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December 29, 2003

Instaconversation
: Wow: Glenn Reynolds started comments. Briefluy.

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Online film awards
: The Online Film Critics Society released its annual film awards and got coverage in the Hollywood Reporter and thus Variety. I thought this must the be from BlogCritics but, no, it's another group. Lesson to bloggers: Form societies and give awards and get press.

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The most dangerous President?
: Howard Dean is flailing like a loser. Here's his latest slap at the President:

From Iraq to homeland security to public health, President Bush's "reckless" habit of placing "ideology over facts" has resulted in "the most dangerous administration in my lifetime," Democrat Howard Dean charged over the past two days.

The "most dangerous administration" in his lifetime?
This guy is so over-the-top that he makes Democrats have to defend George Bush.
The "most dangerous"?
OK, let's gander at the Presidents since 1948, the year of Dean's birth:
: Harry Truman. Dropped the first atomic bombs. Overaw the Korean War. I'd call that dangerous.
: Dwight Eisenhower. Military man. Many find that dangerous on its face.
: John F. Kennedy. Damned near bluffed his way into a couple of nuclear confrontations. Dangerous.
: Lyndon Johnson. Well, my generation thought he was mighty dangerous. He was going to send us to our deaths in Vietnam.
: Richard Nixon. In my book, the most dangerous. Tried to bring down the presidency.
: Gerald Ford. Dangerous mainly to himself.
: Jimmy Carter. Not dangerous. Not terribly effective, but not dangerous (except to interest rates).
: Ronald Reagan. Well, I won't start a holy war on this one. Suffice it to say that some think he's a saint but others think he's the opposite -- and I'd bet those people would prefer Bush to Reagan (I would).
: George H.W. Bush. The Republican Carter: Not dangerous, not effective.
: Bill Clinton. Well, I liked him.
Go ahead: Play the Howard Dean Game with others and I'll bet that few if any over voting age who've washed in the last week who will come to the same conclusion Dean did. I'll bet that most will vote for Nixon.
It sounds as if Dean is trying to revive the '60s (and turn Bush into Nixon). But these aren't the '60s. What's uppermost on our minds today is not a war we declared -- no matter how much you wish that were the case, Howard -- but, instead, the war that was declared against us, by terrorists. This is more like World War II. If this were 1940 and a Republican called Franklin Roosevelt "dangerous," would you tolerate that or think it disloyal?
Criticize the President and the administration all you want, Dean, by all means, have at it.
But don't ever forget that the real danger is out there among the people who want to bomb our White House, not stay in it. If you can't remember that, Doc, then I won't feel safe with you in that White House. If you get elected, come November, I'll be paraphrasing you: "the capture of Saddam election of Howard has not made America safer."

: UPDATE: Josh Marshall says the Dean is also "playing the defection card and that crosses the line."

: UPDATE: Roger Simon says he's flailing because he's terrified of Hillary. Yup. I keep saying that: Hillary to the rescue.

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Our real friend up north
: Kathy Shaidle, one of my very favorite webloggers at Relapsed Catholic, just became even more of a favorite thanks to the op-ed piece she wrote for the Dallas Morning News. Go read it (I set up an account: username: weblogs@weblogs.com, password: weblogs):

...Well, I am a recovering liberal, and Sept. 11 is my dry date.
That morning, my leftist life flashed before my eyes. I remembered to my shame all of those "Yankee, go homes" I had chanted as a Reagan-era peacenik. And rolling my eyes at the tacky teddy bear memorials at the Oklahoma City bombing and muttering, "You would think a building never had blown up before."
How sophisticated I was. And how sick....
I have taken to wearing a Stars and Stripes scarf. When asked about it, I explain that I use it to strangle old draft dodgers.
I really want to buy a gun (somehow) just so that I can refuse to register it.
I even have developed a taste for iced tea.
No, I am not entirely friendless. I have "met" new pals online: fellow Canucks equally outraged by the World Trade Center attacks and appalled by the matter-of-fact "they asked for it" attitude that permeates elite Canadian culture....
I believe I am on the right side of history now. Just on the wrong side of the border.

Thank you, Kathy.

: Update: And here is part of the reason Kathy denies her Canadianess: a column by Toronto Star editorial page editor emeritus Haroon Siddiqui that shrieks:

As the year of the war on Iraq draws to a close, the larger perspective that emerges is clear: George W. Bush, a small man in a big job, has dragged America into one of its darkest chapters.

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Mean critics
: Rowan ("Mr. Bean") Atkinson checked himself into a shrink shop because of depression caused by bad reviews for Johnny English.
When I was a critic, I got the occasional mewling letter from a star (e.g., Alan Thicke) begging me to lay off. I preferred the angry ones (e.g., Bill Cosby). [via IT&W]

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'Involvement journalism'
: AOL sends out a press release touting what it calls "involvement journalism."

To complement the member's personalized news experience, AOL News offers multiple opportunities for members to join in the larger news debates and connect with other members through polls, message boards, chatrooms and AOL Journals (blogs), creating a more enhanced, shared experience....
"We're changing the way people consume and experience the news," said Lewis D'Vorkin, AOL's Editor-in-Chief for News and Sports. "AOL's unique format allows us to create a dynamic, interactive experience that our members trust and value. AOL News brings members the news they want in their preferred format and incorporates multiple voices through shared storytelling elements. As a result, not only do members get the news, but they can also see how others are reacting and gain different perspectives on world events. It's a strategy we call involvement journalism."

Sounds good. If only they meant it and did it.
Go to the AOL news page and all you see from the audience is a tiny box with a tiny quote on, today, Michael Jackson, one user at a time. It's the man-on-the-streetization of the people, the worst of tokenism.
They talk involvement. They don't mean it.
But they could. AOL has all the tools that would allow its audience to become truly involved. They could use weblogs (aka journals) to edit the news from their perspective: See the world through the lense of someone like you. They could use bulletin boards to let their huge audience set the agenda for debate: Start a movement for health-care reform on AOL. They could use scientific polling of their diverse audience to see what America really says about issues: Who cares how it plays in Peoria; how does it play on AOL?
They could do all that if they meant it when they said "involvement journalism." But they don't. Too bad. [via Lost Remote]

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Blogvertising
: Henry Copeland reports that Howard Dean's campaign is the latest institution smart enough to buy ads on blogs.

: Meanwhile, John Robb notes:

I notice that Kerry has joined Clark by advertising on the Dean keyword in Google. No ads are attached to the Bush, Clark, or Kerry keyword. Hmm... Looks like a missed opportunity. This is even more interesting. Nothing is attached to issue keywords like Iraq, Medicare, or the Environment. This is a big mistake. Google performance marketing on issue keywords would be very effective in the 2004 presidential campaigns.

Advertising on weblogs will be more targeted and effective. There's less inventory, but that will change...

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Armed
: The Wall Street Journal asks: Should war reporters be armed?

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Worst and best
: David (yawn) Shaw of the LA Times lists his worst media moments of 2003. What are your worst -- and best?

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RSS on the go
: One of the best reasons to use RSS feeds is to read the news on the go, on a mobile device. On my Treo 600, I can do this with an application -- HandRSS -- or with a new and neat mobile-sized web site, MobileRSS [via Dave Winer]. They're both good starts.
I just wish I could import my list of sites, my OPML file, directly into either application instead of having to laboriously retype every address. Hint. Hint.

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The conversation

: There are some wonderful comments continuing the discussion from the post below on the transformation of news, all sparked by a Tim Rutten column in the LA Times.
In the comments, Othello says:

Let the high priests of the old media sniff at the blogosphere. I, for one, love our modern-day cyberspace townhall, and prefer "talking with" rather than "being talked (down) to" any day.... In spite of the dreck and noise (of which there is a lot), with not too much searching you can still find sites and people with whom you can have reasonable exhanges of ideas and discover common values ... even when they are halfway around the world, and are living in a country where your nation's armed forces have just fought a war.
Reliable communication between common people in which ideas are freely exchanged and debated is a terrific weapon against tyranny....
After all ... once people stop being told what to think, they're liable to think just about anything!

That's less about the press than about the Web as an alternative but it's an interesting perspective.
Bill Herbert sides with Rutten on the value of an objective press:

Despite Rutten's snootiness, I have to basically agree with him: while unabashedly opinionated news sources are fine as supplements, I think journalism should still strive toward objectivity, however unattainable it may be. I simply don't think that human failings are a reason to throw the whole idea out....
Yes, Jeff, most Americans realize that people like Franken and Coulter are vaudeville acts. But in Britain, they'd actually be taken seriously as reporters. You really think that's a good thing?...
Despite all its flaws, the American flavor of journalism is still something to be proud of. It's no accident that our papers have guys like John Burns, while the Brits have ass clowns like Andrew Gilligan. It's because our journalists do make an effort to separate opinions from facts....

And in a wonderful comment, Matt Welch seconds Bill.

...I think it's a good idea to once in a while remember the *good* that has come out of the elitist (and originally, objectively pro-capitalist) notion of high-handed newspaper objectivity. If a magic wand were to be waved, and the media were to all be like Murdoch/Guardian/blogs, and no more of this condescening above-it-all professionalism, I'd wager that we'd feel the loss pretty sharply.
Remember when CNN was the sort of AP of television news? One of the reason why CNN sucks now, in my opinion, is that it tried too hard to be like Fox, and Headline News especially tried too much to be like, I dunno, Entertainment Tonight or some crap. There is a valuable role to be played by our just-the-facts-ma'am news organizations, and I'm bummed now that we don't have a national TV network that just barfs up the straight news for 24 hours a day, without goofy anchor-jokes and interviews with minor celebrities. Bring back Lynn Vaughn!
And I'd even suggest that those of us who welcome 90% of the Britishization process are engaging in a bit of a double standard -- we love to talk about how great the New York Post is, while trashing the bias of the New York Times. Well, that makes for interesting contrarianism (and it's true that I subscribe to Murdoch, Sulzberger), but the Post is both more biased and more sloppy, and the Times (to me, at least), is a far superior newspaper. I just want markets to have (at minimum) both.

News is a conversation and this is a great conversation about news.

What I love about this is not only that it's a captivating discussion but also that Matt and Bill did call me out. I reacted so strongly to Rutten's elitist, head-in-the-sand attitude that I skipped over some important caveats and thus I gave you an incomplete view of my opinion on opinionated news. Because I'm in the business, I assume you start knowing how much I value the news business, but I shouldn't assume that.
Yes, objective, just-the-facts-ma'am reporting is not only desirable, it is the essence of good journalism and of its value to its consumers. Most reporters and editors working on most stories on most newspapers or on TV are trying to report objectively and are succeeding. As I said below, there isn't a lot of bias in a fire. When I was a reporter, I covered too many stories and subjects to even attempt to have opinions on them. I know how hard my colleagues work to bring the people the news. I respect them tremendously. I love this business, or I wouldn't be in it.

However, Rutten is right that we are facing choices on the future of news and so we have to deal frankly and bluntly with both sides of bias -- that is, from the journalists' perspective and from the consumers' perspective -- when it does enter the news.
From the journalists' perspective, I'd say it's damned hard to look at, say, Iraq coverage without having to parse the perspective of the source. When The Times doesn't cover anti-terrorism demonstrations but does cover anti-American demonstrations, they and we need to ask what that means. And perhaps the time has come for even mainstream news organizations to be more open about their perspectives, so we can better judge what they report. If it is a sin to fail at objectivity it is a worse sin to conceal it or lie about it.
But there's a new factor in this equation: the consumers' desires. The audience for news is showing a preference for perspective and the evidence is clear: They're watching FoxNews more than CNN; they're reading the Guardian; they're reading weblogs; they're demanding more dialogue and transparency.
So we need to look at new ways to report news and deal with questions of objectivity, bias, and perspective.

I suggest that the way to look at it is as a conversation.
That conversation was started in a still-small voice at The Times when public editor Dan Okrent responded to complaints about the lack of coverage of the anti-terrorism demonstrations. He listened to the complaints and gave them to the Baghdad bureau and came back with, unfortunately, their excuse rather than their real reply. They said they didn't know the date (and I said I don't buy that because we all knew the date). Perhaps they just didn't have the staff to cover it. Or perhaps they thought something else was more important. Or perhaps they thought this was not important. Or perhaps they didn't think anyone would show up because they believed that most Iraqis are anti-American. They obviously thought something; the reporters, bureau bosses, and editors back in New York all made a judgment about this story. And we want to be let in on that judgment, on the process behind that decision, on the perspective that decision reveals -- because then we can better judge both The Times reporting and the event itself.
In the past, such an exchange would have been impractical; Times reporters can't end up in mail or phone dialogues with every reader. Okrent makes that slightly more practical, but that still leaves a middleman in the process: gatekeeper to the gatekeepers. (And, by the way, I said before that I wasn't sure the anti-terrorism demonstrations rose to Okrent's purview; I've now been convinced I was wrong.)
But now there is a far more practical way to have this conversation: The Internet and weblogs enable it. Those Timesmen could talk about what they covered and didn't and why and how they view this on a weblog; readers could enter into a conversation there and via links from other weblogs; the Timesmen could reply.
But that would be a very frightening thing for anyone from the classic school of American journalism to do -- utterly terrifying, for it would decentralize the control of the institution and what it properly stands for and it would reveal bias of individuals. That's why you're not seeing it happen readily.
I'll admit that it scared me at first. It still does now, as I write something like this, close to home. But in for a dime, in for a dollar, I long ago decided to let it all hang out here and because I did, I've learned a great deal about new ways to look at news and the relationship to news' consumers.
I've learned that news is a conversation.

So Rutten is right to say that we are facing "a referendum not only on America's political future but also on the direction of its news media" (he's just wrong about most of the rest). Herbert and Welch are right that we need to remind ourselves -- me first -- of the value of objective reporting. But Othello is also right that the consumers of news demand to join in on the conversation. We need to figure out how to do that. And if we do figure it out, we'll end up with a stronger news business with enhanced credibility and a richer relationship with the people it serves.
I don't pretend to know how to do that; I don't! But we do need to start trying to figure out how we could do it. We need to talk about it.

: UPDATES: Terry Heaton has more in this conversation on his blog. Ditto Henry Copeland.

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