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Eight Years a Blogger: Come for the knowledge, stay for the snark

It’s hard to believe this thing is still going after eight years, kind of in the same way its hard to believe that the almond-colored refrigerator with the faux-leather texture and Bakelite handle that your parents bought in 1983 refuses to die. I always figured Sage would have decided I was more trouble than I was worth by this point, or I would have run out of bits of wisdom, weirdly effective exercises and opportunities to mock god-awful mistakes in the media.

Oddly enough, that’s hasn’t happened. And speaking of exercises, if you still want to get in on Dr. Vinnie’s Bin of Exercises and AI Joy, feel free to hit the link here.

This semester is guaranteed to be a little off as far as the blog is concerned, in that I found out last week I will need to teach a fifth class this term. It’s the second of the five that I’ve never taught before in my nearly 30 years of college teaching and the third of the five that’s not in my area of expertise.

Why, you might ask… Well..

 

The relative insanity that this blog provides me might be my only salvation, so let’s get started with a few thoughts to brighten your day (and allow me to blow off developing a giant roster of PowerPoints and podcasts I will likely use only once in my lifetime):

 

STUIPD IS AS STUIPD DOES, TOO: In digging through a ton of examples I wanted to use for the upcoming classes I am prepping, I was stunned at the level of general incompetence when it came to making sure things were edited before they went out. I’m not talking about internet memes or mom-and-pop operations posting on an AOL-Dial-Up-Friendly website. I’m talking about actual organizations with money and staff support.

The number of missing words, misspellings and generally bad writing made it tough to find quality examples for the kids. I mean, I can’t exactly say, “Here’s a great press release, if you ignore the three misspelled words in the lead and the sentence structure that makes Tarzan look like Shakespeare.” Of all the blunders out there, I had to highlight this one:

If you are in the state, promoting the state and having a fair for the state, the least you can do is spell the name of the state properly in the headline…

Also, for the sake of irony, I found this job posting for an entry-level PR position with these two key bullet-points back to back. And I SWEAR I didn’t PhotoShop this:

I looked at it three times and thought, “Is this like one of those tests where they try to trick you? Like that one speed test where you are supposed to read the whole set of directions first, so that you figure out you only need to do the first thing on the list?”

Or do they just really need proofreaders that badly?

Speaking of someone who needs a proofreader:

If you really need something that big to house that item, I feel sorry for your significant other…

 

DID THAT REALLY JUST HAPPEN? I’ve frequently noted that paranoia is my best friend, so much so, that I often find myself doing double-takes on things I swear I saw that turn out to not be as bad as I thought. It usually comes up when I see a sign for “angus” burgers or “first-hand jobs” or something where my mind drifts to the terrible error, even if there isn’t one.

That said, this Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel headline on my phone really should have freaked out a couple people somewhere at the newspaper:

For starters, that’s not Cavalier Johnson unless I have officially gone blind from computer monitor radiation. Here’s his official city photo:

I have no idea who the dude at the podium is, but Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito made a more convincing set of Twins than the two people in the photos above.

Second, and this is really what caught me, that has got to be the worst headline break any human or computer could have made with this story. When I saw that “Johnson speaks with black talk,” I think my brain broke, before remembering Robert Townsend’s spoof of how white people do stupid stuff in Hollywood.

I understand that everything can’t be perfect in every publication, but I also know there are certain topics that need a little more attention and care, due to their sensitivity and the long history of insensitivity associated with them. This is one of those where someone fell asleep at the wheel.

Conversely, sometimes we can really go a bit far in clarifying things for our readers:

Thanks for the clarification, CNN. Otherwise, I might have been confused…

And finally…

I, (FILL IN NAME HERE), AM HAPPY TO HELP (FILL IN NAME HERE): As is the case every semester, I got a series of “could you please squeeze me into your full Writing for the Media class?” emails over the past couple weeks. The excuses are usually the same (I missed my registration day, I accidentally dropped it, I died while donating my heart to my cousin, but thanks to revolutionary bionics, I’m back now…) as are the ramifications they use to nudge me in their favor (I need this to graduate, I can’t move on with out the class, I’m planning to join a biker gang but they won’t take me without a bachelor’s…)

This one came oh so close to moving me…

Look, AI can be helpful in some cases, but your really gotta meet it halfway…

And off we go on another semester-long adventure. Let’s stay safe out there…

Vince (a.k.a. The Doctor of Paper)

Gone Fishin’: AEJMC Edition

I’m heading to San Francisco for the annual AEJMC convention, where the best minds in journalism and mass communication will meet and engage with each other to improve the entirety of the field as we know it. (Meanwhile, I am clearly there to explore a city rife with awesome pinball spots.)

 

With the summer starting to creep toward the start of the semester, I figured it’s as good of a time as any to take an actual break (of sorts) to make sure I can finish up some stuff before the semester actually gets here. I’m still building exercises for folks to use, as promised, including some AI stuff I’ve been pondering over the past couple months.

I’ll also be in San Francisco this week at the AEJMC convention. If you are interested in connecting while I’m out there, let me know and I’ll be happy to set up a meeting. Or, you can wander over to the Sage booth on Friday afternoon, where I’ll be hanging out to talk about everything from books to the Journalism and Mass Communication Educator journal.

I’ll boot this back up around Labor Day, or sooner if something pathologically stupid happens and requires some attention.

Vince (a.k.a. The Doctor of Paper)

Not-So-Flippin’ Sweet: UW professor gets an unpaid year off for toppling Young Republicans table during election

(Alvergue’s action wasn’t quite like this, but at least in this case, no political opinions were being subverted and no criminal citations were offered. It’s also Buffalo, so, y’know… things are just different there…)

THE LEAD: A UW-Eau Claire faculty member has received a yearlong unpaid suspension after he upended a table the school’s Young Republicans group during the April elections.

English professor José Felipe Alvergue was removed from his position as chair of the department, had his promotion revoked and will also face several other punitive measures as a result of his April 1 outburst:

(Group adviser Tatiana) Bobrowicz said she explained to the man that the chapter always tabled in that location and UW-Eau Claire had approved it. The man, later identified by police as Alvergue, told her “the time for this is over,” flipped the table over and walked away.

Accounts vary on how aggressive Alvergue was when he flipped the table. Bobrowicz called the incident “violent.” A student witness unaffiliated with the College Republicans described it as “very non-violent,” the report said. Another witness said Alvergue seemed “a little upset.”

Alvergue initially denied flipping the table to a police officer, according to the police report. He later portrayed the table-flipping as accidental instead of intentional, saying his pinky finger caught on the table when he tried clearing off the buttons and stickers, causing it to collapse. He recalled the people at the table snickering at him, which he believed was because he wore a T-shirt and pin promoting transgender rights.

In discussing the situation for the first time publicly, Alvergue told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel he is now working a minimum-wage job to compensate for his loss of income and that he regrets his actions on April 1.

Alvergue, who joined UW-Eau Claire in 2013, said he was feeling overwhelmed by the election and Elon Musk’s attempts to sway Wisconsin voters with $1 million checks. As the child of immigrants, he said he was also distressed by the Trump administration’s mass deportations.

“I still care about these things, “he said. “But that doesn’t mean I get to go out and knock tables over.”

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: This situation is one of those important reminders about how free speech in this country actually works, especially in comparing “free speech” to “consequence-free speech.” In this case, Alvergue expressed himself without governmental intrusion, but he still had to deal with criminal (he was cited for disorderly conduct and paid a fine for it) and employment consequences.

I have to say I find the consequences to be relatively metered by today’s standards, where an inappropriate tweet, unearthed 10 years after someone made it, can lead to a lifetime on the “cancelled” list in polite society. Other people have lost their jobs for good in cases like this, while some people have been allowed to skate. This isn’t to say this is a good outcome for the situation, or that future ramifications aren’t going to happen, but it is kind of a “OK… so that’s done now…” situation.

Still, I think the bigger thing that worries me is that set of future ramifications that are oblique, to say the least, for both Alvergue and the educational system on the whole. UW-La Crosse is freaking out about letting Joe Gow go back into the classroom because of his “adult-film hobby,” that literally impacts none of his students. What are students signing up for Alvergue’s next set of classes going to feel in terms of potential outbursts or a general sense that he may have a bias against them due to their political affiliations?

In a previous article, Bobrowicz stated that this kind of thing was representative of the climate on campus when it comes to how conservatives are treated. I would argue that varies from campus to campus, as places like one of my alma maters always felt like it was left of left while one of my work stops felt like being centrist practically placed one at Haight Ashbury. That said, the perception of such things often trumps the reality for people who have to live with a sense of bias, so when incidents like these come to bear, it only makes it harder on the rest of us.

Journalists: If your mother says she loves you, go check it out (and then be damned sure it’s true)

As the Russian proverb says, “Trust, but verify.”

The long-held adage of journalists saying, “If your mother says she loves you, go check it out,” needs a little more updating these days, as it seems like NOTHING is as real as it seems. Thanks in large part to corner-cutting, scam-baiting and general laziness, we’re finding a lot of cases in which it never hurts to make absolutely sure you are sure. Here are a couple examples:

 

AT THIS POINT, JUST ASK THE MAGIC 8-BALL:  A few months back, we highlighted Rob Waugh’s story about journalists being duped by AI “experts” who churned out content that ranged from generic to highly suspect. Waugh’s latest piece found that journalists who are using supposedly “legitimate” systems to connect with sources are also now at the mercy of AI spamming, all while paying for the privilege of getting screwed:

A PR agency is selling an AI tool that automatically answers pitches from journalists on services such as ResponseSource, HARO and Qwoted.

The AI tool, called Synapse (not be confused with PR pitching platform Synapse Media), “reads” questions sent for for expert comment by journalists via the services, then analyses sources such as books, podcasts and reports per query and uses AI to draft email responses.

Journalist-request services such as HARO charge a fee for connecting PR agencies with journalists. PRs can send out story pitches to journalists and also get access to requests for expert comment.

<SNIP>

The makers of Synapse, Lithuania-based PR agency Wellstone PR, boast that it has a 7-8% acceptance rate, and that used by a human “editor”, it can answer around 20 pitches per hour with one human PR person able to do the work of five.T

The company brags in its pitch to potential clients that it will provide them with fictional content that sounds so much like the real thing, journalists won’t know the difference. I don’t know if it bothers me more that a) it would appear journalists are getting inept/lazy enough not to notice that they’re being fed total bullpucky or b) that the PR professionals are writing such average, generic stuff so often that journalists can’t distinguish it from whatever garbage an AI can produce.

The cost for this service is a one-time fee of $2,500. The only saving grace is that they apparently haven’t sold this to anyone. Yet.

The PR experts quoted in Waugh’s piece are clearly not thrilled by this breach of trust.

Andy Smith, founder of Sourcee, which aims to offer credible, video-checked experts, says that using AI tools in this way erodes trust.

Smith said: “When journalists post a journo request, there’s an implicit level of trust in the person replying. They’re hoping to hear from real people with genuine insights, experiences, and expertise that can bring their story to life.

“They certainly don’t want to receive an automated, AI-generated reply… if that’s what they were after, they could’ve just used ChatGPT themselves.

One thing that has me rethinking my “stop using these stupid “OK-Cupid-For-Quotes” sites” was a point that Smith made about how a good expert pool, like the one he says he’s built, is meant to broaden the reach of journalists. That can prevent them from only reaching out to familiar contacts and ending up with the “usual suspects” in every story. Still, if I had to pick between usual humans and a random lottery of AI word salad, I’ll stick with my boring peeps, thanks.

 

WSJ PLUS AI EQUALS WTF: If Cliff Behnke isn’t spinning in his grave over this situation, it’s only because he’s actively crawling out of it to come smack the shit out of somebody right now:

A story about development plans for a vacant downtown block that appeared on the front page of the Sunday, July 13, issue of the Wisconsin State Journal was removed Wednesday from the Madison daily newspaper’s website before being replaced by a “re-reported” story Thursday afternoon.

An editor’s note on the re-reported story states that the original “contained incorrect information and quotes that were created by an unauthorized use of AI, which does not adhere to the Wisconsin State Journal’s editorial or ethical standards.”

The story topic itself, both in what I can find of the original and the reboot, is a simple, boring tick-tock story about a development project, in which the material for the proposals are all easily accessible. This wasn’t like the reporter needed whatever the hell Tom Cruise is using in the latest “Mission Impossible” movie to create a miracle out of thin air.

It’s not quite clear what’s more terrifying: That a reporter decided to cut a corner on something this vanilla and didn’t bother to make sure on at least a few basic facts or that the editorial process didn’t catch something that was so wrong:

One section about “The Grove,” a proposal from Neutral, a Madison real estate development firm, outlined plans for a “food hall prioritizing minority-owned vendors” and a “community advisory board” that would shape the development’s public life. Neither of those features, nor the name “The Grove,” appear in Neutral’s proposal linked from a city press release listing the firms that responded to its RFP.

“It’s all wrong,” says Daniel Glaessl, Neutral’s chief product officer. No reporter had contacted the firm about the project before Isthmus reached out on Thursday afternoon, he says.

The Synapse people in the story above are like, “Hey, AI will write all your stuff, but don’t worry! The editor will be there to ‘create enough friction’ to prevent anything terrible from getting into the public sphere.” I’m having even bigger doubts about that concept now, especially since I know the folks involved at the WSJ and I have always respected and admired them. It always hurts a little more when it happens where you live.

And finally…

FOUL BALLS: It’s not a stretch to say that the sports memorabilia world is a multi-billion-dollar industry, in which athletes get paid exorbitant amounts of money for scrawling their names across all manner of items. What makes an athlete’s autograph worth the big bucks is a confluence of the awesomeness of the athlete and the rarity of their willingness to sign items. The more people want an athlete’s signature and the fewer of them exist, the more likely there will be fraud involved at some level.

In the 1990s, the FBI dug into the world of fraudulent autographs with “Operation Bullpen,” a multi-year investigation that took down a series of forgers who made a living faking the signatures of Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Mark McGwire and others. In response, the major sports leagues and the preeminent autograph certification houses began using holograms, certificates, registration numbers and QR codes to assure buyers that the autographs they owned were, in fact, real.

It didn’t work as well as they had hoped:

Brett Lemieux, a 45-year-old resident of Westfield, Indiana, was the founder of sports memorabilia site Mister ManCave, which claimed to have sold millions of counterfeit items with net profits exceeding $350 million, and had “the largest framed jersey inventory on the web.”

Lemieux made the claims in a now-deleted Facebook post on the “Autographs 101” group Wednesday, saying the money was “too good” to pass up and that he wanted to stop the fraud, which had been going on for the better part of two decades.

Part of Lemieux’s post, bragging about his fraudulent creation of autographs and the holograms of multiple companies meant to prevent such fraud.

Over the past week, I’ve seen a ton of people submitting their Shohei Otani, Mike Trout, Derek Jeter and other autographs to online authentication groups, only to find that the balls, bats and photos are fakes. Many of these items have one, if  not more, authentic-looking holograms, to boot.

I know this seems far afield for journalists, but it really emphasizes an important point about how and why fraud persists in our space as much as it does everywhere else: If there’s money to be made in an easy way, people without scruples are going to take advantage of the situation.

That means we have to all be extra cautious about what we are willing to accept at face value and what we are willing to walk away from if the situation doesn’t feel right. It’s especially true when we really want something to work out, like getting that crucial source or making that tight deadline.

I’ve often said that paranoia is my best friend. Feel free to make it yours as well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Mob Shakedown, Chump Change or An Affront to The Foundations of The Country: Framing Paramount’s $16M Settlement With President Trump

This interview, which literally and figuratively did absolutely nothing to the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, was at the core of a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit President Donald Trump filed against “60 Minutes.” 

THE LEAD: Paramount agreed late Tuesday to pay $16 million to settle President Donald Trump’s lawsuit over the editing of a Kamala Harris interview on “60 Minutes” that Trump deemed fraudulent and deceptive.

Trump sued Paramount in November for $10 billion, claiming the editing of the interview created “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference” intended to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales” of the 2024 election toward Harris.

Experts had long noted that the suit was frivolous and that Trump had a better shot of quarterbacking the Cleveland Browns to a Super Bowl title this year than he did of winning this case. Still, the parent company of “60 Minutes” took the settlement route, as a corporate sale of several billion dollars seemed to be at risk if it didn’t:

Many lawyers had dismissed Mr. Trump’s lawsuit as baseless and believed that CBS would have ultimately prevailed in court, in part because the network did not report anything factually inaccurate, and the First Amendment gives publishers wide leeway to determine how to present information.

But Shari Redstone, the chair and controlling shareholder of Paramount, told her board that she favored exploring a settlement with Mr. Trump. Some executives at the company viewed the president’s lawsuit as a potential hurdle to completing a multibillion-dollar sale of the company to the Hollywood studio Skydance, which requires the Trump administration’s approval.

After weeks of negotiations with a mediator, lawyers for Paramount and Mr. Trump worked through the weekend to reach a deal ahead of a court deadline that would have required both sides to begin producing internal documents for discovery, according to two people familiar with the negotiations.

FRAMING THE OUTCOME: We talked about Framing Theory a few months back, but for a brief recap, the idea is that how the media chooses to focus on an issue can shape how people in general will look at that issue. In this case, here are three I’ve seen pop up:

The Mob Shakedown: In most good gangster movies and TV shows, a scene emerges that showcases how to threaten someone without actually threatening them. It’s a pure demonstration of the power the “Don,” the “boss” or the “enforcer” has: Force someone to do something they don’t want to do out of pure fear of what otherwise might happen.

The shakedown scene usually starts with the gangster offering “friendship” or “protection” for a business owner, explaining that the world is a dangerous place and that a lot of bad things can happen. So, for a small percentage of the owner’s finances, this gangster will keep those bad things at bay.

If the owner protests, the gangster tends to get a little more specific while still being vague, offering “God forbid” scenarios like how a mysterious fire could burn the business to the ground or how a random act of violence could lead to the owner being hospitalized for serious injuries. However, fortunately, a payment to this “ambassador of goodwill” can pretty much eliminate those possibilities:

(This was the best “shakedown” scene I could find from any TV show or movie that a) didn’t use enough F-bombs to destroy an underground nuclear bunker, b) use other pejorative language regarding someone’s race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation or pet preference and c) didn’t actually use the violence that was suggested earlier in the clip. Still, it’s not pure enough for totally virgin ears, so watch at your discretion.)

In the Paramount case, the company had a multi-billion-dollar deal waiting in the wings, but it needed “the Don’s” blessing to go through and a lot of terrible things can happen to a deal if, God forbid, the FCC decided to look reeeeeeealllly closely at it. I mean, who knows what might happen to all that money? If Paramount lost that deal just because of a little misunderstanding it could make right with this “60 Minutes” thing? Hey… I’m just saying…

Of course, the Trump administration definitely wasn’t doing that:

Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has said the president’s lawsuit against Paramount was not linked to the F.C.C.’s review of the company’s merger with Skydance. Paramount has also said the two issues were unrelated.

Right. And the business owner got that black eye and broken arm after “accidentally” falling down a flight of stairs before coming to the conclusion that protection money is a small price to pay for proper piece of mind.

 

Chump Change: If you look at some of the more successful campaigns to get money out of people, they tend to be the ones that appear to be the least taxing or consequential. Case in point, each year, my alma mater (or maters) send me a pledge card, asking for a “gift” of between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars. Those always go right in the trash without a second thought.

That said, I have a hard time recalling the last time I refused to “round up” at the grocery store, the hardware store or anywhere else for whatever charity the business was repping at the time. It’s like, “Hell, I’m already $132.47 into the Kroeger Family at this point. What’s another 53 cents for a good cause?”

In addition, I’ve seen people drop a few coins in a parking lot and refuse to pick them up, folks at rummage sales drop the “and XX cents” on a customer’s total and other similar maneuvers that basically just round off a relatively insignificant amount of cash.

Thus, the concept of “chump change.”

I personally have a hard time thinking about $16 million as “chump change,” but everything in life is relative, as noted in this clip from “The Social Network:”

I suppose if I’m looking at it from the perspective of a multi-billion-dollar company that wants to make several billion dollars on a deal, giving up $16 million isn’t a lot to make things happen. I also suppose that if a collections company told me I owed $1,000 to a creditor, but I could pay it off today for $1.60, I’d probably avoid the argument and fork over the cash. (Trust me on this one: The comparative math is solid.)

To Paramount, this is the cost of doing business. It’s rounding up at the register to move things along. It’s chump change.

 

An Affront to The Foundations of The Country:  After the news broke about the Paramount capitulation, it might have felt like time stood still for a few minutes. That’s probably because when Edward R. Murrow, Katherine Graham, Walter Cronkite, Ben Bradlee and David Brinkley (among other journalists) started simultaneously started spinning in their graves, the Earth found itself dealing with that “Superman The Movie” trick:

We’ve discussed SLAPP suits here before, where people with virtually no case whatsoever sue for a ton of money to get people to back off. In many of those cases, the defendants lack the sufficient means to truly stand their ground and fight back on behalf of truth, justice and the American way, so they knuckle under.

In this situation, Paramount had the funds, the legal might and the legal precedents to stand up for all the mom and pop media operations (whatever of those are left) and tell the president where to put his suit. Paramount also had the opportunity to stand up for the free press and free speech rights that have defined the country for generations.

It’s something Graham and Bradlee did before when a president came at them. It’s something Murrow did in a time in which a demagogue rattled this country to its core. It’s something so many other journalists and journalism operations have done in big and small ways to reassure us all that our rights are not a “when it’s convenient to people in power” thing.

But a funny thing happened on the way to our current predicament. News outlets are now part of larger conglomerates with larger concerns. TV news always lost money, relative to other programming, but it was seen as part of the deal: You give us quality news, we let you use the public airwaves. Newspapers use to make money and hold sway over larger groups of people. Furthermore, they weren’t part of a collective that also did entertainment programming, sold time shares, controlled real estate and answered to shareholders. Their concern was doing the news well and defending their right to do it.

For Paramount, “60 Minutes” is a “property” of the company, just like all the other stuff they put on TV. If an episode of “School Spirits” pissed off enough people to prevent a multi-billion-dollar deal from happening, they’d kill it or edit it or pay off someone, too. Cost of doing business. That’s the company’s view. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.

However, when one company lets the powerful dictate the news based on threats like this suit, it undermines the strength of those First Amendment rights for everyone else.

Ask a generic question, get a generic answer: The perils and promise of letting ChatGPT build your interview questions

Believe it or not, we actually used to sell beer like this. Try not to let AI make your interview questions as generic as this marketing approach.

As I noted in previous posts, I wasn’t significantly worried about ChatGPT or other AI programs taking over journalism at this point. The writing wasn’t clean, the material we cover is too specific and the nuances of the language tended to create more problems than solutions.

That changed a bit when a former student told me people in her orbit were using ChatGPT to create interview questions for everything from press releases to profiles. My concerns ranged from students becoming lazy to ChatGPT asking some pretty offensive questions that ill-prepared or inexperienced writers would use to their own detriment.

To see what would happen, I relied on a situation a friend found herself in last week while teaching at Missouri Boys and Girls State. One of the guest speakers was Barbara P. Bush, daughter of former President George W. Bush and granddaughter of former President George H. W. Bush. She has also been a significant figure as an author and global health care activist.

My friend noted that one of her students had an exceptionally good interview moment with Barbara P. Bush, which we’ll get to in a moment. Before that happens, I decided to let ChatGPT take the wheel and build me a set of interview questions for the former First Daughter:

Here are five thoughtful and engaging questions an interviewer could ask Barbara Pierce Bush, daughter of former President George W. Bush:

  1. Your work with Global Health Corps has been widely recognized—what inspired you to focus on global health, and how has that mission evolved over the years?
    (This connects her personal passion to her professional work.)

  2. Growing up in one of America’s most prominent political families, how did you navigate forming your own identity outside of politics?
    (This explores the personal challenge of living in the public eye.)

  3. You and your twin sister Jenna have often shared stories of your childhood—how has your bond influenced your adult life and careers?
    (This taps into her well-known relationship with her sister and could elicit warm, relatable stories.)

  4. What lessons did you learn from your mother, Laura Bush, that have shaped how you approach leadership and service?
    (This allows reflection on legacy and values from a female role model.)

  5. In today’s divisive political climate, how do you think members of prominent political families can help encourage civility and understanding?
    (This invites her to speak thoughtfully about public discourse without diving into partisanship.)

It’s a solid list, but here are a couple key problems I noticed:

  1. Bush has been asked and has answered most of these questions at length before. This means she probably has a pretty standard answer for them, so you’re not getting anything new.
  2. Not one of them directly attaches itself to the idea of your dad being the “most powerful man in the world.” (I always believed my dad to be the “most powerful man in the world” back when I was a kid, as I’m sure a lot of kids my age did back in the day. That said, my dad didn’t have Seal Team 6 or the 82nd Airborne to deploy when my room got too messy for him to tolerate.)

The question my friend’s student asked perfectly dealt with those two problems:

“How did your dad change after Sept. 11?”

Bush teared up immediately, not expecting a question like that, nor one phrased exactly that way. She gave a great answer about how he changed but he would always be her dad. She also thanked the student for asking that question and really tapping into something different.

Even in that scenario, it’s hard to pick on ChatGPT’s effort. These are good questions, and the bot does a good job of rationalizing what each question should provide the interviewer. I could clearly imagine being flustered if I were to interview someone famous like a former First Daughter, who has carved out an impressive career of her own. ChatGPT’s questions would put me on some better ground than, “So what’s it like to be a twin?” or “Was it weird having your high school dates pick you up at the governor’s mansion?”

That said, ChatGPT struggles a bit more when it comes to people who aren’t internationally famous. I picked a Facebook friend at random and tried the same thing, ending up with one of my favorite high school teachers, Greg Frederick, as the guinea pig for this situation (Sorry in advance, Mr. Frederick…):

Here are five thoughtful and respectful questions an interviewer could ask Greg Frederick, former teacher at Pius XI High School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin:

  1. What initially inspired you to pursue a career in education, and what led you to Pius XI High School specifically?

  2. How did your teaching philosophy evolve during your time at Pius XI, and what impact did that have on your students?

  3. Can you share a memorable moment or experience from your teaching career that still resonates with you today?

  4. How did you approach balancing academic rigor with the values and mission of a Catholic high school like Pius XI?

  5. What advice would you give to new educators entering the profession, especially those teaching in faith-based schools?

A couple of these are solid “opener” questions that could get the ball rolling for a decent interview. Why you wanted to be a teacher and why you ended up teaching at Pius for as long as you did could establish report. The third question is always a good one, in allowing the person to open up about something important and not forcing the interview subject to feel pigeonholed.

A couple of these feel problematic: The second question is a bit iffy in that we assume he changed over time (not always a guarantee) and that it impacted his students (again, not a guarantee). The fourth question could be taken poorly, as someone might read it as the values and mission of the faith are at odds with educational rigor.

The bigger thing, again, is that they’re generic. These could be asked of any biped who spent an appreciable length of time teaching any subject at any religious-based high school. In short, there’s less out there on Mr. Frederick because he’s not a president, a pope or a Kardashian.

I don’t know him as well as a lot of other people, I’m sure, in that I was a student at the school for four years during a specific time period, and I haven’t kept up with his life like a stalker in a made-for-TV movie. That said, I do know certain things that might have led to different questions:

  • He taught English at the school, including upper-level courses like honors English and a course in science fiction and fantasy literature. Sci fi seems to predict the future in a lot of ways, so I’d love to ask a question relating his work in that area with what we are seeing now (social media, phones glued to our souls etc.). I’d also like to know what thoughts he would have on how best to inspire his best writing kids to do good work these days, given AI’s rampant use in generating essays.
  • His wife was also a teacher at the school for a time, although not in the same department. A question about what it’s like working in the same place as a spouse, including benefits and drawbacks, would be interesting to me and probably a lot of people who face similar issues. I know how weird it was when Amy was working for the MU police department and I was running the crime beat for the local newspaper. I wonder how people who actually work closer than that find themselves coping with it.
  • His kids went to that school, including his son, Chris, who was in my grade. This opens up a ton of real estate for questions, particularly for me as I was also a teacher’s kid. After kindergarten, my mom and I were not at the same school ever. I’d be interested in finding out what discussions led to the Frederick kids going to school where mom and dad worked. I wonder if they’d do it the same way again, based on how it all worked out for the kids and the parents.

(SIDE NOTE: Chris and I participated in a number of musicals together, which speaks more to the desperation the directors felt in getting males into the productions than it did to our musical acumen. In preparing for one such musical, the choral director actually told both of us to just “mouth the words” during the songs as we were not only godawful at singing, but we were screwing up everyone else who could carry a tune. Good memories…)

  • I’d be interested on his take on things like homeschooling, which really beefed up its presence over the past few decades, in terms of teaching your own kids or being able to have other people teach them. I’m sure I could blather on forever here, but let’s move on…
  • It never hurts to ask the “So what are you doing now that you retired?” question, in that it opens the door to something people who learned from Mr. Frederick or taught with him probably want to know.

Again, this is just based on some basic stuff that I know that ChatGPT doesn’t. If I were to end up doing a profile on Mr. Frederick, I’d take my normal “build the donut around the hole” approach and interview his family, some people I know who taught with him, some of his students who have gone on to work in specific fields and so forth. The goal would be to figure out what kinds of questions to ask that are more on point about him specifically as opposed to Generic Catholic High School Teacher X.

This is why it’s important to use ChatGPT as a tool in your toolbox and not view it as a panacea for completing your work. If you don’t go beyond the basics that ChatGPT can offer, you will never create anything better than a basic piece.

Goodnight, Cliff Behnke. There will never be another one like you.

I bogarted this photo of Cliff from the obit. I’d argue “fair use,” but I probably wouldn’t argue it with Cliff.

 

Cliff Behnke, the former managing editor of the Wisconsin State Journal and generational journalist, died Sunday in Madison at the age of 80.

The irony of this piece is that it’s impossible to explain Cliff without resorting to cliches, a writing failure the man himself disdained.

Cliff despised lazy writing and wasn’t above telling writers how much redundancies, passive voice and unneeded descriptors displeased him. However, if there is one thing anyone who worked under him knew he hated most, it was cliches, so much so that the concept led his obituary this week:

 

 

Spring never sprung under Cliff Behnke’s watch.

“White stuff” didn’t fall in winter, and no reporter ever dared refer to Thanksgiving as “Turkey Day.”

Behnke was a stickler for detail and standards during his four-decade career at the Wisconsin State Journal.

(I managed to pull off a minor miracle once in a weather story when I used the phrase “a white, wintery mix” and Cliff never said a word.)

The cliches really did tell the tale of Cliff, as everyone in Barry Adams’ fantastic obituary seemed to use one now that Cliff could no longer stop them.

He was an “old-school editor,” in that he prized big-picture accuracy, clarity and value while simultaneously picking at the details that would rob a piece of any of those things. He was “no nonsense” in that staffers knew him to be serious and direct, focused and fair as he kept the newsroom moving forward. He was a “newspaperman in the best sense,” spending far more time in his college newsroom than his classes and helping to shepherd the state’s official newspaper throughout the salad days of print journalism.

In reading Cliff’s obituary, one fact discombobulated me: His age. I was in my early 20s during the three years I spent working the night desk at the State Journal. That would have put Cliff in his early 50s back then, which is where I find myself now. I can’t square those numbers, given that I have neither the skills, the seriousness or the stature that Cliff had at this age, never mind how he terrified staffers in a way that is almost impossible to explain.

I feared Cliff, as did a number of the folks quoted in Adams’ piece, but not in the cliche way usually associated with “old school” editors. He never yelled at me, nor did he have a large physical presence that had me afraid of violence. He didn’t break out a string of colorful curse words when dressing me down.

(Cliff was always on the lookout for stray curses making it into the paper. I remember him calling out a sports story that contained a quote like, “We played a hell of a game.” Cliff’s restrictions on cussing in print would make a 1950s all-girls boarding school look like a biker bar. It took at least three phone calls for us to run a quote in one of my stories about a riot with the quote “F— the pigs!” in it. And, yes, that was WITH the dashes.)

Listening to Cliff’s assessment of my screw ups was like watching a ninja throwing razor blades at me. It was just slice, slice, slice until I fell into 1,000 pieces. It could be about something big or about something small, but I still remember (and refer to) a number of them.

In one case, it was a redundancy. I was writing a photo caption about a model train railroad show when I felt the presence of Cliff lurking behind me. He began simply enough:

“Can you imagine if there were 88 model railroad layouts that were EXACTLY the same?” he asked.

“Huh?” I replied, unsure as to if I was having an out-of-body experience because Cliff was talking to me.

“Do you think it would be possible for a group of people to build 88 IDENTICAL model railroad layouts?” he said in that calm, metered voice of his.

“Uh… No?”

“Right. So why are you telling me that there are 88 DIFFERENT model railroad layouts in this cutline? Of course they’re different. That’s redundant.”

He then disappeared almost as quickly as he showed up and I still haven’t forgotten that lesson.

I also never forgot the time I should have been fired for screwing up a brief, in which I reported that a guy was dead when he wasn’t.

It wasn’t bad enough that I screwed it up, but then the local radio stations did their “rip and read” journalism on the air, letting EVERYONE know the guy was dead when he wasn’t. Our competing paper also used to love to crib our stories and then claim they had an “unnamed source” that confirmed the info, so those folks also amplified the story. It turns out everyone was wrong because I was wrong.

The man’s wife was getting condolence calls from people who saw or heard the “news” and she freaked out that the news people knew about his death before she did. After a complete clustermess of a situation, I got called into Cliff’s office for what I assumed would be the end of my journalism career.

After slowly and calmly walking me through every stupid thing I had done and every way a reasonably competent biped could have avoided that stupidity, he told me that the woman wasn’t going to sue us, but she had several demands. Aside from a correction for the paper, I had to write a letter apologizing to the man’s children for screwing up and then I had to hand-deliver it to his wife and talk to her for as long as she wanted.

“You need to go to the hospital at 10 a.m.,” Cliff said. “You will not justify your mistake. You will not discuss your feelings. If anything comes out of your mouth other than, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ ‘No, ma’am’ or “I’m sorry, ma’am.’ You are gone. Do you have any questions?”

I was both young and stupid enough to have one: “Yeah. Why don’t you just fire me now instead?”

His response was perfectly Cliff: “I honestly don’t know, so get out of my office before I figure it out.”

What he taught me that day was responsibility for my actions, the importance of paranoia-level accuracy and that I needed to tough out this painful lesson if I was ever going to be much of anything in this world. As another editor explained to me when I said I should just quit, “How are you ever going to teach a student to do something tough if you won’t do it yourself?”

I didn’t work for Cliff as long as many other people did, nor did I spend much time in contact with him during my time at the paper. In reading some of the online tributes to him, he was both everything his obit said and so much more. He was generous with his time to Daily Cardinal kids, serving on the board and kindly mentoring staffers as they gained their legs in journalism. He was a giving person to friends and family who knew him less as a mythological editor and more as a human being.

What I can say is that there will never be another editor like Cliff, as the confluence of events that made him could not exist today. Nobody is going to spend four decades in journalism anymore, least of all in one state or at one publication. That means we won’t have someone like Cliff who can capture the culture and soul of the audience the media outlet serves. It also means no one will have a firm grasp on all the details that add clarity to local stories, such as if Devil’s Lake gets an apostrophe or where the East Side stops and Downtown starts. He was like Google in a shirt and tie.

Accuracy, the driving force behind Cliff’s work at the State Journal, now seems to be as antiquated as the term “newspaperman,” with people caring more about being first, getting views and making sure “their side” is winning. In the days of newspapers, mistakes were permanent and you couldn’t undo your failures. That fact helped Cliff drive the rest of us to obsess over being right. As much as I still obsess, I know that if someone finds a mistake in this thing, two quick clicks and it’s like the error never happened. As nice as it is to be able to erase public errors, it does make for some lazy journalism.

Above all else, I do wonder how this generation would take to Cliff’s brand of leadership, as to cause fear these days is hate crime and to criticize is a soul-crushing micro-aggression. I wonder how Cliff would work with people who have been known to bring a parent with them on a job interview. Not every 22-year-old who rolls off the college assembly line these days is the stereotype of an entitled snowflake, but I’ve seen a significant crop of emotional hemophiliacs who complain about everything from making deadlines to not getting enough praise for things they’re just supposed to do. The amazing thing about working for Cliff was that we knew he was reserved with his praise and generous with his critiques. That’s why his praise really meant something, unlike the vast sums of participation trophies that line the bookshelves of “kids these days.”

What I do know is that if anyone could have found a way to make all of this work well and get the best out of people in this current environment, it would have been Cliff. He just wouldn’t quit until he did.

 

The Draft Slide of Shedeur Sanders: An Exercise in Framing Theory

DOCTOR OF PAPER DISCLOSURE: I have to put this here or I’ll never hear the end of this from people who know me. Here is the baggage I bring with me to this post:

  • I am a decades-long Browns fan. I have seen more terrible football than I can accurately describe.
  • The Browns quarterbacking situation has always been a disaster and I’ve literally hated everything they’ve ever done with it since they cut Bernie Kosar in 1993. In some cases, I’ve been right as rain (Deshaun Watson, Johnny Manziel, Brandon Weeden, Brady Quinn… How long do we have for this?) while in other cases I was dead wrong (Baker Mayfield; I hated that pick but came to love the guy. Then I hated it when they let him go.)
  • I’m keeping my opinions to myself about Shedeur Sanders and Cleveland picking him for now, as to not ruin the point of the post, but if we had to say anything was “framing” my opinion, it would be the “I wish my Browns didn’t ruin everything they touch and make every bad decision about every player” frame.

 

Every time someone gets a “Welcome to the Browns” greeting, an angel gets sucked into the engine of a passing American Airlines jet…

THE LEAD: Shedeur Sanders, starting quarterback for Colorado and son of NFL Hall of Famer Deion Sanders, was selected in the fifth round of the NFL Draft this weekend by the Cleveland Browns. Sanders had been projected in numerous mock drafts to be a first-round selection by a QB-hungry team, but fell to pick 144, where the Browns actually traded up to get him.

The slide of Sanders was a major spectacle in the draft, but the reason we’re talking about him here is more about WHY people THINK he ended up as a Day 3 instead of a Day 1 pick.

FACTS ABOUT SHEDEUR SANDERS: For all the discussion about Sanders, here is a list of actual facts about him:

(I have to say “actual facts” here, even though it’s redundant, as so many of the commentators this weekend were screaming opinions and calling them “facts.” The louder you say something doesn’t make it any more true…)

  • He is the son of Deion Sanders, an NFL Hall of Famer and Shedeur’s primary coach throughout college.
  • He weighs in at 6-foot-2, 215 pounds
  • He was a senior at Colorado, where he played for two seasons, an FBS school (a.k.a. Division I). Before this, he played for two seasons at Jackson State University, a FCS school (formerly known as Division II)
  • At Colorado, he amassed a 13-12 record, going 4-7 in 2023 and 9-4 in 2024. In 2024, the Buffaloes went to the Alamo Bowl, where they lost 36-14 to BYU.
  • He received the following accolades in 2024: Second-team Associated Press All-American. Big 12 Offensive Player of the Year. First-team All-Big 12. Finalist for the Davey O’Brien Award (nation’s top QB).
  • In 2024 he also set a school record with 64 career passing TDs and led the FBS by completing a school-record 74 percent of his 477 passes. He ranked second in the FBS with 353 completions and school-record 37 passing TDs (10 INTs) and was fourth with school-record 4,134 passing yards.

This is as close as we can get to a set of facts that will set the stage for how this went from a simple draft story to an epic exercise in framing theory;

FRAMING THEORY 101: Framing is a concept first championed by Erving Goffman in the 1970s that looks at not just what a story is but how it is presented and what influence that has on how the audience comes to understand it:

In essence, framing theory suggests that how something is presented to the audience (called “the frame”) influences the choices people make about how to process that information. Frames are abstractions that work to organize or structure message meaning. The most common use of frames is in terms of the frame the news or media place on the information they convey. They are thought to influence the perception of the news by the audience

Here’s a simple example: The owner of some land in the city of Springfield wants to build a complex of condominiums on that land and is petitioning the city council for the permission to do so.

We could frame this story in a number of ways:

  • Government bureaucracy frame: How long does it take to get stuff done around here and why should someone have to get approval to do something with land they own?
  • Growth frame: The city is clearly in good shape in terms of its financial and population if we need more places for people to live.
  • Social inequity frame: Instead of building pricey condos that X percentage of the population can’t afford, why isn’t the city trying to push builders to create low-income housing that would better meet the needs of so many more people?
  • Environmental frame: This is yet one more project that turns green space into concrete, which will have significant ecological impacts on this area.

There are a ton of others, but this gives you a basic idea of an array of topics.

FRAMING SHEDEUR SANDERS: In looking at the Shedeur Sanders situation, the frames varied widely. The terms I use for each frame below is just a general “vibe” and not an official title for the frames, so worry less about that and look more at the explanation:

  • RACISM FRAME: One of the prominent areas of discussion was the issue of race and how Sanders was unwilling to “code switch.” That term, used in this case by former NFL player Emmanuel Acho in his analysis, meant he was basically a proud, young, Black man who spoke his mind and was unwilling to change who he was to appease the predominantly white ownership/management of the NFL. Thus, the NFL was trying to not only smack Sanders, but also “teach others a lesson” about how the league expects its Black players to “behave.”
  • DADDY ISSUES FRAME: Deion Sanders has long been a vocal individual in public. (That’s probably the most neutral way I can say that.) His “Prime Time” persona was an invention of his that amplified his presence well before social media even became a thing. When it came to his son, Deion was just as vocal about everything from hinting that certain teams shouldn’t draft his son to calling out the Browns before they drafted Shedeur. This frame suggests that teams didn’t want to deal with Deion and his vocal nature.
  • ARROGANCE FRAME: This is one of the flip sides of the “racism” coin that can go around and around and around until we’re dizzy. In this frame, teams passed on him because he was a “me, me, me” guy with a self-aggrandizing temperament that really didn’t sit well in a team sport. What some people saw as remaining true to one’s self, other people saw as cocky and overhyped.
  • NUMBERS FRAME: For every number that showcases significant value in Sanders, someone else can offer numbers that showcase significant weakness. His completion percentage was mindboggling, but he was barely a .500 QB. He led Colorado to a bowl game two years after the team only won one game, but they got crushed by BYU. This one goes either way.

You can go into a TON of other frames as well, and even flip most of these frames on their heads. That’s the goal of today’s exercise.

EXERCISE TIME: Do a search of the Shedeur Sanders post-draft coverage and see what frames you see as showing up most prominently and most frequently. What do you think this says about the overall view of the media and how accurate do you personally feel those predominant frames are.

ALSO:

Pick any story, column, social media tirade, blog post, vlog post, whatever your professor will allow and analyze it for a specific frame in how the draft slide of Shedeur Sanders is being presented. How much do you agree or disagree with this frame and can you counter the argument in a meaningful way, relying on facts and sources to support your point?  (You could even pick out something you know you’re going to disagree with and then work hard on that end.)

 

 

I lost, but it doesn’t suck, and that’s thanks to you all

 

It can be ridiculously hard not to be a hypocrite some days.

I spent the previous weekend at the Missouri College Media Conference, where among other things, I presented the evening’s keynote address. Because the speech was just before the awards were presented, I decided to keep it short and focus on the topic at hand.

I told the students there something I’ve told every student in every newsroom I ever advised that I honestly believe to be true when it comes to awards:

“Awards are great things, and you should be proud to win one. However, they aren’t the end-all and be-all of life. When you win something, you should be honored, but don’t let it get to your head. When you don’t win something, you should NOT let it make you feel inferior, as you have more than plenty to offer now and in the future.”

The minute I said it, I realized I had essentially jinxed myself. My new textbook, “Exploring Mass Communication,” had been nominated for the Textbook & Academic Authors Association’s “Most Promising Textbook” back in late October and the winners were set to be announced any day now.

Sure enough, the results came out shortly after I got home and I didn’t make the cut.

After I checked the list a couple times to be sure, I emailed my friends at Sage and told them I was sorry I let them down. They spent time and money putting together an extensive application for this thing, not to mention about five years of their lives helping me build this opus, so I felt they deserved this award more than I did.

The answers came back pretty quickly and identically: We don’t know what the hell was wrong with the judges, but we think we have a winner here. The response to the book has been overwhelmingly positive and adoptions are beyond our most optimistic expectations. We’ll take that over a plaque.

That made me feel better, as did thinking about the award itself. I didn’t know the TAA existed six months ago, so being really upset about not winning something from them seems pretty stupid. It also helped that this was one of those “best newbie” awards that often feels like a kiss of death. In scrolling back through my mind, I thought of all the “Rookie of the Year” award winners (Joe Charboneau comes to mind) and “Best New Artist” Grammy winners (A Taste of Honey comes to mind) who became part of that one-hit wonder crowd.

Awards ARE great and winning IS great, but I was right that they don’t mean what people think they mean. Hell, the Starland Vocal Band won two Grammy awards more than a decade before the Rolling Stones even got nominated for one. If you asked me whose career I’d want, you better believe I’d want to be with Mick and the Boys as opposed to Taffy Nivert.

The thing that really made me OK with all of this was my boss, who put a different spin on things when he told me, “You need external validation more than any human being I’ve ever met.” In other words, it wasn’t the award that mattered. It was someone telling me I did something right.

Which is where you all come in and why I’m writing this post today.

Steve is one of the best friends I could ever ask for. He’s put up with me for far longer than the AMA’s recommended lifetime allowance…

The one goal I have in everything I do is to try to make life a little better for the person who is interacting with me. I want a student to learn something. I want an advisee to get through the program more smoothly. I want people who attend my sessions at conferences to feel like they didn’t waste their time. If you’re reading this blog, I never want you to say, “Well that’s 20 minutes of my life I’m never getting back.”

The same is true for my books. I don’t write them to supercharge my ego or to win an award. I write them for other people. I hope that they can help instructors reach kids and help kids learn something that matters in a way that doesn’t feel arduous. The best external validation I get is knowing that people trust me to help them help their students. That validation is much better than any award I could ever receive, and it shows up when I least expect it.

Case in point, a few student media advisers were on a listserv, discussing which media-writing text would be good for their classes. “Dynamics of Media Writing” came up three times. That was amazing to me. I also got a few messages after MCMC from people asking if they could get a desk copy of my “Dynamics of News Reporting and Writing” text, as they wanted to adopt it in the fall because they heard good things.

Even the kids, who I have been told a jillion times hate textbooks and never use them, have been amazingly kind to me over the years. For example, I brought a bunch of swag to the MCMC, including “Filak Furlough Tour” T-shirts and a “trophy bat” for the organization to give away.  At the end of the MCMC, the students on the board got copies of my reporting book as a thank you, when one of the kids came up to me and asked if I would sign the book.

“You don’t want me to sign that,” I explained. “If you keep it shrink-wrapped, the bookstore will pay you a chunk of change for it.”

She gave me a “why the hell would I do that?” look and then peeled off the wrapping. I ended up signing all three of the books that day.

Actual proof that someone wanted my autograph on something other than a check or a grade-change form.

When I got back and told the story to my reporting class, one young lady told me, “I read your book. I still think it’s the best textbook because I could understand things from it. It felt really… human.”

In the age of AI, I’ll take the hell out of that.

Perhaps this is the longest way I can think of to say thank you for everything you do for me in the “external validation” department. My goal with each edition of the book and each blog post is to make sure I earn it.

If there’s anything you need, please let me know.

Vince (a.k.a. The Doctor of Paper)

 

 

How AI “expert sources” have duped journalists and four tips on how to avoid being the next victim

 

Meet Elizabeth Hubbell, a 25-year-old skin-care expert who is willing to be a great source for your next story on anything makeup or skin-care related. She’s actually completely fabricated. Her picture came from an AI generation site and her name is a combination of my car (Betsy) and a baseball player whose card I had laying around (Carl Hubbell). Careful. It’s dangerous out there…

When it comes to doing interviews, I always tell students they need to do them in person.  In response, they often look at me like I’m asking them to use a teletype machine or some semaphore flags. It’s easier, faster and more convenient for both parties if they can do a text, a chat or an email interview, the students say.

I argue that the face-to-face interview allows for a deeper connection for profile and feature pieces. This approach also can prevent sources in news stories from weaseling out of answers they could otherwise work through via several drafts of an email. Plus, if I spend some time in the source’s environment, I can probably find a personal effect that could give us something to talk about, like a family photo, a kid’s drawing or a sports item. At the very least, it’ll help with scene setting.

Apparently, there’s another good reason for my approach these days: Your easy-to-access, extremely helpful, expert source might be AI:

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, anyone can generate comment, on any subject, in an instant.

It is a technology that appears to have fuelled a rise in expert commentators who have appeared widely in national newspapers but who are either not real, not what they seem to be or at the very least have CVs which do not justify their wide exposure in major newsbrands.

The rise in dubious commentators has been fuelled by companies that charge the PR industry in order to share quotes via email with journalists who have submitted requests for comment.

Journalist Rob Waugh found that in a number of cases, digital outlets were mass-generating content from these supposed experts, giving everyone from news journalists to PR practitioners the exact the quote or information they needed on a wide array of topics. However, when challenged to engage more deeply regarding who they are or what they have done in life, the “sources” suddenly had difficulty:

She has been quoted in Fortune talking about “loud budgeting” and by Business.com talking about the best countries in which to obtain a business education (both sites are based in the US).

A profile on Academized describes her as a “biochemist and science educator”. The same byline picture also crops up on a publisher called Leaddev, for someone called Sara Sparrow. Rebecca Leigh has written for DrBicuspid.com about how to write a business plan for your dental practice where she is described as a writer for Management Essay and Lija Help (two online writing services).

When challenged via email to do something that would be difficult to do with AI image-generating software (send an image of herself with her hand in front of her face) or prove that she was an environment expert, Rebecca stopped communicating.

One AI source, “Barbara Santini,” was particularly prolific in the volume and array of topics she could cover for journalists. Waugh found this roster of publications that had included Santini quotes:

She has been quoted in The Guardian talking about the benefits of walking (paid content), in Newsweek talking about white lies, Marie Claire talking about the meaning of money, the Daily Mirror talking about the benefits of sleeping with your dog, in The Sun talking about sexual positions, Pop Sugar talking about astrology, and Mail Online talking about how often to change your pillow.

Santini was recently quoted in a BBC article examining the lifelike responses of AI to Rorschach tests used by some psychologists saying: “If an AI’s response resembles a human’s, it’s not because it sees the same thing but it’s because its training data mirrors our collective visual culture.”

Despite her ability to be all knowing and wise, Santini apparently couldn’t receive phone calls, a relatively easy giveaway that the “person” on the other end is AI. Waugh also found other examples of journalists who were getting taken for a ride by an AI source, including one case where the non-human pitched a sob story about breast cancer survival:

“Seeing my scarred chest in the mirror was a constant reminder of what I had lost,” Kimberly Shaw, 30, told me in an emotional email.

She had contacted me through Help a Reporter Out, a service used by journalists to find sources. I cover skincare and had been using the site to find people for a story about concealing acne scars with tattoos.

<SNIP>

Shaw’s experience may not have been relevant to my acne story, but it tapped into the same feelings of empowerment and control I wanted to explore. Thinking she could inspire a powerful new piece, I emailed her back.

But after days of back-and-forth conversations, something in Shaw’s emails began to feel a little off. After idly wondering to my boyfriend whether she could be a fake, he suggested that I run the emails through a text checker for artificial intelligence.

The result was unequivocal: Shaw’s emails had been machine-generated. I’d been interviewing an AI the entire time.

As a result of Waugh’s story, a number of these information clearinghouses have tried to cull their ranks of AI “experts” while the deceived publications have retooled or removed the stories with fake people in them. Although the founder of one of these “expert mills” blamed much of the situation on “lazy journalists,” he kind of gave up the game a bit when it came to explaining why these platforms don’t prevent the frauds from gaining access in the first place:

Darryl Willcox, who founded ResponseSource in 1997 and sold it in 2018, says that the simplicity and speed of platforms like ResponseSource is key to their appeal and that attempts to add authentication risk slowing down the system.

Willcox said: “The other factor which complicates things a little bit is that these platforms are quite an open system. Once a journalist makes a request they can be forwarded around organisations, and sometimes between them, and often PR agencies are acting for multiple parties, and they will be forwarded onto their many clients.”

In other words, “If we slowed down to make sure things were accurate, we wouldn’t be as appealing as we want to be.” Eeesh.

So what can you to to avoid quoting a fake person? The overarching theme is basically, “Don’t be a lazy journalist,” but here are a few more specific tips:

TRUST, BUT VERIFY: The old Russian proverb really comes into play here and for good reason. I often say that paranoia is my best friend and has kept me out of a ton of problems. To that larger point, not only did I click on every link I could find in Waugh’s story, I also Googled the hell out of Waugh himself. Why? I imagined that it would be the most epic “Punk’d” moment on Earth if the media world was flocking to this story about AI screwing with journalists, only to find out that Rob Waugh was also an AI fake. I found LinkedIn, X, Bluesky, media staff pages and at least a dozen photos. I wouldn’t bet the house on the fact he’s real, but I’d probably bet the lawn tractor.

This can be harder in situations like the one involving the cancer scammer, as regular people tend not to have as big of a social media presence or digital footprint. That said, even regular people under the age of retirement should have left a few breadcrumbs out there for you to find.

KICK THE TIRES: If you can’t find the person clearly through a digital search, feel free to play a little game of 20 Questions to see if you can get some things ironed out. Experts who have kicked the tires on a few bots can offer you specific ways to ask questions that will tend to ferret out fakers. The author in the cancer-scam story revealed that asking for specific photos based on prior conversations can be helpful as well.

I learned about this kind of thing in trying to defeat scams when it came to buying sports memorabilia. When unknown sellers offered either exactly what I wanted when I couldn’t find it anywhere else or provided me with a ridiculously low price for something I knew should cost more, the pros who had been around the block a few times suggested I ask the seller to “coin the image.”

What this meant was that I wanted the person to take a picture of the item with a coin (usually asking for either heads or tails, or maybe even a specific coin) so I could tell they had the item and weren’t messing with me. Turned out, that advice helped me dodge a bullet or two. As weird as it might seem, asking someone to take a picture with their left hand raised or holding a quarter with “heads” showing might help you avoid a problem.

MEET IN PERSON: Again, this is the most obvious one to suggest. If you meet a person, in person, it’s a pretty safe bet that you can consider them real. The rest of the stuff (Are they the expert they claim to be? Did they really do what they say they did? Do they actually have cancer?) remains a risk without substantial additional reporting, but at least you’ll know they exist.

If that can’t happen for legitimate reasons (the person lives too far away etc.), look for other ways to get some human connection with the source. That could be a Zoom/Teams/Whatever video chat or an actual phone call at an actual phone number. In the cases where the frauds proliferated, it was pretty clear that the only connection between the source and the journalist was through a keyboard. That’s especially dangerous when you don’t have a prior relationship with a source.

WHEN IN DOUBT, DO WITHOUT: At the end of the day, there is no journalistic rule that says you have to use a source, a quote or a “fact” just because you have it. If you don’t feel comfortable with how a source is providing you with information or you aren’t 100% sure this person is a person, it’s better to leave that source out of your story than it is to run the risk of getting bamboozled.

If you say, “Well, the whole story will fall apart without this one source and I can’t get anyone else to provide me with this information,” maybe that’s more revealing than anything else we’ve said here.

 

It’s all fun and games until someone sues you for being an idiot: Pat McAfee Edition

ESPN forced to put out 'don't sue us' disclaimer as Pat McAfee show launches on live TV as NFL icon apologizes at start | The US Sun

The disclaimer on the front of Pat McAfee’s show.

THE LEAD: Pat McAfee, former NFL punter and current podcast maven, amplified an internet rumor on his show about Ole Miss quarterback Jaxon Dart and his girlfriend, Mary Kate Cornett. The unsupported allegation was that the 18-year-old freshman student was involved in a “triangle” of sexual relations with Dart and Dart’s father.

After suffering weeks of abuse, threats and other unpleasantness via the Online Idiot Brigade of Dude-Bros, Cornett plans to sue for defamation:

Now she is looking to hold accountable those who contributed to ruining her life, with McAfee and his network, ESPN, clearly in her sights.

“I’m not a public figure that you can go talk about on your show to get more views,” Cornett said on NBC.

BACKGROUND: McAfee is one of several larger “main-stream” media outlets that amplified this rumor. Barstool Sports folks promoted the rumor, along with a meme coin of Cornett. Former NFL player Antonio Brown posted a meme about the rumor. And this doesn’t count the number of other yahoos and local “shock-jock” idiots who did their own hot takes on the topic.

As a result, Cornett’s life has become a literal living hell:

As the rumor spread, Cornett removed her name from outside her dorm room, but she still had vile messages slipped under her door. Campus police told her she was a target, and she moved into emergency housing and switched to online courses.

Houston police showed up to her mother’s house, guns drawn, in the early hours of Feb. 27, in an apparent instance of “swatting” – when someone falsely reports a crime in hopes of dispatching emergency responders to a residence. According to security camera footage and a police report reviewed by The Athletic, the homicide division responded to the call.

After her phone number was posted online, Cornett’s voicemail was filled with degrading messages. In one, a man laughs as he says that she’s been a “naughty girl” and cheerfully asks her to give him a call. Another male caller says that he has a son, too, in case she’s interested. Several people texted her obscene messages, calling her a “whore” and a “slut” and advised her to kill herself.

 

UNDERSTANDING THE LAW: I talked to a couple Legal Eagle friends about this and they’re pretty much in agreement that anything from a defamation suit to an invasion of privacy case would likely tilt in Cornett’s favor. The key things to consider are this:

  • Cornett is not a public figure by any reasonable definition of the term, which means defamation is easier to prove. Yes, she’s dating a high-profile college athlete in the days of NIL money, but that doesn’t make her fair game. If she were a high-profile athlete or if she were promoting her personal brand of something or other online with a “brought to you by Jaxon Dart’s girlfriend,” McAfee’s actions would remain despicable, but the law could be a bit murkier. As a private individual, the standard she has to prove is negligence, not actual malice.
  • The rumor and the people spreading it (especially McAfee) have offered no proof for the allegations they are making about Cornett. As far as anyone can tell, this started out as a random post on YikYak and just kind of spread all over the place. Truth is one of the best “silver bullet” defenses against libel, which is why accuracy is so vital in journalism. If you accuse your university president of running a cocaine ring out of the basement of the student union, and you can prove it, you’re likely up for a Pulitzer, as opposed to a multi-million-dollar legal bill.
  • McAfee is not protected by the word “allegedly,” despite him and his panel of merry men slathering it about like mayo on a BLT. As we’ve discussed before, “allegedly” offers no legal protection.
  • McAfee is also not protected by his stupid disclaimer about it just being a joke-y show with a bunch of “stooges” just throwing bull around. If simple disclaimers like that worked, I’d put one on the back of Amy’s truck that says, “Disclaimer: I have a lead foot and a total disregard for my speedometer, so don’t pull me over to ticket me. I won’t change my behavior.”
  • Hyperbole doesn’t protect him either. The concept of hyperbole is that something has to be so outlandish that no reasonable person would believe it to be true. That’s why the Flynt v. Falwell case ended up in the favor of the porn producer, not the televangelist.

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: The first and most obvious thought is that Pat McAfee should know better than to do this. He’s 37 years old, so he’s been a grown-up for quite some time. He graduated with a communications degree from West Virginia University, so it’s likely he ran into some course at some point about what is and isn’t legal to say on air. He’s got a listener base of nearly 3 million people, so he should know that anything he says has a real chance to have a significant impact.

Even if he were none of those things, basic human decency plus the ability to observe the carnage that has befallen this poor kid* should have clued him in that it’s time to call off the dogs and apologize about this. (*Yes, the law considers her an adult, but she’s still basically a kid. Tell me you felt like a fully formed adult ready to deal with the world at large and I’ll be hard-pressed to believe you.)

Life as a teenager is ridiculously hard as it is. People are angry, petty and stupid. You feel lost and unable to control anything. Your mind races and wanders all at the same time as you try to figure things out for yourself, as every adult around you seems to be asking, “So, what are you going to do next?”

That doesn’t even account for the way in which social media has amplified the “Mean Girls” aspects of life, in which rumors spread more quickly, people get more vitriolic and anxiety can become amplified many times over. The crap teens say to their peers on a daily basis on social media channels could peel paint and give a truck driver the vapors. Now, imagine that it’s the entire world seemingly aligning against you for no good reason other than some chucklehead thought it would be funny to tell people you slept with someone’s dad.

I can’t imagine a way out. Actually, I can and others have as well, which is devastating beyond belief.