Monthly Archives: November 2017

Op-Eds

And Now, A Prairie Home Sexual Harassment Complaint

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Garrison Keillor
Garrison Keillor (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

America is in the middle of an agonizing reappraisal of sexual conduct. What constitutes sexual harassment or assault? Where is the line that separates acceptable, or merely rude, actions from unacceptable, and possibly criminal or civilly actionable, behavior?

If you feel like this process has been dragging on for a year, you’re not alone. But as I write this, it’s actually been less than two months since the New York Times brought movie magnate Harvey Weinstein low with its story on his decades of sexual misbehavior and cover-ups.

Weinstein was the first domino to fall, but far from the last. Numerous entertainers, journalists and politicians now find themselves beleaguered by, or even  at career’s end based on, allegations that might, even if true, once have brought a wink, a nudge, and maybe an insincere verbal reprimand.

It’s impossible to know in advance how far any social sea change will go, or how far it should go. But this one may have just seen its first bit of backlash — literally.

Garrison Keillor is an unparalleled icon of state media as entertainment. Foremost among his accomplishments is creating Minnesota Public Radio’s A Prairie Home Companion and hosting it (with breaks) for 40 years.

On November 29, MPR announced that it had fired Keillor and severed all contractual relationships with him over allegations of “inappropriate behavior” with a co-worker.

Keillor might, like so many others, have donned a hair shirt and beat his chest while screaming public apologies for a few days before conspicuously entering rehab. As a liberal of his age (75), he’d probably have been quickly forgiven by his admiring public, who would award him a  moral golf handicap for being from way back when.

Instead, he shrugged off the firing (“I’m just fine. I had a good long run and am grateful for it and for everything else.”) and politely explained himself without pillorying himself:

“I put my hand on a woman’s bare back. I meant to pat her back after she told me about her unhappiness and her shirt was open and my hand went up it about six inches. She recoiled. I apologized. I sent her an email of apology later and she replied that she had forgiven me and not to think about it. We were friends. We continued to be friendly right up until her lawyer called.”

The explanation has the ring of truth to it. As he himself points out, he’s well-known for being physically stand-offish and describes himself as being on the autism spectrum (of which aversion to physical touch is often a feature). Groping a colleague isn’t just out of radio character for Keillor. It’s out of character, period. If he’s not lying, there’s no sexual harassment here.

If Keillor’s travail, and how he’s handling it, marks the point in time where we pause to reconsider the content of our suddenly evolving set of standards instead of plunging headlong into a new Salem witch hunt, he will indeed have brought us good news from Lake Wobegon.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

James O’Keefe versus the Cardinal Rule of “Gotcha” Journalism

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Stock Photo — MaxPixel

James O’Keefe is famous — or at least notorious — for running sting operations in which he uses actors to trick organizations he opposes into behaving badly on (hidden) camera. The Washington Post didn’t fall for his latest ringer, a woman falsely claiming that Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore got her pregnant, then procured an abortion for her, when she was a teenager.

Writing at The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf takes O’Keefe and his Project Veritas conservative media operation to task for “bad faith” in the dust-up. Instead of admitting that the Post‘s reporters exercised great care in investigating Jaime T. Phillips’s claims, and declined to publish allegations their research couldn’t substantiate, O’Keefe went on the offensive, posturing as the victim of an “ambush” by the Post and raising funds to “finish this investigation.”

“O’Keefe’s team seems less interested in what’s true than in making the media look bad,” writes Friedersdorf. The indictment is harsh but it seems to be true. And that’s a problem.

Investigative journalism, including the “sting” variety of which O’Keefe has made himself one of the 21st century’s acknowledged masters, plays an important role in informing the public. Real stories are broken. Real corruption is revealed. Real institutional flaws are outed.

But “gotcha” journalism of the Project Veritas type must, if its practitioners want to remain trusted and relevant, hold itself to even higher standards of truth and disclosure than might be expected in “straight news” coverage.

If a regular reporter gets someone’s birth date wrong, a one-sentence correction on page B-38 is reasonable.

If an investigative sting results in the discovery that the target didn’t fail in the expected way, page B-38 isn’t going to work. The truth of the matter needs to be put right out front. Not just to give the targets their due, but to protect the reputations of the investigators. The claims of an investigator who won’t admit error and exonerate the innocent in the present can’t be trusted in the future.

The mission of Project Veritas (“Veritas” is Latin for “Truth”) is to “[i]nvestigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions in order to achieve a more ethical and transparent society.”

Ethics and transparency require a clear admission from O’Keefe that his Washington Post sting didn’t reveal the misconduct he expected to find. His reputation, such as it is, requires that as well.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

No, The End of “Net Neutrality” is Not The End of the World (Wide Web)

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I get lots of email, including email from political advocacy groups trumpeting the Impending Doom of the Month. This month, that doom is the coming end of “Net Neutrality” at the hands of the Federal Communications Commission.

“Donald Trump and his corporate cronies are about to destroy the Internet,” writes Eden James of Democracy for America.

“[FCC chairman Ajit] Pai is paving the way for monopolistic ISPs to block and censor what we see online, and push anyone who can’t pay extra fees into ‘internet slow lanes,'” warns Carli Stevenson of Demand Progress.

Kurt Walters of Fight For The Future says that the impending end of the FCC’s “Net Neutrality” rules is a “plan to end the Internet as we know it …”

For some reason, those alarmist emails leave out the fact that “the Internet as we know it” — the World Wide Web — survived and thrived for nearly a quarter of a century without “Net Neutrality,” which was only imposed by a previous FCC a little more than two years ago.

But now the alarmists insist that axing the two-year-old rule will suddenly, for unspecified reasons, cause Internet Service Providers to divide the Internet into “fast” and “slow” lanes at the expense of their own customers and of small web site owners. Why ISPs would cut off their noses to spite their own faces in this way isn’t explained, probably because the prediction makes no sense at all and simply isn’t based in reality.

The fight over “Net Neutrality” is best understood as a duel between corporate interests — Big Telecom on one hand, Big Data on the other, with Big Data doing a better job of fooling activists into making a moral crusade out of the matter.

Big Data — specifically companies that deliver high-bandwidth services like streaming video (Netflix, Google’s YouTube service, et al.), or that consume lots of bandwidth simply by virtue of being very popular (Facebook and so forth) need ever larger pipes to shove that data at you. They want ISPs to shoulder the costs of building and fattening those pipes.

Big Telecom — the ISPs — want to charge the bandwidth hogs extra for getting such large amounts of data to your screen in a timely manner, so that Big Data bears the costs of building those pipes and keeping them uncongested.

If Big Data wins (“Net Neutrality”), ISP customers will end up paying more for Internet access. Everyone’s Internet access fees will go up (or at least remain higher than they otherwise would) and broadband Internet’s expansion into rural areas will slow down.

If Big Telecom wins, different customers (streaming video subscribers, web hosting users) will see our fees rise.

There’s no such thing as a free Internet. Someone’s going to pay to make it keep working. The only question is who. I’d rather pay an extra $5 a month for my web hosting and Netflix binges than shift that cost to my neighbor next door who checks her email once a day. Good riddance to “Net Neutrality.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY