BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

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.

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Big smoking gun
: The Smoking Gun teams up with NBC News. [via LostRemote]

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Headline of the day
: Trippi's firing according to Kaus: "Beltway 1, Blog 0"

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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....

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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.

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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.

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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..."

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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.

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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.

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I have one, how about you?
: The FCC is protecting us from the knowledge that men have genitals. Do we need this?

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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.

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Everybody's a winner
: Katie Couric to Howard Dean this morning: "Let's talk about your second-place victory in New Hampshire."

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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?

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