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July 24, 2003

Import
: Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, gave a wise keynote at the media confab (below), which I won't do the disservice of summarizing in a paragraph post.
He also acknowledged discussion about starting an American Guardian.
He said they were inspired by the two million Americans a month who read The Guardian online. He said it's still just a dream and they're not even sure whether it would be daily, weekly, or monthly.

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The other war
: Forgot to mention earlier that Tom Rogers, former head of Primedia, told me that he was asked by Mayor Bloomberg to mediate the fight between the Yankees' YES network and Cablevision. Now that's a war.
(I side with Cablevision on this one. They don't want to give it to everybody and charge everybody. I don't watch baseball and so I don't want to pay a penny for the channel.)

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Alterman agonistes
: So I ran into Eric Alterman at the New York Mag/Guardian media/war confab (overblogged, below).
I thought it was a friendly how-do-you-do during the coffee break: Good to see you, Eric.
Eric thought otherwise and took out after me. He said he almost responded to my "attack" on him (here and here) regarding his stance on attacks on Jews in France.
To recap: He said that the attacks were coming from Muslim immigrants angered by the occupation of Palestine. I said that by seeing a motive other than hate he is ascribing a justification to anti-Semitism and that is a moral mistake.
We went back and forth for a few minutes. He said he was trying to learn and understand the reasons behind these acts. I said he was giving a hate crime credit for rationality it does not deserve. He made some metaphor about learning the behavior of mosquitoes so he can avoid them. I tried to make a joke that he just saw me as a pest now. He was not to be amused, not to be trifled with.
A TV crew was getting ready to interview him and had its camera turned pointed in our direction. Alterman pushed the microphone away and snapped, "I'm not talking to you."
He turned to me and said, "Your attack is unfair." Then je walked away.
I want to emphasize that we had a perfectly friendly conversation later. That's not my point.
What's interesting here is what happens when bloggers meet after having a disagreement onine. So we had a public disagreement. Happens. But that apparently festered in private. Well, I say the better thing to do is to continue the discussion in public until you work it out (unlikely) or tire out. I wish Eric had responded, in public and in kind; that's oddly easier to deal with than a private spat.
You talk to my blog, you talk to me. Talk to me, talk to my blog.

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Media last
: Just a few last notes from the media confab.

: Adrian Van Klaveren, head of newsgathering for the BBC, says regarding the Kelly affair, "The BBC is confident that our position will be vindicated." Surprise, surprise. He has the sputtering demeanor of an embattled Washington aide.

: There a dust-up over a BBC film about the rescue of Jessica Lynch. The BBC reporter, John Kampfner, says he stands by the report. Members of the audience take him to task.

: The BBC is acting like the cocky powerful clique in its last days in power but unaware that the click is ticking.

: Sidney Blumenthal insists that many members of the Bush White House, partidularly Chaney, are secretly rooting for Tony Blair to be kicked out.

: Eric Alterman asks an irksome question at the end: "We can all agree that truth is very important. But the American people don't care about truth. They care more about results." A lady in the audience gashs about shouts: "Not true." Amen, lady. If your own audience doesn't care about the truth, why write for them, Eric. That's essentially insulting to the entire damned nation. And it's wrong.

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Media more
: More bits from the media and war confab:

: Discussion of embed fashion: The BBC's Gavin Hewitt said that apart from wearing the chemical suit, when ordered, he made sure to wear civvies.
"The truth is, some of the embeds really enjoyed the dressing up," said ABC's John Donovan.
Blogger Eric Alterman calls out from the audience: "So did the president."

: Michael Wolff tries, as usual, to see the sinister intent of the military in providing khakis.
ABC's LeRoy Sievers: "John was a White House correspondent. He dressed like the president: Dark suit, white shirt. Nobody said, 'John is trying to act like the President.'"

: Jonathan Foreman of the NY Post says the Iraqis did not need embedded reporters because the BBC's Andrew Gilligan (who said the Americans were not in Baghad when they were) "was doing the job for them."

: Wolff tries to say that embedded reporters weren't experienced at war. The reporters jumped down his throat. LeRoy Sievers of ABC said the reporters had more experience in war than the soldiers.

: Foreman complains that reporters were getting excited and calling one shot a "heavy bombardment." Sievers says "that happens every day on many stoies."

: Rick Leventhal of FoxNews: "I would never go unilateral (that is, not embedded) in a war. You guys are nuts."

: James Meek of the Guardian says the problem with the embed program was that no one was embedded with the Iraqis and thus, we did not know where our bullets and bombs landed. He makes an analogy to a boxing match and portrays the Iraqis as a little guy being beaten by a big guy.

Meek says that when he arrived over the border in Safra, he found people who were happy to see the Americans; he saw looting; he saw no administrative structure. He was not embedded. John Donovan of ABC was not embedded and he had a different perspective, saying the Iraqis are uniformly pissed off. He says his producers were asking for him to find pictures of people cheering. So which story was the right story?

Donovan says it was crazy dangerous, more than he knoew.

He says the Iraqis wouldn't believe us that we were neutral. "And, in fact, we weren't neutral."

Well, Mr. Donovan, then were you doing your job?

: Gavin Hewitt of the BBC says being embedded let him get more stories than he could have otherwise: He could show the sand storms that delayed the invasion; he showed images of dead Iraqis on the road into Baghdad. He said he self-censored images of gruesome injury. "I wondered whether we hadn't shown enough of the reality of the war."

: Wolff tries to say that embedded reporters weren't experienced at war. The reporters jumped down his throat. LeRoy Sievers of ABC said the reporters had more experience in war than the soldiers.

: Foreman complains that reporters were getting excited and calling one shot a "heavy bombardment." Sievers says "that happens every day on many stoies."

: Wolff tries to get it all ways. He complains that the reporters are uninformed. They say they're informed -- in part by attending bootcamps set up by the military and then Wolff complains that the military was setting up coverage.

: The Guardian's Meek said when he got back, "I felt as if he had missed the war because I had not seen it on TV."

: Sievers says in Vietnam, we all knew soldiers in the drafted army. Now, there is more "separation" from soldiers and part of the story was to close that gap.

: Donovan says media doesn't show how awful war is. Again, Mr. Donovan, and why not? "The principle isn't we're trying to be pro-American," he says. "It fits more oddly into standards and practices. We don't show naked breasts and we don't show this (corpses) because we think you can't take it." Sievers add: "If we don't, then war is too easy."

: You leave an hour with these people realizing that they are a smart bunch who care and work hard to get the story to you.

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It's all our fault
: Kaveh points us to a provocative Usenet post on Iranians blaming America written by an Iranian expat in America answering an Iranian complaining about us:

Let me ask you something. . .have you bothered looking into the collective soul of Iranians as a people?
Is it the United States who is responsible for Tehran's 8 million
drivers who can't seem to extend common courtesy to each other respect
right of way driving in between lanes, or stop at a red lights?...
Is it the United States fault that Iranian women who are beaten by
their husbands and ask for a divorce have to leave their child with
the bastard who was beating them?! And speaking of that do you know
how many Iranian men are abusive to their wives?
Were those Americans who were riding motor cycles in the streets last
month beating students with chains?...
People like you don't want to address what is wrong with us Iranians
as a nation. You want to say it's all America's fault or it's all the
Arabs fault. . .I have news for you: Iranians have been screwing other
Iranians longer than any other nation has screwed Iran. Five Hundred
years after there were no more Arabs ruling Iran, Iranians were
screwing their fellow countrymen over.
In the last 100 years Iranians screwed Iranians.
I know. . .I know. . .your going to say that the Mossadegh Coup was
all America's fault. . .well let me tell you, America sent a single
American (Kermit Roosevelt. . .grandson of the former president) to
Iran with a bag filled with 1 million dollars to start that Coup, but
the people who accepted the money, and ran in the streets and beat
Mossadegh's people were Iranian not Americans. If you came to
downtown New York with a truck full of money (a billion), and asked
people to betray America, you would get your ass beat by the first
poor Puerto Rican from the Bronx, but a million dollars was enough for
Iranians to sell their own country down the drain.
Who is the monster?. . .the American who showed up with a million or
the Iranians who accepted the money and changed sides at the drop of a
hat?!
Iranians are the biggest roadblock to the welfare of fellow Iranians
in Iran. Not Arabs, not Americans not Aliens from Mars!...

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Media at war
: A few notes from the start of the NY Mag/Guardian media/war confab:

: Gossip first: I introduce James Truman of Conde Nast to Nick Denton of Gawker.
"We stalk you," Nick says.
"Well, stop," James said.
A moment of British irony.

: The session starts with an agenda-dripping intro from a provost of the New School: "I have never been more concern and indeed angry about where the republic is headed today." That set the course.

: Michael Wolff, the media columnist from New York, keeps trying to put the media right in the middle of the war, to make the media the story. That is, after all, the meat of a media critic.
"Was the war staged for our benefit?" he asks. "To what extend is war a staged event, a media event?"
That could be cosmic question: Is war the message?
But that's not where he headed. He was counting column-inches.

: Paul Steiger, ME of the Wall Street Journal, was impressively level-headed and smart about all this.
"Sometimes we think over-much that it's about us," he said. "There is a tendance to overplay our role."

: Much discussion of the Palestine Hotel shelling with an undercurrant -- never said aloud -- that journalists were targeted.
David Chater, a correspondent for SkyNews, gave this balance. He said that day, he saw the fiercest firefight he'd ever seen. "It's extaordinary," he said, "that they showed such restraint... I think it's understandable that this happened."
Much discussion also of the bombing of the Al-Jazeera offices that day, which Chater said was a bigger story.
Al-Jazeera D.C. correspondent Hafez Al-Mirazi said he did believe that the offices were targeted -- not for killing but to get them off the air. He said it's not just chance that they were hit. "Some people in our office are saying we should start buying lottery tickets if the odds are that much in our favor."

: Reuters Middle East editor Barry Moody argues: "If there hand't been journalists in Baghdad the possibility of civilian casualties would have been much higher."
What a load. He's saying that if there were not media witnesses, the U.S. would have gone on a killing spree. Crap.

: Chris Albritton, who raised money to go to Iraq for his blog, Back to Iraq, was there.

: Tom Rogers, former head of Primedia, owner of New York, came to the conference. He was ousted in a big change of strategy by KKR (that is: they want to sell off much of the empire). He showed loyalty to his former employees to come.

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Bleu
: I don't speak French worth a damn, but I can tell from this lead in le Monde under the headline "New York City Blues" that there'll be fun in this story (over to you, multilinqualists): "Crise financière et crise de confiance, New York n'a toujours pas surmonté le 11 septembre 2001. La ville a le blues."
: Treacher forwards a link to an imperfect Google translation of the story.
: And let's commission a story called Paris Blues. The world knows that your leader is a twit. The richest economy on earth has stopped buying your wine (damn, I like Australian wine). Our tourists have stopped coming to spend our money there. Your stupid tower is on fire. You are playing host to anti-semitic attacks.... Yeah, Paris is is whistling a happy tune itself.

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Quagmire this
: Andrew Sullivan has a nice bit of rebuttal from Wolfowitz re progress in Iraq.

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Editors
: Continuing on my snit fit about the editing job I got from Nieman Reports...
: Dave Winer says we don't need no stinking editors.
: Dan Gillmor says we are our own editors.
: Tim Porter says bad editors are everywhere.
: Ed Cone says we can all stand a good edit.
: Cyberwriter says "recht hat er."
: Mike says in the comments: "Oh fine, now you've burned your bridges and you've lost out on the audience of 500 who read the Nieman Report and will have to fall back on the 10,000 who read your blog. Smart move, Mr. Blogger-guy."

: An important note: Only once before in my (long) career have I seen an editor try to insert her or her own agenda into a piece I have written. The prior case (a story I have told here before): The editor in chief of Time Inc. tried to turn my positive review of a miniseries about Alger Hiss into a negative review so he could defend his mentor, Whitaker Chambers. I put my career on the line over that and threatened to resign; my editor put her career on the line backing me; we won. The top guy admitted that he had gone too far.
That's important to note because American journalism is not filled with editors rewriting and perverting the writing of reporters (as, I think, some assume happens habitually under the reign of powerful editors like Howell Raines). If that happened, the writers would revolt (their principles and egos are that strong).

: David Galbraith fantatizes:

I have this fantastic image of a drab, librarian-type cowering behind a stack of old books, dust flying, as a 6' 4" Jarvis in a don't give a damn suit slams his original manuscript on the top of the pile. Weblogs allow you to do that - but without getting dust on your jacket.

: Did somebody at the wall street journal edit den beste? He wrote fewer than 200,000 words!

: Canadians are Smug says:

All I can think is, what an excellent time to be a young journalist. The ground is shifting beneath the feet of journalism, and such earthquakes are an excellent time to move forward while the old guard nonchalantly reports "Ground seen shaking". All the ridiculous gargoyles adorning journalism's ivory tower are going to fall off.

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Springer's wisdom
: Blogging colleague Joe Territo -- who's cleverly turned his blog into a forum for email interviews with the notable -- has Jerry Springer today, talking about youth and violence:

A. I think blaming the entertainment industry for violence among our youth is absurd. If violent movies and television shows were the problem, you'd expect to find the same level of violence in Canada that you do in America, since Canadians mostly watch the same shows and movies that we do. In fact, of course, Canada has a violence rate many times smaller than ours. And the truth is that the vast majority of kids in this country are perfectly capable of distinguishing between make-believe violence and real life. Sure, there may be a few souls who are motivated to violence by what they see on TV or in the movies, just as there is a small percentage of adults who can't drink liquor responsibly and become alcoholics. But when we tried banning alcohol, Prohibition wasn't exactly a ringing success.

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Confab
: I'll be at the NY Mag/Guardian media confab today, blogging when possible.

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