BuzzMachine
by Jeff Jarvis

May 31, 2004

The future of news

: The Editors Weblog is blogging a worldwide confab of newspaper editors in Turkey (to which I wish I'd managed to finagle an invite). A report on the future of news by Andrew Nachison and Dale Peskin of the American Press Institute, who propose three new models for news:

The first is called the "know-trust network" -- a personal community where informal networks are exchanging news, information and conversation. "They are becoming the principle means of learning and discovery," said Mr. Peskin and they could eclipse traditional media.

The second is referred to a digital everything. "All news and information will need to be virtual, digital and mobile," he said.

And the third proposition is the power of an individual person. "The individual -- not large institutions, will exert unprecedented power," he said.

Not sure what it all means. I'll wait for the PowerPoint.

: Meanwhile, Australian media man Brandan Hopkins responded to Warren Buffett's pessimistic outlook on the newspaper biz:

"Buffett said, 'the economics of newspapers in the United States are very close to certain to deteriorate over the next 10 to 20 years.' This would be due to increased competition for advertising dollars from other media. Now, you ignore Warren Buffett at your peril. But I think it is relevant that he singled out United States newspapers, which in general have not kept pace with the product developments being seen elsewhere in the world. US
newspaper houses must innovate to survive."
More, please.

: And Dean Wright, editor of MSNBC.com and Jean-Louis Cebrián, head of El Pais, say that in the world of weblogs there is more need for editors. I disagree. Weblogs (and GoogleNews) don't replace reporters but they do replace editors. This is all the blogging reports:

[They] agreed that the newspaper "editor's role becomes more important" in a new media environment in which news can be produced and disseminated through online means such as blogs. Mr Cebrián welcomed blogging and said he sees no obstacle to the emergence of these new forms of media, as long as editors still play an active role in monitoring and directing content.
Once again, more please.

This event needs some comprehensive live blogging. Next time, editors of the world, invite me (or I can nominate many others) and we'll blog/report the heck out of this so the conversation can ensue online.

Spirit of America

: Please go and read Dan Gillmor's wonderful column on Spirit of America. I'm going to have much more to say about this tomorrow.....

Unmasked

: Two once-anonymous bloggers have taken off their masks.

Patterico -- the guy who got the LA Times to cover stories they should be covering -- let Mark Glaser print his real name in the story about bloggers' influence on big media. He's Patrick Frey. There, that didn't hurt, did it?

Armed Liberal just revealed himself to be Marc Danziger, who just signed onto be COO of Spirit of America (more on that shortly). Danziger said that as we discussed the need for transparency in this endeavor (and, see below, in media and business and government) it was time to come out.

A few weeks ago, I speculated that Atrios, now unemployed, would take off his mask and he left a comment saying he just might. And he should.

I know we've had this debate on anonymity many times over. But I say again that in this new medium that values and demands transparency, openness, and honesty from government, politics, journalism, business, and the academe, it's hypocritical to hide behind a chicken's mask of anonymity.

And in this medium whose greatest liability is the conversational terrorism of comment trolls, it's dangerous to give them cover by demanding cover yourself.

I have much more respect for writers who are willing to put their monikers where their mouths are. I have no respect whatsoever for trolls who snipe and run into their rat holes of anonymity.

The excuses for not revealing your identify are -- let's be honest -- rare. If you have the courage of your convictions, then follow the examples of Danziger and Frey. Reveal yourselves.

I can stop anytime, really

: Fred Wilson reacts to the NY Times story on blogging as an addiction:

The basic gist of the article is that blogging is an addiction and the people who do it are nuts. At least that's what I took from the piece.

It's not surprising that the New York Times would take this tack on blogging. I remember when the Internet was new on the scene back in the mid-90s and the New York Times was constantly talking about all the sex fiends trying to pick up kids on the Internet. The idea that there are new forms of media that they don't understand is inherently terrifying to the people who run the large newspapers. And so their coverage of new forms of media are inherently biased negatively.

And Scoble, the most addicted blogger I know, also responds:
My response? I'm addicted. But let's compare addictions:

Blogging vs. Illegal Drugs. Drugs are illegal, so you can get thrown in jail. So far blogging has remained legal in the US (if you're blogging in countries like Iran or China, though, watch out). Drugs make you feel good. Blogging makes me feel good. Drugs eventually reduce your brain size. Blogs make your brain bigger. Drugs make you feel crappy the next day. Blogging doesn't have a hangover, unless you count all the comments and email that a good blog generates. Drugs cost lots of money and you have to visit substandard neighborhoods to get them. Blogs are free (or almost so).

I found the right answer to my wife as she launched an intervention. I explained that just because the laptop was on my lap, that didn't mean I was blogging. This is how I read the paper. It's the same as her sitting on the couch reading a magazine.

It worked.

You're welcome.

Joi's love letter

: The AP writes a most admiring feature on Joi Ito.

Democracy sprouts
: Zeyad observes the growing pains of democracy in Iraq:

We had an interesting meeting at the clinic a few days ago. The director asked all employees to her room where we were politely asked to be seated by two people who mentioned that they were from the governorate office, but I suspect they work for the CPA. A middle-aged woman in Hijab and a tall skinny fellow wearing thick glasses.

They were supposed to gather information and our opinions on several issues regarding the future Iraqi government, they were touring hospitals, schools, and clinics to meet with people. I don't know why but the situation felt rather awkward and funny, apparently I wasn't the only one because I noticed that everyone else was smiling. They asked us a few questions about democracy, federalism, the form of the government, etc. I also felt that the two people who were lecturing us were in bad need themselves for someone to lecture and explain a couple of things to them. Toward the end of the meeting, the woman in Hijab progressed more and more into fiery talk until it was all reduced to recycled common rhetoric, that was when I started yawning occasionally glancing at my watch. As soon as I heard her mention "Sayyid Sistani (Allah preserve him)", I began to think that discussion was futile.

It was nice however to watch the other employees talk, the discussion went something like this:

"How do you see the future of Iraq?" the woman asked us.
"There's no use in anything" our biologist whined morbidly, "Iraqis don't deserve a democracy. We need a firm ruler to prevent chaos, anything else is useless".
"Yes, a firm and just leader" the registrar added, "We don't want any new mass graves".
"So you are already quite hopeless?" the woman asked them.
My boss was having a hard time trying to conceal her giggles. I was grinning from ear to ear as well.
"Excuse me, but I think what Iraq needs at the moment is martial laws" ,this was one of my colleagues. "Every nation implements martial laws at such times, it might sound violent at first, but there have to be some firm steps taken to put an end to the lawlessness and anarchy".
"But don't you think some innocents would also be caught up in it?" the man in glasses asked her.
"Not quite.. " a medical aide chimed in. "When you catch someone guilty like a looter or a bandit I say HANG HIM on the spot!". The evident glee in which he pronounced the words 'hang him' made me a bit uneasy.
"So what do you think about federalism?"
"No federalism", "No no", "Of course not" seemed to echo from all around the room.
"Do you understand what federalism is?" the fellow in glasses asked them, "Do you think it's a ploy to divide Iraq?" he offered (it looked like that was what he thought).
"Yes yes", the others replied in unison.
This was where I had to enter the discussion. "Do you actually believe the Kurds are going to agree to anything less than federalism?", everyone remained silent. "I mean they have been virtually independent for 13 years. Why would they give that up?". Some of them nodded in agreement.
"Yes, but Dr., they just want to seperate from Iraq" the medical aide said.
"They didn't say so, even though they have that right. The Kurdish leaders have stated on many occasions that they aren't interested in seperation, they just don't want to be second class citizens". This seemed to have convinced them and they let it go at that.
"So what do you think about the Transitional Adminstrative Law? Is it appropriate for the new Iraq? Has anyone read it?".
No one had read it of course. I gave them a brief explanation about the rights and freedoms granted by the document, they seemed impressed but they objected to the article stating that two thirds of the population of any three governorates could annul the permanent constitution. Some heated discussion followed and we agreed in the end that the law was temporary and could be modified by a future sovereign government and that overall it was a very progressive constitution, while keeping in mind that constitutions are merely ink on paper and that Iraq had some good constitutions in the past, but that proper enforcement of the constitution was the most important issue.

: And eavesdrop on this conversation reported by blogger Ali about a picture of Sadr hanging in his hospital:
-Now how am I supposed to have my dinner with this person pointing at me!? Do you really think this is a picture that should be put in a cafeteria??

My friend smiled and said,

-Shh, lower your voice! I’m your friend but if some of his followers heard you say that, I really fear for your safety. I told you that they have instructions to kill anyone who talks badly of Sadr.

- I won’t lower my voice. All my life I had to lower my voice whenever I wanted to speak about Saddam. I couldn’t have the joy of at least tearing one of his pictures because of the chaos that followed the liberation. I want to tear this one.

- No, please don’t. This is for your own sake.

- I promise you I won’t touch his fathers face or the old Iraqi flag, although I don’t like it. Besides I have the freedom to say my opinion in anyone.

-Yes, but what about your friends, the Americans, do they allow anyone to curse bush? Didn’t they hit Al-Rasheed hotel because of the picture of Bush the father was painted on the floor of the entrance? Another friend interfered.

-Are you serious!? And for your information many Americans hate Bush, and the Americans -even if they don’t like it- don’t prevent anyone from saying his opinion, and I want to scream in contempt and rejection for any tyrant and this fool is a tyrant project.

-Can you really swear at Bush? I don’t think so. My Shea’at friend said.

-Ok, just to show you that I fear no one and that we are free: S**T ON BUSH, S**T ON SADDAM AND S**T ON YOUR MUQTADA AL-SADR. I screamed as loud as I could.

Some of my friends laughed and others looked around to see if there was anyone of Sadr supporters there. They couldn’t believe what they heard.

: Meanwhile, Raed is pissed about the selection of an interim government. But at least he now lives in a country where he can be pissed and say so.

May 30, 2004

The audience is dead. Long live the audience.

: I was listening to Studio 360 this weekend as Kurt Andersen and music blogger and critic Greg Sandow (the music critic I hired at Entertainment Weekly and a blogging colleague of Terry Teachout's) talked about the iffy present and future of orchestras in America. Various orchestras are trying new programs and new buildings and others are sighing a lot.

And as I ran along (listening on my iPod), I thought that orchestras need to learn the lessons of community from online. Orchestras and others.

Why shouldn't orchestras go to MeetUp and arrange get-togethers of fans with other like-minded fans (this community of interest can act like a community). Why not friends' cocktail parties before the concert at the concert hall. And why shouldn't orchestras start blogs and forums to let the audience know the performers and watch them particularly (Sandow said that one major symphony until not long ago had contracts requiring performers not to smile.

It's just an extension of the Cluetrain. If markets are conversations, if news is a conversation, if companies should be conversations, if politics is finally starting to be a conversation, why shouldn't the arts be conversations? If we in media are trying not to call the audience the audience, shouldn't orchestras also find a new relationship with their audiences? That's not to say that we can all be violinists. Of course, we can't. Art -- and talent -- are a clearer separation than business or journalism or politics. Still, if orchestras want to reinvigorate themselves, perhaps they should start not with themselves but with their audiences.

Just a thought while running.

Can't do

: I was thinking more about Chris Albritton's post, linked below, about the difficulties of reporting in Iraq. The one thing I wish he'd done was think from the readers' perspective and tell us the stories he thinks he should report and would report but, because of security and other difficulties, can't.

In short: What is the effect of security issues in Iraq on the quality of coverage we are getting?

The New York Times and Washington Post and other major news organizations should write similar messages to their readers. I don't want to hear about all their problems; I hate stories about not getting the story ("the mean mayor wouldn't call me back").

Instead, I want them to honestly tell us what we're not getting in their coverage of Iraq: How they're not able to tell us the mood of the street because they dare not venture onto the street, for example.

I'm not suggesting that reporters should take more risks for the story; I was very relieved this week, for example, when three NBC news employees who'd been held hostage were released. But I am suggesting that news organizations be transparent and open with us. They know the stories they should be delivering but can't and they should tell us that.

: You see, not all communication with readers has to be in the form of post mortems and mea culpas. How much better it would be if a news organization would level with readers as the news and coverage goes on.

But post mortems are better than coverups and it is a new Times that has Dan Okrent dissecting the corpus journalism of WMD coverage:

The Times's flawed journalism continued in the weeks after the war began, when writers might have broken free from the cloaked government sources who had insinuated themselves and their agendas into the prewar coverage. I use "journalism" rather than "reporting" because reporters do not put stories into the newspaper. Editors make assignments, accept articles for publication, pass them through various editing hands, place them on a schedule, determine where they will appear. Editors are also obliged to assign follow-up pieces when the facts remain mired in partisan quicksand.

The apparent flimsiness of "Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert," by Judith Miller (April 21, 2003), was no less noticeable than its prominent front-page display; the ensuing sequence of articles on the same subject, when Miller was embedded with a military unit searching for W.M.D., constituted an ongoing minuet of startling assertion followed by understated contradiction. But pinning this on Miller alone is both inaccurate and unfair: in one story on May 4, editors placed the headline "U.S. Experts Find Radioactive Material in Iraq" over a Miller piece even though she wrote, right at the top, that the discovery was very unlikely to be related to weaponry.

The failure was not individual, but institutional.

How much less embarrassing this would be -- and how much more respectful to the readers -- if it had occurred months ago and not just in print but even in dialogue online.

When Len Apcar, editor of NYTimes.com, was at the first Bloggercon (he didn't attend the second), he said he doubted the editors of The Times would want to be too transparent about their process. At the time, I'll admit I pretty much bought that. But I don't now. What's the harm of letting your readers, your customers, your public know that you, too, debate and fret about the stories you can't get or the stories that are resting on the stomach like bad kebabs? What's wrong with transparency? It beats the hell out of opaqueness -- especially for an industry that demands transparency of all others.

May 29, 2004

Memorial

: David Weinberger just sent me to the most amazing story of Cpl. Jason Dunham, a Marine who saved the lives of his fellow soldiers by throwing his helmet and body on a grenade.

Self-defense

: Chris Albritton, the journalist/blogger who just returned to Iraq, unleashes a long diatribe about how difficult it is to report in Iraq: the traffic, the security, the rules, the mistrust. He defends his journalist colleagues against accusations that they either aren't sticking it to the man or aren't reporting good news ("There isn't much good news to report").

OK, he's there and we're not. Better reporter than I, Gunga Din. But I think the diatribe misses two points:

First, because of all the limits he lists, don't we need to acknowledge that we are not getting good reporting from Iraq? I don't care about the reasons and excuses of which there are plenty. Let's just take a cold, hard look at the quality of the reporting and see whether we're getting the whole story.

Second, Chris, if I may suggest: Go talk to some of your fellow bloggers, Iraqi bloggers. You, of all journalists, should understand the benefit of their perspective -- and reporting. Partner with them; show them some tricks of the reporting trade; quote them; introduce their story to mainstream Western media because no one else is. It's the perfect bloggers' scoop.

See my earlier post suggesting this to other reporters here and here. See Jay Rosen on this topic here and here. See also Thomas P.M. Barnett's description, below, of Iraqi blogs as "serious ground truth."

Harry Potter, R.I.P.

: The actor who plays Harry Potter predicts that his character will be killed off.

Images of sin

: Thomas Kielinger argues in The Observer that Germans can't escape their history and shame all the more because there are so many images of their sin. Well, perhaps. There were fewer images of, say, the Soviet gulags and so there is less chronic memory of them. Still, the Germans' relationship with history has more to do with the enormity of their crimes than their documentation, I'd say.

: See also this image from Normandy.

Bike nuts
: Some amazing video of bikers holding a frightening drag race through traffic (and pedestrians) in New York. [via MediaDigest]

Busting out with pride

: Living in Europe (third post in a row) reports that Danish breasts are growing.

Yawn or vote

: The Party of European Socialists starts a European Parliamentary election blog "to counter voter apathy." Oh, yup, with headlines like these, they'll rush to the polls:

: "SAVING THE PLANET THE EUROPEAN WAY"
: THE SPIRIT OF SOCIAL JUSTICE GAINS GROUND
: THE WORLD NEEDS PRE-EMPTIVE POLICIES AND NOT PRE-EMPTIVE WARS
: FAIR DEAL FOR INTERNATIONAL WORK-SHARING
: MAKING EUROPE GOOD FOR YOU
: MAKING EUROPE AN EXCITING DEMOCRATIC ARENA
: RUMSFELD IS WRONG ON "OLD" AND "NEW" EUROPE

They need to read Wonkette. If they want to stir up excitement about politics, a little sex always helps.

Backlash

: Living in Europe celebrates a German mea culpa for anti-Americanism:

Well, now, what have we got here? Why, it's Andreas Rinke writing in today's issue of Germany's leading financial newspaper, Handelsblatt, and regretting the repulsive anti-Americanism that's become the leitmotif of German discourse this past while.

His op-ed is entitled "Der gute Deutsche" ("The good German"), and in it Rinke takes his fellow citizens to task for their arrogance and their ignorance....

"It is with astonishing nonchalance that the ordinary German judges the moral deficits of the superpower," Rinke writes. "Responsible for this, is a mixture of schadenfreude, political rejection and cultural arrogance." The key graf:

"And that, by the way, is why it is so presumptuous to boast about the apparently better ability of the Germans at "nation building". Here the torturing US soldier, there the school-building German army — this contrast is consciously cultivated. But, on the one hand, what is being suppressed here is that Germany itself is a successful example of the American ability to build democracies. One the other hand, people are being brazenly diverted from the fact that the German army cannot and will not do anything else: it is only because the Americans and the British did the "dirty" work in the war on terror that the schools can be built in Afghanistan."

Worldwide yellow alerts

: Get Aon's political risk email updates, free.

The ground truth

: Thomas P.M. Barnett, author of The Pentagon's New Map and a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, has a weblog [via Die Zeit] filled with lots of blunt and interesting commentary, including this, which leads to a compliment for Iraqi blogs:

I understand the deal with the devil in Najaf, and I know that temporizing situations can work in our strategic favor. But such deals only work if we spend the meantime creating the connectivity that generates strategic despair on their side, not ours.

Strategic despair is when your side surveys the environment and says to itself: “No matter how hard we try, this thing is going south—there’s just too many of them and too few of us.” I worry about strategic despair a lot right now with the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, and even more so back here at home, where media coverage highlights only failure and never success. Why? The media’s definition of war is almost as narrow as the Pentagon’s: show us the smoking holes and dead bodies! The “everything else” is completely ignored, which is why onsite blogs like IRAQ THE MODEL are so important—they define serious ground truth.

All the nonnews that's fit to print

: Don't you just love stories that report what did not happen?

The Times today reported that the antiwar left is not yelling at John Kerry. "Despite doubts on Iraq, left-wing Democrats have not attacked him," said the Page 1 caption.

This is such a nonstory that it stinks of agenda. Does The Times think the left should attack Kerry?

wwmemorial.gifWhat we fight against

: The war in Iraq is not like Vietnam. It is like World War II. It is a war against fascism.

It's hard to find something more politically incorrect to say these days. One side will yelp because it gives the war in Iraq an air of legitimacy. The other side might object because it borrows the tragically ironic rhetoric of Soviets.

But as I watch the lead-ups to today's dedication (at long last) of the World War II memorial in Washington, I am struck by the need to remember the single cause that led us to sacrifice so many lives: eliminating fascist dictators. I wonder how many lives could have been saved if we had wiped them out sooner. And I wonder how many Iraqis might have been saved if we had taken out their fascist dictator sooner.

Yesterday, I picked up P.J. O'Rourke's Peace Kills, which is sometimes written like a gravel road. But when O'Rourke hits a truism he hits it dead center. I hope he won't mind me quoting a segment on fascism and war:

Americans have been surprised by Iraqi fascism, although we are familiar enough with other evil ideologies. Communism still persists in Cuba, North Korea, and the minds of a million university-type intellectuals. Religious extremism waxes worldwide. But communists do bad things for a purpose. They have a vision of utopia where everyone shares everything and you give your Lawn Boy to a family in Chad. And religious extremists do bad things for a purpose. They have a vision of a utopia where everyone goes to heaven together. So what if you have to die to get there? You have to die to get to heaven anyway. Fascism, however, is a pointless ideology -- the graps of power for power's sake. The fight against fascism seems like Dad's war, Granddad's war. Fascism should be out of date in the purposeful, task-oriented world of today. Never mind Slobodan Milosevic, Vladimir Putin, Yasir Arafat, Somali warlords, Charles Taylor, China's politburo, the Saudi royal family, murderous Hutu rabble, and New Gringrich's career arc.

Fascists do bad things just to be bad. "I'm the baddest dude in Baghdad," Saddam Hussein was saying, "the baddest cat in the Middle East. I'm way bad." This was way stupid. But fascists are stupid. Consider Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. He didn't have any. How stupid does that make Saddam? All he had to do was say to UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix, "Look under my bed. Look in the special spider hole I'm keeping for emergencies." And Saddam Hussein could have gone on dictatoring away until Donald Rumsfeld is elected head of the World Council of Churches.

Instead, we blew the place to bits. And a mess was left behind. But it's a mess without a military to fight aggressive wars; a mess without the facilities to develop dangerous weapons; a mess that cannot systematically kill, torture, and oppress millions of citizens. It's a mess with a message -- don't mess with us.

Yes, and once the mess is made, we need to continue to follow the lessons of World War II -- and not World War I. We must not cut and run desert the Iraqi people and the region to future fascists. We must help the Iraqis, who are not our enemy, as we helped those who were our enemies in Germany and Japan to build better futures. And that doesn't just mean waiting for the government to do it. We, the American people, should remember the righteous cause of both eliminating and preventing fascism and we should be helping the Iraqis -- and thus the Middle East -- to do that, people to people. (More on how to do that in a few days.) Eliminating fascism and tyranny from the world is the truest memorial to the millions who fought and lost their lives in this cause in World War II.

May 28, 2004

Sudan blog

: A blog to get and keep you up to date on the Sudan. [via Rebecca McKinnon]

A new leader

: The Iraqi governing council has picked a new leader: British-educated neurologist, former exile, and Shia Iyad Allawi.

Tonight, NPR's reporter said outright that he's corrupt and second in Iraqi contempt only to Chalabi. Haven't seen any reaction about him on Iraqi blogs yet.

: UPDATE: More from Glenn Reynolds.

Any of us

: You never know where and when it is going to hit.

I happened to have on Dateline, rarely an inspiring experience. But tonight in a story that was probably a rerun, they gave us the amazing story of Harry Waizer, a survivor of 9/11 and Cantor Fitzgerald who was headed to work in an elevator that day when his car filled with jet fuel and flames, burning him horribly. But he made it down; through is own fortitude and that of his amazing wife, Karen, he survives.

He feels guilty for the colleagues around him who died. I feel guilty for watching him and coming away with nothing but a pill a day. Nevermind that. It only hits home again, as we are warned of another attack on the way: It can be any of us any time. Any of us.

Here is his testimony before the 9/11 Commission:

I have no rage about what happened on 9/11, only a deep sadness for the many innocent, worthy lives lost and the loved ones who lost so much that day. There have always been madmen, perhaps there always will be. They must be stopped, but with the cold detachment reserved by a surgeon for removing a cancer. They are not worthy of my rage. Neither do I feel anger at those who arguably could have foreseen, and thereby prevented, the tragedies. If there were mistakes, they were the mistakes of complacency, a complacency in which we all shared.

This commission can not turn back the hands of time. There is nothing to be gained by asserting blame, by pointing fingers. The dead will remain dead despite this commission's best efforts and intentions. But it is my hope that this commission can learn and teach us from its scrutiny of the past, and if the findings of this commission can prevent even one future 9/11, if they can forestall even one plan of Osama bin Laden, prevent even one more act of madness and horror, I and the rest of this nation will owe the commission our gratitude, and I will be proud of the small part I was allowed to play today.

New York notes

: My son and I saw Beyonce filming a scene on Madison Avenue. She walked. That's all, walked. But she walked in a flouncy, thin, white summer dressed. She Beyonced.

: The guy at Car Cash told me that his business changed after 9/11. Huh? Well, after the economy sank and new-car manufacturers went to no-interest deals, the bottom fell out of the used-car market. Amazing how the ripples keep coming out of that rock in the pond.

: The Car Cash guy also said they've been advertising with Howard Stern for more than 26 years and it works for them.

Next: the hyperlocal show 15 Minutes

: Don Hewitt -- who has produced 60 Minutes for, what, a century? -- is working on creating local franchises called 30 Minutes.
Am I wrong or didn't Hewitt object to the creation of 60 Minutes II because it would dilute and distract the brand?
What is this going to be like in the hands of the local hairstylees? [via Lost Remote]

Bozos

: I like having comments here when they bring discussion and argument over issues and the news and ideas.
I hate them when bozos who hide behind anonymity come in to attack.
Nobody says I have to take it. And so I just banned one bozo and I'm going to kill bozo comments.
Don't give me any crap about "censorship" and Stern. I'm not the government. This is my house and if you talk trash, I kick you out just because you're an ass.
You want to disagree with me and argue with me, great. You want to insult, then I'll kick you out. If the bozos force out those who would talk like civilized adults, then I'll just kill the comments.
And if you do that without having sufficient balls to use your real name or sufficient imagination to make up a name then I have no respect for you anyway.
You know who you are. If you don't like it, tough. Go start a blog.

How many?

: For the record, the Paper of Record messed up Technorati's statistics on the number of blogs in its story yesterday. They said:

The number of bloggers has grown quickly, thanks to sites like blogger.com, which makes it easy to set up a blog. Technorati, a blog-tracking service, has counted some 2.5 million blogs.
Of course, most of those millions are abandoned or, at best, maintained infrequently. For many bloggers, the novelty soon wears off and their persistence fades.
Wrong. Those are blogs that are regularly updated. A proportion of new blogs are abandoned, as I explained to the reporter in email (emphasis added):
A good source is Technorati, which tracks blogs for links. At www.Technorati.com you'll see that they are now tracking more than 2.4 million blogs. At the Personal Democracy Forum at the new school today, Micah Sifry quoted his brother, David Sifry, founder of Technorati, with the latest stats: They track 12,000 new blogs a day (up from 3k last March); a third of those new blogs will go stagnant (no new post in three months); the other two thirds add up. The number is growing fast.
Pew also did a study. Note, though, that its study came from figures gathered last year and the number grew considerably since. See these posts:
http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_03_02.html#006406
http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_03_03.html#006414
http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_03_01.html#006398
You are way, way safe saying there are more than 2.5 million. There are actually many more than that but they are tracked with ongoing content. If you need anything more at all, don't hestitate to ask.
The Times made it sound as if it's 2.5 million and dropping. They also found the lowest numbers they could find (Pew has bigger numbers than Jupiter, which they quote, but Pew didn't fit in with their agenda.)

Smells like this deserves an Official Times Correction.

When I first got called on the story -- by the intern not the reporter -- they were on the track of the bloggers-are-nuts-in-bathrobes and I lectured him, saying that's wrong and insulting and blind to the real story. They did at least include a quote of mine defending bloggers against the instastereotype. But They were setting out to make fun of and belittle the medium.

Scoff at your own risk, Times.

(They also got the description of my day-job company wrong. And I wouldn't have minded a link, guys.)

: UPDATE: Considering the apoplexy of some in the comments, I am getting some clarification on the stats and will pass on what I find. If I'm wrong, of course, I'll say so.

: UPDATE AND CORRECTION: I was wrong about an important aspect of this: I had understood from Dave Sifry when he spoke to ETech that Technorati dropped blogs from its count when they did not update in three months. I'm now told (and a commenter confirms) that this is not the case; Technorati still tracks the total. So I was wrong about that.
The actual count of current links from blogs is a different matter; it counts links from the home page of a blog, I'm told, and that is why the number of links to an individual blog can go down and up.
The commenter still says that The Times story is wrong but I leave that to them to discuss. My understanding that the count at Technorati was cleaned was not correct and so I'll be the one to make the correction here.

Whereabouts

: Taking the day off to try to sell my wife's car to CarCash. I feel as if I am Jack taking the cow to the marketplace and if I don't do this right, all I'll have to show for the trip will be some magic beans. Back blogging later.

: UPDATE: I have to say, CarCash made it pretty painless. Old Bessie is now sold at market, ready to go to slaughter. And I have a pocketful of magic beans. Now in an Internet cafe waiting for John's Pizza to open to feed my son. And if I keep going giving you a chronicle of my day, it won't be long before I write about my cat and prove the Times story yesterday right. So I'll stop now...

May 27, 2004

Real

: I forgot to link to Curbed, the great new New York real estate blog from Lockhart Steele. I saw a preview and loved it and it keeps getting better. NY property is always entertaining.

Pass the brie

: My colleague Joe Territo says excitement about New Media is back, thanks to blogs:

I'm looking forward to my next invitation to a new media cocktail party. It's been a long time.

Campaign advertising online
: NPR's Morning Edition had a good piece this morning on campaign advertising online. Matt Gross and Scott Heiferman quoted.

Nanny government: You are what you don't eat

: As upset as I get over the FCC's efforts to nanny us, I will admit they're damned libertarians compared to the looney Euronuts. There's a movement to ban advertising of junk food:

European legislation would be needed to impose an effective ban on junk food advertising, according to a public health specialist.

Dr Geof Rayner, the former chairman of the UK Public Health Association (UKPHA), said that a national ban on television commercials that promote junk food, such as burgers and fizzy drinks, would be ineffective because of widespread and growing access to satellite TV.

His comments came after the Commons health select committee today recommended a voluntary ban on TV commercials promoting unhealthy food in a damning report on Britain's obesity epidemic.

Idiots. It's not junk food you want to ban. It's excess. Is a peanut bad for you? No. Is eating two pounds in a sitting every day bad for you? Yes. But we wouldn't want any fizz in Europe.

The Daily Stern

: KEYSTONE KOPPS: The scariest FCC commissioner, Democrat Michael Copps, opens his yap and pushes once again for more government regulation of media. Say that three times out loud and feel the hair stand up on end: Government regulation of media. Government regulation of media. Government regulation of media.

Federal Communications Commission member Michael Copps said media deregulation is “dangerous,” news and entertainment have deteriorated, public-interest protections have “weakened and withered” and TV stations’ service to their local communities must be measured by more than blood drives and fund-raisers.

In remarks Copps planned to give at an FCC hearing on broadcast localism in South Dakota Wednesday night, the Democratic commissioner said American communications has deteriorated under deregulation.

“We are paying a terrible cost, both in the kinds of homogenized entertainment Big Media sends our way and in the news and information upon which our democratic dialog depends,” he said.

Copps, the commission’s most outspoken media critic, told the community members in attendance that he wanted to know whether they thought local broadcasters were airing too much sex and violence....

Government regulation of media is what Iran, China, North Korea, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia do -- not America. Listen to him -- he would have government regulate our news and entertainment. He's a friggin' ayatollah.

: CATCHING UP: Been too busy with meetings, meetings, meetings that go into the night to blog, even about Stern, the FCC, and the First Amendment. So here are a few catch-up links:
: Ernie Miller on the FCC regulating speech (and sex).
: The FCC plans to expand its regulation of TV violence.
: College stations being affected and even shut down for fear of the FCC.

This is a test...

: The Department of Homeland Security and the FCC are holding a session on June 2 to see how local media can be better prepared in the event of, well, a terrorist attack. It will be webcast.

Gulp

: Well, it's a quasi-blog, but it's relevant hereabouts: Boston.com has bought BostonDirtDogs, a Red Sox fan site. [via IWantMedia]

The ultimate blog meetup

: Hoder sends word of a Weblog Festival in Tehran, Iran on June 8-10 (damn, don't you wish you could be there?). Here's a photo from the last big gathering of bloggers there at Hoder's photoblog. Iit was Hoder's photos from that session -- just folks, just eating lunch -- that first impressed upon me how blogs and the Internet can connect folks across any boundaries; this, too, is why I'm so glad to see photos showing up on Iraqi blogs. Here's Hoder's blog post on the event. And the official Weblog Festival site: "Our goal is to improve the quality of such Persian media and to improve their quantity as well." (That sounds just like the mission of the Citizens' Media Center I've been hoping to put together here.)

It's being put together by Persian Blog and the National Youth Organization of Iran -- which, mind you, is a government organization. Think about that: This is a nation that has arrested bloggers and still cuts off Internet access and yet a government organization is sponsoring a blog event and bloggers -- who write at some risk -- will come. A land of ironies.

: MORE: Hoder forwards a link to a story that by Dan de Luce, the Guardian journalist recently expelled from Iran, that explains well just how ironic a land Iran is:

Iran is a country where repression is arbitrary, not systematic as in many other states in the Middle East, and it is not as efficient either. Some laws are never enforced, some murders are never solved and some critics of the regime are left alone while others are locked up. Iranians never know where the boundary is, allowing the "system" plenty of room to manoeuvre as it pleases.
Arbitrariness makes life unpredictable and allows for a degree of debate and political ferment. But sometimes it is merely cruel.

Carb news

: Steve Rubel, PR guy and blogger, is promising to read news only on blogs next week. Cute, but I say this is a completely bogus gimmick, a PR stunt without substance (sorry, Steve). The problem is that he won't click on links to journalists' stories.

Well, no [honest, sane] blogger would say that we present all the news that's fit to print on blogs. We edit the news; we select it; we give it perspective; we poke and prod and question it. But we can do all that only because we link to others' news and source material and only by clicking on those links do you get the complete story. I also assume that people who read blogs are not living in caves and are not idiots and do care about the world and do get news from TV and radio and newspapers and web sites. At this juncture, bloggers do not attempt to give you all the news and so the result of this "experiment" is a foregone conclusion: You won't get all the news.

: Steve responds in the comments:

Jeff, I appreciate your opinions, as always, but this isn't a stunt. It's a true experiment to see if I can use the perspectives offered on weblogs as a window onto the core news delivered in the media. If you read my post I state strongly my belief that the media will always be important. I am simply trying to see if I can get the news I need to live by learning about it all through blogs. Normally, I would definitely click on the news links, but that defeats the purpose of the experiment.
: And I respond:
Sorry, Steve. Love your blog. Don't agree with you here. I don't see the "experiment." Reading blogs and NOT clicking on the links they recommend to you is not reading blogs; it's tonedeaf to the medium and how it works. Links are essential to blogs and by ignoring them, you're not performing an experiment that tells you anything about blogs.

Separate from that, I think the apparent hypothesis behind the "experiment" is flawed because you're assuming that bloggers even try -- even as a whole -- to give you a full news report. They don't. When people yell as us for not writing about a given topic, that is what we yell back: We're not trying to give you all the news. So this becomes self-fulfilling; you will not get some big stories (because they don't interest the bloggers you happen to read -- which is another deciding factor in the "experiment" and because bloggers assume you'll get commodity news elsewhere).

I don't object to this in defense of news media. I object to it in defense of bloggers; it misinterprets the medium.

Quote whore

: I guess I've been so busy because I've been giving so many interviews. Herewith a summary of recent press:

: Quoted in today's NY Times Circuits story about obsessive bloggers. When the (intern) reporter called, I worked hard to get them off the idea that bloggers are all a bunch of looney cat owners typing in bathrobes. My bits:

Jeff Jarvis, president of Advance.net, a company that builds Web sites for newspapers and magazines, and a blogging enthusiast, defended what he called one's "obligation to the blog."

"The addictive part is not so much extreme narcissism," Mr. Jarvis said. "It's that you're involved in a conversation. You have a connection to people through the blog." ...

Mr. Jarvis characterizes the blogging way of life as a routine rather than an obsession. "It's a habit," he said. "What you're really doing is telling people about something that they might find interesting. When that becomes part of your life, when you start thinking in blog, it becomes part of you."

: Daniel Radosh did a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece on the agent to the blog stars, the wonderful Kate Lee, the one person in that stodgy old biz who gets this new world and knows it's a goldmine of talent and ideas.
Suddenly, books by bloggers will be a trend, a cultural phenomenon. You will probably read about it in the Sunday Times. And when that happens the person to thank—or blame—will be Kate Lee, who is currently a twenty-seven-year-old assistant at International Creative Management.
Buzzmachine [one word, factchecker, one word!] is merely mentioned in a list of bloggers who feel guilty about not working on their books and I'm grateful for that mention.

: Mark Glaser put together a good and it's-about-time roundup of how bloggers are -- cynics be damned -- having an impact on media. Here's a quote from the cutting room floor:

This is the best thing that could happen to journalism.

News is a conversation. The process of informing the public and getting
to the truth can only be strengthened when news media get help from the
audience to push harder for accuracy and fairness....

: And rounding out this ego roundup, I'm honored that Xeni Jardin quoted this blog in her Wired News story on Rumsfeld's sudden photophobia.

: UPDATE: Felix Salmon gives the NY Times obsessive-bloggers story -- and the bloggers quoted in it -- a proper tweak:

Jeff Jarvis, president of Advance.net, a company that builds Web sites for newspapers and magazines, and a blogging enthusiast, defended the fact that he is quoted in every single article about blogging ever written.

The Daily Blog

: WashingtonPost.com's Dan Froomkin writes a very instructive piece for editors of online news services. Among its many good ideas is a love song to blogs:

Consider if you were starting a "newspaper" today. Wouldn't you want to facilitate exchanges with readers? Wouldn't you want to encourage your readers to find out more than what you can publish? Wouldn't you want to make it easier for them to take action? Wouldn't you want to define and create a community? Wouldn't you want to make your readers feel important?

Blog tools give you all that -- not to mention the ability to easily and quickly post something you just found out about. (What could be more journalistic?)...

So I think that at least a portion of every online news site's home page should be turned over to some sort of blog space, where journalists can post items and readers can post comments, effective immediately. Try it and see where it takes you....

The most successful blogs all have something in common. Their authors are unashamedly enthusiastic about the topic at hand. (Often, of course, they're outraged.) The lesson: There is no virtue in sounding bored online.

Online, journalists should not conceal their fascination for the topics they cover. They should not hide behind the traditional bland construction of news stories. They should still be fair, of course, but they should also have voice and passion -- and sometimes even outrage. There is a risk here that the line between news and opinion may get blurry, but so be it. We should be turning our online journalists into personalities -- even celebrities -- rather than encouraging them to be as faceless as their print colleagues. The Internet demands voice.

Hows would you incorporate blogs into the news sites you read (or, for that matter, don't read)?

May 26, 2004

The Kremlinology of Iraq and The Times

: The New York Times appears to fall on its sword today over some of its reporting on the lead-up to war in Iraq. But it's not necessary what it seems.

In one view, this is The Times going after Bush: By admitting they were stupid to rely on Ahmad Chalabi and his henchmen for stories, they can put themselves up on a pedestal of late-blooming virtue and say that Bush was even stupider to rely on Chalabi and his henchmen for intelligence that led to war. The problem I have with that is that The Times is being quite selective in its sword falling. Every day, the paper -- any paper -- is filled with anonymous sources and mistakes and stories that don't turn out as reported and predicted. Why is the paper taking the extraordinary move of public confession with this story? Because there's an agenda.

In another view, this is The Times getting ready for various attacks on reporter Judith Miller that are coming (at the Personal Democracy Forum, Eric Alterman said it was shameful that The Times had not fessed up on Miller's mistakes and the crowd, lefty like Eric, applauded; there's a bill coming due).

In yet another view, this could be The Times getting ready for more to come out about Chalabi and even various reporters' dependence on and relationship with him. Lots more is going to come out about Chalabi from every side of the fight. Yesterday, the NY Sun (no link available) said that the raid on his office and home "cam as the Iraqi National Congress leader was preparing a potentially devastating audit of how Iraq's oil resources and seized assets were being disbursed by the chief of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer."

You can't read this story without a Kremlinologist. And I'm sure that today, many webloggers will do a fair bit of Kremlinology behind what The Times says:

But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge.

The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on "regime change" in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks. (The most prominent of the anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmad Chalabi, has been named as an occasional source in Times articles since at least 1991, and has introduced reporters to other exiles. He became a favorite of hard-liners within the Bush administration and a paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles, until his payments were cut off last week.) Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations — in particular, this one.

: UPDATE: Here's the Guardian story on the NY Times "mea culpa." Unlike The Times, it actually mentions Judith Miller.
One of the New York Times' star reporters, Judith Miller, is known to have relied heavily on Mr Chalabi for stories about Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction, although she was not named in today's piece.
There are rumors of at least two big stories about Miller about to come out. This is the sound of the first shoe dropping. Plunk.

: The AP's spin makes it about regime change at The Times, too:

Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis told The Associated Press she could not comment on whether disciplinary action would result from the newspaper's investigation.

Nearly all the stories were published during the tenure of former Times executive editor Howell Raines, who resigned in June in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal. Raines and former managing editor Gerald Boyd left after a Times investigation found fabrications or plagiarism in dozens of Blair's stories.

: I wonder what involvement, if any, Public Editor Dan Okrent has in this. His column was absent Sunday.

: Now here's a fun combination: The Agence France Presse story on this in Al-Jazeera. And here's Reuters' version. Mind you, they're all just reading the exact same thing we're reading and have nothing new to add.

: Here's Jack Shafer's lead-up to this in Slate yesterday: He predicted today's editor's note and also said Okrent has been calling reporters with WMD questions. Many other good links there.

May 25, 2004

Technical difficulties

: Wazzup with Technorati lately? Or should I say, wazzdown?

Kudo

: Tom Biro's Media Drop keeps getting better and better. Add it to your list of media sites (Romenesko, IWantMedia, PaidContent.org, et al).
Among today's Media Drop news: Big plans for Sirius (glad I bought the stock)... a link to CableNewser's scoop that CNN is considering a broadband Internet-only channel...

: I just got scolded in the comments for not also mentioning that Tom started blogging for NJ.com after meeting up with the folks there at a blogging MeetUp. I thought that was taking self-promotion too far; but fine; here's Tom's other blog.

Eclipse

: I picked up a copy of the NY Sun today -- something I do occasionally -- and was going to link to a few interesting stories today but I can't.

More hot blog babes!

: Greg Auld sends me the link to a FoxNews interview with Wonkette and Washingtonienne. I watched a few seconds but couldn't listen because the family has the yodeling contest called American Idol.

NPR watch

: On the way home tonight, All Things Considered's lead stories were:
1. The replacement of Gen. Sanchez as Iraq commander.
2. An American Friends protest with empty boots on Capitol Hill symbolizing dead American soldiers with many, many quotes.
3. The guy who built Abu Ghraib protests Bush's promise to tear it down.
These were the three most important stories in the world tonight? OK on the Sanchez story; that was actual news. But the other two?

Not ready for prime time

: The Boston Herald says no Kerry acceptance speech could kill network coverage of the Democratic convention [via Lost Remote]. The truth is, the conventions -- plural -- have not deserved major TV coverage in decades. This is why God invented CSpan.

Dear John,

: In this, the final chapter of Arianna Huffington Day in New York, she talked last night to a small group at the Citizens Table dinner. It's usually off-the-record but she whispered to me before the dinner began, "Does that include bloggers?" I said that was up to her. She was, of course, fine with more mentions. Amid her always-amusing and charming spiel, this was new to me:

Arianna said she and Joe Trippi have created a petition to John Kerry:

We all want to send George Bush home to Crawford, Texas in November. We know that Bush will try to win by playing on our fears, appealing to our worst instincts, and keeping us divided from each other and the world. You can prove that the answer lies in appealing to the "better angels of our nature" and uniting us.

Let Bush own September 11th and the politics of fear. You should own September 12th - the spirit of generosity, courage, and community that poured forth in the aftermath of the attacks - and the politics of hope.

Offer voters a bold moral vision of what America can be. A vision that is bigger than the things that divide us. A vision that brings hope and soul back to our politics and appeals to more than voters' narrow self-interests. A vision that makes America once again a respected force for good in the world.

Dont be tempted to adopt the familiar - and failed - Republican-lite swing-voter strategy. Instead, you can reach out and inspire the fifty percent of eligible voters who have given up on voting altogether. If you do, you will win not in a toss-up, but in a landslide.

Senator Kerry, I'm ready to vote my hopes and not my fears. So please: Go Big, Ask More!

I'm not sure what to think of this. On the one hand, you could see this as an expression of citizens' media and politics: The people speak to the candidate. On the other hand, if two Democratic machers feel the need to start a petition to get their candidate on the right track or chugging faster, doesn't that imply that they fear he could be the engine that couldn't? I prefer to see it as the former, because I, too, have been pushing Kerry for a stronger, clearer strategy on Iraq (quoting Micah Sifry's admonition: "You can't beat something with nothing") and it's a lot easier to be heard not as one person online but as -- taking Arianna's latest tally -- 300,000.

Strength in numbers is something I learned at yesterday's Personal Democracy Forum. Rep. Weiner emhasized that he reads his mail from his district but it's clear that the more letters he gets on a topic or the bigger media presence that pays attention, the more attention he pays. And the Kerry campaign's CTO said the campaign gets 10-15,000 emails a day and they use it to tally up the buzz that's out there. Not sure what to do about that in this blog world; I think there needs to be a way to aggregate opinion and express it as a movement. Strength in numbers.

Hyperlocal campaign blogs

: In the comments below, Jon Ham says the Herald Sun down Durham way has offered blogs to 100 local candidates. I'll be eager to hear how that goes.

May 24, 2004

Personal Democracy, cont.

: I didn't blog our panel at the Personal Democracy Forum this morning; trying to is the height of obnoxiousness. Instead, I found myself taking notes on paper, as if I were blogging. Just can't stop.

The panel turned into pounding Rep. Andrew Weiner on blogging. He doesn't think he needs to blog -- but then, he doesn't fully understand what blogging is (even though he reads them when links are sent to him). Like media people, he still thinks blogs are like forums with unbridled comments and nastiness (he said everytime he appears on FoxNews, he gets 100 anti-Semitic messages and he fears that). But he needs to understand that having a blog is all about transparency and communiation and conversation.

What I saw clearly is that if we want our politicians to blog, we need to help them. We need to hold a session for them to educate them and their staffs on blogging and citizens' media and the benefits of them. We need to create tools and tutorials that match their needs.

"If I could, I would substitute a blog for that gymnasium in Forest Hills in a minute and live there." Then let's create it for them.

Odds & odds

: A few more odd moments from the day so far...

: I sat next to Tina Louise at The Week's lunch. Nothing more to say about that. I just think it's about the coolest name-dropping I've ever done here.

: Spent some time catching up with John Gibson, a friend from our mutual long-long-ago in San Francisco and a very nice guy. He explained what happened in Britain (see the previous post): He called the BBC a bunch of liars on the air in Britain and there were complaints against him for violating a law -- a law -- that he says forbids newscasters from giving opinions in the UK. God bless our First Amendment. Thank God for the Revolution.

: Michael Fuchs, ex head of HBO, said afterwards that he put George Carlin's special, complete with dirty words, on cable twenty-odd years ago and he can't believe we're still huffing and puffing about it this many years later.

: Michele Malkin, the columnist, said as she left that she likes this blog. What a strange if wonderful world this is. That should be the other way around: kooky Internet guy goes up to big-time print person. Times are a'changin.

week0504.gif

The Week on indecency

: I'm at The Week event on indecency and media and I'll blog first, clean up later...

: Bill Maher says Americans "really like bad words, they like to see some skin, they like titillation."

: Maher on Janet Jackson: The country is freaking out after "that one blurry black tit." At the same time, they have accepted 2,500 vacation trips from those they should regulate and that's what's obscene.

: Michele Malkin says she's more concerned about political correctness: Her editors X out "illegal alien."

: Arianna turns it into Iraq: "Obscenity is invading a country...." Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maher later accuses her of entering into her stump speech.

: Maher says that "if a lot of people like pornography, that is community." Thus that is the communiy standard. Harry Evans asks him: "Do you have any standards at all?"

: John Gibson says he's a friend of pornographer Mitchell (an old San Francisco connection) and it's fine if people have it -- but broadcast is different.

: Evans, the moderator, brought a whistle to blog off the dirty words.

: Arianna starts to make fun of Gibson for joining FoxNews and changing. Gibson: "I remember a different Arianna, too."

: Harry asks are sexual words damaging and dangerous? Gibson says people shouldn't have to hear it in their living rooms. Maher says, "You say it as if we're in an Orwellian world where they're watching it on TV and they can't get away from it. They're watching it on purpose."

: Maher: "I have never in my life listened to a shock jock. The only time I have heard Howard Stern was when I was on his show and that was too much."

: Arianna says we're paying too much attention to indecency and too little to 9/11.

: Harry asks whether Maher is opposed to Stern being dropped. "Yes, and I hate him," is his answer.

: Maher: "Can we put away these silly old chestnuts. The other one is that the public owns the airwaves. Rupert Murdoch owns the airwaves."

: Harry turns to political correctness and censorship. Malkin says she is "concerned about the use of civility as a club to censor speech on campus." Example: The affirmative action bake sales on campuses that have been shut down. "That is what I am more worried about." Newspapers will take out "illegal alien" because it is "insensitive."

: Maher: "The biggest threat of censorship is on college campuses. They are out of control.... The kids today. Somebody needs to slap them. They do not understand what free speech is. And it's coming from the left...." He tells a story of speaking at Smith and a student who walked out of watching the final episode of Ellen because it was boring was threatened with being thrown off of campus for a "hate crime."

: Arianna says she things The Swan is the absolute bottom but she would not want it banned because then someone would try not to show her the pictures from Abu Ghraib.

: Gibson raises the Nick Berg video -- showing Abu Ghraib but not Berg. Maher: "I've never been so proud as an American ... that our torture is better than their torture."

: Gibson: "As Tom Brokaw said about 9/11, we didn't exploit the day. We sanitized it."

: Gibson: "I don't know if I"m supposed to tell this. I almost got kicked off the air in Great Britain." He said it's illegal to express an opinion on broadcast. Not sure what he means....

: Malkin: "Those Abu Ghraib pictures were journalistic pornography." She says that if you ask a journalist to report on the details of partial-birth abortion "they all of a sudden get too delicate."

: Karen Finley does a moment of performance art from the lead table. She acts as if "orange alert" is an orgasm. Hadda be here....

: Maher on Abu Ghraib photos: "Those pictures are very gay. When you're staring at a gigantic table of man-ass, that is over the rainbow Will & Grace... I don't think Donald Rumsfeld should step down, he should come out."

: Maher says there shouldn't be such a thing as a "hate crime. That's a thought crime." Crimes, he says, don't come out of love.

: Sue Elicot (sp?) of Air Amerca (the one with the British accent) says the station is pushing the envelope? How? "Anti-political correctness." Really?

: Ashleigh Banfield says that she did complain about Michael Savage, who called her a slut and news whore. The complaint went nowhere.

: Michael Fuchs, ex head of HBO, scolds them: "None of you has mentioned the First Amendment." I applaud.

: Karen says, "We have to live with offensive speech." Amen.

: Maher says MTV is worse. It teaches children to be narcissitic and shallow.

: I stood up to complain about the chill government creates. You've heard it before. I'll spare you.

: Arianna: "Can we please be outraged by something real rather than Janet Jackson's friggin' boob." She says "boob" with a cute accent.

: Monica Crowley complains about the lack of uniform standards. She used to be for the rules until she got her own radio show. "Everything is so subjective." She stopped herself from saying "bitch" yesterday.
Maher: "What she's saying is that the definition of a liberal is a conservative who's just been censored, if I may paraphrase that."

: Maher brags: "I went on the Tonight Show in 1993 and said the words 'sucks.' No one had ever said the word sucks before... They went apeshit backstage. Three days later, Johnny said 'sucks."

The Daily Stern

: EVIL DISNEY: For a cynical, greedy, and evil corporation, Disney now outdoes itself for cynical, greedy, and evil behavior, throwing out the First Amendment for the sake of its cable strategy:

The Walt Disney Co. has quietly been lobbying Congress to apply broadcast indecency rules to cable programming, according to informed sources.

Were Congress to agree with Disney, basic and expanded-basic cable networks could be fined thousands of dollars by the Federal Communications Commission for airing four-letter words and steamy love scenes prior to 10 p.m....

According to informed sources, Disney is backing cable indecency legislation while fighting proposals that would require cable operators to sell cable networks a la carte.

Many broadcasters think it’s unfair that they have to comply with FCC indecency rules while cable networks do not. That’s the view of the National Association of Broadcasters, but NAB has declined to support indecency regulation of cable.

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association — of which Disney is a member — is fighting both indecency and a la carte legislation. Disney is apparently supporting indecency legislation in an effort to drain momentum from a la carte, which some consider a potentially devastating blow to ESPN’s business model.

Disgusting. There's a crack in the First Amendment allowing the FCC to censor words on broadcast -- a crack I say should not exist -- and now Disney wants to take away First Amendment protection from its own media. Short-sighted. Cynical. Greedy. Evil.

: AND THE POPE, TOO: And for his own agenda, the Pope wants to regulate media and speech.

Pope John Paul today called for regulations to ensure that media was truthful, saying that mass communication sometimes offered distorted visions of family and morality....

“Means of communication can, however, cause grave harm to the family when they offer an inadequate or even distorted vision of life, the family itself, religion and morality,” Pope John Paul said, urging consumers to “learn how to use them with wisdom and prudence”....

“It’s a task that likewise involves public institutions, called upon to enact regulatory procedures aimed at ensuring that the means of social communication are always respectful of the truth and of the common good,” the pontiff said.

Yo, Pope, who the F gets to say what is "truth" and "common good." Do you, when media want to report about boy-diddling priests?

So the Pope, too, attacks free speech. Now you could say that Vatican City and too much of the world are not privileged to have a First Amendment. But, you know, I think that actually all God's children have the First Amendment. God gives us all free speech. Then government and priests try to take it away. Well fight back. Fight Disney and the Pope as they fight free speech.

The Iraq strategy

: Fred Wilson sends us to Wesley Clark's piece in Washington Monthly on a different course for Middle East policy.

Whether or not you agreed with the president's decision to invade Iraq--and I did not--there's no doubt that America has a right and a duty to take whatever actions are necessary, including military action, to protect ourselves from the clear security threats emanating from this deeply troubled part of the world. Authoritarian rule in these countries has clearly created fertile ground for terrorists, and so establishing democratic governance in the region must be seen as one of our most vital security goals. There is good reason, however, to question whether the president's strategy is advancing or hindering that goal....

This dream of engineering events in the Middle East to follow those of the Soviet Union has led to an almost unprecedented geostrategic blunder. One crucial reason things went wrong, I believe, is that the neoconservatives misunderstood how and why the Soviet Union fell and what the West did to contribute to that fall. They radically overestimated the role of military assertiveness while underestimating the value of other, subtler measures. They then applied those theories to the Middle East, a region with very different political and cultural conditions. The truth is this: It took four decades of patient engagement to bring down the Iron Curtain, and 10 years of deft diplomacy to turn chaotic, post-Soviet states into stable, pro-Western democracies. To achieve the same in the Middle East will require similar engagement, patience, and luck.

Clark's parallel to the Soviet Union is flawed, like Bush's, for though we thought the Soviets were enemies plotting against us day and night they did not attack us on our soil. The Soviet Union bred spies, not suicide bombers. That is an urgent difference. So I don't agree with all of Clark's recommendations, but it's a good piece to read as homework for tonight's Bush speech on Iraq policy. Compare and contrast.

Another blogger at the front

: New York Mag blurbs Chris Albritton as he arrives in Baghdad:"

Reached by phone, Allbritton described a changed Baghdad dotted with billboards. “My Internet café is run by this guy who only listens to Abba,” he said, adding that the walls are covered in ads for body armor. “I’ve got a nice little apartment surrounded by concrete barriers and guards. It’s $1,000 a month—like I’m back in New York.” He’s already been approached about working on the country’s first English-language newspaper, Iraq Today. But he’s also got plans to shop a book proposal: “It’s Indiana Jones meets Marshall McLuhan. Does that sound like a good pitch?”

Personal democracy

: I'm at the Personal Democracy Forum; will be blogging here and there. Andrew Rasiej, who put this together, just said that if you send email to the info address at Kerry's campaign, it goes nowhere. Politics, he said, is in the position where the music industry was when it didn't pay attention to the digital revolution.

: Gawd help us, while we wait for Bob Kerrey to arrive (who does he think he is, Mick Jagger?), there's a debate forming on "personal" vs. "particpatory." Arrrrgh. Rasiej, to his credit, flicked it off as semantics and not worth discussion.

: Rasiej is now interviewing Kerrey. He quotes the view that thanks to technology today, people are realizing that you can organize a movement without organizing a government. "What I see happening with the net is truly a dispersal of power," Kerry says.

He says that years ago, government got 70 percent of its information from internal reports; now they get that much information from "the open source." That, he says, is why it's so disturbing that President Bush says he does not read newspapers. That means, he adds, that he has to be briefed on whether the Yankees won.
"I promise you that on September 11th the most important piece of information he got was by watching television...
"Today, anybody with a notebook computer has the pwoer to be an analyst."
He thinks that the :30 campaign commercial will not go away but is lessening in importance as "people get information outside of the campaign" online.

Asked whether he is using the Internet in the 9/11 Commission, he says yes, but acknowledges a "reliability problem" and that he looks upon what he reads there the way he reads the New York Post.

On blogging: "Blogging's sort of like gravity: It is. It's a question of how you use it. How you connect to it, capitalize on its power. Anybody out there can put together his own newspaper. The monopoly is broken."

He tells about giving an interview on the 9/11 Commission and he said "something I shouldn't have said" and it got picked up all over major media because "every single one of them go to Matt Drudge in the morning" and they don't want to admit it. "Say what you want about Drudge, he has become a credible source."

Asked when elections will occur online, Kerrey says it can't happen until Diebold opens up its source code. The answer is not paper ballots but open source.

Asked whether he reads blogs, "I read them when they're actually called to my attention... It's entirely when someone emails me and directs my attention to them."

He emphasizes that success in blogs requires that "you know how to write" and have "personal integrity."

: UPDATE: From one row ahead, Sanford Dickert sees what I wrote above on the Kerry campaign and email and he says it's not true that the emails go nowhere. Every day, 10-15,000 emails come in and a staff reads them, categorizes them, and creates a report call "the pulse." Emails do not get individual responses but they are heard in aggregate. (David Isenberg issues the correction on the backchannel chat.)

Hey, as we say on the Internet, personal democracy doesn't scale.

: NEXT: I will blog if I hear something that perks up my ears as new; won't try to be a blog of record on the event.

The heroes of free speech and democracy

: In three repressed nations -- China, Vietnam, and Iran -- we see regimes trying and trying again to shut down free speech on the Internet and we also see heroes who refuse to be silenced.

: CHINA: The Washington Post tells the story today of Wu Wei's Democracy and Freedom forum:

The authorities have shut down, blocked, hacked or otherwise incapacitated Wu's Web site 38 times in the past three years, repeatedly disrupting the discussions it hosts on political reform, human rights and other subjects the ruling Chinese Communist Party considers taboo. Each time the site has been closed, though, Wu and the friends who help him run it have found a way to open it again.
: VIETNAM: The regime has issued tough new rules on Internet use. Last week, I linked to this German report. Now see new rules requiring identification and tracking of online use at Internet cafes. There's also this news that an Internet dissident sentenced to seven years in prison for merely speaking is appealing his sentence.
...Nguyen Vu Binh, will appeal against his sentence in the Supreme People's Court in the capital, Hanoi.
Binh, 35, was sentenced last December after being found guilty of writing and exchanging information and materials that distorted the party and state policies.
The spokesman says foreign journalists will not be invited to the appeal trial.
: IRAN: I also linked the other day to Hoder's report that the mullahs are once again trying to shut down ISPs to shut down speech. But that cat is long out of that bag. Says a comment on Hoder's post:
... the Age of filtering the internet is over now :) ... Sure they can do anything they want but the truth is they can not stop anyone! The only way that can stop people is unpluging every internet cable ;)
For every tyrant who would silence his citizens, there are countless citizens who will speak.

Who's who

: Cameron Marlow explores a new way to measure authority in weblogs.

Technorati and the Ecosystem measure total weblog links. Cameron measures just permalinks -- that is, links to posts but not blogroll links.

While some webloggers hold top positions in both ranks, the list diverges considerably as the position increases. While Blogrolls tend to support the weblog elders (scripting.com, evhead.com, etc.), permalinks suggest a different set of authors as influencers (joi.ito.com, buzzmachine.com, etc.)....

This raises new light to the age-old weblog power law debate. While the blogroll rankings (reflected by Shirky's original analysis) suggest a model of preferential attachment, many of those weblogs listed in the top permalink ranks are much younger. If the weblog social structure is mitigated by a law of the "rich getting richer," we would expect older weblogs to have more influence, and hence more links to their entries.

Cameron's Blogdex has tracked 30,000 blogs since 2001. These results would change greatly with more data (Technorati tracks 2.5 million) and over a shorter timeframe (the longer timeframe would measure authority as consistent quotability/linkability while the shorter timeframe would measure current buzz). In a short time frame with lots of data, I'll bet that you'd find many more blogs breaking through to the top, making this more of a democratic or "fair" medium than has been presumed thus far. I also would be curious to see this tracked against volume of posting: That is, I'll bet that if you post a lot, you disproportionately increase the odds of getting links to you because people are in the habit of coming back to you more often.

Whereabouts

: It's Arianna Huffington Day in New York. I hope to be on wi-fi through much of the festivities.

May 23, 2004

Sopranos

: The familiy redeemed itself with tonight's episode.

Fore!

: Focus reports (auf Deutsch) that for the first time since the Soviets marched into Afghanistan, golf is back in Kabul.
: Reuters auf Englisch:

It may provide new challenges to any modern player, but it used to be a lot worse. The entire area has had to be cleared of mines in recent months and three Soviet tanks and a multiple rocket launcher have been removed.

Quelle surprise

: What, we should be surprised that the French like Michael Moore?

Hyperlocal fame

: The Chicago Tribune blurbs the hyperlocal blog work being done by the students at Northwestern with whom I've been working.

Back in Iraq

: Chris Albritton, the journalist who was paid by his readers to go to Iraq as the war wound down is back in country.

Hot blog babes!

: Getaloada the cheekbone action in this meeting of Washington's -- if not America's -- two hottest bloggers: Wonkette and Washingtonienne.

Now if you've missed the saga of Washingtonienne, she blogged about her alleged Capitol Hill sex and was fired by Sen. Mike DeWine. The Washington Post sums it up. Wonkette has had the story at every step.

Washingtonienne said that she was paid after (if not for) sex. The Post reports:

One diary entry described a "married man who pays me for sex" as "chief of staff at one of the gov agencies, appointed by Bush." That man, she claimed, paid her $400 on Tuesday for sex, but she declined to provide his name to The Post, saying, "I'm not trying to ruin his life." (On her blog she identified all the men by initials.)
And for this, she was fired.

I think she could claim protection under the whistleblower law. She says she, ahem, blew a government official's whistle and then blew the whistle on him and she was fired. I say she should sue to get her measly $25k job back.... or at least get that much on her book and movie rights.

Cameras equal transparency

: I get the military need for secrecy.

But not these days!

And so it would be quite numbnutty if it's true that Rumsfeld is ordering a ban on camera phones, digital cameras, and camcorders in Iraq and the military. Ban stupidity, don't ban exposing it.

Iraq: Everybody's pawn

: Iraq is a mined chessboard with outsiders -- American left and right, Europeans, Saudis, Palestinians, and on and on -- all playing the big pieces while Iraqis are everybody's pawns. Iraq is at the center of political fights all over the globe but we hardly hear from the Iraqis.

So consider these related posts today. As they say on This American Life, our story today is in four acts:

: ACT I: AN IRAQI BLOGS: Ali writes another remarkable post about everybody else in the world speaking for -- and killing and killing for -- Iraqis but we don't hear from Iraqis themselves. He laughs at a huge demonstration organized by Hezbollah in Lebanon "protesting against the 'violations' of the American army in the holy cities of Najaf and Kerballa" while in Iraq...

Despite some alleged "Fatwas" and few speeches about “red lines”, most of the political AND religious leaders were calling for withdrawal of *all* armed forces and militias from the holy cities. No one called for jihad, and no one blamed the Americans, except for Sadr followers. There were almost no anti-American demonstrations regarding this issue, at least not any significant ones.

If one is to believe the media and the Arab leaders and Muslim clerics, the only conclusions that can be drawn from such a situation, is that there are no Iraqis in Iraq. The only Iraqis who seem to exist and “care about the Iraqi people” live outside Iraq!

Isn't that too true: judging from all the people speaking for Iraq, "there are no Iraqis in Iraq." So why, he asks, aren't Iraqis taking to the streets and demonstrating like Lebanese?
I guess there are only few answers to this question. It’s either that the majority of Iraqis don’t feel there’s such huge violation that needs to be protested against, or that they are more interested in their daily lives; their jobs and the future of their children than whining about buildings that as holy as they are to them, can not match their care about their jobs and children’s future.

This may give the impression that Iraqis are apathetic to what’s happening in their country, which could be true for some of them as a result of decades of oppression and hopelessness, but when one remembers that Iraqis did demonstrate a lot in the last year, such presumptions indeed seems to fit only a minority.

The only difference here is that most of the demonstrations the Iraqis made were not demanding ending the occupations. They were about improving life conditions and security; in other words things that really matter to them. Still there were political demonstrations, but the largest of these were, one demanding immediate elections and one condemning terrorism!!

And remember that that demonstration was not covered in major western media; it was, instead, covered by a blogger in Iraq.

Ali tells you what Iraqis really do care about and it's what you and I care about: freedom and democracy.

The only way we can stop that is by continuing the building of democracy in Iraq. Once those outsiders lose any sympathy inside Iraq, and once the neighboring countries feel that it’s impossible to stop the process, they’ll give up and try to find other alternatives that might help them keep their decayed regimes alive, at least for few more years. It’s not that easy, but it’s that simple. This is a battle of wills above all.
: ACT II: PERSONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION: Now read Tom Friedman on PMDs -- persons of mass destruction, the homicide bombers who are recruited by extremists to kill Israelis and now Iraqis.
We're so shell-shocked, we just treat this as another day, another suicide bomb in Iraq. But we need to think about this. My rough estimate is that there have been 50 to 75 suicide bomb attacks in Iraq in the last year. So the first question I have is this: Where are all these suicide bombers coming from? How do you just get these people off the shelf? ...

But the U.S. "occupation" of Iraq is only a year old, and the suicide bombings started there within a few months of U.S. forces' arriving, to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam's warped tyranny. So what does that mean? It means that some group or groups have the ability to recruit a large pool of people willing to kill themselves in attacks against American or Iraqi targets on short notice — and we don't have a clue how this process works.

We don't know who these people are — although reports suggest they are coming from Europe, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria and Saudi Arabia ...

"I don't think the P.M.D.'s are really a product of local Iraqi resentment against us," says Raymond Stock, an expert on Arabic literature and media based in Cairo. "They are mainly imported cookie-cutter killers, created by a combination of Arab mass media, certain extremist elements in Muslim culture, and some very shrewd recruiting by Al Qaeda and its ilk. When young, angry, futureless, sexually repressed people are taught that death is a permanent vacation of guilt-free pleasure, and they see it glorified in countless videos, all you need is a willing truck driver to ferry them over the border from Syria, Jordan, Turkey or Saudi Arabia and presto — a human bomb."

In our media, you'll hear these people called "insurgents," as if they are Iraqis with a cause. No, they are insane murderers from elsewhere. They do not speak for Iraqis. They murder Iraqis. We still need to hear Iraqis speak for Iraq.

: ACT III: THE CONE OF SILENCE: Now see Jay Rosen summarizing the issue I also raised a few days before: Reporters for Western media in Iraq aren't leaving the fortified Green Zone because it's unsafe. That means they're not talking to Iraqis. That means we're not hearing Iraqis.

: ACT IV: THE FLORIDA SISTERS: Here's an odd little story: Two Florida sisters start a web site -- and even send a pres