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August 09, 2004

The terror warnings

: I actually bought a copy of Time today to read what they said about the terror intelligence and warnings. I challenge the nya-nyaers to go read it and still argue that the government should not have warned us about what they learned.

But there remains plenty of cause for concern. Al-Qaeda has cased targets for years before attacking; preparations for the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa began in 1993, for instance. Intelligence and law-enforcement officials familiar with the material recovered in Pakistan told TIME that the discs revealed far more detailed, wide-ranging and current research and planning by a terrorist group than have so far been made public. Though the surveillance information on the discs was done mostly in 2000 and 2001, one disc contained an updated photo of the Prudential Plaza building that was added to the al-Qaeda file in January of this year.

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Tasteless towers

: An Australian radio station uses the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in its crass promotion. Ozzies enraged.

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Jersey blog meetup!

: The folks at NJ.com, together with blogger/teacher Will Richardson and other good people are holding a blogger MeetUp this Thursday, August 12 at 7 p.m. at MediaTech, upstairs at 118 Main Street in Flemington, NJ. All bloggers, would-be bloggers, and the merely curious are invited to please, please come on by.

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The family that sleazes together....

: Don't you just love it: The NY Post reports today that one factor in the success of so many reality shows is that for the first time in years, prime time is now filled with shows that families can and do watch together. Survivor and Fear Factor and American Idol are good for American family values!

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Comment changes

: I finally (belatedly) added comment spam protection, because I was wasting time on the bile-slurpers who spam blogs. Besides adding Jay Allen's wonderful program, I have made it necessary for you to preview comments first before posting. Pain? Perhaps. But it also gives you that extra second to ask, "Do I really want to say this? Do I really want to add this morsel of snark to the permanent record? Or should I think better of it?"

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Disunity

: Jay Rosen has a followup to his excellent commentary on the Unity Kerry-ovation hooha.

The whole logic of diversity hiring assumes that minority journalists will exert and express themselves within the councils of the profession, and--for example--at daily meetings in newsrooms. Freedom of speech in public settings is not a trivial issue for people who band together to make their voices heard in journalism.

I agree.

There are two issues at work here: diversity (of ethnicity or opinion?) and free speech (do journalists have it?). Below, I called for redefining diversity around opinions that are openly held.

The ironies are foghorn-loud. Here is an organization of ethnic journalists that forms to rally around their special interests as ethnic journalists. If they didn't have special interests -- if they didn't have an agenda -- they wouldn't be coming together. So we should be surprised that they have opinions when Kerry or Bush come to talk?

This only throws a spotlight on the essential hypocrisy of journalistic objectivity and rules of alleged ethics that put a gag on journalists when it comes to expressing their opinions openly.

I think it is unethical to withhold those opinions in public, to act as if you don't have them, to lie by omission.

I also think that Unity should be pushing for diversity of different definitions -- diversity of viewpoint and opinion and new source and not just hiring. This whole thing is a bit too insular to the journalism community. It's an echo chamber, damnit.

The bottom line of all this is that journalism should be the town square at which we, the people, come together to find facts and explore problems and try to find solutions and share our diverse viewpoints in an effort to discern the wisdom of the crowd -- of the democracy. That is diversity at work.

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Changes at the top

: Choire Sicha is making the long-anticipated move to editorial director of the Gawker Media empire. Jessica Coen is taking his place at Gawker; I'm told she's cute.

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Luxury kills

: Time says that the terrorists were planning to use limousines to blow up the Prudential Building and other targets -- because limos are hardly ever checked and because they have darkened windows and, no doubt, because it's symbolic: They love to turn our symbols of success against us. What's next: exlpoding Manolo Blahniks?

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It's about control

: At the journalism confab from which I just returned, one media exec raised what has become a standard complaint about all this new media: Fragmentation. It's said as if that is an ill of the age. My answer: Turn that word around and look at it from the opposite perspective -- from the individual's perspectived -- and it's really a question of control. The audience is moving to lots of new places now that they have the choice, now that they have control. The single, shared national experience we keep sighing about existed for only a few decades as we lived with three networks and fewer and fewer newspapers. The natural state of media is fragmentation: consumers gain choice, media loses control, citizens gain control. Fragmentation is good.

In a variation on this theme, Sunday in The Times, Jack Rosenthal filled in for Dan Okrent and whined about too much news:

Much more news and much faster news: it has created a kind of widespread attention deficit disorder. When news events cycled in and out of the spotlight more slowly, they stayed in the public mind longer. People could pay attention until issues of moment were resolved. Now, we are surrounded by news - on the TV at the gym, on the AOL home page, on the car radio on the way to work. To pass through Times Square is to be enveloped by no fewer than four electronic zippers flashing headlines day and night....

Saturation coverage now seems inevitably to exhaust the public and leave the media eager to move on. But that means the spotlight goes dark even when the wrongs endure. That, in turn, suggests that this all-news environment is creating a new responsibility for The Times and other serious media: systematically to look back, recall and remind.

This, too, is a question of control. Rosenthal longs for the allegedly good old days when The Times and the big media outlets controlled the news cycle, as he quaintly calls it. Now we all do.

This is the way I put it in Toronto:

It used to be, we waited for the news -- when the paper was plopped on our doorstep, when the show came on the TV. Now the news waits for us -- we get what we want when and where we want it.

More news is good. Choice is good. Citizens controlling their media is good. Fragmentation is good.

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