I’ve got a partial solution to the problem of out-of-context quotations described by Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi in the wake of the 60 minutes Kamala Harris scandal.1

This 60 minutes “format is dead”

Kamala Harris: The 2024 60 Minutes Interview

Water Kirn declared that the 60 minutes television format is dead because we can no longer assume the good faith of audience and integrity of the network.

Print Media is troubled too

But its not just 60-minutes-style television that is troubled. Walter says he currently avoids print media because they can take a statement you made and make it seem that it occurred in an entirely different context than when you made it and there’s no way you know there’s no way for the audience to tell

So what would a reformed medium look like? Expand one of Walter’s quotes above to see the roughly 30 seconds of video and the YouTube transcript.

Copernicus’s Heleocentric Model inspires a Source and Expertise centered Model

A Copernican Revolution: A New “Center”:

In a similar vein, journalist Ken Klippenstein is calling out the way “mainstream” media act as gatekeepers, putting themselves at the center of everything, much like humans used to believe the universe revolved around the earth.  Instead Klippenstein advocates a Copernican revolution for the news where media revolves around the source materials and expertise instead of other media commentary.

Martin Luther, 1528

Echoes of 16th century Reformation:

I majored in History before embarking on a career as a computer programmer, so this questioning of gatekeeping and the ad fontes philosophy (“back to the sources”) recalls my college Reformation History classes. Imagine if, in addition to the 60 minutes “director’s cut”, the show also published the Raw video of the interview.

Almost exactly 500 years ago, Europe was transformed by the mass reproduction of texts.  Gutenberg’s printing press ended the Catholic church’s monopoly on access to important texts, revolutionizing society, politics, scholarship, and the church.

Institutions might not like to provide more transparency by re-centering the focus on the sources, but what if this is a necessary reform required to establishing society’s “social contract” with media?

Discussion: Proposed Changes

How might the path of reform or revolution be outlined?

A) Short-Term: Print

Flemish printer’s shop, Impressio Librorum,  Antwerp, 1580-1605 (British Museum, London)

Personally, I’ve been focused on the print revolution because it is easier to achieve results in the short-term.  You can see the contextual popups featured in this article as an early implementation of print reform.

As Walter Kirn suggested, would readers and writers be more likely to engage in media which is more complete, transparent and contextual:

1. publishing the full interview transcripts and
2. building capacity into websites for displaying the context of their quotations.

B) Longer Term: Video

I’d be interested in hearing Ken sketch out more of what he envisions a Copernican Revolution would look like.

Diagram showing a multicam setup

I’m prioritizing work with “print”, but I’d like to describe how I imagine video would look like if the full contents of each camera were available, unless it has been explicitly  and “transparently redacted.”2  This proposed format would mean that 60 minutes would be transparent about the full version of:3

1. The over the shoulder video of Kamala
2. The over the shoulder video of the interviewer
3. The side video of both together.

Bill Whitaker: Interviewer, 60 minutes

The viewer could choose to watch the “director’s cut,” or toggle between cameras at their discretion.

Software would also be developed to simultaneously display multiple video sources from a crowd, taken from hundreds or thousands of camera view-points, aggregated on a map locatable from the camera’s GPS coordinates and orientation.

About the CiteIt App

I built the CiteIt App for writers in the belief that the inadequacies of the old model necessitate new tools to build reader trust and understanding.  CiteIt makes it easy for writers to conveniently demonstrate a quote’s context:

• without requiring extra room within the article to display transcripts and video, and
• without interrupting the reader and their reading process by making them leave the page.

Feedback?

1. What do you think of Walter Kirn & Matt Taibbi’s conversation about 60 minutes video?  Is the 60 minutes interview format dead?
2. What do you think of Ken Klippenstein’s concept of a Copernican Revolution about the centrality of sources in journalism?  What would this revolution look like?
3. What feedback do you have on the concept of CiteIt contextual citations and their implementation?
4. Would you like to see the option of using CiteIt’s contextual citations built into Substack?

Examples: Contextual Citations

Readers may want to use contextual citations because

• • they want to verify a quote or because
  • they are curious and want more information.

1) Matt Taibbi: Who Blew Up the Nord Stream Pipelines?

I’ve enabled Matt Taibbi’s readers to browse the context of his quotations, without requiring readers to leave the original article. This aligns with Ken Klippenstein’s call for centering journalism on sources and answers skeptics of Taibbi who question whether Taibbi took quotes out of context:

2) FDR: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first Inaugural Address is remembered for the line: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself

If you cite the source with CiteIt, the reader can explore the historical context, so that the quote lives connected to its historical context, rather than as a disconnected soundbite.

3) Ocsar winner “Refutes his Jewishness”?

Isn’t it outrageous that this year at the 2024 Oscars, an Oscar winner Jonathan Glazer went on stage and said: Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness .  What a disgraceful thing to say!

No, the director of Zone of Interest did not disavow his Jewish identity at the Oscars (Vox)

CiteIt can be a convenient option for a writer who  wants to show readers this contextual video and transcript, without requiring the reader to leave the page and watch and the video with the sound on.

4) Donald Trump Warns of a “Bloodbath!”

A lot of the media carried a quote in which Donald Trump says: if I don’t get elected it’s going to be a blood bath. Television is seldom able to present the whole context of a quote, given space limitations and incentives for soundbites and sensationalism. Substack writers could exploit this flaw because CiteIt enables interested readers to have the option of pursuing a quote’s context without commandeering the attention of all viewers.

5) Did Biden call Trump Supporters “Garbage”?

• Click the word “garbage” above to quickly view context, without having to leave the original page.
• (The transcript was autogenerated by Google)

6) Did Trump call Liz Cheney a “Chicken Hawk” or Call for a Firing Squad?

Authors who cite a quotation should share the context from the most complete video they can.  Snopes described Trump’s rhetoric as violent but concluded that he did not threaten Cheney. Here’s what Mary Trump’s post would look like if it used CiteIt.

“Last night, in conversation with fascist and Russian stooge Tucker Carlson, the Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States said this about Liz Cheney, somebody he considers a political enemy:”

Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with 9 barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.

7) Trump: A dictator on day one?

Snopes did an article about Trump denying that he would be a dictator except for day one.

8) Poetry is language against which you have no defenses

David Whyte on poetry:

I always say that poetry is language against which you have no defenses.

9) They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats

It’s not just out-of-context quotations.  Contextual citations can be used to surface related material.  After the Trump-Harris debate, the internet responded with songs and remixes of the Trump line

• CiteIt offers the reader the comfort of maintaining their focus within the article, while allowing them to sample media they are curious about.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS:  ..  And I’ll tell you something, he’s going to talk about immigration a lot tonight even when it’s not the subject that is being raised. And I’m going to actually do something really unusual and I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch. You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And I will tell you the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you. You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams, and your, your desires. And I’ll tell you, I believe you deserve a president who actually puts you first. And I pledge to you that I will.

DAVID MUIR: Let me just ask, though, why did you try to kill that bill and successfully so? That would have put thousands of additional agents and officers on the border.

FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: First let me respond as to the rallies. She said people start leaving. People don’t go to her rallies. There’s no reason to go. And the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there. And then showing them in a different light. So, she can’t talk about that. People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. That’s because people want to take their country back. Our country is being lost. We’re a failing nation. And it happened three and a half years ago. And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War 3, just to go into another subject. What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country. And look at what’s happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don’t want to talk — not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame. As far as rallies are concerned, as far — the reason they go is they like what I say. They want to bring our country back. They want to make America great again. It’s a very simple phrase. Make America great again. She’s destroying this country. And if she becomes president, this country doesn’t have a chance of success. Not only success. We’ll end up being Venezuela on steroids.

Source: ABC News Transcript

10) Malcolm Gladwell: There are no bad neighborhoods

One point Gladwell made was that there are no bad neighborhoods there only bad blocks. By this Gladwell meant that crime is concentrated in small areas (blocks), which require a concentrated response, rather than a blanket “stop and frisk” policy that affects whole neighborhoods.

11) Matt Taibbi: How do you regain Trust?

In an interview on Rising, Matt Taibbi said how does science recover from this how do you regain trust and it’s similar to what happens in journalism after an episode like for instance the WMD affair or even Russia gate I would argue uh you know once the public is betrayed and they see that they’ve been betrayed it’s very hard to win that trust back and in science it’s it’s the same thing

12) New York Times: “institutional lack of skepticism”

Judith Miller says the New York Times found that the paper had lacked skepticism, but they did not interview any of the editors or name specific reporters as responsible.

Miller disagrees that there was insufficient skepticism, but that we were accurately conveying wrong information.

13) Stacy Plaskett: ‘Not The Free Speech That I Know Of’

In a hearing on the weaponization of government, Congressional Delegate Stacy Plaskett took issue with Robert F. Kennedy’s statements about Covid 19 vaccinations saying: this is not the kind of free speech that I know of

14) Jack Nicholson: You Can’t Handle the Truth!

With CiteIt, writers can evoke the Jack Nicholson line:

You can’t handle the truth! — by pulling in the context from a YouTube video.

• In this case the usage of CiteIt is not to verify, but for the viewer to revisit an old and favorite memory.

15) The Princess Bride – “Get used to Disappointment”

Do you remember the context in which Wesley tells Inigo: Get used to disappointment?

16) Putin: “collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century”

Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century.

• Has this quote been accurately portrayed?  Ad fontes!

17) Hamish: Why do they still call it “New” York?

Why do they still call it “New” York? It has been around for ages.
Phisto Sobanii: Here’s an explainer, Hamish!

even old New York was once New Amsterdam
why they change it I can’t say people
just like it better that way

Hamish’s Note: 

P.S.  I’d like to see Substack add contextual citations to both Articles and Notes.  This would create “Twitter” with context!