BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

November 13, 2003

Burchill jumps
: Well, damn. Julie Burchill jumps from the Guardian to the Times, which means that we ferners won't be able to read her without helping pay for her big raise.

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It's beginning to...
: A few days ago, as I was walking down Sixth Avenue, I heard somebody whistling "Silver Bells." Who could that be? I turned around. Of course, it was no one else than the guy up on a cherrypicker hanging lights on the naked trees in front of CBS Black Rock. A man who knows his mission.

: Today, I ended up at Rockefeller Center. And there she is, The Tree. Workmen were climbing up scaffolding, putting the big lower branches back onto the trunk, improving on nature. Folks stopped for pictures. TV crews stopped for live reports with The Tree behind them. Christmas hype begins.

: And this evening, driving home, what do I see but snow. Snow!

: Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds basks in Southern warmth, still. Well, we have the Christmas spirit up here, damnit.

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Spam, please?
: Fred "VC" Wilson went to a meeting about email today and reports on a survey of consumers that included this boggling fact:

74% of consumers want porn emails filtered out of their inboxes

So the other 26 percent really do want bigger you-know-whats?

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Walden
: There seems to be a one-man Instapundit Instabacklash going on these days and if I smell a trend, I can't resist joining in....
I just hate it when Instapundit has his Walden Pond moments, giving us sylvan moments when he's blogging from the woods with a camera.
I spent two hours this evening trying to get out of New York and Jersey City dodging street people and downed power lines and broken water mains and homicidal drivers. I come home and go online and what do I see? Glenn is watching leaves waft.
And I hate him for it.

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Rock the CNN
: Terry Heaton brings another perspective to the planted-question scandal at CNN's Rock the Vote. It's about elitism.

What strikes me here is the belief that in order to produce a show that's appealing to young people (while maintaining their place as a news authority), CNN felt they had to control the content of the entire debate. It has blown up in their faces as just more evidence of elitist authority. This is an essential truth that broadcasters must understand: Postmodernism will not be controlled, and relinquishing even some control will be the toughest door through which TV News operations will have to pass in order to successfully do news in a Postmodern World.

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Winning the war on terrorism
: Austin Bay writes from Texas:

Winning a war is difficult. Ask the World War II generation.
Every experienced strategist understands warfare is, at its most basic level, a clash of human wills. The motive will of a man who spends years preparing to smash a jet into a skyscraper is large in big letters. His cohorts are betting that America is a sitcom nation with a short attention span. We'll change channels, cut and run....
Self-critique is one thing, the acid of self-doubt spurred by lies is something else. It's time for every American to be a leader, to bury these lies -- from unilateralism, to quagmire, to "no one told us" -- and get on with the hard business of winning the War on Terror.

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Citizens' media
: Ashley Highfield, director of BBC's online efforts, answers questions at the Guardian, among them a query about online's impact on the gathering of news. The reply:

One of the biggest shifts in News reporting I think is that the reports do not all have to come from our reporters. Increasingly, our audience can submit articles, views, comments, photos, and even video footage. The big challenge in this world is how to maintain both impartiality and quality in this world of user generated content.

Well, apart from the obvious straight line ("What, you're worried about impartiality from the audience when you're apparently not worried about it from your own reporters?"), there's truth and good forward-thinking there.
He's also asked about a project that had members of the audience submit video:

Many of those short video-stories made by members of the public using our equipment and posted on our website were really exceptional, some quite moving. Watch this space, we have more plans for this very public service!! i think they have a future because one of the key social trends that we've noticed is, in a fragmenting society, people want to get more involved in their media consumption, want to contribute, sometimes as a substitute for real-world communities.

Yes, they want to be involved in more than media consumption. They want to be involved in media creation.

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Justice
: "Judge" Moore, the 10 Commandments nutjob, has been removed from office. Well, bravo. This is a nation of laws, not of cultists. The man disobeyed the law he was sworn to obey. His word was meaningless. His cause unconstitutional. Good riddance.
Gives a person faith in the system (and doesn't do a thing to that other faith).
: As the Misanthropyst says, "Another ayatollah bites the dust."
: Michele says: "No judge, no more."
: Glenn Reynolds: "If judges don't obey court orders, who will?"

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Let me just say...
: ... I'm a chickenhawk and proud of it.

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Happy birthdays
: Josh Marshall and Steven Johnson are both waxing nostalgic on the anniversaries of their blogs.
I'll wait for the 10th.

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Emerging, electronic democracy
: Well, I'm jealous. Ed Cone got to go to a small O'Reilly (not Bill) braintrust confab on emerging democracy. He wrote about it on the way to the airport.

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Finally, a blog without politics
: Zeyad's 16-year-old brother Nabil starts a sports blog from Baghdad. There is some talk about Saddam punishing football players for losing, but they had Saddam, we have Steinbrenner.

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Bill O'Reilly in '08?
: Verne Gay buries the lead under two feet of set-up in his Newsday piece but he finally gets to talking to Bill O'Reilly about running for President.

"I may take a look" at running and "certainly the option is open if I want it. But what I want to do over the next few years here is clean up the process. We have the bad guys on the run - no question about that."
While he says there have been "lots of offers" to run against Clinton someday for her Senate seat (there are four years left on his Fox contract), he also quickly adds, "I'd lose.... It'd be a fun race [and] I'd drive her crazy, but she would ultimately win." Besides, he has no interest in the Senate: "I'm not a quid pro guy" who'd have to play at pork-barrel politics to bring "goodies" back to the state.
The prize would be the White House, but "the country's not interested in an independent candidacy. Maybe in 10 years they will be, but right now, you have 50 percent of Americans who don't know anything - they're totally disengaged from the process, the 'Mall People.' They don't know anything, don't watch the news or listen to radio or read the newspapers. The other 50 percent - and there was a recent poll on this - are a third crazy left and third crazy right and third in the middle. So the pie you're going for is a very narrow pie."
Yeah, maybe he "could mobilize a certain number of independent thinkers who think, 'This guy could be a ... Teddy Roosevelt kind of guy, who could come in and clean up the garbage...'" but "I'm not a vanity player, I'm not gonna go out like Al Sharpton, to get on 'Saturday Night Live' to run for president, so unless I'm convinced I could pull it off, I wouldn't do it."

Whoa, Bill, you're sounding like Al Gore (below), dissing the people, otherwise known as the audience, otherwise known as the electorate. That's no way to win an election (or ratings or book sales).

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