CHAPTER ONE: CHANGING MEDIA LANDSCAPE

- Syndicated columnist Michael Gerson

“I lost my job because of a Facebook status.”

- Ashley Johnson

The two friends were talking politics, chatting about the Obama and McCain campaigns and making fun of Sarah Palin. They had no clue their private conversation was being secretly videotaped by the non-descript young guy sitting in the row behind them.

Had Fowler and Spratt been aware of the man behind them – the one with the [iPhone] balanced on his tray table – they would have known he was the modern day version of their worst nightmare. Not just a hardcore conservative. He was an activist hardcore conservative with a blog. And he was about to turn it against Fowler.

Fowler was caught on video telling Spratt that the expected landfall in New Orleans of Hurricane Gustav – just in time to disrupt and alter the tone of the opening of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., “…just demonstrates that God is on our side."

A day later, the video was anonymously posted on YouTube under the headline, “Foul Don Fowler Amused by New Orleans Hurricane.” On the popular conservative blog RedState.org, the anonymous poster – “redstateabsentee” – identified himself as Caleb Howe, a regular contributor to the site.

The first reaction came from the South Carolina Republican Party. “The outrageous behavior of two of the Obama campaign’s highest profile supporters in the south is despicable, a cynical politicization of life and death,” South Carolina GOP Chairman Katon Dawson said in a statement. Dawson called on Obama to “immediately denounce Fowler and Spratt and demand sincere apologies.”

A host of conservative blogs used the Fowler video as digital kindling. They turned up the heat enough to generate an apology from Fowler, but not enough to land a response from the Obama campaign or to ignite a full-blown media blaze.

Fowler claimed to the Associated Press that his comment was a joke, a play on unfortunate post-9/11 comments made by Rev. Jerry Falwell, who had said God, “gave us what we deserve.” Appearing Sept. 13, 2001 on Rev. Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” television program, Falwell said, “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'"

Fowler told the AP, "I think everybody of good will has great empathy and sympathy for people in New Orleans. Most religious people are praying for people in New Orleans. There is no political connotation to this whatsoever. This was just poking fun at Jerry Falwell and the nonsensical thing he had said several years ago."

Fowler’s explanation fails the logic test. If his comment was truly a play on Rev. Falwell’s statement, he would have said something like, “Gustav is God’s punishment for the debauchery that takes place in New Orleans.” And claiming there is no political connotation to saying, “God is on our (Democrats) side” is a farce.

We address public apologies in Chapter x, but one thing is certain: Someone who says, as Fowler did, that he’s sorry “if I’ve offended anyone” shows arrogance and insincerity in place of humility and remorse. In fact, if you are issuing a public apology, there is no “if” about it. If somebody hadn’t been offended, the apology would be unnecessary.

Fowler’s statement was more of an explanation than an apology, but for the most part the national media accepted it.

A number of newspapers – including Fowler’s hometown Charlotte Observer, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Chicago Sun-Times – ran short blurbs in national roundup columns, quoting his explanation from the AP story.

The New York Daily News was one of the few media outlets that wrote its own story on the incident. Headlined, “Hurricanes Sure Are Funny, Dopey Dem Thinks,” David Saltonstall’s piece quoted Fowler saying, “Let me make it absolutely clear that that was a facetious remark. No fool believes that God brings hurricanes on people for political reasons, and to the extent that that offended anyone, I apologize."

The Washington Post ran two mentions of the incident, including a reference in Dana Milbank’s “Convention Sketch” column that pointed out filmmaker Michael Moore made essentially the same joke as Fowler on MSNBC – without apology. Mark Silva wrote a similar item in the Chicago Tribune’s political blog. In its “Razz and Jazz” column, the New Orleans Times-Picayune hit Fowler with a “razz, ” pointing out that, “A hurricane is not a laughing matter. Nor is it a blessing for either political party.” The Times-Picayune also blasted Fowler and Moore in an editorial.

Fox News Channel covered the story. And while commentary on the footage from Jacob Howe’s [iPhone] made it all the way to the Jerusalem Post and the Times of London, for the most part the major news outlets in the U.S. left it alone.

Even with fairly substantial coverage, the Fowler episode was more media brushfire than wildfire. There are three primary reasons why this story was, for the most part, contained:

1. 
   As questionable as Fowler’s explanation and apology were, he did address the incident quickly and characterizing it as a joke was believable to disinclined reporters who found the episode of the surreptitious taping and anonymous right-wing web posting too creepy for them to want to write about it anyway.
   
2. 
   Twitter had not yet become as addictive as crack to political journalists. Today, this story would be a trending topic on Twitter and would get much more attention.
   
3. 
   Fowler was past his prime as a key player. Had he been the sitting DNC chair or someone with a more prominent name and more direct influence on the Obama campaign, the story would have been bigger. Had Congressman Spratt, seated beside Fowler on that flight to Charlotte, made the comment, it would have gotten much bigger play.
   

The fact that the story was contained to one or two days and reported largely by conservative web sites pushing a partisan point of view should not minimize the significance of what took place:

• 
  As of late 2011, Caleb Howe’s video has been watched more than 381,000 times on YouTube, so however one feels about his methods, the tools available to the average citizen are powerful and as a result, the media landscape has been changed forever.
  
• 
  Howe functioned as a one-man wire service – creating and quickly distributing his own content to a mass audience – possessing the power to influence the mainstream media. He recorded it and posted it. And outlets from USA Today and the Associated Press to Fox News Channel and the Jerusalem Post took the content he provided and in one form or another, delivered it to their mass audiences.
  

Consider the case of Ron Schiller. Citizen journalism – combined with his own bad judgment – cost him not one, but two jobs. And that’s not all.

Schiller was president of the National Public Radio Foundation and senior vice president for development at NPR. On Feb. 22, 2011, Schiller and NPR Senior Director of Institutional Giving Betsy Liley met two members of the Muslim Education Action Center for lunch at Georgetown’s Café Milano in Washington, D.C. Ibrahim Kasaam and Amir Malik wanted to discuss a $5 million donation to NPR as a safeguard against efforts by Republicans to de-fund public broadcasting. They sent a stretch limo to pick up Schiller and Liley.

What Schiller and Liley didn’t know was that their lunch dates were actors and the Muslim Education Action Center was a fake organization created by Project Veritas, a non-profit organization led by conservative activist and self-proclaimed muckraker James O’Keefe.

The Project Veritas web site states its mission is “to investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions in order to achieve a more ethical and transparent society. Our goal is to inform the public of wrongdoing and allow the public to make judgments on the issues.”

The lunch conversation between the NPR execs and the undercover Project Veritas operatives was secretly videotaped and released to the media on March 8, 2011.

Setting out to achieve a “more…transparent society” through a complete lack of transparency in their own methods is one signal that citizen journalists often don’t believe the rules apply to them.

What the actors did was legal in D.C., where, along with 38 states, only one party needs to be aware of the secret recording. Had they been a few miles away in Maryland – a two-party consent state – their operation would have been illegal.

In the video, Schiller says of the Tea Party: “They believe in white, middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it’s scary. They are seriously, racist, racist people.” He added that the Republican Party had been “hijacked” by this “xenophobic” group.

Schiller also said liberals “might be more educated, fair and balanced” than Republicans and lamented the demise of intellectualism in America.

On the subject of the federal funding, Schiller had a bombshell for his new friends:

“Frankly, it is very clear that we would be better off in the long run without federal funding. NPR would definitely survive and most of the stations would survive.”

With House Republicans pushing for an end to funding for public broadcasting and the debate reaching a fever pitch around the time of the meeting with MEAC, Schiller’s comments were extraordinarily unhelpful to NPR…and provided abundant ammo to Republicans.

Unlike the “brushfire” video of Don Fowler almost three years earlier, Schiller’s comments during the Project Veritas NPR sting operation quickly achieved full-fledged media wildfire status. In the space of a couple of sound bites, Schiller made his opponents’ case for them: NPR has a liberal agenda and they’d be fine without taxpayer dollars.

An NPR spokesperson denounced Schiller’s comments as "contrary to everything we stand for, and we completely disavow the views expressed."

The spokesperson said Schiller’s comments that NPR would be better off without federal funding, “does not reflect reality. The elimination of federal funding would significantly damage public broadcasting."

At 5:35 p.m. on March 8 – the day the video was released – NPR placed Schiller on administrative leave. While Schiller had previously announced he was leaving NPR to become director of the Aspen Institute Arts Program, he had planned to stay until May 5, 2011. At 10:30 p.m. word came that Schiller’s resignation was effective immediately.

In a statement of apology, Schiller said, "While the meeting I participated in turned out to be a ruse, I made statements during the course of the meeting that are counter to NPR's values and also not reflective of my own beliefs. I offer my sincere apology to those I offended.”

There were two more shoes to drop.

The next morning, Schiller’s boss lost her job. NPR announced on March 9, 2011 that CEO Vivian Schiller (no relation), already embattled over her handling of the firing of commentator Juan Williams in November 2010, was out. NPR board chairman Dave Edwards said, "The events that took place [particularly Ron Schiller's statements and Juan Williams' dismissal] became such a distraction to the organization that in the board's mind it hindered Vivian Schiller's ability to lead the organization going forward."

Later that morning, the Aspen Institute announced that Ron Schiller had informed them that, "in light of the controversy surrounding his recent statements, he does not feel that it's in the best interests of the Aspen Institute for him to come work here.”

Think about it for a minute. When Schiller stepped into the stretch limo sent by O’Keefe to bring him to lunch that day in February, it must have been unfathomable to him that he would say something at lunch that would cause him public humiliation, damage all he had accomplished in his career and cost him his dream job near his home in Colorado.

It’s little consolation to Ron Schiller that upon close inspection of the raw video – provided by O’Keefe – the conservative web site The Blaze exposed O’Keefe’s misleading editing of the tape.

Syndicated columnist Michael Gerson – a strong conservative voice and once the lead speechwriter for President George W. Bush – called O’Keefe’s editing job, “selective and deceptive. Mr. O'Keefe's final product excludes explanatory context, exaggerates Mr. Schiller's tolerance for Islamist radicalism and attributes sentiments to Mr. Schiller that are actually quotes by others -- all the hallmarks of a hit piece. Mr. Schiller's comments were damaging enough without Mr. O'Keefe reshaping them into a caricature.”

In studying the NPR case, Gerson also explores the ethics of undercover journalism today – particularly the brand practiced by so-called citizen journalists.

“In this case, Mr. O'Keefe did not merely leave a false impression; he manufactured an elaborate, alluring lie, Gerson wrote on March 17, 2011. “The stingers bought access to NPR executives with fake money. There is no ethical canon or tradition that would excuse such deception on the part of a professional journalist.”

Robert Steele of the Poynter Institute – the authority on the ethics of journalism - told Gerson that undercover reporting can only be justified on matters of "profound importance" when "all other alternatives for obtaining the same information have been exhausted.”

Perhaps the undercover operations O’Keefe ran to expose allegedly criminal wrongdoing at the federally-funded Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) met Steele’s standard of “profound importance,” but the Schiller sting clearly falls short.

“Mr. O'Keefe's defenders contend that he is not really a journalist but a new breed of ‘citizen journalist,’ Gerson continues. “This can be defined as the simultaneous demands for journalistic respect and for release from journalistic standards, including a commitment to honesty.

“The profession of journalism counts many biases, challenges and failures. But citizen journalism has a problem of its own. Do we really want private citizens deceiving, taping and exposing the foolish weaknesses of their neighbors, with none of the constraints imposed by responsible professional oversight?

“Modern technology makes such things possible. Human nature makes them enjoyable. Neither makes them ethical. These tactics are not a new brand of gonzo journalism. They are a sophisticated version of the political dirty trick.”

Well said, but of little help to Ron Schiller and Vivian Schiller. They lost their jobs at the hand of citizen journalism - and you could, too.

Ashley Johnson lost her job because of a Facebook status update. In May 2010 Johnson, a college student at the University of North Carolina – Charlotte, worked as a waitress at the Brixx pizza restaurant in Uptown Charlotte. According to the Charlotte Observer, Johnson was irritated after a couple spent three hours in the restaurant – forcing her to work an hour later than she was supposed to – then left what she considered a “measly” $5 tip.

According to the Charlotte Observer: “Johnson did what most folks who need a good rant do nowadays. When she got home, she went on Facebook. ‘Thanks for eating at Brixx,’ she wrote, ‘you cheap piece of ---- camper.’

Just as Don Fowler thought he was safe chatting with his friend John Spratt on that flight from Denver to Charlotte, Johnson thought she was safe among her 100 Facebook friends. She knew them all personally, so what could happen?

Johnson told the Observer she’s not sure how her mini-rant on Facebook got back to her managers at Brixx, but it did. She was called in, shown a copy of her Facebook comments and fired for violating company policies against making disparaging comments about customers and “casting the restaurant in a negative light” on social networks. Johnson apologized but it was too late.

In the pre-tech era, Johnson would have probably gone home, called her best friend on the phone, vented for a few minutes about the cheapskates lingering in the back booth and it would have been over.

In today’s world, the 11 words Johnson wrote meant “Unemployment by Facebook.”

The Charlotte Observer story about Johnson’s Facebook faux pas was picked up nationally. Dozens took to the Brixx corporate Facebook page to defend Johnson, calling her firing, “extreme” among other things.

Brixx defended its position, responding with a strong statement:

“Please know we value our employees very much, which is why we are one of the few small restaurant companies that offers benefits. Brixx also values our customers and has a policy against making negative remarks about them.

“As an employer, it is necessary to enforce policies for the benefit of all our hardworking employees and valued customers. Our policies ensure Brixx is an enjoyable place to both work AND dine. We welcome your comments, but please keep it clean!”

Johnson told the Observer, “It was my own fault. But I had no idea that something that, to me is very small, could result in my losing my job. I lost my job because of a Facebook status. That’s still a lot to get your mind around.”

The entire new Wild West of citizen journalism and social media is a lot to get your mind around. New media has permanently altered the way old media does business. Newspapers no longer hold stories for the print edition as they did in the early days of the digital revolution. Today that notion sounds downright quaint.

Local media staffs and budgets have shrunk dramatically as people increasingly get their news online and on their tablets and smartphones. Television stations in some markets that once fiercely competed with each other to break local news now share content. For public relations practitioners, the number of cameras that showed up at a press conference or event used to be one key measure of success.

Now one or two cameras might feed every outlet in town – and in some cases, manpower is stretched so thin, the station can’t always send a reporter or producer. A number of PR people have told me they have taken the microphone for a camera guy and asked the questions of the newsmaker – often their boss. That may be the best news ever for the PR person, but it’s not journalism.

While the number of markets with more than one newspaper has dwindled to a handful, the print media has been driven into content-sharing agreements as well. In one of the earliest examples launched in February 2009, the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram entered into a sports coverage partnership. Here’s how it works: The Morning News provides beat coverage of the NBA Dallas Mavericks and the NHL Dallas Stars. The Star-Telegram covers Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers for both papers. Some college sports coverage is also shared. Each paper independently covers the NFL Dallas Cowboys (some things really are sacred) and retains exclusive content from its columnists.

On a trip to Dallas in 2009 I picked up print editions of both papers to compare how Morning News beat writer Eddie Sefko’s coverage of a Mavericks game was treated differently in each paper. The version that appeared in the Star-Telegram was actually longer, less edited than the story that ran in Sefko’s home paper. And the headline writers at each paper took almost opposite points of view on Sefko’s piece. [headlines here tk].

If content-sharing partnerships are what it takes to save newspapers, we can accept it as smart business, especially when there is very little crossover of readership as in the case of the distinct but nearby Dallas and Fort Worth markets.

It’s also smart business for print media to shift content and develop apps to be able to serve their readers wherever they are. And that, too has profoundly shifted the way journalists go about their jobs.

I arrived in Vancouver the day before the start of the 2010 Winter Olympics. I was there to serve as a “Media Relations SWAT Team” volunteer on Bob Condon’s Olympic communications team. On the bus ride from the airport to the hotel, I sat across the aisle from veteran Detroit News sportswriter Gregg Krupa.

As a light rain fell traffic was understandably heavy in downtown Vancouver, but when the bus came to a complete stop, Krupa called up to the driver, “What’s going on?”

“The Olympic torch relay is coming through,” the driver said.

Krupa sighed. “I guess I better blog,” he said to no one in particular as he reached into his bag and pulled out his laptop. Krupa craned his neck to look out the bus window to gather whatever information and color he could.

“Who’s the runner?” Krupa hollered up to the driver.

The driver gave the name of a Canadian Olympic star from yesteryear.

After a little more back and forth, the driver said, “By the way, I’m from St. Louis. I got in yesterday.”

As I watched Krupa in his cramped seat banging away on his laptop, I realized how much his world as a journalist has changed. Before he had even reached his hotel, he was expected to file a blog entry. But what really hit me was that he was relying on a bus driver from St. Louis as his primary source for information on the Vancouver Olympic torch relay.

I remember thinking to myself, “I hope someone back at the Detroit News desk is going to fact-check this thing.”

I used this anecdote in a number of media training presentations and then decided to go back and read what Krupa actually wrote that day.

Krupa’s wonderful scene-setter – 121 words written on a bus stuck in traffic – accompanied by a compelling photo of the torch runner leaping with joy as the crowd cheers – demonstrates how the immediacy of digital media can serve the reader, especially when in the hands of a talented storyteller who understood his obligation to report, rather than nap, on that bus.

As Krupa demonstrated, reporters today can never really clock out. The schedule of deadlines that once ruled newspapers are a thing of the past. Too late to get it in the print edition? Better get it online before someone else does.

Reporters are not only expected to tweet consistently, they must follow the people they cover on their Twitter feeds. When news breaks, it’s common for reporters to include a sense of the reaction on social media channels in their stories - at times quoting Twitter feeds with fingers crossed that it’s actually that person doing the tweeting.

Reporters who filed three or four stories a week are now expected to contribute five or six pieces for the print edition – and blog multiple times per day – all without extra pay in most cases.

For all the ways the forces of citizen journalism, social media and blogs have redefined the way we consume content, the revolution is mostly about empowerment.

That’s why back in 2006 the Time magazine person of the year wasn’t a world leader or the Human Genome Project researchers who published the final chromosome sequence that year. It was “you.” As Time explained it, “…for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, Time's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.”

Time went on to describe the empowerment of the average citizen as “…a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.”

And this was before Facebook, Twitter and HD video cameras in every smartphone.

Think once again about Don Fowler sitting on that flight yakking with Congressman Spratt. In 1995-96, when Fowler led the DNC during President Bill Clinton’s successful re-election campaign, messages and images were still managed according to a 24-hour news cycle. The emphasis was on what would lead that night’s network broadcasts and the next morning’s newspapers. No wonder he never noticed Caleb Howe and his hidden camera in the row behind his.

Jack Quinn, the former Chief Counsel to President Clinton, sums it up: “The communications world in which we live today is radically different from the communications world of the ‘90s and before. If you wanted to get your message out in the years in which Bill Clinton and George H.W.Bush and Jimmy Carter and so on were president, you made sure you from time to time got the news anchors in your office and sat them down and talked them through the issues you were grappling with.

You…talked them through the politics and policies.

“Today, the so-called traditional media or old media is actually being driven by the new media. The nature of the debate – the tone of the debate as well as the content of the debate – is being driven in very significant part by what’s going on out there in the ether, in the digital world.”

In Fowler’s time as DNC chair, CNN was a factor, but MSNBC and Fox News Channel were both in their infancy. MSNBC launched in July of ’96 as a complement to NBC News. FNC launched in October of ’96 (with only 10-15 million subscribers), but neither had begun to play the partisan role in the political debate they would come to embrace.

The web was still in its early days. Consider this digital timeline:

• 
  The term “blog” was coined in the spring of 1999.
  
• 
  Wikipedia launched in January 2001.
  
• 
  Palm introduced the first smartphone for mainstream distribution in 2001.
  
• 
  Blackberry was a game-changer in 2002.
  
• 
  MySpace arrived in August 2003.
  
• 
  Podcasts came along in a meaningful way in February 2004.
  
• 
  Flickr, also launched in February 2004, made it easy to share photos and videos.
  
• 
  YouTube was born in February 2005.
  
• 
  Facebook was founded in February 2004, but didn’t open to all comers 13 and older until September 2006.
  
• 
  Twitter was founded in July 2006, but it was the South by Southwest music, tech and lifestyle festival in March 2007 that began to inject Twitter into the mainstream.
  
• 
  March 2007 also saw live video streaming go social with Ustream.
  
• 
  In 2007 the tiny HD Flip Video camera made recording and sharing digital videos simple and easy.
  
• 
  On June 29, 2007 the media revolution really took flight with the release of the iPhone.
  
• 
  Tumblr, the microblogging platform, launched in April 2007 and as of June 2012 had almost 60 million blogs and 13 million unique monthly visitors.
  
• 
  2009 brought the location-based social platform, foursquare, with its check-ins and digital badges.
  
• 
  March 2010 gave us Pinterest, a social photo sharing “pinboard” site that quickly became popular with women.
  
• 
  Instagram, a social channel for photo sharing, went live in October 2010. By the time it was purchased by Facebook in April 2012, it had registered 30 million accounts. Initially an iPhone-only offering, 12 hours after being made available for Android devices, the app had been downloaded one million times.
  

Today, when we leave the house, we should do so with no expectation of privacy. If you think that admonition is just for the famous being stalked by TMZ and any number of dirt-seeking websites, check out the YouTube video of Cathy Cruz Marrero falling into a fountain while texting as she walked through a Pennsylvania mall in January 2011. The video is undeniably funny – so funny that a mall security staffer just couldn’t help himself and e-mailed it around.

Next thing you know, Marrero’s moment of embarrassment has been watched more than 2 million times on YouTube and by countless millions more through national television coverage, which got a boost when Marrero unwisely announced a plan to sue the mall owner for not having a railing around the fountain. The suit went nowhere, but Marrero became a Twitter hashtag - #fountainlady for at least a few days

The cameras and recorders are everywhere – and figures from the worlds of sports and politics regularly fall prey to them. Chicago Blackhawks backup goaltender Marty Turco was sitting on the bench during a game in Montreal in March 2011 when a fan sitting nearby bet Turco $5 the Blackhawks wouldn’t score a goal. When Chicago’s Patrick Kane scored, the fan wrote “Habs Rule!” on the back of a Canadian $5 bill and handed it to Turco.

And of course, another fan, seated a few rows back, shot a cellphone picture of the payoff and tweeted it. After a series of double-or-nothing bets, Turco gave the money back to the fan, inscribing one of the bills with, “Turco Rules!” Of course, the fan made the media rounds in Montreal and Turco got a call from NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly. Ultimately, the NHL decided it was a harmless incident, but you can bet – excuse the pun – that when Turco began joking with the fan, the last thing he expected was to see a photo of their exchange all over the Internet.

In April 2010, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was surreptitiously videotaped in a bar while chatting with a group of fans. He criticized former Cowboys head coach Bill Parcells (profanely) and then-draft prospect Tim Tebow. Someone sent the video to Deadspin.com and soon thereafter it was being played on ESPN SportsCenter. Two of the local Dallas stations aired the clip and two did not.

Much debate ensued. Dallas Morning News columnist Tim Cowlishaw wrote that the paper owed Jones an apology for posting the video on its website. "It once was much easier to determine the journalism world from the entertainment gossip scene,” Cowlishaw wrote. “The distinction between investigation and titillation got blurred a long time ago. But prominent news organizations have clearly-defined rules and source policies when it comes to reporters breaking news."

KTVT-CBS sports anchor Babe Laufenberg said his station’s management chose not to air the clip because they "didn't see the news value in it. If I brought that video to our news director, told her it was recorded with my cell phone in a bar without Jerry's knowledge … well, she would have thrown me out of her office, and -- I hope -- fired me."

WFAA-ABC sports anchor Dale Hansen, whose station played the video, delivered an on-air commentary in which he called airing the Jones clip, "another example of the decline of journalism as we once knew it…and the fact that some creep slides up to Jones, records the conversation without Jones knowing, then tries to sell that recording and that becomes news is an embarrassment to us all."

ESPN’s Vince Doria defended the network’s decision to air the Jones clip. “Everybody is focusing on what he said about Parcells and what he said about Tebow,” Doria said on Colin Cowherd’s ESPN Radio show. “Certainly those were factors, but you have to look at the context of when this story occurred. The NFL is currently struggling over situations over situations with Ben Roethlisberger (and) Santonio Holmes, two high-profile players whose actions in a bar have potentially embarrassed the league, certainly have impacted its reputation and its image. Right in the middle of this, arguably your maybe most prominent owner in the league is caught on videotape in a bar -- certainly sounds like he's inebriated -- talking loosely about a former coach and player in the draft and so forth. When you look at it in that context, we believe it was newsworthy to run."

The debate is interesting, but all that really matters is that Jones let his guard down and, as a result, was embarrassed. The fact that most of the traditional Dallas/Fort Worth and NFL beat media sided were sympathetic to Jones is of little consolation. Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist and Dallas talk radio host Randy Galloway summed it up: “How could a man who owns a 60-yard, HD-video board not understand the impact of modern technology?"

These civilians – empowered by their iPhone cameras and broadband connections – are out for one thing: The YouTube moment. The thrill of seeing their photo or clip turn up on ESPN is too powerful for them to use good judgment.

There was the time in January 2010 that colorful New York Jets Head Coach Rex Ryan was being heckled by Dolphins fans at a mixed martial arts event in Miami. With a big smile, he gave them the middle finger. You guessed it: Quick cell phone shot…e-mailed and tweeted far and wide…and soon Ryan is fined $50,000 by the NFL. That’s an expensive finger.

Ryan gave them exactly what they were looking for when they heckled him – their own moment of sophomoric fun and attention. Remember, the first of our key steps to effective communication is preparation. All of us need to think about how we will handle the situations we could be confronted with – before we are confronted with them. The first rule for a public figure: Don’t give them the YouTube moment.

And it’s not just cell phone cameras that get sports figures in trouble. In November 2008 Cleveland Browns General Manager Phil Savage exchanged insults in a back and forth e-mail exchange with a fan during a game against the Bills on Monday Night Football. The fan called Savage, “the worst GM in the NFL.” After the game ended with the Browns 29-27 winners, Savage must have felt vindicated and emboldened. At 12:37 a.m. he emailed the fan, “Go root for Buffalo. F--- you.”

Of course, the fan immediately forwarded Savage’s email to the local television stations and Deadspin.com, an entertaining and well-written site with a huge following that specializes in taking down sports figures. The fan, known only as Brett, also told his story on sports talk radio.

As the ill-advised email became national news, Savage held a news conference to apologize. About a month later he was fired. A source told the Cleveland Plain Dealer the decision was based on “problems with Savage’s leadership and communication skills.”

It happened to Phil Savage, but it could happen to anyone who gets into a heated exchange with a customer of any kind.

Politicians are responsible for some of our most sensational tech-related screw-ups. In February 2011 Congressman Chris Lee, a Republican who represented Western New York and held a seat on the powerful House Ways & Means Committee, resigned hours after the gossip site, Gawker.com, published a shirtless photo Lee had sent to a woman on Craig’s List. He was answering her personal ad in the “women seeking men” section.

Lee used his own name, but said he was a 39-year-old divorced lobbyist. He was in fact, a 46-year-old, married Congressman with a young son. The woman conducted a little online research of her potential suitor, quickly discovered his true identity and sent the photo, along with her email correspondence with Lee to Gawker, effectively ending Lee’s once promising political career.

Give Lee credit for fast action on ending the scandal. On ABC, George Stephanopoulos said he had “never seen a story like this move so quickly from revelation to resignation.”

Not so, of course, in the case of another married New York Congressman: Democrat Anthony Weiner, whose Twitter/sexting scandal dragged for three weeks in May-June 2011.

It all started with a tweet that was intended to be a direct message.

On May 27, 2011, a lewd photo of a pair of bulging gray men’s briefs was sent from @RepWeiner – Weiner’s Twitter account – addressed to a 21-year-old college student in Seattle (not the intended recipient as it turns out), but delivered to all of his 45,000 followers. Oops.

Weiner tried to brush it off as a routine case of account hacking. “I know for a fact my account was hacked. It happens. You move on,” Weiner said. He met with reporters but sidestepped the issue, even calling one reporter a “jackass” for pursuing the matter. When he was pressed to explain how he knew his account was hacked and asked if he had reported the hacking to the authorities, Weiner’s responses were unconvincing.

In the next days Weiner brazenly lied to reporter after reporter in hours of interviews, insisting he did not send the tweet. But when he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on June 1 that while he didn’t send the tweet, he “could not say with certitude” that the photo was not of him, the heat got turned up.

On June 6, after conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart posted more photos that Weiner had sent to women, Weiner admitted he had sent the photos, but defiantly refused to resign. The next day Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, “I wish there was some way I could defend him, but I can’t.” Still, Weiner refused to step down, even as more lurid photos cascaded onto the web.

On June 8 the New York Times reported that Weiner’s wife, an aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was pregnant. Leading Democrats, starting with former DNC chairman Tim Kaine, began urging Weiner to step down.

By June 11, the chorus calling for Weiner’s resignation included House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Democrats simply couldn’t get anything accomplished with the lingering scandal still in the news. Weiner asked for a two-week leave of absence to receive treatment.

With more inappropriate photos hitting the web, the women now beginning to do media interviews, and no media in Weiner’s corner (they don’t like being lied to), it was over. Finally, on June 16, Weiner resigned the seat he had held for six terms. At various times considered the future Governor of New York and the future mayor of New York City – Weiner was through.

Could Weiner have saved himself if he had told the truth at the outset? We’ll never know the answer to that, but we do know that lying to reporters and attempting a cover-up is a bad strategy.

In the aftermath of the Weiner scandal, Alexia Tsotsis, who writes about human behavior in the online world for the popular TechCrunch.com, wrote that “social media giveth and social media taketh away.” Tsotsis went on to write that while the advancement of technology has made it easier to connect with people, it also “changes the margin for error among communication distribution.” In other words, every misstep is magnified to potentially disastrous proportions.

Maybe Google executive Eric Schmidt was right. When discussing online privacy in an interview with CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo, Schmidt said, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Tsotsis suggests this is “proving to be the golden rule of online discourse in the 21^st century.”

The empowerment that defines today’s media landscape, is a two-way street. Jacob Howe is empowered, but so is his target, Don Fowler. In fact, someone removed the reference to the secret taping of Fowler’s embarrassing comment from his Wikipedia bio. The editor noted it was no longer relevant following the 2008 election. Take that, Jacob Howe.

Citizen journalism, like everything on the web, is used for both high-minded and low-rent purposes. Twitter, Facebook and blogs have played at least a minor role in helping topple regimes in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and elsewhere. That’s a good thing.

CNN is wise to engage its viewers where they live – on their devices – so the network’s citizen journalism initiative, CNN iReport, is good for business. But in 2009 one knucklehead uploaded a phony report that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack. CNN posted it and Apple’s stock price dropped more than five percent. That’s a bad thing.

But make no mistake: Empowerment is a good thing. And when taken as the sum of all its parts, citizen journalism is a good thing. Social media is a good thing. More people are connected in more ways and the sense of community beats isolation and narrow-mindedness every day.

As long as care is taken in considering the source, for consumers of news and information, there has never been a better time to be alive. We have more choices and more points of view available to us when and where we want them.

When it comes to using social media, remember:

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  If you choose to use Twitter (you should), tweet with a purpose. For example, use Twitter to connect with customers or clients – always think of how you can add value for them. Pass along interesting news clips, videos or your own relevant observations. If you manage multiple accounts, always double-check that you are using the appropriate handle. And unlike, Rep. Weiner, make sure a direct message is actually a direct message. Of course, never be negative, always think before you hit “send” and leave the humor to @jimmyfallon and @chrisrock.
  
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  Regularly check your privacy settings on Facebook. Don’t post anything you wouldn’t want to read on the front page of USA Today. Be careful regarding photos and make sure you have to approve any tagged photos before they can appear on your page. Mix personal and workplace friends as little as possible. Take advantage of the Facebook settings that allow you to separate “friends” and “close friends” from “acquaintances.” After all, you don’t want your boss or the jerk in the next cubicle to see the photo Aunt Helen just posted of you wearing a bunny suit when you were in first grade.
  
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  Don’t let your guard down in the presence of people you don’t know. Use common sense. Don’t talk about sensitive topics in public places such as hotel lobbies, AmTrak cars, Starbucks, elevators…you get the idea.
  

PBS did its due diligence and nobody got fired. Now, that’s empowerment!