The tweet heard ’round the journalism world

July 8, 2010 By

Between Twitter, Facebook, e-mail and text messaging, I’m always a bit terrified that a fleeting opinion will come back to come back to haunt me. For instance, I once was appropriately chastised for making fun of an organization that I covered in my private Gmail chat status. So half of me reacted to Octavia Nasr’s CNN firing over a tweet with a twinge of sympathy while the other half of me said, “What was she thinking?”

Nasr wrote on Twitter after the Shiite cleric died on Sunday, “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah…One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.” File that one under “objective reporting fail.”

Nasr was senior editor of Middle Eastern affairs and a 20-year veteran at CNN, so she should be no stranger to the ayatollah’s controversial status. Reuters describes him as one of Shi’ite Islam’s highest religious leaders, an early mentor of the militant group Hezbollah, and listed as a terrorist.

Following Nasr’s firing, Mediaite posted an internal memo:

From Parisa Khosravi–SVP CNN International Newsgathering

I had a conversation with Octavia this morning and I want to share with you that we have decided that she will be leaving the company. As you know, her tweet over the weekend created a wide reaction. As she has stated in her blog on CNN.com, she fully accepts that she should not have made such a simplistic comment without any context whatsoever. However, at this point, we believe that her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward.

As a colleague and friend we’re going to miss seeing Octavia everyday. She has been an extremely dedicated and committed part of our team. We thank Octavia for all of her hard work and we certainly wish her all the best.

Parisa.

The New York Times reports that Nasr reported and provided analysis about the region for CNN’s networks but did not run the CNN’s Middle East coverage.

In a blog post on CNN, Nasr wrote, “It was an error of judgment for me to write such a simplistic comment and I’m sorry because it conveyed that I supported Fadlallah’s life’s work. That’s not the case at all.”

I used the words “respect” and “sad” because to me as a Middle Eastern woman, Fadlallah took a contrarian and pioneering stand among Shia clerics on woman’s rights. He called for the abolition of the tribal system of “honor killing.” He called the practice primitive and non-productive. He warned Muslim men that abuse of women was against Islam.

My guess is that Nasr would not have been fired if she had tweeted something negative about the ayatollah, but maybe I’m wrong. So was she fired for having an opinion or having an opinion that angered many of CNN’s constituents?

This does not bode well for reporters who are already worried about Twittercide or emailcide. Remember Dave Weigel? Many of the reports about Nasr’s firing seem somewhat flippant. Here’s Megan Gibson at Time: “Though she didn’t say she regretted the sentiment, she does regret tweeting “such a simplistic comment.” Seems that wasn’t enough for critics and CNN.” Here’s The Guardian‘s lead, “Twitter, with its strict 140-character limit, was never going to be the best medium to make a nuanced point about Middle East politics. But Octavia Nasr gave it a go.” Politico frames her firing as disappointment to Arab-Americans and spends more ink on the reporter’s work at CNN than Fadlallah’s controversial status.

It inevitably sets off the perennial discussion over how the difference between journalism and opinion is increasingly blurred. Newsbusters’ publisher Brent Bozell says it was a “step in the right direction” while Stephen M. Walt writes at Foreign Policy that CNN’s decision was spineless.

What’s unclear is whether Nasr violated a CNN policy currently set in place. Business Insider reports on guidelines that were issued back in 2008.

“Again, on these sites only write about something CNN would not report on. Don’t list preferences regarding political parties or newsmakers that are the subject of CNN reporting.”

Maybe this serves as a warning to reporters who feel the urge to write a miniature epitaph on Twitter for their favorite sources. For instance, it will be interesting to see how reporters react to the deaths of religious leaders like the Dalai Lama, Billy Graham, and the Pope. The best coverage usually comes through capturing the leaders’ influence through other people’s eyes.

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Filed Under: Islam, Journalism, People, Religion, Web/Tech, World Religions
  • Jerry

    When I took a law course in college many years ago, I learned a legal principle “every dog is entitled to one free bite”. It’s not entirely true, of course, as a legal principle but it is sadly also not true in situations like this.

    It seems that people are not allowed to be human any longer and are punished severely for a mistake. And woe betide someone who actually has a real opinion about some situation. In today’s world, for those old enough to remember, Walter Cronkite would have been fired on the spot for making his famous Vietnam statement.

    Her sin was seeing something positive in someone labeled an enemy. This kind of knee jerk firing is all too common these days and is underpinned by a lack of a sense of loyalty. Loyalty is considered to be a fine thing for employees to give their employers, but no one should expect it going the other way.

  • Ben

    The firing should outrage those at GR who view objectivity as outdated and who wish reporters would reveal their worldviews more. Since I still see the value of striving for objectivity, I think CNN did the right thing.

  • http://twitter.com/kevinjjones Kevin J Jones

    Before the internet, people had to wait until the Final Judgment to have to answer for every idle word.

    Whatever happened to the reprimand or the unpaid suspension?

  • Sarah Pulliam Bailey

    It’s a tough situation. I’m very much in favor of at least trying to strive for objectivity–there’s a reason why reporters strive to keep their distance from their subjects. Of course, every reporter will be influenced by his or her background, views, experiences, etc. That said, you’re supposed to self-censor in unedited contexts like Facebook, Twitter, etc. It’s just so much easier to broadcast unedited feelings than it was even 10 years ago.

  • Sarah Pulliam Bailey

    Oh, I just came across Rod Dreher’s post on this where he calls her firing “unjust.”

    http://blog.beliefnet.com/roddreher/2010/07/the-unjust-firing-of-octavia-nasr_comments.html

    Does she have a record of slanting coverage and commentary in a pro-Hezbollah way? If so, that’s an issue — and I suspect if Helen Thomas had not spent the last 20 years turning herself into a crazy bag lady and diminishing her professional reputation, people would have been quicker to defend her after her idiotic remark about Israel. But if Nasr’s work has been fair and competent for two decades, what’s the big deal — especially because she makes it clear that she’s not a Hezbollah supporter (if she were, it would be strange for a Lebanese Christian)?

    and

    I wouldn’t trade one Christopher Hitchens, who makes no effort to hide his prejudices, but who is a brilliant journalist, for a thousand personality-free journalists who make every effort to suppress expression of their own opinions or biases, for fear of destroying their careers.

    for further discussion.

  • Ira Rifkin

    Re Dreher’s comment about Lebanese Christian support for Hezbollah:

    As it happens, the Lebanese Free Patriotic Party led by Michel Aoun, which has the 2nd largest contingent in the Lebanese parliament and has 5 ministers in the government, is a Christian party.

    So its fair to surmise that it is NOT strange for Lebanese Christians to support Hezbollah.

  • http://michaelaltman.wordpress.com Michael J. Altman

    These issues of objectivity and reporting intrigue me because it’s so different from the way the debate has been framed in academic circles. Scholars of religion (my field), and many other fields, have given up on “objectivity” a long time ago and I think the trend has been an emphasis on positionality and fairness. Let people know who you are and where you are (race/gender/class/region/religion/whatever else might matter) and then aim to be fair in treating your subject.

    In Nasr’s case, she positioned herself after the fact: a woman from the Middle East. Her background offered the reasons for why she respected Fadlallah the way she did. Would a blog post where she could have offered more nuance been a better decision instead of a 140 character tweet? Probably.

    As a news consumer, I’d like to know who you are and where you’re coming from when I read your stories because there is no “view from no where” so at least let me know where your view is positioned.

    I agree with those above who note the severity of the penalty. A suspension, a slap on the wrist, not a firing seems more appropriate to me.

  • Ben

    Michael,

    How do you judge fairness in an academic work, and is that measure in any way impacted by knowing the position of the writer? I would imagine that the scale for judging something fair or not would look exactly the same if you didn’t know the author’s background. If the scales ARE different, then how is your field of study rigorous?

    Same questions apply when thinking about this issue in journalism.

  • http://jettboy.blogspot.com Jettboy

    I think fairness today should be less about how an article is written and what a reporter’s biases are. Rather, I think true fairness should be a newspaper who hires good writers of all kinds of viewpoints left and right, Jewish, Christian, even Muslim. The problem as I see it is that people don’t trust Media not because of reporters have bias, but that the bias seems so one sided by the majority of those doing the news.

  • http://michaelaltman.wordpress.com Michael J. Altman

    Ben, that’s a really tough question but a really good one. I don’t know that I have a satisfactory answer.

    So, when it comes to fairness, what I mean is the way one makes use of the the sources–be they ethnographic or historical. Is the scholar interrogating the sources sufficiently? But also, is the scholar allowing the sources to be understood within their own context and represent themselves? There’s a balance here between a hermeneutics of suspicion and a hermeneutics of sympathy. Where is that balance? That’s a decision each scholar makes and it then gets critiqued by other scholars. I think that an awareness of positionality (that we are all positioned and that some positions offer different views of a phenomenon than others –revealing some things and hiding others) helps a reader/critic understand why you made the decisions you did in your interpretation and use of the sources.

    I think rigor is a slightly different question. As I usually think of it, rigor is a matter of how well one uses the evidence from the sources to makes one’s argument. To be rigorous is to have turned up as much evidence as possible and made sure one’s arguments or interpretations don’t outrun the evidence. But I’m thinking in a humanities mode–I think rigor has a different connotation in the hard sciences where it means something more like the ability to objectively evaluate knowledge (I don’t know I’m not a scientist.)

    I’d be curious to hear more about the relationship between rigor and fairness, though. I’m not sure I get it.

  • http://AandBAcademy.com Don Ibbitson

    She made a huge error in judgement by trying to encapsulate her view in 140 characters. Twitter does not allow one to “elaborate” and she’s paid a huge price for that error. I have my own perceptions of where most of the mainstream media fall on the ideological scale but at least they have the good sense hopefully to stay away from forums like Twitter.

  • Ben

    Hi Michael,

    This definition of fairness you gave seems eminently reasonable in the context of academic study or journalism:

    Is the scholar interrogating the sources sufficiently? But also, is the scholar allowing the sources to be understood within their own context and represent themselves?

    That seems like something which could be judged based on a careful examination of the final text, with possible supporting feedback from those who were interviewed. But you lose me here:

    [P]ositionality … helps a reader/critic understand why you made the decisions you did in your interpretation and use of the sources.

    If the author is making interpretations, then the author needs to bolster those within the text itself. Readers can then make decide about the soundness of the reasoning presented. That seems like a more rigorous foundation for criticism then conjecture about authorial intentions. I agree with your notion of rigor as well:

    [R]igor is a matter of how well one uses the evidence from the sources to makes one’s argument.

    That approach seems rigorous to me. Judging the author for his/her intentions — truly only known to the author — strikes me as not rigorous at all. That leads you down the path of saying, Author X is a Catholic so we will judge Author X’s writings on Catholicism as skewed toward sympathy. (Or maybe if we learn Author X is a lapsed Catholic, the opposite.) Either way, how does one confirm this prejudice — except by returning to the piece of writing itself and building a case. Which is what the critic should have done in the first place, irrespective of the author’s biography.

  • Ira Rifkin

    This conversation about fairness and context is interesting but a bit rarified for the work-a-day journalism profession.

    Deadlines are perpetual given today’s 24/7 news cycle, there are fewer and fewer editors to keep writers from embarrassing themselves (who edits Tweets anyway? unless they’re supplied to a celeb by a pr team), the emphasis is now on highly subjective opinion rather than detailed reporting, and the more outrageous the more the public pays attention. Alas, none of this supports the sort of high-minded journalism being discussed here, a journalism seemingly less valued by the day.

    Plus, continued access – particularly when covering dangerous folk who have their own ideas about what constitutes “journalism,” Hezbollah, for example – requires a certain amount of sucking up.

    Whatever Nasr’s deepest sympathies may be, she fell victim to her game of choice, the rules of which are in total flux. It will be interesting to see where she lands – that may tell us something about her beliefs.

    Bottom line: The street just ain’t the classroom. Never will be. Certainly not in the Middle East.

  • kristy

    So, will they get somebody of Nasr’s background, understanding and passions to replace her? I think it’s stupid (yes, I said stupid) for CNN to allow one tweet to undo about 20 years of journalistic work, especially after she made an explanation of her comments. That is really too severe.

  • MJBubba

    I agree on the “too severe” judgment. I think CNN overreacted, but they needed to make a statement, as their credibility has been in decline for years. They spin too far to the left, and their biases are eroding their market.

  • http://politicsdaily.com Jeffrey Weiss

    Walter Cronkite’s evaluation of Vietnam was made on camera, as part of his normal work, and was part of an analysis based on specific information that he also presented. I could envision it happening today. If you’ve watched Anderson Cooper’s coverage of the BP oil spill, you’ve seen something similar.

    Nasr’s main transgression was exactly what she assessed it as after the fact: Trying to do far too much in the limits set by Twitter. Though I have judgment questions about her choice, given her job, to focus her tweet on that particular part of his life and legacy. As I’ve said elsewhere, that’s akin to praising Mussolini because the trains ran on time.

    Was that a firing offense? That’s a different question.