagining the millions of tiny waves pushing them about and so forth). As long as you can balance those thoughts with the vigilance necessary to keep from drifting into the surf zone or floating out to sea, searching for a stationary spot on the beach can't compare.

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The essence of editing is easy come easy go. Unless you can really say to yourself, “What the hell. There’s plenty more where that came from, let’s throw it away,” you can’t really edit. You have to be a big spender. Not tightass.

More…

You can’t be a good, ruthless editor unless you are a messy, rich producer. But you can’t be really fecund as a producer unless you know you’ll be able to go at it with a ruthless knife.

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Editing must be cut-throat. You must wade in with teeth gritted. Cut away flesh and leave only bone. Learn to say things with a relationship instead of words. If you have to make introductions or transitions, you have things in the wrong order. If they were in the right order they wouldn’t need introductions or transitions. Force yourself to leave out all subsidiaries and then, by brute force, you will have to rearrange the essentials into their proper order.

Every word omitted keeps another reader with you. Every word retained saps strength from the others. Think of throwing away not as negative—not as crumpling up sheets of paper in helplessness and rage—but as a positive, creative, generative act. Learn to play the role of the sculptor pulling off layers of stone with his chisel to reveal the figure beneath. Leaving things out makes the backbone or structure show better.

Try to feel the act of strength in the act of cutting: as you draw the pencil through the line or paragraph or whole page, it is a clenching of teeth to make a point stick out more, hit home harder. Conversely, try to feel that when you write in a mush, foggy, wordy way, you must be trying to cover something up: message-emasculation or self-emasculation. You must be afraid of your strength. Taking away words lets a loud voice stick out. Does it scare you? More words will cover it up with static. It is no accident that timid people are often wordy. Saying nothing takes guts. If you want to say nothing and not be noticed, you have to be wordy.

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There is a paradox about control which this kind of writing brings into the open. The common model of writing I grew up with preaches control. It tells me to think first, make up my mind what I really mean, figure out ahead of time where I am going, have a plan, an outline, don't dither, don't be ambiguous, be stern with myself, don't let things out of hand. As I begin to try to follow this advice, I experience a sense of satisfaction and control: "I'm going to be in charge of this thing and keep it out of any swamps!" Yet almost always my main experience ends up one of not being in control, feeling stuck, feeling lost, trying to write something and never succeeding. Helplessness and passivity.

The developmental model, on the other hand, preaches, in a sense, lack of control: don't worry about not knowing what you mean or what you intend ahead of time; you don't need a plan or an outline, let things get out of hand, let things wander and digress. Though this approach makes for initial panic, my overall experience with it is increased control. Not that I always know what I am doing, not that I don't feel lost, baffled, and frustrated. But the overall process is one that doesn't leave me so helpless. I can get something written when I want to. There isn't such a sense of mystery, of randomness.

This paradox of increased overall control through letting go a bit seems paradoxical only because our normal way of thinking about control is mistakenly static: it is not development or process-oriented because it leaves out the dimension of time. Our static way of thinking makes us feel we must make a single choice as to whether to be a controlled person or an out-of-control person. The feeling goes like this: "Ugh. If I just write words as they come, allow myself to write without a pan or an outline, allow myself to digress or wander, I've turned into a blithering idiot. I'll degenerate. I'll lose the control I've struggled so hard to get. First I'll dangle participles, then I'll split infinitives, then I'll misspell words, then I'll slide into disagreement of subject and verb. Soon I'll be unable to think straight. Unable to find flaws in an argument. Unable to tell a good argument from a bad one. Unable to tell sound evidence from phony evidence. My mind will grow soft and limp, it will atrophy; it will finally fall off. No!  I'll be tough. I won't be wishy-washy. I'll have high standards. I'll be rigorous. I'll make every argument really stand up. I won't be a second-rate mind. I'm going to be a discriminating person. I'm going to keep my mind sharp at all times.

But this static model isn't accurate. Most processes engaged in by live organisms are cyclic, developmental processes that run through time and end up different from how they began. The fact is that most people find they improve their ability to think carefully and discriminatingly if they allow themselves to be sloppy and relinquish control at other times. You usually cannot excel at being tough-minded and discriminating unless it is the final stage in an organic process that allowed you to be truly open, accepting—even at times blithering.

You can encourage richness and chaos by encouraging digressions. We often see digressions as a waste of time and break them off when we catch ourselves starting one. But do the opposite. Give it its head. It may turn out to be an integral part of what you are trying to write. Even if it turns out to be an excrescence to be gotten rid of, if it came to you while you were thinking about X it must be related and a source of leverage. And you may not be able to get rid of it completely unless you see more of it. Almost always you cannot disentangle the good insight from the excrescence until after you have allowed the digression to develop. At the early stage the two are so intertwined that you can't tell one from the other. That's why it feels both interesting and wrong. There are concepts in there that you haven't yet learned to discriminate.

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A comparison was made to the Open Source Software movement and I made a very quotable statement (by Twitter standards): “Journalism is the software upon which democracy runs”.

Other than the awful mixed metaphors, I think I made a good statement: coding software has a very clear correlation between the work itself and the measurement of the final product at the end. Journalism: not so much. Of course some people do talk about how access to information and analysis from diverse viewpoints is vital to the continued health of our Democracy, but they get shouted down by Glen Beck. Newspapers themselves (or Cable Access TV or whatever is going town the toilet today) are usually discussed as some impalpable, circularly-reasoned necessity rather than put into context as providers of a what is necessary for the kind of society we want to live in.

Call me progressive, but let’s talk about what we need to build tomorrow, not reinforce today.

Here’s a quote I have trouble disagreeing with from Mark Lloyd’s Communications Policy is a Civil Rights Issue:

…to argue that getting out of the business of regulation is the only constructive role for government to play is as blind as it is disingenuous. The challenge is to create a set of rules that reflects the best nature of our society. As Newton Minow makes clear in Abandoned in the Wasteland, the issue is not really whether the market provides good choices, but whether citizens have a real say in what those choices are. The issue is whether the parent must let his child be a consumer, or, more to the point, a product to be sold to advertisers, or whether the parent has a right as a citizen to demand more.

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The writer who overuses commas tends to also overuse adjectives and adverbs. He tends to be repetitive, won’t be subtle, and often gives too much information. He grasps for multiple word choices instead of one strong choice, and thus the choices he makes won’t be strong. His langugae won’t be unique. Commas are also used to qualify, offset, or parse, and the writer who frequently resorts to this tends to be reluctant to take a definitive stance. He will be hesitant. His characters, too, might not take a stand; is plot might be ambiguous. It will be harder for him to deliver dramatic punches when need be, and indeed he is less likely to be dramatic. He is interested in fine distinctions, more so than pacing, and is likely to write an overly long book. He writes with critics in mind, with the fear of being criticized for omission, and is more likely to have a scholarly background (or at least be well read) and to consider too many angles. This writer will need to simplify, to take a stronger stance, and to understand that less is more.

In my defense, an Amazon reviewer says these sections are “presumptuous and insulting”.

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Nonfiction writers, of which I am one at this moment, routinely lie like slugs in their narratives. Often they’ll lie like like slugs about facts, which, as you already know, I sometimes do. Sometimes lying about facts is okay, sometimes not. But what’s never okay is to lie in subtext, purposely cause the reader to have a rush of insight about the workings of the world which the writer knows to be false. Lying in subtext is sin. Writers who do this, of which there are a bunch, will rot in Writer Hell. My theory is that this worse case lying-in-writing scenario is invariably caused by the same condition that cases bad behavior of any sort: a failure in self-reflection.*

If you’re going to write a book (but not someday): The key to writing, good writing, is self-reflection. In  a sense, it’s a writer’s job, his only job. Take that to the bank and put it in an interest-bearing account.†

*     My view is that lying about facts is sometimes “okay” when the writer’s sole motive is to keep the story moving, or to foster unity (symmetry), or to ease the narrative onto another subject (a segue), with not deceitful implications about ho the world works.

†    Aside from self-reflecting in his work, a writer has to keep the reader wanting to know What Happens Next. So, regarding jobs, writers actually have two.

Later on in the book, Weisbecker shows some explicit examples, as well as makes (to me) a damning statement for media literacy [Part 5, Ch. 7: p. 336]:

Woodward sees fit to end Veil, the Secret Wars of the CIA with a lie on every level you can lie in a nonfiction book. He ends with a chapter describing a personal visit with CIA director William Casey on his deathbed (from the brain tumor).

About two sentences into this, I knew Woodward had made up the scene .… (Others have opined the same regarding that scene, based on looking into dates and hospital records and the like.)

But I could have forgiven that lie, which was only about facts, i.e., Woodward’s deathbed visit to Casey having never happened. … What Woodward does, however in the deathbed scene he made up, is to lie in the subtext as well —in what is really going on —which kind of lying is a sin, for the commission of which writers will rot in Writer Hell.

Here’s the scene: Casey, on his deathbed, admits to having known about the diversion of Iran arms sales funds to the contras. The subtext here is that Casey didn’t have anything to do with the diversion. He knew about it.

Technically, Woodward wasn’t outright lying. But what he left out of his fucking narrative is that Casey knew about the diversion because he had been instrumental in planning and executing it.

A whopper of a lie by omission, no?

…

But my favorite lie by omission, one near and dear to my heart, comes in Woodward’s Plan of Attack — his definitive history of our conflict with Saddam Hussein. Woodward does better, wordage-wise, in this one, devoting one whole page (out of 450) to U.S. history with “The Beast of Baghdad.” One little problem though: In his one page history Woodward skips from the 1970s to the 1990s, leaving out the 1980s. Not a word about the decade of the 1980s. Right: The decade during which the U.S. and The Beast of Baghdad were close allies and the U.S., under Reagan then Bush I, was actively and knowingly aiding and abetting The Beast of Baghdad in his crimes against humanity.

Thing is, Bob Woodward himself classifies his books, his nonfiction books, as being “somewhere between the news and the history books.”

Let’s take him at his word on that.

See if you concur: People who provide a democratic society (like what the United States is purported to be) with news (meaning journalists) should maybe question what the shitball motherfuckers in power tell them about their antics. Same goes for the writers of history books, which mold the minds of our children.

Bob Woodward does not question anything the shitball motherfuckers tell him. Woodward just parrots their lies and perception management as facts. Bob Woodward’s books, his nonfiction books, which are something “between the news and the history books,” are lies.

That I had this rush of insight about the journalist who in the 1970s questioned everything and in doing so uncovered the truth, then followed the truth wherever it led, even to the toppling of a president, and who was a hero of mine, and who was now the personification of why Orwell was an optimist and hence of why the world is so fucked-up, slightly exacerbated my terminal loneliness.*

*    If the rewriting (or erasing) of history, which is what Woodward does in his books, sounds vaguely familiar, this was the protagonist Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984. Smith, along with the rest of the world of that story, was intimidated, threatened, bullied, into denial/lying via “jackboots on human faces.” That the jackboots are unnecessary in the world of today to get Woodward (and the rest of the mainstream media) to rewrite history is the basis of my observation that Orwell was an optimist.

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