Being the Media: A Cautionary Tale

As the 2012 Presidential election very slowly starts to ramp up, with the shape of the Republican field now starting to chrystalise (Pawlenty, Romney, Santorum - IN. Donald Trump - OUT.) the media is starting to make judgements about who they will choose to cover. Early media attention to a fledgling primary campaign is like gold, and a lot of the candidates have relatively low name recognition. So the decision the media takes about who to focus mainstream television coverage on in these early races can be very influential in setting the stage for the race.

So it's worth pointing out that while former Republican Governor Mitt Romney was announcing his candidacy for office, to respectable and appropriately fact-checked coverage, much of the media was spending their time doing this:

As they left the clambake she attended Thursday in New Hampshire, Palin’s two-SUV caravan traveled at 52 miles per hour in a 35 mph zone as it peeled away from the hosts’ neighborhood. Both cars blew through a stop sign about a mile later. They did 70 mph in a 55 mph zone on I-95 — and then, after they got off, without signaling, flew right past a flashing sign informing them they were going 45 mph in a 35 mph zone...

On Tuesday, the bus nearly hit a biker turning off of Pine Street in Philadelphia.
On Wednesday, after a police escort led the bus through a closed section of the Lincoln Tunnel, the bus ran at least two red lights racing up Sixth Avenue and through Columbus Circle in Midtown Manhattan. Before long, a cop pulled up, pointing out to the first reporter trailing the bus how many lights they were running. The reporter apologized — but begged to stick with the bus. The perplexed cop let him go. 

On Thursday, the story was much the same. Palin’s two SUVs — used for minor events and tight spaces — braved the tiny, winding streets of Boston’s North End. And when the bus joined them, the trailing car in the entourage ran two red lights after the bus barely made it through the yellow, as did the media caravan, leaving behind a traffic jam for the locals. 

The reporters who are speeding, tailgating, cutting off other cars, blasting through roundabouts and passing on the right in an effort to keep up, say they have no other choice since they never know what Palin’s up to or where she’s headed — and aides typically won’t tell them anything. Once they’re on the road, they’re filing urgent updates by phone and figuring out unorthodox bathroom breaks, like the reporter who pulled over to relieve himself on the side of the highway going from Gettysburg, Pa., to Philadelphia — drawing notice from both Palin aides and the rest of the trailing press.

The reporters say they, "have no other choice". I can think of at least one other choice they could make. Hypothetically, they could not cover Sarah Palin's family holiday. 


Bear in mind, unlike Romney, Sarah Palin is not a Presidential candidate at this point. She's a reality TV star, former half term governor and Fox News commentator. And she refuses to release details of her bus tour to reporters - that's fine. She's not making speeches to define policy on important issues, she's not meeting with party leaders, she's not even spending time talking to voters and constituents about the issues. She's just driving around, visiting tourist attractions and occassionally mangling American history. 



But the media just eats this stuff up like candy.

And you know, I think I understand why. Time for an embarrassing personal revelation.

Here are this blogs most visited posts of all time and the respective number of hits:

I've written 51 posts about Health Care reform policy, an issue very near and dear to my heart and the single most important legislative debate of the past 2 years. I've written about the Supreme Court, Gay rights, women's issues, and a lot about politics and polling in general. None of them could break into the top 10 by popularity.

In total, I've written 554 blog posts since my first post three years ago. And if you took everything ever written on this blog that ISN'T about Sarah Palin - that's 545 out of 554 posts that didn't even mention her name - and added them together, they equal collectively about a tenth of the total readership of my famous Sarah Palin Facebook page investigation. I'm not sorry I wrote that post, nor am I sorry it got a lot of attention - let me be clear about that.

But every day since then, literally hundreds of new visitors come to the blog to read that one post. It's probably the most read thing I have ever written, maybe the most read thing I will ever write. And I like being read - it's why I write. So even though I'd rather not be writing about the former Governor of Alaska, I'm dealing with this niggling temptation - I could draw people to my page with just a few disparaging references to her. It's comparatively easy. Then, I tell myself, I could weave in the things I really want to talk about - enthusiasm for the President and his policies, the case for voting Democrat. The case for voting AT ALL, especially as an American Abroad (don't forget, US citizens living overseas can vote from abroad in all federal elections - that means any election for Congress OR President).

The clicks could be mine. And I want them. I REALLY want them.

But at the end of the day, I'm just me. I don't have employees to pay, or investors to satisfy. I don't accept advertising on the blog, and I am lucky enough to be able to make a good living outside of my blogging-and-politics hobby. So the only pressures on my are internal - wanting to build a readership - and not instituational or financial.

Imagine what it's like for MSNBC. Or CNN. If they know that they can get viewers or clicks with an easy to acquire cutaway shot to Sarah Palin mangling a Paul Revere reference, and they equally know that they will have to work hard to build an audience for any coverage that investigates the reasons why, for example, the May unemployment figures took a discouraging downward turn, of course they're going to go with the Palin footage every time.

She knows this. The media knows this. And it doesn't matter what they think of each other - Palin can throw out all the "lamestream media" quips she wants, but she needs them and she knows it. Fortunately for her, though, she also knows that she'll always have them with her. Careening down the road, blowing through stop signs, and panting to stay in site of her magical mystery tour.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama's administration has been  orchestrating an almost miraculous recovery of the US Auto Industry - which after federal support at the crisis hour has now fully repaid the government investment, and is profitable for the first time since 2004.

Did Sarah Palin violate Facebook's terms of service?

UPDATE: I was right - Facebook (a client of my employer) have now removed the Lou Sarah Facebook account stating that it did in fact violate their terms of service: “The account was found to run afoul of our terms and it was disabled,” wrote Facebook official Andrew Noyes.

I wonder if Wonkette journalist Jack Stueff started pursuing this angle before or after I pointed it out to him by e-mail?

Yesterday I came across this intriguing tidbit from Wonkette, in which they used info from the recently leaked manuscript from a former Palin staffer to identify Sarah Palin's gmail account, and by conducting a simple search they were able to identify that Palin has a Facebook account under a different name, "Lou Sarah" that she has been using to "Like" content on her own and on Bristol's Facebook pages, and to comment positively ("amen!") on both pages. The profile still exists, but has now been scrubbed of its activity record - when I looked at it last night, though, it still looked the way it did in the Wonkette story:

So here's the thing. I do a lot of work on Facebook. I work for an agency that has Facebook as a client. I manage Facebook pages, I advise clients on use of Facebook. I've royally screwed things up on Facebook from time to time as well. Hey - it's how you learn!

So I think it's probably important to clarify a couple of things quickly (don't worry, you may commence your respective "Sarah Palin is the Devil" and "How dare you attack this woman who will SAVE this COUNTRY!" diatribes momentarily).

Firstly, Wonkette says the Lou Sarah account is Palin's "second" Facebook account. If it were true that Palin had two Facebook Profiles, that would be a violation of Facebook's terms of service, which specify:

1.You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.

2.You will not create more than one personal profile.

But it's not immediately clear whether Palin has done this or not.

The famous Sarah Palin page with 2.75 million fans is a page - not a profile. A Facebook page is sort of like a website set up on Facebook. There is no limit to the number of people who can "Like" a page, and pages can be managed by multiple users. Pages that represent a brand or famous person are asked to confirm that they do in fact represent that brand or person.

Facebook profiles, on the other hand, represent individual people, not brands. They have "Friends" rather than being "Liked", and are limited to a maximum of 5,000 "Friends". The important thing to note here is that Facebook pages can only be managed by people with a Facebook profile of their own.

So, if "Sarah Palin" the individual person and politician would like to directly edit and manage "Sarah Palin" the Facebook page, she needs to have a Facebook account of her own. And, as a famous person, she may well want to avoid using her actual name for that, since people that she doesn't know personally shouldn't interact with her via her profile, but rather via her page.

So, in short, it wouldn't be so odd if "Sarah Palin" the person (hmmm... getting tired of the scare quotes, will drop them from now on) had created an account under a disguised version of her real name - Louise is her middle name, so Lou Sarah isn't a million miles from representing her - and that personal profile might well be something she would want to use to interact with people she really knows such as... her daughter. An occassional comment on Bristol's page from this account therefore doesn't strike me as terrible, especially since Bristol will presumably know the secret of "Lou Sarah's" real identity. Moms are allowed to gush over thier kids, so we'll let that go.

BUT - consider for a moment Lou Sarah's comments on the Sarah Palin page. Firstly, liking and commenting positively on your own content is a bit sad and pathetic (and in this case, pretty pointless - it's not like she needs to drive traffic to the page!) but not against the rules. But the fact that she was able to post at all as Lou Sarah on the Sarah Palin page shows that the Lou Sarah account is not an admin on that page.

If Lou Sarah had been one of the profiles permitted to post to the Sarah Palin page, then any comments she made on that page would not appear under her profile. Page admins appear under the identity of the page whenever they post on their page.

Thereby, QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRANDUM we arrive at a great big circle. There are only two possibilities here. Either Sarah Palin herself is not an administrator on the Sarah Palin page (which seems unlikely) or she does indeed have two separate Facebook profiles.

Which is in violation of Facebooks Terms.

Right then.

Totally Straighforward Edits on Barack Obama's Facebook Page

Having spent some time a couple weeks ago taking a close look at Sarah Palin's Facebook page, I thought it was only fair, for the record, to go through the same exercise with President Obama's page. After all, I had been working on the assumption that his page was in fact not being edited to remove negative comments based on my impression that I had seen a pretty wide range of comments there from various perspectives. But on reflection I realised that it wasn't sure how the mechanics of his page moderation were operating. So, here's what I found, based on a sample that was taken last week. [Note, I wasn't able to write up this post last week because I was running late for a film - note the Curzon cinemas tab in the background. We saw The King's Speech. Yes, it was great, thanks for asking!]

When I first went to the page I was struck by the much higher ratio of positive to negative comments. Still I didn't have to look hard to find some criticism -

Here's the aptly named Betsy Bitter demanding 4 times in sequence that we "Repeal Obamacare!"


You can see that these comments have been on the page for over an hour by this point.

Next up, we have a couple of posts that seem to be straightforward spam - one selling some sort of weight loss product and one inviting people to click his link so that he can earn money for each click. Please, dear readers, do me a favour and don't do this. Thank you.

Although these are not negative comments or criticism, I'm pointing them out because these are exactly the sort of comments that a reputable page owner might well moderate to remove - after all, the page does not exist to allow others to market commercial products under the President's name. If I were advising a client on the moderation policy for this page, I might have suggested the routine removal of such spam, not least for the protection of page users. But that clearly isn't the policy here.




 Here's a post from a user claiming to be Tunisian and making prodigious use of ALL CAPS: "USA... WE DON'T NEED YOUR GREETINGS TO THE TUNISIAN PEOPLE BECAUSE YOU ARE JUST EVIL COUNTRY AND YOU WERE SUPPORTING ALL THE DICTATORIAL IN MIDDLE EAST .. JUST LEAVE US ALONE AND EVERYTHING WILL BE OK."

Hmm... can't help but think that with their shared enthusiasm for being "left alone" by the US Government, perhaps this person might find unlikely common ground with the Tea Party...

But in any case - this comment was posted 7 hours before.

Here's a man in a cowboy hat posting two sequential criticisms saying, respectively:

"SEE YOU STARTED YOUR CAMPAIGN A TRIVIAL EARLY... BUT THAT WAS TO BE EXPECTED...GLAD THE OTHER TWO MORONS KEPT THEIR STINKIN MOUTHS SHUT ..HAD A LOT OF BALLS BRINGING THEM HERE TO MY TOWN."

And:

"YOU SHOULD READ THE DRIBBLE HERE.. YOU ALL DISGUST ME..... ALL HAIL THE KING................."

I'm not completely sure what this gentleman is on about, but I don't think he's a fan.

In any case, it seems clear that there are criticisms of President Obama on the page, but not many. In fact, there aren't many posts at all - when I first looked at the page the most recent post had been published 15 minutes before.

At this point, though, I started to notice how frequently I was seeing multiple identical versions of the same post - both those that were critical of the President, and those that praised him seem frequently to have been posted repeatedly.

Putting these factors together, I started to wonder if possibly the Obama team was pre-moderating comments. Pre-moderation, means reviewing comments before they are posted so that you make an active decision to make them live, as compared to post-moderation, in which you review content after it has been posted to remove objectionable posts. That could explain the duplicate posts, as if people don't see their content go live immediately sometimes they keep trying.

So I decided to post a comment - a relatively neutral one - just to see if it would go live immediately. It did.

So there it is. Far from finding heavy-handed moderation, I couldn't actually discover any evidence that Barack's page was being moderated at all.

This is not necessarily a good thing. There is content that should - even must - be removed in compliance with Facebook's own policies. There is content that contains violent and offensive language that a page owner may well decide goes too far for his or her comfort. And as discussed, it is often a useful service for your readers to remove spam.

But the thing that disturbed me the most about the President's page is its comparative quietness. When I conducted the same exercise for Sarah Palin's page, it was virtually impossible to even keep track of the speed with which new posts were added (and, of course, often removed). But she's responsible to no constituents, holds no elected office, she is the formulator of no policies, achiever of no legislative accomplishments... at the moment, she's a TV star.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, is President of the United States, had just given one of the most widely praised speeches of his career, is preparing for his forthcoming State of the Union address, and recently signed a raft of high-impact legislation - from repealling Don't Ask Don't Tell to ratifying the START treaty. But on his Facebook page? Crickets are chirping.

Is it possible we enjoy the sensation of being angry and polarised more than the prospect of unity and accomplishment? And if so, is that the fault of our leaders for not engaging us... or us for being too easily distracted?

Palin Post Follow-Up

So the one and only post on this blog to ever focus on former half term governor Sarah Palin has generated orders of magnitude more attention than anything else I've ever written - with extensive mainstream media coverage (now including this think piece from today's Evening Standard), and nearly half a million views of the page. I've written a short follow up that I prepared last week, but put on hold following President Obama's extraordinary and moving speech in Tucson last week. The speech, and the events in Tucson overall, just seem so much bigger and more important than anything the former Governor's Facebook team is or isn't doing. If you haven't yet seen or read the speech, I'd urge you to take a moment and do so now.



I'll be posting my follow up post later tonight, including a matching look at Barack Obama's page and some thoughts on the insight this whole experience has given into the pathology of mainstream media coverage (and even blogger bandwagonism).

But before I do that I wanted to welcome my new readers from The Evening Standard, those who sought us out based on coverage in The Telegraph, and of course those who found me through MSNBC's The Last Word, or the Atlantic, or through Dan Savage, or from one of the many, many bloggers or forums that wrote about the story.

I'm proud of the work that I did in that post, and I worked hard to make it as fact-based and objective as I possibly could.

But for those of you who are new here, you should also know that this is not a Sarah Palin blog.

This is not a Sarah Palin blog

As you may have noticed, things have gotten a little busy here on the blog in the last day or so! Yesterday's post has generated over 350,00 page views in just a 24 hour period, and the blog has been linked to by a bewildering range of high profile figures, including Andrew Sullivan, Dan Savage, and the Guardian newspaper. The post has been retweeted and shared on Facebook tens of thousands of times.

So hello to all my lovely new readers! And judging by the tone of the comments, I have a few not-so-lovely new readers as well - hello to you too. Have a cookie. Take a deep breath. We'll be hugging and growing before you know it in the finest tradition of the situation comedy.

So I realise that you (new readers) and I (old blogger) are at a slightly awkward moment in our relationship. This is like the morning after a one night stand with: our chance to grab a cup of coffee and get to know each other a little bit after a highly charged and emotional introduction.

Let me start.

Let's answer a few questions:

• Why do you care so much about US politics if you're British? I am not British. The blog is called Obama London because I am a US citizen and activist with Democrats Abroad who works to register US voters here and London and throughout the UK so that they can exercise their right to vote from overseas. If you are a US citizen living overseas, no matter what your party affliation or voting intention, you can register and request your absentee ballot here: http://www.votefromabroad.org/
• Aren't you kind of obsessed with Sarah Palin? I am not a Sarah Palin obsessive. I am a Barack Obama obsesive. (Check the name of the blog, guys.) Very important that we get that straight, because if you are expecting this blog to feed a Palin fixation, you will be dissappointed. This blog has been in existence for nearly three years, focussing exclusively in US Politics - including detailed coverage of the 2008 campaign. In all that time, yesterday's post - which has taken off to an incredible degree online - was the first time I have written a post specifically about the Former Governor. I mentioned her in passing exactly twice. (For the record, here and here.) If you think about it, I would seem to have been working pretty hard to AVOID writing about Sarah Palin, and for good reason. Any time her name comes up, people tend to get sort of shouty. On both sides. It hurts my head. I would suggest, given the overwhelming response on the one occassion when I did write about her, that I am not the one who is obsessed with Sarah Palin but rather that the obsessed are... well, everyone else.
• So what do you write about, then? I'm glad you asked. I like writing about health care reform. About gay rights (btw, I'm a straight married female), about legislative reform. Politics, policy and lots more.
• How dare you suggest Sarah Palin is responsible for the AZ shooting!? Did I? Let's go to the tape: I said, "in the wake of the terrible events in Arizona, with many commentators pointing out the obvious fact that Gabrielle Giffords had been targetted by Palin in the November election on a map that used a chilling gun site graphic, I thought it would be worth watching her page for a little while to see if her team were indeed deleting negative comments routinely." That sentance was not followed by, "Because this is all her fault." I think Sarah Palin made some terrible judgements about how to express herself. In particular, "don't retreat, reload" makes me queasy. I think she should, I think most people would, feel terrible if someone that they had directed a comment like that towards is attacked in this manner. I think we should tone back our rhetoric and remember that we have more in common than we disagree over. And I think that people like Glen Beck shouldn't suggest that the desire to provide all Americans with affordable and comprehensive health insurance is exactly the same thing as being a Nazi. I think these things are a bad idea, and I would ask them to stop. Please and thank you.
• I can't believe you spent ALL THAT TIME obsessing over Sarah Palin's Facebook page! Don't you just have too much time on your hands? I really don't understand this criticism. I spent about two hours just observing and reporting what I saw on Palin's page on a Sunday afternoon while waiting for my husband to finish up some work. Better I should have spent that time watching Friends reruns? Because I do think I get enough of my Recommended Daily Allowance of Friends reruns. Yesterday's Palin post, which generated hundreds of thousands of readers and hundreds of comments was not a waste of time to write. Although I am starting to wonder about the many hours I have spent crafting long posts about policy and politics lo these many years for far, far fewer readers.

Inexplicable Edits on Sarah Palin's Facebook Page

Sarah Palin has a reputation for being an aggressive editor of comments on her Facebook page - a reputation that has always seemed likely accurate to me, given the tedious consistency with which all comments on the page are along the lines of "I love you SARAH!"

But in the wake of the terrible events in Arizona, with many commentators pointing out the obvious fact that Gabrielle Giffords had been targetted by Palin in the November election on a map that used a chilling gun site graphic, I thought it would be worth watching her page for a little while to see if her team were indeed deleting negative comments routinely. But I had no idea how incredibly, almost comically, efficient her people would turn out to be in deleting comments that were even slightly critical of the former Governor. And then I came across... well, what I guess you'd have to politely call an appalling example of editorial misjudgement at best.

Here's what I found, from a brief sample achieved by the simple expedient of hitting the refresh button repeatedly over a short period of time:

A negative comment saying, "YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE, YOU EVIL WITCH" - at 17:19PM. (I'm in London, so that's British Standard Time.)

 Removed by 17:21.

 Two negative comments, one suggesting that her publicity team must be working overtime to make her not look guilty and one from a British poster saying "Guns and nutters don't mix..."

 Removed by 17:26.

Comment saying, "I can't believe you don't have the leadership of intelligence to tell your people that putting crosshairs on people incites violence." 17:27

Was removed by 17:28 (although I failed to capture a screen grab - oops).

 A comment that simple says, "hypocrite" - presumably in reference to Palin at 17:28

 Gone by 17:29.

 Comment alleging "THEIR BLOOD IS ON YOUR HANDS" at 17:29.

Gone by 17:31.

Comment saying the commenter is glad her show was cancelled and saying, "I'm not blaming her but is it really a smart thing posting a map with gun sights of politicians with opposing views?" At 17:38.

 Gone by 17:39.

 Comment that refers to the text of Palin's post by saying, "Peace and Justice? That's a new concept for you isn't it?" at 17:48.

 Gone by 17:50.

OK. At this point, I am finding this all kind of... well, funny I suppose. I mean, the ruthless efficiency of the deleting and the desperation with which people would try to get their negative comments up there combined with the efficiency of their removal. There were actually a lot more examples than what I've been able to show here.

And in fairness to Sarah Palin, I should say that there were a couple of comments that were removed that weren't directly critical of the Governor but clearly offensive. Most notably, a commenter who repeatedly posted, "To bad it wasn't Pelosi." Yikes.

But then things got a little... well, upsetting.

A commenter posted the following at 18:12:

"It's ok. Christina Taylor Green was probably going to end up a left wing bleeding heart liberal anyway. Hey, as 'they' say, what would you do if you had the chance to kill Hitler as a kid? Exactly."

I think I literally gasped when I read that. Remember, Christina Taylor Green was the 9 year old girl killed by the shooter. Apparently she had been brought there by her mom, who thought she might get a kick out of meeting Rep. Giffords, having recently been elected to her student council.

I assumed, as a matter of course, that this particular comment would be deleted with greatest possible speed.

So I kept hitting refresh, hoping to use this as an example to say, "You see, Palin's Facebook editing at least has the good judgement to remove clearly offensive content such as this." But it didn't come down.

By this point I thought it was likely that the staff person monitoring the page was simply no longer working - I mean, fair enough it's a Sunday, right? So I thought I would just satisfy myself that the page was no longer being edited by continuing to look for negative comments, assuming that either they would all remain live for the time being, or if the editor came back to work, that they would be removed simultaneously with the Christina post.

So here's a comment posted at 18:16 saying, "I hope you're happy now. It's because of the influence that you do wield, that you should think about things you say and do."

Deleted  by 18:18.

 But the Christina post was still live.

 Huh.

So then I thought, well maybe the page editors just haven't seen it. We all make mistakes, perhaps it just slipped by them.

Then I spotted another commenter, rightly expressing her disgust at the post. "You are so out of touch... Show a little consideration and leave innocent out of your twisted diatribe."

Having been alerted to the post, does the editor NOW remove it? Nope, it's still there.

And I spot several other posts being removed. For instance, here's a post from 18:28 saying, "Your type of sorrow doesn't make up for the blood on your hands."

 Gone by 18:29.

 I found a few more instances, but I won't belabour the point. The Christina post was still live at 16:39 when I started writing this post.

I don't really know what to make of this. Sarah Palin has the right to edit her Facebook profile - it's not technically a public platform, it's a privately owned space. But the fact someone has a right to do something doesn't mean it is always a good idea, and I think that someone who aspires to public office has an especially strong responsibility to try and engage with the public at large - not just those who agree with them. But still... she's not currently in any form of elected office and she can do what she likes.

But I find her team's editorial judgement to say the least... odd.

UPDATE: Since this blog was posted, there has been a lot of media attention paid to it and a lot of online discussion. If anyone wants to discuss the article with me, the best way to reach me is on Twitter - http://twitter.com/#!/karinjr

UPDATE II: Here's what happened when I conducted the same exercise to look at Barack Obama's facebook page: Totally Straightforward Edits on Barack Obama's Facebook Page