Lawrence Lessig and "activist's frustration"
Lawrence Lessig reacts unhappily to press coverage. Jon Garfunkel wondered why. This is an opportunity for me to write about net-politics and the press, from the trenches.
There's a particular malady of "activist's frustration". This can happen when someone deeply believes in an idea or cause, spends a large amount of time campaigning for the cause, and then finds their heartfelt efforts reported to a huge audience via at best garbled, confused, impressions in a hurried article by a journalist.
The canons of the craft include an unfortunate practice where it's frowned-upon for the article-writer to actually consult you to check if they got it right. The origins of this procedure are understandable, because for a political investigation, it's just tipping off a target who is likely to be upset. But for an intellectual, who cares passionately about conveying his or her ideas, it's very frustrating to have to suffer someone trying to reduce those often complex concepts to a little squib without even a sanity-check (e.g. "No, I don't really propose eating babies, that part was satire"). Here I don't mean reading back a quote for stenographic accuracy - I mean checking that it conveys what the person was actually trying to say (the Al Gore Internet story is somewhat illustrative, but that was arguably a deliberately malicious misreading).
When the article comes out, people then say "Why are you so upset? What's the problem? It's a reasonable article.". To be fair, it's not always clear whether the activist is overreacting to a merely less than perfect account, or if the other readers simply don't perceive how badly it's been butchered. But this can be another source of annoyance, as the activist is then faced with the task of explaining exactly why the article is so bad, to varying amounts of receptiveness to the concept ("Gee, it said you wanted to eat babies? But how is that different from your well-known concern about infant nutrition? Nutrition is eating, right? Babies are infants, correct?"). And then there's always the comments about how no publicity is bad publicity ("So they called you Mr. Baby-Eater - at least it shows you're important enough to be noticed. Maybe they'll get it right the next time").
There are of course far worse problems in the world. But the human irritation possible in this case should be clear.
By Seth Finkelstein | posted in activism | on April 10, 2005 11:36 PM (Infothought permalink)
I responded on topic here. The more relevant trope here is knock-the-Times, the news-pinch, etc.
I'm surprised no one's promoted a good technical solution to the apparent problem here: getting adequate coverage of an event. Have the event oranizer promote a tag (or URL, whatever) to identify the event. Anybody can blog away on it, and the reporter will know to read those blogs a priori. If he misses a detail, well, then the activist has a complaint. Not only would the reporter have missed a detail, he would have missed something else that was reported in quicker time, and had the chance to read. Certainly this is pointless for over-covered events like a political convention (where journalists outweigh participants), but not for these little events.
Just my constructive take on the whole thing.
Interesting points you've made concerning an "activist's frustration".
"But for an intellectual, who cares passionately about conveying his or her ideas, it's very frustrating to have to suffer someone trying to reduce those often complex concepts to a little squib without even a sanity-check (e.g. "No, I don't really propose eating babies, that part was satire")."
Excellent point and, unfortunately, true.
Thanks for the blog (I found it from your reference on Lessig's site).
Peter.