
Vanity Fair reporter freak-out - apress
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tPFggJcOw_MJ:www.langner.com/en/2011/03/10/vanity-fair-reporter-freak-out/+Vanity+Fair+reporter+freak-out&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com
======
sedev
This is a good example of why specialists shouldn't talk to the media.
Generally, the interests of (for example) the New York Times are opposed to
the interests of (for example) a particle physicist. The incentive structure
of mainstream dead-tree media is aligned against producing accurate summaries
of specialized information. There are some good parts and some bad parts to
this. The bad parts, though, are sufficiently bad that if manipulating the
media isn't your actual job, you're probably better off outsourcing that task
to a trusted third party. This is basically the same as talking to lawyers and
the police: they will lie to you. There will always be some technical
exception so that they can tell themselves and the people higher in their
authority structure that they weren't _really_ lying, but no, from the
perspective of a layperson, they're liars. They lie all the time. So you need
to either be the sort of person who can cope with that and tell them the lies
in return that will get something resembling your actual views and statements
into their publication, or you need a specialist - just like with talking to
lawyers - on your side to do that job for you.

Never count on a reporter to act in good faith any more than you would count
on that from the police or from a lawyer. They will disembowel you.

This advice is much less applicable, happily, to technical publications in
your field, or to 'citizen journalism,' but you still have to be cautious
there. The major difference is that with technical publications or citizen
journalists, you may have some actual leverage, and they may have some idea
what you're talking about. You have no leverage, as a specialist, over the
NYT, so they don't care what harm they do to you - what the heck are you going
to do to them? And the average reporter for, say, Fox News, doesn't know what
the heck, say, Bruce Schneier is talking about. They are worse than laypeople,
actually, because they have an incentive to misunderstand.

Don't talk to the mainstream media. They will lie to you, and they are not
your friends.

------
btilly
My absolute favorite example of a reporter willfully twisting words is the
following.

A reporter was trying to interview my mother about my sister. My mother said,
"It's not that we don't think you're important but ...". This wound up in
print as, "It's...that we dont think you're important."

Remember, it is the job of the media to get a compelling story out there. They
don't care about the truth. They don't care about informing people. They want
to create interesting stories that suck people in, and punish people who fail
to give them access to information that they wanted (whether or not they had
any right to pry).

When we see subjects that we understand misreported in the media, we
invariably cringe. When you see subjects you don't know anything about
reported in the media, your default assumption should be that if you knew the
subject better, you _would_ cringe, and the only reason you're not cringing is
that you don't know better.

~~~
jrockway
_A reporter was trying to interview my mother about my sister. My mother said,
"It's not that we don't think you're important but ...". This wound up in
print as, "It's...that we dont think you're important."_

Honestly, whoever did this is a failure at their job. This can't be a common
practice because it's so blatantly wrong. Even Reddit commentors don't get
upvoted for crap like this.

~~~
btilly
I have no idea how common that is. However that incident taught me why people
say, "No comment" to the media. Short. Sweet. Can't be misquoted out of
context.

~~~
hugh3
Ah, but they have a way around that as well.

Journalist: btilly, would you ever rape a child?

btilly: No comment.

Headline: _btilly refuses to rule out raping children_

Next week they'll ask whether you're running for president, and if you don't
comment on that then the cover of Time will be a picture of your face with the
caption "Is America Ready For a Child-Raping President?"

~~~
btilly
Ah yes. The Glenn Beck approach.

I'm very glad to have never had to deal with it.

------
tptacek
Here's the graf in the VF piece that has Langner so upset:

 _“If I did not have the background that I had, I don’t think I would have had
the guts to say what I said about Stuxnet,” Langner says now, finishing his
second glass of wine during lunch at a Viennese restaurant in Hamburg. Langner
studied psychology and artificial intelligence at the Free University of
Berlin. He fell into control systems by accident and found that he loved the
fiendishly painstaking work. Every control system is like a bespoke suit made
from one-of-a-kind custom fabric—tailored precisely for the conditions of that
industrial installation and no other. In a profession whose members have a
reputation for being unable to wear matching socks, Langner is a bona fide
dandy. “My preference is for Dolce & Gabbana shoes,” he says. “Did you notice,
yesterday I wore ostrich?” Langner loves the attention that his theories have
gotten. He is waiting, he says, for “an American chick,” preferably a blonde,
and preferably from California, to notice his blog and ask him out._

This looks bad in isolation. But the piece is enormous; more than 60 grafs
long. Langner's complaint makes it sound like a hit piece. It's not; it's
simply using those (apparently misleading) details to add some color. The
article is ostensibly not even about Langner, even though it quotes and
discusses him warmly throughout.

I don't want to sound like I'm defending bad reporting, but the VF articles
has _substantive_ concerns about Langner as well --- for instance, his
prevalence as a authoritative source for lots of other journalism about
Stuxnet --- and one way to dodge that is to redirect attention to stupid stuff
like what kinds of shoes he _really_ prefers.

~~~
FeelsGoodMan69
Is "graf" an actual term for a paragraph? Or is this some new Californian
thing I haven't noticed?

~~~
tptacek
Google [graf hed lede]. I use them, as I think many other people do, because
they're very easy to type, and you knew what it meant without being told.

"Tk" also another great journalism shortcut; it's like "XXX" in code --- easy
to search for and fix later.

I'm in Chicago.

~~~
FeelsGoodMan69
Interesting, I'd never heard of anything like this. Thanks!

------
ivank
"My experience is that journalists report on the nearest-cliche algorithm,
which is extremely uninformative because there aren’t many cliches, the truth
is often quite distant from any cliche, and the only thing you can infer about
the actual event was that this was the closest cliche. I should write a
separate post on this at some point.

It is simply not possible to appreciate the sheer awfulness of mainstream
media reporting until someone has actually reported on you. It is so much
worse than you think."

-Eliezer Yudkowsky, [http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/predictible-fakers.htm...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/predictible-fakers.html)

~~~
hugh3
On the other hand, if you hang out with journalists you'll start to see it
from their side as well.

They've got some short deadline to write a few thousand words on some topic
they don't really understand and don't really care about, either... and the
consequences for rushing out a just-good-enough article are pretty minimal.

Sound familiar? It reminds me of high school, and dashing off some crappy
just-good-enough essay on the night before it was due. Journalists (or the
vast majority thereof) are stuck in an endless loop of having to write two
crappy high school essays on different subjects every day. I don't envy them.

~~~
kmfrk
Your idealist view of the perfect article is something that quickly goes out
the window, when you begin to write for a magazine or newspaper.

The character limit on articles alone is enough to break the hopes of many
people.

------
Jun8
This mirrors the story of McChrystal's treatment by _Rolling Stone_
([http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-runaway-
genera...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-runaway-
general-20100622)). In both cases reporters pull specialists who are unaware
and unprepared for the perils of such interviews to uncharted territory and
then benefit from the results. I bet they can't pull such a fast one to one
who's seasoned, e.g. Lady Gaga.

------
thezilch
Google Cache -- English roots of langner are returning blank pages:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tPFggJc...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tPFggJcOw_MJ:www.langner.com/en/2011/03/10/vanity-
fair-reporter-freak-out/+Vanity+Fair+reporter+freak-
out&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com)

~~~
terio
That page comes out black in my browser, but the text is there, just with the
wrong color. Select parts of the page and you will see it.

~~~
thezilch
Text-only version:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tPFggJc...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tPFggJcOw_MJ:www.langner.com/en/2011/03/10/vanity-
fair-reporter-freak-out/+Vanity+Fair+reporter+freak-out&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1)

------
staunch
I've seen similarly bizarre malfeasance by a reporter from one of the most
famous newspapers.

Their fact checking _is_ completely useless. They don't check _any_ of the
most important or fundamental claims, only the very trivial. Editors
apparently don't care or are incompetent.

In the case I'm intimately familiar with the reporter made no claim or attempt
at impartiality. He was actively hostile and came close to threatening. He was
on a witch hunt and continued his vendetta over a couple years of trumped up
articles until he realized no one else bought his bullshit.

I pray for the day when shitty journalists can't hide under the umbrella of a
"respected" brand like Vanity Fair. It's too much power with no effective
checks or balances.

------
mmaunder
For future reference: If you think you're being set up in an interview, in
many cases you can legally record the interview using a voice recorder app on
your phone without telling the other party.

The only US states that require all-party notification of a conversation being
recorded are:

California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan,
Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington.

All other states allow you to record a conversation without notifying the
other party provided you are party to the conversation. If the conversation
crosses state lines, Federal law applies which only requires one party to know
the call is being recorded.

<http://www.rcfp.org/taping/>

~~~
tptacek
I'm struggling to see how that would have helped this person. The VF story is
in fact not a hit piece, and involved what appears to be a multi-day
interview. The audio recording required to shoot down the tiny fraction of
this story Langner objects to would be very boring listening indeed ---
because, of course, you'd have to trawl the whole thing to verify that he
didn't crack wise about California blondes or D&G shoes.

------
nikcub
We rag on PR people a lot, but this is definitely a case where a tech company
needed a good PR person or good PR company to back them up.

A PR rep being in the room during the interviews never would have let this get
out of hand in the way that it did, and they would have framed the interview
better to suit the tech company. This is just a case of an unsophisticated
tech guy being trodden on by an experienced journalist in order to suit the
journalists goals for the story.

PR might be 90% useless now, but there are good PR people out there who could
have helped in this case.

Btw I am a huge fan of VF but I thought the Stuxnet piece was weak. I am
surprised that some of the more experienced tech journalists are not all over
the story releasing articles, books, touring lecture, etc. the mainstream mass
market would eat up this story in a hurry (movie deal!)

~~~
tptacek
The Atlantic put Mark Bowden (for crying out loud) on Conficker and turned in
a clunker. I think the problem is that a narrative journalist's instincts and
pressures aren't compatible with stories like Stuxnet and Conficker.

~~~
nikcub
I remember that - it _was_ terrible. I was thinking more like Steven Levy for
Wired or even Bruce Sterling. Wired have yet to do a feature on Stuxnet

or Clive Thompson for NYT Magazine - his tech writing has been excellent,
particularly the Netflix prize[1] and his coverage of privacy and security
issues[2]

[1]
[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23Netflix-t.html?...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23Netflix-t.html?pagewanted=all)

[2]
[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/magazine/03intelligence.ht...](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/magazine/03intelligence.html)

------
rudiger
The article in question, _A Declaration of Cyber-War_ :

[http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/04/stuxnet-2...](http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/04/stuxnet-201104?printable=true)

And its HN submission (1 comment):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2284385>

------
motters
There have been times in the distant past where I was contacted by people from
the mainstream media for interviews or TV appearances on well known shows. I
always politely turned them down, because I feared similar exaggerations and
distortions to those described in this article. Anything connected with AI or
robotics tends to be reported on very poorly and in a highly sensationalised
manner, and I didn't want to end up being misrepresented or be portrayed as a
crude stereotype.

------
tokenadult
There is a good book, Mediasmart,

[http://www.amazon.com/Mediasmart-How-Handle-
Reporter/dp/0964...](http://www.amazon.com/Mediasmart-How-Handle-
Reporter/dp/0964042908)

by a reporter whose work I used to see on my local TV news, explaining how
subjects of news stories can turn the tables on reporters by understanding
more of the news business. The tips in the book are frank and useful--
including sometimes declining to be interviewed.

------
kmfrk
Here's the article formatted in ViewText:
[http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwebcache.google...](http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwebcache.googleusercontent.com%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dcache%3AtPFggJcOw_MJ%3Awww.langner.com%2Fen%2F2011%2F03%2F10%2Fvanity-
fair-reporter-freak-out%2F%2BVanity%2BFair%2Breporter%2Bfreak-
out%26cd%3D1%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus%26source%3Dwww.google.com&format=).

------
josephcooney
More interesting (in my mind) is - why are we reading this out of the google
cache? The original site doesn't seem to be up. What's the back-story there?

------
gburt
There's a remarkable amount of "dramablogging" on HN lately.

~~~
tptacek
New here, are you? :)

------
blakerobinson
I wonder how commonplace this is across media outlets.

------
racketeer
gotta be a little oblivious to think that vanity fair is interested in stuxnet

~~~
megamark16
It sounded like he was just hopeful that he could get the word out about
Stuxnet. Plus, he mentions that Vanity Fair wasn't even available on German
news stands, so perhaps he didn't know what to expect.

------
adrianwaj
How gross of Gross.

This is what happens when the "perception is reality" maxim gets to people's
heads.

Vanity Fair: Fact or Fiction?

