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BuzzMachine
by Jeff Jarvis
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January 31, 2004
Analog 1, Digital 0
: David Isenberg has a unique perspective on the switch atop the Dean campaign: The nethead was displaced by the Bellhead.
: Meanwhile, Richard Bennett is characteristically blunt as he assesses the situation: So what is happening? Briefly put, Dean's problem is the Deaniacs. The Internet-driven campaign has enabled him to amass a large following, but they're primarily unbalanced people, fanatical followers, extremists, and wackos. In my experience with Internet-enabled activism, these are the kind of people most attracted to online chat and email wars, so an organization that's going to use these tools to recruit has to prune the weirdos before they run off the mainstream people you need to reach out to the undecided mainstream people whose support you really need in the voting booth.
Figures
: The one big media company Larry Lessig defends is the BBC.
Spreading
: Now a U.S. airline -- Continental -- has canceled a flight along with BA and Air France because of terrorism warnings.
...blame me I voted for...
: Aaron Bailey gives Dean supporters helpful tips on how to remove a bumper sticker.
Public suicide
: The BBC is performing public suicide. Just read the British press today.
Even the pro-BBC, anti-Blair, anti-American, anti-war Independent reports a "civil war" in the company: The BBC was at war with itself yesterday, as rival factions began to attack each other over competing versions of the events that triggered the worst crisis in the corporation's long history.
Some of its senior managers turned on the journalist Andrew Gilligan, whose flawed reporting began the crisis, claiming that if he had not resigned last week, he would have been disciplined and possibly sacked....
Others within a divided BBC want its acting director general, Mark Byford, to continue the battle with the Government.... The Telegraph reports on managers turning on Gilligan -- at long frigging last! This wouldn't have happened if his managers had tried managing him and his editors had tried editing him a few months ago!
The Observer also calls it " civil war." And it gives us a long tick-tock on the release of the Hutton report, showing BBC officials circling their wagons in desperate defensiveness. This under the headline, " It's war." The BBC is at war with itself and at war with the governmet.
: Meanwhile, at the BBC's own news site, the story is virtually gone; just one teensy headline and a defensive one at that, with ousted boss Greg Dyke attacking Hutton. In every other corner of British news media, this is a huge story; at the BBC, it's being buried. Now that's news judgment.
:We are witnessing the death of the BBC, for the BBC doesn't want to save itself. It would rather fight with itself and with the government than serve its audience and learn from its mistakes and move on. That's because the BBC has utterly and completely lost sight of its mission and reason for being: serving and informing the public.
: In my comments below, Silver said it well: The whole affair points to the vast difference between press in the free enterprise system and press sponsored by government.
Why was the NYTimes contrite over Blair? Because if they lost their credibility, they lost their revenue.
Why won't the Beeb be contrite over this? Because every Brit with a TV pays their salaries (through an unbelievably stupid tax).
The world no longer needs the Beeb, and the Brits should not have to pay for it. Let the free market system determine the veracity of their reporting. The Beeb, as a ward of the state, should be abolished. :Journalism cannot prosper, let alone survive, inside government. It is such an obvious oxymoron.
The BBC is inside the government, so it fights the government hardest.
The BBC does not have to answer to the market, so it ignores the market, also known as public, the audience, the citizenry.
The BBC thinks because there is also public anger at the Blair government, that means the public is for the BBC and the BBC isn't even self-aware enough today to see that it is positioning itself as a direct player in politics -- an utterly impossible position for a news organization, but one the BBC is welcoming.
The BBC thinks it is answerable to no one, not the market, not the audience, not Hutton, not journalism.
The BBC has turned into the monarchy of news -- just as big and rich and meaningless and useless.
This will kill the BBC.
: I deeply regret this. Until very, very recently, I held the BBC in the highest esteem. When I was young, I even dreamed of working for them.
But now the BBC will get the fate it deserves.
It deserves to lose all public subsidy. It deserves to be thrown out in the marketplace to fend for itself. It deserves to face new competitors that will beat it at every measure. What Rupert Murdoch did to CNN with FoxNews, Rupert Murdoch will eagerly do to the BBC, just watch.
But the BBC brought this on itself. The BBC committed suicide.
The ideal blog reader
: David Galbraith lists his wishes for Kinja, the coming blog reader.
One pill make you...
: Bill Maher notes that the SuperBowl will be sponsored by competing Viagra sequels and says: It's more than a little ironic that, just a week after the President uses the State of the Union Address to rail against performance-enhancing drugs, we hold a Steroid Bowl brought to you by - you guessed it - performance enhancing drugs.
It all comes back to the "what's-your-pleasure" hypocrisy in this country. If your pleasure is the slurry, cheery buzz of an apple martini, you're legal and accepted. If it's the serene, introspective buzz of a joint or, say, the warm, itchy buzz of Vicodin, then you're illegal and unaccepted. If you want to risk taking a pill to get your penis hard, "ask your doctor," but if you want to risk taking a pill to get your biceps hard, pee in this cup and turn in your locker room key.
We all have our reasons for ingesting what we ingest. We are a nation dependent upon drugs to act as an antidote to everything from our boredom and depression to our impotence and the poisoning effects of our toxic food supply. To arbitrarily single out certain drugs and certain drug users as immoral, while others skate (and profitably I might add) is a complete hypocrisy. Hmmm. Sounds like the Rush Limbaugh defense fund.
Anil is right that Maher is finally turning his blog into a blog.
The boy off the bus
: GQ has a long and timely (thanks to the Internet) profile of Joe Trippi. Jim Treacher sends it to me, wondering whether it reveals he is an ass or the perfect subject for another West Wing -- "Not that the two are mutually exclusive, I guess..."
I don't know what to make of reports that Trippi pocketed 15 percent of Dean's ad buy. (Has that been verified? Where did the report start? What do other campaign managers do? Anybody have the facts on this?)
It's also too soon to know whether Trippi will be seen as the genius who changed politics forever (likely) ... or the fool who wasted all of The People's money to lose Iowa and New Hampshire and frontrunnerdom (possible) ... or the victim of a bad candidate (likely). I won't be surprised to see Dean and the Deany Babies (wasn't that a '60s beach band?) trying to blame Trippi.
If I were Trippi, Zach Rosen, Zephyr Teachout, Matt Gross (who's not visble on the blog, by the way), the minute the Dean Campaign sputters to a stop, I'd set up a consulting shop to tell politicians and companies how to exploit this new bottom-up world (see below). Rather than taking the Carville path of punditry, why not make a fortune? It matter whether they were right or wrong; doesn't matter whether Trippi is an ass; they'd make a mint.
Hanging up the hatchet
: The Dean-O-Phobe is no more: My work here is done....
[N]ot only is Dean's nomination dead, Deanism is dead as well. By "Deanism" I don't mean Dean's mix of issue positions, or his novel strategy of Internet organizing (which, I hope, will become a model for Democrats in the future). What I mean by Deanism is the belief that some combination of technology and Dean's charisma can somehow suspend all the known laws of politics, that liberals can wish away unpleasant facts about the American electorate, and that the failure to do so represents cowardice, betrayal, and the absence of principle....
Finally, John Kerry takes all the fun out of Dean-o-phobia. Indeed, if there's anybody who could make Dean attractive, it's Kerry.... : And elsewhere at TNR, there's a debate pro and con on Kerry. Kaus sums it up.
Posterity
: LiveJournalers can now get their journals made into a PDF and a book. [via WeblogHype] Kind of a neat retro idea. Sometimes, I wish I had a printout of this, just to put on the shelf. But it would take forever. Last Sunday, when I went to be on Chris Lydon's show, I thought I might want a few posts and links and so I printed out January's archive -- and the month still had a week go to. It was 104 pages. Damn, I'm verbose. This blog would fill a shelf.
You are there
: A photo moblog of the South Carolina primary. [via SmartMobs]
Op-op-ed
: Fred Wilson amazed and astounded partygoers when he said that he doesn't read columnists anymore. He reads blogs instead. (Of course, that also means that he does read columnists' thoughts when blogs point to and excerpt the best of them or ague with the worst of them.)
Just get him to the church on time...
: Armed Liberal is trying to bring his blogging buddy to his wedding and asks for your help.
Bottoms-up!
: I was catching up on my magazine reading t his morning, going one-issue back in Fortune (how amusing and quaint to find such an antique magazine that calls Howard Dean the frontrunner!) and finally got to David Kirkpatrick's fine column about the "bottom-up economy." What do these things have in common: the TV show American Idol, Howard Dean's presidential campaign, eBay, and the open-source Linux operating system? They're all manifestations of a key trend of our time: the shift in power away from centralized institutions and toward the individual—from the center to the edge.
We're entering what might be called the Bottom-Up Economy. As the Internet's influence grows, we're seeing its intrinsic egalitarianism and tendency to empower the small start to change many aspects of modern life. Customers today have more options and less loyalty. They will migrate to businesses that see them as participants in a process rather than as just consumers.
Smart companies are already embracing this... Right. And don't forget media!
January 30, 2004
What kind of blog are you?
: John Robb lists ways to be a top or almost-top blog: Be a connection machine... name dropper... ideologue... thinker... topic owner... a voice of outrage/affirmation... cool hunter.
Sweeney Tod
: The German canibal who killed and ate a man got a sentence of eight years. Dr. Jack Kervorkian, who helped dying people commit suicide, got 10 to 25.
(And, yes, I meant Tod; it's a bilingual joke.)
A blog, sort of
: The NY Times has been threatening to start a campaign blog and now it has... sort of. It's basically just short (for The Times) bylined (!) pieces with token links. But the sidebar actually links to the competition. It's a start.
He takes the ball and goes home
: Michael Wolff didn't manage to buy New York Magazine and so he quit to go to Vanity Fair.
I'll apply for his old job.
The scream redux
: The Scream Spin of late has been that it wasn't loud in the hall and so we got it all wrong; ABC is buying that. I don't buy it. The candidate was not playing to the hall. The candidate was playing to TV and knew exactly how it would play on TV. It was a calculated move that turned out to be a miscalculation. Put that in your history books and smoke it.
The real liar quits
: Andrew Gilligan -- the Jayson Blair of Britain, the man who brought the BBC down to shame -- has, at last, quit.
But he goes out shameless. He's the one who sexed up the story. But even after an amazingly extensive investigation that found that he was the sexer upper, Gilligan still accuses the Blair government of sexing up its report and he has the audacity to use that phrase again: If Lord Hutton had fairly considered the evidence he heard, he would have concluded that most of my story was right. The Government did sex up the dossier, transforming possibilities and probabilities into certainties, removing vital caveats; the 45-minute claim was the 'classic example' of this; and many in the intelligence services, including the leading expert in WMD, were unhappy about it....
This report casts a chill over all journalism, not just the BBC's. It seeks to hold reporters, with all the difficulties they face, to a standard that it does not appear to demand of, for instance, Government dossiers.... No, you haughty, clueless, disastrously destructive, unrepentent, and incompetent lunkead, you cast a chill over all journalism. For you singlehandedly diluted the credibility of our craft. You brought the BBC to shame.
Good riddance!
I'll take a Coke with my fish 'n' chips, please...
: A commenter bets he'll have a book deal by Wednesday.
I'm betting a juicy job on The Independent.
: Now this is funny: Russia's minister of media criticizes the BBC for apologizing. Why, in our day at Pravda....
: Thanks to the comments, I'm watching BBC's Newsnight show now and the acting head of the BBC, Mark Byford, is being pushed hard by the interviewer to accept the Hutton report. What he keeps saying is that "the BBC accepts that Lord Hutton has published his report." How Orwellian. The BBC acknowledges that the sun came up. The BBC acknowledges that Hutton published. The BBC acknowledges, he says, that Hutton criticized the BBC. He says he apologizes "for our errors." He won't admit and apologize for sexing up the report. Round and round it goes. Until the BBC accepts responsibility for what it has done -- and it has not -- repair cannot begin and damage will continue.
Blog geek help for hire
: I need an MT expert to help get my blog house in order (which will allow
me to upgrade to the next MT and to a new design). The structure of this
blog is in great part a leftover of its Blogger beginnings. So I need
someone to go through all the data and fix it up and then set me up with
some neat new MT plug-ins. The tasks, many dull:
- Move all headlines (now enclosed in bold tags in the body) into the Title
field so I can start using it.
- Fix up strange duplicated posts in early months.
- Set up per-item archives and convince me this won't mess up every
permalink ever created (my monthly archives are now horrendously long
because I'm just so damned verbose; see next post).
- Set up comment spam plug ins and recommend other plug-ins.
- Set up mail-this-post.
- Recommend other fixes.
I would have this done on a shadow blog to test and debug and then switch
over.
And then I'll worry about a new design and new CSS.
If you're able and interested, please send me email.
Please include an estimate of cost.
: I wrote this post earlier and added a line from the road on my Treo but accidentally erased it. Two kind souls send me the text again out of their RSS readers. Thanks. You can see I need the help!
The click heard 'round the world
: Martin Nisenholtz, the very smart and focused head of New York Times Digital, gave a visionary speech this week to the Information Industry Summit [via PaidContent] in which he says that media is awaiting its Pong, its application that unleashes something wholly new and with it a new creative class and a new industry.
Martin keeps dancing around the idea that weblogs could be that thing. He won't take the last step to annoint them. ("The jury is still out.") But perhaps he's reluctant because he's using the wrong word and thus looking at this thing too narrowly. Yes, a weblog per se won't change the world. But citizens' media will. And the weblog is the proof of that concept: It is the Pong. It is the click heard round the world.
Martin lists many characteristics of this messianic Pong he awaits and I agree with all his criteria: It evolves media past its current roles of "sorting, distributing, and making accessible content created principally for other formats, to creating content that is native to the computing world." It brings users "new and original ways of communicating." It, like the Web, "is designed to foster social interaction, not just information retrieval." It causes a "control shift" giving the user that control. He sets up a test: : First, the medium must be large, global and spawn a new profitable industry.
: Second, the medium must be expressive. It must delight people on an emotional level. It must become a regular part of their life experience.
: Third, the medium must ultimately engender a new collective class of creative people. Think of film, with actors, directors and set designers; or videogames, with art directors and programmers; or newspapers, with reporters, editors and photographers.... Ah, but Martin, that new creative class is nothing less than the people themselves. The citizens create. That is revolutionary beyond creating a new, closed industry that employs a new, limited cast of trained professionals, a new priesthood. This is more than Pong. This is Gutenberg, baby!
But my friend Martin remains cautious even as he is visionary (that's why he's successful): Many are now postulating that Web logs – or blogs – are the pong of electronic publishing. These new forms blend a unique stew of audience input, amateur content creation, the editing of outside content sources and other attributes. They evolve – in part – from the forums and chats that ran on Compuserve twenty years ago, in part from email, in part from newsletter publishing, in part from search, in part from content syndication.
The jury is still out. Certainly, Web logs delight their audience. Five million people each day read a Web log. [Nice new stat - ed] Even though Web logs began as a form of amateur publishing (all new forms begin with passionate amateurs because a professional class does not yet exist to create in the new medium), we are now beginning to see more professionals entering the fray, and the form seems to be developing a division of labor in some instances.
So we satisfy two of the new criteria at least.
The last one – and often the most challenging – is our first criterion. The form must evolve into a profitable business if it is to sustain the professional class required to attract mass audiences. Indeed, it is possible that blogs will remain a vibrant amateur medium, much as CB and ham radio have over the decades. Standing here today, that would be my bet. But I could be very wrong. Ouch! Not that CB thing!
No, the problem is that you can't look at this industry the way you could look at others. This is all about the -- thank you, David Weinberger -- small pieces, loosely joined all adding up to something gigantic. It's not the top or the tail of Clay Shirky's beloved power-law graph; it's the rich, meaty middle. And that will add up to a new, profitable industry -- listen to media mogul Hubert Burda: "But if the audience is there, a business model will emerge. I’m sure of it." And that business model will be on a new scale, broad and flat, not tall and AOL-Time-Warner-vertically-integrated. Each little component -- each company -- in this new industry has a very, very low cost of entry (try zero) and tiny overhead (try a spare bedroom) and low staff (try one). So profitability comes quickly. My magazine startup, Entertainment Weekly, went through $200 million before it broke even; Nick Denton went through a few thousand.
But it's not there yet.
A business infrastructure is desperately needed and I have many thoughts on that -- but not now.
And this Pong we have will grow more sophisticated -- it already is. Pong begat Doom; blogs will beget... well, we're not sure yet.
Citizens' media is already exploding past the limitations of a mere weblog with new forms of media -- not just the obvious audio, video, and graphics but also media that communicates, media that calculates, media that categorizes itself, media that carries with it ratings of its own reliability, media that relates. Martin, in his speech, also notes more elements coming together: Infrastructure that allows anyone to watch anything... A shift in the media day to noon because of connected devices are now at the center of the consumer's day... Control shifting from the center to the edges of the network... A host of new content-creation technologies... New devices for consuming media anywhere...
That, still, is merely technology. It's not revolutionary, just spectacularly and beautifully evolutionary.
What's revolutionary is that citizens' media is created by citizens, giving them an entirely new relationship with media. That, again, is the new creative class Martin is looking for.
All this was inspired just by the first half of Martin's speech. There's a second half...
A new architecture
: I've been talking lately about using feeds and RSS as a new architecture for the content on my news sites. I can create a town page using feeds of paper headlines, internal and external blog headlines, forum thread heads, weather, classified listings, restaurant specials, video reports.... It's all just feeds.
It's more than that, of course. I've been thinking about how I'd architect news if I had a clean slate. This gets down even to the level of how you'd write a news story. There's no longer any need to write in the background; you can link to it. Ditto analysis. There's no such thing as a deadline or an edition; you add to the story as you find out more. It's friendlier because it's briefer and easier to consume. It's better organized. It's more informative because it can include reports and photos from witnesses in the audience. It's more accurate because you can include fact-check-your-ass challenges from readers. It's more compelling because it includes interactivity. It's better presented because it can include video or audio or programming, whatever it needs. It's more responsive because, well, finally the audience can respond.
That's just the architecture of presentation. That also affects the architecture of storage: Each element -- each news post -- is identified and linked to related items by the writer and by the audience. And, obviously, this affects the way the news is gathered, by whom, with what.
Martin, in his speech, also speculates on a new architecture for news: There is no primary media format in this new journalism. It is all media combined. All of the assets available for storytelling are seamlessly available and can be offered for the sole purpose of telling the story. Aggregation and sorting are rapidly becoming media independent. In part, this is because the means of production are advancing to allow creative teams to work seamlessly across media – and to tell stories in new, non-linear ways. And don't forget that the audience will link these elements together, too. That is a key to the value of weblogs: editing by the audience. But Martin sees that, too, for he says that in this new world, "News reports become a focal point for social networking. Again, we see this bubbling-up in Web logs today." Later, he says, "the social extensions of the journalism become deeply embedded into the product itself." Right, and that "social" element adds value; it tells you what the audience cares about; it adds their viewpoints; it adds their facts; it creates linkages; it edits.
He also sees the need for a reputation system because "while deception is possible even in the most controlled context (think about Jayson Blair at The Times), the casual online encounter is rife with potential fraud." He adds: "Ultimately, journalism is about trust." I say the goal isn't to create such a system but to create a system that captures the reliability ratings of the audience. Technorati already does that: The cream rises with links. But that's still more quantitative than qualitative. I link to the BBC but these days, that doesn't mean I trust them anymore.
Martin and I don't agree about all of this. He sees big value for an "aggregator" (not a program but a company) to "build and maintain this news universe." I think that function is already distributed to the audience. He's not sure weblogs are the Pong he's looking for. I am sure. But we agree about where this is headed ultimately and how important it is.
It's an important speech.
Brutal Honesty, Inc.
: I agree with Corey Bergman that "brutal honesty" is the news-media trend of today. I say Howard Stern started it. You can expect that I'll throw both FoxNews and weblogs into the mix. Corey notes t he trend with Dennis Miller on CNBC plus "think Daily Show combined with Anderson Cooper 360. Or MSNBC's Countdown. Miller is aiming for 20 and 30-something (male) viewers who would rather trade the stiff formality of TV news for their X-Boxes. And I think he's on the right track."
January 29, 2004
The terrorists have won if...
: Howard Dean just said in tonight's debate that "the terrorists have already won" because we have the Patriot Act.
What a horrid attitude from someone who would be President.
The terrorists have won?
Those words should never pass your pursed lips!
Dear Joe letter
: David Weinberger, an adviser to the Dean campaign, bids farewell to Joe Trippi. Dave is characteristically candid: I am not inside the Dean organization enough to know what Trippi did wrong. I hear the TV ads sucked, and I'm more than a little disturbed that the campaign managed to spend all of the money it raised, but I also saw some things that Trippi did right. Real right.
Slow
: Apologies for the site being slow today. I check Insty, who comes out of the same factory of froth, and he's slow, too. So I'm guessing it's just the worm terrorists causing traffic hell.
Seeding
: James Lileks writes about the lessons and prophecy of Dean and blogging and The Scream in his Newhouse column and he confesses to taking part in the Scream Meme with his remix: I assembled one of the more popular songs. Within 36 hours it had been mentioned by The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal; it was played on NPR, Hugh Hewitt's nationally syndicated radio shows in a hundred markets -- and even made MTV.com. I didn't mail the song to newspapers, or call up radio stations and offer payola. I simply seeded the URL in the comments section of a well-read liberal weblog and a well-read conservative one. And it was off. This is how information works today: You can go from the bottom to the top with no friction whatsoever. Hmmm. I'm honored that he seeded the address on this blog. I wonder whether this was one of them and if so, was it the liberal or the conservative one, I never can tell.
Anyway, that ego break aside, James goes on to judge the significance of this: Meaning? Well, weblogs make it tough for candidates to sell falsehoods, because there will always be a hundred dozen foes ready to feast on the lie.... Forevermore now, there'll be someone watching who can tease an offhand remark however he pleases, post it to the Web and join the roiling conversation....
It's not the e-mail. It's not the blog. It's not the Web sites. It's the computers, and the people behind them, connected like never before. They won't control the buzz this year. But in 2008? Count on it.
Two down...
: BBC honcho Greg Dyke resigns. This is the same sanctimonious prig who lectured U.S. media: "For any news organisation to act as a cheerleader for government is to undermine your credibility. They should be... balancing their coverage, not banging the drum for one side or the other." Mr. Dykes, for any news organization to act as a cheerleader against government is to undermind your credibility, wouldn't you say?
Next: Bring us the head of Andrew Gilligan.
: UPDATE: The BBC apologizes to Blair.
Iraq to Howard Dean: Explain yourself
: Iraqi blogger Ali writes an amazing open letter to Howard Dean following the candidate's assertion that Iraqis' "living standard is a whole lot worse now than it was before."
Ali calls that "too irritating and insulting" and says, "I’d like to (debate with) Mr. Dean and his supporters on few points." I’m not going to comment about the rightness of the statement with more than saying that only a (blind) man would believe it and only a man blinded by his ambitions would dare to say it, but when you say such words, don’t you mean in other words that the sacrifices made by the American soldiers are all in vain?...
You are saying that, either they are stupid enough to sacrifice their lives for the sake of GWB political future, or they are evil people who love fighting and killing and they are doing this only for money, in other words they’re no more than mercenaries. Saying that you only disagree with the way this issue is handled will also not change the fact that you are only harming your men and women on the battlefield.
By statements like these you deny any honourable motives for the great job your people are doing here. How in your opinion will this affect the morality of your soldiers? Feeling that their people back at home don’t support them and that they’re abandoned to fight alone in the battlefield.
And all of this for what? For staying in the white house for 4 or 8 years? Is it worth it?
And this is not directed only to Mr. Dean, it’s for all the Americans who support such allegations without being aware of their consequences. What’s it that you fight so hard for, showing your soldiers as s occupiers and murderers, the soldiers who I had the honour of meeting many, and when talking to some of them, I didn’t see anything other than gentleness, honesty and good will and faith in what they’re doing...
Please consider this for a moment, does winning the elections and getting rid of GWB and the republicans worth the damage you’re inflicting on your men and women’s morality?
My heart goes with those brave people and the widows, orphans and mothers of the American soldiers who died while doing this great service for their country, ours and humanity. No true American could have said it better.
: Meanwhile, at Healing Iraq, fellow Iraqi blogger Zeyad writes a truly remarkable essay about his country and his weblog. Go read it all.
On his land: If you were here now you would almost feel Iraq bleeding from its wounds. You would almost see the palm trees weeping and shedding tears. You would almost hear the two rivers murmuring and moaning in pain. You would almost hear Baghdad wailing and crying for help. You would smell the tension in the air which even rain is unable to wash away. You would sense the years of deprivation and negligence in its soil. Who is trying to steal the smile from its weary face? Who is going to heal Iraq? Who is going to help it stand on its feet? And is this going to be the end to all its sorrows or is there more? On why he writes his weblog: I chose this title for the weblog three months back because I had realized that Iraq and Iraqis needed to heal more than anything else. I was naive and conceited enough to believe that posting entries into this page would actually achieve something. When I started I had huge determination to correct all the misconceptions, sterotypes, and preconceived notions the world held of us as a people. I wanted to bring out the good news from a torn and beaten country that the rest of the world had unanimously regarded as a source of only trouble and bad news. I wanted to convey the daily life, dreams, fears, hopes, and aspirations of Iraqis. I wanted the rest of the world to see us as more than mere news items. I wanted to put a face to my country, a country that millions of people couldn't point out on a world map. I had great hopes that someone high up in the CPA hierarchy would listen and take notes. I had hopes that coalition soldiers patrolling our streets would read and realize that there was no need to be scared of us. I had hopes that other Iraqis (both inside and outside) would look and take heart in my words. I had hopes that I would encourage other Iraqis to write and share whatever they had to share. I had hopes that the whole world would stop crying over spilt milk and move on. I had hopes that we would just all understand and accept each other and stop pointing fingers. Maybe I was too optimistic or maybe I was just trying to justify my own views of the situation. No, Zeyad, you weren't too optimistic. You are doing just what you set out to do.
: And over at Hammorabi, Sam the blogger is doing an amazing job giving us details on the reports of Iraq using oil to bribe and cajole the anti-war, anti-American forces.
This story is so amazing, I wonder how it could be true. But it could.
: Ays tells us about "a bomb in our neighborhood.... the people were sad, others were cursing the coward vandals and terrorists."
: See what one simple tool and the courage and effort of just a few men can do.
Blogger du jour
: Nick Denton and I agreed tonight that Mickey Kaus is on a hot streak.
Farewell, Trippi
: Here's another theory about what happened to Dean: Maybe the campaign became the star instead of the candidate. (And when people finally did see the candidate, they didn't like what they saw.)
It's fascinating reading the comments on Joe Trippi's farewell post on the Howard Dean blog as he is kicked off the bus and replaced by a Gore Beltway boy.
Most of the comments are grateful tributes to Trippi from the community he brought together online. A few are snarky. A few try, gamely, to rally the troops for under the campaign's new leadership. But all in all, it feels as if the campaign is sitting shiva for Trippi -- or for the campaign itself. If I listen real hard, I think I can hear in the background: Those were the days, my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way
La la la la la la Now when can you remember a campaign manager drawing this kind of cult of personality? The only personality that matters in a campaign, the only star, must be the candidate. But here Trippi became a star.
Or more accurately, the campaign and the campaigners became the star. It's about them, not about the candidate. A few weeks ago, we would have said that as wondrous praise of the Dean online miracle: It's about the people, not the politician.
But that turns out to be a big political mistake, for the voters don't want to elect a bunch of bloggers with backpacks. They want to elect a leader.
No Jayson Blair
: Emily Bell writes in the Guardian that Andrew Gilligan is no Jayson Blair.
Right. He's worse.
Blair was merely a psychotic liar who didn't bother trying to act like a journalist in the end and who only wanted to cheat to keep his job.
Gilligan is worse because he does try to act like a real journalist, even as he single-handedly devalues the credibility of the craft.
Gilligan is worse because he operates on an agenda -- anti-war, anti-American, anti-Blair.
Gilligan is worse because he has defenders who share his agenda -- BBC executives, numbnutty journalist unions -- and who will fall with Gilligan and risk bringing down the BBC and, again, the credibility of jouranlism with them.
Gilligan is worse because he does not have even the same decency as a psychotic liar; he does not have the decency to save his network and his profession; he does not have the decency to quit now.
Gilligan is a bad reporter. He is poison to journalism. The last act of his bosses should be to sack him before they then quit.
January 28, 2004
Denial
: There's pathetic denial going on in certain circles over the Hutton verdict. The Independent (surprise!) says, "Hutton is accused of a 'whitewash.'" Tee-hee.
Big smoking gun
: The Smoking Gun teams up with NBC News. [via LostRemote]
Headline of the day
: Trippi's firing according to Kaus: "Beltway 1, Blog 0"
Blogging the blog king
: I'm at Columbia now, awaiting a Nick Denton talk with Oliver Ryan. Nick's not happy that I parked myself by the electric socket. "You're not going to blog this, are you?" Live by the snark, die by the snark...
Nick tells the journalism students that he doesn't look for journalists to write his blogs. He likes to get people when they haven't been destroyed by working in a big paper....
Student asks how Nick squares his view that daily American papers are boring with his admission that blogs are parasitic on big media, linking to the content they create. Nick says, "Why do I have to square it." That is what a Nick conversation is like.
Student tries to get Nick up on a soap box. Nick replies, "We feel no public-service responsibility."
Student: "If it's so boring why are so many bloggers media addicts?" Nick: "They're hypocritical."
Nick punctures pomposity with aplomb....
A new political blog
: David Weinberger has started a new Corante blog: Loose Democracy. I'm way looking forward to reading this because Weinberger is one of the smartest and most candid yet humble people in this new world. In his first post, he rebuts Clay Shirky: We do have a couple of indisputable facts: Dean came in a poor third in Iowa and a disappointing second in New Hampshire. But this by itself leads to no conclusions about whether social software hurt the campaign. For all we know, Dean would still be in single digits as an ex-governor of the Maple Sugar state if the online connection hadn't happened. And we certainly don't know that, if social software failed, it was because it lulled participants into a sense of "inevitability." That's just Clay's speculation. My earlier comment on this here. See especially Jack Balkin's analysis there.
Blinded by the light
: Greg Dyke, BBC director-general, issues a defensive statement.
And Andrew Gilligan, the mope who started all this, does worse and the British journalists' union does even worse. They should be chasing him out as the shame of the business but instead: However, the National Union of Journalists, which represented Gilligan, today hit out at the report's conclusions.
"Whatever Lord Hutton may think, it is clear from the evidence he heard that the dossier was 'sexed up', that many in the intelligence services were unhappy about it, and that Andrew Gilligan's story was substantially correct," said Jeremy Dear, the president of the NUJ, which is representing Gilligan.
Who owns the truth?
: This is not a good day for big, old, traditional news media. It is, however, a good day for the truth.
The BBC accused the Blair government of lying about war when, in fact, the BBC lied about Blair. Now Lord Hutton has handed the Beeb its privates on a platter and we wait to see whether the blind, pompous, and self-righteous heads of BBC News -- Gavyn Davies, Greg Dyke, and Richard Sambrook -- plus the alleged reporter who started all this, Andrew Gilligan, first repudiate the lies, second apologize for lying, and third quit in shame. See many posts on this below.
And in New Hampshire, the big old media guys were proven way wrong today when the voters did what they said for months the voters wouldn't do: vote for somebody other than Howard Dean. See John Podhoretz, below.
So the press didn't give us the facts because, in one case, they lied and, in another case, they were just wrong.
The real mistake -- the real sin of hubris here -- comes when the press acts as if it owns the truth.
It doesn't.
Nobody does. Many people try -- some more honestly, earnestly, and reliably then others -- to find the truth. Some people, like Andrew Gilligan and Jayson Blair, try not to.
But in the end, the truth is a high standard, hard to reach, and an honest soul will admit to failing to reach it, or least to the need to keep trying.
This is what I mean when I say (too much, I confess) that news is a conversation. It's not as if, once the oracle who owns the press or the broadcast tower speaks, we have heard the truth and can stop the search for it. Of course, we can't. It takes time and openness and curiosity and effort and a great deal of back and forth with contributions from many diverse sources and viewpoints adding onto each other to perhaps pile up to the truth.
Yes, the web and weblogs, with their ability to reach out to unlimited sources and viewpoints, can help with that process. They are no more the truth's sole salvation that big media was. But they can more loudly announce when big media fails.
The mistake, again, is acting as if you own the truth, for when you fail, the fall is a long one. The BBC acted as if it -- not its government and not American media, either -- owned the truth. And now it is in free-fall.
All of this is simply to say that in this new media world of instant updates with the ability to change and correct news at any time and with many viewpoints and the ability to link to them anywhere, it's more important than ever for the media to be transparent and open and to recognize that the news is a two-way street and the truth is a process.
So rather than ending newscasts saying, "That's the way it is," perhaps the best thing to do is to open newscasts saying, "We don't know but we think..."
The vindication of Tony Blair
: I just heard Tony Blair's speech to Parliament on the Hutton report. Brilliant: to the point, direct, demanding. He calls on those who lied about him to recant. We're waiting.
The statement is here. In conclusion I repeat what Lord Hutton said in his Summary, at page 322.
"The communication by the media of information (including information obtained by investigative reporters) on matters of public interest and importance is a vital part of life in a democratic society. However the right to communicate such information is subject to the qualification (which itself exists for the benefit of a democratic society) that false accusations of fact impugning the integrity of others, including politicians, should not be made by the media."
That is how this began: with an accusation that was false then and is false now.
We can have the debate about the war; about WMD; about intelligence. But we do not need to conduct it by accusations of lies and deceit. We can respect each other's motives and integrity even when in disagreement.
Let me repeat the words of Lord Hutton:
"False accusations of fact impugning the integrity of others ... should not be made".
Let those that made them now withdraw them.
The moment of truth in Britain
: The Guardian is essentially blogging the Hutton inquiry live. Key points: · Kelly 'took his own life'
· No 'underhand strategy' to reveal Kelly's name
· There was nothing dramatic in Kevin Tebbit's evidence that Blair chaired the meeting that agreed to confirm Kelly's name, or any inconsistency in their evidence
· Gilligan wrong to say government knew its 45-minute claim was wrong was unfounded
· The desire of the PM to have a strong dossier may have subconsciously influenced John Scarlett and the Joint Intelligence Committee to produce a strongly worded document
· JIC's assessment was in line with available intelligence
· BBC editorial and management system was 'defective' - governors also criticised
On Tony Blair
· No 'dishonourable, duplicitous, underhand strategy' by the prime minister...
On the BBC
· BBC editorial system was 'defective'
· BBC management failed to appreciate that Gilligan's notes did not support the most serious of his allegations
· The BBC governors should have recognised the desire to protect its independence was not incompatible with investigating Mr Campbell's complaints, no matter what their tone
· The BBC governors should have investigated further the differences between Gilligan's notes and his report, and that should have led them to question whether it was in the public interest to broadcast his report relying only on his notes...
On Andrew Gilligan...
· Gilligan's allegation that government probably knew its 45-minute claim was wrong was unfounded - even if the claim is proved to be wrong in the future
· Kelly did not tell Gilligan that the government knew the 45-minute claim was probably wrong... Well, it looks like a victory for Blair and a shameful defeat for the BBC and especially Gilligan. The closest he should get to news is wrapping fish in it.
: The head of the BBC is "considering his position" after Hutton slaps him. As well he should.
: UPDATE: Stuart Hughes of the BBC blogs from his foreign outpost: "We're all fired -- thank God I'm over here."
By the way, Hughes once asked why I speak through my "arse" about the BBC. One word. Gilligan. No, three words: Gilligan the arse. I used to respect and even love the BBC and I didn't join in with many others going after them at every turn. But the more I saw of Gilligan, as a symptom of the disease, and the more I saw the BBC leadership allow Gilliganitis and its lies and irresponsibility and journalism-by-agenda to spread through its organization unchecked, and the more I heard the head of the BBC attack American journalism, the more I believed that the vaunted BBC was blindly destroying its own credibility and even that of journalism.
Thence the arse.
: The BBC lets viewers comment on the report but not in an open forum; the Beeb selects which comments to post and look what comes up first: "Mr Blair seems to have nine lives. -Mary, London, England"
Amazing. This report just boiled the Beeb's nuts and it still thinks this story is about Tony Blair and, worse, snarking about Tony Blair.
Tony Blair was right, the BBC was wrong.
Head up its arse.
: Glenn Reynolds has more links here and here.
: UPDATE: BBC Chair Davies to resign. How about his henchmen?
: Greg Dyke -- who should be the first to go -- issues a defensive statement.
: UPDATED UPDATE: Davies has officially resigned. And in the BBC report, former Blair spokesman and BBC punching bag says this: Former Downing Street media chief Alastair Campbell said: "If the government had faced the level of criticisms which today Lord Hutton's report has directed at the BBC, there would have been resignations by now, several resignations at several levels." Hint, hint.
: Tim Blair has a better memory of what I've said than I do (frightening on many levels). He reminds me that I predicted this.
I have one, how about you?
: The FCC is protecting us from the knowledge that men have genitals. Do we need this?
Owning a press doesn't make you right
: John Podhoretz tears political reporters new bodily orifices today: The results last night in New Hampshire represent a humiliating disaster for the mainstream media. The political reporters and editors who have been judging this race for a year have made utter fools of themselves.
Nobody foresaw John Kerry's huge victory in Iowa.... The press failed just as miserably in New Hampshire - but this time by overestimating and overrating John Edwards....
There was no such thing as the Edwards surge. He ended up somewhere around 12 percent, a spectacularly dismal showing considering that he had scored 32 percent in Iowa only eight days before.
And speaking of spectacularly dismal showings, how about Wesley Clark?...
But there could be no more infamous an example of the political media's gullibility than the Zeppelin candidacy of Howard Dean....
It was all basically bull. The same wide-eyed, breathless nonsense has been thrown at us for decades by wide-eyed, breathless journalists who are desperate to catch lightning in a bottle and get famous for spotting the Next Big Thing....
The press has been wrong about everything. Everything. Keep that in mind for the rest of the year. You can be sure that the political media won't remind you of it. Jay Rosen might say that the problem is turning the campaign into a horse race. But I say we want some level of race handicapping; we want to know who's in front because we want to back winners and use our votes well. The problem isn't race handicapping, it's bad handicapping, it's being wrong. The pollsters have been wrong, the pundits have been way wrong. But we've never had alternatives. And we'll never know what impact the predictions alone have on the races (did more people vote for Edwards and Clark, in the Podhoretz formula, because they believed reports of a groundswell?).
I wonder whether the collected wisdom on blogs would do any better (it would be nice if somebody had a way to quantify the morning line on blogs). I don't think it would. Pundits with or without press are still just pundits. It's the voters who matter, as it should be.
So the bottom line is Podhoretz' bottom line: Everything you read everywhere is wrong.
: Newsweek's Howard Fineman on Today, admitting he had been ready to write Kerry's campaign obit only recently: "The lesson to take from the last couple of weeks is don't jump to conclusions."
: Wonkette's guide to press reliability.
: UPDATE: Al Giordano proposes a law of media, politics, and punditry: Before we should take any statement or prediction or political judgment seriously on the Internet, or in any Commercial Media, or other kind of media, we must demand that the plaintiff show us that he or she has been correct in such claims before. Otherwise, it's just a theory, without any proof that the theoretician has any idea what he or she is talking about.
Everybody's a winner
: Katie Couric to Howard Dean this morning: "Let's talk about your second-place victory in New Hampshire."
March to the convention
: CNN says Dean is ahead of Kerry in delegates. Go figure.
If Edwards does what we expect in South Carolina and this thing stays wide open -- if Clark and don't forget Sharpton get some toy soldiers to play with -- we could end up with a convention race. Glenn Reynolds doesn't think so; he says it'll be settled in a month. Probably so. Maybe this convention thinking is wishful thinking. It will be fascinating to watch a party work in smoke-filled rooms in a different era. There are no party kingmakers now, save Clinton (Gore is not even a pretender to the throne). There are also lots more rules about delegates who can't change their votes. When I was younger, the political junkies' dream was always the "deadlocked convention," when the opportunistic savior (Hillary?) could swoop in and grab the nomination away. That didn't happen back then; certainly won't happen now. But as the numbers start to gell, we'll hear all sorts of what-if scenarios.
If this thing does stay wide open, watch the network executives fret about what the hell they should do. In recent years, of course, the conventions had turned into nothing but advertorials for the candidates and the networks were quite right to reduce coverage to nil; let the campaigns pay for commercial time. But if this convention actually matters, then the big nets will not want to see their last frayed hold on the news franchise taken away by cable.
Interesting times.
: And here's Safire's convention wet dream.
: Aaron Bailey's pipe dream.
: Kaus says winning doesn't matter, delegates do. Heck, George Bush taught us that lesson last time around, eh? Why does a Democratic candidate have to win a primary somewhere. sometime to be viable? With the proportional allocation of delegates, it's possible to actually win the nomination without ever winning a primary. All you have to do is finish second in a lot of contests and accumulate delegates while the other candidates perform inconsistently. (That result wouldn't be undemocratic--sometimes Everybody's Second Choice is in fact the candidate who should win. Such a plodding-but-widely-acceptable candidate might also be the strongest opponent for Bush.) ... Why would someone who has a perfectly legitimate shot at winning be expected to drop out? The test should be delegate count, no?
January 27, 2004
Convention
: What are the odds that this goes to the convention? How long as it been since a race was determined there?
Political junkies unite
: Command Post has election-night chat.
Undecided, not divided
: On the radio tonight, I heard that a third of voters decided their votes within the last four days. I'll say it again and keep saying it: We are not a nation divided, we are a nation undecided.
CNN hints that one of the successes of Dean in New Hampshire is a lowered reliance on backpacked outsiders invading the state.
Fox projects Kerry's victory at 8:16.
Could this end up being decided at the convention? When was the last time that happened? Will the networks regret de-emphasizing the Demo confab?
The results trickle in
: Kerry is winning. Dean's "temperment" is hurting him. Dean and Edwards are running in the others' tails. Lieberman is off-camera. Clark keeps the oxygen tent, running head-to-head with Edwards.
At ETech Emerging Democracy
: I'm happy to say that I'll be on a panel led by Dan Gillmor at the ETech Emerging Democracy confab. I'm also looking forward to meeting leading Iranian blogger Pedram Moallemian in San Diego. If you're in the nabe....
 Get 'em while they're hot
: I just went to Demstore.com and bought some hats, buttons and pins for a couple of my favorite candidates -- in case it will be too late tomorrow.
Arrrgh
: I love I Want Media but I may have to stop going there until a talking ad disappears. Every time I go to the page, it starts jabbering with no way to shut it up. I'm saying all this so IWantMedia's proprietor can go to the advertiser and say people are complaining. My complaint isn't with him; it's with a company called Adfare -- whom, you'd think, would know better.
Until blog do us part
: Blogs are not a marital aid: Dear Harriette: When my wife gets mad at me, she writes on her Web site what I did wrong that day. We are in counseling, but sometimes my words will be twisted around on the site. She tells me not to go to the site, but I know one of our neighbors does and I want to know what is being said about me on a public Web site. Any advice? -- Tom, Texas [via Blog Herald]
A Joe surprise
: I wonder whether (actually I'm only wishfully thinking that...) Joe Lieberman could come in at least higher than expected tonight.
: Kaus says: "Some people actually believe in Joementum, thanks to independent voters. Having worked for a low-polling conservative Dem here in '84, I don't."
: John Ellis says Lieberman beats Clark: Kerry 35%, Dean 22%, Edwards 18%, Lieberman 10%, Clark 8%. (I'll say it a third time: Get the jam ready to spread on Clark.)
: Sean Hannity on FoxNews says that Lieberman is the Democrat who could beat Bush because he's the only one tough on terrorism. That, as I've said lately, is the Howard Stern strategy.
I still don't think Lieberman has a ... pardon the expression ... prayer. But at least a Lieberman surge would send a message to the rest the pack.
Wishful thinking, I know, just wishful thinking.
: MORNING AFTER UPDATE. Yup. Just wishful thinking.
A star is conceived, not born
: Best Week Ever asks: How does Dennis Miller have a TV show and Wonkette doesn't? But it looks as if they want to get her on their show.
: Meanwhile, Wonkette says today: Drew Barrymore Gets Onboard Clark
First Madonna, now Drew. What is it with the slutty blondes and Clark? Must be some kind of daddy fixation. Or the raw, sexual appeal of the underdog.
Al Franken of the WWE
: The NY Post reports that Al Franken tackled a heckler at a Dean rally: Wise-cracking funnyman Al Franken yesterday body-slammed a demonstrator to the ground after the man tried to shout down Gov. Howard Dean.
The tussle left Franken's trademark thick-rim glasses broken, but he said he was not injured....
Franken said he's not backing Dean but merely wanted to protect the right of people to speak freely.... "I'm neutral in this race but I'm for freedom of speech, which means people should be able to assemble and speak without being shouted down." ...
"I was a wrestler so I used a wrestling move," Franken said. That might seem like an odd contradiction -- I'm in favor of free speech and so I body-slammed you to shut you up -- but it turns out he was going after a Larouchie. Now it all makes sense, eh?
Better watch out, Bill O'Reilly.
: UPDATE: Nick, a commenter, says the Post is tabbing it up and he points us to two other versions of this most momentous event. From NRO: But just then, a second protester stood up and began his own high-volume tirade.
"Dean's a liar!" he hollered.
At that point, comedian Al Franken rose from among the journalists and others near the stage and said, "Let's get him out of here."
Franken and a few others hustled the second man outside. As they did so, the first ill-mannered LaRouchite reemerged...
Throughout all this commotion, Howard Dean's fuse stayed long and moist. Bad visual.
And CNN does a Larouchie roundup: Franken, a comedian and self-described liberal well-known for his attacks on the Bush administration and conservative-leaning media, helped carry out one of the disrupters. In the process, Franken's glasses were knocked off his face and broke in two.
Putting them back together with electrical tape, he quipped he had been "deputized" by Dean's security.
Undecided blogger is not an oxymoron
: OregonLive, one of my day-job services, got two undecided voters to blog. Steve Outing writes it up.
I'm gonna wash that man right outa my hair...
: Mickey Kaus sums it all up: Campaign dynamic: Race throws up frontrunner; frontrunner attacked and trashed in press; frontrunner fades and is replaced by new frontrunner; lather and repeat. Once upon a time, I thought this was a dumb system; why don't we have a national primary and be done with it? And while that has many advantages (campaign finance reform not the least among them), I now see benefits to the primary unsystem: It is the gauntlet though which candidates must go not only with media (who so far have been wrong about whom we like) but with the voters. Oh, sure, it's not a real test of Presidential qualifications. But it does bring out the worst in the candidates before it's too late. And it gives us time to make our own decisions.
January 26, 2004
A growing threat
: By now we've all heard that weapons detective David Kay quit after not finding WMDs in Iraq. But listen, too, to what he told Tom Brokaw tonight: TB: The president described Iraq as a gathering threat — a gathering danger. Was that an accurate description?
DK: I think that’s a very accurate description.
TB: But an imminent threat to the United States?
DK: Tom, an imminent threat is a political judgment. It’s not a technical judgment. I think Baghdad was actually becoming more dangerous in the last two years than even we realized. Saddam was not controlling the society any longer. In the marketplace of terrorism and of WMD, Iraq well could have been that supplier if the war had not intervened. An imminent threat. An imminent threat.
Whose human rights?
: Human Rights Watch, self-declared protectors of humans and their rights, issues an appalling opinion saying that the ouster of Saddam Hussein was not a matter of human rights because not enough people were being murdered. How many is not enough, they don't say. The US and British governments cannot justify the Iraq war on humanitarian grounds, according to the annual report of Human Rights Watch published yesterday.
Kenneth Roth, executive director of the human rights organisation, said at the launch of its 407-page report in London: "The Bush administration cannot justify the war in Iraq as a humanitarian intervention, and neither can Tony Blair.
"Such interventions should be reserved for stopping an imminent or ongoing slaughter. They shouldn't be used belatedly to address atrocities that were ignored in the past."
Although Saddam was responsible for massacres, especially of the Kurds in 1988 and of Shia Muslims in 1991, Human Rights Watch said the killing had "ebbed" by the time of the invasion last year.
Mr Roth said: "We know summary executions occurred in Iraq up to the end of Saddam's rule, as did other brutality. These should be met with diplomatic and economic pressure, and prosecution. So by this horrid logic, if only Hitler or Amin or Stalin or pick your tyrant had stopped mass murders, they should be left in power. Cool. Murder to your heart's content but as soon as the U.S. troops are at the border, stop and the world will be on your side.
In his own paper, Roth says: The result is that at a time of renewed interest in humanitarian intervention, the Iraq war and the effort to justify it even in part in humanitarian terms risk giving humanitarian intervention a bad name. If that breeds cynicism about the use of military force for humanitarian purposes, it could be devastating for people in need of future rescue....
In our view, as a threshold matter, humanitarian intervention that occurs without the consent of the relevant government can be justified only in the face of ongoing or imminent genocide, or comparable mass slaughter or loss of life. To state the obvious, war is dangerous. In theory it can be surgical, but the reality is often highly destructive, with a risk of enormous bloodshed. Only large-scale murder, we believe, can justify the death, destruction, and disorder that so often are inherent in war and its aftermath. Other forms of tyranny are deplorable and worth working intensively to end, but they do not in our view rise to the level that would justify the extraordinary response of military force. Only mass slaughter might permit the deliberate taking of life involved in using military force for humanitarian purposes. Oh, please, give us the chart that defines "mass." Give us the color-code that says that rape rooms and executions and political prisons and utter repression are not worthy of intervention. Since you, sir, are the sold arbiter of what is mass murder versus just plain murder and what is humanitarian and what isn't, please illuminate us.
This is a tainted political move by Human Rights Watch and it will color its credibility in the future. The organization would rather fight Bush than defend the human rights of the Iraqi people.
Rerun
: If you missed the Blogging of the President radio show, you can listen here.
George Carlin = Andy Rooney + snark
: The last time I saw George Carlin, when I was a TV critic, I thought he'd lost it. He hasn't found it since. Q: You're known as a very liberal comic. Are you trying to change people's political views when you go out there? Do you have an underlying agenda?
A: No. First of all, I'm not liberal. I'm just about (being) anti-United States. I don't like the way this country operates. I think we've ruined this place. And I think it's largely because of businessmen. And businessmen are not liberals. So if that makes me a liberal, then that's just an association. It's not a choice. ... Yes, anti-Americanism is thrust upon you, like a slump in your career.
Virus alert
: A dozen virus emails snuck through the spam filter today. Not dumb enough to open any of the attachments. But we warned: There's a spam swarm.
Just one question
: My colleague Peter Hauck wants just one question asked at the next debate, just one: Do you believe we are at war? And he means the war on us, not the war in Iraq.
One candidate would answer yes: Joe Lieberman.
I fear the rest would not.
That means to me that they don't know what's happening in the world right now -- or in the electorate.
Howard Stern has been escalating his advice to Democratic candidates. This morning, he said that a winning Democrat would say that we are at war on terrorism and that Bush is doing a bad job and that I, Democratic saviour, will be even tougher. That person will win.
Whose side are you on?
: Someone I like and respect said this to me in email: I would never say this in public, but you are happy to slam Dean and the other Dems on your blog but you never tell anyone who you are for. Just like negative campaigning doesn't work, negative blogging has its limits. Well, that person was too nice to say it in public but I will. What the heck.
My life is an open blog.
But the problem is, I don't know who I'm for. (Hell, I can't even say that without getting my knickers in a grammatical gordian knot: I don't know for whom I am? Oh, well...)
In this blog, writing about politics, I'm just a voter and I'm transparently subjecting you to my process of selecting. I've done that in other areas. In the early days of this blog, my few readers watched me give up my cherished pacifism in the face of our generation's Hitler (a comparison I make quite intentionally, unlike others who have lately used it glibly). I've gone from disliking and distrusting Bush to at least giving him a chance to do his job (and weblogs have helped me be more open-minded). And I've decided that I don't like the new Burger King sandwiches after all. This is the transparent life. That's one reason we webloggers get attacked -- who the hell could care less what you think? -- but we also get attacked if we're not transparent. So I'll be transparent. So call me the Invisible Man.
When it comes to politics, though, it's not so easy for a journalist to reveal preferences; we have that beaten out of us at an early age. There's no crying baseball. There's no political preference in journalism.
But my email correspondent is right -- and so, for the most part, is Roger L. Simon when he challenges us all to vote in public -- and so I should at least give you the context of where I stand right now, in case you could possibly care:
I have been a life-long Democrat and liberal and I've enumerated various stands here (never enough for the satisfaction of some, but they can kiss my NWL ass). I've been disturbed by many trends on the left, leaving its roots and soul behind. Too often, the left cares more about PC than free speech; today it cares more about fighting Bush than fighting a tyrant like Saddam. I could go on and on but I already have. Unlike Simon or Totten, I haven't left the fold; I just dyed my sheepskin black.
It's no surprise that I don't like Dean and the more I see of him the less I like him. I won't hash it all over again because I've hashed him plenty but I think he is destructive, trading on bile rather than on building a future. I say he is wrong on the war and that ousting Saddam is a humanitarian and thus a liberal issue. I disagree what he says about many issues (including media) and agree about some. But in the end, I think he is far from inclusive and he is hot-headed and perhaps even a bit unstable; I do not think he would make a good President; I also think he has no chance of winning the election. As a voter, he turns me off and I say so. And as I've said here, I think his negativity is what has lost him the nomination. I am not alone. Far from it.
But because Dean was -- through the fault of my fellow media travellers -- so long the presumed front-runner and winner, I will admit that I was lazy. What was the point of studying the stands of a dozen other candidates when none of them will win or, at the least, most will not survive until my state's primary? The primary system will do its job, I figured, and then I will do mine. But the last few weeks have changed all that.
I had hoped early on that Clark would be the alternative to Dean but he has, instead, tried to become Dean the Sequel. He harps on the war with the same shrill tone as Dean. He flipflops menacingly. He reveals himself to be an amateur and if this were American Idol, I might be forgiving, but this is the Presidency we're talking about. Clark is not my man.
Lieberman would be my man -- if only he could win. We agree on the war. He is the most mature and experienced of the entire field. He's smart and practical. He's a Clinton Democrat and so am I. We disagree about many issues -- among them, government control of entertainment content. But all in all, he has come the closest to my weltanschauung. But he's losing.
So now I turn to Kerry and Edwards and, quite frankly, I don't know enough about either of them yet. Sure, I've followed Kerry over time but I need to study up on what he's saying today, for politicians do morph, don't they? And Edwards is impressing people but I fear that could be because he's the one about whom we know the least, and thus he's the one in whom many are now putting their greatest hopes. He is the blank slate. So I'll watch him, too.
So I'm not engaging in "negative blogging." I'm engaging in honest blogging. I don't like or trust Howard Dean and I say so here. I have been unimpressed with Clark and I've said so. I am still figuring out the rest of the pack if the primaries don't select for me.
And that, folks, is the way things are.
Should you give a damn? No. I'm just one voter. But since (some of you) asked....
Any enemy of yours is...
: Qiwi Lisolet (what a great name, eh? I hope it's real) wonders about my suggestion that we should counteract our overdoes of friends networks with an enemies network: Does this mean that the enemy of my enemy's enemy is my enemy? A question for friend networks and foreign policy alike.
Take that! Please!
: Atrios responds well to Sullivan.
I'm disappointed that this is turning into a talk-radio decibel derby. It's unbecoming and unproductive. Who's to blame? Well, Andrew did throw the first punch last night. But as I read comments on my site on my Treo from the studio, I saw mention of insults thrown at me (and, I assumed, other show guests) over on Atrios' comments.
And today, I hit my fill with inane, childish, immature, offensive, stupid, braind-dead, numbnuts (enough?) name-calling and insults going on among a few people without lives on my comments. You know it's getting bad when it turns into a game of insult poker: I'll see your homophobe and raise you and anti-semite!
Enough!
This is precisely what gives the Internet its bad reputation as a neglected schoolyard, populated by childish, churlish, ignorant little street urchins.
Discussion and argument and challenges over issues and ideas is welcome here and should be welcome on all weblogs.
But bitchslaps -- as good as they might feel at the moment -- should be the subject of regret.
This is our neighborhood. Let's clean up the graffiti.
 The snow tracking poll
: Forecast for New Hampshire Tuesday: Snow. What does that mean? Deaniacs are more cultishly motivated so they'll wear their PJs inside-out (see blow) and trudge through mountains of cold stuff for their man. Clark people are military and tough and they will go to the polls in their Humvees. Lieberman voters are long-suffering and will suffer for their man. Edwards supporters will worry about the snow on his hair. Who the hell knows? It's too late for polls and guesses and pundits and pronostications about what the weather will do. Now the vote is where it should be: with the voters.
The blog for those without lives
: MarthaWatch. [via IWantMedia]
The snow day meme
: Has anybody else heard this: Our kids suddenly started wearing their PJs inside out. Turns out all the kids do it when they're hoping for a snow day. It's good luck, says the meme. We didn't do that in my day. We trudged through four feet of snow with nothing on our feet but....
Off the air
: Just got home from the Chris Lydon radio show. I had fun; who doesn't love a microphone? But the problem is, whenever I get off their air it feels like the morning after: Did I make a fool of myself? (Of course.) Will anyone remember? (Well, it is radio.) Did I talk too fast? (Am I me?) I was quite honored Chris included me for an hour of his show and so, I also felt like a guest in his house, at his party, hoping I wouldn't spill any red wine on the rug, wishing I'd get invited again.
It was amusing at the end listening to Andrew Sullivan go after Atrios and turn this into, oh, just another radio talk show, albeit one with bigger PBS words. What is it about conservatives and radio? Do the microwaves boil their blood? Sullivan said he criticizes Bush but Atrio never criticizes liberals. Atrios was nonplussed. I was merely amused. I did, however, join in when Andrew went after Atrios for being anonymous. Andrew set it up well, talking about transparency as a virtue of this medium and then accusing Atrios of being transluscent. I agree. If he has some good professional reason why he can't, then he should at least give us a hint. He owes that to his readers.
I also enjoyed asking Frank Rich when he's going to blog. He said he has no time and wants a life.
Net: I'm glad that Chris got two hours on many stations to explain and explore weblogs. This phenom is still damned new and now's the time for this discussion. I hope it becomes a regular gig (and I hope he will invite me back after the carpet cleaners leave).
More links and comments over at the Blogging of the President site. And Doc practically transcribes the whole two hours (sorry I talk so fast, Doc).
Good-night.
January 25, 2004
The betting line
: The stats kid discovered by Kaus gives his final projections: Kerry wins in the 30s; Dean recovers to the mid-20s; Edwards is third; Clark is fourth and thus toast; Lieberman is Lieberman.
Oops
: This was an accidental blank post from my phone but suddenly a dozen comments about the radio show appeared, so I'm leaving it here.
More from Blogging of the President
: A Republican strategist, Max Fose, says there will be an 800 pound gorilla on the Internet and "that will be George Bush and his Internet campaign." Why? Email addresses. They still belong in the direct mail church.
He talks about letter and talk-show campaigns through this "avenue to activism." Josh calls him on it: "That's very top-down."
A caller, Elvira asks the question of the night: What the hell does "blog" mean?
And Josh gets a fan call.
Blogging of the President
: I'm in a studio in Newark at WBGO listening to the feed of Chris Lydon's Blogging of the President as I wait to go on at 10p. Call in.
Chris is doing a good job explaining this thing to the larger audience. Josh Marshall is soft-spoken and smart, as usual. Ed Cone is level-headed about the reality of technology. But the best is hearing the calls. So call in.
The latest caller admitted trying to blog for two days. She prefers paper.
From the house that hype built
: Subhed on a Newsweek cover story on Kerry: Forget the hype about blogs and backpacks. It's all about getting warm bodies to the polls.
We are not a nation divided.... We are a nation undecided
: A few posts in recent days have grappled with the contention of some that we are living in a more fragmented, some would say balkinized world -- and many blame the Internet for that.
Those who say that are wrong about the Internet, wrong about the natural state of the world in media and politics and marketing, wrong about the current state of American politics, wrong about about the cause for all this change, and essentially insulting to the intelligence and spirit of their fellow man and fundamentally cynical about democracy. Take that!
See Jay Rosen's comment at Davos that the age of mass media is just that -- an age.
And today, Jack Balkin follows up on his eloquent refutal of Republic.com a few days ago by refuting a New York Times story that frets over fragmentation.
The Times says: The Internet became the ultimate tool for finding like minds and blocking out others long before supporters of candidates began seeking one another out on Meetup.com. With online dating sites where searches can be tailored by age and income, e-mail forums for the most narrow band of subjects, bookmarked sites and even spam filters, the Web allows users to tailor the information they consume more than any other medium. Social scientists even have a term for it: cyberbalkanization. And Balkin replies: The article runs together two different kinds of democratic activities: One is organizing followers for a political campaign, where you want people of like minds to get together, the other is engaging in democratic discussion about public issues with people who may disagree (and disagree strongly) with you. These two activities are part of democracy, *but they are not the same activity.* Both are necessary, but it is often difficult to do both at the same time. Exactly.
In fact, if these fearful critics read citizens' media, they would understand that it is incredibly open: You have to link to that with which you disagree so you can argue with it and by doing so, you send people to your opposition and absorb that opposition's viewpoint in what you write.
But candidate weblogs, as I've said often, are not citizens' media; they are political organizing tools and damned good ones.
Both are important tools in a democracy. Both serve different roles. Neither balkinizes. The organizing tools of the Internet get more citizens involved. The citizens' media tools enable more citizens to be heard than ever before. Together, they are healthy for democracy.
Now as to fragmentation, I've said often that the real revolutionary invention of the last century was the remote control (added to the cable box and the VCR), for that gave the audience the freedom to select what it wanted to watch, not what three network executives wanted them to watch. This is how I put it a few days ago: The remote control and cable killed mass media like a volcanic eruption; the Internet is the forest that grows in the ashes. Given choice, the audience, of course, selects from it. That is the natural order of things in news, entertainment, media, products of any kind. And it works in all those areas; it serves the market -- that is to say, each of us -- better: I now get the news in which I'm interested from all kinds of new sources. I consume the entertainment that entertains me, not necessarily you. I buy products more customized to my needs. Given choice, of course we take it. That's not fragmentation. That's progress!
There's just one area in which that does not completely work: elections.
For we can't all have the President -- or senator, or congressman, or mayor -- we want.
Somebody has to win.
In the end, we can't be fragmented, segmented, balkinized there; if we are to be a nation united, we have to end up selecting and supporting the winners.
Now there are those who say that we are terribly divided now. I say they are wrong. Here's how I put it in my Star-Ledger op-ed: And the truth is: We are not all angry. Despite the way media and politicians treat us, we don't all live on the edges, in our red or blue states, facing each other across some new Mason-Dixon line of left vs. right.
We hear all the time how we are a nation divided. But we're not. We are a nation undecided.
Look at the large number of voters in Iowa who settled on whom to support just a week or even a day before the caucuses. They were looking for a leader to march in front of the positive wing of the party, to stand for something. We are a smart and caring people in a system that works, and we want to hear various viewpoints and select the ones that fit us best and that give us the best chance of winning. That's politics. That's democracy. That works.
The Internet as well as cable are, in fact, doing a great job of providing us -- those who care -- with a tremendous new diversity of sources of information and viewpoints and opinions. This is incredibly healthy for the democracy.
The Internet and cable are not dividing us. They are informing us.
And we are absorbing this information and these viewpoints and deciding in our own sweet time whom to vote for, as is our right. That's what happened in Iowa. That is what is happening across America in what is now -- God bless America! -- a wide-open race.
No, the Internet is not dividing us. Politicians are. Media dinosaurs are.
Yes, if anyone is dividing us -- or trying to -- it is the politicians and pundits who want to think that we are two-dimensional creatures, easily swayed, uncaring, not bright, not informed, set in our ways, angry, and vindictive. How dare they? How awfully insulting of them. How terribly undemocratic.
Yes, it's true that half of American didn't vote for George Bush and half did. But once he was in office, most Americans -- especially after 9/11 -- wanted to support our nation. Most don't want to see us lose in the war on terrorism or in Iraq. Most are patriotic, caring Americans with diverse opinions. Most aren't angry and divided. We can d | |