: 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.
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.
Archives:
06/05 ...
05/05 ...
04/05 ...
03/05 ...
02/05 ...
01/05 ...
12/04 ...
11/04 ...
10/04 ...
09/04 ...
08/04 ...
07/04 ...
06/04 ...
05/04 ...
04/04 ...
03/04 ...
02/04 ...
01/04 ...
12/03 ...
11/03 ...
10/03 ...
09/03 ...
08/03 ...
07/03 ...
06/03 ...
05/03 ...
04/03 ...
03/03 ...
02/03 ...
01/03 ...
12/02 ...
11/02 ...
10/02 ...
09/02 ...
08/02 ...
07/02 ...
06/02 ...
05/02 ...
04/02 ...
03/02/a ...
03/02/b ...
02/02 ...
01/02 ...
12/01 ...
11/01 ...
10/01 ...
09/01 ...
Current Home
