New Feature: The Kang Watch
Cecilia Kang’s coverage of technology for the Washington Post is one of the inside jokes in telecom policy circles. She is, without a doubt, proof positive of bias in journalism. On any given day, she’ll put up three or four posts. If you read them closely, you start to see clear patterns emerge:
- She rarely, if ever, quotes conversations with telecom or cable companies. She prefers, instead of actually talking to them, to simply pull selective quotes out of blog posts or press releases.
- She almost always quotes someone from Free Press, Media Access Project, the Consumer Federation of America or Public Knowledge.
- She often quotes analysts that are aligned with the free-culture movement, but rarely quotes analysts that are favorable to the industry.
- In the event she quotes individuals or groups aligned with industry’s positions, it is usually a quote that reinforces her general theme – These companies are large. These companies have lots of money. These companies are opposed to what the FCC is doing.
Starting today, I’m going to begin a regular series called “The Kang Watch.” The series will examine Cecilia’s coverage, and based on the four characteristics above, will score her coverage – with one point awarded for each of the items above. Since many of her posts are rather banal recitations of announcements of committee hearings and the like, I’ll focus on the posts that are particularly egregious. And just so I am not accused of being unfair, to reward her for balanced coverage, I’ll deduct a point for each time she balances one of these four behaviors by, for instance, using a quote from a third party to actually convey the other side of the issue.
The score for each post will be written as points against/points for balance. A perfect score based on her usual coverage would be a 4/4 – meaning she performed as normal in regurgitating the free culture line, but she at least balanced that with material that provides the other perspective of the news.
As an example, today’s post, titled “Gloves off, telecom giants to FCC: It’s on!” would score a 3/0. She gets three points against, and no points for balance.
Worse than the score in today’s post, however, is the central premise of the article actually has nothing to do with her thesis statement.
Soon after the Federal Communications Commission released its national broadband plan a few weeks ago, the nation’s biggest telecom companies began a battle against specific measures and questioned the agency’s ability to regulate broadband services.
Kang goes on to cite a great number of policy positions that have absolutely nothing to do with the broadband plan. Case in point, she notes the opposition by AT&T and Verizon to merger conditions that would prevent the two companies from leasing spectrum from SkyTerra – a new wireless broadband provider. The FCC approved the merger only after saying the company could not lease space to the big telcos without getting Commission approval. The merger had nothing to do with the broadband plan.
She follows that example with a look at Verizon’s recent suggestion that Congress revamp our nation’s telecom laws. VZ had suggested that rather than applying to the Internet an antiquated framework originally developed to govern railroads, our nation might be better served by a new model developed for modern telecommunications.
Again, it had little to nothing to do with the broadband plan – other than the fact that it may make the goals of the plan easier to reach.
She concludes this journalistic travesty with the invocation of Free Press.
Ben Scott, policy director for public interest group Free Press, said look no further than the long and difficult battles between former FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and the cable industry over a la carte pricing for a glimpse of what the new agency’s leadership will face. Martin faced similar battles with telecom companies over net neutrality and other reforms. Hill staffers have said intense lobbying by the cable industry contributed to an investigation by a House committee of Martin.
“The only reason this looks new and shocking is that for so long the FCC hasn’t made a decision opposed by a major company,” Scott said. “The FCC has spars [sic] with companies on a regular basis and this is good news.”
The irony of pointing out the years long battle between cable and former Chairman Kevin Martin only to follow with a quote saying the FCC never does anything companies don’t like is apparently lost on Kang. The FCC spent the better part of the Bush Administration trying to force bad policy in the name of “competition” – reversing its own decisions and research to build questionable evidence of a problem. The fact that the current FCC appears willing to do exactly the same thing is the real story here. Maybe Kang should get a quote from Free Press about that.
What’s even more interesting is that, when someone posts a legitimate critique of Kang’s work or points out her bias in a comment on her blog, she or a confederate posts followup comments accusing the poster of being a violent child molester. And the Post, while it recently announced a policy of removing such attacks, does not do so.
Michael,
Criticism from time-to-time is one thing, but your idea is bordering on tabloid entertainment.
If there has been anything that has set this site apart from other offerings in a good way, it has been the lack of petty personality-based writing like that. Any site can get a smart bunch of people together to write about technology, and this site has quite a few. The value-added portion is the lack of stuff like that.
It’s also a subjective issue. I’ve felt that this site has a bias towards industry. A lot of what is written makes sense, but it also reeks of pro-industry ideology driving content.
I’m disappointed to see this. It’s so childish and adds nothing to the various substantive debates over technology generally, and communications policy specifically.
Paul, the problem is not with “personality,” but with the blatant bias of Ms. Kang’s writing — both the selection of topics and their presentation. The Post is an influential newspaper. It’s quite appropriate to point out bias on the part of one of its reporters when she purports to be reporting news but in fact is lobbying in print for the agenda of a single company — a sponsor.
Brett,
The problem is fixating on one person instead of the larger issue. As I said, I have nothing against pointing out problems in her posts every now and again, but every single time complete with a ranking system?
That’s neither healthy nor productive.
Paul –
I appreciate your comments and your suggestion that questioning her writing is somehow inconsistent with the content of this site. Let me address each piece of that separately.
First, I am unabashedly libertarian in my world view. I believe that government does most things it takes on fairly poorly. That worldview, admittedly, aligns with a pro-industry position fairly frequently. I do not, however, believe markets are infallible. The recent economic downturn is more than ample evidence of that. On par, however, I believe markets are better able to solve problems.
Government has no incentive to get things right. If they mismanage resources, they can raise taxes to make up for the shortfall. If they provide poor customer service (Katrina, anyone?), there is little we can do about it.
Corporations are much more accountable through market forces.
To the specific charges about Cecilia, there is a difference between the two of us. I don’t consider myself a journalist. I have an interest in, and experience with telecom policy fights. I write for a site that has a fully disclosed free-market slant. I do not write for an organization that claims to hire objective journalists.
In my eyes, Kang’s position with the Washington Post holds a higher standard of responsibility than my writing here. She is allegedly reporting news, not commentary. If she wants to report the free culture perspective, let her disclose and identify it as such – as we have done with the free market perspective we bring.
Paul –
I responded to your first note before seeing the note to Brett.
I agree that pointing out bias on a broader basis is valuable. There are a lot of organizations out there doing just that. I consume a lot of tech news and commentary from organizations as traditional as the Washington Post to as offbeat as Boing Boing.
When I read DSL Reports, I know I am getting a biased view of telecom. Karl Bode is quite clear in his dislike of telecom companies. Even he, however, will note positive things the industry does – something I have yet to see Cecilia do.
And, again, Karl doesn’t write for the Washington Post.
Whether such distinctions still matter online is a matter of debate, but in my eyes certain institutions are still held to a higher standard of objectivity.
Michael,
Thanks for replying.
My only concern is that the value of criticism lessens significantly as it trends toward the personal, and suggesting a ranking/point system like you did — hopefully in jest — strikes me as more personal than is necessary to make your various points about Cecilia Kang’s writing.
It’s more than enough to say she’s wrong, explain why, and criticize her methods for getting there. If you make your case then people will agree with you and her credibility will suffer. If you do it every time out, you risk making it look personal (even if it is not), which will trivialize the criticism and then people will ignore it.
I just don’t see the value in that process. If she’s as ethically lax as you suggest then you ought to be able to make your point in one solid shot, definitively, and then move on.
As for DSL Reports, there’s nothing wrong with passion but there’s something to be said for trusting people to be smart enough to get the message without beating them over the head with it.
Oh great, another industry shill. Just what we need.
Paul, you make some good points. However, the problem here is twofold. Firstly, the Washington Post has an inordinate amount of influence, and to rectify the damage done by Ms. Kang’s bias it is not enough just to critique it once in a space which will surely get far fewer clicks (not to mention the fact that many folks still read the “dead tree” edition of the paper). Instead, one must raise the awareness of the industry, of decision makers, and of her employer, possibly embarrassing that employer into taking appropriate action. And the best way to do this is to point the bias out repeatedly as it occurs.
Secondly, this isn’t just a matter of differing points of view. It would be bad enough if her articles were biased due to a consistent political philosophy; reporters are obliged to put their biases aside when they report the news. But what we have here is a bias toward the interests of a specific corporation: Google, which places the ads in her blog and thus funds her paycheck. This is a fundamental conflict of interest and a breach of journalistic ethics.
It’s interesting that Kang is accused of “regurgitating the free culture line,” but that her repetition of industry talking would count merely as providing balance and perspective.
Today’s Turk Watch score: 1/0.
Cecilia has always been exceedingly fair in her coverage of broadcast issues. Witch hunts against journalists are not cool.
By the way, be sure to score Ms. Kang’s news article at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/06/AR2010040600742.html, in which she claims — in a very biased characterization — that the DC Circuit’s court decision “undermines” the FCC’s authority rather than delineating it.
“Cecilia Kang’s coverage of technology for the Washington Post is one of the inside jokes in telecom policy circles.”
[CITATION REQUIRED] please. Nice way to open an article complaining about bias. Heh.
Let’s settle it in the octagon!
Interesting. After my comments, Kang modified her story to make the bias more subtle. But it’s still there. Contrary to her claims, the FCC never was the “watchdog of the Web.” Congress never authorized it to do that.
But Ms. Kang, who lobbies in print for the corporate agenda of Google, misleadingly claims that the court has somehow deprived it of such authority. She then bemoans the fact that the agency might not be able to impose the “network neutrality” regulations for which Google is lobbying (both directly and via DC “astroturf” groups such as Public Knowledge, Free Press, Media Access Project, and the New America Foundation — the last of these essentially being a wholly owned subsidiary of Google).
She then made a doozy of a blog post, at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2010/04/three_options_for_the_fcc.html#comments in which she lays out “three options for the FCC.” But not one of Kang’s options for the FCC entails respecting the Court’s decision, or the law, and backing down on its drive to regulate the Net! Unbelievable bias.
Leaving aside bias, I just wish Cecilia would get the facts straight. If forced to choose, I’d even rather have a competent biased reporter than an incompetent objective one. On the front page of today’s Washington Post, Cecilia wrote: “In a 3 to 2 vote, the FCC found that Comcast had improperly slowed traffic to the BitTorrent file-sharing site and urged the company to halt the practice.”
This is just false. The FCC did not find that Comcast had improperly slowed traffic to the BitTorrent file-sharing site, because that’s not what Comcast did. Comcast interrupted peer-to-peer exchanges between its customers and other end users, not some centralized “file-sharing” site.
I implore the Post to enroll Cecilia in some basic Internet classes. If she doesn’t pass, then replace her.
You’re right that Gigi got that so wrong. But most people have that fact wrong and they keep repeating the myth that Comcast was trying to be anti-competitive by shutting down Vuze. But Vuze was never affected since they pre-seed their own content and Comcast doesn’t slow BitTorrent downloads and they only pruned some of the seeding (not all or even most of it). Vuze simply jumped on the case because it was like hitting the lottery for them from a marketing/PR perspective.
Comcast wasn’t trying to act badly or anti-competitively. Comcast was trying to act in the interest of their customers to try and improve network congestion. The solution largely worked although it had some occasional side effects that were grossly exaggerated. This notion that they had their own video service so they wanted to hurt Vuze is a myth repeated so often that it has effectively become true as far as most people are concerned.
Getting the facts right would be a good first step for Kang. But the falsehoods are coming fast and furious…. She just posted an article at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2010/04/fcc_some_key_parts_of_broadban.html in which she claims to know better than the FCC’s chief counsel how the execution of the Broadband Plan would be affected by today’s DC Circuit ruling. She then ends with a whopper, stating that the court “removed” authority from the FCC. The truth, of course, is that it never had it.
She’s pegging the Kang-o-meter….
>>!!!!KANG!!!!<<
Yes, folks, Cecilila Kang does it again today with another blatantly biased article. Today, at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2010/04/fcc_rolls_out_broadband_propos.html, she writes:
Huh? If the FCC really has he legal authority to do what it wants to do, then why would the ruling make it “difficult?”
Sounds as if Kang is trying to mischaracterize the ruling as harming broadband deployment, when in fact it will prevent the Commission from violating the law and imposing regulations that would deter deployment.
Kang is already being paid by Google via the ads it places in her blog. I wonder how long it will be before she bolts from the Post and takes the cushy, high-paying job for which she is now “paying forward?”
Cecilia Kang continues her lobbying for Google in print with two new articles. In the first, at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2010/04/in_the_last_week_google.html,Kang falsely claims that Google has been mute on the issue of Title II reclassification issue. Google’s captive lobbying groups inside the Beltway — including Free Press, Public Knowledge, Media Access Project, and the New America Foundation (this last group funded by Google and chaired by Google CEO Eric Schmidt) have been very active indeed — pushing hard for reclassification of broadband services under the stifling and inappropriate regime of Title II of the Telecommunications Act. Google has been letting these sham “public interest” groups — which really work for it and not for the public interest — do the talking. Other Google surrogates, including law professor Susan Crawford (for whom Google secured a post in the White House), have likewise been doing Google’s work, so that it can pretend to be making nice with companies like Verizon.
The truth of the matter is that Google wants control of the future of the Net, and wants to see ISPs completely hamstrung so that they have no power to influence that future. And Ms. Kang, much of whose paycheck is supplied by Google, is promoting that agenda.
In another blatantly biased article, at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2010/04/michael_powell_wants_to_set.html, Kang interviews former FCC Chairman Michael Powell and then insults him and deprecates his statements in the headline, saying that Powell “hates” reclassification.
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