BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

October 03, 2004

Another billionnaire blogger

: George Soros is allegedly blogging. [via Steve Rubel]

Defeating freedom

: The Institute of War and Peace Reporting has had to cancel its training session for journalists in Baghdad because of... war.

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Friedman returns

: The NY Times' Tom Friedman is back -- he sure picked a lousy time to leave -- and he's still resolute in the need for a beachfront of democracy in Iraq but he's pissed about the execution of that effort:

Being away has not changed my belief one iota in the importance of producing a decent outcome in Iraq, to help move the Arab-Muslim world off its steady slide toward increased authoritarianism, unemployment, overpopulation, suicidal terrorism and religious obscurantism. But my time off has clarified for me, even more, that this Bush team can't get us there, and may have so messed things up that no one can....

What I resent so much is that some of us actually put our personal politics aside in thinking about this war and about why it is so important to produce a different Iraq. This administration never did. Mr. Kerry's own views on Iraq have been intensely political and for a long time not well thought through. But Mr. Kerry is a politician running for office. Mr. Bush is president, charged with protecting the national interest, and yet from the beginning he has run Iraq policy as an extension of his political campaign.

Friends, I return to where I started: We're in trouble in Iraq. We have to immediately get the Democratic and Republican politics out of this policy and start honestly reassessing what is the maximum we can still achieve there and what every American is going to have to do to make it happen. If we do not, we'll end up not only with a fractured Iraq, but with a fractured America, at war with itself and isolated from the world.

I'd say he's appropriately tough on Bush but inappropriately easy on Kerry.

And Friedman is being too easy on Friedman. I'm distrubed that he, like the candidates, is throwing up his hands at the difficulty of the task he supported. He should be pushing the candidates -- both of them -- step by step toward the means of victory for democracy, humanity, modernity, and decency in Iraq.

Mr. Friedman, I was one of many who endorsed this war because of your own doctrine there. Now it's time to follow through and turn strategy into reality. It's not your fault. It is your responsibility.

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Andy Rooney's solution to all the world's problems

: Andy Rooney -- for whom I have little tolerance; even two minutes is too many -- says of CBS News tonight: "I don't feel real good about it these days."

The cause of his agita is the Rathergate snafu. The cure, in Rooney's view, is this:

Turn our Evening News With Dan Rather into a one-hour broadcast seven nights a week. Provide it as a public service in exchange for the license that CBS has to make hundreds of millions of dollars from the entertainment shows that Les Moonves puts on.

The American public gets most of its news from television, and it doesn't get enough. The Evening News is 20 minutes long -- nowhere near long enough to tell Americans what's going on in their own country, let alone anywhere else.

Oh, man, that's the exact wrong way to go. More Dan Rather? No thanks. More formulaic network news? Uh-uh.

That's what I would expect Andy Rooney's solution to be. And that's not the right solution.

If network news is going to survive, it has to break away from its old formulas and old star system, it has to be open to new definitions of TV news.

Rooney goes on, unfortunately:

One of the reasons America is hated around the world is because we're ignorant of everyone else's problems, and that's partly our fault. Television provides too little foreign news.

So, send a bunch of CBS reporters to other countries, too, so we give viewers an idea of what's happening somewhere other than here. If CBS News was on the air every night for an hour, it might make people forget this mistake.

Oh, man. So Andy says we're hated around the world because we don't watch enough CBS News. That's so stupid it's offensive, so offensive it's just stupid.

Yes, it's time to reform CBS News. And the first thing I would do is get rid of Andy Rooney.

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Comment spam note

: If you try to use the words "poker" or "casinos" in a comment, it will get blocked, saving me from chasing the tail of the spam slime.

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Whereabouts

: Sorry to have been gone today. Family, church, recycling, packing, movies. Back later.

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